he wondered once if that old bottle would actually be enough. he called it a “vacation fund" for the end of this small little adventure, except even he didn’t know when it ended.

he brought along no sword, no axe. this was a silent trudging, you see. no pride here, no hope. just that continued slouch into the darkness ahead, torch still lit more for safety than anything. he knew the monsters already, knew when and where they would come.

and so he treks on, that small bottle slowly filling with loose change and loose dreams, the cavelike walls of the silent city surrounding him, nerve impulses flying overhead on the municipal power lines. the maze has him caught, or so he begins to believe. he begs for a quiet alignment, the medicine he keeps swallowing supposedly attempting to give him a skeleton key.

it seems more like the waking dreams are the answer, the days at the beach and sitting along others with empathy, observing and occasionally participating.

only time will tell.

Another romantic comedy hand selected by the gods that be graced
Its preset presence and morals upon me
“break rules break heads for love” it roared
Never once did it say
Smoking is bad for your health
Then maybe all of those cigarettes would
Have been in that small brown plastic bag back when
I could pretend I knew what I was doing

Hell in the form of santa ana winds
Came to me to tell me I was fired
Long before being hired
You see we’re all time travelers
At the rate of
One second per second
But there is no one to tell you
Just which direction

See my blue box got impounded
And my companion left me for another man
That’s okay
Because she never told me
Smoking is bad for your health

Sometimes stargazing settles the mind; other times it's called destruction of intellectual property. Boundaries lightly treaded over are still overstepped, and left alone once again I am, missing you. And life, O life just passes me by, as I nurse a dark mixture of boredom and solitude alone in my room, working out new pathways to my own demise.
     Hope stopped living here a long time ago. Happiness missed the boat by a smidgen and it's been off course ever since. The directives are the same: "Go forth into the Arctic of your own heart and melt it with the fires of passion". Instead I burned the temperate forests lying just eastward, toward foreign waters I have never seen.
     And now here I sit, boat strategically positioned between my failed objective and the destruction I've wrought, and I ask: "Do I continue and complete my objective? Or do I go home, acknowledging my losses?" Torrid affairs of state are not my cup of icy, frothy tea, if you catch my continental drift.
     Your tender kiss beseeched upon me a plush stranglehold of mixed forgiveness and alarm, almost like you immediately regretted saying sorry for marooning me with a gun, a bullet, and a dream. Unfortunately that gun got me a crab, which got me stones, which gave me the tools to build a liferaft back to home waters.
     And yet again you sit on my vessel, offering me recompense or a boat, a gun, and a bullet. O, how I miss the days of toy ships and plastic sailors.

Nose so hard to the grindstone my face is unrecognizable and I seem to have lost my dignity out of my ears I’m not quite sure what to do with the breathing spaces between periods anymore. I lost my art like people lose keys and I’m sure it’s still under the couch but I just don’t see it anywhere.
They should call it a writer’s monolith because of its worshipful insurmountability; I sat there beating on it with my bare hands until they were ****** arm and hammers freshening up my mind and I was free, free from art.
And of course that’s when my life fell apart and my self-harm came from the grindstone, ignorantly pressing inputs for a desirable output I feel like my soul was numbed.  Part of me walked away in outrage at the boldness of this new survival style because there was no life.
As college kids we joke about no-lifing to get work done but what happens when you no-life life? It would explain the singularity roughly two inches under my left lung.
Sleep still comes difficult to me.
Love,
Alex

I still don't sleep well at night sometimes. I miss you, whoever you are, or maybe I just miss having someone close to me I can put all of this love into, an outlet for my affection. Whatever the case, I spend my waking moments wondering where you are and my moments asleep wondering when. It's honestly getting harder to tell the difference between the two, the two infinite worlds of possibility where wild, unexpected things happen. Or don't. Sometimes the reality is more interesting than the dream.

There's a certain sense of tranquil quiet when you're lonely that I can only appreciate for about 5 minutes before my heart grips against its iron bars, looking for a key or a file or a spoon to leap its way out of my chest to freedom and adventure. It writes Morse code letters on skipped heartbeats to you, but I am a miserable translator and I'm sorry. I'm sorry for my past, for all the wrongs I've committed in the nebulous black leviathan night, the almost-nightmare state of bleariness and hypnotic suggestibility. Clarity only comes when you spirit your marble curved likeness in the warm wooded embrace I do so long for in waking life.

I ramble and you float away, O kind angel of faint hope, white stone wings beating tremendously in sync like the buzzer of an alarm clock, striking me asleep again for daylight, somnambulating across the barren black-tar desert in search of water and finding only more black sand.

The nights have become more torturous without your colorless gaze. Please get here soon so I can tell you about how I've known you all my life.

With fondest regards,
Alex

I can't stop, not now, not when it's all about to burst! into magnificent steel magnolias.
Sick as I am of the weather, I trudge on through the bleary morning to find that old newspaper, bringing back memories of times gone by and daylights turned into the fires of Hell in retrospect.

I see you've been keeping quite busy, with your darling all snuggled up next to you with that mug I liked and a book I left at your house. Funny thing, really, because I'm sure I left those for you, and not the aura of contempt you seem to be trying to give back.

Face it. We had a good time, but you grew tired of my obsessions and I grew tired of your image always around me. Thank you, though, because laughing in the face of danger has never been easier.

there’s no need for hope in an endlessly calculated world of projected outcomes and probabilities, he claims. hope is a useless tool for those stuck eternally in a loop of self-fulfilling demise; a way out of the rat trap.

but who is he to comment on the one who goes in circles? just because his circles are a bit bigger doesn’t mean keeping his ties on a cycle and his appearances up sixteen hours a day makes him any better.

woe be to the one who doesn’t know hope; as a vehicle of change for the downtrodden and an aspiration to the evil. those with pasts long forgotten by the general public look to the few who know, who see what the cruel world is capable of and stand straight in its face, daring it to make a move.

and soon enough, his world will collide with theirs, of drinks in the dark until the bar closes, of nights awake wondering just what this life was made for. the drone , the cog in the machine now screams internally when he realizes he’s greased with the blood of the poor, of the disabled.

if he didn’t choose this, then who did? who was the invisible hand taking those unfit for service and feeding them to the hungry sharks made to eat the meek and each other through years of self-preservation speeches made by the last generation.
he, we, they all look at the world, so empowered with the capacity for beauty, vicious yet unanimous beauty, looking for just when the wave hit, when the world went under our own weight.