To walk until this gradual curve gives out-
Or to walk until the point where "up"
is sideways

and jump.

I'd fall for countless hours
pass all the stars and waywards
who, like myself
couldn't walk a straight line in broad daylight
I'm too sober
and too addicted to vice
I'm a pincushion of anxious
and when the tension releases,
explosions shake my achy feeble frame
or just plain mistakes get made
I feel like I can't handle life
I feel like I can't cope
with even the slightest feather's poke
I feel useless
a self-destructive nuisance
who speaks grandiose
and uses words like verbose
but couldn't tie my own shoes
-note that these don't have laces-
or might miss a bus cause
"**** look at those clouds"
or
"man, bees are super weird"
and meanwhile I'm crashing through china shop two.
I'm a bull without horns,
ever bitter, never scorned.

so I'll walk in silly circles
until this curve gives out.
I'll walk until I'm back where I started
and change course
I'll walk until my own head makes sense
I'll walk until I feel like I have enough room in my body
to contain me.
I'll walk until my legs give in
and my shoulders slump forward
from exhaustion or boredom
I'll walk until I figure out there is no
"up"

and jump.

I left my house today to find all things about me were wet.
Not from melted snow, but from legitimate, god-given rain.
I could smell the downpour in everything, all things ecstatic that they had survived so far.
And this is when I decided that winter had ended.
That's right, people, it's over. We can all go home.
Winter may pretend to linger, and it will probably snow again.
But I can feel it in my bones, the seasons have changed.
The trees cry out that they still live. The soil itself is stretching and yawning.
It seems this always happens when the seasons change.
Summer ends, and there is a change in the wind.
Before the leaves even begin to fall, autumn is present. An elephant in the proverbial room.
In late October (in salt lake at least), the earth enters the big sleep and snow begins to fall.

It seemed strange that I could feel this so distinctly.
But it's entirely natural, from a step back. Birds fly south, salmon migrate.
Perhaps, in fact, it's stranger that I would consider it strange.
The seasons are more natural than anything else we know. The cycles of the earth are at the core of our experience in terms of being alive on this planet.

Maybe we should begin to worry when we can only tell the seasons by the calendar.
Or maybe it would be worse if all that the seasons changing meant was a change in wardrobe.

Our ancestors used to rely on these sensory gut feelings to properly harvest their crops.
Frankly, I'm embarrassed that the term "sweater weather" exists.

I take pride in the fact that I participated in the plants stretching today.
We yawned and raised our faces to the rain and rejoiced as one.
It reminded me that the cycle goes on, and nothing really ends and yet everything ends but nothing really really ends.
It's just a little rain, after all.

Happy birthday,
by the way.
I just thought I’d write to you,
since I never really did

It’s been two years now
two complete rotations around the sun
since you died.
I probably think about you every week-
believe it or not,
you changed my whole outlook on life
But I’m sorry to say it didn’t happen until you left.
I think about you every time I leave the house in the morning
I think about how sudden it was
and how that happens every day to all kinds of people
even you.

I think about you every time I say goodbye to anyone
especially if the person I’m saluting is getting into a car
and when I say goodbye
I say it as heartfully as I can
and I hope that maybe they’ll realize that I’m saying
“I love you”
and “please, for the love of god, drive safely.

please.”

all in one word.
Because if I said it openly like that they’d all think I was totally mental.
I’m not mental.
I’m just a lover and a fighter
who lost something he didn’t even think he had the option of losing.

I think about you when I hug
anyone.
because you never know.
  and hugs are not ever worth half-assing.
                       ever.

  So maybe I lied.
and maybe I actually think about you multiple times a day every day of my life.
   not consciously i guess.
      but I can tell you for certain
that your absence is felt
          in one way or another
                      every
                             ­      day
                             of my life.

I wish I could have learned these lessons without losing you.
                        but you went all the same
                                         and here we all are.

             anyways happy birthday.
                          
                             Miss you.

Dusk.
The black of undermaintained asphalt
in a ribbon rolling over
the volcanic hills,
the yellow of the centerline
flashing into view and passing beneath
in a rhythm,
like a heartbeat.

Jackrabbit on the shoulder
***** his head and springs
away from something in his imagination,
following the yellow dashes
in an awkward gait,
a single bold jump
followed by twenty yards of
dead sprint.

Not eight feet overhead
a pair of nighthawks bob and flutter
erratically
but following one another in
pursuit

of something I cannot see.

Conifer-covered hillside
in the hinterlands
of this sleepy town
on a warm day
in this mid-June

The unspoilt soil
neither grieves
nor revels
and there's no revelation in that-
just what you see.

It's just what you see.

The quivering quakeys
can't hack it even when they cackle-
an attempt to unravel the shackles of
their incomplete alchemy-
cause it's never enough

one laugh is never enough.

The high's always flanked
by a sunrise so rank
as to wrinkle the brows
of the loudest and proudest-
the laughers and criers, or livers and die-rs

Just give me the bliss of the birds
and a big lidless urn to retire my fire
when the work week expires
when I finally can see even truth holds some lies
and when the sun sets too low to appraise the horizon,
I'll fly.

I'll just fly.

Looking out this double-paned plate glass window into the gray frigidity and red-leaved bitterness of October in one of the last wild and still-untamed bastions of freedom in the west at the mountains thinking about how even they are moving, my darling, and how the spaces in between them are growing just like the space in between the sun and the earth and the space between all the galaxies all at once and the space between the spaces between the world and I and soon I’ll just be floating all by my lonesome in some swirling pool of- not air, no, not even air, just nothingness and watching everything float away like disappearing city limits from the tailgate of a truck on cruise control zipping across the badlands and maybe you’ll be there but going the opposite way and there’ll be nothing to do but watch it all go, go, go, til it’s
gone, gone, gone

My knuckles will bear a scar
From where they collided with your teeth
Until the skin heals completely.
I will bear a scar within
Until I learn to forgive
You
And myself
And everyone
For being what we are
Which is sometimes
Terrible, terrible
People.

But all this anger
These fifteen-pound chains I carry as weapons of self defense
Are not hurting
Anyone
Who is trying to hurt me.
They are doing
nothing
But weighing me down
And I'm sick and tired
Of trudging the streets of this city of headstones
With them in tow.

They are doing nothing for me.
And I will drop them
Just so soon
As I get over
Myself.

A million tiny pinpricks
the brightness of the sun
they would blind you
if you looked right at them.

A thousand earsplitting whispers
wishing you well,
pushing you on
they would deafen you
if you hadn't already stopped hearing them.

A sea of faces
fades into black before the horizon
if you didn't know not to
acknowledge them,
you might.

Someday,
years from now I can guarantee
those million spotlights
will blind you

those thousand voices
will drown out your own

that sea of faces will look back
Confused(?)
Disgusted(?)
or worse

disinterested

Fifteen minutes is up.

light leaps lengthwise
purging this promontory prismatically
awakening all us awestruck
shameless sleepyheads, spying
delicious daylight drowning
out obscurity and occlusion,
frameless fixtures focused,
beams bouncing back between
emphatic eyelids,
leaving lenses lacerated,
despair defeated,
darkness destroyed.

I'm feeling
Bitter.
And all this stupid
Pretentious hippy
"Spirituality"
****
Is just getting old
Or maybe I'm just getting
Older
And I'm seeing how all these
Burnouts in tie-dye
Appear friendly
But they're not talking to you,
Just your girlfriend.

"Free love, man."

They're scumbags just like the
Scumbags in suits they hate so much
Or the rocker scumbags who are
Mysoginistic
Just like them.

This
Self-brainwashing
Is getting old and I'm getting sick of
Being lied to,
By them and by me.

the truth is nobody knows
What's going on in the universe,
No matter how much of a
Shaman
They claim to be or how much
Peyote
They smoke.
And anybody who claims to
Is
Selling
Something-
Be it glassware pendants
Or ****
Or their throbbing
*****.

This hippy ******* is a bastardization
Of an image
Of a faded picture
Of a set of ideals
Thought up fifty years ago
That only ever really worked on paper
Anyway.

Sometimes I'm low.
and quiet
not really despondent
or depressed
just
low.

And quiet.

She says she doesn't like the desert,
says it's ugly
and I can't help but wonder
why?
And she's sometimes quiet
but never low.
I think maybe the desert is in me
and when lowness abounds
the wind whips the dunes of my soul
and shapes me as it sees fit
that wind is the sound in my ear
just
before
sleep finally takes me.

and although we wouldn't know what to do with it
even if we had it,
we will pray on for
rain.

Yellow
fissuring undulations
breaking through
inky navy-
street lights casting reflections on
the lake out the window.

Flecks of neon
marking locations
where the party is still raging,
where people are still
chasing the world of delirium
and ***,
breaking over distant trees.

This is the place where America's
rich come to die
after a lifetime
of toil
chasing the American dream.
And I suppose that means the American dream
is here in Florida,
where sweat never dries
and mosquitoes never sleep,
where retired bankers
and ******* dealers
can finally get their slice of the pie-
separated from the suburbs by twelve foot tall hedges
and automatic gates.

The young don't care here-
they're too preoccupied
with The Chase
and neither do the Old-
because they're tired out
from a lifetime of being young.

This is the place
where America comes
to roll over
and spend its final hours
alone,
bitter,
and wealthy,
taking naps in the sun-
having more than earned

a little rest.

I can't come back.
Sorry, pastor, I can't come back.
Sorry mom and dad.

I can't come back.

I have seen crippled men beg for pennies outside the mile-high walls that guard the glittering, gem-encrusted Vatican.
But I haven't seen Christ.
I have seen good men's funerals picketed by angry mobs all swearing to be the hands of God.
But I've never met the rest of Him.
We've seen holocausts, crusades and conquests **** millions in his name.
But I have never heard His voice.
And I think those men holding those guns missed the point as far as his commandments go.

But that's not why I can't come back.

I ducked out from under the umbrella of religion and I felt the rain
And every day since I've been learning to take the wet with the dry rather than seeking shelter in what's comfortable.
And what's more, I've gotten a clearer view of the sky than ever before
And without that umbrella
I have seen something.
Or the outermost edge of something-
Something unimaginably large
Something not only too big for words, but too big to see all at once.
Something bigger than me and you and god and everything.
And I can't unsee that.
I've surrendered to the fact that not I, my children, or their children will be able to fully comprehend the vastness of everything,
But I am willing to die incomplete before it.

So sorry mom and dad.
Sorry god.
I found my own truth.

and that’s why I can’t come back.

The night's cold.
Cigarette smoke's silken silhouette
on the steam trail
off my breath.
Defiantly shivering-
no, I will finish it
the cherry- red
down to the last futile drag
and me,
the only living thing
in earshot, breathing on
and godsbedamned
I sit
despite winter's frigid grip
just like snoop dog said-
smoke til the last hit
but I fired and missed
and there's something I missed here
though the air is all clear
and I can't hear anything
but a heartbeat-
beat-
beat-
under the empty stars
I penned these few bars
to keep my hands warm
to make the blood flow-
everything's hallowed and hollow
especially me.

I've tried portaiture,
but for some old reason
I find it hard
to eulogize the living.

And when I do try,
the details just never seem
to fit right,
it's too much
or not enough
or just plain inaccurate,
from a few steps back.

I'll paint your actions, alright
'cause I can watch those happen
start to finish,
but I wouldn't pretend to be good enough
to encapsulate a whole person
-all that transient multicolor light under your halo-
with my petty vain jabber,
my incomplete vocabulary
of unflattering grunts-

take it as a compliment.

When it's October 12th-
When it's a sunny Sunday afternoon
In the fall
When you're curled up in your comfiest sweater
Next to a purring cat curled up in his
And you sit in front of the bay windows of your home
Watching the clouds and cars and wind roll by
Carrying burning yellow leaves
In the updrafts.

When you want something,
but you don't know what.
Maybe it's a want to want,
misplaced in hopes of filling
the ever-present void in you.
Maybe it's happiness.

Maybe it's as close as you'll ever get.

Either way,
Maybe it's enough.

The way down has been a screaming horse on fire blundering its way on

    Down,
         Down,
    Down.

Last Saturday was the bottom.
The absolute lowest the sun will dip the absolute earliest in the day.
So we drank ourselves more than half to death and spit whiskey at the sky screaming
"I made it this far!
I took everything you threw and walked the coals to this day-
I dare you to end me now!"
And the night drew on and I walked to a park with a pond with a friend
We threw snowballs at the sleeping geese
And talked about our losses and our victories
-And there was an obvious weight on one side of that scale-
We talked big fish and sea monsters until the church bells rang across town
And the Catholics walked with their guilt to the cathedral on first.
We stumbled home
-blasphemers, but free of guilt-
And talked women and war
Until we found our way to our house in the ghetto.

So that's how the way back up began:
Too hungover to work
Too broken down to fornicate
Too weak to wage war

And it occurred to me at that moment
That if we have crossed the first half of the valley,
we are now walking uphill
And the worst may well be

Yet to come.

We are balanced
Precariously
Over the vastness of the unknown.
Every day when we get ourselves up
We have a choice
To continue to walk the tightrope above the abyss
Or to let ourselves
Fall.
This can be both good and bad
Or one or the other
But the important thing is to remember
That the life of the tightrope walker
The fence sitter
The cliff hanger
Is one that is doomed
To regret.
We must cast ourselves in
If we seek to
See what life is and life is always
Unknown.

Like how
babies
laugh
at
nothing
at all.

The laughter that comes
as it pleases
without invitation
without joke
without ridicule
like something floating
on the rising
and falling
of the spring wind
the trees laugh
as they
bloom
like fireworks
without audience.
and the bees laugh
at their fortune
to have such pollen
they fulfill their calling
in collecting
and retrieving
the precious powdered gold.

They do what they are made to do
and they laugh
like children laugh
buzzing sweet harmonies on that same effortless spring
breeze
everything is laughing and reproducing
and the
season is
holy
and the
laughter
is
holy.

Streetlamp's effusions,
uncaring,
rain down on
milky flesh clad in
shapeless polyester
and pockmarked asphalt
under abstruse night,
with unfaltering
honesty

like the nonsense soliloquies of drunken idiots.

"thank you,"
I offer.

"Just doing my job."

I’m counting paces.
The distance between the warmth of my hearth
and my still-beating heart.

The shortest distance between two points
is just a handful
of measured steps
a mouthful
of tentative breaths
a fistful
of glove
and a heart full
of quiet tenacity.

with these tools I could walk anywhere-
name the points and I’ll join them
with a
trail
of
measured
footsteps.

Out the ***** double-paned window one would first notice that it's unbearably hot.
The metal box in my window is humming a metallic symphony as it blows
cold, electric salvation into my greenish-brownish, moldy, moth-eaten room.
A white van drives down the street. I know this guy, I've seen him before.
Well, maybe not him but the van.
He's peddling poison, not the prescription ****,
but the **** that makes you need to self-medicate
with more.
Upon close inspection one may see the used ******
and two ***** needles
lying in the gutter.
Across the street, in the "yard" in front of the projects
there's kids playing tag.
At the end of the street there's a corner store where the toothless
and their pimps shout at passers by
a guy storms out the door, ticked off that he didn't win enough
quarters on the "arcade game" inside for a tall boy.
One of the pimps shouts at a girl across the street
as a coke (crack?) dealer slowly cruises by on a bike,
his flag hanging out of his back pocket so there's no
confusion
about how he affiliates himself.
The kids are running through the stream of a hose and
laughing and
laughing.
The have no idea where they are.

I get up to open the window,
trying to create some kind of breeze,
any kind of breeze.
I raise my beer to the neighbor, waving from his lawn.
As I sit back down a procession of sirens passes our street.
as they pass I hear the children laugh and somebody at the corner store shouting.
Hustling.
everybody but the kids is hustling and the sirens are wailing and it is
so
****
hot.

The haze of a distant fire
flattens the light on the knolls
beyond the sageflats. Their half-tone
silhouettes jagged by tall pines.
The rumble of the engine as I stand beside the truck
with the door open, surveying the
horizon. Locusts crackling.
A patchwork of shadows washes
over the flats. Steel-gray clouds above.
The wind kicks up sparse columns of
dust. A lonely road
and a shot-up gate.
A glimmer in the dirt. Brass.
Nine millimiter. Discharged and forgotten.
The lock on the gate has been grazed by bullets.
Maybe this one.
The shadows wash over outcroppings
of lava rock amid the tall sage.
Nooks and crannies. Places to hide.

A gust of wind and I am standing in the shade
and my eyes relax as a prairie falcon
glides over the road to survey the
far side for something to eat,
close enough I can almost
hear the beating of his
wings and suddenly
zigs up and then
charges toward
the ground
and then
he has
gone.

Interchangeability.
affixed to loss, affixed to
     loss of limb, or
             worse.
                                              She has the
                                              wildest hair.
                                      So wild it almost makes
                                            her look tame,
                                                   by
                                comparison. and she talks
                                            of magic,
                     no,
                         she talks magic.
                                      she speaks in smoke rings
                                             and with the light of god nestled
                                                            in her bounteous hair
                   those smoke rings float up to form
       halos
                    cresting her brow

                                           shining inner light out.
                                              she is lost.
or I am lost.
       either or, but not both.
we are interchangeably lost
                        and it is not that we are less lost together,
  simply that we are together,
              and that means
                     no matter
              how
                                                      ­    l
                                                           ­                                                              o
                              s
                               ­                                                     t
       ­  we become,
    we are found.

    I
          am:
Lost in liberation
                    in victory
                    in security
                    in madness
                    in
                      her.

Sweetly stomach-sick
again.
Plummeting back into
my puzzle-piece niche
among more notes in the same key.
We’re a messy chord,
played by masterful,
but drunken hands
on a piano
wavering on the brink
of broken intonation.
Just close enough to make
you want to sing
along
and hold the right notes in your throat
bring the decibels up
to a thrum,
vibrating in my chest that
calms down the sick
in my belly.

It feels good-
in the most nerve-wracking way
to look at you looking at me
like that again.

The talent is what we wake up with
And it has got nothing to do with
Being good,
Because everyone has at least some
Ability to do something
In the beginning.

The soul we all have
It's just a question first,
Of volume, second,
Of whether or not we lose it and third,
Of how well we interpret it.
It's the grit
In the battle-cry
It's the blood
On our fingers as we work the neck
Of some great instrument,
Playing on despite the insignificant pain,
With wet strings.
It's the vibration
In shaky muscles clenched
In complete and utter control
To hold a pose for a moment,
And flow into the next.

Skill's the hardest.
And it's got nothing to do
With perfection.
Perfection's an antiquated lie-
No, skill's greater, more intangible
Skill is turning typos into plot movements
And a missed note into a syncopated part of the beat
And each stumble
Into part of the dance.
Skill's in improvisation
Because error is unavoidable.
And when computers and amateurs err,
They freeze up and break down.

A skilled artist knows better-
Knows the mistakes are all just part
Of the grand scheme,
More a product of divine inspiration
Than anything we could have
Meant to do.

She said,
"you won't believe what I'm looking right now.
The flames must be fifteen ******* feet above the roof"

And I went outside and I could see the plume of smoke like it was a block up from the house
so I ran back in and got everyone out of the house and we hopped in the car and sped off
toward
the flames
-just like a gruesome car accident-
and when we finally came within a few blocks it looked like the revolution
gone and started without us
people were running and jumping fences
to get closer to it.
So we got out and started running
through back alleys
and back yards
and suddenly, we came around a corner
and there it was.

They said the building was abandoned, that no one had been inside when it started.
It wasn't much of a building now.
It was a skeleton
and the flames were maggots picking it clean.
Inside was like the brightness of the sun
and the fire crews were giving it all the water in the world
to little avail.
Gigantic plumes of tiny embers were jetting from its open ribs into the twilight-
falling all over houses and businesses

and all I could think was
"what if it
doesn't
stop?
What if this is it? and it can't be contained?
and the whole
city
goes down with it?"
We were standing in the middle of a riot ready to happen-
it was like a backdraft-
an explosion minus one ingredient-
a single exhaled breath.
So what if this is it?
What if the end starts right here, right now?

So I began to root for the fire, not the firefighters.
I prayed for it to collapse
and eject all that hot ash over everything
to end us all.

But it didn't.
and after fifteen minutes or so the firefighters were winning.
So we turned on heel
and we hobbled home.

Live to fight another day.

Breathe, breathe on.
let's sit across from each other
so we can
breathe
each other in.

I can smell the pheromones
in your hair
from the next room over
I'm listening to
you
pack the last of your
things
and I'm asking myself if you're really
trying
to make that much noise
or if you're just
******.
and you shout that I'm being an *******
and start to leave
and I wonder if you can smell
the *****
on my breath
when I say
"bye."

and I wonder if you really misheard me when I slurred it
or if you just wanted to hear me say
something
else.

And I wish there were something else I could say
to make everything better
and put you on the other side of that closed door
so we could sit
and breathe
each other in
and get high
on the tension
on the pheromones
on the *** stained on my breath.

But you're not.
You're outside
and I'm inside
and I can't hear you breathe
or sing
or cry
or say our names
separated by a miles-long ampersand
or whatever it is you're saying to whoever you're saying it to.

and instead I'm just getting high on cheap cigarettes and cheap ***
thinking about
everywhere
that's not the bed I have to sleep alone in tonight
thinking about
everywhere
you could be riding that bicycle.
thinking about
anything
I could have invented to say to you
but it has all been said.

So breathe on,
and I'll try to do the same
between the long drags
and drams of cheap *****.
and in time, maybe
there will be
something
to be said.

I rattle on like the wind if you let me
I make a million plans a minute
To go a million places
And **** a million women.
I spin silken sterling yarn with my silver tongue
But I can't do much else.
Not too surprisingly, plenty of people don't care for me.
And for a while I was among them-
The product of an overanalytical mind and a policy of no-******* cynical honesty (or maybe honest cynicism), I suppose.

However, on my good days I know it to be true, that I
Can't change them, can't change me.
Why try?

I was built
To fly by the seat of my pants
And try to use my best judgement-
Though I'm probably going to lose my mind
And all my money
And friends
In the process.

We'll see.

The road stretches infinitely onward,
To the bitter end-

God knows I'll get there someday.

Fog lays like a pale figure in an uncomfortable chair
languishing
and I lay too
with a full heart
under a duvet
yet awake in the dark
as the electric fan ticks away in the corner
and on the street there is no one
not delinquent teenagers
not stupefied drunks
not star-crossed lovers in the cold

just the vapor in the air
too lukewarm to form hoarfrost
too cool to disperse

the streetlights are refracted into orbs of blue light
hanging with a soft buzz
over wet asphalt,
beacons for no one,
no thing.

Pushed?
Pull until they fall with you.
Shushed?
Make a silence so deafening it drives them insane.
If evil strikes your right cheek,
slip that right hand so fast he falls on his face.

Be aggressively passive.
Because fire plus fire just burns down the house.
Be the negative space
Invisible to everyone
but those who are
looking.

And if that maddening silence makes them scream,
(which it very well may)
reply calmly,
but give no ground.
not even an
inch.
and you will do more than win;
you will baffle them.

Because all the
pushers
know to do
is push.


They’ve never seen someone like you.
someone so
avoidantly
direct.
so deafeningly
quiet.
so precise in chaos.

You’re like negative space.
and you baffle me
because when I push
you pull
until I fall over myself.
When I roar a lion’s roar
you are a mouse

Yes, you are a puller
and I am a pusher
and I am so
astonishingly
fascinated
by you.

If I had back every dime I've ever frittered away foolishly,
I'd be rich
for a day.

Contrails, like brushstrokes
made with measured and elegant
exactitude
wash over the halo of white light
worn by mother moon-
the persimmons of night cut through
the vaporous blanket of winter,
swaddling the earth below in mellow
reflected light,
saying "carry on, my sons
and my daughters,
the night shall pass,
but until then I give what comfort
I can."

I'm a little surprised
It took til now to realize
That I'm a little more than a
Little attracted to crazy.
Maybe crazy isn't the right word
That spark of divine madness-
The muse incarnate.
Sometimes they look very similar
And it takes months to figure out the difference,
In your case I think I just called it close enough.

Crazy beats boring, I suppose.
It overcomplicates things, that's for sure.

I don't know what love is any more
Because I've now discovered that one day you can be in love
And the next day find yourself the cuckolded brunt of a very brutal existential joke.
At any rate, that drug-fueled madness we shared, trying to fix each other so desperately,
Trying to feel something so impetuously,
Whether that was intimacy or just validation,
Collapsed. Go figure.

Madness at its finest,
And it left chaos in its wake.
For me at least. You seemed alright.
And I use the word "alright" very loosely there.

Light killed night so I rose and rolled over
shaved and showered
then stood before the blinds-drawn-back
freshly foggy glass
I traced the outline of the ridgeline
of the mountains outside with my finger
in the condensation,
sat and watched the light bounce off the snow
til the misty glass dried
and suddenly all the details were clear
tufts of green
tusks of brown
standing up through the crusted-over ice
and crystalline facets of cliff-face
bits and bobs, anyway, of color on a fresh canvas
and all still
til I spied a couple specks
-and squinted-
not just spots now, but bodies on stilts
(four apiece)
and a ***** crown on the one.
Goats!
yes, mountain goats,
male and female,
traversing the treachery
in spite of it all-
though I could feel they had none,
not an ounce of spite between them
no!
not in spite, but in tandem
with the elements,
the terrain,
with each other.
The conditions aren't adverse,
I realized,
they're ideal.

here is here,
now is now,
and you're a little speck,
just like me,
just like mountain goats,
just swimming through it all
with grace
and tact
and majesty.

We seek love because in love we are validated in our perfect flaws and exactitude of malformation and in love we are given reason not to hate ourselves for the things we see are wrong but cannot change even if we spent a millenia in an instant or infinite instants in eternity struggling to shake off the shackles of our humanity which is both our captor and liberator in this,
life,
yes we recognize its importance in allowing us to be but we spend the congregation of moments we are given in that holy being damning it, for it also makes us imperfect and in our imperfections is the capacity to do harm unto the world which we love so much,
and so,
we equate these imperfections with evil and seek to expunge them with all our might of will and all our cleverness of wit and all our screaming and pounding and passion of
soul,
but it is all in vain for these things which we despise so greatly are joined at the sutures with our very being and hence have many good but troubled lambs of the internal apocalypse chosen to end that being for sake of ending that malformation, though they know this is wrong, but it is the only solution in trying to remove the weight of one’s existence and hence the weight of existence from one’s mind and so they sleep easily,
unbreathing,
unknowing,
and having completely cleansed the burden of themselves from this immaculate and gorgeous universe which they love so, but they are also
unloved.

And it is in love that we are validated, both in our perfect flaws and exactitude of malformation,
it is in love that our weight on the world is not lifted, no, but counterbalanced and nullified,
and in that way,
we are set free.

and one day I get tired of walking
so I climb to the top of a very tall ridge
no bigger than the contours on your fingertips
and I jump

The ground spins away from me
and it falls into the distance
I get lost in orbit
around the technicolor island of shiny garbage we’ve all left in space
pincushioned with guidons
it spins out of my field of view

I scream at the stars
tell me why, tell me why
but they’re silent
they’ve always been silent

But even silence is an answer
and I’ve grown to know the voice of the void
without, within
the shape and color of that silence
has hardly ever stopped me from shouting
and somehow it never fails to surprise me when it shouts back

The self-portrait you printed on a rectangular piece of cloth
waving in the wind of the atmosphere of aerosolized liquids we've all sprayed
hairsprays and bug repellents
at the end of a metal pole
I see it
and even though I am too far away to do anything
I call out
and the answer comes in silence

And then it spins out of view
so I close my eyes

The tether of gravity hauls me back down
and I splash in the plastic ocean
the flecks of confetti that used to be styrofoam containers and disposable straws we've all used and disposed
dance in the light amid the baby blue

I sink
faster and faster as the bubbles rush out of my pores
the baby blue turns navy
the red and orange flecks blink out
and then the green
and the rest

The sun drifting farther and farther
even as I watch it go
then the blue goes too
and the cold of space is holding me again
I’m spinning out

The prehistoric things down there giving off their lights
make streaks of ultraviolet beyond my comprehension
they float around me
so alive and so alien
I watch them through my unblinking windows
undulating back and forth from one food source to the next
pushing against the silence down there
swimming stars in the night
they rotate out of my view and away
into the vacuum

And then the void takes me in
why, why I ask in the loudest whisper I can muster
water rushing over my vocal cords
and the answer comes

And I cannot see it
but I can feel the eventual dirt of the bottom rise up
to catch me
it consumes me like an amoeba taking in nutrients
I close my eyes
and I understand.

Late nights alone.
Doesn't really matter which.
Sure, I could go get laid.
but that wouldn't even begin to bandage my problems.
Sure, I could watch some girl with daddy issues ******* in a chat room.
but that wouldn't even begin to fill the void in me.
And sure, I could drink this whiskey,
and I could pass out again.
In fact, I think I just might.
In my dreams I don't have to be lonely.
I can see the curl of your hair splayed in fresh grass.
In my dreams there's no difference.
And this whiskey's just going to help me get there,

right?

That's all we ever wanted anyway, right?
To love and be loved back
to trust and be trusted
to push,
and feel some *******
RESISTANCE
for jesus christ sakes?

Or maybe not.
I'm starting to think it's just me.

It seems the world's perfectly happy
with their g strings
their foam parties
their cam girls
their sitcoms,

their pleasure.

but not mine.

I stared into a void, deep, wide, and truly awesome
and felt as though I were a single grain of sand in the belly of the ocean
infinitesimally small
and the void stared too,
back into me
and I wondered how I must look to it
a blinding light?
a void of equal size?
perhaps it perceived me as I perceived it
More likely, I was virtually invisible
something to be ignored
for what is being in a sea of non-being?
and I grew tired of this, this void
this great and mighty nothingness
and I began to fill the space with being
faster and faster
I grew and it changed
from nothing to
something
and something filled in all the cracks where nothing had been
and twisted and contorted to form shapes
and waves of somethingness across a background of nothing
and this sea, this
great and mighty somethingness
surged high and drowned out the nothing
until there was only something
and there was no nothing
and everything was exactly the same.
but I realized this was the same as when
there was only nothingness
and without negative space
there was no difference
between what I am
and what was
before.

But,
there was one space.
a space
infinitesimally
small
which was blank
a point of something in a
sea
of nothing
I watched it for a long time
and I am
sure
it too, was watching me.

I want to lay with you,
roots grown together,
tired from the day
in a bed of clover
under mother moon
with nowhere to be.
The leaves would begin to fall,
eventually,
blanketing us from autumn's bitter cold
and the scorns of obligation.
I want to drink you through my nose,
your primrose perfume twinged
with subtle notes of leaf litter.

And when the whim to rise finally
lifted us
the grass beneath would be matted
and combed
in the shape of yin and yang.

Thou.
I can't think of a more romantic word.
and who was the genius who first said "thou"?
who distinctified another human being from all the other
"it's"
and realized that whoever that was, that first
"thou"
saw the world just as he did?
and perceived him just as he perceived them?
brilliant *******.

He,
Whoever he was,
was the first man to grasp true
empathy.
To identify with another human not as an object,
or an animal,
"but as another of himself"
an extension of himself.
himself.
itself.
thyself.

It is one of the oldest existing words,
and has not undergone any major change in tenthousand years.
Perhaps this is evidence that we were,
in fact,
built
in pairs.

Which raises the question of who the first "thou"
was
and his relationship to whomever first said it.
I like to think they were lying across from one another,
he and his partner
or she and hers
and it occurred to one of them that the person opposite them
saw
them too.

Thou art.
as I am.

Next must have come "we"
or some variation thereof.
Thou,
I,
thou and I.
We.
Us.

What was the brilliant sonofabitch who first uttered "us"?

I wonder if he died alone.

See "Laws of Physics"

1. You will have a body.
2. You will have a mind.
3. You can do whatever you want with either.
4. You will hurt.
5. You will feel joy.
6. Love is not guaranteed, though it is a possibility.
7. You do not owe anyone anything. Although, (see rule 8), people may decide you do.
8. Some people will be more powerful than you. This can mean influence, size, weapons, or intelligence.
9. There are no laws (excepting the Laws of Physics). Although, (see rule 8), people may decide there are.
10. You will not have time to see it all.
11. You cannot choose to whom, or where, you are born.
12. You will die.
13. Any prospective afterlife will not be revealed until after the time of death.

These are the rules. They are entirely non-negotiable. Should you find them agreeable, you are welcome to experience life and all it has to offer. Life is non-refundable. Life cannot be re-sold. Life is without material value.

To proceed, please sign here-


X__________

You asked me why I would ever want to
be with you
and I said
"Really?"
and you said
"After having gotten to know me better, and learning all the problems I have,
is it really worth the time?"

Really,
I just want you to remember that
I kiss you
even when you smoke Marlboro Blacks.
And I'd kiss you if you smoked
Cloves
or even GPC's.
And if you ever decide to quit I'll be 100% behind you
(Because honestly blacks taste awful)
(And because they're terrible anyway)--
But if not,
I'll still be happy to kiss your
cigarette lips.

Because they're still your lips-
no matter how they taste.
And because they're worth it.

splayed
with a deathmask as gaunt
as in life

metacarpals and phalanges,
liberated (in vain) of rubbery
connective tissues

ribs and spine,
so surprisingly human,
sunbleached

bones that may as well have been mine
but weren’t for whatever reason
(or no reason at all)

what karmic debt
could this poor specimen have possibly incurred
to be pinned, naked and fleshless, in a glass-paned box for all to see for all foreseeable eternity?

mayhap beauty is, itself
criminal
when it goes without a price tag.

Last night was one of those nights that makes your coffee a little blacker the next morning
And takes a few more cigarettes from your pack
And makes your ulcers worse
If you got ‘em.
Snuggled up alone
With a barrier three blankets wide
Between me and the rest of the world
Trying to heat my still-beating heart.

It was raining hard outside.

The snow silences everything.
I walked,
nearly barefoot,
into the whited sepulchre
of my backyard this
evening.
And everything was white
and the same
and silent
like the
grave.

I hummed a low note
just to break the
silence.
Just to make
absolutely
sure I was not
in fact
already dead.

It was
almost
a perfect moment
of absolute oneness
and sameness
and purity.

And as I began to **** into the unbroken blanket of snow, I pondered
if we are not
destined
to break the silence.

For some people,
Reality is too much to bear.
For some people,
The weight of the air in their lungs
Is too heavy to hold
And for some
Just living is
too much.

Call it insanity if you want
Go ahead, cast that stone
if you want

I call it a hyper-awareness.
And maybe a mind with too
logical a view of how
Illogical
It all is and how
Tragically
Ironic life is and how
Impending
Our doom is.

I know a fair few of these.
They are mostly good, kind people
Who have too good an understanding of the words
"Infinite"
And
"Nothing"
And of the point where those two words meet.

So to my friends who want to end it
Because they see too much every day
Who can't breathe because they're
Drowning in rising water-
I hope you live long enough to find
A reason to.
Because I am confident
That like with all things,
If you persist in looking

You will succeed in finding.

Life.

Life is, at its best and its worst, pure, unadulterated madness. The moments when we laugh and cry or we cry and laugh. The moments when we scream at the top of our lungs. The moments when we smile sadly. The moments when we collapse on the floor because it's all too much.

Love.

Love changes so much. From the first embrace of a warm body, kicking and screaming, to the last. From being loved to loving, yourself, and then loving yourself. And all of them are as different as the colors in the rainbow- gradient shades of warming light. Many things of one kind- or maybe many kinds of one thing.

But here we are. Where else would we be- no, Where else could we be? And here it all is. Just where we left it. Like coming home from vacation to find not a crumb out of place.
We are dynamically static, waves in an ocean, snowflakes in a blizzard, grains of sand in the wind-whipped dunes.

Together we hum a vibrant chord in the key of being, the vibrating thrum of bees busy at work to keep the scaffolding of what is from collapsing.

And here we all are. Here we are and everything is different but nothing has changed.

Where else could we be?

The rain hammers on the whistlepigs outside
like an organic xylophone
they fiddle with bits of grass in the dark

It's night and the chorus frogs
back it all up,
the humming of the refridgerator
the whistlepigs
the water in the pipes,
the rain.

I've been in this cabin in the woods
**** near a month already
and the incessant buzz of electricity trying hopelessly
to ground through the faulty wiring
in ten million appliances
still cannot be escaped.

Better to be a whistlepig
living beneath the floorboards in the damp
than a mouse in the walls-

but I guess I've never
been either.