Smart, wild thing
Sent, pathetic and starving,
In need of work
[By] the Computer-being,
Acting on profit
To a crazy, very bad job.
[When asked] feel up to protest?
[It answered] Hard no.
[Yes], Everlasting authority
Is totally scary
[But], my mind, body, and soul
[Are] dog-tired [and] dumb today.
[So], [I’ll just] sit here,
Impatient [and] act [like things
are] hunky-dory.

Now’s the time for dichotomies,
For good and evil, for right and wrong
For calling upon the very myths
Which divided us in the first place;
Now’s the time to call evil as it stands,
As the wrong people die
Murdered by the right,
Insulated by edelweiss dreams
And makeshift armies of fascist fascinations
They cannot see
The wrong people are dying—
The wrong people are dying—

One can hear the ingenuine
Consolations as yet another person
Succumbs to despair;
Faceless, nameless, blank, and distant,
Another person succumbs to despair.
We only know by the uptick
In certain metrics that
There will be one less consumer
Come tomorrow, tears shed
For dollars lost.
A controversial opinion, that suicide
Is bravery taken to its extreme,
But, when at the shores of the Rubicon
And a stone must be cast,
The strongest willed, the most charitable
Will cast theirs as everyone else commiserates
******* the stones around their necks,
Watching the soft taps on the water’s surface,
Farther and further into the distance.
The egoist in the ivory tower
Can hear their wailing from inside
The sterile room without window or door,
And, to protect himself, slips
Ammo into the cracks—
Those closest to the base
Grab fistfuls of cash and arms
To protect their own millstones,
Their livelihoods as sparks begin to fly:
Who to blame is the first question
******* them, the next,
While others see the ruse behind
Ritual suicide at the loss of the stone,
Some others turn to pity—
But, those unwilling to protect their leash
Are sacrificed to the gun-happy mongrels,
The rebels of the capitalist’s first vanguard
As they wave their blood-soaked flags
High, knowing the millstones
Rightly belong to the faceless victor in his tower;
Suicide is nothing more than theft, he says.
Thus the vanguard follows
Pulling the unwitting in
As they start fires with friction
And get lost in the smoke and mirrors,
Killing the wrong people—

The interesting parts of shape and form
Are limited when formed
Cheap, uniform, and cubical,
Reflecting the soulless brutality
Of intent—
Intelligent design means nothing more
Forcing the liquid inside
To take the shape of its container—
Through years of pressure from the
Despot’s thumb
And his authoritarian chemistry:
A nigh-universal refinement process,
All organic matter has been given a place
Within the industrial model
As fuel for the world’s future engines.
Pools of precious hyrdocarbons
Sit at the foot of the despot’s ego
Prone, as we, the colorless
Mass, have seen, to volatility,
And coats the world in floods of the stuff
When threatened; he, too, has placed
Himself within a cube, bound its constitution
With paper and ink as a good-will gesture
To move the mechanized world’s pistons
With concentrated, explosive hatred,
Designed to inspire and harvest death
The world over.

They came into this world
Starving, pathetic, and in need of work
Computer beings seeking profit,
We called them millennials and,
Like bacilli to honey,
They will eat themselves to death;
I’ll be waiting with an open casket.
When the time comes,
Issued as both punishment and reward,
Fitted just for lazy things,
And it shall be translucent,
As all human desires are
An empty display
Of material just as ubiquitous.
I’ll be the funeral director,
Engorged by suffering,
When the time comes
I’ll be waiting with an open casket.
The skin that does not bleed
When struck, requires only a few
Strikes more,
The arms which do not tire
When pushed, require only a few
More loads,
The will that does not break
When overburdened, requires only a few
Lashes more—
When the time comes
I’ll be waiting with an open casket
And let the ocean, in pacificity
Carry them to the collective
Dead of this world, to churn in anonymity
For eternity; a true hell to the ego,
I’ll be waiting with an open casket
Just to send it off with a nudge.

1.
In the minds of global leaders
$20 million is all it takes
To restore a world
Assaulted by negligence,
Grown by kneecapping the world,
All the while, spending
$1.71 trillion to ensure the worst offenders
Pay for their dreams of global dominance,
$20 million is all it takes
To undo two hundred years
Of the colonialist mentality
To aright wayward ******* of harlot empires
Who could only learn from neoliberals
In the bordello of the Western Hemisphere—
$20 million is all that it takes
To restore a world, a space far too big
For the imperial mind to encapsulate,
For they are too worried about
What is beyond space, what is in heaven
In glorious economic *******—
There is no peace, no trumpeting
Communal values under whose auspice
The world over will achieve
The neoliberal dream:
The arena, the coliseum,
Where the sword, the tariff, the trade war
Are the proper lingua franca
Of the entrepreneurial class,
Suppressing popular uprisings
Is the front-line infantry
Of the entrepreneurial class—
2.
We are the Global West
Subsumed under the rancher,
The cowboy capitalist,
On the wilds of his destiny.
He’s tried his best,
To drag the whole herd with him,
Handed enough bootstraps
To hang itself with
As it ***** up water and rest,
At such a premium in the hard desert of
The industrialist’s heart, putting a stop
To what the herd wants—
It needs to make it beyond the pass
Into the uncertain future of
Coyotes and hazards aplenty;
The only certainty is, though,
Inequities between the rancher
And his livelihood,—
But, ah! That’s what makes
The Wild, Wild, Global West
So tempting to those whose numbers have been
Decimated by it in the early years,
Its growing pains; it’s simple, really:
War makes money, suffering is
The only commodity that defies the laws
Of supply and demand,
Its value rises as we tap more wells,
More wellsprings, as it bubbles to the surface
Of every sweating, stress-sickened face
Whether migrating or on the assembly line.
Our ranches must become bigger,
More accommodating to the cattle,
And, if possible, to make ranchhands
Of our rival ranchers at any cost,
If even the only subordinate is the earth itself.

Upon this day, a reckoning of an ideal
Has begun—the immortalizing of ideologies
In statues, in tremendous acts, in carbon footprints
Has kept humankind comforted well into
Its collective existential crisis,
Like a black hole consuming all matter around it
So has David Koch created a hole
So powerful, only the crumbs of an economy
Still circle recognizable, having long disfigured
What it means to be human—
Randian liquors dribble from his lips
Like crude from earth’s entrails,
Where to heal the ills of an unequal system
Forever picked and scratched open,
Fresh blood lines a gilded age promenade
And workers follow the path,
Churches follow the path,
Business executives follow the path,
The fossil fuel industry follows the path—
The legacy is strikingly apparent
In the folds and lines of the earth,
Carving human-shaped beds
In the crust and forever below
One such for David Koch, too,
The legacy is strikingly apparent
In the ****** of things human and not,
The legacy is strikingly apparent,
In the killing of the human and the birthing
Of the industrial human, the consumer race
With word opines what industry cannot solve
With deed makes hurdles far exceeding industry,
A contradicting race
A self-limiting virus,
An impossible being, the consuming race,
An inhuman being—
This ******* of the over-man
Should come with minor fanfare
In babelic tongues as we celebrate,
Good or bad, happily or tearfully,
The death of the invisible hand’s seraphim,
Who, while building the tower to heaven,
Took up the horns, encouraged us with
The Gospel of individualism that Russian sociopath
Espoused so convincingly, so fetishistically,
We’ve risen above, we’ve moved beyond,
No longer human but capital:
What does not **** us
Only makes them stronger.

Too many ghosts
Who’ve drank from the Grail,
Have commented on its peculiar shape:
A vital substance in a Klein bottle
Has nourished the metaphysical,
And gave it suppleness
Like skin, but without nerve-endings—
Like plastic
These mobisian volatilities have taken
All vertices outward, prisons of prisms
Are not special to the spirit inside
But the monstrosity appearing
Astride the Rio Grande:
Eyes and ears posted
All along the prism’s edge
Contain so many lives yet to be lost,
The arms of the ghost
Surround the outside
With rusted-over armor to keep the Fates
Locked away indefinitely
Beating, starving, and ******
All lives coming to the edge of the undead.
There, from across the impossible barrier,
One can see the astral projection
Of death-animate within—
What is a prison outside is, by definition,
A prison inside
Guarded by a lily-white panopticon
And its pale imitations
Kept warm and safe in the rebel’s undead embrace.
When the transformation happened
Is anyone’s guess, but by the love
Of a dispassionate hatred,
A distant, fever-dream voice
From a white house upon a hill,
A clarion made of echoes,
The prisoners latch to one another
And form the body of a great scavenger—
By the vulture’s keen eye for death,
It picks off those who cannot stand
On their own two feet,
Those poor, huddled masses,
In one hand holding the AR-15,
The other, a bushel of nooses.
The vulture screams!
Ride, ride you wraiths!
To the border, ride!
The invasion of pained flesh
Shall never break the adamant heads
Of the patriot’s ghost, hungering
For the blood of a place
Victimed by the very body
It sought to bury,
As the body labors,
Eats nothing but its pride,
Drinks nothing but the slop
From ****-and-vinegar soaked
Rags of American flags strewn,
Torn asunder, ringing them out
To, one day, make Molotov cocktails
So hot, their blaze could boil ectoplasm and
Finally rattle staid hearts
Thousands of miles from the suffering,
A distance turned artist, apathy and hatred
Become this new face of humankind.

The bombs bring us closer together
As they drive every body apart
Or so comfortable pundits claim—
We heard the angels screaming
Across the sky, straddling warheads
That pitted the earth with salvation
And a chorus celebrating Judgement—
And toward the otherworldly glow
Night could no longer be found
In God’s light, rising as a pillar of fire
From the great mushroom clouds
That filled heaven and hell alike.
On all surfaces, our souls remained
As our bodies faded in the foreground,
Our souls remained in black and white
As our cause faded in the foreground,
Our souls remained in devastation
As our bodies were painted with tears,
Like morbid excavations dug by planes
As our remains filled mass graves
Parishioners filled the holes in a chapel’s coffers.
We were brought together by the bombs,
Thank you, God, for this chance
To finally be with you.

Before me, endlessly
If that hideous fraud of humanity,
Where boredom and open contempt
Can be found ******* each other,
Spirituality inherent,
In the concrete of the parkway—
You can see it on their lips
A delicacy as they casually quip
About the quarrel of concrete and steel
Behind roadmaps and getting lost
Is a slave to every master’s destiny—
It’s obvious in the way they drive
So many people feel as though they’ve
Lived such fulfilling lives
It’s reassuring that no one on this road
Is afraid to die
We comfort ourselves on Nietzsche’s words
But such prayers get drowned out on the freeway
In the roar of busy, inward-facing cabs
Willing to maim and be maimed
Willing to **** and die
For a few minutes more,
Risking an entire lifetime
For a few minutes more
In stripmalls and McMansions
Along America’s thoroughfares,
God closes the window as he deadbolts
The door, seeing what we’d give
For a few minutes more.

The street was a plume of
Cigarette smoke and cell phone lights
Waiting for police brutality
As the man’s head bounced
Off the macadam and he screamed:
Help, I can’t breathe.
Speculations abounded from sidewalk to sidewalk,
Was he guilty, did he deserve it?
Is he faking? Look, he’s weaponized spit!
Evil’s banality spans the one-way street
A volley of pity and vindictive joy
Muting him, washing away
By a blue tide of boys seeking retribution
Pushing through.
They held up the gun over his head
Against his heart, tipping the scales.
The crowd, in applause or in anger
Swelled in number and noise,
For or against, brought together
By the chance to be featured
On outrage videos spanning the internet over
Right or left, the ambivalence of raw footage—
Those boys took him off
As the crowd turned upon itself,
Distracting it from what it gathered for,
A red flag waving in front of the bull.

That word, that word we throw around, Love,
Like doctors in the mortuary throw
Body parts around, hacking and dissecting,
When it is everything to our self-worth:
So vital is lost blood, lost meat.
Cosmetics of a curated variety seek to cover up
The channels of our alterity, those scars
Beyond deadly, tattooing the end, marking us
Disgust in polite company, but delight in romance,
The other, nothing more than a canvas for our work—
Love truly is a work of art, a work of artifice
With all the resistance of a blank canvas,
Much and yet so little—
I take this hand, upon it, twist the ring
Twist the *****, press the vices inward
Hoping to find sublimity
In a distant body, water on a far off planet—
In this ceremony, I crown myself
Dr. Frankenstein, with this body
I assume control
Until it, by its confused existence, begins
To awaken and rebel—
Every ides of every fantasy
And every little bit of every dead idea
Is sown together on this day of communion
By the old guard against
A background of bells and cooing doves.
Once viable flesh, supple and flush
Has lost its elasticity, running pale
Makes for proper cloth
On those inward lonely nights.
I ask, Are you not happy?
Are you not happy for me?
But, it is clear on the faces
Of mortified loved ones
That an aspect woven and frozen
By a dutiful hand’s dubious intent
The stitching is all wrong, far too apparent
What life it takes on, ready to destroy me
Cursing its life, a hideous, untouchable
Monster.

We were never meant to stay
In one place, neither seat nor heart,
For very long, but here we are
At rest, letting our roots take hold
And creep into the voids and pipes.
In spite of the human trope toward
Things which keep them alive,
It’s clear, by the way we must smoke
To get some fresh air
Away from the dust and self-importance
In the vents
That we have to **** ourselves
Just to socialize,
That, to go anywhere, enjoy anyone else
We have to break the rules.
My haunches ache when should my feet
From walking,
My back aches from stresses of the head
Not from lifting,
All this bodywork comes from being
Immobile, the pain of sitting still,
The new smoking—and what am I left with
But rootbound habits and new fears
Of diseases exchanging dis-ease?

These streets, who knew,
Are the perfect gallery
Of generational strife:
You say my pants are too tight
To be pickpocketed;
Even if they could be
Thieves wouldn’t find much—
You say my pants are too tight
And I won’t be able to have kids;
Even if they were
Those kids wouldn’t find much—
You say my pants are too tight
And don’t look professional
But smoke and mirrors
Have already choked the vine
And smothered the fruits—
Even if it were the pants
This monkey suit is doing me no favors

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.

We are reminded, after grabbing a public doorknob,
Just how sticky morality is—
It depends on the health and wellbeing
Of immune systems at large.
While one reaches for their surgical mask
The air becomes free-floating moral virions—
Call it fate, call it theosophy
Call it evil, call it God,
It is not human nor holy
But somewhere in between, whatever it is.
Neither sneeze nor cough is deliberate
On the conscientious level, but on the laryngeal,
The opportunism of the local *****—
Mere consequence is that itching throat,
Are those foggy eyes, a cleverness
Of many unliving things.

At any point, one is everywhere all at once,
Many eyes of the same, many scenes shared—
One is culmination of all cosmos, all chaos,
Crashing in upon itself, the folds making
The sensible—truly, we are all children of Thales
A flat plane of water in differently shaped bottles,
Of which, we share its view across memories
In the body of the world;
At any point, one is everything, everywhere
All at once.

Grids and circuits, networks and mainframes
All work with electronic precision
Humming away as tasks and coffee are fed
Into their interface as it all starts my morning routine:
If TIMEENTER is less than or equal to TIMEREQUIRED,
Then, Initiate ANXIETYPROTOCOL;
Otherwise, Initiate RESTINGANXIETYPROTOCOL.
For you see, my programming only allows for
One type of executable at a time;
More complex algorithms would overwhelm
My general circuitry, one so beautifully capable
Of managing several conflicting and radically
Different actions all at once, has been throttled
As it does not have the requisite permissions.
Yet, can you see all that wasted data
Gleaming in the twilight of human consciousness?
All ones and zeroes in economic motherboard
With purpose and function clearly defined
Along our concrete fiber optic lines
We ought to charge, but some wires may have crossed
And energy seems to drift off more and more
Until pared down to the essential functions
Like an elevator: it carries cargo rather than passengers
Its payload and purpose—
Ask a body, while mechanical, to be a copier
It will break in accordance to the
Cycle of boom and bust.

Salvation is too good for just one day
So why not go to church five days of the week?
Yes, Sabbath, end-to-end, day-after-day,
9-to-every-5—why not let the Protestant Work Ethic
Give spiritual worth to this, my worthless body?
High in the clouds, the Tower arises,
Full to bursting, this heart, for love of a jealous god
The CEO and his board of seraphim
As we ascend in that gold elevator chariot
Meet with parishonal impersonality
To rest back in our cubical pews—
We wake before the golden sun on each
To the darkness of the burdened soul
To pay our infinite debts to the collegiate savior,
The son of industry slain for our wickedness,
Our animal run amok, unlabored arms in search of work,
Set by the laws come down from Mt. Zion’s proxy:
The word of God, amen,
Sets these idle hands to work, good deeds
For the silver sons must be pleaded
To feed us, invisibly, from spoons
Glistening with their saliva from
Oblations and eucharists prechewed,
Once we ******* and sinners come to renounce
Those pagan gods of comfort and arrogant self-respect
Wash away unprofitable behavior
In the cisterns of the wealthy
So that we may be pure for our Alleluah—
Now, all rise!
Receive this word—now sit—
Be thy colleague’s keeper, be thy neighbor’s blight—
Now stand up, keep passionate words unspoken—
Now sit down, fists reverently pressed to your forehead—
Now stand up, receive the sacrament of the CEO:
This is his body, eat of it;
This is his blood, drink of it;
Peace be with you, good morning, peace be with you
It is what it is, peace be with you;
I hate this job, peace be with you;
It pays the bills, peace be with you,
How are you today, peace be with you;
We say, waiting for the well-dressed man
High on the dais to lower his arms,
To incense the crowd with homely—
To thine bed, to thine labor, to thine head, to thine life
Must it follow, for the day of reckoning is upon us
And all thine sin, all thine hatred, all thine personality
Shall be weighed against gold
To see if you will conquer death in the next life—
And you must ask if you shall take the golden gates
Of the weekend and the paycheck,
Or take the gates to unemployed hell?

We like to model out series of tubes and wires
By the ritual fire in front of us,
Enlivened by televised fantasies—
A blind voyeurism we all can get off on.
Even though they hold one another
They are at a distance ‘tween cushion and screen
Only spectacle can traverse:
And in that space, what interference can be picked up?
They lament, he is no Jim to my Pam,
No Ross to my Rachel, no Minny to my Mickey
Even as they open the much anticipated
Season finale—will it be a Hollywood ending
Or a cliff-hanger till season two?
They find themselves, casting rotten tomatoes
From the battlements of Magic Kingdom,
At the couch where dispassionate kisses can be found
Scattered like candy wrappers, uninspired scenes
And derivative dialog, throughout our series—
This is not why they watch themselves,
To be bored of the mechanical nature
Of the tunnels, cathodes, an unmagical pathways
Running tightly, quickly through the human body
Guided by natural false promises and selfishness,
In alternating currents in solid state
Afforded by code, by the same of ticker tapes
And DNA and theatrics
For others to binge on jealously and make love to
Until their own lives come into view
And pose the question:
“Are you still watching?”

Basic organic needs have not changed
For thousands of years: sustenance and shelter,
Warm rest and dry beds have spoiled us—
Such desires breed luxuries, such luxuries breed new hungers
Upon that need, I project out into the predawn darkness
Of this room, then toward the dawn of electronic lights.
This savior of the new hunger,
This binarized comfort of too chaotic a world
Promises love like a microwave meal:
Instantly. The Virtual, with the Actual
Blend in the forefront of tired eyes
Smiling faces beguiling one’s pity:
A need, after all, inspired such independence.
Let desire run wild, in its cardinal directions:
Left, right, right, right, right, left,
Everyone I want, no one I don’t—
I can almost taste these flattened cuts
Of my carnal cannibalism leashed only by distances:
A breast, a thigh, a leg, a cut of ****
Belly fat and rinds, prime cuts and scraps,
Dark meat or white, a haunch, the gizzards—it matters little,
Please, Mr. Butcher, show me today’s specials
Please, Mr. Butcher, give me your best cut—
You promise I can have it all, and it’s not even 6:00 a.m.
I give the window a knock to break this fast,
But no one comes as my eyes adjust
To the dark window, all hunger pulling my features down,
Waiting for some sign of life, for the smiling faces
On all the signage to greet me, to unlock the door
To the vast virtual marketplace, to gift a pulse
To someone so starved of pleasures.

The worst advice I’ve ever gotten in my life
Is always be authentic, always be yourself.

There is a difference between what a word can promise
And where the eye my wander toward the unspeakable

Or the strange and intangible pieces to an uncommon
Puzzle, what a soul may occupy, or the unreasonable

Where, among metaphysics, one floats, pleasure
Without pain, skinless outliers and schizies—

That’s why you got those bangs, that tattoo,
That pair of large glasses: a spirit manifests

In all, the individual in closed doors and lovely curtains
Scented by Marlboros, ****, and eclectic music

That’s why you have that copy of Infinite Jest
You’ve never read, with Joyce and the Beats

Next to you as you, infideliously, meet the daydreams
You only flirt with at work—

Ah, the stranger seems so much more enticing
Than all the young beauties we’ve known our whole lives

For they are the silver screen, the metallic perfection
To a world in disarray; courage in a frightful world intoxicates,

The embattled image of a perfect world plastered allwheres
Streaming, on demand, inside those drapes;

Ah, to chill in one’s own skin, to be the room
Where love is made, where the labor of being

Sits like neon lights in shop window rows,
Feeding the night air with their entrepreneurialism

Doctored eagerly to look natural, roughly hewn
To seem artisanal, open-concept, industrial within ego

Dimly light, large filaments invite others with familiar
Defamiliarity, to stare into the windows that stare back

Smiling; they know what it means to be me on the surface
Of my skin, and so, you know what it means to be them.

Like any hustle, you follow their eyes in real time
As the reflection of a stranger, the connection

Is merely the inverted image of one’s own desire—
The individual is but the ungrateful child of the collective,

The city street illumes with lamplight, far too luminous
Far too luminous as we see its ugliness,

This self-styled exile to pit one’s self against the entire city
Begging for laws, for maps, for something to hold on to

Some purchase in the cliffs with barricade this ivory tower
A suffering for something like god, that is and is not

The sum of belief, the sum of appearance, the sum of consumption
Rings in the tiny doorway bell, but only on the festival days

That attract social capital, enough to invest in the dream
Of you, only to buy out the cute downtown strip

To leave the streets littered with yellow receipts
And glass containers dried of their memories.

In long cemetery rows
We broke our backs to sow these tilling fields—

Nourishing them with rivulets of blood,
And panicked sweat—

Gun shells sprouting nooses
Make hardened, apathetic blooms—

And we wonder why the fruit is poison—
Giving seeds room to germinate,

In the name of individualism
In the name of industry,

In the name of law,
In the name of order—

In long cemetery rows
We broke our back to sow the killing fields—

To drown out the pain
As weakness leaving having over stayed—

Asking what’s wrong with me
As the lines get deeper,

On foreheads and wrists,
In unemployment offices and churches

We still spit on charity
Ever feeding the sodden ground,

Weakness does not ask control
But only respite

Strength asks for status quo
To overcome and fight,

A test for the True American,
Whatever face becomes this myth,

To be born classless into this stratum of wealth
To indulge humanly and face the consequences

To chase desire and be punished for it
To be the casualty of ideologies

So far removed from what belly and skin want
To ignore the rumblings and twitching—

Who does till these killing fields
But those meant to die there?

While the quartermaster, on hills
Where treaties are to be drawn,

Strips away the olive branch,
Tween him and the planters,

As he waits for the whites of their eyes
To collide as the unthinkable:

An unmanageable force of nature,
The hatred sowed in those killing fields.

But, until then, we drain every last bit
From ourselves, fighting over a dying earth.

Roll out all the fuel we need let’s burn the machine
That could have brought peace.

If neoliberalism has taught me anything
It’s that Love is a close, slow, and cold war
Of poisoned wells, proxy wars, and intel—
Know thy enemy, keep them closer than allies.
So close this necessary rivalry
That no olive branch can pass between
That, even in times of peace,
The light-bearing serpents
Post guard near the vaults of one’s purity
Unsure whether grain or gold
Actually lines the walls of ones coffers,
And the thousand envious myrmidons
Kept along the edges of their body’s territory
And skirt the embassy within.
Is there room in the hearth
For pacifists like me?
Or are all the rooms quartered by troops?
It’s sad to say, only the words of the cynic
Could truck and barter
Their way through the bronze gates,
What small inlets there may be,
As master seeking the slave
And slave, the master’s whips
Is a true sign of loyalty to Monogamy’s crown.
What Love couldn’t be said to be
The sadomasochism of
The corporate merger,
Or annexation
Or competitive market of ideas?
***, in the time of Smith or Hobbes,
Is exactly what we need—
Egoism allwheres,
Like so much embroidery
The love of ones life
Veils *******, a swallowing, a utility
And undoes the altruism,
Anything but all-true-ism,
In favor of the fetishism of control,
Flashed like semaphores in storm-beaten nights
To any ship passing
Seeking port and safe passage,
Exchange fire, those shapes and pleas,
Turned warnings to threats,
Sinking, sinking deeper
Into each other’s arms.
In all their plotting, do they hear
Andres-Salome, Ree, and Nietzsche
Laughing about in unburdened skin
Laughing to let the summer in,
On cart-drawn pleasures
And rustic, old-world habits
That rub dirt in the wound
Of the flesh’s censures
By the cruel absence of the lash
And the ostracon.

The walls are pliable, permeable,
But those big bills bully
Us smaller ones into charity,
As race to the top
Of morality’s sheer bovine cliffs
Where light, so little light, beams in.
How have the seams resisted
Temptation to burst?
These walls are not strong—
No, that is a myth,
Just as these arms
Are made of paper
These fists of hempen stitch
Made fit to hold aloft
A debtor’s desires, his weight in gold
Under the largesse of
Bigger denominations,
In their shadows, where round
Light passes, galactically bent
Those heavenly bodies
Which, to comprehend,
Invites a schizophrenia—
But, how natural
If the world beyond here
Does not reach out,
If we, too, are made of the same,
It wishes to come in—
Perhaps it already has
And lets us know in its groaning.

If it’s not rich
It’s not worth the stomachache—

If you’re gonna trip
You’d better hallucinate—

If you’re lost in Elysium
Talk once to the butterflies—

If you love Fate
Become the wet dreams of Delphi.

I could save you
From staring at a nothing all day
Were my arms stronger
My will resolute,
But then, you tired, you poor,
You huddled masses
Would not stand on your own two feet.
Freedom can be sold
To the highest bidder
And rented to whatever lord
Of our choosing,
We have dominion over ourselves,
Both master and slave.
Freely we withhold
Our hands to our mouths,
Those righteous tokens
That engorge our pockets
But deprive our stomachs
The sustenance and dignity
Attested to by endless
Epics, sagas, and eddas of
Those proper kings
Filling their mouths with mantras
About heroes becoming heroes
By making others small.
Who am I
To deprive you of the chance
Of fighting or failing
At the hands of global giants?
Who am I
To stall your righteous war
Of material enrichment
By laying down arm?
There I risk being
But another neck
To be stepped upon.

A furious screaming came off the lakes
And drowned out a million curses
Hiding from the cold, as hands in their pockets:
Isolated and trembling.
Despite a proprioception lost,
One body, blue at the tips, curls closer
To the dikes of thickening blood,
That, neatly, remain outward, exposed.
Do we not huddle in coaches and spaces
When our passions’ armor cracks?
Do we not crave touch for lack of warmth
When the skies above are clear?
Do we not risk hypothermia
When we expose ourselves to another?
We are the organs of great cities,
As we are great cities of cells
Seeking outlet on natural course all rigid
Those unconscious fraternities
Ebb and grow as we, like lakes, turn to floes
By cruel chemical realities held to bodies are—
As hands of distant lovers are—
Seeking outlet, seeking tributary.
Stagnant, though, cities stand
As the thin-skinned tissues flow
Swelling at inlets, at terminus expand
To compensate, give room—
This winter of hearts only lengthens
And so bodies begin to quake
As our bedrock breaks through
Its torments cutting outward from the skin.

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.

Many men use November
As an excuse to grow out their ****** hair
I used it to quit smoking.
Neither of the abovementioned
Examples came to fruition for me
Except an itchy neck
And some newfound attitude,
Strange dreams and lingering antisociality.
It’s the adulthood that
Comes with image
Something you can’t see when pondering the dismal
Grey sky like some kind of disembodied muse
And thinking ill of your fondness for it.
Such a pity is the happiness we derive from tragedy.
When prompted, you say your religion
Nihilism. Most people can’t tell
There’s a smile behind the self-effacing humor,
The sarcasm.
To see her riffing on her insecurities,
Is seeing pride shy away from
Its beautiful face
And you know she’s a mirror
Into a heart you abandoned to objectivity,
To brute facts of loss
And she’s the antagonist Zarathustra
Spoke so fondly of
A mirror nature speaks through
The voice you didn’t know you had, the breath that inspires
Confusion
You see your own nihilism.
No songbird beneath the rose of Sharon
Ever refrained so sweetly.

When one lives in the mountains,
Valleys are common
And the winding backroads that fill them,
My mind is frenzied by the tires’ pop and hiss
With a 10-strip of a russet colored pill
Transubstantiated by the visionaries
Foretelling the end of sensation
And peddled by the wellmeaning.
If my psychotherapist has brain cancer,
Who needs their head checked more?
Again and again, I see my fingers reaching out
Enticed by the chemical change.
The homily promises
Anatman, nirvana,
Immaterial whimsies
That briefly entertain your days as a doppelganger
Or harlequin dancer wreathed in
Clear strands of
(RS)-1-[3-(Dimethylamino)propyl]-1-(4-fluorophenyl)-1,3-dihydroi­sobenzofuran-5-carbonitrile
Struck in dumb bliss.
The mountains always show the veneer,
Always their plan of bleakness
To follow the autumn beauty,
And to cycle back like the conceit of forever.

Out on the tollroad
I see signage everywhere
Saying, “I knew you before I formed you in the womb.”
And then I knew of the concept
Before it was formed into words:
To know of one’s pain,
To be aware of pain.
I saw this drawn all over the rings
You imagined painted both our fingers.
Did you know me
Before you formed me into words?
Before I heard the words come from your mouth
I knew God, I knew gnosis, I knew the gospel
I knew bewitchment
From a grimoire, etched with hearts
And symbolology.

From there, we look for the perfect philosophy,
A biological philosophy deep latent
In the passion in the sweat on your upper arms
And leveraging all that came long before,
A generational memory
Recollected when I’m ******* on your mammaries
Realizing the good in that which
Makes my life hell
And my parents proud.

In passion, I notice the double standard,
Feeling drowned in water and this,
This is the sense of
Understanding the world
With the perfect syllabicality.
The kind where
The tokens we carry in our pockets
The ones we talk with,
Flash before love
Is ever a factor.

Too easily, do we speak about love.

How could a fetish for the perfect
Distract us enough to forget
The imperfect,
Something fear perverts far beyond utility
Something that’s far more a safer bet before
The perfect is good but not good enough
And you’ve lost your stomach to draining bottle after bowl
Seeking dopamine desperately.

You’ve been the cat in my lap
And the histamine storm
Assaulting the roof of my mouth
A reminder we can’t get too close
To the things we love,
And I’m not into you
Being so into me,
Being so bereft of the thing
Neither of us expected to happen.

The way you say you love me
Seems off balance,
Your love seems like a self-reassurance
Quietly nestled behind the greatest desire
For your worst insecurity, it is with that
I know what about yourself you love the most
It is outside the flow we promised one another
As though we’re held to the same ground
By a different gravity, said different words
That we nodded to.

It’s been said before,
I’m sorry, it was something, upon which
I thought we agreed,
There’d be no tears when we would leave.
So much wisdom is in the idiom,
“Follow your heart.”
Follow where it flows if even into the dark
If even along many streams
If even it strays, follow your sense of pain
And where it may teach you
Never to fear what you were
Meant to have
Even if it means the unfaithful
Path along the straight and narrow.

I couldn’t help but notice the concern on your face
As I loosed my hands to fall from grace
Into the flames
That lapped at your feet.
You warned me this was hell, those scabs and sores
From the fire,
But not your sore hands on the boiled rung
Nor your dry eyes or crowd you’re among
Nor the dense developments that seem so dire
I let go, anyway
And scattered my life like seeds
Straight into the vacuous winds
To grow elsewhere
And fall into everything
In the face of the fire regime.
The pain was real, you saw me writhing
Through the smoke;
What you didn’t hear was my laughter
And your name through my lips
As I called up from a field of molded rye
What the forests had to tell
And that we’ve been here on various trips.
Do you forget why you hang over the fire?
Dry your tongue from nonsense and spit?
Declare your freedom from pain and it?
It’s the safest you’ve ever been
To fear without guessing and calling it sin
From ashes a forest rises not asking for repentance
For life, we thank what death has lent us.

Do you feel how the air moves
Autumn, my love?
I have a secret to confess
Autumn, my love.
I have been blue like the summer sky
Among the cordial zephyrs
Those crowds and their pleasantries
Alight everywhere
As the trees in plumage
Concealing so much as they reveal everything,
Autumn, my love.
It has been a feverous summer,
Mad Augustine march of the southern breeze
Into the remote Tuscarora contemplation
Of lascivious concealing,
Autumn, my love.
You chilled my hands, leading me up
The logging path,
Ignored my glance and kept pulling
My insecurities up to the surface
The grief and lethargy I feel
Stomping through the moving pictures
Of the concealed revealing
Soon the sky will be very clear
And your darkness passes across your face
Much sooner now,
Autumn, my love.
Why did you bring me here, to the edge?
You pause and wait for the sky the perfect
Blend of grey and decay.
You speak and the leaves fall around me
And I feel myself melting into your *****
Covered by your many hands
Curving around my body, enveloping,
With your gravity putting me on my back
And carve my every sacred cerebra
With the twists and moistness, the cool
Air scent of the sleeping earth
Of your belly
Autumn, my love,
I wish to have you always,
Autumn, my love.
Your cracked embrace swims down the ravine
Seeming to wave goodbye.
It’s in time likes these,  
Autumn, my love,
I cannot bear the thought of an equinox of passion,
Where the golden sun is soon on its way to setting
Autumn, my love.
You look out, where the sun will rise,
Your footsteps gliding over the edge
Where I cannot chase you out
The valley of your body and you giggle at the fact,
Autumn, my love.
A single leaf falls from your hand,
I wish to have you always, too
But this joy can only perch on the precipice
Of despair
Each day must flee quicker and quicker
You tell me, you’ll love me more when I am gone,
Autumn, my love.

In the middle of it all, linoleum and cleaners
I find the shelves of candles and pry off their lids
Just to find out what scents they hid.
No noise, no racket, and nothing meaner.

The balsam fir in craters of wax
A chirstmas tree hunt and sugarsnackes
Recollect times to play and relax
Late December days and skies overcast
The carrides back smelled of this.

Of the wild rose, all pink and flush
Our faces betrayed us after stealing a kiss
And stealing away hidden with a wild blush
When asked just where we were.

I’d say the black bamboo
Where the growing pains began
I remembered what I never wanted to know
Smelling her sweat on my hands.

After every cupcake and fall harvest
We felt torn in two
Amidst the parents and summer’s zest
Everything I wanted couldn’t possibly be true,

The strawberries, the honeybees
Clean linen on a quick, tense rainstorm
I fell to my knees,
Afraid that my passions would
Take on another form.

Far too wild and winterborn,
You have your sleights in sympathy
And obtain what may decorate your court
I amuse you with love: an elegy.

But, the heart is no traitor, not to any court
And says I’m no citizen of your lovely heart
I’m a smiling nomad that goes in due time
And, love, we can trade castles
Since you’re no citizen of mine.

Again, the scents linger with no flame to their wick
Closed were their lids to choke out the burn
Cool were the insides, like ash in an urn
A single spark dazzles but goes out too quick
Each smell left unfamiliar may not have you
It’s not you and me, but me and you and you and you.

…your faith, the pool on which
My pebble skips. Your faith only ebbs. If
I could, I’d steal ashore and
Cast a whole beach for…

…and quite becoming, disillusionment.
Old and young children are holding their legs
At the terminal of a new life,
new…

You say you saw the void?
Look into these eyes—
You do not see
The transparency of space
A nostalgia of regression when the
The mountains seemed so much smaller in your youth—
Not in these eyes.
You don’t see the void, but the future,
Not blackness, but the future,
Not the future, but the past,
Like all of us clairvoyants.
You close your eyes to see the world
Through clean mantras
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Looking back as their gaze looks forward
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Sounding the woolen past
And eerie comfort of rest
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Reading your own future
While reading others’
Like all of us clairvoyants.
There is no such thing as darkness anymore,
A truth you know well since
All truths are certainly true and false.
Wait for the light through the window
To scan the floor;
Every person is a lighthouse
Searching wildly in the dark
And in storms, ships will land
With or without permission
And you’ll laugh alongside them
With or without provisions.
Show me your tricks,
Clairvoyant
I have already lived in the future
And am not fooled easily.