zero in on that second when gravity
takes a small dive into the contrast
that is nothing.
you are left comparing what your
senses still reveal to the soft blanketed
blankness of no-thing at all.

an absence only apparent because
it has been
defined.

the numbered becomes numberless
when there's nothing
to
count.

insert reference
     to famous artist
                   drinking chardonnay
        on expressionist rockface
  dreaming of a better
                                       madder
                                                          sadder­
                                                                ­               gladder
                                                                ­                                 world.

part of me
wishes
there were something more
lighthearted
to a super-sonic boom.

something muted;
not another
concept
to be scaled
by the
rock climbers
of
rationality,
in one ******* ear
and
out the other.

it's valentines day,
and I miss her.

there's no plainer way to put it;
what this day
represents
is my
drooping
solar plexus,
and the tightness
of my totality
when I try to
focus in
on the feeling;
or, conversely,
when I try
to turn myself
away.

And so I must accept it
in minor tidal waves
lapping
across my tired eyes,
just to get caught in the crevices
of my always-bleeding
lips.

there are times
when the thoughts
float through my head,

of you,

and I picture your face as it glows
but from a place of distance
---like it wasn't
less
than
a
week
ago
that we ended almost 4 years of love in close proximity
--- instead,
it's been 6 months,
and with some distance on the pain,
rationality has processed all aspects of the break
and twisted the Rubix cube of my life back into its
solid reds, blues, greens, and yellows.

however,
as my concentration slips in the early evening,
this distance is replaced with what feels like a soft,
slow-motion punch
---not just to the gut,
but through the gut,
twisting my intestines into knots of withdrawal,
my eyes drooping from
AlErT
to
"why does it feel like I've had a death in the family?"

it's like clockwork;
I have a window to work with
each and every morning,
but by 4 PM if I'm caught mid......
-sentence..... in my....
textbook.....
"A History of the Modern Middle East",
my stomach dropping
like
global oil prices
in the 1960's
under the tutelage
of the
Saudi King
Faysal,
every word I read bounces off my irises
like they were tennis *****
and I'm playing squash with the pages.

Add another desire to a blacklist marking the names
of each of your failed ventures, as if being broke at a 5-star
restaurant were the worst thing that could possibly happen in
life.

The soft intimation of a legless dove, way above
the solar system and about to exit the gravity well to
enter warp-speed, presages itself with an advertising campaign
claiming there are never any slaves in the making of a planetary
settlement; but is it really because there was nothing there?
Is it really because there was no one to force into *******?

Or is there more to a story that can't be told?

it's a winter with a drop of
sun next to the pudge-smudge
artwork sweatily traced on the
window, reading: I <3 WINE
with a phallus extending from
the lower W and past the I N E
to limp dejectedly rightward and
down as if the weather were so
beautiful it caused conceptual
******

*or, perhaps we like it rough,
the rain, let's get those rocks
off

take another laterday

and remember I annoy

you.

I felt like I was expected

to expect, "I, exception."

I don't believe in special

chances; just deadmens

hands, a lot of painful

ambition

and a place I can't call

home

(but still

rest in)

You come out of the dark, and a young Japanese schoolgirl--couldn't be any older than 19--is standing in a heavy-lit archway, the blinkered 'sort-of's' of her eyes only visible in corners due to the convex glare rebounding from the heavy light and onto a parked Miyata windshield, right back into the bloodshot lower-left cleft of each eye, sleepless veins like miniature pipelines slogging her fossil fuel blood to the energy markets of her face (but it ends in death, hopeless economy! it begins in death like OPEC!)

There's concrete, and there's stone: the former a collection of synthetically compiled chunks of the latter. In either regard, it might just be the end of the World, tho just an intermission during an afternoon matinee for the world. There are a lot of things you don't understand. There is plenty more you do, and yet you believe your own humility when it whispers, "You don't," tho you are entirely unaware this is delusion and not humility, but some unconscious form of ascetic worship of WONDER!! You're going coocoo for cocopuffs WONDER! We can remember what J.B.S. Haldane once said: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

I was born at the edge of the Cold War. 4 years after America's Operation Just Cause deposed Nicaraguan dictator Manuel Noriega using heavy metal music and heavy metal weapons, loaded to capacity with heavy metal bullets. 4 years after the slow-dissolve tablet of the Berlin Wall finally faded upon the German palate. Brian Mulroney was my Prime Minister at birth. I was also alive (tho not 'conscious,' per se--intellectually conscious, that is) during the Prime Ministership of Canada's first female Prime Minister: Kim Campbell (she was only leader for just over 3 months and thus I cannot give her time in office the full credibility it would have deserved had she been a fully elected candidate instead of an inter-election Prime Ministerial appointment; when, for godssakes, will we have a Fist Nations' Prime Minister? I would like to believe the only reason there has been none is because the indigenous people have categorically rejected the game-fantasy we have stomped upon their land and the world and self-righteously crowned as 'realistic, sober, objective;' tho maybe I'm wrong, whispers Humility: "I don't know").

There is the endless and omnipotent consensus that the world's about to end. For those who study history, they will often notice that when 'then' was 'now,' it was often and always the end of history. 'Now' is the always-result of 'then' and it will never change unless we neglect its consideration. That's really all theory takes to disappear: stop thinking about it. (as if that were possible, ha!)
Because the impression has been one of pollution and confusion, our wide un-thought idealization as children has often led us to emulate all the bad habits we witness growing up, even if at one point we cloudlessly rejected them because the damage didn't seem clear, it was clear.

I was 8 years old when I took my mother's cigarettes from her bedroom while she slept, and proudly announced to her the next morning that I had thrown them out. She had become furious, tho I had done it out of a militant concern for her well-being. During my years of primeval arrival on this planet, mom had almost lost her life to breast cancer. I can't remember understanding much as it happened, nor do I recall fully understanding the implications of death until my grandmother died and I watched my dad fight back tears as he read aloud her eulogy, recalling a story I can pick through scattered memories stored in grey matter to resurrect only one fact about it: they were on a boat, pulling up to shore. My grandfather--the cheeky Briton-optimist he is--made some silly joke, and my grandmother pitched in. The rest is somewhere else in space.

However--regarding death-- I feel that even then we never understand the full implications of death in witnessing another's death, but only through dying ourselves. Which is fine. None of us need to understand these implications until the time comes (and even then, it may just drip away once you've reached the Light. Which is fine).

Returning to the cigarettes: I had absorbed the common knowledge they were awful for you. 'Death-sticks' indeed, just like that scene in Attack of the Clones. Tho I understood nothing of the chemistry, a box or a video or an authority explaining their potential 'results' or 'consequences' was enough for me to righteously desire to save my mother from her own acquired vice.

14 years later, I skulk through the streets of Victoria with Chris, high on ******* and chain-smoking Export-A Gold on the subconscious condition that the world will probably end soon enough for none of this to matter. Tho as I said: For those who study history, they will often notice that when 'then' was 'now,' it was often and always the end of history.

History is comprised of an endless succession of losers who sincerely believe they've figured it out. The only redeemable characters in this Human Odyssey are those who have realized nothing in particular. The people who think, believe, and conceptualize as an infinite process; something without a result. Something with abstract 'goals' that only fit for awhile, not forever.

I'm nobody special. Tho, at the same time, I am; and at the same time and in terms of my relationship to this greater Human Odyssey, whether I will matter in this giant plot is in part up to me (should I write a book? 10 books? Relentlessly pursue the arts, whether that be rapping, writing, music?) and in part up to sheer probability (if I do write a book, will many notice? Or will it be swept under the Great Rug of the Present-Into-Past and be forgotten to thought?), and regardless of all this: the rocks will forget. The trees will forget. Both space and dark matter will have already forgotten what I am doing and what I may one day do.

But life can't be approached on a basis of personal impact; honestly, who wants to pursue the writing of 10 books or the creation of albums in the same way the capitalist approaches economy, for sheer attention and accumulation? Those desperado's, those who chase-the-game-of-success, they have already lost. They lost as soon as they tried to win. There is nothing to win, no award great enough to keep, no person you love or have loved who you will one day depart with for the very last time. But to depart with a personality may be tragic, it is only a true void in concept; when one removes the individual (both themselves and the one they love) from the eternal context of the universe--the ebb and flow of tides to the movement of the moon, the soft breeze supplemented by a fan placed next to an open window, how your hand--when clapped to the surface of a wooden table--is one with the matter in that table regardless of how transiently you perceive such a touch as an interaction. In essence, it's all still here; it always was, and never won't be.

tho maybe I'm wrong, whispers Humility.


                                             *"I don't know."

Cleopatra's Boom, as worn as earth as economy, salivating stone-head medusas turning Hercules to stone mending torn shirt-sleeves as it's posterity's sign of decay when nostalgia melts like an old bucket of icecream, not empty—but gooey sticky sugar-salt in mist of phosphene glare from a quarter of the deserts heat. You can see 64% of the picture. The other 36% is forever lost in the splattered blindspot dots of your diamond optical nerves, an eternal mismatch eternity—the parts you won't notice when your stomach aches after three consecutive cigarettes for breakfast. **Cleopatra's Boom, belittled like oceans, always so alien tho it makes up 71% of our global entirety—thoughts find external storage on disc drives, in water—there's a mouth out there with a saltier kiss than the Pacific, one that caws like seagulls in exodus, announcing to the Peace Arch: “I American. I need a greater space to spread my legs.”

it's like the fuzzy streak left across a shut-closed car door window on a "Goodbye Jane," perhaps a "Goodbye Forever"

where the sadness—blank, distant, muffled innermost I-already-miss-you's—it's all there and we just hug the phantom between us: one last joke

before

      the      wheeelss

roll
    away.




*(my 4-wheel drive
parked in neutral
greeting inconvenience
like the credits
at the end
of an hour)

Far out, and beyond, and within, the Diamond Jubilee is the Diamond Sutra.

The Diamond Sutra.

There were so many moments, back whenever it was, when I would stop and listen to the nothing that corrected itself thru my earbuds-- bloodflow, cloth-blank losers in a wanna-wantnot trance.

It was eons in the making. And so am I.

What is it you wish to do with your life? Find a happy little wife or a burly, gunsling husband, something to get married to so-as to reinforce the stereotypes? (becus stereotypes are the comfiest thought-houses to live in, hm!)

Do you wish for money money and a jobby job with Bishnu arms to paint the 'bigger picture' at quadruple the speed only two hands ever could?

I wish for tears! Tears and frustration and suicidal thoughts, with reprieve to mind-explosions every time I see or hear of something beautiful. Something aching and *****, little silver fish crawling in the soup I made with the blood and sweat of all my friends' indifference.

What made Anthony so elaborately cold in those early autumn months? What made him glare so sourly at my exhaustion whenever I slithered past his adonis figure in our overwhelmingly ***** kitchen? Was I the quintessence of a terrible roommate? Irresponsible? Ditzy? Was the kitchen—in its pig-trough pig-sty bacon-grease glory—tacitly my fault, despite the observation it'd been I who had purged the mess last? Or was it my drug habits and the fact that on the night Anthony returned from his impulsive trip to Alaska, I was with Chris—blasting Bob Dylan and the Tallest Man on Earth—cradling my chin on the jean-sand islands of my cramping knees, high as a shuttle in the ketamine nebula? These were all questions that stoked the fires of internal doubt whether I liked it or not. People pretend to talk themselves out of status anxiety as if it were possible to entirely neutralize such a natural reaction—as if it were possible not to wonder what earned such irrational disfavor in the eyes of another. Especially when “another” is a roommate, an almost omnipotent staple in day to day life even if efforts are taken to ignore or avoid—a constant weave of growing atmospheric pressure and a pang of anxiety at the sight of his shoes or the sound of his grunts and clangs while at work on a meal in the kitchen—of course, as is obvious, I can take things far too personally. But there were points in which his silence or indifference would scare me—as if he might've wound up a psychopath and broke my neck in a fit of overboiled passive-aggression.
To be fair and give the reader a clearer picture of Anthony, he had—historically—been an incredibly generous fellow and a relatively close friend long before we approached one another on the idea of potential roommates. He was large in build—not overweight in any sense—but incredibly fit with an active agenda to exercise and eat right, both habits of which I had never had the stamina to maintain. Girls loved him. Physically, he was gorgeous—puffy curled hair deliberately stylized into a modern European pompadour; dark hazel eyes with a constantly evolving dynamism in the way they gazed... and a masculine stubble that seemed to naturally grow-out to look as posh as David Beckham, just without all the effort and pomp. Mentally, he was the perfect synthesis of adorable geek, thoughtful philosopher, and strikingly suave, dapper, athletic, and goofy 'good-guy'—he was always out with his friends or at home reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy novels, and on occasion I would see that his looks were almost burdensome to him. As if they were a superfluous gift and a personal curse—constantly forcing him into social over-exertion as an extrovert when he, at heart, was a closet introvert unable to disentangle his self-reflective image from his internal reality. As if he were unable to process the amount of attention he received.
I had tacitly wondered, at times, if he was also in-the-closet regarding something else as well, though I had always admired his effeminate qualities and mannerisms as he never once hinted at a negative self-consciousness about their strange manifestations in open view of the world. Externally, at least, he never acted like they were problems or indicative of some internal lack of found-definition, even on the comical occasion when I walked in on him bathing on his lonesome, quietly listening to Miley Cyrus and playing with a troupe of three rubber duckies—the bathroom light off and several candles burning in aesthetically strategic corners of the room. He also constantly brewed tea using an adorable teapot designed to look like an elephants head, with the hot liquid pouring from the Disney-like characters trunk. This—I reflected—was most certainly connected to his love for the 1941 children's classic, Dumbo. It was a movie he and I held in common, having watched it together on multiple occasions before our cohabiting turned sour. Of course, what was most indicative of this private wandering judgement of mine was the fact that he worked at the city's only gay bar as the youngest bartender employed. At 1 AM every night, all the bartenders (whom were pre-screened eye candy for the patrons' sake) would peel off their skin-tight neon tops and romp around shirtless, shouting last-call through the bright-eyed frey of top 40 hits and cannonading flirtations.  
Not that I wish to put him under the microscope, as if any feminine qualities in a man were something strange or problematic to me—nor do I wish to study his mannerisms like a condescending anthropologist of imperial Britain, establishing pathological definitions for what was never an illness to begin with. No... I ask these questions because he decided, one day, that he didn't like me. I ask these questions because I came upon him in the living room multiple times listening to Alan Watts's lectures on taoism—a strange anxious-emptiness behind his eyes—and when I began to worry he was dipping into some sort of existential depression, I approached him with an Alan Watts book—The Wisdom of Insecurity—in order to make a recommendation and strike up therapeutic conversation on the basis of  a philosopher we had in common. As I did so, he would frantically nod and avert eye-contact, hiding any perturbation well enough for me to assume he was still with me as I spoke. I later found the book on top of the fridge and placed it back on my shelf thinking, 'he probably has a ton to read as is.' It only became apparent when I finally decided to ask him if he was unhappy with me—this was about 2 weeks before he finally moved out—and he responded with, “I've definitely been annoyed that you use my stuff and eat my food all the time without compensation or asking,” which I understood at first until I realized I only did so because he did the same—constantly eating my cereal, using my milk, reorganizing my couches in the living room—but I didn't mind because I assumed it was a reciprocal arrangement and thus took his eggs and his bacon on the assumption (and belief) in pooled communal resources. But he continued: “And you talk at me all the time about things I have no interest in which is kinda frustrating,” which confused me even further when it was only friendly concern I was tacitly attempting to translate into his feeling wanted and liked by the person he lived with. These words, in the end, released the built-tension between us like a bursting pressure valve. He eventually apologized for how he'd behaved, and then largely disappeared from my life.

Sometimes I'll be brushing my teeth, and I'll wonder if he's doing alright. I'll wonder if he found his taoist balance in either silence or speech.

me me me all me ** **** HOho ****

this the nature of the snowmen snowing

Peruvian wind blowing, hoping hoping

wonder wander with an all-night eyes-

-play-trickz and shout strange figures

peripheral dandruff / cigar / concussed

mental image of an addicts bloodied

scabs

riddle **** **** u riddle

not a joke a riddle riddle

short little psalm-reading

ya ya psalm reading no palm

reading psalm reading hymn

and that girl kept singing

all loud lisp shuddup *******

it I love hurt the way u call

me kieren not ky-ran rhymes

with iran in all disembodied

pro-nounciationz like 'EEE-ran'

or 'EYE-ran' both let response

wither wither from my dumb dumb

writers-black writers-dark writers

block wither wither withering

hydrochloric salt

flavored kimchi noodles

make me favorite I'll

miss u in past-tense

tense tense kiss tense

lip tense wrist tense

lovely lava leave me

tense tense tense man

wat u doin' wat u wearin'

wat u wantin' wantin' crave

crave lead lost iris-tilted

desire

"there's all these worlds I just want to explode into, and I.. I haven't been able to.. haven't-- part of me is really excited while another part of me-- another part of me is like aahhh very nervous, you know" she sits and talks like fire thunder water rain, the lesser part of me is still stung with an arrogant confusion. No reality is my reality is the reality of things around-- sometimes it hurts to be alive-- aches and bleeds-- other times it's like gym-pain-hurt or classroom significance with a keepers knowledge base but a lot of fear of fluorescent lights (of and for said fluorescent lights).

There's only silence now-- silence in the modern sense of silence of speech-- the drone of water-drips and espresso machines and underquiet music from ceiling speakers is the whitenoise of the world when everyone decides to shut-up. I will begin to read into the world the same way I read up on it.. I will sling my own roadkill carcass across my left-shouldered sweater.. cross myself off your bucketlist; wish I had some adderal to weather me up like a cloud.

I'm not gonna lie and pretend to be 'okay.' Per se, I'm 'okay,' but as a business-as-usual assumptive process of 'yes I will see you tomorrow afternoon and we will meet in the cafe downstreet from the market' sense of the phrase I am not okay and in fact sat alone ontop my sheets and for 27 minutes straight gazed into my bookshelf wondering why it all seemed so uninteresting when 30 minutes ago the topic of Islamic extremism tethered me in with wonder and fright.

- - -

If you want to meet a boy, meet him in a library. Meet him in your favorite section and next to your favorite author, next to your favorite subject-- perhaps your forte is the trading history of ancient Polynesian tribes--- they had oversized canoes and somehow managed to sail thousands and thousands of oceanic kilometres unto ancient Australia, Pitcairn, Wallis and Futuna... perhaps it is a cultural conceit of ours to look down in awe and wonder, "how, in the name of Judaeo-Christianity, were a group of savages able to spread across an expanse of ocean the size of several Roman Empires?"

shut the **** up and drink yr fluoride water, whiteman

- - -

There are a thousand different ways to spell a name.

Pronunciation means so little—so desperately trying to fit itself securely into the matrix-belt of existence—no, I said, you can't use my toothbrush. It goes in my mouth.

With the sertraline still sifting its way thru my veins, I arranged another line of ******* upon the cloud-white-black-stripe plate and saw that—except for the light—it was almost entirely invisible. I rolled up Chris's 5 dollar bill and then pinched both ends to draw the makeshift drug-hose into an even tighter loop. Chris paced back and forth in fueled thoughtfulness, unperturbed at my disallowance of his using my toothbrush to assuage his plaque-plagued jaws. He was on about the lowest common denominator as we discussed the folly of all orthodoxy—I held the bill up to my left nostril, inhaling with rapid force to push the drug past my nasal cavity and toward the closest vessels capable of breaking blood-brain barrier for ecstatic 30-minutes of internal spirit-fame.

most of the time, my bad habits are just telling my thoughts to shuddup.  

(quiet little Angels; confused Holy Ghosts. That's all we really are, innit, kid?)

more than a wizard!
cavernous in the round
-about assumption I am
anything else-- I gazed at
the wetted street of 6 AM
superhighway & thought
of how ready I was to die--
******* binge and a ******
rip of snot to a ***** handkerchief--
ears ringing like a subdued choir
of thoughtless Catholics following
symbolic dogma to drown-out the
itch of erected ***** and wetted *****--
gonna have to tug at the **** like a
trainwhistle and tell the passengers
that we're about to *** to a stop--
more than a wizard*! baked beans
topped on moldy stench bread from
pity party church supper and the city
does flash-spins in my arrogantly careless
high-eyes MAN I am intoxicated as alternative
to a singular quiet in bedroom with youtube /
thoughts of chest-burn goner lover / thoughts
of suicide and debt / maybe only I know the
facts and maybe I will learn how to tell them

I

tried

to

write

a

poem

but

it

















hurt,





    






















             etc.

your delicate figure







crushed





on

      the







seament.

the brain muffles itself in fuzzy
screech-fall-flows. writers block,
zoned into oblivion, thought anti
-depressed and always sleepy with
a whistle with a wary worried walk
beyond the words it read in quiet little
head-room office space. hitherto unknown
was the minds capacity for deserted lethargy--
a battlefield full of intuitive feeling gone and
warbling like a bird with no verbalistic functions--
speaking in musical notes and tonal chirp's-- the
reality of things can only be understood as an over
-extended staring contest and our eyes have been teary
since the birth of the

    

                                     warmblooded  





mouse.

the adderall dripping down the back of my throat tastes like sour oranges. little patches of sooty blackness caress the strange dips under my eyeballs as a sign of overworked modernity eating filth to break the fast of a dinnerless evening. cars... more and more cars... glide up Johnson Street on direction to an anywhere packed with reason and meaning, travel-wrung after hours of work and play like Greek tragicomedies written in an Indo-European language lost to the passage of endless time in the Urals. Trailing behind us, the Cossack signaled for the rest of his entourage to approach a little slower if the city were to be won from the Mongol horde approaching Baghdad at the eastern gate (A.D. 1258) and within the little eyelid movies drizzling through my mind every time I close my eyes, I heard screams and scrambled hashtags pleading for humanitarian assistance.. pleading for a chance to rescue the Islamic Golden Age from the brink of its twilight battle with obliviously obvious tired-eyed savagery reveling in the soft moonlit warmth of Mesopotamian beachsand. Blood was being worn as some sort of slimey undergarment, leveling the entire populace to a place so far gone, the mind could no longer discern the universe as a set of tetris patterns blocked and connected with a light string of consciousness, the light of intense college-student starvation as if tuition were the bloodlands trapped between ****** and Stalin.

There isn't much to be said for the way she used to dance. It was sort of like a jimmied cow-- I say 'jimmied' in the context of a cow, out late, midwestern meadow, center of the winter, shivering... shivering so profusely, it was almost as if it were dancing. Dancing, jimmied, silly, frightened, escapist sentiments pulsing through his beef belly blood as if he were capable of some sort of latent sentience, some sort of ability to discern love from hate, black from white, ethical standards from matters of the spirit. That's the way she danced.

She'd shiver to the beat like a dangling mango, misplacing herself in the music. She would cry a little, too. You could see the tears in her aura, flagrantly asking to be left alone. Flagrantly leasing themselves to the moment and whatever delight the moment could afford.

She asked me; "so, what do you look for in a girl?"
I said: "a decalcified pineal gland."

She jingled her keys in front of me, and smiled. I lost myself in someone elses talking points; across the room, I could hear the chatter of some teenage lip-reader repeating her every word line-for-line. It was 12:58 AM, the Mongols began their destruction of the Abbasid libraries. I just stood there, amazed at the near ventriloquism of this strange pretender. Was he, perhaps, pulling her strings? Was she, perhaps, a puppet? Was there, perhaps, an instant connection between these 2 brains on the quantum level, one effecting the other, regardless of the distance in space and time?

all vaugely demand echo
dead echo sideways all
vaguely insight meaning
unto lingering match-struck
scars says reminders are just
enough to forget. filters con
-secrated like saints to canon lore,
cardinals spell sociopathy in a simple,
sym-pathetic phrase: "Sociopaths have
no regard whatsoever for the social contract,
but they do know how to use it to their advan
-tage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil
existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for
him."

the wind was like a sidewinder
missile. desert below kept itself
cratered and ancient, 'fraid of
some explosion from a Greater
Deity of Temporal Landlock.
Where the lesser of us saw death,
the better of us saw livers. Where
the lesser of us saw loss, the better
of us felt drunk. The learn-ed belief
in the existence of the Human Race
kept calling itself back to base with
tinnitus raging in its ear-drums:
"the dreams of the elder chiropractic
surgeon are the same as the dreams
of the youthful architect: design; that's
it. design."

melded, eaten, forgotten, and left to the
bunchy blood of 'ask,' the marauder saw
herself as complete. flawed within bound,
angry within reason, there was a little angel
on her shoulder, asking: 'sundown? this is a
time for bringers. never those who forget.'

the amount of traffic on any given street is a laughably proclaimed quid pro quo sputtered by a drunk university third year major in philosophy-- taking the room as his own outer brain-- leveling it with the assumption: 'this is how exciting it is to be alive... rooms are the physical manifestation of the categorical imperative.'

taking government loans, parental guidelines
and flashy dress-skirts made this life unfact
and unfiction. Lost in the disabled returns on
tax dividends, the world kept calling your name.
“Rise up and be born with me, brother” Pablo
Neruda inclined-- “Give me your hand from the deep  
Zone seeded by your sorrow.” it all it all it all ached,
an abyss of patience with nothing-- a droplet of sidelined
coffee given sentience with ingestion-- all the banal all
the mundane all the flowing rock-face moments so
presented by society-- in my heart of hearts, in my mind
of minds, in my eye of eyes, in my neck of necks, I found pain....
the ache of achey betrayal and the ache of achey loss. In this
pain we find repreive from Pollyanna-- reprieve from the false
Gods of Evil, the Devil Within your Ex-Girlfriend-- the reason
she let his ******* inside. Through all the latency-- through
starving streetless sleepless evenings-turned-to-nights I could
see death within the sliver of a flashlight beam.. telling me to
take the life or leave the life but never in-between-- telling me
the pain was part and parcel to the ecstasy of faith and resurrection--
screaming “FLATLINED IF YOU WANT, FASTLINED IN YOU
WANT, SIDELINED IF YOU WANT, STREETLIGHT IF YOU
WANT” and throughout this evil and this darkness and this nothing
-but-a-flashlight-beam, I hear Neruda--

*“Rise up and be born with me, brother.”

it's night now
and events have stopped.

Stillness evades the froth of evening
calm leather moves none under the fabric.

This home -- older than our world -- flushed
with wisdom -- flushed with glee -- flushed
with the violent storm of transience and
correction -- eyesight jiggled and adjusted
for new intentions -- meaning frisked for
rocks on a Boeing --

it's night now
and events have stopped.

you have stopped.

I have stopped.

stove-top percolator sits stove-top *****,
house is a flippant mess of disgust and
attempt. there's a distant whisper of a
yell to somewhere someone else outside,
blinded windows and piquing sunlight
writing lawnmower hums to the conclaves
of covered eardrums and a thought crosses
the mind:

*'stale old coffee and undusted, unswept floors.
life is an attempt to keep the world clean and yet
lose yourself in the rubble *** it seems that all
secret desires crave an unmade bed'

what does it mean to be lonely.

what does it mean to be lonely,

what does it mean to be lonely?


except



they're so




           close
















you























can't  

































­feel    




      





































      ­          them?

greater than the sun and the moon
and the stars.. all combinationed as
amorphous telepathic diamond in
muttering ******-cave... is the dirt
underneath a slippy fingernail. an
aching finger working overtime to
function the body as day-to-day
existence laughs itself back into
shape after universal disaster. when
it was younger, the finger began to
pick at silly things like dusty piles of
trash, heaps of dirt, and flyswatter dog
****. it later grew up to finger a girls wet
***** and tease her with the juice on two
-finger-three-finger in mouth as *******
shoved itself up and inside, natures tractor
beam          -     -     -          God's Great Throbbing Death Star(e)

you took my ****** rags and smeared them with your spit-- taped naked pictures to the wall of that dungeon until all he could see was your body, and your body alone. you loaded the pistol and shot yourself in the foot, when I noticed the bleeding you said it was just a flesh-wound. he finally fizzled your toes from out of your shoe, a dark cinderella-meets-the-prince-in-the-dark, and I saw that the wound was so open and gangrenous that little spritz of dried blood had formed faces and tears on the soles of your torn-and-tumbled canvas shoes.

you tried to say sorry. you pleaded and pleaded and said you'd take pistol-to-head or pistol-to-heart to be rid of the pain of my gargled and gutted reaction. you cried and you cried, our hearts sunk to the bottom of plastic-now stomachs.. but forgiveness is no microwave. forgiveness is a ballpark in steep Illinois summer heat where you drink to stay hydrated, think to stay sane, and write to the titter of tears on your chest.

Now heal your wound, antibiotic the gangrene. Just better the soles of your feet.

I'm already walking and walking and walking 'til my face meets obliterate sun.

allegiances shift; those who once loved each other now hold tight to grudge. one reason, two reason, black sooty handprint slapmarks on the ***, on the face, on the chest, on the rest... raindrenched beauty translated into achy-bone-break loneliness beer ****** drug addictions constant fall from grace-- as if the void of action gave way to unnecessary criticism, phantasmal attack, reasons to judge as if it were anyone's place (everyone's place) and you can dole out the truth yet never take it when it's given.. the rain and the forest are so still and yet the rain eventually runs like blood, pools at your feet, leaves and branches like guts and wind like sharp-pain hack-coughs from the root of the solar plexus.. happy I left what it became in my mind, and yet (somehow) the bitter-blood still reaches out, plague-like, to tick the back of the mind and say: 'remember where you came from' 'remember who you were.'

two minutes past 3:30 PM,
work in an hour. browsing
the internet I discover two of
my best friends have erased me
from their virtual lives like toxic
badfumes. they are somewhere
else in their flaming skulls and I
am somehow made a target of
convenience. I sliver between 'they're
-bad-friends' and 'they're-troubled-friends'
and wait for a reason to come by facebook
message explaining their choice-disappearance.
it's like a battering-ram to the skull, but it does
not hurt me so much as it makes me wonder:

**who do they think I've become?