Act 1
Standing near glass, one is never alone,
The room is always crowded
An inanimate audience, rapt,
Starved for words as water in the desert.
They are quite fashionably dressed.
Fashionably late to the lisztomanic social hour
Entertaining Pan, Eros, and Aphrodite
So to catch the eyes of some
Rebel of the heart;
Ah, but who could take their eyes
Off the face of world-hope and earthly pain?
Deep and Endless as he rides the soft, pink waves
Of love from strangers infinite and faceless,
There we see Alpha and Omega
Cruelty in his perfect Travis Bickle impression:
“You talkin’ to me?
You talkin’...to me?”

Act 2
With dumb admiration, they all look back,
Whispering like gospel, praise and fear alike.
A show was one to give, and so it was given,
But the silence is deafening--
So, this fourth wall fails us,
The veil of envious telepathies
Cast locks of hair errant and
Eye with nocturnal shadow--
Disassembly spiders like ice from water
And all in the foreground fades
Washed out by limerant lights
Wasting outward tithes
That, within or without, we are blind  
Lest that slowly shattering negative-space
Converts, excites, and tosses us back
To the depreciating eye and its yawning folds
Outside the mirror’s window
The implicit volley from another world
Those faraway pastures of greener plane.

Act 3
There, there I know the judgements of distant onlookers
Are but the prodigal son of fear and desire
But knowledge-of and feeling-toward are two faces
Of no glass possible to modern physics,
And yet, though I’m the spectacle
They can see what little part of the world
I cannot.

Take to the skies, your leader dreams, limit the attitudes
That weigh you down for, remember, punishment is grounding
On what stone you find purchase,
Know your head may float on−
Anything you want today figures in dollars and sense,
For crimes unknown between me and Adam,
Anything you want tomorrow, by God, is recompense;
Till the earth from whence you came−
Sanity and health are luxuries to the virtual yeoman
Who wishes day after day to see those legs rise,
One after the other, fancies of make−believe clash with
Laws of take−believe, of grit and wealth−
They say, live happy, make your destination,
Your goals, your strength, your perseverance
To really think success off
The table of what you can achieve
And place more stock in the invisible hands that
Usher a wretch like me−
Teamwork, the qualitative change needed to quit a pride
No words can succeed to encase,
Focuses its hatred when given positive chance
(But never can quite dull the edge of self−worth)
Your victories today are given answer: limit
Love to fullest soar, my actions, my purpose
Of leader−effort greatly cherish
What all the Haves deem mine−
Let not sin color your pay,
For they know best; slaves dare not reach
Beyond what they imagine we celebrate
Strung aligned by ebbs and flows
Of mankind’s cold regard
And, in humbled separation, find we move together−
This life we do determine to be endlessly new,
110% unreal work, supernatural labor,
Why wait for the ineffable dreams, the !!! dreams,
When they are nothing but a hurtful difference,
Hard to give up, hard to ring true−
Every person, me, you, suffice, surfeit on discipline,
Put, now, what priorities they’ve found better
Toward the hard line of the bottom,
The earth, quick with clouds pitch
Cooling the heads as the cores explode
Every winter, a winner opportunity
As raging ice and hellfire forests
Dot the mountains called I−
The successful follow those who’ve achieve
Those leader dreams, the calmly rational, the spoken articulate
To its first day of life after disaster−
I’m doing time, wasting mine at the boss’ door:
Expect to keep your passions in the heart,
And off those tired, sordid fingertips.

The last of the angels’
Castaway nametags
Hung from the plush red edges
Of the art deco interior.
A breeze from the open door
Cast the doctor’s pamphlets to the floor
Advertising his services
For the special remediation program
Since he could not sleep
What with all the voices
From below chanting his name—
How he envied the people he killed:
For they were spoken so little of.
That is, except for on his intake sheet:
After passing over the names,
Seven in all,
Whose lives were, shameless,
Shed over ***,
The latch clicked
And out came the doctor’s hand
Beckoning through the door
A “come hither” gesture.
On the couch he sat,
Neck conforming perfectly to the couch
As he swam a cascade of Rorschachs
Apart the mirror-faced, owl-like man.
Speaking with a heavy Eastern-European accent
He knew exactly why Elliot had come:
Perhaps the intentions were dubious,
Perhaps he was looking
For quick solutions;
Regardless, Mirror-Face was there to help:
Too easily, these days, was it
To determine dysfunction in the masculine—
And this case was rare,
Awash in chatter from below.
So, there must be something deeper
Rooted in fear of perpetual
Romance fetishism
And absence of its referent.
Yes! The penetrative is missing—
The limerant object
Is without form, shapely, and feminine
And would forever escape him,
In part by suicide,
In part by isolation.
The reason you are here
Is the absent-present offspring
Of such missing ***,
A veritable porcupine-dilemma
In the flesh, a show of insufficient ****** capital—
See now in this face of mine.
Yes, now that I’ve diagnosed
What ails
Let us explore what solutions
Could have been:
The living world does offer suitable surrogates
For those lacking—
Recognizing this is the first step
To being forgotten,
To allow you to sleep.
Yes, you recognized then
The gun as the extension of the phallus
And it levels the playing field
Raised up, aroused by power
One feels when operating heavy machinery—
Yes, all flesh which is the metaphorical egg,
The bullet is the *****,
Which penetrates the flesh of the paramour
Impregnating her with life inverted
And creates, in death,
The child of ****** frustration.
While this child is one of children lost,
It is child nonetheless.
Yes, and this gun, the metal *****,
***** not one
But many—in fact, incestuously,
It ***** entire families,
Entire communities,
And leaves their lives gravid
With your legacy.
Yes, it is the only way to create
The ultimate matron, the universal feminine,
The supreme m-Other
For the Supreme Gentleman.
And you, as you see me,
Are the absent-present of this child of death
This union of bullet-***** and the whole-body womb,
With which you, sadly, impregnated yourself.
But, here’s the secret,
Because of this, you can only do damage control:
Your child will prevail.
Yes, the name may be gone, but the child prevails.
Name may be gone, but child prevails.
Name gone, child here.
So, have the voices stopped?
Has the child matured in you?
You are on your way to being forgotten,
But the child lives on:
Yes, the name may be gone, but the child prevails.
Name may be gone, but child prevails.
Name gone, child here.

What would happen
If we read “X over X”
As the calculation
It deserves
Instead of so much
Self-serving banter?
We’d find what goes in what
And in quantities unforeseen
As conversing crowds
Among the qualities:
How about this?
“Mind over matter.”
How much matter is within mind,
What pieces of the world
For ideals left behind—
Perhaps what memories
In nutrients we disregard
And the patchwork politics
Between chocolate and hearts
Of artichoke.
What of “ballots over bullets?”
When blood spells the words
We’ve yet to choke
Down?
How many shots will be fired
Before we like band-aids
To wounds apply?
How much violence endures
Till democracy is blest,
How many protests cut down
Before we can lay down the sword?
What of the adage “brains over brawn?”
The well-known oath of courts and kratocrats
With force harp upon?
The strength which one must possess
To prove intelligence
Proves unattained
Yet so many beatings
Are reasoned as recompense—
What sense must be made of pain
To convince us the path of enlightened men
We must avoid
To stay in line.
Thus, submission over freedom
Is where true freedom stems.

She’s going clean
She’s going sober
After the high from chase
Is all but over—
It’s not the envy
But hypocrisy that stings:
We both agreed we’d worry
About more important things—

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

Call it stupid
Or call it fate
20/20 vision
Is too little, too late—
Purse my lips and wrap my arms
To the closet thing around me
And give my vows
To slick roads and sneaky trees—

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

I guess I found the question
To an unsaid answer:
What is hate
But a little love with anger?
I’ve had to stew in shame
As a judgment was made
Right above my name—
There it is,
In my crumpled dashboard:
These black thoughts
Spelled out on my record.

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

The west seems impossible
Domestic country foreign
Left and right, up and down
Meet and aspect feint
As the universe turns miles fast
Beneath the laborless turn of the wrist,
A calm smile on my face belied by the whites
Of knuckles, eyes trained toward stars and dust betwixt.
I, a mote of solar stuff,
Hurtle past the known outstretched edge
Toward the center of my solar system.
It’s a challenge, a race, a pledge,
To outrun the dark recess
Too heavy for Apollo’s light,
In that impossible west—
Yes, far too massive
Far too massive
Far too massive.
Every move has reached its apex
Bourne tired on the fabric
Heavy lies its form
As I flex
Spreading over pillows, over sheets
And to the navy dour
Of home’s familiar door
Those moments shared by all,
Soft illuming like torches,
Move closer to the center
Where each affect glows like mothlight
On neighbor’s porches.
It gave me pause
For I thought nothing could escape
A blackhole
Once crossed that threshold reach.
Upon that event horizon I gave pause
And forced a humble laugh
To let what’s still
Lay besieged.
Lest it be him
Lest it be me
Looking back
Looking in
Over the veil where one as I cannot observe
Spreads sly reminders from the other end
That has inward turned:
The product will emerge rife
With absurd cosmic alchemy
Formed but missing name and birthright—
What shall we name him?
What shall we name him?
It’s clear these twisted do-overs
That one can only watch
Are responsibilities of life
O’er event horizon crossed
Despite the warnings shouted
The wishes to him I can’t observe,
To him standing, running still become
At best, vicious reforming features—
These turn to doubtful lines of reasoning
By childhood’s chimeral creatures
One can feel its phantom limb
One can hear the pseudonym
Left with little to identify:
So, what shall we name him?
What shall we name him?
Only fools, the crowd of past selves,
Headlong cross the event horizon
And follow north
The stone covered in moss
Till a once around the globe,
All upsides and down, sufficed,
Brings them to the river
They never cross twice,
Brings them to the river
They never cross twice,
Yet somehow repeats the past
As though it follows in tow
Renewed and dilated
In matter, in style forever cast.
No, this can never be, this dark flow
Looks back from impossible east
And returns to the future
With words of warning or of comfort
And all too hesitant,
The future is the memory
Of the past
Lived in the present.

Though paths remain uncrossed
And souls still give a friendly gesture,
The local haunts are still shuttered
To those that brave these occult and rural roads.
The busted macadam speaks volumes
Written in its faults those riddles and anecdotes
Long kept in the spirit of the place
And the etchings of otherwise mute country spaces.
Such is the clarion of a hero’s return
On the lips of a medium, forever for profit
Incanting enchantments upon grounds
Which formed his genesis and the ash he became.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Delusions of that throbbing arrogant wound
Have played tricks on these eyes before
To all soothsayers and falsifiers with words
So dulcimer as they are harmful to restful nights.
This is the true passing of the hero:
A loss of a child’s wonder to the silver lines
In the unnatural twinning of reality and make-believe
As sung from cardstock ramparts of an ocean of carpet.
There is no looking backwards to a road disappearing
With the valley’s crushing winds to my back though
The battle grounds and olive trees suspending offerings of peace
Run headlong in their respective directions, those unrealities: present, past.
Only spirits can hold time’s scales
With such precision or precariousness
As preternature may devise—
Those creatures of children’s books.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Smoke crafts the forms of three adolescents
Jogging along the culverts of the West Fall hill:
Among them, the long-haired boy I know, face as though a mirror
In fear, I fire my arrow straight and true in the name of reason.

They scatter into the fronds of wheat and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.

Or so the flicker of passing wheat conceits.

I come to the shores of that river where young men dive
Inside the crater that grave of bicycles inured twelve in all
Attempting to dredge the depth for a lost frivolity
And the scattered refuse of the year before: perhaps a trading card.
I throw myself to westward skies out from that sylvan steppe,
Whose lustrating turgid flow repelled the revenant of the past.
May its purity allow me to meditate upon its unwavering face,
And it shall shine back stern with an idol of a comforting familiar.
As it opens its eyes, halfway, its clear aspect scatters
Beneath the inflatable tubes where, hand-in-hand and sweetly as birds
The voices of those long-haired wraiths: the girl of his fancy,
Whose name was destined to be cast aside in the autumn wind.

They pass beneath and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.
Or so the flicker of the passing stream conceits.

And, oh, the mountains rise as the curtain
Upon which a young poet casts dispersions
And anger for the sclerotic moments in flowery metaphors,
For there at the altar of renunciation, one can only speak in tongues.
And over the young poet, the fog hangs lazily to mark the world’s turning away:
A blinding of witness to his offerings, the deafening of ears to his word.
For I am no mere present, but the possession of that which looms
And that which as passed—for whom am I, the present, a memory?
Yet, this knowledge sates all hunger and quenches thirst
For those wounds, those ashes,
Those songs written deeply
Have proven fertile for genesis before.

Or so the flicker of passing dreams conceit.