A mess of thighs and hair and love
We ******
For the same reason
That kids throw rocks at the sea

I go back to Hampshire
to pretend I have old friends.
I drive around the mountains
to look for an end
to the violence
that's been breeding inside.
I've been a god ******,
god ******, god ******.

There's a dying wild
surrounding this town;
a girl limping with her mother,
holding ****** hounds.

You can consume it,
the blurred out dreams,
that these rubber-lovers
hung in Christmas trees.

There's a sense regret
amongst the ****** chic;
a romantic degeneracy
not lost on the teens.
Push in the fate,
to let something out.
I'm such a god ******,
god ******, god ******.

And I blot the ******
remnants of the past,
fire a cheap cigarette
and cut myself on the glass
of the car I drove into
the bank of your dreams.

To get out, to get out,
I've become such a ******* fool.
To get out, to get out,
I've hurt everyone that thought I was cool.

The distant park
Was a graveyard of dead stars.
Each streetlight a system of worlds,
So many lives between each mote of light,
Indistinguishable in their unique love,
Bespoke hate, and the drama of the modern age.

Drunk laughter behind transparent
Double doors. Another hotel balcony,
Another cloud behind the canopy
Of marijuana eyes
To unsettle me from the crowd.

She points out, when you look closely
You can see the disorder
Amongst all constellations
Of life and love and litter;
Of discarded Coke cans
And temporary highs.

She says this is not a scene
To imbue the ****** of a present mind,
More to baulk at the incompletion
Of one thousand to-do lists;
A million reasons why
You should just stay inside.

She says you can see the human swell
Of ignorance, our city lights
Blotting out the stars
In a black ocean of broken politic
And irretrievable fault lines-
Divisions between us all.
Lives twisted with professional smiles
And eyes lit with stunning indifference.

Still, I have felt charity and warmth
On the doorstep of lunatics and fascists.
I have read the love of life
In faces of those who gave up.
I have recounted countless artists
Who saw beauty
In moments that precisely lacked it.

I have spent too many nights
In anaesthesia,
Fleeing each instance of feeling
And terror; all the tremors
That tell me I am still alive.

Continued to stare at the lights
Long after her voice
And the laughter inside had gone.

Heard waves in the traffic.
A world so large, so expansive,
It can never truly sleep.
Every broken heart,
Every war-torn land,
Every promotion,
Every one-night stand.

I wonder what would happen
If we all stood still.
If we all took one moment
To observe the motion
That unfolds beneath
Our static windowsill.

If we all took one moment
To recover our loss.
The wars that we won,
The feelings, forgot.
The hell we retain;
Our paradise, lost.

The secret of my energy
can be found in my false libido,
unwanted erections,
vibrations on the
inner-city bus.

My blue collar life
with a white collar tongue,
tried pyramid schemes,
tried working for the right thing
on the wrong side of the bar.
Worked on my oral ***
until going down was an art,

worked on my poetry
in the hope I could ******* through
the empty spaces,
clear absence of a career path.

The secret of my energy
can be found in my distance
from anything or anyone.
The secret of my energy
can be found in my contempt
for telling those I care for
about who I love
or what I ate for lunch.

Tried drinking green tea,
meditating by the ocean waves
until I sang the ballad of the sea.
Tried tuning my guitar
to the point the strings would snap
in the hope of portraying emotion
my talent had always lacked.

The secret of my energy
can be found in my distaste
for positivity and pessimism,
for conservative thought
and overdrawn liberalism,
for whistle-blowers
and tone-deaf singers
of flag-waving anthems
and golden age dreams.

Tried holding my hand to my heart,
pledging allegiance
to red wine, white skin, and blue truth.
The secret of my energy
can be found in every idea
I had reached out for
only to find that in my pursuit

I could only become the sum
of all that I knew,
of all that I was,
of all I outgrew.

They keep the air cold to slow the spread. A pale light draws you into existence, a bloom of city smoke and glass. I watch the shadow of your wrist thin as the sun dies. You turn your head away.

Everything thins. Houses shrink. Streetlamps burst. Organs wither. I walk for hours along the wharf. Rain trickles through broken windows and falls into the black harbour. Dust clots the waterways. Skin sheds.

The problem is you were born human. Turned away, you obliterate.

A woman swears at her crying child. She pulls his arm violently. Existence floods the air. A miasma of confusion, fear and hatred. The mirror turns outwards.

You rise with your bed. A fold in a sea of whiteness. It was your spine, they said. The thing holding you together. It was disintegrating, flattening to infinity.

There is nothingness. A flood of it. A pitiless swell that never ends and threatens to crush the world with every breath. Bated wait in a heart white as bone.

Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of—

The IV fluid is imaginary. So is the taste of cold water beneath your tongue. It is a fractal world. A reality formed from a fragmented possi—haven’t I written this before?

There is a traffic accident. I am not there and neither are you. They pull you out of the wreckage, smoke rising from your chest, breast alight with hatred. You gaze at me, a stranger, and I break into shards, each one capturing you like a memento, a death drive.

Ash falls from the sky. I gaze up until I am blind. I reach my hand out and find the neck pulse of the earth. I find you.

I sit in the common room. I shuffle through pieces of myself. There is nothing here but you. Where am I? Where the **** am I? Where is the nothingness between you and I? Someone addresses me. I look up and find myself incapable of speech. I reach out but my arm fails to follow. I listen but cannot catch a word. The bell rings but you aren’t here. I look down. The pieces reflect nothing.

Reality collapses. Hypodermic crash to the libidinal economy. Desire and lack the same. Anticathexis sublimates into worthless ******* words on a document. Wren bursts black particles across the pavement, like cancerous soma running fingers through a spinal column. You smile. I sink. I sink.

The mind is sick with existence. Ganglia, myelin, dendritic sprawls. It all functions. It all works too well. Purpose, connection, reaction. I envy you. I *******—

Winter is here, bright, empty winter, almond grey and silent.

A barback slid you out
A generation early, in
The shape of your father.
He who befriended the
Blondest girl in town -
Elf-sheen baby, eternally mortal,
Entangled in bedsheets, or,
Everyone's Fantasy ****.
So she gifted you lawn rakes
And snack cakes, and you
We're raised in the bar on
Highway 51. Far from the
Vinyl static emitted from your
Mother's breast. She warned you
About The Suburbs. Always
Whispering tiny prayers -
Grab the keys, we're leaving.

And they keep dying on you -
Your matriarchal mirrors.
Leaving you in the hands
Of workmen scientists,
All waiting for the explosion,
The bomb to drop,
The neighborhood burn.

Grab the keys, we're leaving.

Left her crying in the driveway
after forcing her way through the window,
feigned a car crash, a sudden death,
so I could sleep alone and warm
without discussion across the pillow.

Drank whiskey and coke,
distant and remote-
noted her painted nails,
her short skirt, her knotted shirt,
shaved legs
in anticipation
for something I could not give her.

Made an excuse to sing the blues
until the pills took their hold
and muffled my strings
in a tranquilised series
of half-toned grins
and yawns that sing
the death of another evening.

Would rather take to art
than any flesh, bone, or heart
that bleeds upon my feeling,
would rather cling to a verse,
a muddied crime, suit, or hearse,
that leaves me high and dry
and staring up at the ceiling.

Left her nursing her wounds
whilst I search for an excuse
why I cannot love without leaving.
Left her alone in her bed
a feast of wine and bread
that has no taste,

that has no rhyme or reason,
for why I keep ploughing the field,
for why I keep moving through the seasons.

There is no meaning to my motion,
no depth to my frantic gathering of breath,
no distilled calm, nor consequence to each brief,
suffering emotion.

I am just a ladder to climb.
I am no stairway to heaven.