A CONFUSING DAY FOR CUCUMBER FISH

I’m not being able to escape this, in parts, either on the slip where the drifters weigh themselves against daily chores, or to the perch, where against the millions of suns striking into the cabinets where devoted criminal ****** *** offenders aid and abet their children:

flying kites, tossing bread crumbs to water fowl, playing tag, hide and go seek, or

Cooking food, drinking cold alcoholic beverage, and listening as a friend with a guitar sings about the child born in the mountains as a man, only to find the world as a legend.

Still there is no escape. There is only the peril of night stretching 99% of our brains across the tepid sky, only to wait for the light of those suns to fade, and then only have to worry about the dross and muck on every fingerprint of every man from this place or the next. These are fingerprints that ooze the familiar green devil whose face familiar ages our futures before they can even happen. Then we succumb to the bitterness of these years on the perch, the stoop, the step, wandering around the chollas in nothing but a pair of aquamarine boy’s briefs. This is not insanity. This is the product of insanity. This is not losing, this is the product of living under a government that has been taking what it could not afford, and who trades in what hurts rather than helps what ails rather than aids.

This is the ratcheting heard inside the bruised and frail hearts of many. The pain inside their backs and legs and arms and heads is real. It smells real. It sounds real. It feels real, but no one here has ever known what it is that is happening, therefore they do not understand the great costs being played with when these oozing poison-stricken fingertips start playing at the game of life, or they start playing at the game of their neighbor’s life. There is an outcome of sunset still yet to be seen, and that is the inescapability and uncertainty of millions of children being born today, tomorrow, and hereafter. The children tomorrow should not have to worry about washing someone’s fingerprints off of the skin they have yet to be born inside. Stretching across the dusty and quiet streets, if this Wild West is closing its wildness out and isn’t doing anything but wandering west, there isn’t a committee of sanity that will prevail. Especially as we choke through the gravely heavy metals meddling with the untold stories of tomorrow’s sons and daughters.

All of a sudden I'm a shadow
and it seems I can't escape that which blocks the sun. Every move I make, the eclipse follows. And all of a sudden, I'm a celestial body and it seems I can't escape this being that falls beneath me. Every move I make, the darkness follows.

Equals ~ at the very least in inescapability!

Running from each other results in fatigue.

So does shadow boxing.

Don't beat'cher self up kiddo.
Chin up, quit starin', it ain't gonna leave!
There's a big bright sky right above ya!
Just look arouunnd!

In my mind, I was
Prepared for your presence.
As if you would illuminate my world and
Tear down my mental fortress;
I was prepared for everything to be
ok.
So these preparations became the most daunting of dreams;
Wonders and hopes of everything
Actually
Being
ok,
And even after you monotonously sauntered into my physical world
And everything hopelessly remained the same, if not worse,
I kept dreaming.
Months after, I dreamt.
Prepare? More like pretend,
Pretend that you, in fact, never did
Physically saunter
Into my monotonous world.
That you, somewhere, existed
In a consistent aura of love and affection,
Or even in just the sense of an ability to love would've been
ok.
You had to exist somewhere because,
For god's sake,
It surely couldn't be here;
This surely couldn't be the you I had dreamt of.
And it wasn't, it was the you that was irrevocably you
You were as good as you were going to get.
And I was the same.
Indifferent.
Incapable of loving anyone,
Let alone you.
This was the "ok" that I had so long awaited,
and I was certainly not
ok.
So I dreamt.

How long can one continue to dream?
How long until they off themselves on the realization of the inescapability of hopelessness?
How long can one lie to themself?
The reluctant truth is that every reachable
"ok"
Is really not ok at all.
ok is miserable and impossible and
ok
Ceases
To
Exist
Amongst those who are miserable enough to admit this reluctant truth.
ok is putrid and a liar because
I'll never be ok.
And I'll always say I am.
And you'll, from time to time, saunter back into my monotonous melancholy of an "ok"
And I'll never be happy.
And one day I'll off myself on the reluctant hope that there is an
ok
Existing beyond you and I;
Beyond everything that I've dreamt of.
Because none of that was ever ok.
It was only a dream.
And all I've done is woken up.

What’s the statute of limitations
        on my obligations
                as a son
        on my victimhood as a
                semi-orphan
        on my blamefulness as a
                father
When does it end—these yet-to-be-seen effects of the mundane
        I make now?
When do I not carry them
        the strings
        of the yarn map tracing
my endless encounters and tacking
        not into cork but
        into my soul stretched pulled
in four dimensions.
Length times width times depth times time. I coexist
         in every manifestation of
myself simultaneously.
        All time all me, all tacked,
        All pulled, all stretched by
more hands than my own.  Vibrating
        into my marrow reminding
of the inescapability of the
        contracts I didn’t sign.  Most of them.

Each day the threads move.
They swirl and choke or puncture
        taut and pull. pull. pull
        me back, back to them.
        To early morning and late nights
        every day
        That old house of repressed
memories and façade bonds
        of newspaper-wrapped electric
circuits waiting for the
spark
        to finally incense the
        old aged kindling of other
        string maps of
        other pasts of
        more and more disappointment.

My heart is a prism. a rock.
        set in the stone of my
chest compressed
by pressure into endlessly
        juxtaposed edges of glass.
        An edge: a time a place a person a me. Surrounded
        onyx black
but yet
        Reflecting.  It’s deep
        yes
        but shine deep enough
        yes, go
        and it will reflect
        go on, go on
        fluoresce
        yes yes yes go
        myriad colors of spectrums
                of me
torn out of the mine of
my own construction of
        the muscle memories of
        the past pains of
        the unceasing variations of
the crude black **** I’ve
made before.

        How long
                        will I be responsible for
                                                     her?
For you?
Was I ever?
Am I at all?

Anger at who defends language as something holy
Fury at the ease with which cruelty is inflicted
Rage at the inescapability of money and society
Chafing and aching against self awareness
**** the stoics for teaching manly indifference
**** the christians for preaching fake empathy
**** the evolutionary drive, the cultural roles and all who allow oppression to thrive
Broken systems are all we have, after all.
Il try and keep avoiding looking at the cracks

“Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:” such is the first line of Metamorphoses, the title of my favorite book as well as the "borrowed" Latin version of my favorite word in the English language, metamorphosis. Ovid was a poet of enormous artistic caliber, that much is a given, but in writing this Book of Transformations I believe he also became a scientist. Who else can appreciate the beauty of change more than one who, being intimately concerned with understanding the rules that govern our universe, is routinely forced to face its transformative nature? After all, it is because of the moon's phases that we can appreciate when it appears at its fullest in the night sky; even the rock-solid ground, static in its appearances, changes ever so slightly across the eras, resulting in the timeless gaze of awe-inspiring mountains. Even in Augustus' times, Ovid understood the inescapability of transformation as a direct result of time and expressed that very scientific idea at its core using the mythical power of gods as a crutch. And weren't all gods created as an attempt to understand a universe that provides no ready answers? With the advent of time, what were once fantastical theories far removed from the truth became the science that we know today. Such is the beauty of metamorphosis: it not only touches upon what Physics aims to study but also upon the science itself.