there's no rules
governing the way
to proper life.
There's no advisor
telling you the rules
to having done it right.
When it's your time for
your organs to shut down
and communication from
brain to body to cease,
there's no final test of
whether or not you've made
an impact or done it
the way people expect you to.

All that matters is that you've
done things.
You've eaten too much
cheesecake, and been in
trouble with the law,
and it's all been good. It's all
in accordance with physics,
and it's all
been here.

Landon Pigg plays in the background.
His eyes are there in front of mine, staring right back at me,
except they’re not really.
He’s not here and I’m not sure if that’s my fault or his. Who’s the protagonist?
A creatively cut-together camera angle
captures our embrace perfectly, and zooms out on that bed,
on the brick roof,
on the college campus.
Oh, good, this is a college movie,
nice and angsty and brooding as it should be.
My thoughts have a narrator and I imagine myself watched by millions.
(I’m not vain, I’m insecure)
What would mass media think if this life was a movie?
2 out of 5 stars,
not a very wholesome flick,
doesn’t seem to have any moral
or lesson,
or even a continuous plot line for that matter.

The wind blows the back of my hair
straight up, and in my shadow
I have horns or antlers.
I don't even recognize myself!
Looking up at the gray as the trees make themselves
just outlines- so you can see each
individual branch against the atmosphere as if
under a microscope- with a backlight.
I left flowers at home. I put fresh daisies-
no- dandelions by my own grave
and now I'm here- like I don't even exist
over there anymore.
Like life reincarnate.

creaking bones and heavy eyes
the distant stare of deprivation
teeth hurt up into my eye sockets
from clenching in the night,
terrorized by my own brain chemicals

I need to eat- fill my stomach and my
bloodstream with sugars and caffeine.
I need to sleep- maybe if I disappear
from my own thoughts for a while
the world will be a little quieter-
a little less demanding
when I wake.

Maybe it's in my own mind.

Colour now with an
extra “oh!” as if it needs
more exclamation

Does it rain more, here?
Do I just notice because
my umbrella broke?

All I brought from home
was the blanket from my bed,
and it doesn’t match.

We were addicted to
each other
like gambling.
Like counting the cards
and knowing you'll win.
We were filthy
******* rich together.
The smallest bet,
or the highest stakes,
like,
put it all on red
and reap the dividends
but don't make a show of it.
It's like,
we could have been billionaires,
started our own casino,
reveled in
the constant flow of fortune.
It's like giving up because
we moved down the block,
and because
the bus stopped running.

a park bench
a gazebo in the middle of a circle of a keyhole
like a teapot centrefold
three dance inside of it- bright hair
and nowhere else to go
passing around a single thin cigarette
my ankles have goosebumps

a streetlamp that creates the illusion
that the night isn't setting in
and yet beyond the gazebo the sky looks
like it would smell like lavender
and "seaside"
the buildings and buses all let of orange yellow glows
i'm getting too cold
the wind really gets up under my coat
this time

At home, there is fullness.
There is not taking for granted
the smell of your mother
or the shuffle of her
soft pajama pants as she
makes you both coffee in the
quiet unmoving morning.
Blanket. Colors. Television.

At home, there is forgetting.
There is a solid layer between
you and the demands of
The World. Your family takes
your hand, persuades you:
“just stay here. Sit down. Have
another cup of coffee”.
Quiet. Agreements. Closed windows.

At home, there is guilt.
No, there is a version of guilt
that is more like longing.
It’s more like wishing that seconds
were as long as millenia.
Knowing that you’re choosing to
leave this behind.
Put on a coat. Pack a bag. Cause a commotion.
Break the silence that
defines this comfortable and loving
place.

But you know that
at home, there is leaving.
There is expending of time and energy.
There must be chunks of yourself that
you throw out there to The World
because it matters.
Fear. Exhaustion. Exhilaration.
There are things to be seen, and lived.
There are people to meet.
There is a better self to be found.
There are notches to make
on your belt, and boxes to check
on your list.

There are sisters, mothers, brothers, dogs, cats, frogs, couches, blankets, dinners, colors
to tell these things too.
Because at home,
there is always coming home.

It's
dangerous to be on anything that isn't a precipice.
**** your flat-footed surety!
Sometimes the
solidarity
you stand on
is far too smoothed over by
heat and applause
for you to try to
walk it without a razor-sharp railway
under you.
Like,
that scene in Donnie Darko where
the rainbow bubbles know
which step you'll take
to
the fridge, the couch, the TV.
I'm talking about irony!
How
it's the only way to not slip.
Someday you'll
realize
how the great Dog above
didn't always mean for us
to be so
literal.

Do I have to tell a story?
I always thought that words could just be stand-ins,
they could be taste and feelings and hands on your body,
they could be a wet finger in your ear or
a slap across the jaw.
I always thought that they would just be there,
stagnant and-
****, read them if you want to but otherwise they’ll sit,
they don’t poke unless provoked.
Do I have to have morals?
I don’t mean the author I mean the worlds: do they have to be active? A verb: what you do.
But words are born from a sting on the arm,
a shot of rushing brightness that can’t be captured.
They’re eggs: they’re capsules: they’re formulations.
I don’t want to write a word that would be
seen on the hem of soldiers,
I just want to pull them from my skin like clay
and let them dry

Swirl of bitter smoke as smooth as a scent.
Richness, indulgence.
Why deny the body corporal pleasures?
What more is there to living
than cake, creamy coffee, scents, softness-
excessiveness in excess.
Finding meaning in knowing that
it's all Absurd.
When the pang of wanting arises,
do not deny. There are no rules.
Willpower will not follow you beyond the grave.

Brass bed posts, tainted and smoothed
by touch, casual grazes,
as the feet touch the cold floor,
the breath creaks out.
A wooden table, round and stained
that softly accepts the heavy mug.
That gives the fingers something
roughly smooth to touch
when there's nothing-
or when there's everything, it's all too much-
the sensory.
A window with an eroded sill.
Or better yet- a balcony.
A purple sky, the air humid and warm.
A chance to breathe.

Is it selfish? Is it how true life should be?
Lazy, gluttonous, pointless, boring.
Tell me I don't know what's good for me.

Sleep, wake,
bed, sheets soft and hugging
tugging on a duvet to cover from the
breeze- an open window with curtains dancing.
Is it time clocks or is it days and feelings?
11:30 is not too early for lunch because
lunch is when you're hungry.
My body calls for
blueberries, tobacco, dozy sleeps on and off for 3 hours,
dark chocolate squares to excite my tongue,
outdoors, fresh air, being naked in the day time.
A shirt with a joke on it that only you understand.

The nakedness of someone taking off their glasses or shaving their beard.
2. Once, you had to conceal a patch of short hair on the side of your head that you acquired because of an anxiety-coping tactic Well, the tactic was to pull your hair out from time to time. It was okay in the end because it grew back a different color.
3. Have you ever thought about how we check to see if it’s a bruise by pressing on it, and assessing whether or not it responds with pain?
4. Once, a person wrote you 3 separate poems on 3 separate occasions and told you that you were “perfect”. You tucked them all inside of a small purple wallet (that you loved), then one day promptly lost the wallet and all of the words in one fell swoop.
5. Sometimes, people fall deep into a pit of despair that's impossible to get out of. Seriously, you can’t get out! There’s no hope whatsoever in sight. Then, eventually, you get out.
6. Recently, a person who you haven’t seen in 4 years told you that you came up in a conversation that he was having about how hard it is to find “sane girls” these days, and how you are one of the only “sane ones” that he ever remembers meeting. You find this ironic.
7. Every animal has just enough brains to tan its own hyde: as if these creatures have evolved for us humans to tear them apart.

he taste of cream, iced.
the cold helps my throat and my body which both feel like furnaces that won’t **** their burning faces.
tell me which is worse: the end of a railway track
or the beginning of a meal when you’re already sick at the thought of it?
this is what France has given me:
the confidence and surety that everything I’ve ever wanted is valid;
and therefore I should not consider myself to be a whiny white antagonist but rather,
an activist,
and someone who is alive, AWAKE, alert and always after all the action.
And I will go faster.
After all, this isn’t about me, it’s about you- no I take it back, in fact- it’s about what we leave behind. How many times does a nursery rhyme have to tell you to be a good person before we all start moving to the countryside and growing our own food to provide?
But that’s beside the point.
Pass me the bottle of water or put my head under the tap, you know: I’d prefer the latter.

I follow a man around a bookstore.
His eyes
tell me that he is
of the age of reciprocation,
but his upper thighs
tell me he's a father-
he has occupations.
The ***
of his jeans tell me he's got
better places to sit
than this bookstore with me.

Phish Food
If time travel was possible, you say you’re sure you wouldn’t change a thing,
but I would.
I’m not mad, but I just think that I’m worthy of better times in my life
than what I’ve had.
This just isn’t what they mention when they mention being my age-
And I have my issues separate of you, and that separation might have been
what drew us together.
I recently compared my love life to Rose and Jack from the titanic,
except I’m the one in the water, grasping and freezing.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, I swear-
I just mean:
thanks for letting me hold on for a while.
I hope I was a turning point in your journey to
psychedelic self-discovery,
or whatever.
You were not a turning point in mine.

Take deep breaths- deeper- deeper still.
Shake your head, squeeze your eyes closed and open.
Keep striding through the night- faster- faster still.
Tighten the straps on your backpack until it squeezes
your shoulders like someone grabbing you from behind.
Listen to the sounds of the breaths that you keep *******.
Clench your hand around the old receipt in your jacket pocket
rub it between your fingers until blisters form like mountain ranges
between two tectonic plates.
Walk- power walk- breathing deeper still-
up the steep and winding hill, away from the street lamps.
There’s not enough
air
to fill the heaving, squeezing lungs.
Vision blurs, white noise.
Out-of-body weightlessness.
Feeling nothing, your brain a loud buzz of
desperation.
Sensing almost nothing
except for that insatiable breath.
Keep hauling the body
in a state of emergency
past the other ones who walk about.
One of them whoops- hollers- laughs.
Let a breathy sob escape into the night,
and wonder- cursing the noise of joy- how they can be happy
when you’re anything but.
Soon, in a moment of
clarity,
the lungs let up on their erratic work.
Reach the level grass at the top,
like a parachute dropped from an airplane.

One needn’t know the nodules of my
secret self
to clasp to my
super nova-
The ballpoint pen bears meaning beyond the plastic
even after extensive efforts
you can't expect to be the one
to ceremoniously break it
but broken, does it matter which beaten,
battered guise it takes?
Consider the others like it:
a million pieces of shattered sharpness, still producing ink.
No matter the tired efforts of your fingers,
extensions of the brain which aches for escape,
ragged nails picking at that plastic piece--
the potential remains.
Consider the ink: succinct
reserved, and well.

I’m fine with the fact that each second dies as soon as it’s born,
birthing and killing me along with it.
As the man-made measuring mechanism
tells us that with each moment, there is
a change,
So I, too, metamorphose
with each tick and tock.
A death of self- a senescing-
timely, and repetitive.
The moulting of an identity that once existed.
The world giving me a new opportunity
to decompose, contribute to the carbon cycle,
yes, again,
turn me to CO2
release me into the soil and let a plant grow where I stood.
Every day
with endless opportunities to have my own
renaissance.

The sound of a highway that is really the wind
pushing down the wrong side of the street.
He stood there with a voice so timid, I wanted to cry-
no- hug him- no- laugh- or-
lay down on the cobblestone right there and
scream the poetry of that moment at everyone
walking by- but- I didn't even
give him a pound because by the time
my heart began to constrict, my legs had already
told me to keep walking along- but-
all I can think about is his hands in his pockets
and the white piece of paper
on the ground at his feet, telling him
the words to a song that he knew by heart.
And there was his stubble and where is his family?
And his hands in his pockets
and I just kept walking.

On my fingernails
there’s chipped-off red.
I’m tipped off my axis, don’t
ask me what’s in my head.
I just painted them
so I couldn’t see the dirt underneath.

If you ignore the parts that you’re sure
are just the worst- can’t be a
true reflection of you- it hurts.

There’s a difference between
an eraser and a curtain.
Within, it’s too much.

there's a moment in the car where I realize that I enjoy proximity
the proximity of me to the body next to mine
just body with blood and heat and pumping
just the pumping of the music through the speakers
with the driver screaming,
and all of us in the back seat nodding and saying
yes, yes, yes (rest) yes.
I enjoy the proximity of my thoughts to yours
how do you know?
I enjoy the proximity of emotion in action
as your hand taps the closest surface and your head wags from back to forth I feel the YES YES BEAT BEAT that you feel
I feel the closeness, feel the solidarity
there's both, you know? you know.
I promise I won't care.
We're singing and I'm thinking about the sound of my own voice and thinking that,
you must like it.
You must like how it's not quite on tune but it's got lots of soul.
You must like how it's not quite that scene in the movie but it's quite inherently human.
I, too, consider myself the point of everything.
Not because I'm great, or anything like that remotely, but because I'm
here.
If I see this, does it pertain to me? Just because I see it does it mean it makes a sound?
Let the music feel you, don't feel it to much. It will tell you what to do with your right hand while your left grabs the wheel, and don't worry, it'll make you sweat and salivate.

my legs have seen better cashmere
than this lamp of blanched bulb-
and my tendrils, better sunshine
than this pallor of fraying felt.
would you excuse me- just for a second?
I'd hate to reduce that discordant disk-golf
that you call "discourse"
to anything more than-
what's better known as-
abhorrent.
would you excuse me? I'll be right back-
it's just that late nights tend to
dilate my find of last rites and conflate,
switch back, rewind, the time so that
my psyche somehow aligns
with what's trying to find me.

how quickly it all changes
from light to dark
as the weather gets colder still-
we are running out of
time-
daylight, save
me.