Is
The confirmation of the superstitious
The skeptics permutation of chance
The guarantee of the paranoid
The communication expected of the spiritually transcendent
The nothing [at all] for those who never penetrate the surface tension of their world

The intuitive see
An allusion to
The creeping deep synapse connecting
[thickly binding]
The breath of the world

William Blake asks, “Who can stand!?”
Every day my unspoken non-answer is “Not me.”

“WEAPONS FREE!”
The gangly teenager
Pushes greasy hair from his face and
Throws a bony fist at a smaller kid
Hitting him in the shoulder,
Years of this fetid neighborhood’s condensed detritus
Telegraphing through his rail thin frame.
In a moment of an old man’s prescience, gilded by hindsight,
I see him
Still at it
30 years later
Probably  riding that same chrome razor scooter.

We’re still alive, after all these years
Overcoming relentless assassination attempts
Souls withered, pitted from the wounds
Stubbornly dragging lifeless limbs towards the goal we set out for, bright eyed and hopeful
Years ago

I’m sleeping
Heavy creaking footsteps walk down our hall
Into our bedroom
Auditory echo of dysnchronous high amplitude waves [maybe?]
Rough hands grab my legs
Ripped out of bed
Dragged out of the tissue paper of my reality
Into dark expanse, glistening eyes turn to me

Voice  [speaks internally]:

I will eat you, one day at a time. Moment by moment I devour you

Struggle
Open my eyes
Articulating forms become dresser
Plant
Clothes on the floor

“Stop”
“You’re dreaming. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep”.

I wake up tired the next day.

Two twin boys kick the
Water meter to their apartment

Instinctively destructive

Screeching like dying crows

Before turning on each other
Over an offence only they understand

Their mother
Dressed in the same sweatpants as yesterday

Smokes her cigarette
Eyes glued to the screen of her phone

Numbing herself with its glow
For a few selfish seconds [turn to years]

The best kind of poem
Cracks stone
Letting it bleed empathy
Attaching it to the ****** of the feeling
That the author loads into verse

I just smiled at a few lines of Bukowski
And then flipped around and
Wrote this ****
Losing any sense of literary proprioception with each word I type.