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

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

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.

the henpecked mistress of
a frozen night
hands held a gloved
in juvenile delight
the shackles thrown
to feelings blithe
and in her shown
remained a live
for tempest foul
the boundaries of couth
asked to be flaunted
both happy and versute
though soon to be haunted
because
now that it's had
now it can be lost
and in no way sad
can these eyes be

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Passing storm clouds
are just that,

shared dreams of jet streams,
hallucinations of slithering shadows

on lost horizons,
quiet and dark.

we've made
a vow
to keep
doing
so we
can keep
being

we've agreed
to keep
moving
to distract
us from
seeing

we've decided
to stop
looking
at what
is within
here

we've put
it off
slightly
to be
postpone the
fear

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 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

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.