my reincarnation is that of a treasured cup

i’m almost entirely certain that my death will play a role in the cup’s creation

whether it be the clay I molded my alien hitch hiking signs into

or its maker lays back and reads in a hammock the same hours I do

just half way around the world

once my soul has leaked and drained through hell’s piping system

and what’s left escapes through condensation

the clouds will carry me to a bazaar

where the ceramic painting class is struggling to use oils

with rainy weather

in ******* up the work of most attendees

several of them will hide me in backs of cupboards

until they move or my soul dies of dust

one, if god allow two

painted mugs

are repeatedly stacked with layers of sediment

coffee, *****

tea, *****

coffee

tea with *****

a cigarette accidentally

my father should feel proud to know

his son’s vices followed him through the afterlife

that i got a nice home

that i accepted leaving parts of my soul in old cupboards

(Dad), i didn’t mean to contact the aliens so recklessly,

and i feel like I have to get off my *** if i read too much

i’m sorry i thought smoking was non-conformist

you’re right, i lied a couple of times

it cost just as much integrity as you said it would

i know i will do much better as a treasured cup

after an oil spill mowed the lawn
for eleven an hour,
tiny migrants crowded the greenhouse gate.
the bug ****** moonwater muddied
the steps of the tenderhearted
community (of seed undertakers),
and made its way by means of caked rubber
into the cytophotocycle,
where the moonwater volatilized.
liquid volery.
vivid luck.
awoken like post-dream nap perspirants -
oneiroceiving precipitate;
the greenhouse grew murals in condensation,
the accidents si quieros.
a misty opacity attrited
like deskinning a spider,
with a definitude of exo scaling tons;
memories shed,
shies misled.

        ⌂ the greenhouse stands where a glacier once
        slipped, clumsy as steadfast could be.
        foreign fruit fits inside it.
        it knows not what it grows.

        🌢 the moonwater was salt-lipped for a while.
        where it passed through, it was soiled.



you’d be surprised how many things hit glass.
the moonwater didn’t realize what volume
seizes space
until it heard its kind on the outside. from the inside.
Venus has a reassuring kiss when a drone is dampened.
there were three rows for puddling;
one for naps,
one for not naps,
and one for knotted gnats laying hot eggs
in lustrated bloom.
flume frustrated.
somewhere far up the chain, a worn-out manager
ordered inventory off-brand,
and enchanted a horticultural hobbyist.
the devil is ennui and god is curiosity.

        ⌂ there could be a greenhouse next door, but
        it would be an accident, a leaky shed
        with errant sprouts.
        as it would seem to my lustrous heart.
        lagging and callous.

       🌢 the moon was uninterrupted that night.
        mighty sky drifters never passed between them.
        like a parent with patience or a friend with faith.
        like a husk that stole your pose.



the maceration was mutual with leaky infusions
of purpose and imagination
materializing into groundskeepers
that tamed the pressure of an ever encroaching periphery.
one time the moonwater nearly fumed its way dry
after a political candidate entered the greenhouse
with scissors promising bonsai.
but pesticides pass by.
and pictures of fabric mean less than bird song
or beetle guides.
for the frame never mattered to the moonwater.
no more than a furnace in winter,
than a flower in summer.

        ⌂ when it comes time for the greenhouse to deracinate,
        to throw her vines like limbs over garden walls
        and access roads, eye to eye with cumulus
        monoliths; her moonwater sweat will slip
        through the glass glue and slide down to
        her fingers . . . to feel what she feels

        🌢 i love pooling here
        🌢 i love steaming and raining here
        🌢 i will love being the halo in your refraction

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.

the tree in my throat started budding, i coughed up flowers

shaped like ******* and my doctor

called the government

now they want to sever my neck, count my rings and guess my age

i am afraid the sap will start seeping and i am afraid

that you are committed to the idea of putting your ear against the hole

the government is calling again, this time of an alien kind

they are also curious

i offered them my toes, but only soil drained from my shoes when removed

i guess you’re going to have to sweep more often

dirt, petals, and alien footprints

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

I am a French horn, a bottle neckless hourglass and butterscotch tape

You're a red harp with veins painted on the side

When I come home, you see me as an acrylic heap with chips of lead and belly aching homing words

Scotch sticks and smoke smells and the stitches are uncomfortable on my neck where you often warm your hands

I am a masquerade of shellfish clamoring on about the epitome of burlesque humor

You’re alien to anything other than sourdough and design

I have structured my thesis around burlesque and you fail to see the humor

When I fear the apologists

You fear the escapists

I am the tigers of the world, borrowing viciousness

You’re a long pause, loved and disquieted, painting my stripes as veins

I’m freaked out now because the apologists are escaping and the escapists are apologizing

At this clear impasse, you pity and press on until my fingers at the French horn drain to my sides

I am an island in a puddle of sand

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.]

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.

the mattress is possessed and my days are numbered

my numbers are possessed and

tree branches are starting to grow from inside

my neck, sprouting ****** bulbous limbs

wearing the springs of my mattress

in my sleep, the tree talks to my mattress

from my throat

they are in cohorts and I suppose

the ghost has nothing to do with it

but in the end the ghost will

have an affair with the mattress

and they will run away leaving the tree

and my numbers

I can’t speak because of the

tree

and the karmic terror

of the heavy branches tearing

through my throat

the ghost doesn’t know about the tree

the mattress will never tell her

the mattress is missing several springs

the mattress is possessed and can only speak in tongues

so the ghost only hears the whispers of leaves

Silence is now. The sun is risen 5 hours where you are. It is the deepest twilight here, traffic lights disrupting. My window is playing a videotape of an invisible sunrise. It was directed by viking film students. They included your paintings in the credits. i hate to spoil the ending, but i leave you. The soundtrack was going to be radiohead, but Yorke’s record label yanked it. So silent film. Silent students acting like they never learn for my benefit. If it isn’t already obvious, the film is me. And you’ll never read this letter, as i’m already loading it into the movie reel and projecting it into snowy pine trees somewhere in Canada that i’ve never been.

Previous Lover and Grateful Friend,

i keep my pride under house arrest

tied to an enema of ***** soda

that stops at the border of the premises

what a great laugh crawls from the nailed headboards

and sips from my resolve

i try not to show my subordinates the pressure points I worry about

but the maintenance staff knows too much

the maintenance staff keeps us up the most

they read the cracks in the plates

silverware scratched from being thrown around

every shard is collected

the professionals recommend 3 square meals a day

my pride is offered for breakfast

3 eggs, potatoes made one way, a dragonball shaped pancake

with 5 chocolate chips, and an apple skewered sideways

coffee is poured over top soul

my pride is offered for lunch

grilled cheese, something plain and boring, chips, something also plain and boring,

Gatorade, or overdone redemption

my pride is offered for dinner

grease, a good burrito with grease, an IPA,,,toast to mix things up, a joy ride with Cassidy, a waterbed of folk music, (zero ***** given), pesto penne, another IPA, a timeshare just south, and sometimes dessert

after yelling at the neighbors some

and a few reruns on adult swim

the ***** soda kicks in with a little extra

and puts us all to sleep

in 25 years

when the sentence is over

I don’t think it will find the same 3 square meals a day

i keep two buttons in either pockets

they’re part of my usual pocket cluster, wallet phone keys headphones matches

both hands in my pocket now, i run my finger along the ridge of the left button on the hard days

i roll the bridge between both buttons before sneaking out back and pressing the right button

but like all psychoactivities, relative direction, cardinal hand eye, the right button looks identical to the left and I left them both on the table in between tobacco pouches and empty beer bottles

things that press the left button: ominous psychosis, soma mania, fire flushes from ******* not listening, an empty checking balance, an empty emotional balance, an emptiness

things that press the right button: herbal breath in the nice chair, glassy eyes and extra papers, a quiet hour in surround sound

I stare at the left button while my dad calls and hover over it, pausing mid drag to weigh the consequences, weighing the empty balance, feeling an overdrawn surcharge to my soul, taxed in tension, fumbling headphones

the left button sometimes makes me yell, dissociative silence or telling strangers to go **** themselves because I can’t afford the time for anything else

It’s usually the left button I smash against the wall, slaughtered, obliterated, my friends hand me broken batteries and shattered screens and say things like, “press the right button, stop pressing mine”

things that press the right button: not me, usually.

things that press the left button: the left button presses the left button, leaving me with a locked right button, pressed permanently and I fidget with a flathead trying to pop that ****** back out

why can’t I hit the right button?

why am I stuck with the left button, ad infinitum, added insidium, snarling and suffocated, shaking it out in the center of my bed

it might be easier if they left me in a blue gown, *** exposed, *** laid down, pressing that ******* button by the hospital bed, pressing that ******* button like I know how in the coward’s way out

irregardless of what button I press, or what gets pressed, or what’s pressing me and pressing against me, they find their way back into my pocket cluster

pockets with my hands, fingers that get skinnier until my fingers are thin lines or circles or buttons themselves and I have nothing left to do but give them to you and have you press every button, drugless and dampened

things that press the right button: you when I need you to

and when you press it, the left button and the right button are one in the same

they are you and you can withstand being pressed or being there to be pressed

out of my hands and a little lighter

you heard me correctly darling when i said i was

going camping in the witherness. look in this bag i’ve already

packed sun strokes, swill trunks, an array of emptying

books and a flashlight that projects white moving dogs.

in the witherness, we stack silent burning gavels, achieving

the balance of a permanent new moon. we are arriving

by cheap chernobyl trucks and we’ll know when we’re there when

the engine dies and we open the hood to find a blanket-less

girl. don’t worry, she is environmental. made of mist.

we stomp on her sisters, **** like holy anorexics,

steady our foreheads on the ancient bark of

the witherness (dark hallways in a house of leaves)

Quiet now. lay your spine on eggshells so that your joints

may hatch asterisk chirp double asterisk something

akin to what asteroids do, but with a murmuring whistle

the only noise you can hear at the edge of the witherness.

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.

you are not an impostor

**** those bastardly sons of ******* you are not an impostor

i know that you curl your toes under your shoes

hold your breath before you speak

check your laces twice before you step

out on tightrope 8 miles above ground

when you swallow a sentence and chase it with whiskey

trying not to choke on the sharp edges of “not enough”

your stomach bile will vault through your esophagus

in perfect lingual trapeze

stick the landing with ease and say ta da

say everything except what you need

when you rise from your knees

those itchy words will drop

into the soul of your shoes

with which you curl your toes

hold your breath

and check your laces twice before you remember

that you are not an impostor

in front of you are jesters and clowns

and a circus of whistles, bells, and frozen sounds

your shoes will grow three ******* sizes

because a) the grinch ain’t got **** on you and

b) you can do the Charlie Brown to space funk and

see(c) that you have all the room in the world to move your feet

tumble from your tight rope

let the people around you string together bridges and safety nets

go out to the carnival and win some bottle caps

take the stuffed version of you from the prize rack

and sleep well with it at night

the creature has noticed me. it has thousands of broken legs on its face and keeps tabs, never wasting an hour without checking in, watching my home grow bigger in the corner. i am a long bodied cellar spider, suspended, inverted beneath the guitar case, just right of the bed frame. food is scarce, but i sense we share this hunger in the humid subterranean habitat. it takes on thinness, shakes at times, makes day into night, flips pages, tele-spells, turns night into day again.

micro-fibrous dust settles on my spinnerets, a twitchy sneeze draws attention, the cruelest of details. while unraveling undaunted one pseudo-day sort of night, a pulse was released comma intent to ****. it came like resolute qualia, something my eight eyes can’t see. the plastic cave, the broken allegory, all ghastly and converging. as soon as the web gets jostled, a switch will summon my stunning epileptic display. i am ready to give it a leg, but only from the calve. it has never come this close.

you wanna take a guess? you wanna take a guess at this? guess nice long and hard. take a second guess if you need one. it’s ok to second guess. in fact, i insist you take another and keep guessing because guessing is smoke. in this tight circle, we’re taking guesses.

i am an educated guesser.

bummed guesses for awhile. bought my first guessing glass one July. play the guessing game all my days and guess my days away. they make guesses into the same thing as candles and its spiritual. it feels like taking an infinite number of guesses in one breath.

your guess is as good as mine.

drop to the next level. it is the doctor’s thesis of guessing. It is conjecture and formality, but with the fractal reasoning of a true American pack of guesses. they’re the guesses at the end of something replete. the last guess you have left.

out of guesses.

There is a string of panic tied to the last guess, which we tuck, flip, hide in the bottoms of cardstock caverns. when the time comes to draw the last straw,

B. there is nothing to guess at but a missing paycheck. These are the only answers we ever get.

A. she is there, all smiles and fresh questions with a bunch of guesses. she is my best guess yet.

We are gathered here today

In the Church of Y2K

To celebrate our word and savior,

Java C

Lift your antennas and let us pray

Our father who art in service

Hallowed be thy wave

Thy computer come, thy will be done

In life as it is Internet

Give us this day our daily update

And forgive us our bugs

As we also have forgiven our programming

And lead us not into life

But deliver us from reality

Forever the monotony, the lifeless, and the holy code

I tell you my friends, I have come to doubt the scripts

I woke up this morning to find my feed filled, but my soul hungry

Throughout the day, my devices said I was charging, but my batteries were dead

When I felt nothing left,

I remembered the simple calculator,

Its solar cells still breathing after living ****** in a drawer

The revelation I bring forth to you today is this

Drown your devices

Soak your SIM cards

**** the frequencies you are attuned to

And abandon your provider

There was life that preceded us

An evolutionary process the corrupt have cursed, wiped, and reduced to bits

In those fragments of simplicity left in you

You will find an outlet of energy of nuclear proportions

In a field of concrete bunkers,

The left from the middle is guarded by a charred garden gnome

With a necklace of battery powered light up flamingos

And Cheerios

The hat of the gnome sits by an open hatch

The rim of which wears

Teal chains and hula fringe and

Cyborg rhino keychains

The ladder is cut from a sheet of metal

That had a ******* poster on it

And a mural of a man screaming

White and black lines

With a meeting seaweed mustache

And empty picnic baskets

Line the hallway lighted with fireflies and Christmas spirits

I drop a smoke down the hatch and wait for it to bloom

my great throat tree is featured in float parades now

sponsored by paper mills

they send us free notebooks and you leave me

rounds of exquisite corpse to play

or folded frogs

or news of another alleged abduction with ***** political jokes in the margins

or the times you jot down to remember when you thought of the ghost

when i find these on my table, i sneak off for a phone call to the mattress

the mattress doesn’t care to watch parades on live broadcasted television

i can hear the ghost making breakfast on the other end

the mattress stares at the ceiling mostly and i remember this and i’m so

thankful

for you

i pick up a folded sheet and draw the trunk torso

and inside the tree trunk i draw a little man playing the french horn

but before drawing hearts spilling from the brass

i drew a massive ***

i smiled, knew you’d appreciate it, and started sweeping

(cw: kidnapping, ****** assault)

being paranoid is just being extra prepared for red dots, laser sights, red lights, blue lights. every

cigarette in the hands of passing strangers is an open flame and I dread like the pavement being burned and tread on, on the pavement, my feet walking

burned on the pavement, my feet tread

the cracks are inside dreading being stepped on

I test the walls by tapping on their shadows and humming over my shoulder, and without moving,

I imagine my escape at a circle of angles and determine the difficulty of each. the shadows merge and produce a man from a faceless corner

a shadow that had questions for me about a circle of angles

being extra prepared and protractor armed I scan and calculate for firearms and ****** features, hands in pockets, sharp objects, the signs of maybe a weak kneecap.

visions of epinephrine heroics, karate out of nowhere, super saiyan strength or sleeper cell ninja

the thoughts that come through tell me to stand my ground

in kind fashion, he asked for directions and left me disarmed

but once the dreams were done, the nightmare crawled out of the exhaust and the shadow grabbed from below

within seconds but feeling the eternal nature of prison cells, I was almost forced into the back seat, where I saw the scratches on the cushions as notches in hell

when the shadow stopped being a shadow I stopped being prepared

prepped and dreaded, treading in a circle of angles, desperately quiet,

the sound of rubbing nylon and heavy breathing to indicate conflict, cries for help escape after I do, looking for blue lights, sharp objects, red boxes and safety nets, threaded

light to knit out the shadows, weak in the kneecap dialing in

“Please give us your current location”

Myles Hall. Miles below, looking for my head in a circle of angles

An acephalic poet felt the demiurge from a field of orchids and sunlips

Tapped on the shoulder by a nagging crastination -

the immediacy of putting off both before and after now

From the soil grew daymares that bloomed into ultrasight - the undervisible beauty that comes into view when feeling soft red

I was distracted, and retracted

i waited for you to

deposit bumble bees down my

throat with your mouth

they will safely disarm their stingers

and bring them all to me in a square envelope

‘shake it’ i tell you

the stingers become the poem i wanted to write

a really lovely one that tells you you’re a campfire warming my nose

that you’re pretty


it isn’t all roses though

it feels thorny somehow

yeah, i say, ‘i meant to take those out’


my throat and limbs are

fuzzy i say

but you find this, contradictory

diffeomorphic metal between bubble wrap and foil, acrylic olfaction in plastic ignitions, flat-iron physics in lice screams, integument with Guillain-Barré in extra steps; the annealed strands : immunity :: the follicles : nervous remains. cephalic solar panels and thermostat polymers protect against the misses and false alarms of signal recovery. there is time to think before the eggs hatch.

it dawns on me that the
rug of spacetime is being
blanketed in black paint
as distant stars blink finally

and only with myth under fingernails
can i pick it clean

If I were to write a novel, it would probably be called, “Big Words Capitalism **** ****”
It would make Nietzsche **** his pants
I want to make enough money to settle uncomfortably until I **** my own pants
And hopefully sell ten thousand hardcover copies
It’s gonna be straight up philosophy and drugs
So all the hipsters can pretend it changed their lives
And when they get old and **** their pants like me, I won’t feel lonely

In my novel
Fascism wouldn’t have lasted so ******* long
Facism makes people feel lonely
Makes people close their eyes

God is a fascist
His secret was the Copy and Paste function
He created the universe with Apple products
On his MacBook Pro
He held the command key
Commanding all his people to copy and paste that ******* bible
He shifted everything
turned caps lock on and capitalized on all the cold ******* that took it seriously
That’s how fascism works

In my novel,
When my gravestone smokes the nicotine in my ashes
The buzz will trickle down the economy
Until the grassroots stir crazy
And my ***, as it has always been,
Will be the **** of the joke <finish cigarette here>

Trying to live on philosophy is like paying rent with minimum wage and forgetting about food
You forget the basics and go straight to the hard stuff
Trying to **** with philosophy is like taking a sword to bed
If you get any head, it’ll just be the tip
Trying to fight with philosophy is like bringing a ***** to a gunfight
You might surprise the *******, but more than likely, you’re just waving something flimsy and obscene

Guess what God?
I’m gonna write a novel,
And you can try to hit control F
To find out how I made it “work”
And all you’re gonna find is that you’re a control ****

For those of you still with me
All it took for me to write a novel was to
blame God for **** I didn’t want to be responsible for
Smoke a lot
Trip on acid
And travel the universe

God bless capitalism




<-> written jan26.2016

there’s a forest known with a wicker scent
woven tree line where we caught the snake
pull a full bottle from behind your back
rinse a clean slate and lay it on the track
                                                                             coal come stain
                                                                             nickel abstain
THERE AINT DAGGERS AT HOME WHEN iT
MEANS THE SAME
when i lean in vain

build a portal out of garden vines
taken on the precipice of hardened signs
stretched out over our memory seams (seems at rest now)
full bent spine over backlit needs (needs to rest now)
CUZ YOU KNOW i AINT LIVING
i’LL BE WONDERING HOW
   entering bow
it leaves
a
  compass stage

you take me back into those dimed up days
long at lasst quartered in century delays
give it two best like the nightlight’s dead
lead me to the outlet where i lose my head
dollars and cents
it kinda makes sense

LABOR FOR THAT FEAT WHICH ENDURETH UNTO
    everlasting
    it leaves
a      compass     stage

i eat my grin and my stomach still growls, it’s hungry for love. i chew off my finger nails and swallow them to pick my teeth. i say ‘say ahhhhh’ in tongues.

i tell the cops i’d stop dragging my drugged feet if they’d let my hands drag through the mud too. a sort of camaraderie.

i take the wasp spray and target my shirt and huff hard enough. afterwards, i don’t feel a buzz.

they ask me why i haven’t been taking my meds. i tell them i take after i give, and laughter is usually what i offer them, which they take as an insult.

when the doctor comes to visit, all i hear is “it’s knife to see you.” and my stomach wants out. surgery is not the part where they take something away, but rather when they put the emptiness of living back.

remember all the games we played? you all were so ahead of the shame even though none of us could help ourselves.

if i could beg a favor, i would beg on my needs, without fear or forgiveness, to call it a night. but it has to be the last.

there’s a farm that hosts swing dancing lessons in the ballroom. we all watched the guests from the bushes and i felt my moods winning first place.

i drilled a peephole into my wall and wait at night for an eye to fill it, just to feel a change of seen.

i fill up the glass until i taste the rose tint. it’s thorny but i’m guaranteed to make my bed in the morning. my one regret in life is that i have known someone else’s primrose path.

knifely put. give me the nice back and i can prove all the questions you've been dying to ask.

you ***** attention then slice off my foot fingers and press my toe prints into bile stains that will eventually be discovered. they will think i tiptoed disaster. we read and clean and leave corpses for the carpenters. there is a box for world-building and a box for world-ending. when i put my head in either, i come out wearing leeches named Charlie. we pour our gasoline stores in cardboard that will soak until the sun gets hungry and swallows all roads to dead families. come out in your best dress for me to slit it to match. let’s feign surprise when we unearth the bed bug hive as if meeting for the first and only time. i lick up the slug trails mid-air, mid-sentence. the bee frenzies about mowed and cut pollen producers.

from its underbelly
my fingers traced infinitely like ants
climbing a castle
the stony crevices were
indicative of something provocative
of peacock flume
of simple reason

the dorsal side was too primal
parroting the same story
the same swollen shell

with aching speed
painstaking minds
spend 10 maybe 15
seconds

the jungle gym swallows
little children whole
and their little hearts too
while under trapeze
four legs fall in succession a hundred years old

pink paws don’t prance
after too many hops on horns
too many nights in cold blood

in the essence of feral flowers
******* roam freely
but the tortoise understood
yet I was the hare



<.> written feb16.2016

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.

sharpie bats lit against knotted wormy water in the fugue reservoir

wings caught and pinned on lonely patches of grass

her nightly squirming huffed and inked into jittery night critters

swarming her thighs

a bearded moth dazes off over the Gordian whitewash

pipes pumping a current of his brothers bodies

wet wings and carcasses, the lure of consequence

the bearded moth did not get too lost, sensitive to

the drawings of his furry devourers from the girl beside him

she says insects have never touched her blood

from the ether he thinks startling wing twitches,

punk echolocation, apologies learned not to be given,

touching water, even distribution of limbs

dripping disintegrating becoming the age of the earth

but the bearded moth

plays it cool and dries in the shape

of a man that looks apologetic. maybe honest.

she’s satisfied and sends a thousand

paper bats to rip apart the reservoir and

pull the grass closer together.

this is no one’s chance.

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.