Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

I cry

I cry without stopping





infidelity known.

she speaks.


a swarm is simply a swarm


I nod
blood spills from my ear.


a lance.

a knife to a fight.

short of a trophy
I prove myself.


star of track of field

six in the morning child

again


alas they say memories swing round


bad off

NATO orders my artillery to leave


die
(all of his connections)

die
(all of his corrections!)


its fingers
its denim

sweet sickly


the need to taint
its need to taint


of rose

of lace




and the nauseous chariot


I hear a man tell me to lower my pants


five fifty child molester





rumors of a wasp's nest.





Climb dig and burrow.

Four people become one warhead.


a family forgets it is first

a weld forgets it bonds



still a spider.

suspend my fangs



a jar



Orlando



Missouri



states away a kiss mimics a drone.


She
darker no.
now darker yes.


with shameful splashes we recover.
Gather and mourn in a corner.

a drink? a meal?

Yes, his favorite.

Her favorite.

Swallow.

First chew. Through salt and oil.
Find there the meat.


Excrement rots?
Fertilizes?


Or does it sink?



there

now our tears join.


With sodium we are one.

I'm drinking your blood
and you are doing many thing to drink mine


Chaos on this doorstep.




With you tonight.




remembering twenty five years ago


a signature is needed

a window to nail close.
a match to ignite
and a legacy to squabble over


life shines
i give birth
his mother
and i


and I'm praying he sees the same flake fall twice for the first time

and I'm praying he enjoys courdory

and I'm praying he has my mother's green eyes

and I'm praying he has my will

and I'm praying he knows my grandparents loved

and I'm praying he has my father's eye for beauty

and I'm praying he never knows where I came from

and I'm praying I haven't witnessed too many falling stars

and I'm praying I've not broken a heart


and I'm praying


i know it's wishful thinking


see thirteen species go extinct
see my mother cry
gnaw on iron bars
give more than have
gain a scar
smother an infant
bury a corpse
live their life
stroke hair


enjoy peeled grapes and tomatosoup with no vomiting


destroy a legacy


I reach into a wet trashbag
I feel hair and bone


I clean up and I grow up



myself molested
myself molded



a ******



two

three

and now it was eleven

twenty two?



then I wake up
and I forget



(hoping this would always **** me)


and I want to know why