I look into myself and see only an accumulation
of lost objects
Piles of beautiful, forgotten documents
unusable
but loved for what they are
I am the words on a tea-stained music sheet
that mean nothing
and yet
you turn them over eternally in your mind
because there's something about that
sequence of syllables
that makes them
irresistible.
Look at my shelves and see my soul
Repeat my words and learn my essence,
Home is knowing who you are.

Hair burned into beautiful submission
Face acrylically defined and chemically composed
Adornments meticulously chosen
Scent tested and approved
Smile practiced and performed
I am a porcelain doll
Sipping tea, at 6 am in the quiet of a sleepy-city apartment
Porcelain doll dainty wrists
Washing dishes, feeding cats
Folding linens, singing hymnals
Praying for peace and safety
Porcelain doll knitting sweaters
And folding paper cranes
Reading poems, setting tables
Wearing cardigans and pearls
Porcelain doll decorating cupcakes
Lighting scented candles
Watering potted plants and humming childhood lullabies
With my porcelain painted lipstick mouth


But lipstick can be dark
Eyes lined black as city alley ways
There is anger at injustice
The world outside the confines of a pastel doll house
It’s messy
It’s hard
It’s iron and concrete and coal
And I am too
Biking through the brick metropolis
Sunglasses and headphones
And anarchist literature
Evenings spent sprinting through the smog
Heartbeats synchronized to the crude drumming of the city
So hard to impress
I’m on the metro
Eyebrows structured and defined
And adorned with a calculated air of apathy
See me social justice march
Down highways with fervently entitled youths
See me armed against misogyny
Until my peers learn to better conceal it
See me smoking cigarillos
Drinking black coffee
Breathing the tainted air of the city that birthed me
And chanting manifestoes.

But my manifesto can be love
And love can conquer anger and fear
And hatred
Love can reconcile, it can erase timidity
And it can abolish resentment
Let it wash my face and take the need for vengeance from my spirit
Let it replace the thirst for power with thirst for truth.
I burn incense
And wear long skirts
Naked face and braless lazy days
Reading pacifism in the park
I walk far to find pure air to breathe
I sit and deconstruct my dichotomy
Under a wise and ancient tree
I trace myself backwards and forwards
I meditate on the paths I have traveled
I cry for the things I have seen
And for the things I have done
I contemplate transcendence
I drink wine and listen to folk music
On the terrace of my home
I bike barefoot to buy Indian takeout
And eat it in silence on the floor of an empty room

I think only of death
And resurrection
Of betrayal and redemption
Of opposites and compliments
And how to progress in knowing how divergent pieces of myself can learn to harmonize
I think about minimalism and materialism
Sentimentalism
And swords and pens
And how this race I run was rigged from the start
I think about blackberries
And the complexity of their literary and symbolic significance
I think about the number seven as I see it reoccurring in every possible sequence and equation
I think about God,
And TS Eliot
And If I dare disturb the universe
I think about porcelain dolls and ****** activists and ***** hippies
I think about war and peace and politics
About corruption and poverty and imperialism
About western ideals and conspiracy theories
And communism
I think about being radical,
And how both sides of this ideological war are defined by fear
And I think about love, as radical but defined by the absence of fear
The absolution of fear
And how I am fairly certain it is the answer
I think about the inevitability of art and war
how they create each other
how they destroy each other
inspire each other and annihilate each other
and how there is nothing that is innocent.
I think about pain and privilege
And stacked decks of cards
I think about dreams and nightmares
And prophesy.
I think about the darkness within me
Tendencies to lie and manipulate and steal
The darkness that I know could make me very great
But alone in the ashes of the world
I think of the curse of wealth and power
And I try to evaluate my motives
And the driving force of my ambition
But I don’t know.
I think about grace and all the things I don’t understand
And toil and fate and destiny
The shape of these things, their origins and culminations
And what this black box of secrets contains.
I think about so many things,
Until everything I was on the outside is gone.
My body is gone
My painted face and sculpted hair
My varnished nails and pierced ears
All my clothes and appendages and freckles are gone
My blood evaporated
My brain an invisible energy in the wind.
My home and street
And city
Are gone.
And even in such complete concentration
When it is only my essence and nothing else
And I transcend throughout my past and future
When I am spread thin
And stretched into the corners
When I fill the cracks and crevices
And melt into the pores of everything
And my spirit is awaked to a dimensionless reality
Even then,
Scio Nihil

I know nothing. .

Black box breaking
Slowly breaking
Slowly
I saw the cracks
I saw them ripple down her back
I saw the freeze and thaw of nations
The renaissance and death and renaissance
I saw the wealth and worth of world powers
I saw them crumble
I was there
And I am here
I read it all and wrote it down
I saw it all and wrote it down
I kissed the survivors and wrote it down
I saw the earth in its entirety
I fell in love and vomited and fell in love
I saw her in her emptiness
I saw her sway in the winds
The winds grew cold and colder
She grew old and older
And so distraught
Mangled
Destroyed
Derailed
Demolished
Stripped of poise and polish
Stripped of it all
I saw her disintegrate
I saw her fall
Still I,
I still
I always standing
Watching still
Always seeing
Standing and seeing, I
Drinking tea
Calm, cool, collected, serenity

Now your turn
You see me
See me walking down the street
See my waist-long wavy hair
Blonde and sparkling in the sun
Lipstick smile
Hipbones and cheekbones chiseled and deadly
Long leg strut down the runway
Of center town sidewalks
The world is my oyster
See my backpack full of alphabetized books
Handwriting neat and perfect
Pen behind my ear I’m ready
For all of this
See me smoking cigarettes out my dorm room window
Listening to Mozart
And smiling fully when the strings jump in
See me on the park bench reading
Long Russian novels
I inhale the pages like heartbeats
In-hale
Ex-hale
In-hale
Ex-hale
Breaths and beats fully synchronized to the flipping of pages
And to the Metronome Mozart wrote me.

Don’t be deceived
I made my world and destroyed it and made my world
Independent to a fault
I made my living off stitching together broken bones
And melting old forgotten thrones
Sculptures that said I needed no one
No one could keep up anyway
I ran too fast
I ran all day
And kindof expected someone to care
But no one ever has
I was never worth the trouble
Pull me out from my own rubble
And kiss me if you can
No one knows my secret plan to live an embarrassing convention
All this glass is just pretention
I glued it together myself
I wrote my own pamphlet for self help
I pieced together my own face
I sculpted my own form and adorned it
I broke my own heart and mourned it
I arrived and left and arrived
And here I’ll stay
Black box breaking
Slowly breaking
Slowly
I saw the cracks
I saw them from the start
Death and renaissance and death
***** and love and *****

Museums as art
Art as museums
Sail the trail to my mausoleum
Psychopaths and physicists
Psychiatrists and philosophers
Philanthropists and pilots and painters


Declare now, that these are our days –
Our hours, and our days
These are our city, our hours
Our time, our days.


This is our world –
At 14:92 I landed here and claimed it
And searched it and found it wanting
Of civilization that I could so easily supply
By means of wounds and iron
And brawn and truth
(and just a tiny touch of influenza darling)
By means of our Lord,
Who grants us all that we desire
If only we **** enough of those he did not choose.
This is our world –
And we shall make it what we will
Make it in our own image
Teach it that innocence is not knowing the difference between right and wrong
Raise it to hate no one
But to love itself so deeply
That all other love seems hateful in comparison.
This is our child, love
Yours and mine.


Here the first shall be last
And the last shall be first
But once the first are last they shall be
Last
Last
      Last
And once the last are first
They shall make it so they can never be last again
This is our primitive accumulation
Of necessary materialism
Let’s cultivate matter
To make objects that we can place on shelves
And in cases –
These are our cases
And we love them as we love ourselves


Museums as mass graves
Mass graves as museums
Kiss me in my mausoleum
Priests and prisoners
Prostitutes and prophets
Pioneers and pilgrims and pagans


This is our time –
And we are dispensing it in spendthrift increments
Buying threadbare bandages for our cavernous canyons
Buying ample earplugs
To seal in the silence
So we can somewhat say
“look there is peace –
Look we have done it
In our time it is accomplished” – 


This is our peace –
And we know it by the signs
The lions and lambs lay quietly together
In our brass-barred zoos
For as long as shelves and cases
Are intact and the first are first
And the last are last
And the civilized are organized and holy
There is peace –
Oh, look
We made peace!

And as for Solomon and Socrates –
We take their words to weave through our new wisdom
And when we re-chart the constellations
We shall give them each a star
And salute them once a year
When they come around the universe
Oh, look
How wise we are!

Mass graves as art
Art as mass graves
There have been no better days
There has been no greater time
Politicians and pornographers
Professors and pirates
Psychologists and pastors and pianists


This is our time –
And we are doing with it the very best we know how
The last are toiling and trying
And the first are trying to think to try –
But there is a shortness in our hours
And a violence in our peace
There is inherent foolishness in our wisdom
And disease in our cities
And there is death upon our shelves and in our cases.

This is our world –
We crafted it and declared our truth to be true
We sculpted this, our colosseum
Please inscribe my mausoleum
With “we know not what we do”

Fascist fascist
Fascinating
Liberating or degrading
Hangs from single strings
Nothing comes and no one sings
No one laughs and nothing breaks
See the cracks drip down my face

Fascist fascist
Fascinating
Fascinating fascist face
Flash-forward foreshadow
White cold lace
Not as durable as we first thought
But the car is packed
In the parking lot
I light the cigarettes we bought
And now there is no going back
Not back to there
Nor back to that
Not back to night
Nor back to day
Nor back to summers
Far away

Fascist fascist
Fascinating
Forget my fascist family tree
The fascist fascist memory
And moustache moustache damaging
Or fresco firefly reverie
Just tell me that I’m yours
Sign the line
Like you have before
This is where we are right now
Two souls alive
In the empty town
Two souls alive
In the ******* ghost god-empty town.

So, What think you of Whitman?
And what say I of Plath?
I understand all but maybe half
On my greatest finest day
(dearest, how’d we get this way?)
How’d we fall so far from grace?
How’d this canyon split my face?
Maybe it’s the trace trace amounts of fascist.

Fascist fascist
Fascinating
Friday fickle convocating
Tragic talent intubating
All the world smiles, undulating
But in the end
You’re still a fascist.

Sanguine
Choleric
Melancholic
Phlegmatic
Phlegmatic
Melancholic
C­holeric
Sanguine
Blood oranges
And hibiscus tea
White wine
Carcrash memory
Hypertensive
He straps me down on the table
This is for my own good.
Too much blood they say,
Too much red wine too much liquid
Too much
My hand is swollen
My stomach distended
The vein in my forehead is bulging
Too much blood
A needle
A leech
A pen
Blood oranges
White wine
A needle is a leech is a pen
Is what the doctor ordered
He straps me to the desk
This is for my own good
A cure
Too much blood
Too much tea
Too many memories
Too many thoughts
Hypertensive
Sanguine
They say
They hand me the scalpel
And show me the line
Too much
I’ve had too too much red wine
To be doing this
A pen a leech a needle
A bucket of blood
A novel
Sanguine
Melancholic
Choleric
Phlegmatic
This is the cure
This is for my own good
Too much much blood
They hand me the pen
I’ve had too too many
Blood oranges
To be doing this
A scalpel is a pen
Is a leech is a needle
A bucket of blood is a novel
(Bleeding is the cure)
I bleed.