Life is pointless
Like an ever revolving top
It'll take it's spin before falling over still
It laughs in your face
Like a bad memory
That resounds in your nightmares
People make it worse
Even though they see your troubles
They make thing complicated by adding their drama
So why?
Why must we go on?
In this never-ending carousel?
Like a haunted carnival
Life is full of terror
And the rides will never end
Until you give in
And leave it forever

She frolicked through trouble, and dandled with mischief. Alison Wonderland; everything I wished I was and so much more. Ever emanating her doe-eyed façade; proclaiming our jests mere “mischief.”
Yet, an unspoken verdict (Foretaste? Conception? Notion?) had cloaked the truth: wickedness rippled beneath our parade.
I nuzzled her contours; my peripheral eye – nailed to her profile, her blueprints, her chassis. I stalked her mirage – dancing with vapor.
She glissaded about, no fool to my truth, varnishing my mantle.
I belonged to Alison: perpetually at her side. Our couplet became a “we.” So, We regretted nothing. We veered for the pyre: caroming(skimming?) those embers alit with vice.
She narrated my mental seminar. Discarding my dogmas to uphold her own; and thus, my mind was hers.
My mind was her mind.
Alison made heads turn, and mouths water, as we sidled – hand in hand – down the street. She was my Christmas morning: each colloquium – giftwrapped with finesse. She personified paradise, she illustrated utopia. Hatching our Carnival; netting us, enamored, sidling the Carousal. We’d skim, we’d sail, her halo – my fossil. Her lips, her eyes, her hands… they echoed the innocence of a child. Niave, innocent, and giftwrapped in wonder.
Little Miss Wonderland: my very own fairytale. She was mine alone; she was mine to keep.
Did I want her, or did I want to be her?
Alison Wonderland.
Her aura – so celestial – paralleled my prose. When she banished my husk – Maple Thatcher – I cackled good riddance… And I grew a new personality to accommodate her own.
For, without Ali – devoid of our we – I doubted the very existence of me.
On my composition, she bestowed rhythm. She gave tune to my silence; her chimes, her cadence. My ink was her song – fusing a symphony. A symphony of Alison: the melody to solidify our tryst.
My mind was her mind.
And yet… somehow, I missed a carriage – or two – aboard her train of thought. For, the same felon spiting my existence, was the angel I loved to life. Gladly, I huffed, and I puffed, and I blew Maple down.
Fused against Alison, I needed none of Maple.
Carnival infatuations…

Alison Wonderland.

I told you the carnies were ripoff artists, but  If you really wanted, you could have said the real prize was the love in the air that night.

Cotton candy kisses
Blood-rushing roller coaster ride
Spinning high like a ferris wheel
Lovin' this hiding and seeking
That's what we felt when we entered this carnival love life

Ferris wheels
Round and round
Rock away
The loud sounds
At the top
Where I sit
It all seems so calm
Nothing could matter a bit

the haunted house looked too much like your ribcage.
the rides only reminded you that you're not scared of dying.
your lips looked so beautiful while they pouted around cotton candy you pretended to eat.
i look at you and my whole body feels like a roller coaster.
i just want you to be okay and i don't know if you can be.

I love the carnival
I don’t love butterflies or photographs
But I love the wings and faces
When they’re caught in the lights of the rusted rides

I love the way the light dances on your face
And makes amber to hold your pupils
I love the way you blur when we go in circles
The way your nectarine laugh tangs over the children’s
When the wind makes your hair a fury
And your teeth are naked in the glow

I love the ferris wheel
Over the river at night
The fake dahlias hanging from the booth tresses
The lilac smell of warm nightfall
And the cold fence wires passing over my fingers
While four eyes are hitched to the stars

I love the immortality
Like a kitten I was too afraid to touch
Delicate as a paper ornament
When I would twitch around 9:30
At the thought of my feet on the carpet
And my raspberry joints turning sour again
You overhearing the mortal in me
Became my midnight sigher

Ambrosia, I think
Is made of wet cotton candy
And the games we won

It’s made of teacups
The peer in the dark
And the way you looked into adult eyes
Older than they will ever be
And more innocent than their children
Your sneakers covered in dust
And your head lolling against the car window
With our hands touching like wind chimes
In our candlelit drive by the ocean
Your lips would open ever so slightly
When you started to fall asleep
As though you had something more to say

Man,
You carry me higher than any big drop
With your arms at your side
And when I go to the carnival at night
I still look up at the stars

On the land molded by footsteps and ruled by obnoxiously bleached clowns,
Visited by swarms of neighborhood guttersnipes and the opulent from uptown.

Allured by the traditional Irish circus music and the grinding of rusted gears,
To arrive at dawn and to leave only when the night sky is tired of fireworks and flares.

Skittish and gleaming eyes would roll on the floor, struck by daze and lost in wonderment,
At the marvel of giant steel rides and god forsaken and socially foretoken genetic mutants.

The word of a woman with two faces and the boy with a tail would make any catholic priest run.
Amusing the rational ones, alongside the man with elastic skin and the girl with the forked tongue.

The opera lady with outlandish proportions and tumorous lips sings to break a piece of cheap glassware.
Little do people know,that the magician’s red gloves are actually stained with blood of rabbit that disappeared.

Their noses get caught in the medley of fragrances from the exotic perfumes shop,
Blended with the saccharine tang from the stall that sells candy floss and soda pops.

Indulging over the overly priced confectioneries at the stall of the baker with the forbidding grin.
Try it a hundred times,try it a thousand,you’ll never get the fifth one right in the game of rings.

People will come out screaming from the haunted house,only to laugh about it later,
Little do they know,that skeletons that drove them pale and white couldn't get any realer.

They’ll jostle and struggle to make their way through the crowd to various rides and attractions.
Hustling to navigate through the maze the carnival is, encountered by countless illusions.

And once your body wears out and senses give in,that’s when you've truly entered the carnival state of mind.
Your ears stinging ,nose stifled,tongue baffled, eyes exhausted,and your sense of judgment blinded.

That’s when my masked act begins,the most profitable act at the carnival,
Diving into the heart of the crowd,to draw an act of brilliance lasting an ephemeral.

Slithering across the crowd in a different disguise every hour,concealed by stealth.
Sneaking into every nook and corner and slipping my furtive hands into your pockets for a little bit of wealth.

Only to dine with the clowns and the carnival family at the haunted house at the end of the day.
**And of course, rabbits for dinner,if the baker may

It was about fifteen years ago
No romantic notions
No grand stories
Just another part of my strange journey
For a high school dropout

It was a wooden bed
In a blue storage trailer
One and a half month long
Sleep deprived
Long drive
From site to site
One week
Per city
Doing my laundry
At laundry matts
With strange pretty girls
Hanging at a bar
Playing slutty slot machines
No drinking
Cause I was only nineteen

It was two vets
From different wars
Smoking *** in the morning
It was my first *** buzz
Staring stupidly up
At the ceiling
The strangest set of strangers
Bathing in the back of a semi
Getting lunch with a lemon punch
Using carny credit

It was sketching for a distraction
No artistic satisfaction
Very few journal entries
And those journals are now lost
Searching for myself
As all young men do
In the end it was just another job

if life was like a carnival
and we drove on the road like we were in bumper cars
wouldn't we adapt to live in a place like that?
a place where the cars crash and slide into each other
a place where you shoot a target with a real gun and take it with you as a prize
a place where going into a haunted funhouse could mean the end of your life
should a creepy clown venture close enough?
wouldn't we adapt?