Here I am again, it's 4pm.
Online searching "Ways to Combat Depression"
How did I get into the mess I'm in?
It's only 4pm.

The sun still filters through my window.
Cindy Whatshername says it raises serotonin.
How am I ever going to win?
It's...it's only 4pm.

All day long I felt the pressure,
Pounding like a hammer in my head.
Remind me how I'm not already dead?
It's only 4pm.

It's afternoon and the lists are full:
Vegetables, vitamins, a positive outlook.
But Cindy, I'm sorry, I can't buy your new book.
It's only 4 pm.

Once the sun has fled, it's true, it feels dark.
I never really appreciate its light.
But now it is a weapon in a fight.
Oh look, it's 4:02pm.

How early in the day can you regret it?
Waking up and going out at all.
These are just dumb ways to slow the fall.
And pass the time until it's later on.

Watch funny movies, do yoga, try a new sport.
Take supplements, read books, set up goals.
Get some sleep, try to have some fun, and you'll feel whole.
I've done all that. It's only 4 pm.

I don't need advice I've tried already,
I've done all this so many times before.
I don't want to feel defeated anymore.
God, it's only 4!

They say it's caused by anger,
Well, I've got that.
I've got plenty in my life I can be mad at.
I've got hours to explain.

They say you have to face what you've been hiding,
Well believe me, I have really tried.
And several times over again I've died.
And you know... it's only 4pm.

It's 4pm and here I am, alone
Watching a funny show, researching
"Ways to Combat Depression" and I'm searching.
I know someday my search will have its end.
But...I don't know how to do this,
And how am I going through this?
Isolated within memories I always miss.
Toes curling the at edges of a darkening abyss.
And it's too much to continue to dismiss.
And it's
And...it's....

It's only 4pm.

12mn: I was babaw. I made a "funny" joke. You didn't laugh. Usual. I made a funner joke. And this time, you laughed.

1am: I changed our chat emoji to a nose. You realized you were turning 17 in 23 hours. I asked you what you learned from this year, and you said "I hate people", and I wished you didn't hate me.

2am: I was asking you what picture I should tweet for your birthday. Why didn't we get a picture last night. You're laughing at me for wearing the huge *** NASA shirt you gave me. (Thank you a bunch for that.)

3am: I asked you how the Mcdo was. You said "good". My tummy grumbled.

4am: You asked me if I was up and honestly I wasn't – you just woke me up. But conversations at this hour are the best so why not? You sent me some songs. And my groggy self listened to them half asleep. You said 20 hours til you turn 17.

5am: Kuya Soy just left. I am sad. You said jmsn at this hour is great – and he is. You're now gonna try to sleep (**** it, just when I was awake). I asked you what time you were born so I could greet you on that time. But **** it was at 7 am, still, I set my alarm. Goodnight and goodbye, for the mean time.

6am: I write because you exist. Woah that dramatic effect though (just kidding). But really, I am awake, writing my greeting for you. I fell asleep with my notes open.

10am: I was still asleep, you messaged me in reply to "I write because you exist", you said same.

12nn: I just woke up and I just saw your message.

1pm: I followed you with my 2016 account. You followed me back.

2pm: You sent me a hugot quote about walking away or trying harder. I think I'm going for the try harder option. You never know how close you actually are to your goal, right? You said you're turning 17 in less than 12 hours.

3pm: Easy to talk to, hard to understand.

4pm: I learned that your mom's name is Nilda. Hi Tita pls like me half jk. Actually not jk.

5pm: You told me everyone was making 365 accounts. Actually, it's 366.

6pm: I told you I was sad about kinder eggs having genders. "idk lol ugh HAHAHA"

7pm: I asked you if you were okay, you said yes. (And I wished that you'd never lie to me whenever I ask if you're okay)

8pm: Some ungrateful btch be tweeting about not wanting to get food for Christmas. You say "BRUH FOOD IS ONE OF THE GOOD GIFTS MY *****", I laughed.

9pm: You made me listen to Jidenna (aheheh ahas) and I'm reminded of your great music taste.

11pm: You told me your family was fighting. This is your "worst christmas". I want so desperately to do anything to make you feel better, and I am trying to help you.

12mn: Still trying. I wanna hug you to absorb all your sadness.

I asked myself over a warm cup of tea, "what kind of beauty is there in finding mystery in yourself?"
I took a little sip, and had more thoughts.
And so I scribbled, a few words on a piece of paper.
a fine day indeed to be playing Thelonious Monk,
one of my favorite Jazz pianists.
y'know, his music has a certain type of soul to it, something inviting about it. I dunno.

with that cup of tea still in hand, I listened to the ocean dance while Monk rushed over the piano keys.

that cup of tea smelled like years of fear and peace to come.
that cup of tea reminded me of the first time I burnt my finger with a candle when I was still a kid.
that cup of tea reminded me of my first love.

it reminded me that I'm still 17, it also tasted like conversations I had with friends about girls we'd never have.
"that girl. she's the one, you'd probably have a chance with her. say something, you shy mo'fo."
but then again it wasn't about probability.

it tasted like 5AM in the morning after your first breakup.
it tasted like 4PM when you wrote your first poem.
it tasted like bitterness.

the tea tasted like my love for things that have aged.
'65 Mustangs and inked pages.
ripped jeans and new faces.
jazz music and new places.

its funny what tea can do one's mind once it burns your tongue and runs down your oesophagus to warm your lungs.

Monk's music in the background, I still scribbled words on a piece of paper.
if only this moment could linger.

cup of tea, cup of tea, what type of flavor did you leave in me?

see, when i stare at this cup, it seems as if it holds unneccessary emptiness.
but can still hold my deepest desires in liquid form - a warm cup of tea.

I probably wrote all of this after I burnt my tongue with tea.
but then again, this isn't about probability.

this is from the deep of things, with love.

sincurlyxbaki

for a heart's worth of stone,
will the mind
hardly succumb to
the sponge...
             easily ingested,
yet hardly
          perforated
to give off a worth
of a translation...

                         let alone,
        a chance to print less money,
and more,
postage stamps..
               my heart to no mind
belongs, even if it's the crucible
of my own...
                 the mind goes one way,
the heart, another,
    and by death,
in pristine inversion,
relocated to their former
bearing...

              the heart begins to speak
for the mind,
   and the mind:
"forgets" to speak for the heart...

   my worst "fear" of death,
is that...
   it will never be the akin justification
for taking repose,
   for sleeping...
how,
   somehow death will
                transcend sleep...
and i will be forced into...
        dignifying,
or undignifying dogmas,
based upon the whims from
a dream...
   conjuring...

                    i can stomach
a forever-slumber,
    when it comes to death...
but to have to put up
with...
           fears of dream
being realized?
             cats don't sleep
during the night,
they pretend to,
            you can pass one by,
and he or she is: "snoozing",
with eyes half-open...

                     peering at shadows
of shadows in the daft night,
then...
   also...
                  prying on
the eternal silence of man's
rested set of comforted body
to bid him and his fellow:
a good night...

             audacious, some will meow
akin to the sparrows come morn,
but between the 11pm and the 4pm
mark?
     the house falls silent...
a drunk shuffles...
     itching to tattoo his fingertips
with texture of the wallpaper...
a cat sleeps...

                    i can almost always,
find myself,
   ascribed to a haunting,
           like the atypical english
out-suburb house...
  a house, whereby the natives
care so much for a garden...
but then actually use it...

             glued to their "castle"...
bonsai felines...
ever notice, that they have
eyes, akin to reptiles?
       large cats have mammal
eyes..
   when their pupils constrict,
they are not akin
to their bonsai counterparts,
i.e. reptilian slits?

                   i sense there's a spy...
what was once a serpent,
became a bonsai tiger,
a cat...
    when these felines
are bound to rest
i almost alway find them suspect...

         pandemonium spies...
i never allow myself
to be comfortable in
the presence of a cat,
                spy of: beelzebub,
spie of moloch...
  and the whole milton litany
of names...

               i don't trust them,
they're mammals...
but they have reptilian eyes...
esp. when the pupil slits
appear...
   a normal mammal would
have the same shaped
     pupil dilation and constriction,
like a lion...
but little bonsai tiger over here?

            venus in furs...
reptile in fur...
             i think the dinosaurs did a sly
one on us, when we arrived
with the capacity to breed these
bonsais...
                
         you'll still find the cool kids,
"petting" / more or less: keeping
snakes, lizards, chamaleons,
      spiders...
        i honestly don't think cats
are that much different...
             were you ever fed a deception,
so good,
that you, "somehow",
began questioning the authenticity,
after many years of
convincing yourself it was "true"?

        a cat, a bonsai tiger,
is about as much mammal...
    as i'm a ******* cyborg right not...
it's a reptile, in a mammalian
disguise...
   a bonsai doesn't behave
like a mammal...
     not even a mammal...
that hasn't been domesticated...
esp. a mammal that was been
quasi-domesticated,
    for the worth of cow,
or pig...
             or horse...
                        sly little *******...

i'm suspicious of cats,
and the cats i "own" are suspicious
of me...
       they're nothing more
than a dinosaur remnant of a spine
and a brain in a pickle jar
of lost eye-lids (snakes)...
  with a taste for fashion,
furs, masochism...
                
           cats are deceptive...
looking at their eyes...
they're ******* reptiles!
                        that and the birds...
pseudo-mammals...
                reproducing via
the aid of the reptile egg...

         hell... sure... "it's all about
the bees and the birds"...
more like it being about
the cats and the birds...

    why else wouldn't a reptile fake
"being afraid" / or seek to find a mammalian
reply for: endearing?
  than expand their slit eyes...
into a fully dilated pupil?
           as a mammal...
my pupil either contracts
or expands... it's either
                                    o or O...
a cat's eye?
                        O or ()
    and that's still stating a "compliment"
with the () curvature of the slit...
       that's not how a mammal's
eye should behave...
   fur,
    and as much does for birds...
also with fur, but no female womb,
instead a plot of egg
                    and greedy omelette...

    sure sure, i could have owned
a snake, if a wanted,
    or a tarantula...
   but cats just freaked me out
to begin with...
   that whole fur bit of *******
is an act of subversion...

               as is the whole bird:
feed me a budgerigar clock...
   because the whole beak...
was never going to be akin
                                  to a horse's hoof...

cats, when they're faking it,
turn all O puerile with their pupils...
but then they revert back
into their reptile calculating
demure of the slit ()
                                pupils.

big cat,
                 elephant, dog,
the eye dynamic is either
from o to O or from O to o,
to conscript their allowance
for the traffic of light...
    once again...
      whatever categorical divisions
we have constructed
to process information?

               to me,
cats are the old fashioned
fabble of a hushed variant
of chimera.

I don't talk about it much anymore but you know you broke my heart
Not because we were in love
Because we weren't
But I loved you anyway
Not romantically speaking but in the way that sisters lie together in the same bed
Or like brothers hold hands when they're small
Innocent
I was innocent and so were you
But things change and I have too
I'm not the same anymore as when you stuck the knife in my back
I'm not the same as the kid who didn't know how to react when you tore into me numb on the cabin floor
No I'm not the same but somehow after all these years you are
And you can't keep hoping that someone is gonna become more than themselves for forever
You can't stay up waiting for the same response you've been waiting for for the past two years
And I've been here for the past two years
Hands folded staring numbly at you and your changing personas
Yeah you can change your hair but you can't change your color
You can't change your heart
So yeah I hang back when you walk in
Yeah I leave early and I show up late
And yeah I've written you over a hundred poems trying to sort out the knife you left in my back
But I know better than to talk about it
I know better than to look you in the eye and expect you to honestly look back
I don't talk about it but you ******* broke my heart
And you didn't even try

tailing off / trailing off poetry, or signature poetry prior sleep
is usually filled with too many prepositions,
and by being filled with too many prepositions
the prepositions tend to be repetitively used;
nonetheless, a study of language is provided,
not everyday you get to see language
in such quanta; yes, quanta, because
physicists will not get away with smartphones
by mystifying words with all those theories
in the subconscious working on the word idiot
consciously in argument with an antagonist;
well it would be hard not to express mystification
of a word in the standard vocabulary package
of conversation, without having so much quanta quarks
stork butter and curd cheese to mash up:
for a thrill in the trill... yar yarn pi's randomised counting rates.
because not everything you read is technically
within the framework of an addressee, or read aloud,
and no one wants to read **** like a bog standard
newsreader prompt on auto-queue of flimsy pages of lies:
i mean, it happened on a monday, but not a joycean monday,
it was 4pm, one gun shot was heard a minute prior,
but then jules anno domini came along and said: stern!
make the eyes stern! then gregory the pauper of paupers
said: it was actually 9am and the gun shot was heard a minute after:
but still the man at the market shouted: '*** yer bahnanas,
toe fo' 'un, *** yer bahnanas - toe quid bunches fowl's worth!'
yes, the h in english is an elongation "umlaut,"
now say it *****, say it *****: bahamas.*

most people wash their faces in the morning
for the eager 9 o'clock slap of reality
for the bossy 8 hour toothpaste feel
on the vertical, without the whips and chains;
i only wash my eyes, knowing that
i'll probably "say" something *****
but see all too squeaky;
then i fuse a hangover with a bit of alcohol
to ensure the hangover stays longer
and feels like the previous night's binge;
we apache and aboriginal down here,
we don't ask for cruise shipments of thoughts
on the sunny side of starboard with the pensioners
under blankets of deceit.

so the first time they tried to **** me was
in a hospital cot,
the nurse almost suffocated me, gave me a heart
condition, fearing the monster with the chernobyl
birthmark.

the second time it was my childhood companion
conrad, who pushed me into a deep dark well
but having clung to the edges i managed to not fall
and climb out, conrad's mother was there too
(sunlight in a sugar crystal, or the punkin for a
pumpkin in canto xii from chicago breezy,
now the poem, reflected with the pumpkin in mind,
or that rowntree pastille twinkle of bleached tooth
and thumbs in thumbs up the ****
for things sold with audacity past the use-by-date;
cold-air balloons nearing titanic!).

the third time? south american poison, brain damage,
the entire prompt for my writing expedition
into ***** wonka's factory of candy tooth smiles.

or as i say of darwinism with relief: am i watching
the athletics or am i simply watching a chemistry experiment?
shouldn't it be called anabolics instead?
a needle to the puzzle muscles of aesthetics without
greek ship oar, *** horse reins, the scythe of wheat,
and we turn protein into carbon dioxide covered
by some plastic surgery on the sheen of lost wrinkles
in balloons on film - well obviously - given the tractor
and the aerodynamic future of fifty hundred different
speed mechanisms - the lax and laze of the populace
requires constant intellectual stimulation:
the 100m record was downsized from 10.5 to 9.5seconds
over the past twenty years, the mob rule is?
talk talk talk.

My roommates Leong, Sophie, (Charles) and I were coming from a Yale sporting event. The sky looked like a ***** Swiffer-mop and the wind seemed to be ignoring the posted 20mph speed limit. It was a typical spring day in New Haven, overcast, 65°, with intermittent, drizzling rain. I was thinking it was a good day to be a duck.

We were looking for something to gnaw on and a beverage - of the alcoholic variety. We picked up some Mike’s hard cider (featured in our refrigerator now), which proves college students really do plan for the future.

It was about 4pm and the streets were puddled, slick-looking and empty. The lone passing car sounded like it was riding on a sponge. I was wearing a navy blue, short sleeve Polo dress, a matching Polo bucket hat (for the rain) and a slub knit hoodie that I ‘borrowed’ from Sunny forEVER (seriously, I ordered her a replacement from Amazon) and Roxy boat shoes.

On a side street, a “party-bike” sat parked, sad and abandoned in the rain. A party-bike is a tram fitted up as a bar that slowly drives noisy drunks around. The drunks sit around a “U” shaped bar, on small, backless stools welded onto the tram. Yes, an open-air bar on wheels. I can’t help thinking that a lawyer came up with the idea, because what could go wrong?

The first time I saw a “sightseeing” party-bike was on Beale Street, in Memphis Tennessee. Memphis is the Disneyland of barbeque and the blues. Every storefront for blocks is an open air blues bar, a barbeque place or souvenir shop (or all three at once). Party-bikes make sense there, because intoxication is like oxygen in Memphis. It's a party-bikes native environment. In New Haven, they seem cheap, excessive and opportunistic.

As we were walking, in the distance, we heard the wail of a saxophone and a beat so clear, that the sound seemed to linger and shimmer in the air, like a cartoon neon ‘Jazz’ sign. We instantly turned that way and discovered it was coming from a place called “Three Sheets” which was having open-mic tryouts for the house band.  

It’s a bar that serves food and there’s a ‘beer goddess’ painted on one wall. In Georgia, we’d call it a ‘fern bar.' We found a table in the darker back, out of the way, and settled in. A waitress quickly took our orders and brought us several IPA beers.

Near a platform stage, there were 6 or 8 musicians sitting around (with their instruments) waiting to take a turn forming a trio with the house drummer and bass who were laying down a constant beat. One would step in with a guitar and play for a hot minute, then a guy with the sax, another with a trumpet and yet another with a clarinet, it went on and on. They each had a solo, at some point, and it made me wonder why I don’t listen to more jazz.

Our afternoon of music was something Sophie had wished for. Earlier that morning, as we were leaving the residence, she’d said, “I wish there was a concert or something going on tonight - something musical,” and boom, we get this. Still, I don’t subscribe to the idea of holy intervention.

I hate it when I hear people say, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I bristle, my head snaps in the direction of the speaker, I want to see who that dumb-*** is. My parents and sister are doctors, and believe me, people are dying every day in situations that are more than they can handle. Heart attacks, staph infections, gunshot wounds, covid, cancer - Uggg, sorry, I got off track and boiled-over there.

Anyway, we had some jazzy music and incredible Vietnamese pulled-pork sandwiches with fries and a smoky ketchup that I could have just drunk.
.
.
**I put (Charles) in brackets because, as our driver and escort, he’s usually there in the background when we’re not in the residence. But his presence is circumscribed, because he’s not there socially. Is it rude not to include him in every narrative? I don’t know - it's a habit.