see, the thing about her

is that she wreaks havoc cities away



insert any word you’d like

insinuate, stimulate, incite, excite

she will make you want to taste them all



her lips do not trace with lipstick,

they trail thunderstorms of

invigoration, greed, and fulfillment

without having touched you at all



see, the thing about her

is that your invisibility is her tell-tale



she won’t make you delight in skin

or whatever is carnal, earthly, corporeal

never.

instead, she will make you want to write



because she will not become your pleasure

she becomes your whoever and whenever

and breathes life

into all your non-personal conjunctions



see, the thing about her

is that she is complicated chemistry

a principle of uncertainty

in a world governed by relativity



she will be be here

but she will disappear

with the world’s unobtrusive

waves of tenets



nothing good will leave

but love, you forget,

nothing you want ever remains



see, the thing about her

is that she makes you want to use

your tongue and your hands



not on her, love, but on your earth

she is your language

she is your dictionary

she is the words at the tip of your tongue



and no, you will not have her body

you will never have her body

see, she permeated your mind

while you were fretting over skin



see, whatever she is, no matter what you do,

she will always have you



trapped.



in a psychological

wormhole

of want

and creed



she: both ultra-violet and ultra-violent

Did you know you can trick the brain; even if there is no trick. Simply by tricking it into thinking that it's been tricked.

"I can't believe you drank it"
*spits out water

Where the tides of Magnus swell
And his thundering roars beat lightning to hell.

We've been living in a maze.
We've been digging up our graves.
We've been throwing up our brains,
Yet these quakes will still go on.

Sickles and hammers
And tall corporate buildings, portly businessmen.
The windows and towers they will smash because of the beast inside their heads.

Black and white
Good and evil
Are there two sides? Four, eight? Or are there billions of coloured pixels;
Each twinkling their own ideologies.
But once they blend, like watercolours,
The wars commence and their crimes they won't repent.

Our conditioned brains
Entertained by an electronic screen, or perhaps a print of lies on paper.
And we will curse, wail or put other opinions on bail.

Will we live a life of sepia, of black and white?
Or will we respect all sides of that rubix cube which becomes ever more difficult to solve.

The algorithms twist, intertwine, sever
But there is not one single lever- we can pull

to save our bleeding earth.

The quakes will go on
We will not have a break from them.
We are veterans of psychological corruption;
And our armour and weapons are destroyed.

I've confined the greatest hits of Marx
to a playlist
and periodically map over them with dull,
grasping eyes, when desperate for talking points
or anti-capitalism ideation

The works of Bukowski, Poe, Emerson,
tethered to my fingertips where I can stave
them off enough to hold concept
but unearth no meaning

I can pull and manipulate quotes
like nobody's business

I googled Sigmund Freud once
because I forgot how to spell his name

If photos could become life
and give justice to experience and wealth,
I would be Frank Lloyd Wright

If John Muir had an iPhone,
he would be as distracted and rooted
Somehow he died surrounded by angels
at the advent of advertising and public relations;

Emily Dickinson would have been
an Instagram model and romanticized
mental illness

I gasp in admiration and nostalgia
at Rockwell, but that world never existed
beyond his oil, canvas and scope

If the people that wrote the history books
had to read them, they would be
as insatiable as me.

All we are is illusions of aesthetics
to one another
Trapped in the vaguely perfect candor
of rehearsed moments

Tripped up and mired in perspective
because we aren't as lost as they
Only lost to ourselves

The library of my mind relies
on binary communication,
programmed in arbitration

And inside, there's a small child
whose heart still desires to play
But he's overwhelmed and crying for help

In the corner, a yearning spirit
is steadfast and pacified
Forming a benchmark of baseline bullet points
Wrought with cynicism

I am not smart
I am not profound
I am not layered
I am not organic
I am not the next great American anything

I recently learned about
A Frenchman called Firmin Didot
Who invented the idea of replica parts
To speed up the accurate printing of newspapers
Its name entered the dictionary in 1850
14 years after Didot’s death
His name is now a webfont

I subsequently learned about
An American called Walter Lipmann
Who used Didot’s invention’s name
In criticism of the mass-printed newspapers
For influencing readers’ perceptions of reality
86 years after Didot’s death
The name of his invention:
The Stereotype

Wash your hands before leaving.
Every afternoon the television would have a woman in tears
Spanish dialogue, pastel colored sets
Tongue in cheek, modern romance sipping iced tea by the pool
The antagonist wearing a suit and three rings on each finger
Pause.
Soap bars are made of fat, the grease found in
Breakfast diners and sweat off a teenagers face
The lipids turning gelatinous and all I can think of is
Jell-o; the strange colored dessert that doesn’t taste like anything real
My hands begin to itch and I stand up
Wash your hands before leaving.
My hands have become open desert, dry animosity
The skin around the knuckles is delicate, one clench of a fist
I am sure that it will tear, like the skirt of a girl I once knew
But there are creatures lurking everywhere
In the handle of the bathroom door, in the shake of another hand
In the touch of a frame, in the grip of a key
Wash your hands before leaving.
The scattered murmurs on the screen remind me its 5p.m
The women are arguing with their manicured hands
Their eyes all having the same spidery lashes, spiders
I feel insects crawling under my bones
Termites clipping at my heels as I sit in this couch of horrors
I didn’t know the last time it had been washed
It smelled of the 1970’s and I want to go home
The babysitter is on the other chair reclined
Snoring, letting out bacteria through her mouth
At 8 years old I should be on the floor with a coloring book
My lips are dry, the screen is too bright, I can feel the filth everywhere I turn
So I stay
I hear the door knock and it’s my mother picking me up after work
My lungs sigh of relief
Time to go
But first
let me wash my hands before I leave

What was the last thing you forgot?
I thought I’d forgotten about Chumbawamba
Their song about not remembering whether they had amnesia
And discovered the reasons we forget
There are three

Sometimes the memory is simply lost
I fail to record it
I struggle to retrieve it
I lose it through the passage of time
And I may as well never have learned it

Sometimes the memory was never right
A subtle hint overwrites it
A trick of the mind confuses where I got it
A belief or assumption filters and interprets it
And surely I learn to trust my memory less

And then, of course, I could repress it
Squash it into the back of my mind
Remembering Freud’s unproven theories
Hoping that what’s left behind
Leaves me feeling more positive