I think it's stupid
How I refuse to use straws
Because of a video I watched one time
Of one stuck in a sea turtle's nostril.

Or how there is really only the illusion of choice
And statistics from unreliable resources
Making us feel better or worse
About our decisions.

I tell myself to quit sugar
But honestly I just like my lattes
Sickeningly
Sweet
Like the love stories I thought could be under nooks
Around the corners
Of everyday life.

I like ice cream on winter days
Hot tea in the suns of summer
A walking talking irony

A bulb on its way to burning out
Sputtering in the half-eaten room
No one wants to go in to change it.

It's not my fault
The walls dissolve
And that same chord is continually played on the piano
In the corner of the upstairs closet.

It's not my fault
Cameras don’t bring me security
But sensitivity to my own identity.
Dissolution into absolution
Abolishment of egocentrism

And always,
The illusion of choice
Hanging in the rafters chattering.

Thoughts, like the shadows of clouds
That pass below you
Pass above me:
White heat blaring like telephone wire buzzing,
Control box popping
Everything I own
Has been bleached by the sun.
My legs keep up with the crickets
Crescendo desiccating the atmosphere
Incessant buzzing, that telephone wire.
Molecules reverberating around my eye sockets
Hollow ear bones click and chatter.
There is a language here
Unbeknownst to any welded frame
Human or just wavelength
The last breath of Something we all hope for
Transpires on the air--
Air like bathwater.
We assume the return of everything.
CO2 in our lungs, sleep, the seasons
But one day these things will not arrive.
One day, Spring will not show up.

I can't help but feel

I am coming into something.

It's just me and a thousand bugs this afternoon
Enjoying the autumn usher in the browns and umbers
The earthen kiln, ashes burnt like the ground, the trees on fire.
Decay begins here.
The sky is thinner, clouds inhale the last plumes of warmth
Circling in the cirrus above.
Propeller seeds and crackling bones of leaves
I sit in the shivering sun
It's just me and a thousand bugs
Scattering across my knees and arms
This afternoon, in the waning life of light.

Like the moon, we pull through phases
in the midst of our own dark atmosphere.
Waxing towards a new creation,
long nights synchronizing into the fluidity of wholeness
if only for a moment in time before falling into waning,
pieces of ourselves detaching and falling across the sky.
There is a moment of perfection, a complete chrysalis,
beautiful and blinding
powerful enough to drag the seas and every molecule of water upward.
The turning tides our blood within,
pooling and receding
brimming with the magnetism of potentiality.
The moon, like us, like our hearts,
is pocked and blemished, unprotected and standing alone
distant, entombed, a book of history.

My entire life I have struggled with reality.
It is a darkened street on a full moon
Where banks of fog encircle my small existence,
I can only see a few feet in front of me, and
As I glance backward, only a portion of my immediate view
is unobscured.
I squint, but
I cannot look into the future
I cannot look into the past.
I can only see my fate as it unfolds, step by step, in front of me.
It is only my footfalls, the drapery of water droplets on my skin
Swirling in and out of my lungs, pressing against my eyes.
I walk, and I feel myself strangely enough
trust in my own steps,
trust in the moonlight I cannot see.
Like the whirring of the contemptuous wind that rattles
The valley below,
A hindrance tugs at my soul
The brushing of fibers at their very tips
A chalky, dusty substance that irritates membranes
Something has constantly bothered my soul.
I've written more about death
Than I have about life.
I've written about what could be stirring behind the edges
Of that fog.
I can make out the shapes of bare limbs and branches
Suspecting this realm of which I walk
Is but one forest in the infinite galaxy
Of my consciousness.

I look out over the crests
Undulating like the ribcage of a
Subterranean creature.
Breathing in, exhaling the spittle of brine
Caked onto my lips and eyelashes.
The sea is different today.
How it moves, wildly serenading me
With the forgotten
All of the things I have forgotten.
Pieces of me have fallen into these waves,
Cracks of skin like the chipped linoleum
On an old kitchen floor
Drop heavily onto the sand
Sink into the shells,
It weeps.
My vertebrae stretch ever so further
With each fragrant rush of salt air
And I recall those poems
That wafted from afar and came to a rest
On the tips of my fingers,
Like rosebuds that were *****
And shrunken dry with neglect
But beautiful in decay.
I watch the sea today and it is a startling
Stranglehold
As the sounds of the pouring ocean floor
Grip into me with razor teeth
I know
I have left too much of myself behind
In this very same spot.
Yet the emptiness that drifts within, and
The old self
Brushing against my ankles in the sand,
Like an abandoned blanket
Is reassuringly the most naked elegance
That flutters through my chest
And expands outward
Into the gray.

There was a clearing in the darkening wood
Where my beauty would come to meet me
Blades and grasses of sentience in which I stood
Hummed therein a lyric of unequivocal destiny.

Tonight my beauty would find me
Even when crossing over the yellowing musk
Tripping through ivy's tangled eaves.
Reverberating seed and floating husk.

Even if it was terrified of the darkness,
Pinholes in the ceiling extending out of reach
Purging the tiger lily, weeping catharsis
Veins swelling within birch and beech

It would come, following trail and print
Drifting with cicada, down feathers of phlox
Treading across fragrant stems of peppermint
Into Fear's waters, Truth's rising equinox.

The sky was a wounded rabbit punctured through,
Crippled and limping across thinning treetops
Tracing spattered blood of evening dew
Breached forest's sharp edge and came to a stop.

Dense, wet footfalls swiftly soaked my spine
Impaling me with a realization consumingly remote
I only so much became the fireflies within the pine
That swayed my limbs and took my throat.