I want to knock out all your teeth
with airborne nuggets of wisdom.
I want your empty gums to bleed
with pain and hatred and progress.
I want you to cut your hair off,
collect the locks, and throw
them at the trees in the afternoon,
for sanity's sake,
and I want the clouds sunk
into your head to spell
out like an airshow,
"I am Real, Valid, and going
to die."

Sometimes sitting straight up
in bed has its purpose,
pulling the blanket to the floor
and humming all those songs
without words, it's like therapy,
like rest, like wood.
The Lord will find his face
formed in your gnarls,

and he will cry.
He will say he loved you
since the beginning, since
you pierced your nose,
and that it doesn't matter
that you look down more
often than ahead, and that
your sighs grow flowers
at your feet.

We put our mattresses on the roof and sneezed into each others' hands; murmuring, "I'm sorry and I love you, I'm sorry and I love you." They slid off in the morning while we slept on them--the mattresses--and we crashed into the garbage bins a story down. They were right, we were trash all along. We woke up as splinters and fragments, next to splinters and fragments, with only splinters and fragments to say. The lid slammed shut over us and I traced it with my fingers, and told her how I feel better in the dark anyway. We both felt better in the dark anyway.

The up side to living in a place so empty is if there is no one playing music, you learn how to listen to the trees. If there is no art, you learn to see the beauty in the trash cans, the plastic bags, the blurred faces. If there is no one telling you they love you, you silently question yourself into spirals, or find it in the dirt. My fingernails are clotted. My head: fluid. My face lighted by friction of grinding teeth. I will knock myself over when I'm ready, and trees will grow from my dust long after they've thrown me away.

People don't take kindly to wanting everything to be free.
Elephant tears in latin skin drip quickly from their leather faces while they scream "This is America, you have to pay for what you believe".
No one has ever applied land of the free so literally. Golden prosperity jingling. Stick with the concrete, and fall through winter folds.

Don't second guess the heart of holy ghosts. Don't recommend the books that seek your skin and heathen bones. Don't fall guilty of happiness and fraud or life or experience or jargon, or unlucky fines of brute crest mammals herding north. It's all in my head, tell me again.
Pointed knuckles seek the throne, seek help. Empty plastic bags bland the glit of coming phosphors, heat the shining thumbs of forty men. It's all in my head! I didn't see them work themselves to death, fall out hurtless among the chips ahoy box, resting empty on my carpet! Eat the herbs, taste the body, sing through nostrils geometrically still. Stare at your future, a grey dust bit, breezing circles on the window sill.

fake wood grain pressed conscious desk
pushing up on elbows, and armpits, and eyelids
headache computer screen
sinks between teeth and gum

slavery is dead,
only very much alive
not in the same sense..
not in the same sense..

machines collect dust
lives go numb
and wages are spent on daily bread.