A THING IS NOT
A THING UNTIL
IT IS SAID ALOUD.

(David Arnold, "Mosquitoland")

There’re plenty of fish
in the sea
Why are you fishing?
Boil some water
You’re thirsty.

Poetry,
It rises out of the cracks of life like ****,
Rubbing on contact with clothes and skin,
It can’t seem to heal, to dry, it keeps peeling, frothing forth,
Demanding a say, I say
It hurts, it feels like it feels to watch Macbeth **** his friend,
It hurts like Plath’s sliced thumb,
I can’t stop the pain, I can’t
Stop the poetry.
Cover the wounds, let them harden in the cold,
Prevent infection, I’m
Vulnerable, and this world hurts
When the stars shine on summer’s eve it makes me too happy,
When a man drives his semi-truck through two kilometres of bodies,
When a journalist sits on a car bomb or a gay man is thrown off a roof
In some faraway land, while
We sit and talk about Donald’s bad hair and complain about the wounds,
The scars, when
Really, it’s cold outside,
You’re hard as rock, the **** has stopped leaking,
Frozen, half-hearted thoughts and dreams like a zombie, we
Just go around and around and around.
You’re no longer vulnerable, but you’re hard. You’re lonely.  
An unfeeling soul.
Take a look outside: It’s no longer winter.
There’s a global warming, a blanket of ozone peels away to reveal the sky,
Solar radiation rain.
I can’t remember the last time I smelled the rain, like really smelled it.
The collisions on my skin, they break me, the wounds pour out like dams,
I’m sticky with this poetry ****, this burgeoning wonder, this
Tearing of the curtain of my temple, my body is set free,
vulnerable, and it hurts.
Only, it’s when we are most vulnerable,
In pain, bleeding with the ugliness, the mess of this life,
In much trembling,
That God will reach out His scarred hands to embrace us
Skin collisions,
I’m in love again.

I'm tired.

I numb with music, substitute

feeling with sharpness, taste of blood

oranges.
Stars and citrus.
Words are jumble, speak and stumble--

I say to myself quietus is silence,

better to keep to yourself with your

sarcasm and cuts--numbness and sharpness.  

I practice inhabiting my love letters, my suicide

notes, my little ant cage--

Watch them struggle. How

cute.
Stardom and gods.
A mortal's more fun than gods--

Why practice these strongholds,

these hauntings, this phantasmagoria.

gods are wordplay, they watch us

struggle in little ant cages--watch me stumble,
let me

speak.
Fault and fate.
I promise I am not mean--

I mean--sorry. Forget I said anything.

My mind is a totalitarian regime.

I build up walls, paranoia, panopticon. (And to me, Denmark is a prison.)

Keep the voices, the evils of the world out.

An ideology, power, purpose,

Convinces me of the diseases, the deviants,

That risks an illusion to be shattered.

I am my own dictator, hail.

I control words—words are power—

I write my own narratives, make my own excuses,

Create heroines and gods to populate the prison walls. (He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about his Father’s business, the service of a vast, ******, and meretricious beauty.)

I rewrite constellations, make them smaller,

Build babels, buying more time.  

I tell that amnesiac blackness: that it cannot hurt me; it can’t touch me.

Those labyrinthian libraries of sky charts and lovely flower dictionaries, rooms of polychromatic paintings, which I gathered with gayety as a child—I’m still a child—I haul into the fire,

Ignorant wretch.

We live a part of a global economy, where inclusivity and transparency criticize, perfect.

I can’t stand the critics, I cry, ******!,

Condemn them to death by a thousand cuts,

Slicing and dicing, I can hear their silent pleas,

They speak to me, You are loved, Let your family in, Please stop

Please please please stop please stop stop stop speak to please stop speak to me

Horrible hungry faces, they don’t cry as I peal skin from bone,

With shards I crush those voices, with glass, broken mirrors,

Me to speak stop please to speak stop stop stop please stop please please please  

Break down the walls,

why should you die before your time?
An open market is prone to crisis,

These newcomers, it only takes one to break your heart.

Things with merit are gems; scarcity creates value.

Enjoy the labour of love and life, it is a gift of God,

Dance under pixel skies, they **** pride, ****,

Open the floodgates, the dictatorship crumbles and crumples under the weight of these tired eyes

That see light rushing out from the cell window as visions and vicissitudes

A cry from the streets outside

The end is nigh, Night is coming!

One cannot sleep with starry skies in the eyes.

Stay awake, because the guards are coming,

Remember—you are to be tried for warcrimes, hail.

You and me, we can shuffle off this mortal coil, our self slaughter a mere trifle

In this ocean of failed realties, as man to cosmos.  (All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.)

Cause this flesh to melt I beg,

Keep cutting, smaller pieces,

No, the sunrises, it’s ****** and orange,

Citrus, it burns in these wounds,

I feel pain, I feel, warm with this ambiance,

A jacket to prevent morning chill, breathing wisps,

I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to die,

I don’t I don’t now don’t don’t don’t no I don’t want to leave no leave me

Wait!—


(Feb 7 2016)

Christmas full moon to scare the monsters away
I wait for revenant spirit
What do I say?
Happily ever after? Is that it?

It’s Christmas, so what?
I’m a Christian, what now?

Does green planet dry and crack like clay,
Our souls cast off into fiery pit?
Whose story am I in anyway?
I’m caught in other people’s stories and s*

Embroidery of lives tangled in chaos-
Are we the non-approximate product of a particular origin?
Sinews sewn of souls and flesh-
Are we trapped in mortal coil and bound to such curious fates?

I stand here in saintly moonlight
I beg for grey to blot out starlight
so the stars won’t burn my eyes

So many stars–hide me

I love You–bind me

D O U B L E T H I N K