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.

Bitter grot,
daily grey hemlock pulp
wavy lays and apple flesh
at lull.

Brain floating static,
the kind that builds
in shoulder muscle
pushing through an image
mostly null

and void--

a happiness inherent in
South Korean absence
beaten to death by
self & blood & head--

a black that follows everything
in late class hurried laundry pickings
red and blue striped glass
of smoke & life & pine.

Needles ***** the sides of aether sighs
Halving forests by signing
American english bible verses
to the sky.
The path is inside
beside the others.
Content ears
hear nothing new.

The cord is caught between my desk and my foot
my thoughts and my tongue
my fingertips and everything else
**** life from willow
and scream at television screens
that project images into vectors
eating steel through cotton table cloths
every Sunday.

Seated, watching the time
restraining thoughts of getting there
when there hasn't yet been defined.
Uselessness and vigor
will pour through my pores
at 1919 ft worth
and settle,
****.
It's never going to settle.

Strings of life thread form
beneath your collar bone,
only when you aren't looking.
And every distracting thought
is a tally mark onto the stone board
between soft edges of obsidian cliffs.

Mint green elbows pry
the heart from ten commandments
and stitch spirit into twig houses
by the highway.

Cardboard ghosts reach forth
cream knuckles and seated stares
from scintillating pavement and disillusion.

Morning coffee candles burn,
tasteless, vague,
daisy-chained and flooded,

and man seems absolutely
unnecessary.

constantly alone
feeling company through fingers and toes
contemplating enlightened fire
in ice cold days and nights

trash in veins
heart on plate
eat my way through dirt and dream
stab reality through my eyes
just to see.

Spill over the top,
let me drink your insides so they become mine
once more.
We were all the same once but that was before
our parents decided to donate fingers
to the place on their gravestones engraved
forever yours.

And I still see you sitting there
pipe in hand
burnt lavender floating through your veins
just how you floated through mine
every day when we were a lesser age.

You're the only reason I am,
and I am nothing.

I laid out a smooth brown blanket
to comfort the scales
flowing through my laptop speakers
five hundred and thirty-two times every second.
Two more times is disarray,
One hundred less leaves you crystalline,
like water,
pouring from the sink
into tupperware cups,
gurgling,
heated,
tea.
We both just need a little tea.

The scene sways to double voices,
and the library stillness
draws dull attention into
warbling intricacy
flitting amongst television feelings.
A surface connection
waits at half the distance
to every pretty looking girl
that passes by.

But the cracks are the most interesting.
In sidewalks,
in streets,
in spirit.
I'd let their faults divide them
into one of the sixteen trash bins
on the way to class.
It's only past,
and the significance is imprinted
upon the present.

And I guess it's a heavy cotton flannel kind of day.
One dissociated from hard wood,
where the metal corners
nestle in a thick layer of fabric,
and embrace it.
The heavy cotton clouds only embrace for so long,
the fog replicates familiar separation anxiety
in the early morning consistency.
Midnight swells from the left
to steal the rays from my room.

Geometric white light
connects joints of past and singularity
heated tension building through fingernails
and luke-warm glass of water sitting idly by.

Jitters, man. The jitters are strong this time, deep and invigorating. Can't sing, can't comprehend the average. Nothing average.

Feel what's right,
let footsteps fall simply
a pathway predestined, predisposed
to second chances but intimately present.

Eyes are repulsive. Why can't you look through them? Into the soul. It's rude, souls are *****. Resonate deeply, learn the way of vibration, vibrate freely, child.

Don't miss it.
Let it flow, the right is natural,
and ******* breath passes through all
that is just.

We all die the same. No one really grows flowers from their graves but we're all pansies, soiled by the dirt of hopes vested into unrealistic stars at night. And you took me by the hand and led me into the bookstore on the square, and I found myself between the cardboard. Heart beating for small fonts and graffiti letters on rotten wooden doors. Maybe flowers are growing there, from inside the heads of kids with far better futures than those hanging in front of me on black thread, boiling the air with the vescent gloss of winters and leaves long gone. I'm up to my shins in trash and up to my neck in excuses, always hoping to find a reason why I should never be the same, never again. Screaming circles frame the open fields, and whispering spherical expansion pushes forward through the wind. Insanity steeps in present, and I'm working on acceptance. Still-footed or not, stagnant, I'm done forcing it.

Intention can mold a face
On either side of the head
Seven eighths shadowed
And one half lit
Bridged nose comprehending
Life-red cheeks
And seeking.
Sun-heated path
In any direction
Meets oak park benches
By park lamps.
Feet tinged by chilled swaying greenery;
Move forward,
Or change faces and digress?

With toes seeping between
yellow blanket and
quilted leaves

shirt front ripped beneath
blue-white crossed pattern

With newfound treaty between
******* and
poetry

I know I am okay.

Breathe.

White SUVs parked
Through barren branches
Embracing the colors of the wood

Stone pebbles
Rolling through skulls
Like fireworks
Speaking dead Latin tongues
To cigarette fingered teenagers
Progressive and hardly realized
Healed imagination to start.
Red and Blue lights ink
The shaman's circle
And green smoke fills iron.
Half clothed, half chilled
Waiting for the world to be.

The only lit open signs at 1:08 am
are hanging in
the windows of whataburger, cash4gold,
and the racetrack down the street.

Foggy but awake,
I'd like to stay that way.
I'd like to stay that way.

And doesn't everyone eventually die by suicide?
Fake granite countertops biding conversations
on drugged up new years night.
No sleep can fix the negative,
acceptance beats grit-teeth hopelessness.

Foggy but awake,
I'd like to stay that way.
I'd like to stay that way.

You and I were a metaphor,
Bare feet in a morning meadow.
It sounded beautiful,
But we both left punctured and hurting,
Wondering why we thought
It would work so well.

Never stare out the window with only 3 minutes until work.
Ideas sink between priority and procrastination
and you're caught in the turbulence.
And the worst part is,
it's fulfilling.
More so than most meniality
moving through the heads
of every driver
in every car
on every street.

Cotton ***** replacing eyeballs,
light bulb socket eye sockets
glimpsing a contrast computer screen under sullen light;
small talk in the room behind me.

They're really getting into it
three quarters over the line between
I really don't know
and I really don't care.

One foot constraining the other end of reality.

And it's like everyone is shaven down
by their own empty hours
into glazen-eyed laughter.

Forward progress into
counting dirt
in a hole.

tired enough to sleep
not quite tired enough to dream

...And the night deepens into swallowed thoughts and blurry vision. Every time you forget what it means to be human, the air gets cold, and bites you in the back of the throat. Inhale, hold, count to ten. It isn’t as it seems, and none of it exists anyway. It’ll fade into pale blues and grays with the morning light.

There's a soft grating in between your finger tips.
A thin slot of knuckles, for nickels and dimes
when they drop from pant-pocket holes, worn and guilty.
It's always harder to take than it is to give.
But trash cans never regret.
Purpose: Check.
Validity: Check.
Reality: Hand-drawn check in black sharpie across the steel.
Sink deeply, black ink
welcomed wearily into the soul
through clasped hands,
past kneeling knees
and off the sidewalk cracks into the grass
while their eyes are still closed,
trying to feel the touch of the invisible.
Matter is what matters,
not reality,
or the shreds each mind tapes back together;
the pictures esteemed by an eye forgot.
Points of view are only valuable when they aren't,
And I guess that's a disappointment, with too much proof.

Bending back the slate.
Somehow finding enough force in scrawny half pound arms
to grasp that vision's mostly in my brain.
And if i know the world
and if i know myself
skin prickling lines of hate do a lot less damage,
cause a lot less pain.
Noticing the corners, feeling their raspy edge
as they scrape up your throat
and out onto the ground before.
Self-awareness only helps to see the ****
that applies more
to the one who wrote
than it ever will.

Endlessly getting better seems a bit too tiring sometimes.
You can only look at the world through blurry eyes for so long,
until you start to believe in the blurred carcass of the familiar.
It resembles the thoughts pooling out from the shattered glass,
floating up from behind my eyes
and flows through the room from a dark hole, yet to be explored.
Into the cavern, into the waves.
Into the seams, pulled far by a stretched mind and starry skies.
Pulled wide when we broke up last night.
This morning was strange.
I found hospitality in The Upsides, ironic comfort in the past before the past.
You could never understand, and maybe it was better that way.
But I ******* felt you inside me.
No more, active heart between my bones.
Be calm. Be aware.
Still here, and forever observing the real.

Everything's a ******* square.
My journal.
The rich kid crackers.
My pillows, safe as they are.
Some are seam-stretched,
manipulated by a team of God and tired hands
a more desirable something,
thrown away just the same.
My parents.
My head.
The entire visionary sidewalk-gray sky,
as down is up for most, my neck associated with.
It wraps itself a ballooned cube, square faces
to be pinned over themselves by shapely oceans and unwitting gulls.
******* annoying gulls.
I fed one a firework once
the kind you throw at your sister and it pops on her
and she cries, illogical from her eye sockets in
steeped in the terror of the 9/11 on her swimsuit.
Snatched, exploded
Feathery tears rained,
a little less illogical.
I'm vegetarian now.
No relation.

Killing myself on carrot flesh as I lie sickly
in a cloud bed of pollution and distaste.
Man-made things.
All man-made things.

I don't know which was worse:
the hook jammed into my dad's eyelid
or that the suffering of other beings,
of fish
is a respectable pastime.
It's entertainment.
Our parents may as well still be kids
but even some kids can understand the significance
of compassion and respect.
But nothing ever comes out of that
out of them,
out of it.
No one chooses to understand.

You've got a lot of heart, kid
It's just on the wrong side of the line
You've got a bit of soul too,
It's just hanging by your side
In a basket you rejected at 13
Hoping no one would ever see it
Under the 6 wool blankets
you believed into existence
You stole them from the supermarket
Down the street
Threw them in a bag
of rocks and switchblades
You collected with your friends
And with your hate
It all leads down a sunlit trail
To a point on the clock
where the second hand determines your death,
and if it stops, so do you.
But can you tell me,
Is it worth it?

Listen to the whispers of the A/C unit
Humming out a D,
Or a headache
Just solid enough to hear from across the room.
But I don't listen to you.
Or any of your costly fabricated words
Telling me I've got something wrong
Behind the bridge of my nose,
bent and too deep.

I'm a perfect human being.
My heart's in the center of my chest.
I breathe in bad circumstances and exhale gold,
I make the patterns in the wind.
My hands reach inside a sad glob
Of green and brown
mud and roots
Shoveling through with fingertips
I pull minerals from my insides
And show them off.

But there's a hole in the wall there,
Somewhere
Brain-sized with rosy cheeks
Screaming at me to think my way through
The hole isn't round, and neither am I.
My palms aren't symmetrical,
My feet, no direction
And sometimes I catch myself in lies.

Often, I catch myself in lies.

I think all doors start out closed.
I think we're all gonna starve to death.
I think people only truly hate themselves.
I think worshipping the world is ok.
I think people see more than they think,
    more than they ever want to believe,
         and I think God lives within me.

A heart is a palm reaching out from the slots of a weathered man's ribcage, begging for the quarters in the hearts of strangers. "Do you have 49 cents so I can get a soda?" Walk by. Head down. Heart closed. Pale veins clenched tightly.

It's a surprise
Or at least some dark form of it
when you find yourself distantly hoping
that the steaming water from a shower head
spraying the spirit of the sun and others alike
empathizes to such an extent with the flesh
that the heat radiating from the water,
liquid, evaporating freedom,
alights a fire of a more human disposition.
To burn to a counter-intuitive death
in a counter-intuitive world
filled with counter-intuitive people
while those who willfully express their care at the second of desperation
and not before
idle gleefully in ignorance.

Surprising.

Im too afraid we're substituting free love for free WiFi, changing lives by white cardboard shop signs in the green oaks window of a strip mall pile of bricks and *******.

I woke up at 8 am with a crick in my neck, but the world woke up frustrated with a wedge in its back. I'll fall asleep tonight to jon krakauer stories and they'll go unconsciously alive with severed names. It's like a scene from 1984 that got forced into a brave new world and made a ******* child with ***** blood, still just as red as the rest of us.

With dulled minds and calloused hands,
insomnia is inherent instead.

The lot's full but the cars are empty, and the white lines are blurred when it's raining drops of liquid distortion, perverted by man and no longer pure. Jesus' paper face is scotch taped to the glass pane of an apartment's sliding door; blocking a clear view of reality. But what is real and what is reality if we're all just defined by guesses? Just the rough estimates of what should be, or of what is by those who lived before us. And died before us.

Nothing ever lasts, but it's here and so are we.
And that's our stability.

In an afterthought,
it seems
that the prettiest words
now have such an empty meaning;
vacant as the eyes of those affected.
And in the post-humorous glow
of an understanding struck in fluorescent lighting,
you realize
ugliness
might transcend
the flame.
Maybe we should respect
the ugliness
as much as the emptiness,
but maybe the thought
is too far gone
already.

I wish I didn’t require a body. The thought of sleeping against the gravity has a beautiful grip on my mind that won’t seem to shake. I hope for a bit more mortality. I hope for eternity.

I am nothing,
And that's okay.

How strange it is to think,
when the air you breathe
finds its way into my lungs
and when the deep cries of the world
are suddenly shallow, and light
as an offset breath of earthen ties
keeps me alive,
crisp wind,
with an infinite past
and biting emotion
looks on to it's own melody
wrapped in skin and bones
and swaying with the trees.
Some ask for honesty,
and only gain grief
but truth sits idly in the hands of reminiscence
and I've seen the way it treats history.
Relentless, unforgiving, but regard to control
comes swiftly with a skipped thought.
Conscious breathing.
Collected thinking.
Calm existence,
unbound sympathy.
And with a piece of life to transcend stress and pain,
in an unending spiral through every body
I hope to give you a sense of eternity.
Happy birthday.