hidden in the hatchback of goatbreath is the smell of accepted failure. it hums in nostrils. netsick nostrum, holes are burning in my chakra. i seal the deal with seven cigarettes. my stomach bleats at the wealth of judgement, chaotic topology, four hundred calories under four dollars and the ghost that steals it. we metabolize knowing-better until achy. it cinches under my vice reel. vent ounces off the odd keel. cheesey sequence of solitude. sepulcher of the scape goat. wiles of worry, dancing off the coast, calibrated. we carved a mouth on the grave to kissit. some lives. we stained the hull with ****** caramel. sub lies. pick up my sanity from the pharmacy. the world fell short of your specialty.

some of the dryness will bleach from pithing
your noetic strands and the rest, a ****
prinked rind deluded.

i dip cupped hands into the lowlands, scraping
fractal mold flakes captioned, answers in light
crowded lenses.

cubic rift, that, i will toss adoration engines,
in the end, the goddess of substance will
not react.

not retrace, not the rift. mortaled caper,
inflection of the flats, grinded
reactions. grinding thoughts
grounded.

scribbled to-dos spreading forth, immurdered.
tokenized spice cabinets, enter rift
refuge. the caper collapses on molar-novas,
solar lepidoptera folding in your hair.

the sweat-between-us hive. the separatist mind.
salt mines alarm us, a subject deepened
between two gestures. have you the stratum
of intention?

germinal grains, embryonic clock tower -
mineral lies don timescales
tucked in our hereafter mattress.

i will deathlessly dry with a towel
unless i’m showering with it, a full commit
to the status kiss.

[after all that, you still love me,
in the bedlam trees the choral key,
the old oak door embroidery
are pieces of me scattered (spelled) naturally.]

i like how the clouds come down, pick up my spit, then leave. are they hiring? every time i fail, i draw a chicken with a mini mindflayer crawling under its naked skin. some day they might look convincing enough to be seized by the authorities. a kid got the best of me when i was five trading cards for the real deal. don’t stop smelling the cheese, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the competition keeps me on my toes. are they tiring? every time i fail, i pick a name from a hat and mentally execute all those people. some day they might be convinced to drop dead. a bird got the best of me when the birch called us the real deal. the walls aren’t closing in, i said to the maze rat.

i like how my rorshach lungs are little Kara Walker demons in dresses silhouetted when they turn the x-rays upside down. am i expiring? every time i fail, i inhale, bring it in, until i feel wing-clipped and start coughing tar snot. hive mind got the best of me, the rules of engaging reality come with a coronary deal. the little beats are meaning something, i said to the maze rat.

i like how i have two temples, and each one gets a special drill bit from my spirit. am i unwiring? every time i fail, there’s a countdown that starts and drops to absolutely nothing then leaves. knowing got the best of me, a cinematic coronation for the mediocre is the reel deal. they never stop watching, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the am-i questions get the best of me in a real deal, i said to the maze rat

it was a kiss with coyote’s embouchure, with the river’s casket, with gelified venom, with the apron’s appetite, with compact distortion around portable lip cuffs, with trite lies liquified, with mud clumps in mercury clasps, with spit woven theses, with unwound ovoid wellsprings, with sun-hidden shadows, with the frayed nighttime squish, with closeted hand dice tossed, with chance in the fistfuls, with detuned static and bellyaching bramble, with losing yourself, with entropic dissociation, with fleeting tokens, with sayonara stamps, with honey pumping nozzles, with inside out stratus veins, with the pain of history tucked in the trail fringe, in the pebbles kicked outward, with fried abandon, with seatless balconies, with the touch of an insect unexpected while straddling a brick wall with electric grout, with eyelashes trimed by the wind, with patterns passed, with breathless shapes and shaping dimensions, without the taste of lavender or the mosquito’s lonely thirst, with time passing, with time passing, with time passing, without passing time, with the sky dumping elected dead bodies, with spoonfuls of miracles, with starvation kicking, with moon swells forgetting the fomite sea, with weather inside, with dry mouth drawer memories, with omens and herrings with teeth and tongue.

his siberian thoughts crowded among themselves, exiled as usual, until the internal dog pile formed a pattern, a calling. there was sense and it spoke of a redeeming moment, potentially wrestling his family from tuxedo executioners. it would be a journey south. his father left him a felluca that had been sitting icy and still in a frozen lake. using his breath, he thawed his vessel loose and sparked the dilapidated satellite phone for the last sixteen minutes of its batterylife. several hundred penguins armed to the beak in soviet weaponry. so it was decided. the man scribbled for days aboard his ship, while the world met demands to cease certain luxuries. at least the ice melting ones like driving and cocktails. the estranged siberian landed a week after his empyrean vision, and presented each penguin with jobs to start and end in different months for the next five years. he explained that life was about good or bad timing, and that now was not the time for mutually assured destruction. not with so much to be done. one penguin swept twice a day. two penguins were to have a wedding interrupted by a third penguin. young penguins would get in trouble and be forgiven. a council of penguins were to renew the program for another five years. they crowded around him, contemplating each of their roles while he stood with a feeling of being the closest home he'd been in decades.

taking in the darkness by mental synthetic aperture radar, i come across miniature tribes sharing among themselves a symmetric drawing of a mobile home on a Cartesian plane. one of the tribe sits running her tattoo gun along the skin of a candle. she is seriously ******* up that tattoo gun. they decide to build this mobile home, but the construction irritates my roommate. she says they must build their mobile home outside, it’s more tragic that way anyhow. she is right, the trudging-through-mud-and-rain story is riveting, though further scanning on my part reveals that fate intends differently. once outside, the darkness has to move inside, adopt hosts and appease some master i assume. the chewing of massive rodents under the porch sinks into the skin behind their ears. The tribe people all get wax tattoos of warnings, skulls, demon spells, inverted stars. the darkness invades them and becomes the wick. as the mobile home nears completion, my roommate steps out with the garbage. a loosened tuna can careens into the tribe’s escape pod. before the rats even twitch, the wicks light, catch fire and burn them all to a psychotic crisp. look what you’ve done, i say to my roommate, they had hope for certain freedom. she says the rats eat guilt free tonight.

a curious family of raptor children, a lake of caterpillar carcasses (boulder soup), a grocer for the taliban, gas powered anything, the exposed midsection of a tree, bank robberies or bear maulings in progress, triangles, an irascible bus driver thinking in isosceles, the itinerant story of a mama mammoth, starquakes and extinctions, massive roaches, a neck bath in hot breath, sudden abeyance from behind, the way gravity kills caterpillars and spares us because all angles of gravity make 180 degrees and this is stillness. fear running a straight line from behind us, through us, and in front of us. what i consistently get caught up in, the third point might be my final resting. this is why i ******* hate triangles.