All around me, I see endless fear.
Fear of heights, sure, fear of scuttling things
Fear of darkness, fear of bites
Fear of brightness, fear of fights.
This is the fear we can display
Because it’s little, simple, understandable.
But the fear I really fear
That we all let consume us
Is deeper,
Darker,
Cold.
It’s the fear of friendship, fear of love,
Fear of what’s ahead of us
But even more of what’s behind us
Fear to see what’s really beyond
The faces we all fake.
Fear of the unknowable
Fear of what we know
Fear of speaking out or up or for
Fear of conforming to something more
Fear to test the limits
Fear to taste the truth
Fear of what’s uncomfortable
Rather than the deception of comfort
Fear of what to do
Fear of striving for perfection
When perfection’s so unattainable.
Fear of to leave what has been known
Fear of what has been done
Fear to see past fabrication,
Fear to show the truth.
I’m talking fear of emotion
Or fear of not feeling enough
Fear of silence, but worse,
The fear of candid words.
Fear to look someone in the eye
And say, “I know you,
And I care for you.”
Fear to let someone see the darkness that comes with your light
Fear of rebelling though it’s time someone did
Fear of doing what you want and know
Because of what someone told you you should
Fear of being who you are
Because every day everyone is telling you
What to do and who to be
And what is acceptable
And what is not.
I’m talking fear of having an opinion
Because someone will shoot it down
Fear of defense or service or selflessness
Because someone won’t approve.
Fear to accept because of fear of acceptance
Fear to truly love someone
Because it’s risky,
And you never know
What someone else really feels.
I cry for the fear of
Every person who can’t be
Who they are and who can’t
Let people see them in their entirety
Because after all everyone urges
And persuades and demands and values
And idolizes and expects,
You don’t even know yourself,
Because you've been too busy
With trying to be so many different
“Someone Else"s.

I ache for this relentless fear.
I mourn the stagnancy of the condition
Of the human soul who is so afraid
To let go of fear
And BE somebody,
To do something or say something, or simply believe,
That the only thing they truly trust
Is the familiarity
Of fear itself.
That’s why fear is frightening
That’s why we should be afraid of fear
Because it stops us, cages us,
Bars us behind the façade we display
And muffles the words of our heart.

I see these things and wonder
Why can’t they change?
Why can’t this need to fear be erased
From the human condition?
And I realize it’s because everyone
Is afraid.

And I’m so afraid too.

my hands swelled
blue and purple

to match the
glassy doe-eyed

stagnancy.
I saw a pair

of cocoa
moon rocks

heavy with
music and a

queen bee trapped
in a flash

of departure.  
mine and yours

one in the same
corpulent and

greased trembling
at the lips.

there is a darkness
that the silver song
of soft illusion lights
in symbolic equivalents
of images real
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
the breakage
at the jagged edges of the world
and lays hostage to impersonation
that resembles fragments
of smashed oval shaped mirrors
reflecting pieces of broken
brown terracotta soldiers
and causes the eyes to hurt
with a watched inner holocaust
of disturbing coloured detonations,
implosively autonomous
given to a deceived departure
a departure from reality
given by the advocacy
of ideological rationalism  
that sees three kings
with blood on their crowns
in amplified convulsions
call mustre for
disturbance, disorder, destruction
and death
as blood stains the Balkan streets
and all emotional impulse
is volatilized
and a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy
stalks the land
where sustaining minds
are subject to a brutal insensitivity
that dazzles on the edge of a spiral vertigo
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
a vocabulary of incoherence
like the rancid stains of *****
that inhabit the jagged edges of the world

I found a spoon in my garden.
Could you even call this a garden?
The planters are all full of
pine needles and stagnancy.
Even the bench I'm sitting on
is rotting and covered in ants.

Anyway this spoon was barely visible
among the dead leaves and dog ****.
Not rusty, save for the edges that had been
knicked by a lawn mower at some time
and then bent perfectly
down the
middle.

A memory of playing superheroes
disrupts my study.
Someone was trying to prove their
strength by bending it
"with their mind".

Eventually we tired of our
mind's lack of capabilities
and used brute force to
bend the dreaded spoon
but the celebration was nonetheless
sweet after being able to bend
our mother's cutlery.

Back then the garden was tended.
My mother put us to work
and my
"secret garden" was born partly
out of my imagination and
a lack of reality.

My mother called one plant
"lamb's ear" and I didn't
argue because it was the softest
thing I had ever felt or ever will feel.
Did she make that name up?
Surely, she wouldn't lie to me.

And now that lamb's ear, like
everything else is covered in
a thick, itchy layer of pine straw
and stagnancy. To let the plants
even begin to heal from their
prolonged exposure to cold,
mistifying darkness I would have
to scratch through the
allergy-inducing tentacles.
Push them out of the way.
Dig up the dead, dry earth,
plant new seeds and tend to them
arduously--all while wondering

why couldn't my family just
take care of what they had?

but then I notice this spoon.
I've gotten carried away again
and now I forgot to write about
what I meant to write about in
the first place.

It's not healthy to let things rust.

ponces! nancies! veritable egrets of men!
people pleasing anti-charismatic animals
philistines, every one of them,
everyone else

a curse upon their forebears and a curse upon their goings-on
terrible business, that
the world should be filled with boundary pushing eccentrics, that is progress!
a plague upon normalcy, a plague upon stagnancy
uninteresting, dying off, done
ugh!

greatness can not be expected of all but at least an attempt should be made
how else will we overcome, will we build our utopia?
what use is MY struggle when others are defeated in making a move past the remote
television is for swine
rots your brain and morals
I've swell morals, just look at them
my morals reach to the moon
my morals are so swell I should run the country
my morals aren't two millenia old scriptures written by the seers of goat-tenders
my morals are modern, they are sleek and well dictated, they represent the future
my morals defy the past, my morals create new paradigms
why, you could say my morals defy all of traditionalism
and a curse upon tradition!

who ever learned from the past
history is rife with naught but sufferance
forwards is the only direction
forwards is revealed only to me
my ideals aglow with the lumine of the future
they are entrenched in idealism
me and mine, we are ideal

sumatra drips like crocodile tears in
the four-cup *** just half-emptied by nine
big and bought on faith in un-lone-li-ness
drainpipes eroding from her miscalculation

swallowed black and quickly
her white teeth uncompromised so far
her step-by-step morning still clockwork

but when she was eighteen she watched the
cream like squid ink clouds turn it
the color of his summer skin
drinking up the baby hangovers to the
last drop

We hardly fit with our jagged edges
and our heavy breathing, our holes
don't even coincide. Our symmetry
is imperfect, as imperfection can be.
We can't call it home. We're too
edgy to ever do so. It doesn't even
come close to that feeling of
comfort and love. We're not in love,
nor are we friends by any means.
Hardly acquaintances. We wouldn't
lift a finger a finger to help the other
No, this isn't home, love or friendship.
Our weapons are still on us. The poison's
hidden in the secret compartments of the
rings we gifted each other. We never
believed in anything but practicality.
I specially sharpened the blades I
brought with me. I know he loaded
some 'special' bullets in his gun.
We deal like this, like rival gang leaders
It's the only thing that has remained
the same through all these years,
frighteningly comforting in it's stagnancy.
It doesn't even come close to companionship.
It's definition lies somewhere between
hatred, addiction and need. Quiet intimacy
will prevail between us and anyone who walks in,
feels like they're intruding on something a bit
more private and clandestine. Though no one
notices, our spines don't relax even once.

the dead re-materialise by the side of the roadside
they are visible as though seen through a spotlight
it is a brutally interrogative light
that magnifies these corpses
makes them resemble the fragments
of suicidal terracotta pots
it magnifies them as symbolic equivalents
of their real image
its beam dazzles broken glass on the pavement
the breakage an impersonation of their cataclysm
causing the edges of seeing to hurt
and hearing to submerge itself
in a turquoise blue aquarium in fear
as speech sounds a primitive retreat
in its atavistic echoes of inveterate distraction
there is a disorder of blood stains on the road
where all emotional impulse is volatilised
causing a wild distillation of programmed anxiety
which in a different vocabulary becomes
a figment of somebody else's imagination
causing a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy of sound
in palpitations, dropped heartbeats, nausea, headaches
and a foul change in bowel function

It was a beautiful moment
Of dissatisfaction.
One where she realized
Complacency
Does not equate
With serenity.
That stagnancy
Does not yield joy.
So she moved,
Not only her feet.
She moved mountains.
The earth quaked beneath her,
And flowers bloomed
In every crack.
And this,
She thought,
THIS is how it feels
To be alive