The walls are slipping, in your mind that apartment is ever a reconciliation of forced adulthood and early realizations with the faux french ceilings and the off white walls, everything from the closet you trapped that cat in because it dug it's claws too deep into your skin and where's the line between affection and possession. The Cortez Apartments, like the last name you will never be able to claim because it doesn't show up on your birth certificate, not that you ever much cared about birth. Would-be apartments once hotels, now stripped at the turn of the century, my mid-century nightmare. But it never loses the gusto to haunt you in its corridors and I think I could have learned to love that but now things are less glamorous and I only wear dirt-stained jeans.
I should have used that fire escape, I should have climbed to the rooftop and absorbed the city into a jar that I could look at when I felt empty of blood cells. A defiant permanence, I can still taste the lead paint chipping and the exposed pipe but you aren't supposed to know that and why would you.

The breakfast chaos theory comes quickly and with no aforementioned warning. A hell in your stomach like an ulcer with hands now kneading your internal organs into bread or maybe as a precursor for the causalities of a lonely afternoon or boisterous night, no one ever knows. Suddenly the birds make eye contact with you and you are not the center of your gravity, your universe; your mouth is a beat off to your voice as if buffering, but why would it slow down? No physics to that but it's intangible.
Just a school of thought, food for thought. Sipping your stale coffee from the same mug you use every day because sometimes he say " I lose you in between conversations, as if you're not there. Where do you go? what are you thinking? why do you never visit? why is everything a plea? why is it always getting further with you instead of closer. closer. closer." and i can't answer that because I learned from the best and besides I wasn't listening. But I was, I am.
The breakfast chaos theory comes too soon; always hovering, asking of you to stop being that deserted home department store. Aisles of the same fun-house colors: green and yellow or red and white. It's a worldly thing, I think. An anomaly you weren't supposed to expect but now you have and everything has gone moldy.

the sun is my king and sometimes it asks me
what i'm doing down here on earth
i can't help but explain that everything has it's place and there are certain rules you cannot bend
i consistently want to have a ****** job wherein it slowly melts my spirits but not really
what i really want is nothing by the sea
doesn't matter which one
where i can pray into the sand
where someone asks
who are you? what are you doing?
and i can tell them
at ease, at ease
like that cowboy i remember from my childhood
this is me at my most degenerate
at my most free
but you wouldn't know
except the sun king and I

drive from the west coast and then follow yourself down into the south where the cactus mock trees out of their leaves and this is love
memories unglued and being put away into a box for the next move
and there's always a next move
a bluish shadow in the morning gripping the frozen wheel and it won't will to your commands and as you get out your shoe becomes untied with the motion of gravity? you can't say anymore nor that you could before
every day slips into your back pocket so when you lie down you have something to fall back into, so you can look at all you've done and smile "i love repetition" you cry
you repeat it so much you believe it as your eyes close
no one's there when you wake up but you didn't expect anyone to be
they say you should've been a songwriter they say you should've shoved all your hurt into the bottom of a well because it's no use inside yourself they say a lot of things
one day you're going to drive back up the coast and retrace where things went missing, where things went out like a broken taillight or a lost conscience
you're gonna find it and then the writing will stop

i feel like a tight string stretching or pulling
at times just going
into a single direction but the horizon isn't clear because
i'm watching everything from my peripheral (turn around)
days when i stay awake too long and my head begins to move around shakily, unsure and always unassuming
inside my head the dazed knife seizures into little misfires that guide my hands (hold them)
like in those Saturday cartoons when a finger is pinched between an electrical socket and the entire body turns into static, like a lightning bolt personified
but this is real life and what seems so pleasant sometimes leaves my tongue blue, like too much color
too much starch, saturated until your eyes water
and you have to walk away
your back was always the most beautiful to me
but i follow because this is what you do
because this is what i do
because i know you'll always turn around

sometimes i can smell gasoline
i can be familiar with the routine, an everyday
i could be here every day

my lips stick together
i step out but i'm back inside
there's an uncanny i'm waiting for
but i think we're the aliens we're waiting for
yeah, i think we're the aliens we keep waiting for

can it last forever?
life hasn't been the same since i found out that bees have threesomes and there are two kinds of males but only one kind of female
all the light from stars that we can see are probably dead
floating to make the next big thing
like the small of your back
or the twitch on that someone you're so in love with

everything is under the dirt
cosmic divorce
i'm afraid that we don't know what god looks like
and that he's haunting me in my sleep
waiting in every half-open door to jump out and say
this is it
come
back
to
me

former selves in the scribble of some crooked writing
middle of reformed books, evolved journals
i was in them and now i'm not
look
into the mirror
but when i point at you
its me that walks away feeling
at

ease

i don't know you anymore
but maybe i never did