Machine ground days
Somehow survived by clinging to precarious plans
Die for those.
For proles are stuck in a televised gleam
but I’m barred from distractions
I’m a man of action
Spring healing:
I found a new hope to get through the day
It has a name and it’s you

Workday: animistic curses
against people and their systems and products
except animals would escape forever
as soon as they open the cage
but we stay

The beastly gnashings of overworked merchandisers
for invisible self pocket stuffers
The competition's getting to us, comrades
I feel swindled out of my labor
I was pregnant
but they sold my child before
I woke up

Addressing the solipsism of my rehab circle:

I’m Kagey, and my life is hazy
but, blunted or no, let’s get this clear:
don’t trust your senses
and that goes for all my human peers

Body is a cage full of defenses
Still, I’m suspicious of reality
whether it’s façade society
or the wooden chair in front of me

Still, I enjoy the virtual scenery
I ain’t talking about on the T.V. or phone screen
I mean the willows, buildings, and faces
But all these mushy green acres are fakers
blobs without our eyesight

Still tho,
me and the universe are tight.

Is she a pretty hippy
coming at me with that "you're a fine piece of meat" smile?
Flowing long dress c. 1873
wild hair twisting to her *******
Gracefully she shuffles, feet never leaving the grass

She hands me a pamphlet
I see a ragged leather Holy Bible in her hand

Do her eyes wish I was her husband:
born again Christ Man first, and lover later?
Do you imagine our wedding was today:
communion first and consummate later?
"No thanks, I'm sorry darling"

She and her friend get kicked out of the fair
and she probably felt bad *** for it

Ya’ll ****. (Myself included, I said everybody, didn’t I)?
Forbes, a magazine for rich wannabes, says:
85 people control half of the world’s wealth (yet, nobody obsesses)
In my rural hometown alone,
that’d be the equivalent of a disembodied ****** hole
calling all the shots from a platinum throne inside the town hall
“Keep plowing! Keep selling! PLLLLLPPPPPP!
Sop up my **** with all those Benjamins, and bring the Russian ballet in!”
In between **** and brain rotters, everyone else watches ******,
with his handsome silk hat on,
shake hands with the petty bourgeoisie in suits
Little lap dogs
licking up all the slimy brown Franklins

His eyes burned 2 holes in the mountain
when he sat for years, 'till
they let him in

He threw all your old books in the oven
saying, you can like the tales
but they ain't sacred

Write everyday, too much
That's a commandment for a to do list
in hopes it will manifest into routine
I can store the text in the internet
It's safer that way, these days
Store it in a place that actually doesn't exist
How can it be lost?

There's too many spies making logs
and in the rare artful moment of an agent
maybe I'll get discovered

Not banking on it
I'm throwing all my eggs at random houses
and wearing the wicker basket as a helmet to protect from backlash
in hopes that, by then, my poet spirit could leap from treetop to treetop
to avoid hollow bullets

Today, I sent out at least another 10 advertisements of myself. It’s not fair. These potential employee seeking companies show me at least a thousand ads boasting about themselves, but I only got the time to send out a fraction of their words, and it’s somehow bad taste to show off my handsomeness. No pictures at all, just boring words, competing against the tacky hordes of plastic signs, overt lies, and labeled every things. I don’t even get any screen time, and if I could even afford it, they’d think I over did it. So I can’t use any ****** tricks to show my fluency in PR devilry? Y’all hypocrites.

In person body language for the quickest returns
and obvious signs of disinterest and distress
Telephones for voices; plain, animated, or faking it
Letters for gesture, or a classic long slow catch up
And texting...
I know you got it
I may even know you read it
What's your excuse for delay?



Perhaps a brain lapse, perhaps some monotonous busyness
Perhaps I'm now an ignored fad, maybe you got better plans
Yet, could it be, our collective muscle memory pines for saying things by other means?

I was gonna write about how I was writing standing up like Hemingway at some bar in Key West, but instead I ended up nearly lying down, like some Roman eating grapes, and I’m not scrawling with a pen. I’m typing.

Why the standing up, Ernest? Was it to gauge how difficult it was to keep good posture? Was it to better measure how drunk you were getting?

He would have boxed me for those asking those questions, or maybe he’d just slam a few shots.

All of us Northeasterners enjoy getting drunk somewhere tropical. I never have a choice in the matter. Whether it’s Florida, South Carolina, or the South Caribbean (I've never left the Western Hemisphere), all I really like down there is beaches and seawater. Everything else gives deep cringes. Those other tourists, so annoying just to look at. Flip flops, whole families, and the god awful shops they keep open. You go to a place good for a beach, green hills, seawater, and fruit, and you want to buy diamonds? C’mon. I wish you’d want these islands to be like national parks; nature over here and cities over there. But the tourists enjoy fake grass huts that try really hard to sell them junk.

So who’s to blame for the sellers perpetuating petty sales and mediocre values? Is it the islanders that make a profit, or the buyers that want the wares? Or is there a third party guaranteeing that the buyers and sellers alike are propagandized to expect the less than fine things in life? Are the salespeople actually working the shops, the ones really getting rich from the sale?

I don’t want to perpetuate the produce – consume loop
but when I don’t, I feel like such a lazy moocher
Could I play guitar near after dark bars for $23 an hour?
Victor and I did that once, for $11.50 each
Untaxed, that’s better than my dour real job
So, if I really made my place at a street corner, I’d be a smart earner

But then I’d be a fixture, like the accordion man and the bums with PVC buckets
The bar goers would soon hate me for chumping them out of their cash
with three gritty “Heart of Gold” covers
Then soon the mediocre bums would jump me and Riot, my guitar
She’ll smash into the walk under a Irish flag in front of Murphy’s Law,
while drinkers whoop and punch the air
The bucket goes over my head
and the accordion bellows squeeze round my neck

I told the professor I loved beat literature and all the hippy consequences. He said they were such a small part of the population (along with Native Americans too apparently,  he noted a different time. Because of what, you *******? I thought).

A pompous misguided thing, which either understandably or surprisingly, been teaching there since the 1960s. Five minutes of a winded attempt at putting anglophile humor into the lecture and you know the choice is "understandably" rather than "surprisingly." Been professing for the establishment, closed to other ways of thinking trickery.  

A real square through and through. As if all change should come from appeasing the tyrannical bleachy supposed majority. Those in poverty, darker skins, gays, drug users, and all around flashy dressers ought to don suits for their one night Ed Sullivan performance. Get the folks on Bass Run Lane to be okay with seeing you in a glass cage in their living room scene. For just a couple decades. Then maybe they'll be used to seeing you in a grocery store. You'll always be laughable though, as they designed it to be so.

The hippies were a very small majority says the anointed professor.
"So were the suffragettes" snaps back a fiery thing sitting next to me. I should have talked to her more.

Theravada or Zen?

It used be Theravada
Little did I know of Buddhist scrolls
Just a couple of commandments
obsessed with death
and a-clinging to enlightenment
Everything I did was with dharma and importance

Then it went to Zen, anything goes
absurdist, all for enlightenment
except overly polite ritual hymns
What’s up with that
when you don’t fear death?

Now I’m sort of back to Theravada
With a hint of roots Zen, Bodhidharma
But devotedly, I’ll take none of it all
Why believe in enlightenment?
Just appreciate the fall
changes

...**** It

Killed a moth on principle last night
I saw it outside standing on my air-conditioning
Then I found it inside after I turned my air-conditioning off
Climbed in through the silent vent
and orbited my light bulb l006 times
Before I killed it with a sock
and whipped it one more time into the lamp’s brass base
Almost saved a moth on principle last night
Rationality’s a sham and you know it
The moth said in the morning
I found it clung to my lampshade, dead
with white **** coming out from under a wing ripped in half
Life is a sham we all share

Cryptic cryptic
Use too many words with no imagery
to convey some personal philosophy
But, now I just want to say how lost sometimes I feel
Driving on gray dried oil roads through gold maize fields
surrounded by erosion saving forests
Look up, and see blue skies with mountain ranges of bulbous clouds
I am so small, even though we carved this land with the back of our thumbs
and changed the color of the sky with the smoke from our hair gel sleek planes
Alfalfa look from the wind blowing at my side
I’m a shark mechanically lifted as the fastest Earth creature
wantonly killing my ocean predator parody
Even eating the chunks of shark flesh I don’t throw out
A plunder king
atop a pile of just as much bones/cartilage
as jewels and fresh carcasses

“The trouble is, we think there’s time”
Buddha said it so urgent
Complete with Sanskrit contractions
The baby delivering doctor saying we all have a cancer, no matter how slow
so pick up your passions with a god’s effortlessness
Play a concerto that makes your hair stand on end
because the music was more important than a reflective surface
Looking like a you were born in a stormy garret
Writing, thinking, and plucking, as if the gods set you there
instead of the million hopeless mediocre ones
No, instead you are brethren to those gods
All competing for immortal kicks – like mortal tail
Until the game board perspective ceases
looking down on the plebeian pantheon
and it’s just you and what you lived for

Job searches getting me down
I wait a few days and build up expectations of a keyword,
only to be hit with my inexperience in strange computer programs
Secret knowledge, have the behind the curtain research consultants
No one wants to understand a fleeting past

It’s all about what’s profit present
an internet job board is a long look at the priorities of this nouveau world "culture"
The top jobs are in marketing,
turning spy loot into algorithms that explain to magistrates how
the top brands can stay above the clouds
It’s the only way they can look down

My college has a vapid radio commercial
advertising zesty summer programs
- and I thought my prestigious public college
was above that

Spy on this
not because I'm a deviant "ist"
of some dangerous ideology
No, I cannot hold on to anything so strong
What a scary time for those alive
whose key logs match that terribleness
just a little bit
"Oh, but she was so non-violent"
No, it's media martyr silence
Freedom of speech?
See how careful I am - just typing?

But for most the danger is in all our numbers
Algorithms for shopping patterns
voting and religion too
We give our attachments to them freely
so I say "hello there," maybe lone computer
or programmer
soulless, or believing Brother's benevolence
-Not here for the poetry

Humans are caught in a cultural duality at the moment. We - because I am human also - have a want in adventure in life as well as a want for egalitarian progress. Yet, both these options become limited while human population grows exponentially. As we take up more land and resources, and jobs increasingly become automated, many humans will find their lives unfulfilling compared to the possibilities offered by their media, as well as their past.

I truly believe now is the most exciting time to be alive; all the years of the neutral internet till its demise (c. January 2014), and nearly all the world’s likewise connected physically, by fast travel.

Yet, the excitement’s starting to wane. The internet’s becoming censored, and the world is turning monolithically mundane, with no promise of risk and new frontiers. Most people are fed up with growing inequality, including an uneven possibility of an adventurous life.

85 people control half the wealth of the world, but we are polarized toward smaller blame. So most the world doesn't live like I do, estadounidense. They don’t have the possibility of modest adventures. But only a devil’s pawful of people are living the grandest travels we watch in stories and film, and they have enough cash left over to live a life of those adventures a thousand times over.

Those living in real poverty are too concerned with the survival of themselves and their own families to gain progress against this prickly bat, who grows fatter from red blood since Babylon’s past. Now her global shadow casts a toxic plan, either too comforted, propagandized, or terrified - to shrug off some bullies.

The hope is – in this the waning time of the most exciting time to be alive – is that we unite, but keep local pride. Everywhere in the world wants a new comer over for some distinct thing.

Where’s your soul dear actress?
Is it drifting on the paper cranes
made from spent Washingtons?

Stock photos of success
With lab coats and unflashy clothes
She smiles like an airbrush
To entice me into business
An array of boring business

Are you the dynamic person you said you are 4,000 years ago? With no intoxication the conversation’s a bore. The stakes aren't high enough. I’m conditioned by the narrative and we’re all pretentiously pedantic, spewing poison at the heroic romantics.

I've lost my coper’s cloak. I remember how I dropped the dry ones at the river bank, I cut off my imitator’s finger, and as I fell into the tiger’s pit, I grasped a strawberry to make me sweeter. I crowned the beast a hero, cause out of perfect tiger dharma he tore off the limb that led him from his prison. Yet, the human dharma is to save all beings from our reckless peering.

Desensitized by the sands of time
I'm abhorred you're a cultural cog
Bobbing on the surface
you find eating gulls disgusting
but don't bat an eye at nauseous oil slicks

I wish I could set it all ablaze
so we'd pick our destinies more carefully
Or more care freely

You see me as a motley mesh
Flesh covered by cloths from mismatched fads
Yet, you're a pretentious simian that's forgot our past
Just a gussied up grazer, disavowing discomfort
scoffing at any endeavor that isn't grass flavored

The chimers on the lawn are all robed outcasts
bellowing to the fodder eating fodder
the posh set the stalks to be mowed over
But for the justice of all the inside out bulls
leaving their wallets on the ground
the entrail fashion never catches on

Slow milestones
kicked a tad further once in awhile
I stumble as I grasp and catch
a glimpse of my feeble walker days
Way up the desert road near the mountains
the pressing feeling;
I’m wasting too much time on the practical
And soon I’ll hobble my way to that high nest of the vultures;
an unnourishing drab soul
“He went to college and finally landed an okay job
No not teaching, not in humanities at all.
He had a living wage, then slowly managed to move out.
Then he tried dating and getting a better job for the rest of his days.”
“Amen.
Thanks for not making any waves, babe.”
Chomp!

I’d rather feel the raptor claw clutch now,
and, whenever I go,
I’d be a coveted delicacy
They’ll spend all day cooking me,
simmering low in a some big ***
They’d wear shiny ornaments
and put out fine ivory plates and utensils
Then, right before it’s time to dine,
these birds of prey will pray
in simple thanks I kept my flesh strong

Soon I'll be a work day chump
9 hours a day, 1 hour drive
each way
Satisfied the pay's above minimum wage
and I got the weekends free to drink and play

8 hours of impersonal lonely phone calls
next to people unlike me in every way
except how we're all paid
A headset be my cursed crown
I'll forget to take it off
when I leave for lunch downtown

"You're doing this for her."
I'll say to the framed question mark
atop my plastic desk
A future wife, another life
Don't let the exhaustive poison win
We're destined for other places
And darling, you'd leave me here
face it

But, your king is a thrill seeking breadwinner
Who shall conquer fertile forests
abound with cabin mansions, reindeer dinners
and more than 5 hours of weekday waking freedom time
Till then, I just wish I could promise you
I won't lose my mind

Dear God we need to leave this town, friends!
Please don't let me abandon you all here
shivering in underemployment
The West is calling with a Daniel "BOOM,"
the South whispers in a mountain mama window pat
Other countries laugh at us,
but will we join their jeers,
show them we are not just circus bears?
Multi-national parasites,
we're too trivially divided to terminate
O God, how my leisure hours went,
so much faster than the work room's ones
without any vent
I complained and complained
to my friends and fam on the phone,
but the time just spiraled stagnant
like a slow spirit taking six thousand years to explore a too small habitat
I haven't got nearly so long.

I’m in the same place as all of yous, but I’m absent minded and got misanthropic contempt, like anthropomorphic deer by the highway watching Cadillac surgery. But deep cardiac compassion, all you idiots are inside of me, lashing out with lively love. Scorns used to scar, but now I smile. **** the struggle you’re on, and put your shoes on the final platform. It’s not truth mama, it’s death. Have you tried it? Me either, we’re both among breathers. Now, tell me about your facts in expressions unconditioned by human history. Tell me about those bats on your shoulders that babble obscenities like Black Beard’s parrot, named ******. He speaks not of this century, so his “*****” are now children’s songs, sung around plastic bonfires, trying to roast electrical socket covers. To no avail.  

Born human mightiest
Socially slighted and far-sighted
Let’s bash through hierarchy
I said bash
you P.C. crusader
cold as a computer
slaughtering the people’s good language
in the name of removing something savage
instead of asserting a new image
A true sign of the artist
but I’m no artist

I'm on a social networking site on the internet,
What is the internet?
Forgive me for my ignorance 18th century friends,
It's a connection of machines that can share information.
Yes, and that "social networking site"
is part of the connection of machines
to try and make people feel less lonely.

It does feel strange sometimes when I'm on there.
And then the possession inside the machine says;
"but without me you wouldn't know this music, this picture, this place, this girl."
And now, for the first time, I am not subdued.
For the first time, I answer back, but what things would I know without you?

What forests would I have walked through? What people would I have met?
What noises would I have heard?
O the less trivial things I would have learned.
What streets would I have crossed (both in this layer of reality, in metaphor and metaphysical)
What girl's eyes would be staring towards mine, instead of those of a camera's.

I've got to talk about the internet
I've got to talk about the facebook^tm
(though in a year it will be gone)

It feels all so inauthentic
so I indulge in the scary technology
but then omit it from my memories
when I see your pics online
I write about them like they are authentic
genuine photographs I have yellowing
in an album in the attic
I don't have an attic either

Some things change
and some things take longer
You say he’s always the same
well one day he’ll die
and won’t say a thing
Was he quiet all his life?
Well he didn’t look like bones
Now he’s eating worms
Somethings change and somethings take longer
Take long steps
and you won’t notice the footprints, getting
larger or smaller
A limp in his walk
His back starts to arch
a new way
except it’s always been empty
Always full of change
no matter how sharp you are
you will be forgotten
All the books about you
burned by a tyrant
All the progress made
is dead
Some things change
and somethings take longer
Put them together
and every thing is empty
Everything is empty.

No vices, no difference
I have some things to do tomorrow,
I think I’ll just take the wagon
I’m just waiting for something to happen
to help me make up my mind
I always imagine tragic
someone dies and they’re so close
I don’t believe in fairy tales or souls,
but I don’t even want to write their names
for fear I’ll have a hand in why they lost life’s duel
or maybe we’re all just an election away from
anarchic warring states,
where I must defend my beans and cucumbers
from slugs and marauders
If we hold it together, red China could invade
so would I rather be a prisoner or dead?
Perhaps, I’ll just meet some girl,
where I’ll feel “some” as a description does her deep injustice,
because the love will be enormous
Now, I’m courting a chickadee that’s never dull,
but her name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue
Her name is Adventure and she rolls like hills and mountains,
and speed popping truckers with their eyes and ecstatic smiles
If I’m still seeing her, I might be a gat slinging ******* out west
bumming around San Jose or Cambodiay
Hearing all that talk, I think I just want to leave,
and I guess the pay is better anyway
My mind is made up
it’s not something real
It is, was, and is still fluffed up with schooling and the words of persuasive people
their confidence in what their saying is like a lightning bolt ******* into my stem
they jammed us into waiting rooms for something called progress
they even separate the sick people
I closed my eyes to see what was real,
and saw nothing
There is no waiting room at all

And it comes with some pain the the bullies from our childhood were a result of social Darwinism,
at least in the sense of the state, where capitalism reigns and the most ruthless and powerful win all the freedom.

Us cowards were too scared of violence to do anything about it. The teachers barred us from bullying, and with emotion they punished bullies, when they could be caught. Punish the bullies so they will develop the slavish obedience not to harm their peers, so in the future they will merely quietly compete up the ladder and sigh at the impossibility of their ladder extending past their bully bosses. If you want to have real freedom and fortune in this life, I hope you never stopped being a bullying child. I, like most children, bought the obedience and swallowed it like morning pills. In rows I sat, I pledged to red white and blue, and while the bullies slapped our heads, we kept our retaliation to unified grumbling, yet in a school there is no strength in numbers, besides the strength of harmonizing our slavish sighs. It’s just like at work under our bully bosses. The strength of the individual is denied in a school, so we can work like a cog, working hard at our shape to fit best into the machine.

The bully notices the competition early on and acts hard, swift, and originally. For this is how wars are won. But us slaves have our way of converting the bully, we have numbers on our side, yet little strength. Out of weakness we tell the bully that they are an ill shaped cog, and they will never be able to help the machine if they keep their powerful aggression. Conversion to slaves may occur, or a half convert is created who is too deluded with their new illness, so they can do little physical harm to anyone anymore.

And all without a drop of blood. We go to work secretly competing with each other, in order to buy the system’s validity at the end of the week. And we rip each other‘s teeth out in our dreams

Long day indentured college
do they give me land when I'm done?
I just wanna lay near the flickering warm television
like the olde days
Stop, I say
it’s all ****. T.V. does not console
old days are through
already 8 O’ clock
O clock, zero clock
why’d I do nothing yet?
he shouts back in olde English binary that
I’ve only been home for an hour
I don’t know how to loot time like a lawyer’s tie tier
He pit pats after the one in the pricier suit to make sure he’s comfy, all ways
Like a tea cup dog, he’s slightly enamored to serve a taller person
The rich man feeds him emerald colored paper
a treat at sundown,
and that wily servant still finds hours to ***** his wife,
push his boy on the swings, and play a game of basketball.
I don’t know what’s coddle comfort anymore
“good.” says the gray bearded one atop the devil’s mountain horns
The great beast is boastfully clever,
but he can’t tell there’s a bhikhu camping out on his horns
his eyes roll upward, but he can’t see past his forehead.
The old one laughs

I’m in bed thinking of escape plans. When I close my eyes, I cash out endless people in my lines. In dreams I hold dear my own: girl, passion, and life direction. I wake up for seconds and doze off, like reality’s just a short nightmare. Time to get back to my cashin’. It’s not about cash or fashion. It’s about sitting alone, being real with yourself, and seeing your dreams are too far away to help. I spend my days trying to control clock hands. Slow or fast, I make them dance. But still, I haven’t left this place. I’m about to leave a pine cone on my bed, and walk through the woods until I get to the other end. And if in 20 minutes I’m in a farmer’s field, I’ll keep pulling that peel to find a place that escaped this pretentious human race.

And someday the truth will seep
Schizos, and friends who took too much, will be right
Truth seeping from the sewers and dampening
the carpet (basement first, upper floors later)
Then it will seep through our eyes
and our ears, some veins may burst
with all we found out
Our dark eye lidded friends holding the cigarettes
their stories will be true
There’s a New World Order being crafted
We didn’t land on the Moon. No sky
just a big planetarium around
The relatives of politicians, their children, etc.
picked out for some reason (which hasn’t seeped to us yet) from
random families at the hospital, or homeless on the street
Plastic surgery happens, so they all look believable as a family
and then everyone gets hypnotized not to tell, with pills and chanting
Cause secrets are never safe
just look how they seep
They live in satellites (watchtowers within the planetarium sky)
and wear nothing but white and clip their fingernails perfect, everyday
They think they know all
But he’s not as close
as yogi bear guru atop a peak point
that seeps up his ****** hole
He collects his bark and snow
at what the men in the tower label, 4 AM
then he sits and convinces himself
that everything’s fake, even himself
Convinces, for the least amount of reason possible

Effigy girl waits
naked amidst foggy jungles
Not waiting for me

Lovely roadside woods
would be ever so more peaceful
without a road near

Effigy girl smiled
at me ounce and everyone else
I only smiled at her

Haiku marshmallow
Easy to swallow, easy to chew
O haiku, *******

With graduation behind us, my friends, thus began an epoch of slow anxious waiting filled with wonderful times. We ran rampant keeping third party mothers alert and sleepless, while our parents rested soundly knowing we were in good hands: our own. Thoughts of the impending college cold bath swam excitedly in my head, causing soft building of an expectation of golden years.

“””” Part 2
The summer came to an end and I was off to the university, five minutes down the road. It was a weird day. No opportunities came to play out the wonderful situations I made up in my head, months ago. So I felt down in the bouts and, staring at the road, I must have found a million dollars in heads up pennies. So I thought I should lift my head up, like Lincoln, but then I remembered what the history book said. Old Abe was a lawyer without any schooling, and he had the other job too. O yeah, I think he was president. Sitting in class I know I could learn much more than this drunk bro next to me, who will be my doctor someday. Learn more by just lying on the floor at home reading a book or two. But still I have to stay to earn our little paper licenses that say “thank you for your time and your money too. Now here’s some of your money back, over the next 70 years. But, you’ll never get back your time. In fact, we want more of your time if you ever wanna see some of your precious greenbacks again.” And you need a microscope to read all those words cause they want to save money, paper, trees, and all of our gleaming plasticized hopes and dreams.

Dropped into perestroika events
and I don’t really know myself.
I talk differently than my driving desires
I’m a less apt projection of who I want to be.
I can honestly say sometimes I might be the original
but that’s a last resort in boring places.
Someone once had a quote
about how it’s foolish to know yourself.
But I get so **** scared.
Nothing to hold.
Not even a floor for my shoes.
Not even sure what shoes best suit me.
I’m free to make this soul go anywhere,
Yes, Mr. Voltaire, ****** too free.
Mr. Holy Roller says Jesus already came with his plow truck
and paved a way for me.
But which ways did he pave,
God, where will it all lead?
God, which way is best for me?
Still I might not be supposed to know myself,
But The Self
that we all share.
You and me babe.
and that dog and that deer
and that grass and that car
and that lamp post.
All the same.
All the universe’s
and all the other universes’ weight on my head
that keeps being ****** into a vortex
in between where everything’s all the same goop.
All the same stuff. What am I doing living with it?
******.

“Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself would never become a butterfly.” -Andre Gide

Lying in bed
with an abyss in my head
Abyss in my hand
being abyss

Bad faith with options
I can do so much, but here I am toiling without valor
I’m not oppressed enough to count
Almost guaranteed free meals for life
Respect for parents keeps me on the line
I’ll stay near it to get us a notch up
in Americay’s championship belt
But, even Ma knows the façade is tearing away
Wishing we could be the fortunate Chinese kids
We used to send our food to them, when
we couldn’t eat our vegetables. It’s unfair
I hit the books instead of wandering India
or Bloomington, Indiana
The unexciting part of an epic
starring myself and a one handed handful of friends

So dusty,
what's the harm
Another shell of skin to cling to our jeans and old sweaters
Swallow it down with our table top soft butter
and the cowboy leather in our insides
will make us infinitely tougher

Barfing nails longer than the ends of gypsy hands
to scratch the antagonists
in our crystal ball's plans
Sorry, but bloodiness is what
my trombonist destiny demands
I'll slide you a swan song
to contemplate dark magick's sand
that spirals down the throat of the hourglass man
In 100 years time,
our empty glass bodies
will tip from the wind of a fan
held by a butterfly drifting through a faraway land

Hell, so why do we care
when anything at all goes wrong?
Yes, Devil most evil
I address you and everyone else
who resides in your throng
He just lit an unfiltered cigarette
said "just enjoy the song
and ******* lighten up a bit
Think your dead and burning
use your imagination
Whatever's in your head
you're it."

"Meditate"
Tattoo my brain with infinity
Cure shallowness
bring about contentment
cause we're all blameless in our small existence.  
I truly believe meditation's not an end
When, before, I thought it was the key to heavenly eternity
I broke another misconception
It's all you need for eternity
No, just me
Nothing without me, that's free
A being being it.

"Social Mara: Lord of False Appearances"
Searching for past life memories
effigies of more miserable days
painted positively with the longing of their highlights
and the possibilities we already threw away

My present just hangs, suspended in contemplation
for tip of the brain answers
Need to reach the primitive stem
Just live, now
I think the way is already paved
by these split second sparks through the cauliflower mush
Instinct.

"A Ceaseless Conquering of the Unconquerable: A Love for Becoming"
Weird coincidental sayings and labels
Think things, or some happenings
come full circle
Like a defense of solipsism
a dream shared by the lucid
This is my world
and I only almost have control
Stomach in Shambala shambles
Can I face sobriety with a drunk childish high
from the atman in my eyes?

Monroe Ave c. 2018, in my own dream land. K. Daniel's Revelation, cannot reverse what's starting to happen. Darker, more forlorn. No more bar and restaurant patrons, the streets are just a scattered herd of pestilence. No cars, the somnambules own the streets in silence. Honey dripping hipsters, years gone. ***** clothes, hair past their pearls. Asking for boy, asking for O.P.s, asking for girl, asking for crack, asking for methamphetamines. The only noise.

We lost the reclamation of the city our parents left. Escaping dead end cul-de-sacs of basement poverty, we no longer had to drive. Stacked with our friends in tenement commune. We delivered the body we consume in service, catering to a more privileged few. Only responsible for one when long work was done, I ensured my red blood's full of fun. We drank and inebriated with design when allowed more free time. But, darling, I think this town was already gentrified. We changed no thing.

****** affliction of a lack of affection companion
Hand and hand strolling greater than syrupy plunging
and even sometimes buddy shrugging over wooden noisemakers
We whistle with their metal strings
and through the pasta soft ones in our throats
but no nest colored mares seem to hear
our flamboyant feather calls for future fondling
So I scribe slight implied short letters
invites to drink joints and nature jaunts
All too well thought out
hoping your advanced technology cannot trace
the time I spent to type
The overanalysis of our psych: her and I’s
wondering why she doesn’t have an inkling
for a cute fall date where we attempt to bake apple pies
It’s all too contrived, I know
I’ll strive for delusion
Accept a useful interpretation for our chemical inflammation
and let sparks pass it by
Like itsy bitsy flies laying eggs in a wound
for stagnant water maggots
They’ll eat away the thought well
where all my cranial zaps seem to dwell.

or “I think I’ll buy a cigar today”
I’ll smoke it tonight
nothing too expensive
but a reason to walk down a winter street
without going anywhere
A reason to do something devious
unhealthy, but nobody has to know
A reward to get me through a murky future
There may be nothing to do in town tonight
but it’s far too early to hold up
in that bomb shell paranoia
My parents have gone mad
by the cameras behind their eyes
and the dizziness of general telescopic evolution
Me, I was raised on seizure fleeting Pikachus
So far our defense is strong
We really feel the Earth spin
at its many miles an hour

“The Cold Solitary Cigar Walk Happened”

I waited for a friend to get home one evening
Bundled up, emitting smoke
to offend the quiet shut-ins of a neighborhood watch
I walked to the small old bridge over the canal
I had to **** so bad
I snuck down under the bridge and let loose in the snow
but not before shorting that foul little cigar
Bad taste in my mouth
the 5 minute journey was enough
Zipped up, bored on the bridge
my lonliness afforded me
the comfort of no public eye
I looked into the dark water
and spat a good ***
into the small reflection of a red safety light
The ripple and “splat” satisfied me
so much that I spat again
I turned around to walk
and some passerby girl appeared
She kept walking and pretended she didn't see me
Weren't you once my girlfriend?