There’s too much air to breathe here.
A swirling mass of emptiness heaves through the crowd’s lungs.
Stop.
Won’t everyone just *******--

Someone sings at the bus stop just outside my window.
Wires hum, ignoring the melody that person has so carefully constructed.
A hiss.
Rising steam.
An abrupt end.

Another listless night.
A beetle flies in through my open window.
It takes me twenty minutes to help it back out.

I think about wandering the forest.
But am too scared to confront loneliness, and the frailty of human existence.

There is a gap forming already.
Here.
A dialectic that seeks to sublate my very identity.
Subsume those closest to me.
Until I am completely alone.

There is a bush down the street which is in bloom right now.
I think the sun is too hot.
The flowers are wilted.
And the pavement is littered with dead bees.

Voices.
An exchange.
A language game.
Two horizons meet, merge, melt.
‘Wait--’
The horizons drop.
If only for a moment.
And the abyss is revealed.

The only universal in this world is that we are all alone.
Trapped in our own understanding.
Forever interpreting one another.

I am waiting for the day the wind carries me out the window.
Perhaps it will never come.
Perhaps I will live a long boring life amongst friends, family, and all those people I despise.
Oh well.
No point, either way.

It's been a dark and ***** start to the year, and altogether
too many of my heroes are dead.
Too many of the old
villains too; those familiar monsters
are gone, replaced
by new and more appalling terrors,
as fear is rebranded for a freshly emergent demographic.
All the girls are much too young for me. Everyone
is too young for me.
When they speak, I hear
only static, like
the ghosts of extinct, pre-digital
TV screens haunting the
empty beauty of their
dead channel mouths.
In the supermarket, they've taken to
playing songs I like on their
in-store radio, wedged between
corporate jingles and adverts for
two-for-one offers on
hot dogs in jars, and I'm
so irrelevant I could cry.
I'm struggling with the world and my
own inability to find somewhere
I can be in it. I can't relax, can't
stop fighting against inertia, contentment
and any hope of peace. Maybe drugs
are the answer, but I think they'd just
make me forget the question.
I feel the cold, and I
want to sleep too much. I miss
my bad habits, but not enough
to relapse. I'm not
young enough or cute enough
to get away with
this much ******* angst.

Awkward pause
A bird drones on in the background
Unaware
You try to meet my eyes
Don’t bother
This life is just boredom trying to transcend itself
Someone somewhere lies on the ground
Traffic picks up
Voices in the crowd align with the bustle of the city
They fade into insignificance
Too loud to be heard
I comment
I stop halfway
Words elude words
Connections wither
A sprawled empty sentence meanders half hearted out of existence
Frustration tastes a lot like the memory of past relationships
I have noticed
So many people just want to be affirmed
They speak to be heard
Exist to be noticed
You’ve been repeating that sentence since the beginning of the year
A mockingbird singing at a broken mirror
**** the jays
Dissenters, right-wing *******
Yeah, yeah, ***** them, hella
Swallows the choir
It’s disgusting
Regurgitation has become the new culture
I realise I haven’t talked for a minute
You try to meet my eyes
Sorry
There are too many voices here
Repetitious wavelengths cascading into negative space
It’s all white noise
I don’t care about the weather
The whole city can drain into the gutters for all I care
It’d be better that way
Look there
There’s that homeless guy who has no one left
Family or friends
Let’s invite him to the house
He hasn’t read anything in years
Maybe he has something worthwhile to say

His better days were long ago done:
He's a bitter old man at thirty-one.

O.O

My mind is a thousand rooms lit on fire,
a fuse crawled on every window,
pins and needles holding up posters of blank faces,
for the person that belonged in that body is not the same as the memory.
My mind is the intersection at dawn,
lazy cars drowning thoughts,
red lights on all four corners,
until the light turns into a green frenzy.
My mind wisps like tendrils of coffee,
sweet bitter dreams,
that never does quite come alive
when it only leaves a faint taste.
My mind cannot erase the doors you walked in,
or the smiles that blew my way,
and the air you scented in your perfume
of hay and horses from your Saturday hobby.
My mind likes to pretend that I hated you,
that I despised how we sat two desks away and we never said hello, even though it’s been three years since we’ve spoken a word.
I’m doing all that I can to not crumble when I see you have moved on.
My mind constantly replays that night at the football game,
and the conversation we had a week later that said
“I don’t want to say it. But we can’t be friends anymore.”
It broke me like a summer hurricane.
My mind doesn’t know how to let you go.
It, and I, are having a hard time
finding something to fill the space
you have left
in my mind.

You'll live your life from grief to grief:
   Rarely you'll be relieved.
But, fear not, your strife will be but brief
    Till you yourself are grieved.

O.O

.
Slight words and mumbles
Mount, quiet walks together,
Arriving places unwelcomed,
Cooking for one in a kitchen
Together, over filling glasses
Of wine and wordless smiles,
Leftover stories, stale company
Endless invites for new friends,
Road trips without bend, song,
The black comedy of dull, plain,
Platitudinous days.