If you think it will stop
Don’t
Hold on to the railing
Jump
Over the edge
Onto the sidewalk
Separated from streets
Marauding, rubber tires pummel
Surveying alleyways neglected and
Trash cans brimming with disregard
It’s lonely here, as if each pebble were a
Reveler
Ambivalent toward you
Unkempt and stiff
As if petrified and disavowed at once
Ignored, timid
Apathetic discharge
Free,
Fallen
From a short, raised canopy
Of steel
And wood and
Bones and
Dust
Chalk; dried on a lesson
Conveyed
Battalions, battalions
Marching
Avid miscreants
Scurrying
The masters couldn’t paint as fast
And each trifling matter
Marches past with
Battalions
Battalions
Battalions
And Stones

Forget the apprehension,
Let your clouded breath hang
On the rearview you see from
Your memories
Move in that direction
As tears
Dangle, restless, longing for solid earth
Dewy, un-coiffed grass
Emblazons today, still
Underneath can be beyond…
Above can be behind…
Shrouded horizon spins unnoticed
And all-encompassing endeavors
Bending light ‘twixt fate’s fingers
Like moments through a color-arch
Acrid rumors, sweat
Spew from our stolid, misshapen bodies
Soaring, metal box with wheels
Over holt, into the harbor
Hence comes the tide;
Hence comes the tide!
Underneath becomes beyond
Above becomes behind!
Anxious melody of air-springing
Pervades the cacophony of living
Can you forget asphyxiation,
So long
As saturated lungs keep breathing?

Each twilight goes unwitnessed
I haven’t had a meaningful conversation in years
And as the hours pass between waking and dying
I scarcely feel emotion, I scarcely know life
I can’t remember what I did a week ago
But likely it was unremarkable
And the week before that I might have tossed a ball
Although that seems too recent
Things are harder now, despite the congruence
I could be doing those same things
Without knowing it
And each fetch is like an unanswered question
Soothing, in its clumsy forthrightness
The ***** of my yard, dramatically subtle
I assume the sky’s above me as I bend
Here is the ball, I’m picking it up

The world created for us is sick.
It’s decaying.
Wounds, with no scab forming
And we’re expected, without questioning
To live on in such a world
To allow such a world to exist
But it’s infuriating
And it torments the hearts of men
Tearing mother from child
Raising us on malevolence
Scurrying through the fields
Until the hunters carry us away
And every last vestige of shelter
Is plucked from the ground
Incinerated, burned in factories
To make cardboard boxes
That will be filled with promises
Of low cholesterol
For the masses
That gleam over the details
Unaware that hope is lost
And that our species is dying
Hurriedly moving from one space
To another
Without realizing their fright
Without looking at the box
That they helped produce
By failing to protect
Their shelter
A world, ending

You have become like the specter of my youth
A knothole seeping deadly fumes
Surrounding me, embracing me
Leaving me intoxicated and defeated
In a pile of filthy belongings
Tethered to this pole of existence
Wrapped in disregard
Postmarked for the gates of Valhalla
Addressed to sirens of the flat rivers
And dropped at the feet of irreverent lovers
You are my memory and the end of all complacency
The beginning of a new chapter
In a volume to be published
Bound in leather
Taken from cows raised in pastures
Decapitated and sawed open
Removing vital organs from lifeless bodies
Supported by a hook
From which brain chemicals drip
And neurons fire
Through a convict with his blindfold on
Moist cigarette, dangling off his lips
Air breathed by love’s guillotined victim
Rattlesnake’s discarded skin
You take from me coconut’s milk
Fuel for foddering the future
And willingness to triumph in battle
I leave your kingdom
Hopeful for patronage
Seeking refuge, perchance amongst palms
Floating on what seems a sliver
In your filthy sea’s apathy
I bide my time, until delivered
Until my tawny encasings unravel

Every last breath
Noted on a bemusing script of flesh
Like a disease
Like an infectious—
Tell me.
If I could do it over
And kiss you whilst your lips quaked
Then grin alongside shy tears
That life you were pulling up,
With my eyes as your sheave to a dim-lit tapestry,
Would it be there yet?
Behind the curtain of magnanimity
Pit orchestra abashed
Forlorn and begotten
Words of heraldry ring through this kingdom
Existing only in my mind
A land beneath the stage
Worlds inside headspace
Turn the critic’s shadowy eye
Backward from this date on newsprint
Soaked in angry, puddled water soot

A cropped haircut, remembrances of time
The best way to reduce cuticles to bone
And forget what dances behind eyelids
Loosed teardrops and wavering dependability
Useless porch light, shameful gas tank
With shadows which count seconds
Stretching over regrowth
A cropped haircut, remembrances of time