Up as early as the dawn, clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip-- half like empty crystal void, half like deep-ocean Mariana's Trench with happy-little-pockmarks all up-in-between.

What in the Heroes am I doing up so early on a Thursday morning? Not sleeping. Downloading new video games via Pirate Bay. Watching old-analog-rendition documentaries from History Channel circa early 2000's-- one doc in particular about U.S. government tests on unwilling (and largely unknowing) civilian populations. I as the orifice and experiencier of the world at large, all at ONCE THRU THE EYEZ and at TWICE THRU THE BRAINIAL CRANIAL and out thru the thoughts and words and cramped headspace full of starships, *******, eloquent and twisting sunrise dimensionals...

The Internet? It'll make you the universe as-if you weren't the universe already!
Straight through the blood and sweat and 'it's-too-earlies-for-this.' You wanted a bit of laughter, and that's exactly what you got.

Though it time-lapses across my faulty-flick'ring eyelids, I can tell past the Buddha-Bottle-Buddha-Themed-Beer sitting empty on the windowsill amidst a wild collection of coffee cups and power converters that the Sun sees the Capital Letters that were written out line-for-line in Times New Roman across my RNA-DNA slow-Saganite Cosmic Poetry by God the Author.

Eyelids are heavy and yet inverted and living-- real and concerned with loving the affair of life rather than the marriage! Life as an unofficial longevity-but-not-forever kinda thing.. like young love, old love, marriage, too, when you really get down to it.. just confused little souls feeling pulled to one another in the proverbial Dark Under the Sunlight and Illuminated by Aurora Borealis Forever-Daytime-Forever-Nighttime-Forever.. Syrian rebels waking up on a Monday morning to the sound of gunfire and ALLAHU AKBAR's in distance.. creeps, yea, a television Evangelist preaching God is Love and God Treats His Children Like Children (discipline the soul, yes? discipline the soul!) (**** the widow and ask her why you did it)

All the preaching homelessers who think they've found God in the same dark alleyway they found their snot-drenched headaches every casted winter night-- neglected by the Government, always remembered by the God-- Lucifer (Government, Passivity, Watchful Indifference), and God (A Few Dollars Here and There, A Shamanic Vision at Franciscan Ascetic Extremity) aaaahhhh all bungled-up and waiting for a Savior when the Savior is themselves or the debt they owe to Royal Life Ltd. and we wait like the rest of them, they angry over my no-dollars-to-spare ("look, I make rent, I grab groceries, I pay debt. In all likelihood, you have more money than I do right now. I'd love to help you out if our poverty's weren't so close to kissing") all such rudeness in one respect and yet delinquently honest.. how I can admire the travelling Hippie Bands reckless abandon and yet never forget to fear Abandon..

and all the preaching Home-Leasers.. the strangeness' clad in glass and patchwork straight-black perm-pressed leadership stench and pastel markers smeared across the sidewalk.. ".. if you take away your consideration of the company's weak future bond equity, there are three different ways we could tackle this project.." busy-ness-man.. snarky and corrected with a Job To Do. But Who Am I?

A Job To Do. A Job To Do Do Do Do.

NOT so much A Job Well Done (Never Quite A Job Well Done) (serendipity has a crease-and-fold collective opinion of our concrete jungles and military juntas.. "'I can't even watch the game tonight.. Brasilia is the capital of Brazil?' 'Sao Paulo, you drunk buffoon.''No, Brasilia!' 'Sao Paulo!'")
stupors, collect-calls, drag-queens, militant armies and school shooters in bullet-proof vests all the best, all the best.. what I wanted was a reason to crease my forehead all adult-like and say to the kid, "I really think you'd do a lot better in computer networking.. check the job statistics! international openings are through the ROOF.." and she sighs at the weight of every crush-ed dream coalescing into filmy-slime-froth at top of inadequately-heated Cream of Mushroom Soup.. what silty salty ****.. all the parochial worldviews of the 20th century being swallowed in the Liberal Boom and Bust, Boom and Bust, Boom and Big ***** ***** ***** Bloated ***** (click the link and see your fantasies pass Disney's red-light and hit **** ******* with a vintage glass bottle of ol' Coca Cola Noir)..

After a sleepless neverend night, I stayed up and bored on the black leather couch with my roommates cat waltzing in-an-out-an-in-an-out still confused at his relatively recent move to our war-zone clone of a home.. poor ******* of a cat, names Tonic.. has a bred sister named Gin.. drink a cup of joseph trying to finish illegal-pirate of newest Splinter Cell (sadly o'sad it demands too much on the vide-ah card and lags all creative and bleepy) all the steam from my ****-preground coffee in'ah French press doves upward to the window and the clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip.. I contemplate concerta to stay perked-out and take a shower, pop just that, XL release concerta.. not sleeping makes it strangest experience, uncomfortable at first.. pressures in lower jaw, electric tightness at tips of front teeth as I talk myself down on the 6 to Royal Oak Exchange via Downtown all freaky-vibed anxieties about my blurring vision and perhaps eternal cross-eyes I avoid looking at reflections *** they father me out of my bedroom, warm sanity.. warm seance dance-arounds-a'naked-and-praise.. I feel okay now, though. Better than okay, I feel elated and awake as if I slept a solid 9-some hours and Alex to left writing stories of horse-drawn labor with Petter on Skype telling tales of his not-so-gladness to be home in Norway for another 3-weeks.

A group of hearty-look hardly-look investors in stock business pajamas march past in strange rabble on way, perhaps, to next coffee joint down road. The unfamiliar block next to window I sit near seems as mysterious in existence as Diagon Alley.. where in the fuckssakes is it, exactly? I once ventured to find out and came across library courtyard I tagged as future-reading locale. The hungry sun above was at snowblind potential and eating away at my lack of protected retinas. I've stopped worrying about protection as it all dis-integrates equally careful.

And it's our covert motives that give us reason to shame-- unrealistic to be ashamed, but ashamed you'll be anyway for disliking the guy or avoiding the girl and slithering into a fetal position to deflect the ***-flack from Moral Mike. You escape yourself successfully, and douse the city in gasoline machines for another 15 years 'til our fossil fuels shivvy dribble flop fade into literal thin air.. bubye.. the sun is getting brighter with every passing minute, it's all summery out and I'm inside typelocking myself to a circumferenced earth at the tip of my bleeding fingers. I'm just waiting for apostrophe, and realize that, some day, I will be a fuel source too (you're welcome, Succeeding Race).

and all races are inevitably lost. This is not the cynics drawl.

it is optimism.

'Dutch Bakery' in purpled-neon, lights of the cross-street behind slink outward vis reflection projected unto Liquor Plus, Empire Theatre. Kind and married-typical common law couple with a fellow looking feel-low sits with pack atop his lap, tapping bottom, fidgeting leg. His partner whispers 'shall we go for coffee?' and he seems a little fizzled to respond with 'yes, ha ha, yes!'

They all look tired on the bus and I'm wired on the bus, a psychoactive passion for coffee in all forms the general complicit in my make-up brazier. The fuzzy-muffled image in the dark beyond the moving windows are like ground-level star-scapes hopping from eye-to-eye. No one here can see they're part of the greatest story ever told. Part Ten I etch unto a sketch upon a smartphone, I won't forget this moment and neither will the world. All of them I love, they love me back in some corrupted way. Won't admit the night is bright with kisses and arms up past the hemisphere.

Noting every quick fix is a way of ******. Brooklyn ******, 'MOI-da,' counting ways to be defunct. It's a long day every day, some days are handfuls and others vast oceans wherever. Spliced and shared between the masses, each mass correct of parts who think the masses are a giant individual with a fluctuating waistline depending on the era.

You can't help but come and ask yourself, 'whatever became of me? whatever began in hoping? whoever saw land in site?' before the histories rot in landfills, nothin more than sun-drenched wood-sheets, sketched-out symbols on a saw. and this, and this, and this

and this, my friends, is how the story told itself again

          again

                     again

again

              again.

Called in sick to work, disappoint the boss, *** of a terrible ***** hangover I framed as the flu.

'I've got the cold-body-shivers and a bucket next to my bed. I'd be no help to you, trust me.' Thankfully, one of the friendlier dishwashers agreed to work the shift in my absence. My hangover eventually plateaued into one of those fried-brain poetic calms, where you're pretty sure that terrible habit of yours shaved a few minutes or days from your life, and yet you're in some sort of involuntary (yet accepted and mostly secretly-desired) state of meditation and trance with the world. People walking past speak of strange, complex lives, with their own problems, their own triumphs, romances, fears, and aspirations.

Two young college-boys, dashing, laugh with each other at Habit Coffee. My debit card stopped working for some strange reason, with the machine reading 'insufficient funds' as the cause, and yet I managed to check my balance via online application, and I still have a solid $15.86 available so something is clearly wrong. I explain this to the baristas at Habit, and the girl understands my first-world plight, gives me a free cappuccino as a result, and I sit there at the clearest panoramic window overlooking the corners of Yates and Blanshard thankful for the kindness and finish Part One of Kerouac's Desolation Angels (Desolation in Solitude).

*****, echw. I spat at the brink of ***** above my ***** toilet seat, perhaps the more unhealthy fact-of-the-matter is that I somehow managed to keep it down. So it rots away my stomach and eats away at my liver. Disgusting. Although the prior stupor was quite nice.

On my way to the Public Library (where I sit now), some girl with a summer-skirt was unbeknownst of the fact that it had folded somehow at the back and as she ran for the parked 11 (Uvic via Uplands), everyone could see her thonged *** and they all looked back, forth, back, in *****-awkwardity (I included) wondering what was ruder: telling her? or just watching her spring away? I think I heard someone make a quip remark about it, and yet glanced away and forward as to seem unaroused (their partner was with them, holding hands and all, avoiding the lumpy desire and lust that always appears in short bouts during moments like that).

I need some sort of adventure, tasting the potential of existence as I called in sick to work and immediately felt better once the shadow it cast was delivered from the day. I think of Alex and Petter, with their motley crew of savages, riding highway 101 toward San Francisco. Last I heard, they had stopped over in Portland and perhaps had said hello to our friend Tad in the area. I wish I could have gone, felt the road glow in preternatural beauty and ecstatically bongo'd every breath. I haven't felt the true excitement of freedom and travel in so very, very long. Always, the thought of debt and labour. That's the niche I've crawled into for the time being, and I owe a lot to the friends who wait (without hate, without anger) for me to pay them back. I have some sort of shameful asceticism in the way I work now, as if I cannot just up and quit as I may often do, because I'm doing it for the friends who kindly (perhaps, dumbly) propped me up with coin. Even if most of it goes to an insatiably hungry MasterCard Troll living under a bridge of self-immolating sadnesses and post-modernisms, at least my fridge is full of food.

I lost my passport anyways, they would have stopped me at the Peace Arch and turned me back to Canada without exception. That's a modern border for you, there isn't much room for kindness. Just pragmatism.

*****, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism.

That house, at 989 Dunsmuir, the place I call home in the Land of the Shoaling Waters, is exceptionally lonely on days like this, even with Jen there reading her Charles Bukowski and offing a few comments about the gratuitous ******* oft-depicted in the book. I feel trapped, at times, by all those machinations I so deftly opposed as a teenage anarchist. In principle, I still oppose them. Most intensely when they trap me, although the World of Capital has successfully alienated me as a member of the proletariat work-force and somehow twisted my passion into believing that the ways of economy and rat-race are just 'laws of nature.' If this is true, which I believe for pragmatisms sake they are (*****, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism), there really is no such thing as liberty, and what we have called 'liberty' is nothing more than a giant civilised liability within which we are all guilty until proven guiltier. Yes, because I owe it to myself and to the landlord.

I realize, often, the endless love-hate relationship with existence that one calls 'life.' It seems undeniably true that everyone is in this same jam, secretly loving something, and at the same time secretly hating it. The distinction between 'love' and 'hate' quickly becoming redundant when they are found together drinking champagne at the dusty corner-table of the most indescript and ugly bar in the alley of eternal psychology.

My back hurts, my brain
clicks, it's all a little
melancholic; trapped,
finicky, yet calm,
hopeful, excited, and
real. About everything

all

at once.

How can you write like a beatnik in an age of eternal connectivity? Just keep writing messy, weighted passages, whine-and-dine frustration, and cling on to dear life as if it were better in a lottery ticket? Dream of a rucksack revolution, ask yourself how you're not brave enough to be a Dharma ***? Would you not question your motives in rebellion, keep yourself at arms-length for sake of self-hatred, and posture yourself on the sidewalk insisting it's not pretentious?

Ah, all the vagueness and all the creeps, all the I-guess-I'm-happy's and all the success stories mingling with each other on this planet-rock. Some sort of hybrid productivity asking to be heard. Writing about liberty and livers, both accepted as ok and yet all take a beating in the face of silence and revolt. There's a science to all this, no? Some sort of belief in mandalas and star-signs, opening portals to Lemuria to take a weight right off your shoulders. I am Atlantis, and I am sinking.

A cigarette doesn't care, and neither do I. Addicted to a moribund desire to live. To really live! Not just add a few more moments to longevity by swallowing a carrot twice a day. Not just brushing my teeth twice between sunrise and sunset to avoid halitosis. Not just sitting and waiting for language to speak on my behalf.

Be-half, be-whole. Be-yonder, lose yourself. Be-yonder, and travel. Be-yonder, and forgive. Be-yonder, and don't forget. Store those memories and add them to your landscape, next time you drop acid, run amok through those stairwells and fields, re-introduce yourself to your life and remember the every's forever. Become highschool you again, where you'd sit on your mothers porch June mornings on your third cup of coffee, writing a poem with the drive of existential freedom unpresented with fears of rent or labour. You want fast-food? *** the change off your poor mum, and meet your old friends down at the local A&W.; These days really don't last forever, and thankfully you were smart enough to avoid working all those years. They will remain the best years of your life for.. perhaps.. your whole life.

Some mornings, you would wake up late on a Pro-D day, sipping a fourth cup of joe and watching the Antique Road Show on CBC because it's the only half-interesting thing playing on a late Tuesday afternoon. Your mothers couch was leather at the time, placed closest to the deck window with some sort of ferny-plant right next to it making peace with the forest. You would get lonely at times, and it wasn't until you graduated that you noticed how beautiful those 4 high-lined stick-trees standing in the desolate firth as the last remaining survivors of a clear-cutting operation really were, the way they softly bent in the wind, some sort of anchor whether rain or shine. Your mother would be at work, your brother would be out, or at dads, or upstairs, and for half-hours at a time you would stare at those trees, warped slightly through the lens of your houses very old glass. To you, it seemed, the world could be meaningless, and these trees would go as a happy reminder of how calm and archaic and beautiful this meaninglessness was. Watching them always quenched a blurry hunger in the soul. Something happy this way came. Something tricky and simple.

I could never really reach myself back in those days. Not anymore, anyways. That old me no longer had a phone, had tossed it in a creek in a fit of idealistic rage. That old me was living in a tent somewhere, squatting on private property and working at a bakery north of his old town. He still worked there, last I heard. Every summer evening, he went swimming in the ocean, wafting along on his back to think and pray. He was a Buddhist if I ever met one, reading the Diamond Sutra and the Upanishads, cracking the ice of belief with Alan Watts's 'Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown,' and preaching to his friends in cyclic arguments to prove the fundamental futility of theory. He's the kinda guy to shock you off your feet and make you wonder. Really wonder. Whoever he's become is on the road to wisdom. Whoever he thinks he is has never mattered. He's just waiting on the world to change.

Fancy.

Above me, the patterned cascade of skylight-window in the library courtyard hints at sunset coming. I contemplate the warmth and company of Tom's house a moment and wonder if he'd like me over. I think again of Petter and Alex way down there in Cali-forn-ya. A holy pilgrimage to Big Sur, and I still wonder where my passport is. If hunger and destitution weren't a block to intention, I'd be everywhere at once right now. I'd watch this very sunset from the top of Mount Baker, and yet be singing along to the Rolling Stones with Petter at my side. The Irish country would be rolling by again, and I would wonder where I am. The happy patch-work of County Cork would invite me to the Ring of Kerry where I would wait and sip a cappuccino, pouring over maps of Ireland in hopes of finding my hostel, as I'm sure I booked online.

The warm-red stonework of Whitstable village in Kent comes to mind. I think of Auntie Marcia and Uncle Bob, soaking up the sunlight with their solar panels and selling it back to the grid. I think of Powell River and its wilder-middle-ness, the parade of endless trees stretching east out unto Calgary. I think of every public washroom I have ever defecated in, and wonder how noisy or silent they might be right now. I think of Sooke, and its sticks. I think of Salt Spring Island and my first collapse into adulthood. I think of work, and how I haven't missed a dime I've spent.

I think of wine in an Irish bar, that night I was in the homely town of Bantry, with its rainbow homes and ancient churches, reading my 'Pocket History of Ireland' in disbelief at how far I'd made it on my own when that strange old fellow Eugene came up to me and struck up a conversation on world events. He tried to sell me vitamin supplements, toting it all as a saviour. I wrote him this poem a day later, a year ago, and think of him now:

49 years old, names Eugene.

We talk politics like a plane
doing laps over planet ours,
North Korea threatens bursts
of lightening and Irish businessman
defaults on debts to UlsterBank in
the mighty Americas. He tells
me to guess his age and to be
nice I take a medium sum of
35 (white lies). He tells me
why he looks so young at
49 and tries to sell me a healthy
soul as if he were an angel of loves-
yerself or a devil
of capitalism pecking at
exposed heels. Tells me
he used to be drawl, pizza-
faced, suicidal before
production loved a spiritual
lung. Tell me what! Tell me
WHAT!
When life gives you lemons,
hug the lemon tree. Seems
the angels have sold out and
they're nice enough.


He really was a nice guy.

On xanax, I want to
save the world. See it,
save it, savour the lady
who tells me it's 'jargon,'
the newspaper. It's 'jargon,'
all those books you don't
understand and thus return
to the library. 'Jargon, jargon.
All-right, fair enough, have a
good night.' A blustering, fat
-bodied strangeman, walks in,
talks of homeless hairies who
cut in front of him at McDonald's,
rudely assert their desperation
with greasy foreign hair basing
down the nape of their neck,
beseech the poor fat ******* to
his last-straw tossed toward a
health minister who won't 'speak
for himself' but has his secretary
'speak for him.' what the hell is
that? he asserts, face in a squeeze-
pause and a left-side lazy eye bowing offward, 'ridiculous, disgusting.'
'well, I hope you have a good
night, take care,
sir.'

Each crest-wave melts forward unto a cyclic downward unto a mix-exchange at the bank of the channel, fluid between the Georgia Strait and the passive Pacific, all the way from probably-Australia. The overcast is claustrophobic, sort of-- Victoria feels like a small wet cottage in a populated happy brain-cell, so when the clouds roll in all you notice are the creases on the faces that look as they grunt and push their eyes half-closed, exhaling a nicotine cloud in pensive thought toward a day job. Dunhill cigarettes always give off the faint odour of soy sauce, and the blue rot of the Johnson Street Bridge ticks away, caught in a state of eternal construction. In the aisle of an apartment somewhere else inside the city, one can smell the delicate remains of Indian food, curried and waiting for years ago to come again. The narrative has never been more than sheer observation, not to watch what comes and goes, but what flows across the fractal void of every-angle. There are dots on the rocks, and legs on the waves.. butts in the moss, and hours in the days. If 'forgotten' is the outcome of my every effective attempt, it will change nothing up those sleeves of mine. And nothing left exempt.

lips are smokey and nicotined
-up for a night in the dishpit.
the moon leases it's image
for a minute an hour before
stating the lease will expire
sometime between 2040
and 2101. if I'm lucky, I'll be
happy in longevity, or happy
in a 50 yr span which is as
fine as the former. either way
there is a sense of leaking
facets on a Sunday night, a
Ritalin-induced euphoria kept
alive on a caffeine spike. the
bus is always late these days,
which means I am often late
these days, late as daylight,
late as life in fact and as early
as fiction to the evening ball
of predicated tech-gurus riding
hybrid Toyota's in Silicon Valley.
high on a drug called birth and
ingesting like an addict 3 to 5
times a day, I stave off the
ultimate crash.

but eventually, the drug will
**** me.

*it always does.

I wish, most of all, to have had a tangibly physical notebook to write all this in. instead I use the 'note' function of my smartphone, smoke a cigarette. busy on forward, it's Pandora.

one of those acid-high coffee overbouts, feeling the brain compress inside the skull. for an hour. for a few.

some man in tattered-all's gets angry when I state I have no quarter. like I'm lying when I say it, and must be lying because my pants aren't worn like his. bus and car alike ghost past, the monastic rise of the local music conservatory pokes at the skyline, straight at the overcast.

I toss "If on a winter's night" by Italo Calvino atop the third step of the church stairs leading to the church doors, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Where we meet Jesus. I begin to write this poem, huddled atop my cellphone as if I were in silent debate with a lover, only sitting to make a point.

to the left is a McDonald's flying a McDonald's flag. A man with a thoughtless white ball-cap and a thoughtful tattoo walks past with a McDonald's dollar drink in his right hand, pointing his arms in opposite directions to illustrate the dimensions of something he wants. "See?" he says to the woman he walks with, her face scabbed over with acne scars.

my eyes are tunnel-visioned to the screen every time I follow a thought, or the glancing past of a passer-by like the woman with the black scarf, black hair, black sweater, grey pants, black shoes.

the orange 'don't walk' sign pulses 7 times, and then sticks, as if waiting for a high-five.

I reach into my backpack for a cigarette.

flailing in a grave, arabian drums

         arabian drums

'i sing the body electric' / fish-fillet mind is

eclectic, iridescent

finding a jumper cable in a dead-center desert

as the jeep ***** down--

the sound      
            
                            of         eccentric

                  

arabian

                                              
         ­                                 dru*ms

I'm poor
and I'm
anti-dep
ressed a
nd I'm
lookin
g for a
reason
I don't
need to
survive

there are several ways to say, 'what in the hell are you doing?'

the first starts with: 'what in the hell am i doing?'

someone coughs in the backdrop. there is a hollowness to the room.
the cough bounces wall to wall, playing auditory pong.

you turn around, rather startled, and see an old man keeled tightly over his knees,
fast asleep and yet choking on his compressed diaphragm.

he snores, habit fizzling over loose lips and dripping thru his warm saliva 'til it becomes a taoist creek on the bed of the auditorium floor. he coughs, chokes, and it repeats throughout the room like a phantom.

you trudge slowly toward him. he lets out one long, conservative choke and jerks backward, a spinal catapult and to the ground. THUMP

there are several ways to say, 'what in the hell are you doing?'

the first starts with: 'what in the hell am i doing?'

someone coughs in the backdrop. there is a hollowness to the room.
the cough bounces wall to wall, playing auditory pong.

I

Testing that nuclear feeling pulsating through my ventricles, a pain sour at top of my genitals in the area above the ***** dr's call the pelvis
it hurts for no such reasons; mysterious numbness to the pain as it aches and yet it is only a suppressed fear of cancer, the dr checked my prostate jamming finger in ******* n twisting like a diamond fairy-- perhaps nicer not jammed in my ******, but this is 'the nature of the examination'

nature, nurture, I am suffocating myself in her addicted presence, regardless of how much I may love her she was cuddled next to me last night before slipping into a gasp-snore sleep and the ****** intrusive evil thought came to me-- wat if i took this lighter and singed her hair or her skin and fer sakes I scared myself, the same way I scare myself after watching documentaries on serial killers and wondering, so wondering, 'that could be me- the killer- torchering stray cats with infected syringe, binding its legs with an unwound coat-hanger and tossing it off a bridge-- and then years later I pick-up a hitch-hiker and ******* him against his will, slit his throat to keep him bound in the loss-progress of forgotten history'

this 10 mg escitalopram oxalate / i cannot tell if it is working / but my head is a pill and the dr agreed to prescribe me .5 mg xanax n maybe this is why i feel close to losing the mind in burn-ache-scare-myself-away /

II

I got a blood-test the other day, my way of praying to science to ask its all benevolence if I, perhaps, have ***, AIDS, chlamydia, godknowswat

immediately afterwards, I went home and read 3 articles on the Russian intervention in the Crimea as if it were my insanity civic doody

cracked-open my budget and calculated my debt to be somewhere in the $2,400 range n felt trapt and angry and unreal as if high-school is when time stopped and ever since I waste my life / spending it on money / money it on spending ******* /

i go to work, feel dead or mad already, as if 20 yrs is too late for me and it'll be one hell of a trip when I realize I've made it to 21, let alone 30

let alone 30

let alone *30

III

last night i begged her for ***, a remorseless evil pulsing thru my veins and no compassion save for some manipulative control of a dark-force--

she was sleeping, sleepy, woke up, i deliberately watched **** with the volume high to keep her up and guilty

she called me *pathetic and it only hurt becuz I believed her and knew it

it spunnn outta control and into other vortextual matters of an unexpressed zeitgeist diatribe and she went as insane as me, threw my coconut oil at the wall in my bedroom when i insisted i sleep on the couch muttering to herself i feel like dying like killing myself like ending, if u *******, how can u ******* when u know i feel like this it makes no sense and it hurts and i call her one great-big-guilt-trip-lookin-pretty she insists on a slam-slouch next to the door and says i wanna listen to you ******* and i will i don't care we are both now in the grip of an evil cabin fever trapped in each others soulz and i become eviler as she becomes eviler, we look like madmen women to one another going tangent after tangent and in some sick sense realizing how petty and empty we must be to feel so petty and empty and expressive of a dark chill within us each a hot ember of hopeless cold firing the spot-team responsible for motivation and direction due to budget cuts of the soul

and by god i hate myself, and by god at times i hate her the same and the world but only as reflection to that dark chill within us

an empty chatterbox

IV

i wake up, write this poem, refuse to pop a xanax pill today and feel a gritty dirt rubbing thru my hert hertz heart

better, it's better, i love her

and yet there is that dark chill within us

an empty chatterbox

opening up an eclectic ruddy random selection of books to the sound of classical concerto dimmed to 'whelming' (neither under nor overwhelming), is like entering point after point to perspective to new brain after old brain after subject to object to alluvit, the few, the many-- 'on July 21st, 1936, Lockheed test pilot Elmer C. McLeod, with Amelia as copilot, took the new Electra up for its first official flight..' 'This is the picture of the Djinn making the beginnings of the Magic that brought the Humph to the Camel..' 'A block away from the museum doors, the guards still follow us, until a new group of guards from the next building has us under surveillance..' 'More and more, I suspect that Buddhists and shamans are correct..' 'I liked Bloodworth and in the spring we were going to play outfield together on that Lowell team, he whose name for years had mystified me when I saw it in Lowell High and Lowell Twi League boxscores-' 'if the world at large found it impossible to believe the truth of the Holocaust, even when provided with incontrovertible proof, Berliners presented with piecemeal evidence, rumour and hearsay were bound to dismiss such talk as enemy propaganda, or perverted fantasy. As Ursula Von Kardoff recalled after the war: 'we were realistic and pessimistic. But Auschwitz?'-  '"Twenty-five centavos."
"Twenty-five centavos," repeated the Syrian in a firm voice with almost no accent.'--

Glittery mentions along a
lonely red-carpet through
the theatre of mind I hold
so close and dear, greasing
with WD40 to keep my quick
wit intact so I can fight fire
with flame-- an Afro-headed
white-boy with molten lava
for scalp and still frame flame
for hair walks past in all black
leather; fire-proof to avoid his
inner spark so it stays in the fire
-pit of his head where he has set
up camp for the rest of his mortal
life. There is something about the
distinctly mid-point glare of a
human on his way to an odyssey
that gives away the fact he is
between-scenes in the film
-shoot of life, and you can
expect to see his final cut
screen as a Facebook
exclusive starting tonight
at 9 and repeating every
25 minutes for the next
60 years.

itself, it was much in comparison.
butane huffed thru handkerchief
blood-nose, brain-stem dripping
with a wet cleft hemorrhaging
knowledge like the internet.
billowing smoke from the
consignment allegory of
a whokah we all shared
'til confusion had us
asking. I waited
like a trail for
a ballerina
to tip-toe
her way
up my
spine
toward

a waiting lake;
cold and warm
in a nature so
solvent.. quiet..

peripheries embedded
with industry postured
on rocks, metal buddhists
asking all to vague-labor
meditate 8 hrs a day, 5
days a week == sleepless
like dreaming, sleepless
experience wafting
through an open
bedroom door
as chicken
dinner.

on minimum wage, you can expect
minimum work, yet it seems miniwage
employers often demand so much. dish
-do is meditation... but 7 hours straight
without a scheduled break (illegal!)
comes to be strangely therapeutic and
unjust. my colleagues are more-than
-decent.. they're especially strange, especially
kind. the no-break hides itself in small-biz
dialect as to owners barely break-even on
weekly basis due, most likely, to competition
from corporate conquistadors like McDonald's
and Denny's.. the evil colonial powers of America
looking to slowly realize manifest destiny in empty
faceless formatted 'buy me's I'm cheaps' my boss
is a failed artist, and one of the first things he said to
me was this: dishwashing ain't gonna cut it if you're
really going to become a writer. I mean, don't up and
quit on me, that'd **** me off and all.. but in the end,
if you're gonna be successful at your art, you have to
be willing to sacrifice everything. he echoed the
painful decision factor facing every challenged, authentic
soul.. and I knew he was right. someday I would have to
forget security-fear and embrace insecurity-love if I want
to become who I am.

*everything must go.

A feeling of beautiful vulnerability and embarrassment dripping down the length of your spine, focused to a float in your chest and a cloud around your neck gently reminding you of wisp-blank intangibility.. it's that feeling of vacuous shame you had as a teenager after ******* when you had to sit and eat and face your parents dinner, and so you sat in afterglow of cloudy sadness as if all could see but the ache of that shame was a wet wet drip-facet alone in grandmas warm house after everyone's asleep you can see the lights of a ski hill in distance-- that lonely place the soul keeps peeking out of and right now it's so beautiful and you can't face a face but ******* the drip wet wet makes you feel alive-- .. it's an openness out of which a flow of melancholy creeps into the solar plexus and jiggles around in your stomach like liquid in a water balloon.. it is the ache of wholeness and the writer of poetry, an angelic potential to death and a demonic potential to life.. existence is wet, soaking beauty and a sadness inseparable from happiness.

This is your brain on fire. This is your brain at peace.

in the same way you do not choose your ****** orientation, you do not choose whether or not you accept the status quo as is.

if you cannot enjoy a typical wage labor 9 to 5, that is just as much a part of your personal physical constitution as **** or heterosexuality. Just as much as there is a physical difference between the brain of the poet and the brain of the CEO, the gay and the straight, the Buddhist and the Christian, the average and the post-traumatic, the loose and the fundamentalist, the oppressed and the oppressor, the man and the woman.

our world is built on generalization. if it cannot define you as wide, it will narrow and narrow and narrow until the grand generalization can enslave the marginalized categories to it's non-existent objectivism.

God is dead. By God, Nietzsche meant mans search for objectivity.

unlock the *******
door
and burn
your worthless
commandments.

they mean nothing
unless someone agrees.

and they can only
agree
for so
long.

all misery

it seems to me

is rooted

in a lack

of freedom.

fitted dots
to particles
fasting on
insanity

dreaming of
a brittle
sack battle
on beaches

silted rocks
on depth
paternal

hereditary
slush of my
guts and my
guttural
attempts

at
insular
perspective

these

thoughts
are alive
now.

Best of all, there are lives in every skin. They know the words to your favourite language and the aching corporeality of smoke wisps as overused poetic analogy-- sativa with grapefruit, the particulars speak in toungezzz and sometimes I smoke **** and I'm so hungry, but I'm not hungry.. 6 o'clock and Dionysius means what the heaven needs **** done, it's awful-- no misfit twists and yab blam undeclared winter this year we call Fort Summerforever, BLANK, BLAM, expressive bottom-line, you don't look around anymore and check the bookshelves of your lives for those lucid Lucy detailers, trailers a warmer word for tracers, do the replacement parts fit all of the models and every time I went back to Trippy's it was the same guy, $70, oh the whole **** with the slide and all flattened preference to how in-this we are, how imagine how mystical, hanging those mushrooms on the wall, that weird pipe, cover ashes I dunno. In here it was I / thou and the digital paper-- I climb behind the eye and continent for a moment and hear see do 'it was a huge *** bag just filled with all this ****' bazooka balloon. crick the neck to create a feeling, oh but you'll listen to be come and *be

twitchley body funds my eyesight,
endorsing social security of the mind--
the free market of my inhibitions deci
des to monopolize the rights to my soul
as a crown corporation but we'll nationa
lize again again with the help of shock d
octrine-- flinching in the light you called
the office of internal affairs regarding mat
ters of the heart, but but but it was left to
open classrooms to tell you what and how
to live yer life, and nothing more. who kee
ps anyone different? who holds them to sim
ilar? what makes me no h2o and what mak
es you no granite? because last night we cal
led you drunk and you called us sober. no
one picked up the comments and no one pic
ked up the phone. crippled and meaningless,
nihilism felt obliged to die. i felt obliged to die.
i felt obliged to leave myself alone, or risk seei
ng me again.

the noose cooperated and collapsed and collapsed,
and collapsed.

this is not a suicide note. it is a sidenote

and you will find me beating deep inside yer
chest.

setting myself down on an anvil pillow. sleep is an anvil pillow. anvil and stone are a suicide dressed in 8 hours of mini-Godheads.. you become a repeat offender in the ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt you lay across your sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..

by electronic firelight they lay on my leather couch with the scraps of bedding I could afford to share, as if for some reason I can't escape the money analogy and see this, too, as a transaction.. buying.. a transaction.. as transfat is to nutrition.. money is tao.. my hate for money is tao.. I'm a love-and-lost buddhist like every other dreamer before me.

I'm tired of giving myself a *******.

All I ever give myself is a *******.

I refuse to bend over and at least try to give me a *******, or go to the next level in love and **** myself.

I keep telling me to do it. Keep grabbing my own *** during passionate tongue-twisters but I keep on insisting that I just CAN'T go any further.. rationally I may be right, but irrationally I still get shrieks of jealousy because I see that ******* sneaking out to kiss girls all the ******* time as if I didn't exist. As if I wasn't always watching.

I stalk myself. It's a terrifying state of affairs. No matter where I go, there I am.

Watching.

One night, I invited me over, and as usual, I gave myself a *******, yet refused to go any further.

This was the straw that cracked the camels back.. and come 4 AM I kissed myself softly on the forehead as I slept and slipped into the night, hailing the first taxi to sail past me on the concrete river.

I awoke slowly the next morning and.. still dazed.. noticed I was nowhere to be found.

A great grief flooded my solar plexus and moved into my hopeless bones.

I had not even left a note. What a ******* I am!

I had not even left a note.

The rest of the day was spent in sordid grievance. I shivered, lonely, under my ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt I lay across my sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..

stick man

freeze
to death
or

burn
alive
in the

sun.

tarantula drag queen. it was you and me and everything beneath our feet.

walk with slammed gods from bar to bar to car to death-by-streetlight and you will see the deity as well skits itself into a fantasy.

every blasted anecdote and every ******* in naked clothing.. hookah my thoughts and we'll share a belief.

sliver me timbers and
take the class again.
write me up to Beverley
Hills and sick the dog on
merrit, god ****! hoops,
whoops, whom, how, thou,
slack-jawed stupidity, deserted
lava lamp of masochism as u
watch the club-goer swing
illegally and pass a chance
like you pass a test.. you
will be k again.

some ******* took my
      
              wallet
              
                                              and filled it with

                            money

                             then  ran off with all my

                                      


                      ­                                                  time