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i had a dream where i walked outside and it was the right kind of cold.
it was the kind of cold where you can take off your jacket and feel the air biting onto your flesh like sweatbeads in the summertime.
i looked down and i was 13 again when things were bad but not yet worse
and i realized the more i dissect my happiness the more devastated i will become.
and eventually i'll be a highschooler doing lines in bathroom stalls and drinking my dad's tequila
and nothing will feel the way it's supposed to.
my burnt fingertips will touch bodies and bottles and i will sit smelling of smoke,
and i'll only see two stars in the sky.
it won't be raining but i will feel water running down my back, soaking my clothing and the almost black dirt.
i woke up from my dream on the first day of the year and i sat in a hospital gown with the faint taste of blue raspberry on my teeth
and i wished i would've died a little sooner,
because tonight it's even colder and the stars are shrinking and i didn't give my body a chance to grow up before i did.
it's terrible that you don't regret it until it's eaten you whole.
i am back
porch talk, simmering in a Bud light sauce
everyone chair-rocking, even the boxer dog,
in his self-propelled 360 degree swiveling chair
eavesdropping and spy eyeballing the farm for
strangers and any creatures as of yet, unsmelled

get done with weather, the crops,
the neighbors,
the weird, and the truly neighborly,
grandkids escapades, hopes and desires, comparative literature and regional dialects and philosophical dialecticals tickling,
bs’ing and tall tale telling,  breathing the windy geography of the air over the land that dictates the how we live,
open another Bud for the buds,
did I forget to mention
farm equipment?

skirt politics cause nobody wants any
nothing-to-be-done-****-aggravation,
leaves nothing mo’ to ramble on about ‘cept the

absent women

no worries all above board no secrets uncouthed,
but the mood softens as the pale daylight wisps come rarer
as now
nearer to nine pm, obvious saved the best for last,
a very manly-way of ordering things,
big silent pauses in the converso conversation,
guy-sighs many,
as the last essay of the day is being jointly authored,
denotating the generalized listings of
how they drive us crazy,
listing the repetition of ever changing instructions,
which doesn't recognize bi-coastal mannerisms,  non-differentiating
just  humanism-isms

and the peculiarities of each (a list kept)
in a compare and contrast,
an end of the day summation,
and the boasting-outbesting,
of each of their
specialisms
which is sadly now forgotten and which haven’t been
brain-recorded so cannot be disclosed
other than it’s now ten
and all that’s left is
to sleep, perchance, to dream,
of private things
and bigger and better
John Deere tractors
Songs of Oregon  No. 4
i'm pooling blood in the basement,
you're crawling beneath your own spine.
you are sick, you are holy
you are shattering under cynical lights.
no one knows how to wake you.
so we sit, we watch.
we will do anything just to slip into your mind,
to use up all the stars inside of your stomach.
i want you to sleep until noon
to slice across yourself
to surface your sins.
im still trying to forget how cold your skin was
im trying to forget the way this is.
tonight feels infinitesimal so i curl at your feet like roadkill, dead but still full of hunger. i tell you in tears that i can't stop wishing myself away. what do you do to this feeling? how do you punish your pessimism without getting sick on the carpet? everything always takes me back to your eyes. and i cant stop thinking about the decay of all of it, the things i can't even remember. i am still hungry. there's a bearskin rug by the door. you eat fruit to the rind and you smoke to the filter and i love you more when you leave the cabinets unlocked. thank you, for all the horror.
back again
i need to have the earth on a skewer because i am nothing special. i am a harmless child, learning to twist up my tongue and articulate, so i need to grip these men in the palm of my hand. i need to scream until my bones twitch. this summer the edges of my world are going to meet and all the stars will fall flat. and it'll be all my fault. and i will smile so hard my lips will split. this summer i am turning backwards and nothing will ever be the same. take me back into your skin. cover me with a sheet and keep stabbing.
i enter the river
later the woods
tour natures suicide spots
snub them for a man made bridge
snub the bridge
    because i find life pretty today
    too pretty to bend deaths ear
                             and suspend
26/02/23 : date of earliest version
notes -
you go to the woods to end your life
to bend deaths ear and suspend
mending your feedback of strife
hungry
belly growling
go    c a n n i b a l i s t i c
on   victims     of   my   appetite
people flee me with their tidy routine
t r a u m a t i c a l l y    busted up
meat flowers    devoured
my glutton grows
hungry
rictameter style
.

i wake before the others                                                     
                                          betraying the family bed
conduct domestic procedure                                 
         (the sun has yet to rise and punish)
the rooms are illuminated       with the city dim
   projected from streetlight in
a dossing grain of orange                        
                   wiltered by the sheets          
 we use to cower our windows
 
in this near light i go to spread a morning meal
a tray of fruit, yogurt and breakfast biscuits
i bring it too our low living room table
but Abrupt !                                                            
   ­    there is a form   occupying the table

i scout for a spot to place my wares                            
put the tray / direct contact / the floor
                         and make a closer examination
on the table                                                            ­        
it is a soldier boy       simple      life spent out

this warrants artificial light                                      
i pull the cord on the corner lamp                      
   in a glimpse of eyes the bulb pops dead
               i know i won't meet result this way
its a brain pattern going on  i determine        
   and remove shrouding from a street view
orange wash lends  to the olive uniform
both hands hitched                                                
to his webbing   in the middle of his chest
helmet discomforts  his head turned to a side
eyes yelling a relaxed nothing                  
no surprise to his ****** features
boots that haven't even made mud yet
this is clean    but   for the blood reduction
a syrup for his presentation
no fooling  and there is.. the gun                          

the child in me and the child in him want it
he makes seventeen at most
and it is now i feel
when i see the device

war oversees
makes international the weather
I left home when I was young
To the fringes I was flung
And I never wrote a letter
to my home, Lord, to my home
No, I never wrote a letter to my home

I set out for Tuscaloo’
Just my baby sister knew
She hung her head and handed me a dime

An’ it took me pretty far
I hopped on the next boxcar
I waved goodbye to her a final time

Not a coat upon my frame
nor a penny to my name
But I never wrote a letter to my home
to my home, Lord Lord,
No, I never wrote a letter to my home

I was settled on the track
A cold wind tried to ******* back
But I held on an’ swallowed all the pain

I stepped off in Alabam’
Boxcar door shut with a slam
And I tried to build a house there in the rain

If ya missed the train I’s on
Count the days that I been gone
You can hear that whistle blow a hundred miles
Hundred miles, hundred miles
You can hear that whistle blow a hundred miles


But when it rains it pours
When it’s done, there’s always more
And it’s hard to build a home out in a storm

My Papa warned me, “Son
you’ll be sorry when you’re gone”
I thought that he was bitter - now I know

I left home to chase the sun
But it moves faster than I run
Now I cry alone the end of ev’ry day
I can hear my Mama call
“stop your runnin’ ‘fore ya fall”
I don’t wanna go home, let me play

Not a penny on my name
ever since the bankers came
I got a letter on a lonesome day

Said “Your Mama’s dead an’ gone
and your sister’s all gone wrong.
Son I need you home now right away”

Not a coat upon my back
and I’m still livin’ on the tracks
No, Papa can’t see me thisaway
Thisaway, Lord ya know
that I can’t go home thisaway.

And if ya miss the train I'm on
count the days that I been gone
You can hear that whistle blow a thousand miles
Thousand miles, thousand miles, Lord
You can hear my whistle blow a thousand miles.
After Bob Dylan's "I Was Young When I Left Home."
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