Drifting sand as appetizer, curling
wave as prolonged planing, proof
of concept in vellum paper, swirling
words etched into soft membrane, remembering
instances of lucid terrors, abrupt
in constant seizing of May, moribund
fantasies spilled in ink across the plane, burn
cattle lost to famine and cholera, aged
gently such as indigenous softwoods, pulsing
light from illiterate sources, wrecks
the blind insistence on burrowing angels, lifts
skyward the misspoken words, uncorrected
and festering while you fret of etiquette, burned
to nothing but fragrant ash in syllables, dreaming
of white nights outlined in nostalgia, bearing
the trauma of several odd fathers, forgotten.

The bird bellows low, thrusts its
chest, dander spitting through hot bark
it calls with innate confidence and questions,
fires rounds of distinct subterfuge at
facile hawks.

I have become the bird, afloat and
survicing on lost amplitude among
braying *****, mute incantations
for rising suns
           how the dew coated meadow sparks
                    how my song splits the maw / exposing distance as illusion
                              how the pungent firs sigh and heave
                                        how I am the light on their needles, disected and reformed in shadow
                                                  how the hawk is the songbird and I am the hawk and the songbird is I

how behind the mask we are all together faceless

Frozen ragweed slipped
into my dream, laid bare
the shadows between
what I say and how I act,
bemoaned my need for superfluous comfort,
though accepted it nodding
because it is and is less and because
long weekends through dark glasses
because as ragweed it has a
sliver of omnipresence because
by virtue of being frozen it has
retained its shape while changing its form
and because it is the ragweed of my
dream it is the ragweed of mid-Atlantic
pathways. because being defined by
its mid-Atlanticness it finds the
same home in my dream because
it lays in the meadow with its
brothers the humidity and insects,
because it is burrobrush because
ragweed invaded Europe from Mexico
because ragweed as reverse-colonialism
is important to any dream I have
because ragweed is ambrosia because
it renders my dreams immortal
because it erases any pretense
of context in favor of the
truths that exist beyond frozen ragweed.

The monkey strives for both abode
Japan devout the flame in road
Iran disburse a name it mutes
The donkey runs his mane computes

We fish and sleep believe a sheep
It's further than we see, the neap
Our mother calls the hen unknown
We sign and dream return to home

Sled fast conceive that in whiplash hues
Feel fat step back the stars confuse
Petite croissant exist embrace
Averse baguette awoke efface.

Upon and lake perchance to dream
It floats in fall convert to steam
Create the inward and twice ash
The ants devour the lonely lash

Fresh dances raze beneath obtain
Stuck double poet breath attain
We fly we love over the cloud
In creeks in dark macaw his shroud

Light frozen there bereft undress
Gone sigel leaps express duress
Deny denote the soft white waves
Inflict inform a child's last days

Broad field lacrosse ferment the oaks
Short hymns baroque taboo and spokes
Flee singing hymnal there withstand
The treated better half yourself demand

This world is dog ****,
this world is dying,
these things are true,
these things are lying

Mornings are a time of brand
recognition, are the affirmations
of our silicone dreams, are the
insipid anchor of our biological
imperative, are an invention of
themselves.

Much like the poem writes
itself, the morning spreads
as part of its self-invention,
how particles of light are self￾fulfilling prophecies similar
to a spontaneous stream of words
filling a vessel in no particular
order.

The morning appears flat, but
at its edges it bends seamlessly,
is a disc of unfettered
centrifugal absolutions,
posits unanswerable
equations until night
overtakes it and makes it mine
again.

We keep morning hidden
under the sink like a
disinfectant, like spools
unwound and repurposed,
faded spectrums of
observable patterns, fixed
in the sense of observation
as industrial strength glue,
inviting God to see if It can
undo what consciousness has
borne.

Raining hell and fleeting
karma, again, in the fetid brush,
again in singing debris
afloat on leviathan,
again in a thicket
of notes, some
flat.

Again in generation-wide psychosis,
madly revolving across the
peninsula, their hair
ablaze, leasing groceries and
starving whole ecosystems
of luxury isolation.

always a nostril away
from being under the current,
always floating in the morass of
prejudicial survival skills,
always faintly more you than
me, always bygone echoes
of feeling, shadows of dust,
always favorable to disquiet,
alarmed at
how close the sun has gotten
over the years.

Upon and lake perchance to dream
It floats in fall convert the dread
Curate the inward and twice ash
The ants devour the lonely arc

The dances raze beneath obtain
The double poet breath attain
We fly we love above the moon
In creeks in dark macaw he sings

Light frozen there bereft undress
Gone sigel leaps express critique
Deny denote the soft white waves
Inflict inform a child’s last days

Broad field lacrosse ferment the oaks
Short hymns baroque taboo and sad
Flee singing hymnal there withstand
It treated better than yourself

That moment when the thing arcs
ever skyward, continues beyond, enters the unattainable
past it’s being as thing and as dream, and you
realizing it’s lost, moment being memory of your death but
still in as and as in of and as in being dogma
inherent within performance and performance
as plan and or of and by design as by anti-inherently
non-inherent as is if coherence
unveils capacity of being in and of within though non-being
non-sequential arc of sky bound
ordained oath, moment, realization
being by suffering of pangs and of suffering by desire
of ever landing sky as earth, as thing and as of thing without consequence as of thing
thing thus glides lightly and by thus swivels though gratefully
thing disappears deeper into cloud dust
cyan vapor of expectation lost
transubstantiates from quotidian miracle into movie you’ve already seen
in moment in flesh
of flesh of several flesh curating
flesh of creation, as explanation,
as grounding as anchor to one of many passing stills, as pressing the thing and you
flat, as you and memory of you, as thing
as they as moment as you.

Necessary of onion
by onion and through onion
necessary onion
onion laquered
stimulants, rest
high bridge formula
with footprinted snow, flecked
with spring grass
green light of rash
of broken skin of
red postules flood
in valley of valley
of least resistance
consecrated
goose down mystery
aisles flush with
flooding valleys begins
recondite conditions for
all eves of spectral,
ice skates on self
replicating graph of
destitute and of savor in
binge watch Americans binge
fetish announcements of coral of
nylon per regulation
per workers safety and isolation
news travels, ague fashion of
landed boors bereaved
in fleece in gold of
gentry, pro forma ribbons
in arched halls’
winning rabbit.

Passing storm clouds
are just that,

shared dreams of jet streams,
hallucinations of slithering shadows

on lost horizons,
quiet and dark.

Bring a thousand miles of rusted gates.
Slurry upland and rest
by the prickly
Holly nest
grazing on the leeward
of changing hills,
dwindling roots.

It’s shadow, a memory,
as shadows are
hiding the face
, avoiding stepdads
And consequences
Of the nuclear family.
In lucid daydreams

are the muddy puddles
filling in the potholes
Every winter, we
embrace like the
Goodnight kiss, saying
Does it mean anything if
cows are happy?

When the storm clouds
settle in bulbous purple
Expanse across
waves of field,
And this town’s complacent decay
Is just one year
further along?

When always there are flies.

Bring a thousand miles of rusted gates.
Slurry upland and rest
by the prickly
Holly nest
grazing on the leeward
of changing hills,
dwindling roots.

It’s shadow, a memory,
as shadows are
hiding the face
, avoiding stepdads
And consequences
Of the nuclear family.
In lucid daydreams

are the muddy puddles
filling in the potholes
Every winter, we
embrace like the
Goodnight kiss, saying
Does it mean anything if
cows are happy?

When the storm clouds
settle in bulbous purple
Expanse across
waves of field,
And this town’s complacent decay
Is just one year
further along?

When always there are flies.

Loving something for what it is
Is admitting nothing matters

Is a comets tail
Is breath in the cold

Is deliberate rebellion
against several mysteries

Is explainable only through
experience

Is self-inflicted wound
Is boundless expanse

Is divorced from multiple paths
because it’s fine that nothing is

Forever

There is little blood
            left in my fingers,
and I admit that
            my toes are turning blue, and though we were warned of such things happening,
it still makes me uneasy,
            as if their appendages have broken free of the old-fashioned mysteries and
set out to live a new life among the jays and sparrows.

            Is it true that all glass is a mirror?
I’m not sure, I studied the humanities, or to put it another way
            I’m not sure of anything
outside of heat and the evaporating
            solitude that robs us of the loneliness and innocence
that permeates animals and children.

So it is that I request you be still
            and quake silently in the dark noons of the garden,
bestow your autumn hands on the dim odors pervading the curtains
            the affairs of a monstrous tragedy are the bedtime stories we want to hear repeated.
The fawning fever dream of a new possibility,
            spiraling vision
inviting flames
            into the habitual
such that
            burns are inevitable
and the scaly skin
            that’s a daily reminder,
another part of the routine
            another fancy lotion to remember
grieve! grieve!
            the quiet solemnity of drug store aisles,
faded UVs and blinking
            ads, abutting the space between
human need and such deviance as industry and organization.
            There are finally more living than dead, now.
                        it’s fine
I’ll only seek recourse if the rest of things turn out more boring, seeing how I couldn’t celebrate my victories, anyway, it seemed absurd to mourn my defeats.

Does it really matter?
Matter (n) - the substance of which a physical object is composed

Does it? (really matter?)
        It it it

What is it? (they say, “what is it?”)
        It (p) - that one —used as subject or direct object or indirect object of a verb or object of a preposition usually in reference to a lifeless thing

It is a 1986 horror novel by American author Stephen King.

It (also know as Stephen King’s It) is a 1990 American ABC two-part psychological drama miniseries directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen from Stephen King’s 1986 novel of the same name.

Woh (English: It) is a Hindi language Indian television horror-thriller series which aired on Zee TV in 1998. It is an adaptation of the 1990 American TV miniseries It.

It, retroactively known as It Chapter One, is a 2017 American supernatural horror film based on Stephen King’s 1986 novel of the same name.

It Chapter Two is a 2019 American supernatural horror film and a sequel to the 2017 film It, both based on the 1986 novel by Stephen King.

John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer and *** offender known as the Killer Clown who assaulted and murdered at least 33 young men and boys.

John Wayne was an American, too.

John William Gacy is caught in endless cycles of reincarnation, but you thought I was talking about William H. Macy.

They say that history does not repeat itself, but that it often rhymes.

Mark Twain said that. Mark Twain was also an American.

Mark Twain didn’t actually say that. Mark Twain didn’t say a lot of things.

John Wayne isn’t actually John Wayne. He’s Marion Morrison.

Mark Twain isn’t actually Mark Twain. He’s Samuel Clemens.

Stephen King is just Stephen King. (but also Richard Bachman, and John Swithen, and Beryl Evans.

The palm tree's fronds have been painted a pale amber by the sun, flaxen hair hanging wearily from a drooping trunk. We often talk of the heat like it's going away, like an inconvenience. We often don't have much else to say and it does a fine job of filling the air. We often talk of the heat in proud tones, like shaking our fists at the sense of something that's ephemeral, like we can intimidate it, us, with our stubbornness and arrogance. Maybe we will this time.
        The worms are burnt into the patio, unable to cross the concrete desert before becoming charred shadows, offerings to our lifestyle, unmoving grandeur on the path to dirt. Though, under the earth they continue to be held in the sway of inherited machinations, waiting for us - or more accurately, waiting for anything.

Bloodied band-aids lying on the sidewalk, a million little masterpieces lost to forgetfulness, or distraction. Isn't it always that way? Isn't it funny how brand names become synonymous with the product itself? They say you shouldn't deal in absolutes. It's good to operate in the conditional. It's good to survive. Isn't it funny that I was thinking, "It's not a band-aid, it's an adhesive bandage, band-aid is a brand name", instead of, "why the **** are there so many bloodied band-aids on this corner?" It told me something about myself - what, exactly, I am not sure - but I could quickly say with certainty that it didn't really matter.
        The light turns, the cars stop, I begin to cross the street and notice a bloodied band-aid stuck to my sole. It's the best advertising for band-aids that I've ever seen.

I see you. You, wishing to be back there. A prophet now,
then
you would already see everything
ahead
of you. Being just in time you would see fear in their faces, but you wouldn't be able to sympathize.

You would ask questions that you did not want answered, but would speak aloud so that time could record your inquiry. Falling back to caverns
deep within your sinuses, you would taste
the mycological networks,
and
realize that it is hardly more than a pattern.

To go back is to mourn the death of
every version of yourself. Fraught
sleeves, tattered pant suits dragged begrudingly
through Boswellian resin. The versions of you
that didn't exist, all aggrieved but slowly learning
to accept the shadows.

The version of you that does exist, now
an extended, throbbing pain
slowly ceasing,
bound to disappoint the version of you that may exist later
then, without choosing,
being the nature of patterns.

If you squint you can almost see him riding the pale twilight along the speckled curvature. You can feel his presence in the air just beyond the horizon. In clenched teeth you can hear him in the transactional nature of love. He being body, he being commodity, he being the flea bitten innards of common courtesies.

If you let the blood pool into viscous puddles of amethyst you may get a sense of when he abandoned wonderment. A fecund scent of brief interludes, blessed in the private indescretions - you lie to yourself when the mirror can no longer reflect your delusions.

A wavy vision painted in distant heat, he is, perfectly still as Earth rotates in his temporal proximity. He being the discarded lakes pregnant with rusty cans and broken clocks.

From behind ash dusted coasters sat the worsening situation of the increasingly less young, or more accurately the banal.

Bared it’s teeth to the mirror, it did, above the green bottles of forlorn gins. Ornate borders of streaked glass,

muted tones and expectations. It could happen at any moment. Never be too happy. And exponential corridors

you walk for so long that you begin to consider the exegesis and the Eucharist, that you run your hand along the cracking wall

paper, to feel it lift away and sigh at your touch, only slightly more amused than before, consecrated. Where near the end,

light comes in slivers and the water rises from the floor to meet your nostrils ever so graciously. How the void comes to you, and not the opposite. Knowing

what we did, then, was a matter of breath and perception, the totality of chance and redemption. Fine concepts for fine folks. Motivational geometry.

The fleeting mistress is a Malthusian catastrophe, but she is ours, and we are yet to discover any other way of
touching her face.

If perchance to press lips blush with blood, beaded with sweat, throbbing with nerve endings, to the soft flesh and wispy,
invisible hairs of a peach.

If flagrant in the demonstrations of ecstasy, it was only because I couldn't pretend otherwise, rendered helpless in the sweetness and wetness of the nectar.

If the heat were an illusion then my breath said otherwise, the condensation being gas, being liquid, but most importantly,
being.

If I could be convinced of the infinite then it could only be in this moment, when I tenderly so
ate you whole.

I

She doesn't walk right. There is something
about her pigeoned toes that bleeds
into the night. And here we are knowing what's right,
being right we enforce right, in not being right. Maybe
she didn't have guidance on how to walk right. Maybe
someone let her down.

II

I live in a movie. What I want to be is in the screen
and in me, in me and the screen, what I wish to
be, though I'm bored by the movie of I, I still
aspire to exist as both true life and media creation. The succession
of images in my mind, my own reality show, the sum of my
channel surfing, my own dystopian prestige sitcom. Standing
at the end of history and the end of time, ending, in the apocalypse
I watch on T.V.
It's not real, so nothing I do matters. There is something
about how the voyeurism of violence bleeds into the
morning's sad awakening.

Where is the lust, it's beckoned twin,
it's dawning onset of emptiness. Emptiness
-no: embarassment.
Where is the biological imperative
in such a feeling, to feel constanstly, to live the feeling like a habit, to go along brushing teeth and closing doors?

If I felt nothing it was because I was pretending
that the cold cleansed, that moon rays laying lavishly across rippled banks of the first snow, were
somehow poetic, thus eternal. If I forgot
the conditioned response it was lost on the frugal lake,
the clear water
- still, pure -
aground encroaching ice.

For many years now, I have watched the rain/I have scraped the ice off my skin/I have sat in a luxury sedan and dreamed about things, things that don’t exist now, things that never did exist, I have memories of dreams, I have memories of Brooklyn/it is two seventeen am, I have taken three hits of acid, i am sitting at pier 1, I’m drinking triple x vitamin water, it is snowing, the east river is on fire, a van arrives, fourteen Hasidic children get out/it’s  three thirty two am, I’m in Times Square, It’s forty two degrees, I’m wearing a t shirt, I’m running from the cops, the cops were never chasing me, I see Carson Daily/it’s five forty seven am, I’m on a rooftop in Bushwick, midtown has vanished behind pink fog and smeared neon, a woman is orgasming loudly, a **** is crowing, I stand swaying, on the precipice between infinite possibilities and nothingness/it’s three twenty nine am, I’m lying in the middle of Atlantic Avenue, I’m making snow angels/twenty three minutes from now a woman I met on ok Cupid dot com will be playing me tom waits records, I will think about another girl that I love, but who does not love me/forty eight minutes from now I will emphatically ******* onto a large pair of *******/I have walked many blocks and over drafted many debit cards/I have been watching the rain for a long time now