By Arcassin Burnham

Soul Searching, Earth lurking,
Just mind your business , we're over here,
Bird chirping, commenting,
Keep talking **** , we can not hear,
This house , ain't a home in my eyes, there's so much to
Be discussed.

Not taking too much from the fort,
I gotta hold it down,
I plan to place this little heart in a jar for my
safe keeping.

Losing my lil sanity and calcifying fear away,
Too much to bare in this pile of flesh that I
could not be in this place, turn day to night
with just a flick, there is no escape...

Take a picture,
Make it last,
Might be your last to be on this earth,
Don't a menace,
Don't be in your feelings,
Worrying too much , they put aside their dealings,
Way too much healing.

Because I'm Losing my lil sanity and calcifying fear away,
Too much to bare in this pile of flesh that I
could not be in this place, turn day to night
with just a flick, there is no escape.

My mother chewed her nails off, trying
to consume bones enough to
scrape away the
space that's always been
there.

She still remembers
from time to time when
she had to swallow
the whole earth
just to feel full.

She found herself afraid of her ribs.
So she built a panic architecture,
calcifying her lungs, breathing in
nearby rocks and tree branches,
scattering the animal hosts in
her spinal fluid.

By now the elephants
have multiplied,
stampeding through the open
cracks in her ventricles.
There could be time zones
in the cracks
but just the ones that are
still sleeping.

About once a month I worry
I'll turn into her.

Hey young man, nervously idling away the fresh blood the creator sent you,
Cowering, afraid of bounteous opportunity while blood turns stale and the keen head turns to mush,
Stop lying to yourself and to your love, desist in piling worries upon her tender frame!

Whilst the blood congeals in the veins
The eyes can grow dull and sickness can mollify the restless spirit.
Open the cells to mineral impregnation,
Calcifying the legs, then the waist, then the chest…

No need for anything dramatic.
No need to open up the veins in hot bath,
And bitterly expire beside the 2 in 1 shampoo/conditioner
As unsuspecting house-mate knocks patiently on the bathroom door:
“(KNOCK, KNOCK KNOCK) are you going to be long in there?  I need a poo.”
Why ruin a good door-frame by forcing said house mate into shouldering door from hinge
Only to stumble across sprawled carcass bobbing softly in reddened lukewarm water
Wearing swimming trunks for modesty’s sake.

Why face the posthumous embarrassment
Of having your rambling, hastily scrawled farewell note;
Marred with emo clichés and syntactical errors,
Poured over and scrutinised by judgemental mourners.

Nah.
Just lock that bathroom door deep within your soul
And let the childlike ambitions and desires that defined you
Sink beneath the lapping waters.
Soldier on, mourning the demise of the inner self, for now
Where the excision took place is tender and red
But it will heal.
And you will be free from the burden of self-reflective expectation,
You can dine with the servants; **** up to the inept boss,
Discard the heavy crown of ambition
And walk with a light and merry step into the silence of the grave.

And whilst this resignation is all very well
for a piece of self-pitying prose
Maybe you owe it to that guileless infant
(who art the father of the man writing this)
To do better by him than drown him,
Letting him Go Gentle into That Good Night
Simply because
In the face of unwavering actuality
He has become an inconvenience.

I had a dream a while ago in which I shattered to pieces
my porcelain feelings screaming, as my fragile being, my ego
careened into the abrasive floors of a street. My chest became
my cremation chamber when your eyes stabbed instead of kissed
me, charring my skies and calcifying my heart until it crumbled
in defeat.
You left me in this dream; and I became an orphaned soldier,
because your arms have a way of sailing me home, and I
was left stranded with my cheek to the dirt
they're
the entrancing warmth I feel as I open the entrance door after
what feels like a montage  , surgically patching my broken days
into weeks and months, but every patch is the same **** color
every patch the burial ground of scattered death
dirt
tears
dirt
have you ever slept with a quilt so dull it's covers disown you
under it's hollow body?
It's difficult to describe to you verbally the intensity of
what I feel for you, my volubility vulnerable to flaws in the
jaws of inexperience and tangled in destiny's hair, but I can
say I choke under the heavy smoke of my ignorant mistakes,
I cry for you, your pain, I wish I could steal it and make it
my own but it seems that too is a dream.

For me we it
comes realizing later
that Chris Cornell is gone
same as Dad but different still
we have our Garden
of Sound with weeds sprouting against
the grim Cutter hoping
for a missed experienced

Maybe the refugee's trauma
have dried all the tears on
lonely crowded airfields
of a long ago Vietnam seeding
salt from a Grandmother, mother,
father, aunts and uncles,
paladins in our child eye dry
because of the stampeding Thestrals
we shouldn't see

And now almost 50 we know
better the slings and arrowheads
of fortune the calcifying currency
souls make by roughing the round edges
of damning tears scattered like petals
over littered cigarettes killing
us softly because they've metastasized
from intellectualized Lung ****
to a flowering carcinoma

Sometimes I want to tell her. I'll stand in the doorway and watch her do her hair. It amazes me how wonderful she is most of the time. I'm not going to paint her as a saint because we all have bad days.
I want to take her hand and sit her down. I want to look into her eyes and tell her the truth. I want to hold her and tell her it's going to be ok.
I'll never understand why she's with me. She tells me she loves me every once in a while, usually I have to say it first. I don't let myself buy into it though. I know the truth already. I know she doesn't. She couldn't possibly. It was made clear to me a long time ago and I'll never forget it.
Still though.
I want to tell her. How amazing she is. How happy she's made me. How awesome it's been living the illusion.
And how my heart is in the process of calcifying due to a condition called valvular stenosis. And how my prognosis isn't good. How my heart gets tired sometimes. How I can take her shopping and wait while she tries on clothes. Make jokes just to get her smiling. All the while my heart is killing me.
"Honey. I'm dying at a much faster rate than you. Wanna get drunk?"

A thousand years ago when it was early late last June and we thought that this emergency would be over quite soon because the politicians promised but they never could deliver on and now we're calcifying fit only for the catacombs, when the boxes lit on Zoom seemed much bigger than your living room was the reason that you shrank like the balance in your bank account and Amazon got bigger whatever they may tell you.
when you're running out of ice-cream and tomatoes on the vine and trying to cook up something that you tried another time but you didn't buy the recipes you borrowed them online, well now you're ******* and it's the universe that's turning you into an early grave,

****** are calcifying words,
the metronomic marching,
of the new world,
in utero,
Static will bring to bear,
the new frequencies
metallic angels
choking out their celestial messages,
ears deaf to the
shifting of the blood current,
gabbling gods computing
as the future is weaning.

1 Monday I went to the bank because I enjoy being given the shank
which is no worse than singer Nora Aunor's tragical fate, having 28
teeth made ermine by the pineal-calcifying dentifrice called Colgate
Flames scalded Nora's **** when Quezon burned during Christmas
when Christ Jesus was born, happy with a donkey, lonely & forlorn
Hot flames licked Nora's hole while Manila burnt during Christmas
day which is the birthday of Jesus, Korean wine & Alaskan cheeses

1 Monday I went to the bank because I enjoy being given the shank
which is no worse than singer Nora Aunor's tragical fate, having 28
teeth made ermine by the pineal-calcifying dentifrice called Colgate
Flames scalded Nora's **** when Quezon burned during Christmas
when Christ Jesus was born, happy with a donkey, lonely & forlorn
Hot flames licked Nora's hole while Manila burnt during Christmas
day which is the birthday of Jesus, Korean wine & Alaskan cheeses

Her yearly rout precludes calcifying bonds, tanning hides & wearing Japanese pants. ****** is the great shutter-upper...to words, from consonants in line denying what's worthily worrisome. [Chicklet had staying power in commissioned reports.]

The next dose is waiting.
Each day I pop open the cap
I get flashes of a life I lived before prescriptions told me to stop crushing my drugs into easy to snort powder.

No ground down
parachute, no
more credit cards
lining up fine particulates in pretty rows to share with people who only want a quick buzz.

The glory is lost

I miss that instantaneous
transfer of sensation
as the substance
makes its way into my dull aches and my sharp pains, peers into echo chambers in my mind. Calcifying my emotions into easy to chip away chunks.

Forgetting how sobriety meets the calcification like the Titanic meets an iceberg.

I'm sinking fast as I
scramble to my contacts,
trying desperately to
buy just
one

more

hit.

I remember digging pieces of xanax from the carpet,
the pieces that got away the first time,
little nuggets of gold for us to mine that flicked themselves away when we tried to break them down the night before.

I remember these days vividly. I don't feel shame in the memory,
as I pop the cap back onto the bottle of my medication, I can only really feel longing.

Maybe the addict in me
just doesn't want to let go of something that felt so good.
Maybe addiction is just one of the few things passed down to me that I'll never be able to throw away.

Maybe I just need to take my meds and get out of the bathroom.