All this war and yet, there is nothing I would rather be.

I have grown to appreciate,
            as a nonpartisan–
            a silent sommelier–
the subtle earthy notes of irony with which
my deflated ego scolds my hollow spine.

I know my own hypocrisy, my instability, my naivete.

I have been raised in the midst of myself–
I carved and nailed these philosophies together to make trellises
around which my elastic grapevine limbs have learned
to wrap and coil and hoist themselves toward the sun.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are distortions in these wooden lattices,
and there are seasons when the grapes grow sour
or the vines do not flower
at all,
but the crop is resilient and the wood does not break,
and there is enough sunshine here
in the summertime to sustain
and to yield something complexly beautiful because it has been weak,
and it has known the cold.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are plots of land far more fertile than this one,
foundational structures far sturdier and more symmetrical,
grapes far sweeter and more robust of flavor,
but there is no wine I would rather have flood my veins;
there is nothing I would rather be.

With plastic crown atop his head
and draped in splendid royal red,

he arched his back and struck a pose
to loud applause from costume rows:

the pilgrims bowed and paid respects,
all masks and hats his new subjects,

the ghouls and ghosts saluted too,
and, standing tall, he liked the view.

When spinning 'round to win more cheers
from Mother who must be in tears

to see her son no longer small–
but as a lord, a god, of all,

he found that he was there alone
and where she'd gone he did not know.

Forgetting all his lofty dreams,
he felt unraveled at the seams–

the costumes then all came alive,
with teeth and blood and crazy eyes.

The king who once was lord of all,
lay crying, sobbing, feeling small.

A hand then pressed upon his back–
his mom had found the royal rack,

and wiping tears from burning eyes,
he wished he'd trusted his disguise.

if it wasn't for that pretty head ...

staring into my dark, lonely mirror, i feel my body
devour itself – my organs
twist and wring their tissue into thick dark vines—
capillaries converting into tangled leaf clusters on
two heaving baobabs,
the stomach flattening into a rotting jungle floor,
and without seeds or a plan or an objection,
an ecosystem erupts,
growing by night—

not the science textbook kind,
with turquoise estuaries and mangrove trees
and perfect clouds like pulled white taffy, no—

the water there is tar, pooling
at the tip of the cranium and
oozing through the brain
like a slimy pink grate, raining
over the dead and the deathless alike,
making misshapen monuments
out of pain.

the body is silent
as its inner kingdom declines,
and because it is a shell it
becomes preserved,
a petrified relic
of its old glory.

if it wasn't for that pretty head
with those bouncy brown curls,
that pale, almost blue-tinted skin and
your innocent doe eyes glaring into their own headlights like they didn't deliberately design the nightmare that lurks and grows behind them, like they never notice the sticky burning tears collecting in their corners, like they really might
miss their reflection
if it was gone ...

The poets
have staked a claim.
They are not always the type to decide
or declare such things, but
on the matter of the Season of Beautiful Death,
they have unanimously put their dissociated feet down––
Autumn belongs to the poets.

They plant their feet like roots and stand
with limbs like bent branches in half-hesitant salutation of
the low-hanging sun,
and of the wind that smells dangerously
like the citrus-salty sweat on the sternums of
lovers who have long forgotten them,
like smears of strawberry sunset-stained tears on
sticky steering wheel leather,
like caramel-amber irises that they could only then taste by
licking the syrup off the cursive characters
in their own love poems.

Here, now,
with these stacks of decades still decaying in the corners
of our ugly, cluttered crowns,
this is our ritual:
squinting up at the lavender-blue sky, we
concede that we are still broken – (alive, but dying) –
and reinitiate ourselves
as poets.

We breathe in this different kind of death, this
​beautiful
death –
our sticky strawberry reds and caramel ambers displayed like artwork on
these glorious twisted giants –
and we can
pretend we
believe that we
and our heartbreak,
too, are beautiful.

And we look on with aching solidarity
as they burst
into a fireworks display
of a funeral.

yet i stand again alone and cold
watching
an onslaught of angry wet bullets
pummel my peanut-shaped torso

if every midnight a new ghost
was born to loop again through my day
all my naked peanut-shaped torsos
would be standing here
too
all my red veiny feet burning a hole
through the white ceramic floor
and thousands of the same absent brown eyes
watching
– only a few
seeing

all my fingertips work in sync
rubbing face cream into
millions of layers of sticky skin
as our gurgling stomachs tie themselves into knots
and we record in our dejected minds like abused children
shivering in the corner of our skulls

the sickening feeling of
being both
perpetrator and victim

the alarm clock
in my childhood bedroom
has always been
fast by a minute or 2

every month or so i
realign the last digit
with Apple's universal truth

and every month it
slips
out of sync
again

it must be off by such a small fraction
of a second
i tried to calculate it once
0.00001 some-odd something
one brick so minimally out of place
causing the gradual collapse of a skyscraper

i havent found the energy lately
to practice this ritual
and today

my old clock
is fast by 3 minutes
neon green bars flickering silently
marching on
announcing fates to the unwilling and
making
rash judgements

there was nothing i planned to do
with those 3 minutes
and i knew it was
justified in its conviction

but i
realigned the last digit
and watched for 3 minutes
the green flickering rhythmically against
the black screen
climbing minute by minute
finalizing again
my execution