II
Envy darts her wicked tongue
So slick with black desire
To chase the blood from passion and suffocate
The heart of ire
III
Inertia places her hips
Over barren seas
And drinks the lust to fill
Her
Insatiable greed
IV
Solace rests his blunted fangs
Too late
On torpor mottled skin
And echoes haste through empty halls
Still labyrinthine vessels
I**
Curiosity ensnares
Mortality, the wander self
With susurrus pulse and love
Drives caution to the slaughter

Roiling earth
Black dirt and broken roots
Rise
Fingers pointed to the skies

Shiver decay
Mote breath, mottled stretch
Come a marching
Through the static haze

Flesh and ache and waste
Wake after wake
Flesh and ache and pain
Day after day
Carrion stay
Carrion remain

They will walk the earth
And nothing will be

First the spires will fall
To the blackout seas
Then the houses will board
Starved to plaster bones
Next the chatter will die
From the pallid air
Then the blisters will burst
From the crust of the world

They will walk the earth
And nothing will be
They will walk the earth
And nothing will be for worse

This was the only face I was given
Are the edges frayed, are the bones brittle?
I cannot bring my eyes to your image
I am tongueless, dead

These are the hooks in my eyes
These are the anchors left when oceans dried
This is my blood, this is my flesh
I wasn’t molded to love, I was molded to live

Am I worthy?
Am I worthy?

Can I catch your attention?
If I crave just as selfishly
As the media art
Of ******* perfection?

Am I ugly?
Am I pretty?
Or am I faceless when you see me?
Am I faceless?
Am I faceless?
AM I FACELESS?

I crawled through the dead spaces of old houses
Just to breathe in years old memories
Brimming with adolescent thrill and reveries
Picturesque sceneries in glass-encased eternities

Withered limbs broke apart feinting apathy
Parched and cracked, my lips bore silent screams
As I disintegrated, filling the negative space
That resides where loss and ache form dead weight

I am the calm that breaks your heart
I am the still that never departs
In a frenzied world of dead spire loves
Out of reach, out of luck, and out of touch

I became envy, firing sparks across cold skin
I became adoration, pulsing and sun-kissed
I yearned to hate
I yearned to love

Do I dare coalesce?
What will I become?
Knowing all that’s gone?
Knowing not what’s to come?

Do I dare coalesce?
What will I become?
Knowing all that’s gone
Is all I loved?

Sever my head
With two little pills
That shake the sweat from my fingertips

This pity **** is wasted breath
When I’m absent in life, I might as well be absent in death

Because I was driving down the highway over the limit
And didn’t know where the **** I was headed
I forgot the beginning but I wanted an ending
And pulling over felt like too much effort

I think these pills
Aren’t doing a ******* thing

Blood foams out of Mary’s mouth.
Grass on her skirt.
Grubs shift beneath her, trying to breathe.
Pink foam runs down her chin.
Jeremiah hasn’t moved in an hour.
Lying on the grass with his hair rotting.
Bathtub flesh tangled in senescence.
Jesus, where the **** did the time go?
It’s Autumn approaching Winter.
Little nooses run down tree branches and settle round all the leaves.
Hugging them until their necks sever like Isaiah’s.
Eve shakes his shoulder to wake him but his head just rolls further into the gutter.
A dazed expression of absolute revulsion.
Whatever.
I pick up a stick and pierce Eve’s flesh.
Over and over.
Because I’m bored.
And she’s there.
Barely perceiving her own existence.
Shaking the headless body of Isaiah.
While Mary collapses into a black hole.
And Jeremiah sinks into the ground.

it’s hard
to hear you
brushing against
sleeves so thin

empty bites
ringing through
the silence
of wasting hips

i’m too scared
if i reach out
your frame will
dissipate

flee through skin
translucent
taking too much
...space

Tastes like death
Tongue to the gallows
Winter in her veins

All flesh fails
Maggots run empty
Gorged headless
Enfolding
Imprinting

Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing
Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing
Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing

Twin snakes berthed on the wrists
One born of innocence, one born of sin
One lies asleep, the other awake
With a lidless stare and a restless ache

Tongue twists between forever and for naught
The heart yearns to reach the momentous, often cited fraud
‘Impossibility,’ the serpent screams
‘The unproven disease’

Slithers on the spot
In perpetuity
With a ceaseless speech
I follow completely

In my wake
Is dust and death
The once conscious snake
Has become rotting flesh
Upon my right
The other stirs
Fat and swollen, it smiles
Calling itself sin

sand sand sand sand sand sand
i think my mind is disintegrating
i might
**** myself
it probably began before i was born
in the beginning there was nothing
and the world was perfect
then i came into the world
and read lots of articles at university
because
i wanted a good grade
but the world began to fuzz at its edges
i’d drift back to the flat
and stare at all the objects in my room
unable to understand them
most of the time i hate myself
it’s one of the few emotions
i have left
i had this 4500 word assignment
but every time i went to type it up
my words came out, out of order
a string of unrecognisable
broken symbols
a mangled image of my own
stupid head
i came to the conclusion
i was
having a mental breakdown
the other month i
sat in the city mall
and
stared at all the passing people
in their most mundane moments
and thought
this is the rest of my life
this stupid, pointless repetition
i watched people rise on an escalator
faces fixed blankly on
the space in front of them
as if they weren’t there at all
i watched seagulls poke at one another
and squawk into the ground
and thought
there is more life in them
than us
i didn’t want to be a **** up again
i would try to read over
what’d i’d written
for hours on end
until i was shaking, on the edge of tears
unable to understand why this was happening to me
i’d lie in bed
and think about the infinite worthless stretch of my life
feeling only an untraceable anxiety
deep in the pit of
my flesh
for the longest time
i thought all this anxiety and fear
came from without
that if i learned about existence enough
i could
excise all the bad parts out
but something in my head broke
something i couldn’t
control
maybe some part of me wanted this to happen
so i’d have a reason
to die.

Her bleached skin
Frays at the edges
She stitches the tears
With black thread and coloured ink
A wavering rise
Paints her back, golden

Words are meaningless
My teeth will crack from the grit
These sentences are just a puzzle I can’t seem to fix

Spoken like a true fake
My smiles will ache, my skin will quiver
If I keep this up any longer than
Necessary

My tongue will begin, and never quite deliver
My mind will unravel, before it comes together
Never quite peaking, never quite reaching
Intent
I’m an unintentional social disaster

they made a hollow in your head
a place to die
over and again

all the impatience of the years
come close

where i will never find myself again
save in photos
and dead repeats

on and on and on
stupid machines
speak past one another
an automated stupor

brain ****** bourgeoisie
incapable of escaping
their own idiot refrain

demented on chop
and immanence

a closed horizon

Bile grips the gasps of every self-centered ****
They spill the tar out of their hearts onto ****** pavement
Lifeless limbs descend hollowed rooms, to linger over dust
The passing passions left to die in fake laughs

Every new rise
You ghost further from touch
Your pastel eyes
Dried their watercolour love

Once formless on skin
We were formless in lust
But two hundred nights
Left me desolate

Knotted and heaving
Out of breath, out of season
Losing sleep, losing purpose
Am I not enough?

Knotted and heaving
Out of breath, out of season
Once something worth knowing
But you’re not enough.

Cruel saints
Spoke like whimper dolls
And wished the world more
Than what it was

Loft and mind
Comes crumbling every dawn
When the bell tolls morn
Reality shakes our walls

Those hands of a dreamer
Calloused wrists or fitful lids
Fit in that hollow
Of your chest so easily
And warm breath rather suits
Cold air, rather than lips
Tender sleeves never could
Keep our fingers from wandering
. . .
The pages of your soul

Decipher
And fall apart
What terror
Lies in our hearts

Decipher
And fall apart
What terror
Lies in our hearts

Can’t catch this hue of you
I’m a scathing black in the midnight blues
An overcast sky, blanketing blister-paced eyes
Hangs right above my neck

I’ve brewed restless ache
It settles deep in the space
Between my lusts and restraints
Scared to death either way

I’ve let the blood in my skin
Sink into bones and teeth
Crimson flush under limbs
Stiffer than death

I’m all I lack

I’ve felt happiness sink
In this tremor flesh
Sometimes I don’t think it’ll ever rise back up again

Pale figures stretch
Themselves apart at the wrist
Living transient
Beautiful deaths

I know the shift and the slide of my aches
More intimately than love
Or lust

I think when lovers collide
Bloom, then die
They depart redefined

Wicked gaze draws the life
To blossom bright through too wide eyes
Overexposed, like blowing bulbs
They crackle and crack
Leaking dead hope

I’m such a drag
Pull me in your breath
Watch me disappear

I’m a headless lover
Heartless friend

iv 5-2-18

wrest the black tang the cosmic vacuum of background static and an ungainly dream of walking down a mountain path with my father we descend the silent belly of campus seats filled with mounted bodies lolling the inside stench anna walks ahead of me her voice cuts the waking body of midnight shuttles a hydroponic plant and the sparse parking lot of a supermarket radiating cold.

the fright, the nervous flesh, the stuttered pace of cars, the empty lot, the empty hour, the empty admission of make-belief, collapsing into precession at the peak of worthlessness.

ii 22-1-18

An endless stream, the back of an apartment block, fingers twine across the powder red of brick and sunlight.

I try to catch a glimpse of myself in her eyes, but beyond recognition there is nothing.

I see my father behind a sliding door. He moves further into the kitchen to take pictures from a tripod.

Clothes litter the ground. Nothing fits.

iii 4-2-18

the cracked linen STOP the momentary arrogance STOP the surfacing violence STOP the weathering STOP

A YELL torpid stultifying CRASH cruel ******* trace of the same

and all i can do is shrink as green tea soaks the tablecloth.

i 31-1-17

The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human. The problem is you were born human.

She held him within her. A coiled mosaic, whirling on the precipice. His frame shook tumultuous, his skin the colour of autumn grey. The wetness from his eyes spilled against her soft fur. He pressed his lids tighter, as if to keep his tears from the world. Warmth pooled beneath their paws, a thick ichor that smelled of iron and salt.
The dusk receded, and he breathed his last.
Night left the world a husk. A slumber, cessation. In the still, she felt a chill gather within her, cruel and implacable. The forest stirred, with a restlessness only the dead knew. The barrows shrivelled to their skeleton frames. Death lurked in the furs of the pitch beast, in the mottle snares of the witherfang.
She ****** them all.
Her howl tore through the air, bright and gleaming. It thundered beneath the earth, reverberating through the bones of the long deceased. How had she once felt pride in that sound? A bitter rage roiled in her blood. It twisted the vessels of her body, and set her muscles to stone. She moved and shattered into a thousand shards, each one sharper than the last.
She grieved for two days. The soft contours she’d held his dying body against grew lean and taut. The hollows of her ribs had closed themselves around a seething stone, that filled her flesh bitter. She rose a new beast on the third day. Smarter, but crueller; wiser, but filled with rage; and with only one thought on her mind.
She would find the deceiver, and devour all he loved.

Wither your wings go
Yet, forth you walk
To parting lips, blackened
Breath
Sheathing nervous impulse

Behind roiling haze
You were immortal, once
Gazing without seeing
A glass heart
Full of hope

Life flushed your veins gold
Sunk its teeth
Into warm pulse
Carried two sets
Of two strands
To a place, called home

But fear
Etched its make
Into the hollow of your soul
Creasing aspirations
Careless in their birth
And growth

Lying, in a lull
You flicker through
Replays
Fingers lacing
Soft wake,
Soft skin,
Immeasurable

Main street
The ebb of traffic leaves me sick

This is a city of repetitious fits
Transparent monotony

holdover from the air cools bitter awash of dark and a turning horizon without centre. where i entered an empty frame across distance and skin like smoke. ive been having nightmares of cosmic terror a sublime loss of control like paper tearing in the chaotic drifts of broken eddies and other everyday things an inward open mirror a sunlit line wavering to heat disintegration dispersal erosion and death. ive been reading uncanny fluctuations in the sign of things in a power too great and sparse to comprehend overwhelmed by haunting finitude as time veers into collision and the fleeting panic of yesterdays blood. i find myself shaking at the thought of contact the electromagnetic law of repulsion built into the fabric of my flesh eyes turned away like a promise all language from dead stars. dragged along these orbits my skin trembles and i am hateful. faces blur in passageways half-lit rooms smudge across the surface of my memory until i see nothing but the colour of what was tightening the cords of my ribs stumbling inflexion. in the precession of traffic light blurs through my sleeve and i realise i was invisible all along and that i did this to myself and that nobody can help me and that i did this to myself and that i will retreat further and further and further because if it hurts to be abandoned it hurts more to be approached and misunderstood. the masks the words the acts the plays and beneath it all fear cruel mounting hopeless wretched fear eyes turning fingers running over and over until they break the lines of my face a *******. i turn the clocks upside down. i take the batteries out of all my electronic devices. i break the locks on my door. only then does morning come.

askew undoing the worthless match
over and over and over and over

There is no hope.
We walked in circles round the worm, its amorphous purpose lost on us. A sleek, black, rotting corpse, buried within skyscrapers and city streets. We could see no end to it. Everyone had done their best to avoid mention, even as traffic backed, markets stalled and entire city blocks went down.
The pier was bustling at noon. Sweet, burning, haze of smells. Business men wandered out for lunch, laughing to themselves as they secretly wondered how they’d pass the black mass. Children scurried round it, morbidly curious. Their parents would wring their hands, shooting sights at everything but the worm. A throng of oblivious teens skated into it and were knocked flat on their backs. A business man stepped over the moaning mass, eating a hot dog.
Three days passed and nothing had been done. The smell worsened.
The media continued their daily fluster. Weather. Sports. Local news. Farmer John had gotten pink eye again. They held awkward smiles in their teeth, and deadpan concern in their crows feet. His meat would be safe once cooked.
The government were curiously absent.
Conspiracists were already calling it Non-entity 012. The world worm. The dead god in the room.
If we close our eyes, will it disappear?

-- Anonymous Male. New York, USA.

The first attempt ended in nothingness. Ribbons flowed from the belly of mother hollow, and though they grasped at their own absence, their fingers broke like brittle leaves, returning to the mother’s flesh.
This was the birth of change.
The second attempt ended in madness. Shadows rose out of the nothingness in waves and cascaded into pools of being, but when being opened its eyes and saw its image, it let out a threshing scream.
This was the birth of separation.
The third attempt ended in lack. Fire poured from the cosmic maw and baked earth to blood; flesh gorged on itself, and pale figures gripped the edges of rivers, gaping at one another, unable to speak.
This was the birth of despair.
The last attempt ended in man; and nothing birthed after it.


Appended File

Source states the archaeologist was investigating the Mariana Trench. Strangely, he began displaying symptoms of decompression sickness on the descent. His state worsened, but, due to his insistence, the pilot continued the mission. The archaeologist began recounting, in “muddled and broken speech”, accounts of his wife and children. In interviews conducted after the incident, colleagues claim to have never met any persons matching such descriptions. Soon after, the archaeologist collapsed. The pilot recounts, in a shaken tone, “By all means he was out. Like—I called to him, you know.” When asked why he did not administer first aid, the pilot replied “I couldn’t st—he was out cold, I ******* swear. I didn’t notice it at first, moving my hand over his face, you know—staring into space. I grabbed the kit, turned back, and that’s when it hit me. His eyes weren’t glazed, they were fixed on me. Tracking me. Like—those weren’t his eyes, anymore.” When asked to expand on this, the pilot broke down and had to be escorted from the room. The archaeologist has yet to awaken from his coma. It should be noted his eyes are closed.

— 37, Male. Cairo, Egypt.

There is an other, there, in the mirror. Memory space. A body without a head.
There is movement. Abstract thought.
A girl moves her lips. Air brushes against your own, but it is foreign. The staccato of her breath moulds waves of language. Indivisible meaning that slips your grasp.
Traffic stills. Fumes rise from cracked pavement. A child sleeps under a rusting skyline. A mother overdoses.
It is Autumn. Cold snatches another eight, or eighty. Cells rearrange, and a man finds himself changed. He holds a knife to your throat. You laugh until he cries.
The train comes late. You walk around the block to **** time. You find you no longer recognise the buildings surrounding you.
There is misery in your reflection, but it is just the other looking back and smiling.

belated coward on the step
shot break of dusk
twilight receding into concrete
packed on the alley wall
cigarette ash and the suffocating mist of
a lurid breath
fade.

in a dreamlike wake
time collapses
caught in the hybrid space of
ambivalent mimicry
a traumatic double which morphs recognition
into terror.

you smile
i slip into
La Frontera
and learn to hate
myself.

Wreckless love will do no good
With a one sided die, painted faceless white
Not a chance comes from all the throws you could do
Just familiar movement, to a dead end sight

I’m getting used to wearing sleeves again
Some hearts I draw were never meant to mend
It takes two to love, it takes two to hurt
It takes the whole world and more to gracefully lose

We cannot escape. Black smoke fills the hotel. Twenty three are dead.
Two days pass. The smoke has coalesced into a flesh-like sludge. One of the bellboys trips on floor 17 and is coated. He screams and screams and screams. We barricade the entrance to the floor.

Ten days pass, uneventfully.

I feel safe now. The sludge has moved away from my room. The lawman tells me the end will come soon. He gives me a hotel mint.

I sometimes hear the whispers of that poor bellboy, vibrating through the wooden belly of this geometric construct. He tells me he is fine, and he is happy.

A maid throws herself out of a window. I cannot fathom why. We are so near.

The bellboy tells me how his life was once filled with meaning. Motivation that drove him, ideals that enticed him, and responsibility that crushed him. He is nothing now. He is free.

We open the door to floor 17. I see

it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is lies there torn like tar stretched across ****** gills there is starlight in the gape of his throat pitch in his dead dull eyes father passes me a cup and I drink his blood father passes me bread and I feast on his flesh father

Philadelphia is a sweltering 70 degrees today! Whew! I think I’ll go to that cute coffee shop across the street, and try one of those new pumpkin lattes.

The new bus system *****! How is anyone suppose to get anywhere on time? Grr!

These muffins are so adorable I just want to throw up!!!

The park was especially lovely this evening. The flowers were in bloom, and this one little girl just kept sniffing them and sneezing and sneezing until she couldn’t breathe and was driven away in an ambulance.

Red blue red blue, they taped off the block today. Pipes burst beneath the road, a bus overturned and the streets flooded with bodies.

little faces pressed against the pavement little faces pressed flat little faces pressed like flowers flat flat flat flat a poem

don’t make me remember please stop

There’s a dead deer’s head in the foyer above reception. The rest must have rotted. They cut away the animal and left only the carcass, the severed space. Our bodies contain us, they are a boundary, and when we tear at the surface we open up and flood the world with emptiness, or perhaps the world floods us. I think that deer burst and they hung its face on the wall to remind us that this hotel is filled with emptiness, and that death will bring only more emptiness. Maybe we’re meant to connect like shaking hands and football and insider trading fill ourselves with foreign emptiness distract retreat like shaking hands always nervous smiling and empty.

I am not here I have never been here go away I was someone but not anymore

These muffins are disgusting they fill the insides with cream and jam and fruit and it is sick and false no one can escape this pointless stupid life go fill yourself with things filled with other things doesn’t change you are a void pulling in everything light itself devourer spinster

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was

The lawman tells me I have slept for six months. I ask him about that day on floor 17. He tells me there is no floor 17.

We have run out of hotel mints.

There is a gap. There is a gap in my perception. There is a blackness constricting the edges of my vision.

There never was a bellboy. There never was any smoke. The maid is alive. She is alive. I can touch her. She is alive.

We sit in the cafeteria. She pours me bitter black tea, her arm arching in such a manner that would not be possible were she in that twisted ****** state on the day of her suicide. We share this moment every day for a week.

I have begun noticing small grains at the bottom of my cup.

Today I feigned sickness and took the tea to my room. It burns my skin but I do not react. It is as I expected. I am drifting out of my flesh and I cannot stop.

THIS IS NOT THE SAME HOTEL. THIS IS NOT MY BODY. I AM SURROUNDED BY LIARS.

I am going to find the bellboy.

The elevator button is covered by layers of coarse black tape. I tear it away and find plaster beneath. I drive my keys in. The plaster crumbles between my fingers, revealing the bent end of a naked wire. I scream and scream and scream. I am utterly alone, suspended above the earth on a carcass of withered cellulose. The tips of my flesh quiver and the irregular geometric forms of my keys fall to the ground. They are hugged by the synthetic strands of millennia dead creatures. It is carpet, a small voice whispers beneath my skull. What does that even mean? I fall to my knees. I hear gurgling static above. Someone has turned a faucet, fully expecting water to flow out of it, as if it is perfectly ******* normal for water to flow two hundred metres into the air. There is a rasping sound and I realise it is my own throat opening for air.

I don’t want to exist in this reality, anymore.

Two weeks pass. I have collected enough dregs. I will soak them in mouth wash tonight.

The smoke fills my lungs. I hold it until my chest caves, my vision blurs. Grey streams rise from my lips, sinking into the ceiling. A siren screams in the hallway. I hear the lawman at my door. His head smashes against it, screaming, screaming, until it shatters into shell and yolk. I cannot wait to meet my child.

it is a womb alive twisting free empty stupid vessels floating blood in our casings waiting on the carcass spitting my lungs bring me my child bright death bright life

We shift bones to shift words to shift bones. Nobody died but there are twenty six corpses; his flesh fell through his frame, her bones shattered like shrapnel like atomic starlight, his head burst into prismatic decay. I watch their flesh pulled into the womb below. The hallways are umbilical cords pulsing nutrient streams gaping softly breathing burning. I know now. This intersection between life and death. It has always been. It takes in the lacuna. The space between spaces. Human shaped vessels with ill-fitted souls. You cannot tell them apart, you know. Strip the skin away they are revealed formless. They sink into bodies but never form identities. It is this place between places, where transience precipitates like breath on glass, dewdrops spun. I know I know I know the lawman rolls his head side to side blood and brains across the floor shut up.

There, in the hollow of my skull, I am dead, a fleeting absence. I hug the womb beneath me. I drag the rotting parts of myself down. I leave my head beside the lawman. I am going to be with my child. I am going to kiss my bright death into its soul, an indelible beacon to blemish the emptiness of existence.

Dream your peace
Whilst the world rages
Go lie in your steel-walled sleep
Let the crueller men deceive
Let better men bleed

A sleeping mind for sleeping times

What’s another casualty?
Doesn’t affect me
So you let deflections become reflexes
Unknowingly

Happenstance you came to live
In first world palms, with first world eyes
Never looking back at second place
Least of all the third in line

Whatever gets you to sleep at night

With such birth rights,
With such languor
I will rule the world in my own mind
With such circumstantial, beneficial, superiority
I will turn a blind eye

To everybody’s suffering but mine

Boneless city
How did I never see you waver in my youth?
Ignorant of the tilt and the blows dealt on day-to-day walks
Stepping into bruises, slamming into ****** grit

Boneless street
You bring my head all the closer to the ground
All the further from the clouds
From all your round about; circular, ocean mouth
Shark-toothed belly ache
You find yourself insatiate

Quaint, the flesh of a dying city
The concrete simmer, the metallic retreat
The dust in lieu of blanket smog
No fractures with all struts gone
Only a once inflation, reduced flat
A stranger finding himself within
Wading liquid glass that shaves off chunks
Of everything, but the lack

Mercy hollows herself out
To float above the sky itself

Your neo-soul
With all its bright
Lies atop a hungry corpse
Starved in death
Starved in life

Walk without charring your soul
On approaching apparitions
Their chilling resonance
Will shake the present existence

I am slowing
Down
And watching myself
Speed up
Away from here

I can taste your bones in my mouth
decadent, exhausted

you peeled my skin back
and watched me burn brighter than the skyline on fire
pierced reds pulsing pitch

I left the morning with my head on your pavement
staring into nothing

open home
gutter bird
head apart, apart apart

all toil, toil
sheets and time

why’d you bring me here?

I’m still surprised by change
Of half a dozen deaths
A crooked spin towards new age
With dying cells, replenished skin
And if a body can be replaced
Does the same apply to the mind?
Are you gone completely?
Or do you relapse from time to time?
To a person I know
With yearning touch and softer eyes
Remembering our lost lights
Suffocating silence with muffled love
Hasting the future
Stretching reality thin
I’m gone so far from comfort
Forgive me
Forgive me

Dragging my head on the ground
No one, no one’s
I’m catching death on my lips

Sliver off my flesh
Heart’s beating bruises
Well, there’s nothing here but nothing
So give up

Won’t you wear me like a sweater?
Drape me loose across your legs?
Tie me to the bottom of your nothing head?

Kiss me till I turn to dust
Kiss me till I turn

I’ll believe in something when I’m dead
We’re all just passing over each other’s empty skin
Don’t pretend anything
Life’s as worthless as it seems

Cower complete the bitter dream
And drape this dead desire through the streets
From crimson flush to blister black
You rot through my hands
And leave me with phantom death

Everyone’s faces are folded under the surface of the concrete
I can’t make sense of any of this

There’s a barrier to the plaza
Air blows through
Too fat to fit
So little pieces peel away and litter the ground like skin
Everyone just goes around it

They said it’d be 18 degrees today
But I think it’s going to rain

I think we buried him here.
No, no. Don’t dig him up.
Sometimes when it rains the earth opens up and blood pours out.
It’s like flesh, you know?
It’s getting harder to breathe so the pores have to open wider every fall
and more and more blood rises.
The other day the electricity in the city died.
No, not just the lines.
It was like a pulse.
Every electronic device failed
and suddenly we all saw ourselves reflected in our screens;
cellphones, televisions, laptops.
Everyone was so scared.
I remember a child gripping his knees.
Mum, mum, he repeated, but she didn’t reply.
I listened for a minute
and did nothing.
Hey, cheer up.
Some say at the end of every year, all the dead skin we’d shed to that point forms back into itself.
Living, breathing beings indistinguishable from their hosts.
No one knows if they remember their pasts,
if they are born as blank slates or prefigured individuals
destined to repeat the same mistakes,
over, and over, and over.
One day they’ll take over the city and we’ll be out of jobs.
They’ll forget everything we spoke of today and drill deep into the earth.
The flesh will split so cruelly it won’t ever knit back together again,
and blackened blood will carry skyscrapers into the earth.
Don’t be sad. It’s inevitable.
Think of it as returning to the womb.
A pure
unending
nothing.

All these beautiful people taste like death

I hear your hollow words
Laced with doubt
Sharp tongued, dull mouthed
Inattentive love

Your heaven is paved with
The shallow beat of empty hearts
Your heaven is a fortress
Desolate, apart

Closed eyes, closed ears, closed mouths
Closed minds, closed hearts above
This is a hell
I can’t reside

If ignorance could paint the world
No greys would hold
And your whites would grant passage
For only the sold

No promise

a swelling pocket of fat
over and over
the tongue shifts left and right
some nervous gag
mottle
other cascade
where nobody says a thing

well what do you give?

an open palm
a sick stupid wreath