You taste like salt
It deforms
Along the lines of your limbs
The inertia of an infinite movement
Creeps down your breath
The run
Swing
Lolls your head
And pounds the ground wet
Withered
Stop
Stop
Immediate
You—me? You—me?
Existence clings to your leg
Like a dead child
Wrapped into your flesh
And nothing makes sense
Nothing makes
Nothing makes sense

oh no
cut me
here and
here and
here
i’m
less than
what?
spokes in the rain
a spillover on highway
nowhere
i lapped your scent
til my heart
burst
mangled and
helpless

I swerve in the distance
I sink through the sky
Pink patches of dead bliss
Pass me by

Light filters my eyelids
I flutter alive
Depart through my cold skin
We drive

Don’t arrive, don’t arrive, oh, please don’t
Don’t arrive, don’t arrive, don’t arrive
Don’t arrive, don’t arrive, oh, please don’t
Don’t arrive, don’t arrive

I’m holes in your ceiling
I’m shades in your mind
Cracks, between your sleeping
Eyes

Won’t arrive, won’t arrive, no, I know
Won’t arrive, won’t arrive, won’t arrive
Won’t arrive, won’t arrive, no, I know
You’ve passed me by

Black bones. The pages twist. Oxygen runs down the furrows, split the spines. It hurts to look at. White phosphor. Teeth breaking.
I reached my hand in once. Jar of words. Symbols running like a river into the sea. They lose all meaning. Skin wet with breath.
Morning cold or an empty grip. Doesn’t matter.
They used to dance. Shadows running into the heart. Veins tangled. Feet kicking dust.
I’ve been trying to get the words out for awhile now. It hurts the more I try.
Backwards or forwards. Everyone smiles, but the gap grows and grows. We’re progressing, they say; heads rotting hollow. I try to fish them out, but pierce their flesh.
It’s dead now, so they leave.
I used to stare at the stars until they’d burned into my dreams. Ouroboros shaped like a maw. Infinity.
Progress. Human beings. Fingers, throats, airways. Seams of tissue, fibrous joints. I’m sick of humanitarians. Conscious flesh rising into godhood, breaching sanity. Hubris. Stupid words, talking themselves out of existence. Circles in circles. Black crows pecking at mirrors until they break. The animal runs its legs to the ground. Biology. Cells. DNA synthesis. Ligase, unwinding. Atomic emptiness. Split the human. Hiroshima. The enlightenment, a success. Clink of glassware. The president eats burnt flesh.
But none of that matters.
I press the ash between my tips. It feels like fur, collapsing skies. A junction that once was, and now will never be. There is time here. A broken, sad thing. Prisoner of its own flesh, sand in glass. I am lost in this moment. I am disappearing. Breaking like light through a prism.
Why do we even try?

Two tones. Breaking. White light from the bone.
I died a long time ago. Split. Masks moulded from real faces.
Nobody thought to cut breathing holes. Some disfigured in the process, choked and spat out their own mouths.
Wish I’d done the same.

It’s hard to see you here
In a summer heat I no longer remember

Maybe I smiled once
And you smiled back.

They keep the air cold to slow the spread. A pale light draws you into existence, a bloom of city smoke and glass. I watch the shadow of your wrist thin as the sun dies. You turn your head away.

Everything thins. Houses shrink. Streetlamps burst. Organs wither. I walk for hours along the wharf. Rain trickles through broken windows and falls into the black harbour. Dust clots the waterways. Skin sheds.

The problem is you were born human. Turned away, you obliterate.

A woman swears at her crying child. She pulls his arm violently. Existence floods the air. A miasma of confusion, fear and hatred. The mirror turns outwards.

You rise with your bed. A fold in a sea of whiteness. It was your spine, they said. The thing holding you together. It was disintegrating, flattening to infinity.

There is nothingness. A flood of it. A pitiless swell that never ends and threatens to crush the world with every breath. Bated wait in a heart white as bone.

Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of—

The IV fluid is imaginary. So is the taste of cold water beneath your tongue. It is a fractal world. A reality formed from a fragmented possi—haven’t I written this before?

There is a traffic accident. I am not there and neither are you. They pull you out of the wreckage, smoke rising from your chest, breast alight with hatred. You gaze at me, a stranger, and I break into shards, each one capturing you like a memento, a death drive.

Ash falls from the sky. I gaze up until I am blind. I reach my hand out and find the neck pulse of the earth. I find you.

I sit in the common room. I shuffle through pieces of myself. There is nothing here but you. Where am I? Where the **** am I? Where is the nothingness between you and I? Someone addresses me. I look up and find myself incapable of speech. I reach out but my arm fails to follow. I listen but cannot catch a word. The bell rings but you aren’t here. I look down. The pieces reflect nothing.

Reality collapses. Hypodermic crash to the libidinal economy. Desire and lack the same. Anticathexis sublimates into worthless ******* words on a document. Wren bursts black particles across the pavement, like cancerous soma running fingers through a spinal column. You smile. I sink. I sink.

The mind is sick with existence. Ganglia, myelin, dendritic sprawls. It all functions. It all works too well. Purpose, connection, reaction. I envy you. I *******—

Winter is here, bright, empty winter, almond grey and silent.

i wanted to
live in hope

why do i try at all

smoke
out the window
curls
like nothing ever
so simple

i wish i could
follow

dawn fire
i wore myself
a new reflection
traced and tethered
to the elsewhere of your
smile.

are we just remembering?
mobius unravelled;
the universe in origami death.

[act one, a crossing in Akihabara]
lights blur, hands shift, flesh, pockets of smoke
cyberia, the world moves like radio fuzz, no purpose
wires swell, words leak, *akane, tokyo-3
before a neural blackout hits—

existence is like
a flat sheet of paper
time folds
in infinite ways.

[act two, cyberia, a thousand years in the future]
children play tag.

ive been finding it hard to place myself
lapses of concentration
intentions dissipating in the moment of execution
staring into the root directory of my computer
unable to figure out where to go

i found something in sans soleil
a wandering drift of memories replicated in the sleepless dead
the empty motions of an enervated nation
at the brink of collapse

spoke through the fire
we rode babylon 999
like school children making for the intersection
a horn blared
triumphant screech of capital
and we tumbled through the air
the last image reflected in our eyes
coca-cola no sugar

at the horizon of sleep
the empty palm of war stretches indefinitely
a profit-margin rounding the ennui of
all our profane martyrs and saints

history wreathed in the thorns of labour
the mistletoe we ****** beneath
putrid, damp, abject
mirror-images of our parents

and under the skylight of the mall
i found in you a whistling hole
where all the birds caught within
choked.

Come away
She’s adrift

Kissed her shadow
Dozed the district

Did you really think these ghosts would vanish?
Mr. Mrs.

Wear me white
Wear me white

canvas creep blown split idiot boy
like amber fell
che vuoi? che vuoi?
haunt me, **** me
whatever.

where i am
  the skin of   yesterday
an empty trellis—

and here
a slate cover
—over   nothing

Where am I? Choking tilt of the earth, forfeit of the sun. Tomorrow will be as today, a precession in retrospect, an nth masquerade in relapse.

fuzzy fuzzy static static
god reached down her hand
and little people gasped in the back of my head
ah ah
this is the static of becoming
where you perceive yourself as noise
retracted back like origami
paper people
ah ah
you have a blank sheet of paper
(fuzz blackout
death)

the fog rolls in
a putrid headless thing
trailing its jaw on string

where is the edge of the forest?
mother’s grave

Tell me there’s a purpose.
No.
A severed head.
The self in departure.
Crossing a river.
Light beams fall through.
There are four walls that make up the emptiness of this room.
throwing throwing throwing throwing throwing throwing throwing throwing
Language writhes.
I fail to find the contours.
Sharp and brittle, like the hop hop sting of minute glass.
pitter patter
arms thrown
out out, out out, out out, out
The word is power, signifier of a real that folds into itself irrevocably, perpetually.
I construct that which I speak, divorcing the imaginary and symbolic with a plunging knife.
God is born in ****** revolt.
Entangled in the penumbra of becoming, I birth the stranger that is myself.
Who are you?
A static noise.
Father breathing snow onto the mountain.
Hair, grey matted, a coarse empty palm.
Tell me the tale of withering.
White abyss.
The bifurcation of light from darkness.
The power of speech split totality from the world.
Purged death in freezing time.
brittle bones
circulation
a shutting door
still air
winter passing
A cool current that stutters like the clap shut of death.
I run but go nowhere.
Child crying in the empty hallway.
I speak the word but no one is there to hear it.
I circulate like blood.
Face pressed to the floor.
I repeat.
The word is power.
Tears staining my cheeks.
I am nothing but a swell.
The empty drone of the earth.

I've missed this soft hum of night
where passing cars blur indistinct
and I with them.

Three tabs of acid and a year of postmodern novels will ******* up in a shorter span of time than doing a degree in poststructuralism, and only an idiot with a death wish would do both. Manic romp to reach nowhere in a political field that never arrives, except in France.

Well Sartre once said nothing, and so did Derrida, and so did Baudrillard. Endless procession of words for the sake of filling a vacuum that didn’t exist until it was filled. Enter Freud; exit Bernays. All meaning atop a Golden Bough.

Sitting in your flatmate’s room the acid kicks in and suddenly no one is themselves, every line that leaves their mouths traceable to a media product, the perfect communion of pluralism arriving as the terror of integral capitalist banality. To speak is to add to the mockery; to say nothing is to let the mockery continue.

Forget it all by watching Youtube videos at 0.25x speed. Displace the terror of your own situation through the consumptive behaviour that had constituted it in the first place. Watch in gleeful delight as the eyes of whatever presenter happens to be on the screen at the moment dart between this or that object of desire, ever unsure of where to settle amongst an infinite number of existential refrains, none of which deliver from the anxiety of the prior.

Holding a caramel slice in the departmental tea room, your lecturer waits for you to respond, but all you manage is a cough.

arduous spite
the day they laid the brickwork
and two hundred staff
we settled on the ocean’s floor
belly up like BP
too young to know
our exams had taken place
in a house of straw

I have learnt that silence kills
Just as easily as time

muted pieces
scattered all across the yard
and me gazing
back upon
myself

i rose
drenched in
god’s fire

/ yours? mine? /

hospitalised
split across time
three times three times three

worn like
dead leaves
of next fall

we watched
doing nothing
to stop.

the rot that filled your lungs
three years without breath
sinking to the floor.

people you love
without knowing why.

because it hurts to be near
like some divide
searching for heat in open summer.

an outline without interior.

seams
light and concrete
night imperceptibly folds
and all the futures that never came
set a throwaway polaroid
from the other’s light

distance is definition
and closeness a fleeting blur

worn out alone
three years a headless drone through feverish lights
endless tunnel
ouroboros burning pavement
the whole ******* drive

make me whole with your absence
i’ll burn my lungs through and through
and wear the scent of your clothes till there’s nothing left
but radiant waste

I have to use words sparingly now. Things used to be different. Before surfaces there was depth. Before identities there was self. Words go into words; wasted breath, white noise, mute hum.

We camped beneath the stars ten billion summers ago, the park down from your house. We fed the horses with grasses we picked, our hands soft with dew and lust.

I miss every inch of your being. I miss your wretched shadow spun lugubrious in Sisyphian recurrence. The slow burn of your love as it fled black char, the whole ******* forest dead.

I’m sick of spitting smoke, but words elude me. I lack the form of your departure. I’ve been trying to flee for years and now it’s happened. I’ll die astride the world immaterial and worthless.

What’s holy is dead. I swallowed it up with the branches that lay beneath you the day we kissed in the forest after school. The last trace of eternity passing into myth.

Eternity passing in a moment.

will you mark the    bridge on your passing    stanislaw catching in the eddy beneath    where i came apart    water circling into the sky    i was    somewhere else in the ether    alone    beneath a great canvas of static    vacuum    a cosmic blot of existence    what have you    lost in the canals of mars

maybe the ground is tilting
i descend
earth dipped in blood
kid eating a candy apple
space all stretched
fuzzed out
light beams round tree limbs
hanging lanterns
i try to speak
density
a million billion stars crushed into a black-
you pick up the jacket and throw it
the cat says bow-wow
bow-wow
bow-
my head a ******* balloon
string tangled like negative space
the moon’s surface
i hate this world

Mute little bird crying on the sill
where is god?
drowning in the river neck choked on weeds
ribs marked with blue bruises
inward outward in

little bird little bird
swaying through the wind
where is
rising to to the ceiling fingers
devil come riding through the
frame of the world

flitting flitting berries thorns
somebody smiles at the torso
tea cup stirs the black streets run
sun sun no sun sun sun no sun
devil through the alley

it’s going to rain little little
falling from the sky grey it's all
streaks down glass wooden frames the
clutter clap of shutters and here i thought
god was slitting our throats

some nights the black torrent
holy mouth opens wide
breathes carriage horse
arthritis
tombs cracked like pristine teeth

where is god? where is god?
walking down the square walking
hands holding empty air and
silence

blood against the window
head lolling drinking corner masking
salt along the tape bounds the
end of time

out keeping light erosion
bulb eyes burnt the devil riding
heaving shoulders hands encasing
strangers set in motion

little god perched on the tower
devil riding shotgun strikes the
bell the evening opens
temple
sickness
hands through flesh

blue cheeks end of time
world speaking maw the heft
oh nothing wasted comes the river
bird rolling brine

less than
the upsurge of bitter bile

yesterday’s failure
rides his chariot
like blank abyss

because what is money for if not love?
and what is money for if not emotional connection?

and every day spurns a tilt
of forgetting why
we’re together at all

“hey dad i think you treat mom like ****”
“what are you talking about remember that time she left you at the mall”
“i don’t see what that has to do with your own personal conduct”
“ask her about it sometime”

why would i ever want to be
spilt tea across the cloth
on a main street in
mise en abyme
south d

“it’s idiots like your mother who are running the world into the ground”
my mother is a stay at home wife.

Bright eyes, all
your little worries
transcend thought,
to movements
of soul and body.

everyone is dying
has died
will die
the greatest predictor of the death sentence is ethnicity
we're been increasing the income gap so our children leave home without shoes or umbrellas or lunches or coats
i hate this world so much i
choke on my worthless privilege
reading research pieces playing
playstation to escape my own existence
i am breaking apart like waves of
radio static on unconscious shores
waiting for the end to sweep the earth into
sand glass broken teeth
the sun's plasma core
*******
**** your cult of everything will be alright
my gender studies tutor was ***** because you stood by
and said the world isn't a fair place
and to get over it
*******
*******
*******
i ******* hate you all

master motor bearing and the tap tap tap tap tap

end of century summer sweats the tablecloth mixed iridescent spill mixed rancid cream mixed spilt milk mixed mother’s breast

entry the market aisles the aircon slick with dripping fats processed flesh working meats gotcha thumb! gotcha thumb!

plasticide yanks the chain blights the debt fifty-five to the triumph ever closer

above the clatter you let it happen you take out your wallet you scan your loyalty card you take two plastic bags a great machine turns grinding everything to dust above the clatter individual sensations collapse into one cacophony one cluttered ******* oceanic spectre of death

we’ve been here before the flat words the repetition the living death the sickness desire

how far stretch the pennies down

myself myself myself myself myself myself my

upon coming to the exit and birth, beginning, origin of the supermarket, I had the vision I was pushing my own body out of the morgue/into the abyss.
sleek, ultra-modern, aseptic carrion floor, processed through checkout, aisles, background fuzz, and the pointless chatter of deciding upon this or that alienated labour product.
the worthless time, the bare destitution, the surging eyes fixed across a nothingness that reduced both you and i to economic ex--
a holy verification of existence together in this ******* astronomically ******* up world.

blood at my index, slit along the serrated edge of a tin, metal scrap, upon a mountain of flesh; empire, bread and sons.
mass, *****, incarceration, brand loyalty, ethical spending, assimilation; all wallets bleed the same.
my race, my class, my gender, my age; DIY elevator pitch.

there.s nothing left.
there.s no.thing lft.
there.s n.thing .ft.
th.re.s g.f.
h.re.
e.

fine thread through the arched belly of a bleached whale, blood mixed with the grease, and salt, and death.

This is the passing. Traffic stop at the end of the block, where the gutter flows back onto the asphalt, and every split in the road overflows.

Do you remember the day we left? It was the end of Summer. It always is.

We closed the door and felt the world shrink. I reached for your face and found nothing but the surface of a mirror.

It stopped raining weeks ago, but the gutters keep overflowing.

and where do you live?
body of water and smoke
to ride the empty street
cardboard and tongue and plastic and puke
distant dying light.

it’s like
there’s nobody here
a veritable ghost town
where pavement walks itself
and measured stares meet glances
in amorous disgust.

here’s the coffee
here’s the break
here’s the *******
here’s the waterfront
hurried pace through the centre of
the empty body of god.

why don’t they all just die?

my skin is peeling away
soon there’ll be nothing left of me

long long ago
there was light dancing on the windowsill
in the dim quiet of
eyes closed to the sun

it’s a lot harder to think
now

sometimes i see my hands and i wonder who i am
trick of the sunlight
fizzing apart
at the blue red edge of my shadow

today i saw children playing outside
spinning their umbrellas
casting
light across
the parched earth
and it hurt

it’s the feeling of forgetting the air
beyond your room

i just wish i had the grace
of motion without intention

of sunlight
and absence

******* wear me like a dead weight
well you won’t turn off your stupid head
waking on and on that wretched machine
abundance down the drain

it’s all garbage
it’s all claim and make claim
the last breath of a long dead system
that carries on without thought

gimme another song
i don’t want it
gimme along the road nowhere
i don’t want
i don’t want a **** thing
i’ll wait and wait and wait for your stop
you fill me with nothing

stagger and reproduce
it’s how you survive

every day the newest car drives past my window
and i puke

regression into month old sediment
where day old dreams resemble recall into
the arche-fossil of fever

growth splits the ground
and blisters
everything it touches

you say on and on and on
the same condescension

hung on the tree
bone white
an empty frame
over your eyes

like you’re some holy martyr

i’d rather choke on my *****
than live your life

hallucinations of wildflowers and flooding windpipes
yesterday
a fig
today
a bell jar

caved
the open space
caved
caved
caved/.

We dream in highways and landslides, miss the bus and walk the industrial zone, rusted barrels and weeds through the milk carbon whine of gutted machinery. I wear last decade’s dress, all black and splayed hollow; you, the ostentation of a formless pullover. You reach into your pocket — the last smoke before you quit, so you say — climb the graves of primary industry and exhale a microcosm of pitch.

We don’t speak for days. Years of wasting, ******* on churches, and the emptiness of night walks. I don’t *** because I hate endings and you depart to whatever next fix won’t sort you out. It’s a dreary waste of time and we both know it, but we move in circles before an abyss, growing wretched until nothing remains but traces of a vibrancy we’d never had.

After you depart, I mould myself a simulacrum of you. Time slows. I lose touch with my surroundings. Piles form. The imminent dissolves like sugar, like scent on the clothes you left. I find your pullover from months back and it clings like water. And it smells like negative space. And it covers me completely.

catastrophic death of all meaning
semiotic structure picked
unto

this world is noise
broken ceramic
the head of a pin

sometimes i dream about a pin going through my neck
my head rises like a balloon
and i

if you place your ear against the ground
you can hear the earth hum
it sounds like rushing water
blood

feeling of regressing an endless motion
round and round linoleum
carpet
muffled stomach black casing and
stall.

movement is nothing but
the making into absence
of what was.

and three hundred years is
a body without sunlight.

i wanted you to feel exactly how you already feel under corona to feel exactly how you feel i wanted corona under you miserable exactly to feel to feel outside yourself and you without yourself

you wanted lines of passengers vivisecting boxes and makeshift interiors

i wanted exactitude nectar falling from the split of the earth above and the buzzing of wilderness and the shrill call of warblers beneath the parking lot as attendants squirt hand sanitiser into open palms

the other day night fell and i never made it back the next day everything was as it was again i woke a blinding white expanse ceaseless static clinging to my arms like cobweb falls

i wanted a holy verification in the cantaloupe and the cattail

did you know? it grows on the edges of highways and undisturbed plateaus. it brokers nothing. you find it between being and becoming. the panic of not.

ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo
ergo