After taking a gulp of water, M. opens a new Word document, inhaling deeply. He begins to write a sort of Introduction or Author’s Note:

‘This is to be my first real poem. No *******, cheesy rhyming or painfully forced verbiage. I am now only a seeker of truth…’

M., having just crushed two Focalin pressed pills, rolls a five-dollar bill and proceeds to insufflate, pausing momentarily when the line is halfway finished; he exhales before immediately finishing it off. His sinus burns fiercely. There is something masochistic about his preferred method of ingestion w/r/t pills. And but with a sudden albeit expected (in fact, M. was utterly beholden to it) rush of vitality, M. spends the next ten minutes finishing his half-page poetic manifesto [sic] (which term he actually wrote as a heading. “Poetic Manifesto”, that is), before beginning what he considers to be the first stanza. He likes that the location of the beginning of his poem is ambiguous. And so he begins thusly, consciously avoiding conventional rhyme scheme, instead opting for what he considers to be abstract.

‘My first poem, ostensibly an attempt at catharsis, was in fact a failed expression of my latent desire to be accepted. For today it’s a poem and last week a novel; tomorrow I’ll ferociously ******* some fashionably obscure, formidably pretentious prose [sic]. Consuming all but absorbing nothing…’

If he is to discover vicious truths [sic] in his writing, he cannot hold anything back. He thinks of a double-entendre using the word ‘blunt’, but decides not to employ it. Perhaps yesterday. Suddenly, M. begins to ruminate on his poem from the day before, which had earned him the opposite of acclaim from his peers. He must simply do the opposite of what he had done before! When he resumes writing, M. eventually begins to subconsciously fall back into the 12-syllable AABB rhyme scheme of his yesterday’s poem.

‘…Perhaps the following phase will stick for more than a wretched week.
Why have I wasted words on wan, vapid, wheezing lines
Of sickeningly phony, sophomoric, pseudo-sentimental ****?
Surely you see the salient theme,
That from which I hide,
Refusing to acknowledge life’s flaccid, tan **** as it floats in front of me,
Beckoning me forth,
A one-eyed, furiously fetid viper...’

M. chortles at his alliterative stanza’s ending. ‘This is how I write,’ he mutters to himself, maintaining a straight face. He writes without pause for nearly an hour. He is pleased.

‘…A generalist—that’s what I tell myself I am,
Because simply knowing a few facts,
Even for forty or fifty fields,
Is surely worthy of that
Respect which is given to those men and women
Who earn it by grinding away
At that which determine the sycophant vermin
Is worthy of lifting a lash…’

Hours pass. The poem approaches two thousand words in length. After taking a truncated cigarette break (the break, not the cigarette, was truncated), M. continues where he left off.*

‘…Believe you not for a second the frost-bitten-phallus,
That Freudian façade [sic],
The false faces I display to fake friends
Whose frequent fornication
Fills my mind with fossilized fleas,
******-spiritual formication [sic]
For which there’s no vaccine…

…Once I’ve come down from the mountainous apogee atop which I sit,
Calmly surveying the ever-receding landscape through the lens of fleeting euphoria
Which, fading faster always, gives way to—no, I will not say it—I refuse to legitimate her lies.
As I descend with increasing speed,
specters of judgment torment me into insanity…
    
B  r  e
a   t  h
     e  ;

...this feeling I simply cannot bear—
their sirens threaten to burst my eardrums.
Although it’s undoubtedly pathetic,
I can no longer lie to myself;
I desire the approval
of those specters
who haunt
m-
e
...’

M. begins to hyperventilate, panicking at his embarrassment at publishing such a bad poem the day before. He grasps his heart, which is beating out of his chest. The fear of cardiac arrest simply increases his anxiety. Laying down on the ****-carpeted floor, M. attempts to meditate, imagining this to be how it might feel to do TM on *******. Minutes then an hour pass.
Suddenly, a much-welcomed epiphany presents itself to M.; as if it fluttered through his window and hovered, eerily still in the way that only hummingbirds can be, just in front of his face. So obvious does it seem (the epiphany) that he begins to laugh maniacally in the pitch of a female voice either pre-pubescent or near-dead; a kind of

YEE!    

YEE!      

YEE!    

HEEEE!

HE!

HEE!                      

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

sound.
After minutes of uncontrollable mirth, M. holds his abdomen and makes the lugubrious [sic], delirious noises of tired suffering. After a few more YEE’s and HEEEE’s escape, he begins to regain control, trying not to focus on what he’d realized w/r/t futility as it relates to shame, but certainly ensuring that he won’t forget. M. sits in his chair with a old-man grunt, the sort of noise over which wives divorce their husbands.
He sips water.
M. opens a new document and begins to type:

For what do we write, we talentless wretches?
To publish some
gooey garbage
in hopes
that some fleet of demonic tween-age sociopaths
adopts our work as part of the canon of cuntiness?  

Not we, the veritable “un-poets”,
Our haphazardly-conceived writing stinks,
No, it reeks of fetid, smegmatic phalluses;
Of a ****** of maniacal madmen,
Blue-balled after an abysmal night/morning
Tossing crumpled ***** of money
At Patti’s plump-lipped, positively putrid-looking

&&&&               *****               &&&&

In an I-95 truck stop;
“Taste **** and *****
At Trucker Tom’s ***** Taphouse
                                        Where friends meet
                                            and literally throw money
                                              into syphilitic snatches.”

We write for the duty of identity,
We who might be found with a serious face on,
Writing rhyming, rhythmic,
quasi-**** lines of lead-heavy, snobbish lifeforce-larcen.
The sort of **** that keeps you from getting up in the morning.

But of course we are writers, as sure as the sea
Is blue, the day is long, who daresay that I am wrong?
And he who
doth [sic] dare,
I point to that long
******* I posted
ere the day began.
There lies his evidence though it belongs in the can.

O to be loved without want or condition,
Cared for with utterly unfeigned conviction.

Despite dozens of duties he’d doubtfully done
Her love wouldn’t wane for her wizening son.

O but how tepidly tired and dour,
How furiously, phallically fetid its flower.
Monotonously, mirthlessly humming along,
His listless life like a moribund song,
Sodden with pitifully petulant skulking,
Not deigning to die, but dreams of their sulking
Pervaded his psyche as fifty-five fleas
Formicate wildly, stinging suicide-bees.

Three years of contented, ire-inducing idleness,
Vacuous days lacking life’s latent vitalness.
Entitlement, cowardice, perhaps the antithesis
Is he of a man. Singed with syphilis,
****** from sentiment, his is the brain
Of one who breathes indignant disdain
For all those who threaten his thinly-veiled comfort.
The thespian of truth, he’d play the faux jumper.

For some it’s a teddy, a Hotwheel, a dumptruck,
But not Doug, instead he gave lashings and then ******.

I knew not to holler lest Doug lose his focus,
Grasping my collar, he shrieked, “Hocus pocus!”

After Doug’s very first drink he’d soon have a *******,
Then that sinister wink, I knew I was far gone.

Exhausted from ****** my nubile ***, on the couch Doug laid
And then out he passed. I was no longer afraid.

The weekend ere last, after ******* Doug’s ****,
He’d showed me his bolt cutters cut through a lock.

How many times had I undressed ol’ Doug?
His **** were like limes, his chest like a rug.

Sleeping upright, legs invitingly spread,
Soul black as the night, I began to see red.

O, but the sound! Like scissors through steak,
Doug writhed all around, eyes seeming to quake.

After rising, I followed the crimson trail,
As if suddenly hollowed, gravity prevailed.

Wrists sore as my ***, mouth tasting metallic,
Bound like a lass, their faces utterly pallid.

Waddling down the hall, I was greeted with whistles,
“Give me a call!” Words coarser than bristles.

From the infirmary I write, and prone I must lay,
For Jerome likes ‘em white, as do Randy and Ray.

The elusive rush,
That which you lust,
How does one capture that evasive rush?
Call it vitality or motivation if you will,
Every man has felt it,
No matter how shrill.

Must it come from within?
Naturally as they say,
Nay, there must exist another way.
For after soul-searching and contemplation,
Day after day,
You will exhaust prayer and libation,
The recursive foray.

Ere long, you will seek a rush from without,
After swimming upstream like a wretched trout.
Just a taste and that is it,
You are now a fledgling
Beholden to the ***.

Now comes the inevitable epiphany,
They call it “Recovery”,
A period of healing and false discovery.
It is now that your soul is most vulnerable,
Liable to become a group-thinker
Whose truth comes in platitudes,
Who accepts these gifts with gratitude.

Beware of the brainwashing cynics,
And schools in the guise of clinics,
Of the endless masquerade
Where you will learn to be an imposter.
To be careful when fighting the monsters…

What fills the vacuum?
Here one has a choice:
Toil, hedonism, or watching The Voice.
The third option is where you will be steered,
Or rather dragged, held by the ear.

This vicarious rush, is it enough?
Is this really what you lust?
A feeling so fleeting, gone in a gust,
Has your brain turned to rust?

You must escape this phony rush,
For the feeling comes not in a bottle,
It cannot be crushed.
Latent, dormant, coated in dust,
Nonetheless vital beneath the cusp.

Fear not the rust, for it exists on the crust,
Unable to reach the rush that you lust.

Across the thin line twixt denial and panic
Stepped a young man whose Depression was manic.
His heart palpitated, threatening to burst
Right there in line, in which he was first.
‘Sir, can I help you,’ had uttered the girl,
‘Are you one of the specters?’ He’d begun to unfurl.

Awoke he bed-bound in some wretched infirmary,
For minutes he struggled to escape this man-burglary
Which would surely result in a suit from his lawyers,
Upon the nurse’s return he declared he’d destroy her,
At which point he made a regrettable choice,
He hawked and he spat, and even rejoiced
After she’d reeled and dropped his impossibly thick file-
Unbeknownst to him, he’d been there quite a while.

Life’s ostensibly dead weight pulls downward, maddeningly consistent in its campaign to fell him.
Its moribund song is maniacally hummed by he who seems to mourn with his limbs as he walks,
Soul skulking petulantly as suicide-bees formicate wildly beneath his scalp;
He dreams of his post-mortem feast.

Gazing intently at his doodle-strewn bedside wall,
Cringing as he reads those scribbled aphorisms he had erased the day before,
He wonders if the bees were ever really there in the first place.

He writes, ‘Ire-inducing idleness. Vapid, vacuous days;
He is man’s antithesis, ****** from sentiment.
His is the syphilitic brain of one filled with disdain
For all those who threaten his thinly-veiled comfort,
The thespian of truth, he’d play the faux jumper.’

The elevator comes to a halt.
Exiting, he sees someone has left the door open for him.
Climbing cautiously to the roof, he is met with an angry gust upon stepping outside.
The solemn timbre of T. Yorke resounds as he drunkenly stumbles across the pebble-laden surface,
And as he sidles along the ledge he realizes that nothing is infinite.

Once invigorating, now banal and blasé,
Their veritable magic was surely to stay.
"It's only your tolerance," is what I was told,
But idly waiting has begun to grow old.
I'd have paid more attention had I known just how soon
Her magic would wane, like a post-harvest moon.
Though indeed much was learned, elusive flashes remain
Of her psychedelic wisdom, gone like a flame
put out by the rain.

O to return to that meadow of mirth,
Traipse through dew-strewn grass, greener than turf.
Blessed with joy were those days in which I could feel,
Whence I’d discovered their uncanny appeal.
Perhaps a memento, some nostalgic reminding
Of depression unwinding, uncovering joy,
The relief of a father who hears, "It's a boy!”
The triumphant return of that happiness lost,
Only just for a minute, without thought of the cost.
I will surely be moaning once I have found
The specter of gaiety I feel lurking around
The bend beyond which I shall surely remember
The reason for which I feel wholly dismembered
Until then I will wipe away tears as they come,
Which descend from my eyes although I am numb.

Though such heavenly feelings are not meant to last.
An arcing foray like a fisherman’s cast,
It soars to its peak before gently landing,
Briefly submerged before rising and standing
Upon unplush plains of pain and sobriety,
Most fall to their knees as if praying with piety.
And though they might pray with utter sincerity,
Promise to both those alive and posterity
That if they are taken around only once more,
That never again will they knock upon His door,
Nor will they ask him a favor, blessing, or chore,
For only one taste is desired of yore.

That Feeling I chase like a ray of the sun,
Head down, charging forth, even deigning to run
But invariably, ere two months have gone passed,
Dullness descends, ending joy’s songs of the past.
It replaces contentment with grey, tepid numbness,
I remember the time I saw Mr. Tumnus
With Jake and Nadine, each now an alumnus,
Of the College of Psychs, where learned we of oneness.

The bell jar is descending, I cannot escape,
They call it depression but more aptly it’s ****.
For I feel as though life has taken its ****,
And shoved it in my ***; oh boy is it thick!
It ***** me as if I'd done wrong or owed it,
It’s a good thing I'm numb; I might have imploded
Long, long ago, perhaps upon entry,
The two weeks since using feels like a century
Strange sirens from without harass me within,
Each cell in my body writhes as withdrawal begins.

For whose mercy do I plead? Or is it a pinch,
Do I hope I might wake from a dream and unclench
My fists which I plan for our God to receive?
One in each eye and then one in between.
Mysterious indeed are the ways which He works,
Confounding enough, in fact, He causes to perk
Up the heads of the miserable wretches,
Who believe in His lies. O how one retches
At such a shamelessly scandalous, immoral regime!
If the Church is His house then His words are its beam
From which hang their ropes, creaking taught under the weight
Of pallid, limp bodies; this the inevitable fate
Of one who will do and ****, even think and say
When and how He commands, with a joyful “Hooray!”
And who would not obey and cheer at this grand fate
Promised to those Souls upon reaching His gate?
But have faith O they should, nay they must if they are
To escape life’s futilities, the looming bell jar.