I am cascading through myself,
and no one can save me.

We’re outside some gig.
A light rain.
An almost mist.
My knees are cold, and there are too many people,
and I have never felt more alone.

You’re waiting for me to reciprocate.

Everything is white noise.
I’m caught in the eddy of your words,
watching waves flicker into being,
before dashing on the cobbles beside my feet.

All of my existence has been an ephemeral becoming.

I’m in a car.
My flatmate screams at his window for a single second before apologising.

I’m climbing out the side of my apartment,
because I’ve locked myself out of my room,
and I no longer fear death.

The other day I thought I heard you singing.

I watch cars pass.
They bleed into the city.
A breath without beginning or end.

Reality loses definition,
or perhaps I do.









My knees are cold.

Falling leaves hurry to gather
at one worn headstone after another
like a funeral party uncertain where
lies the lost loved one it grieves;;

Time and wind tug on the memory
left in this absent minded cemetery
no one comes visit but weather and me
and the dead lying under the trees

have stories nobody can read.

when the river ran
out i wrapped up
what i had left of
the plasma in my
veins and carried
it from city to city
from high hill to
deep valley until
i saw something
that looked like
you out on the far
end of a long field
and i waved to
you, said i'll  just
be  leaving  this
here and let the
sun eat me while
i walked away.

Secrets held in a college town
Old lawns doused in cheap wine and set aflame by talk of God's existence
Abandoned floors rest high above the likes of academia
Ghosts float past rusted oblivion cased safely on library shelves
In books of history or mystery or something
Most desks know too many bodies
Rooms fill with strangers breaking bread or smashing skulls
Grey foreign spaces call to mind no recollection of summer
But rather holds beds in which we dream of early July nights
Spent punch drunk beneath the knuckle blood letter tree
Alcohol numbs more than our fingertips
And we all drink ***** for sport
Collecting letter grades for ink-fueled suffocation
And some ungodly cosmic conformity

she’s out there on the ice again.
holy night &
positioning the gas-tanks just right.

joseph is her father, and his father,
even if not by blood,
raised flame.

foot to throat, brother remains
in the city working.
he is building a rocketship
in the basement of his apartment
complex.

back to town and dying houses.
foreclosures and fences.
lake of fire.

lights: she lingers in lights.
something so true and alive about the revelatory
of color,
of the world when lit and hit by sun
or our artifice.

her lovers: one dead by heavy
lumber, the other rewinding videotapes
in chasms of the library.
she thinks on his lips.

her dog tracks wet prints
across the carpet and floors.

wish list:
        mittens
        huckleberry jam
        iphone solar charger
        explosives

I wonder what it’d be like to stand on a human face
Would my foot sink right through their flesh
Leave a hole circled with broken teeth
Gnawing the empty air?
Seems no different
Someone writhes on the floor in a club
Is pronounced dead the next day
Exorcised *******
It’s where they go to get ****** up right?
Tequila and lime
Body shot
Set it on fire
A worm died so some middle-aged manager
Could fail at recapturing her youth
****** up, let’s get ****** up
Bones bleeding through the sleeves
Stuffing flesh into mouths
The river overflows with fast food wrappers
And rotting couches
Sit on the pavement and ***** in your lap
It’s what you came here for
Is she going to jump?
Take a picture
Hope the whole roof collapses
We’re trying to ******* sleep, a neighbour yells before slamming the door
Feels awkward and steps off the roof
Lies on the floor of her room
Slits her wrists instead
He’d been angry since he moved in
Kept finding apple cores in his yard
Sometimes it’s Christmas here
And the entire city decides to take part in a ritual
Where the vacuity of existence is concentrated in the shopping districts, so everyone can feel awful together
It’s really something
A black heat descends on Dunedin
And smothers all the children in their cribs
Teenagers light up and skate through the throngs of blank-faced adults
Too deeply enamoured with percentage discounts to even notice their bags filling with the blood of foreigners
Did you know one million Chinese children die a year from vitamin A deficiency?
Good thing we’re buying all these Chinese made goods
Sometimes the smog is so strong
And the water so red
That everyone begins to think the clear days are the strange ones
Sometimes the power poles collapse and generations of children are born sterile and genderless
The fathers all choke their wives with plastic bags
And no one questions them
This existence is nauseating
No wonder your mother hung herself
No wonder your uncle ***** your sister then hacked his own head off
None of this is real
A guy was hospitalised because someone mistook him for a child molester
Smashed his face up so much he lost seven teeth and got brain damage
He’d been a famous writer before
And now he can’t speak
Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?
Doesn’t this existence make you want to breakdown into laughter and throw your head against the wall until there’s nothing left?

Shadow of two-year guilt,
Rather be erratic than static.
The world rolls its tongue
And everyone is talking
But me.

You said
Something good will come out of this.
You said
That I wanted to be unhappy.
I could reach so far
For impossible dreams
But it would not be enough.

Sleep feigns rest.
Bedsheets weather to discomfort;
Hypnotic inducement
As the sun comes up.
Alarm clock, *****. Cigarette for breakfast.
Food sits in the mouth.
Chewing on plasticine,
Sudden fear of choking.

I do not remember when I got so bad.

Lacklustre tyre swings,
A noose in the half-lit cemetery.
No amount of air
To tame the breath.
Folded, years of divorce,

Of cold toast, early mornings;
My insufferable self.
You said
That I wanted to be unhappy.
You said
That love would never be enough.

I've seem to have lost my youth, I fear it was never there to begin with.
All the fuel that was riddled on my tongue as an adolescent is rubbing off with time, like a word I don't know anymore.
I keep darting to women on bus stops looking at their knees and wondering if all the lines there are like the rings in a tree, like the creases in flowers rich men buy for their honeys.
All these bodies piled in a room full of smoke, in recollections of other times they were in smoky rooms with strangers but all I taste, remember, is the sun on my forehead while Spanish guitars play nearby and there's a million voices, curling into chatter, into banter I can reconcile.
The night is young, this is the way to die if you're ever going to but the days are permeated under my shoes; I walk into 99 cent bargain stores and don't see plastic like she does, do not see the degradation of objects that never dissipate but easily break. The ***** floors of feet that live in small apartments, that dry-heave for the cheap cigarettes and low cost security cameras for their victim-less crimes. The resilience of things that grow in the only place they know where.
No I see a 25 year old girl stocking the shelves and watching the soul in her hair run for the door, for the foreign on her skin evaporating into the electrical fans, her golden years on the ankles that will one day twist in slippery showers, in greasy paved roads, in the heels she never learned to wear.
I see my generation through glass windows, through transparent doors, in between every beer I sip I don't find myself losing my worries into the inside of my bra for later inspection, under my wallet for when the party goes into the graveyard hours and I'm frozen in an unknown couch. I don't think about the time she left or the time he lied. Not about the knots everyone you meet leaves, or the heartbreak residue in drawers you don't open anymore. No time.
Standing in front of cold deli aisles, there is no resurrection of when my friends would call me by my first name, no remorse for the chances I didn't take when my shyness didn't burn on my face. A father that had a heart attack at the beach and I wasn't sure if the tears were because mortality was there holding my hand or because there was sand in my eyes and would it matter?
The neglect in my stature, the depth that is lost every time my head falls on a new pillow once again. When they talk about the jokes they wrote down on napkins, on fast food places at midnight, when the leather jacket they smooth down but all I see is the thread that is unwinding below their waist, the condiment stain on their napkin and how so very easily beef reminds me of the hospital.
I want to say that yes I am young, I have always been. That nothing has changed since when I was 12, that when everyone picked up their addiction I chose mine as well. That being alone is like a rock you take off the ground and you hold it for so long you start forgetting it's there until your hand untangles, until your jaw unclenches. You look around and you notice everyone is laughing and you try to as well but the second is gone, eyes are blinking, the sun has turned slightly and there is nothing else to do but grab another rock. I'm afraid I've exhausted myself too quickly.
I imagine the exasperated nostalgia of childhood is because there was no past, no better memories to cling to, you can't look back when there isn't anything there. But you begin hanging out in dim places, where the people are grittier than the seats in bars, in subway cars. The gods in your desk start to lose meaning, and the love, all that love, stops defying gravity like the bags under your eyes. The guys with caramel complexions treat you like the rosary on their chest, with reverence only when it's Sunday. The way the sweat glistens in yellow lights.
and if I didn't exist in all of that, then I wouldn't want to.

I don't want pity, no ****** white room, no Judas kiss; just a simpler truth that you wouldn't understand and I wouldn't expect you to.

You’re drunkenly screaming,
hands against the skin where
my kidneys would be. Telling
same-old-stories, you’re angry with me.
Fingers flexed on a cigarette, smoking through
yellow teeth into my hair, sipping
a yellow drink in a clear plastic cup.
Your accent is familiar, doesn’t
belong here. Sounds like what
home used to be.

You’re telling me I may be profoundly
sad, but I’ve come to understand
that even if you love someone
they may not stick around.
I’m fine, in an unbreakable mind frame.
Happy. That’s not up for discussion.
You’re begging me
to not wind up dead.
Just shut up. Drink your double whiskey.
I’ll cry when it suits me.

Remember when we danced on main street
And buried our skulls in dirt behind the shed

When we ate those light bulbs
Trying to illuminate the black holes that were always showing up in your bed or lingering around us in the driveway

Our knuckles took to cracking in a fever
We soaked them in the party punch last May
Our mixed blood infected everyone that night

Teenagers and their wasted anthologies
Wasted, as in, drunk & drowning
In the city apartment's corners
Or a green backyard that eventually turned lilac grey

Something is screaming in the trees tonight
It might be the wind, but what is wind
Other than gold dust and baby teeth

Remember the night we bought an aluminum can of rage
And planned to mark our town in tragedy
Or the night we shattered vases and elbows
I bled out in your kitchen sink, and you opted for the piano keys