I thought at once the hands
Took hold of life
But only to loosen them
Inside the pockets:
It merely seems a bit tight today.

Let’s go away,
To my haven in the wood
To the lazy, little river
Stay longer than we should
Let’s watch the sun
Lay across the leaves
Chase it with my car
Go until we’re pleased
Let’s just stand
In some field
Dance with the breeze
In each other’s eyes yield
Let’s just forget
The daylight will end
Your light is my light
So we can just pretend
Let’s lay here
In the dark, dewy lawn
We’ll go away together
But let’s stay here ‘till dawn.

Does she believe in a half-built home?
Or its hole in the ground?
I’ve taken the roam
A wide roof I claim to my own
And how much I miss the walls
The studs that creak and waver
To savor the freedom of the breeze.
Life plays on the palm fronds
Not much hope can hang on either.

I’ve been told it’s punishment, but from the divine?
Loosed from the bonds, all earthly ties
And what for, say, can’t I.
Lest I am the sinner, the adversary
No chains of such gall should bind me here
This concrete box where I count my breaths
Forward and back, on fingers and toes
The end of days on etches in the air.

As though it for pleasure, I-sadist returns
Congress of years from within burn
With nothing but that, no soul to confide
I will make up eyes to look—they judge!
Fictionalize mouths that speak—derision!
Bitter and arbitrary partners of mine,
And no tease of release, slamming
Through will, blood, ****, and ****
Only affixed a skin dressed in iron
I am weakly, free of that—least
Then something holds me close
My existence won’t fold in the unjust crease.

Six steps forward, six back, another six
To complete the burlesque of time’s progress
A harlequin, I am, flogging my back
Akin is the hope of some outer earth.
If nothing but pulp is beyond solip
Then fill my placid-skin with it
And disrupt my absorbing wavelength
I fear I am fiction as the words in my ear.
Glass frame of my skin, new days begin!

Even if I could share with these thoughts
Even if day would lithely walk in
Even if the force of death would invite me in
I would tumble, broken, blind by the box
Still within me
Leave n’er I, n’er I, it to me.
Am I ill, bleeding at the wishing well
No token, but holes, to bribe or to fill.

If I could just do as a man I knew of
From a source, I would doubt, skulking above
Who drilled, for escape, a hole in his head
Out from it poured, his greatest wish
In the language of the box—
I draw prophecy from the moan in the pipes
And these hands brought together in faithful decay
Trace licentious dawn and eve—a broken little slit
I know, I know of a sky—I hoped for it!
I’m strong in that face of patient nothing,
And I will win this fight!

All I want
Is my heroine
That I see vicariously
In the arms of a coincidence
And elected poems to speak for me.
I Want to hope to god
Of whom I cannot believe
Because my teenage mouth
Shaped by adultery
Has made a vile construct.
My love becomes a useless thing
A sentiment without action
A stray paper with blood peppered bout.
I’ve made my service
I felt the grandiose emotion
The holy bliss of a teenage kiss
That felt of everything.
It is gone.
I, left with this contradiction,
Am left with nothing but jealous sentiment
Of the more deserving
And the louder-mouthed end,
A questioned answer
That love, love, love is gone
Is becoming, that seeing
Across a nothingness
I held so much significance for
That—****, I felt so a heart-pulse
—is gone.
What I felt is an illusion
And destined to fall to the wayside
As all in this absurdity.

You are no item to me,
But a specter who winds through the bones
Elusive, frightening
Warm and whitening in a cemetery yard
You’ve returned for a purpose
That is not my own.
My eulogy goes as thus on a stone, waiting
Conjuring a spirited hand and knowing
Earthly words cannot tempt
A soul who rejected Heaven.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

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.

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—

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

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—

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.

Why am I always bereft of the thing that I seek the most?
I always seek a willing soul
A soul who would entreat my own
And I the same
I, the slave of my nerves
A slave to the pulsations of my skin
The very thing I’ve always hated
I want hate
I want to hate myself
I want inspiration
That comes from the hate that flows
So freely from my finger tips
So beautiful a thing that passes by
So ignorant of what I could say
What I could appeal to
What drunken emotions accentuated
By the feelings of night
My pointless words
My sickened intellect
What I perceive as truth and the right way
I’m sorry to everyone
All those with the displeasure
Of hearing my obtuse
Faked heart, faked mind
I’m sorry
But I’m not authentic
I’m a replica
I’m not genuine
I’m a thing so pinioned around
The thought of ***
It clouds everything else
I want this false notion of love
I want a distraction
Something that keeps me away
From the emptiness of existence
I don’t want to face it alone
There has to be someone who thinks my skin worthy
There has to be an individual
I didn’t trick
Someone with
The very fantasy of love within them
Someone as foolish as me
With fake blood pulsating through their heart
Like me
Someone with the raw, acknowledged beat of lust
Flowing through those impermanent veins
Like the worthlessness
Extending from every extremity
Nothing is right
There is no light
Goodness has gone beyond me
Genuine Morality
Only the flame of passion
Ebbs in my matter
Not that story
Not that fantasy
Only a lie
One I can’t even abuse
Everyone is gone
I feel like life
Is but staring into a mirror:
Nothingness
Abstraction
Distance
Let this failure,
This over interpretation of a life
Die in the obscurity
Of the night Time
Good night all
Enjoy your lives
If only I could distract myself
From the awful reality
Like you
I want to be like you
Where life has meaning
Like action has sway
I am nothing
And never will be.
If only love could find me.

The sun does arise
In that aubade way
It spills out over petals
Infinitely
So silent but a discourse:
A camp of brook and pale-freckled
Leaves,
A clamor of engines
Escaping the scene
Too busy, too distant
To actualize their hum.
At the intercession of wood and modern man
I stood dutiful, tenuous,
Apt to standing still
‘Tween what has my calling
And what, my will:
This aesthetic simplicity, resplendent awe
Stays with the punch-card
On my way to work
But I know I’ll stand at the edge
Once more.

Go
With me
Where the winds of grain
May breathe
Small atoms of woven gold
So that I may lose my own.
With the oxygen you’ve gilded
Filling our lungs—may I dazzle like you?
Two creations intervene—We are the constellations
The spider webs you see
How paltry and few
The stars, they seem
I cast them off, they sickly gleam
To fill my sky
With you.

Innocence
Your story of silence
Took a shot below the belt
And other colloquialisms.
I would not have it any other way
Nothing of my origin
Flows from these fingers
Suddenly
I’d brought to inspiration
From the driving drums of music
And a $24 bottle
Never has Jackson given me so much.
Who gave you permission
But the idiots of understanding?

[Let this be a gift, my lover not met]
Let this be a gift, my lover not met
This shaky sonnet of weak, boyish hands
With eyes that gaze and trembling mind beset
I live up the dream, stupidly make plans
Await as your gentle brown hair flits by
Marvel the saccharine scent of your air
Contrite by the mind bewitching my eye
Guilty for my presence in yours, unfair
Your lithe little hands in my crumby own
And cute red lips pursed with naïveté
Pouring out poetry like pregnant tomes
And you’re wisdom abundant, be it may
Be you different with quirk, an odd one please
And I’ll always be the one who n’er flees.

“Take it, take it,” to an ocean I beseech
A phial of hungry glass
“To some distant beach”
Holding within it
All the air from my lungs,
Every heart beat,
Baby teeth and hair
All the domestic days in the Delaware creek
And spare
Time
Rolling in the waves, frothing jaws
Now have the empty bottle
I pause, I curse
That some child of me will
Coddle
In the ever-ceaseless body
Full and empty
As the phial, this thing of matter
Sublime in depth
But empty in purpose
Containing all life
But with heartless curses,
Instilled of placidity
But throbbing with surge
Until, it too, the phial will purge
—Had I known its fate of woe
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—I would have weathered the inevitable
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—Then, at least, there’d be something to show
( A monument! And I let it go!)

“Travesty,” those orange words spilled across the highway lines
Came on swathes of a stilled
And perfect evening time,
‘Tween buffeting air and screaming music
It seems but a step in a cyclic progression,
Or the lines that commence
This processional of cars
That follows, to the site, trails of incense,
Tears of mourn and memoirs.
Towards the hills canvassed in reluctant ennui
Jutting in the shadows the bleached ribs and pearly jaw lines
That, at times, may have looked alive, yet now
They rest static as the dead ought to be.
I sense I’m getting close, the ***** surges its triumph
As it does the sanctuary,
My head swells with deep booming sound,
The lyric of the preacher without need to expound,
Too late as the ***** shan’t stop or abate
As I pass through churchyard admonished “Hell,
Is truth realized only too late.”
Though I am soothed by that song of my youth,
Lyric’d by many-a familiar cadence and tune
Vestiges of naïveté play on the lips
But, “Hell is truth only realized too soon.”
I wait at its back and reminisce
The coming great years were something to fight for
With life, defend,
But I now see that I spent those last seconds
Waiting for them to end,
Whilst prayers of hollow wind abound
Escaped to show something holds on, at least
Pretends,
Will remain after me, aft’ I’ve settled in the ground,
To be as a sunset and come back around.
I feel like a sun, burning in fury,
Not simply a shimmer in the vastness afar,
Or the muddy face of fetid puddle
Simply rippling like a star.
Keep driving! Don’t cease my tiny hearse!
Just now do I hear the mourners’ verse,
It sounds so golden and couldn’t get worse!
But the ***** has ceased,
The daylight, it rots
(Never mind that, I’ll charge it with haught!)
And the processional laughs as they go to their plots
Their verses fall too coward to brave
The ice and the snow that is to come, mine fall stricken
With every sense of the word ‘dumb,’
But the sun reassuring with it warmth-giving rays
Will be sure to put flowers next to our graves.

Their eyes did the judicious scan down to our shoes,
Muddied silence gave us away,
Cartographers of the naughty ditch we huddled in for warmth
Alight go the zip-lock bags are knuckles giggled in
Pulling the drug like creativity,
Often enough to it portraiture;
Spacily, we followed their eyes, lay flaccid fixéd
To there, they stay, when precautions cross and made
Punitive pleasures of the proxies, and all.

Rest assured, we did not care.

Blush for the dervishes, aslant, a chin
Ravaging to the eye, a glance, a smile,
Hoping a spin, awry a touch is enough to motion the room
Sheepish, onto the other,
From there at poles and solemn way: yearning.
Sticky lips, servile mementos
Wishing to be the real thing, palms
Inexorable ones, warmly tie loose ends of the world
Together, sharing as some do the spectator’s space
So twain between him and the moon: mind, body, soul
A coupling of felicitous breadth
And her come-hither stare, clung to lusting silence
Dim, in throes of mere taboo, they stay
Safely, that personal place, the jeers of teenaged love
They buried under blankets to escape.

Rest assured, they did not care.

“Replay, diligently, the last song and keep,” she said,
“Your sarcasms to yourself. I lived it before
Before, oh, it fell all into place; the fiction of photos
Will not keep food in my mouth,
Turned down in nostalgia—to be birthed
Is first in the long thread of loses,
Doled out in tips, the ringed coffee, holding each other together
While I move between tables too eagerly,
Unwelcomed contentment
Wears the dancer’s shoes mockingly
A still-life, still life just gets it, the sad times
Are written, my still life has bills to pay
Arranged like puerile bursts, blossomed hearts
Wanting to pull you through the hole in the earth
And show you the center/poetry buried in still
Lifeless end-times we gave up for access
To green roads of experience and all their contradiction;
The rest was all just small talk.”

Rest assured, she did not care.

Her and I wept away from the palpable, at feelings
Knowledge of solutions to pathos, Love begs itself
Remediation, wrong at every turn, swiftly
Excising its possessions:
Do you love me, or is it ought?
Do I love you or merely the thought?
Long, is it, to have or be—
An aspect of a thousand chattering sounds
Plentitude of voices harken answers we
Bear not to hear, but form in the absence
Bliss, enscribed on parchment, out lovely whole
Complementing our moon,
Bringer of the yeasts of child, of its own siege
Full of what we’ve only given room.
I say, recourse for our maddened state, what we promise
In rhinestones, bands us together, in too small a space,
Too short a time, is that of theft and thing—
Undo, undone the marks the sane voices’ command
We, thus, are to be lectured, tongue-in-cheek
The portmanteaus of proper affection, bed-pleasures: individuality,
Its arithmetic and the modals virile, my destiny divisible
Or walk divided, infinitely one,
Autoerotically in praise of my bottled ***, given to all,
Shared with none, taughtfull-wellknown
A love may never love but itself
If it has choice between—it chooses self,
Indulge, indulge the unlovely ecstasies sure
All lessons lead to conclusion, different in their by-ways
Restlessly falling short of dreams, for the fallen fruits
And sour with despair.

Rest assured, we did not care.