Strung out on the dream,
Cars pass, flashes of light from windows,
Fragments of memory, a broken summer come home to lick her wounds,
Winter presses the needle down and the record sings, the blood sings, the street sings, black sky sings, god, it’s no wonder I can’t sleep, I want it to be quiet, I want it to be so quiet my beating heart becomes a firing squad, no, I don’t want to talk about it,

Familiar feelings, cycles of rebirth and devastation, oh god, oh god we’ve been here so many times before,

And while the neighborhood sleeps I am waiting, a savior from the sky or money in the bank or a real connection, there’s demons rising from the sidewalk and I’m feeding them scraps from my table, I’m looking to get recognized and carried away on the back of something stronger than I am,

And round the block the silence is the sharpest knife in the drawer,

Something vicious on the wind,
Something we just can’t talk about,

I look to the sky and,
I watch angels falling,
And I try to decide,
If their wings are broken,
Or if they found the only way,
To make it all quiet

I’m jumping at shadows
Again and the night is closing in
With the kind of violence
Only a mother could know

Right and it’s like back in ‘06 when grandpa stomped the gas down on a ‘69 Camaro and he drove straight up into the sky and that’s why sometimes when thunder claps I mistake it for the chorus of a Bruce Springsteen song and that’s why I keep my read receipts on when I talk to the dead cause you really don’t ever know when heaven is gonna open up to you right? And who could ever know us better than the ghosts we choose to carry? What can living hands uncover about us that we don’t already know? So yeah I guess what I’m trying to say is sometimes it’s more comfortable to live inside the act of disappearing rather than being gone, or maybe that I’m a shallow grave and there ain’t enough bodies to fill it, or maybe sometimes a name can’t hold all the feeling in it so you gotta become something else, intangible and everpresent, I’m still working it out, mostly filling space and such, I wouldn’t know how to explain it to you if I could speak my own language, the clouds hang heavy like hearses on summer asphalt, September a phantom fire that spread all through these veins, I’m listening for thunder, a transmission from heaven that says it’s time to come home

What I wouldn’t give to reach you now, held aloft in the arms of a million sunrises,
Lovers draped across your shoulders like furs from a hunt, what they must’ve seen in you, the cartography of your skin, how it stretched on forever full of the promises of serenity, like all the rest stops on the highway to Providence, like safe passage through the storm,

And do you know what I mean when I say I always seek forgiveness when the harvest is at its most scarce?
I mean that the sun has taken all from us except our names,
I will plant mine like an apology into the mouth of any who will listen and I will hold on,
To what I got,
Long as the light holds and I’ve still got,
Room to breathe, and vengeance to take,

And I know I’ve got this,
Angry heart,
And one day the chains will drag me back,
Into silence,

But I ain’t going quietly now,
I heard the songs coming down from the mountain, rolling like thunder in the immortal night,
And I let all that electricity just build,
And build,
Until I can reach out,
And pluck the lightning from your throat,
Wrap it up in my fingers,
And let it drip like wine onto the page, yeah, ain’t nothing like being born again,
Held still in rapture until the Lord turns the key,

And all you were,
All you are,
All you could be,
Floods the earth in fire and,
You face all the battles of this world with perfect clarity,

And, if I could ask you for anything,
It would be to deliver me a shotgun, not
Into my anxious and craving mouth,
But into my two good hands,
And a horizon, upon which,
I could gouge out a place to exist, and the
freedom to die on my own terms

The alchemy of liberation,
a violent restructuring of the self, upheaval of desire and history

We speak truth in the lexica of negation, subjugate our demons and project them onto the sky, phantasmagoria of dreams and nightmares, visions, fetish, reality consumption,
And this, too, is a god state, an architect of *******,
altered chemistry and planes of being,
Assuming total control over synapse and viscera, sublimation of cells and holy organs,
Feed the burning engines of will and achieve a greater porosity, togetherness,
Free flowing energy between bodies and burdens, from hearts to hands to fists,
Passed down generationally through endless struggle,

Ghosts of a zeitgeist,
spirits of spirits,
hang restless like guillotine blades thirsting the flesh of something weak and divine, to be profaned, chewed up and spat out into the grinding wheel of industry,
god machine reaping soul machine,
conscious machine chaining freedom machine, naturally occurring fascism of the mind

Place your hands on our everburning turbines and turn your face towards brilliance,
Unsurrender hell, be carried to purpose on the shoulders of devils who once enslaved you

Forge in the crucible of uprising, a new identity, of steel and bomb shell casing,
A new language, born of rope, instinct, survival

Enter the twisting vortex of feeling and emerge as your own father, with all the trauma and fresh pressed suits that implies

Melt down that which oppresses to its base elements,
fear, rage, alienation, loss, want
transmute them into air to breathe,
water to drink,
earth to build,
fire to warm,
or gold to share,
In this way we shall grow rich off that which once killed us,

Make your misery a hammer,
And set to the work of reconstruction

Easy
It is so easy, to fall into something larger,
a mouth, more monstrous than the one you were born with, separate flesh from blood, become energy for some terrible purpose, get too real on the come up and dissolve entirely on the comedown, it could all be so,
Lucky,
It is so lucky to be anything, to solidify, crystallize in your own body, connect to all points in time and hold a note, beautiful enough to be sustainable at last, to reach some higher place, some understanding outside of your own context, and isn’t that what it means to be so,
Free,
There is nothing so free as this, the art of disappearing, a release of expectations, submersion in a feeling, blurred images of self and dream self, fingertips meeting at the mirrors edge, escape from wanting, desire’s vicious processes, dead as the night, just alive enough, to cherish what remains

I.
I saw you in a fever dream,
Your ribcage grown sharp and your heart bleeding, you were contorting into unfathomable shapes while something droned on the radio into total oblivion, you told me that you remembered, about how all any of us know how to desire is our own absence, freedom from concern in a total collapse of context, how beautiful you looked to me then, light straining to reach you through all that space, all that time on the other side warped your head into a gladiator arena and you shadow boxed with your father there every night, some nights when nothing plays through the speakers but static I can hear you still begging for mercy but, I can't be bothered to sort out who deserves what anymore, not while the streets still burn and the sky swallows itself whole, yes, I remember now, I remember everything

II.
You and I are one,
We are only as real as our memory, and once we have forgotten this so too will we be forgotten,
I cannot separate myself from you,
I can only judge myself by relation,
Some days this anchors me, grounds me in a definitive state of being and presence,
Some days it sends me spiraling, careening wildly over the edge into abysses I can't hope to perceive entirely,
Most days it is all I have - that connection,
A tether to a fixed point, from which we can waltz eternally together as the moon discards her changing skins, the sun weeps blazing tears of guilt, and the world crumples and fades around us like so many unused sketches in a notebook,
When the music stops, we will fall where we stand, but until then we dance

III.
In visions I rise from the machinery of a home and into the wild night,
Explosive and immaterial, on a collision course with all the heavenly bodies of wanting,
Cataclysmic chain reactions and massive shifts,
Humbling change and mystic power,
I became dangerous when I realized I already possessed all the weapons I could ever need,
And I went to war just to prove I could win

IV.
I have been the Magician, uncertain brilliance channeled into futile cycles of rise and relapse,
I have traded tongues with the Devil, promising freedom in exchange for empty fates,
I have defied the Hierophant, walked the path of strife to the edge of the Earth and ****** off into the void
I have fallen from the Tower, broken my crown on the rock faces of total loss and returned ever the more vicious,
I walk now in the light of the Star, certain only in my own electric possibility,
I walk now with my hands intertwined like the Lovers, into the dark to illuminate whatever awaits and burn it clean

V.
You and I walk together in the night, across the vivid dreamscape of a world historic stage, our skin opalescent and shining,
The sky sings of Providence and the dirt remembers spring,
When next we decide to plant our monuments into it,
We would do well to remember the taste of gratitude after a bitter harvest,
When we bite into the first fruit to reach our lips unspoiled and sweet,
We will cry, a healing rain that falls all over this land,
And something will grow there,
Something beautiful and everlasting,
And it will be ours,
And we will find peace in it,
And until then,
We will tend to the flowers of this world, and dream of a new and glorious one,
It is the least we can do

I. Depression
Hollowed out black eyes pale skin,
Cigarettes for breakfast lunch and dinner,
You, are powerless here
You with your weak wrists and shaking hands,
You with your bones so fragile,
You with your light all burned out,
Drink in the dark, and descend

II. Dysphoria
What shape is this?
Bloated, rotting, gutted
You with your twisted spine,
You with your unnatural proportions,
You with your haunting figure,
Get sick, carve out your insides and replace them with slow burning candles,
Empty out until nothing is left,
Do not spare anything for the child you were,
Down here, we all starve

III. Surrender
This is what you are worth,
You, with your nausea heart,
You, with your revolving door head,
You, with your deafening absence,
Press that brand into your skin,
Mark yourself forever for your weakness,
Wrap yourself up in it like it is the only home you've ever known,
And sink, until you are strong enough to rise

Something is alive here,
Something is begging, something is clawing its way kicking and screaming and biting and gnashing it's way into becoming, suffering the thousand sharpened teeth of transition just to know what it means to feel as though as it definitively is, rather than is not, rather than in between,

Father, I am sinking
Mother, I am coming through the floorboards
Brother, I have abandoned you

******* away eternities on porches and defying the skies of childhood, I saw you, red faced and vicious, a shadow sick of living in contrast, you yearn to be free, to shake your context and exist for the sole purpose of your own continuation, like paintings on the walls and objects in space, you crave the weightlessness, totality of purpose, absence of justification or need, divine freedom that kills the divine and births a new path


Walk this with me,
Stranger, lover, friend
We will know what it means to be unified,
Unbreakable will of the collective soul,
We will be human,
We will be grateful,
And we will be more

The Hierophant stands stoic and looming at the alter,
He is Father, Patriarch, Divine Daddy,
Secondary mouth of God and arbiter of his will,
His hands are twin bridges offering you two choices:
Walk the path of obedience and you will be clean and holy eternal, golden armored against the beasts of this world, promised heir to the ever burning horizon of an infinite kingdom, you will be chosen and righteous, you will walk the verdant fields of bountiful harvest and reap your rewards from this life to the next,
Walk the path of strife, however, and you will become the heretic, pariah, enemy and other, outcast and tied to the stakes of the pious, scapegoat for the evil that dwells within, you will die a thousand martyred deaths before they lay your restless spirit to damnation,
As he stands before me, his face is at once reassuring and mocking,
He is my father, he is the president, he is the unknowable face of creator and absolute authority,
He says, boy, take the easy way out, it is the only chance you'll ever have
I don't know what it was that pushed me over the edge then,
Whether it was the midnights spent crossing myself in the Lord's Prayer out of sublime terror,
The smell of formaldehyde as the most pious woman I've ever known was returned to the dirt under a benediction,
Bruised knees, ****** knuckles, diagnosis or spite:
Regardless, I made my choice there,
I choose strife,
I choose the unending chaos,
I will walk this path to its end,
And when I meet my maker there,
I will tell him that it was worth it