Joy is never pure,
Never homogeneous anyway—
Too many impurities have intermixed
With happiness for it to be meaningful anymore—
I see your face change
But I don’t see you smiling—

Joy is the negative of the negative
Ever climbing toward the total emotional zero; its double,
Rage, its ground state, it, a climbing-toward
Intolerant of the pliancy of a forced feeling of a positive—
I see your face change
But I don’t see you smiling—

While trite, joy does not stand on its own,
Infirm, quarantined, a hopeless pandemic—
And that’s what makes it more explosive than any bomb
Deadlier than anthrax and poverty combined—
I see your face change
But I don’t see you smiling—

Rage draws the lines along vulnerable fault lines
Of a marble statue, its friction like a whetstone
Tempering the war-machine of so nomadic a sensation
A scattering of the borders, invasion of the homeland—
I see your face change
But I don’t see you smiling—

We take our torches, uplifted, to the rows of headstones
And set fire to the desiccated grove of sprouted hands
In prayer from chapel to crypt; let darkness fall on the path,
Let hatred **** the forced smile—
I see your face change
But I don’t see you smiling—

We may be gods, or so religion has gone
But, we gods have no stomach for polytheism
And so must test the strength of other gods
And feast for ourselves
On incense and sacrifice, leaving
Scraps and carnage in the wake—
A religion of consumption and self-hatred
Whereby our tracks and footprints
Are invisible to the eye, and matter so little.
We’ve dirtied up this life enough
That, even if heaven were real,
We’d pollute it too, and perhaps
It’s begun already, stuffed with the suffering
Desperately hallucinating
The glow of distant golden scapes
Where monstrous fetishes grow
Autumnal and austere
In the past, come to alter our times lines,
And take away this hell on earth,
When fire rains from above.
How can you say with a straight face,
If you’re part of the pattern
You’ll break the system?
The insanity of repetition has given us
Nothing benign, the way it’s always been
Business as usual has boiled the oceans
And drained the natural fluid ways of
Their sumption, has ever drawn so many tears—
Perhaps they can cool our oceans
And restore water to drought-plighted lands?
If we could eat human suffering
Like businessmen do, we’d end he food crisis,
If we could drink oil, like our cities do,
There would be no water crises—
But, we don’t; we demand substance
And basic dignity as living creatures
But such self-valorization
Sits like riverstones in my pocket,
Leaving little room for money.
Such hubris, a suicide, watching
The world above bleed into my final bubbles
Something I can call my own
Like so many souls escaping to anywhere but here,
These angel wings of freedom
Bring us closer to a premature death,
Hope is their wax
As we fly on the backs of billionaires
Closer and closer to the sun.

Time to one’s self is important
For so few hours are allotted
To a calm breeze and pleasant roam
Rather, to the braving of hangovers
Of the week’s ingestion of poor decisions
And daily reflux.
The water became warden, trained
To keep us indoors—
But, I have walked home in the rain before
And it’s not that bad—

A looking glass is far too clear to diagnose
Common aliments because of its two-way view.
And so vivid is its eye into the
Streets of the human city
That one cannot help but be reminded
Of the dullard stare through smudges and grease
Use and abuse naturally upon
Transparent presenteeism.
Bow, curtsey, lift the head to a room
Erupting in applause;
You’ve done well in this role,
Interpretations upon interpretations
Miss the minutiae, but get the gist
Of what the grander design was trying to say:
How well you’ve submitted
To the top-down script and blocking—
Just see how well young parents
Use this trope to their advantage
Across reality’s filmy, dusty fourth wall
Into the heart of our performance’s beast,
Our monster within, quick to grow—
Do you see how well the CEO plays
The role of villain in the third act?
We may hate him for it, but every story
Needs a bad guy: after all, the horse can’t
Be friends with the grass—what is he going to eat?
Did you see it? Just now? The glass we stare into?
It’s always chattering back as we bid farewell
To sudden silence of voice’s novelty.

What is this ring I find in my skin?
The mark of attaching when your head latched on—
Getting lost in the weeds of a romantic impulse
I must have picked you up on the edge of my sole
And I didn’t quite notice where you staked your claim;
And exempted me from social sins.
I stared in the mirror to practice your grin
Emoting “Us” as you use me for food
And bemoan my expressions as unromantic or cruel,
Pointed attention to you is too much
But, I panicked anyway and pulled away fast
Your body may be gone, but your head’s
Still attached, embedded in my calf;
Oh, I want you back to parasitize my safety
Once more, drink the vital stuff of my life away
So I would not be so coldly infected
Pathologically obsessed—
Do I run, once more, through the sun-kissed fen?
For food to some other I shall become
As my joints lock into place
Around the last known curve to their bent.

There are far too many things
That would make us happy,
Features light with unbearable being
Scrawled across magnetic tape
In record and prescription,
On our past lives’ VHS,
Ruined by the kindness of rewind—
This wasn’t meant for us,
But that was never the point
We can only know expectations
When we’re already together
One feeling hate, the need to imprison
The wiles of a body, the other
Content to apologize endlessly—
There are far too many things
That would make us happy
But these things weren’t meant for us,
That was never the point;
It was never the point to love one another
And these hearts shaped like Mickey Mouse
Luckily don’t allow us the pleasure.

I wake up to a ring over the sky every morning;
It is not the brilliant sun or a mesmerizing whirl
Of migrating birds, it is not a halo of clouds
Ensconcing the world as a crown Domini of Alterity—
It is, of course, encircling entrapment
Of a very peculiar and particular happiness
Claiming to be what makes life worth living
And the worth of living life, the price of only being—
Westerly blackness confuses my perspective
Since the eye’s machine does not, as it is purported
To do, give us sober access to the world—
It inverts the world. So, I am looking at the abyss above
Ignoring the clouds ground below—
Human is that abyss, fantasy the ground,
The mind’s I is the flimsy bridge
Round bright screens closely wound
Reconfiguring, transposing orientation
So as to make sense of it all.
Strangers, the Other, my walking iteration
Wearing companion mask in a one-man show
With lipstick drawn hastily in the prettiest places—
I, too, want to be pretty
Yet, it’s sand through these hourglass hands
Shadowing through terrifying refractions of light
That, slow to form, would not provide comfort
Were I too see them directly, anyway.
Made lethargic by composition,
Despite the sprites accompanying,
We look for crystalline hands, or some kind of disturbance
To give us what to grasp for
Something to cling to.
The ring, the annular prison, provides what purchase
Needed, but it does not release it hands
Without bearing its claws.