Seed of life, seed of death:
All the twisted people swim
With their twisted little faces
On their twisted big brains

Connected by twisting nerves.
I see happy people, worried people
Despondent people, broken people
Cool people, smelly people
Hard-working and lazy people...

None of them know why they're here.

Now I'm working at the grocery store.
I'm wondering if the 80's happened
As I pick a cabbage from the wet wall and put it in a bag
And I'm saddened by the idea that all these people have a reason to hate me
Because I know
I'm the ******* star at the center of their universe.

They are cells of my body, full and devoid of purpose
Angry when I scratch my back
Seed of life, seed of death.

They are experiences held away from nothing by a certain tension
And you can feel the tension everywhere you go
Seed of life and death.

You didn't want to understand it, but now you do, and you can't go back...

And every year seems more brazen and the Chinese side of me itches

And the American side of me itches

And the whole planet just itches with death as it crawls toward itself
And clambering over itself
And the people wear their different clothes like excuses to be alive
Like they are trying to hide their nakedness
Like they want to distract me from the great ineptitude of Spirit!

We speak languages we don't know, do you think because you'd want to?
We exist divided
Bent against each other and ***** for collision
Worse than that, we don't even exist!
And all the details are just nonsense,
Reeling, unsure of their own identities
Or maybe clothed in white linen and kept safe from desolation,
What a gay promise that turned out to be!

I start to think it was me who twisted all the people,
But I'm twisting too
And I just want to straighten everything out,
Make it all okay
And I start to get scared because there are surgeons but I'm not a surgeon.

I pick up something a customer dropped in the produce section, next to the neat piles of citrus.
OH THAT'S KIND OF YOU

Yes, hello. You are ... kind of... me.
Have we always been this way?
Is it really the same every time?
Can Jesus help us, or Mohammad, or maybe the Buddha or a fireman?

Maybe a gecko that sells car insurance?

I start to worry because I've seen videos of impoverished people, or people with bad health conditions
And I worry I'm not appreciating the status of apex predator enough
I'm not jerking off enough--
How do you glorify God?
I stop my cart to let the elderly lady pass in front of me.
The bag of potatoes I'm holding bumps into my selfish ... didn't happen.

Heading towards the grocery aisles I'm thinking about concordances of self
And how it makes sense that there are stars
And celebrities
And I wonder, am I looking at how happy I was to kiss my high school girlfriend?
Am I looking at a personified version of myself telling a good joke,
Just lensed through the cosmos?
Or am I a future celebrity
Oh, but I don't want to be
Because I'd have to be worse than Adolf ******!
No... no, I couldn't be...
But yet it exists.

We don't exist. Just listen to Glass Animals. You can tell, it's weird.
You're so arbitrary without being arbitrary at all.
You're so full of odium while also being made of pure empathy.
You're giving me looks in the aisles again. You probably just said something I was thinking for the second time that day. You always respond to my thoughts these days...
I feel like you make me look at you so you can have a reason to **** me.
Nowadays when you smile at me it feels like I hired you to.

Nowadays when a family passes me I have to feel guilty, I'm a creepy man, I can't admire them.

There is no good ending to this poem, and I doubt I'll come back and finish it. I'm not trying to be like allen ginsberg and besides

Who's really reading this **** anyway...