I am an anchor.

I will hold you back.

I will pull you down.

I will prevent you from rising.

I will shatter, spoil;

*******, scuttle;

break and devastate;

for I am an anchor,

and anchors weigh you down.

AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of
Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is
represented THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY

     When that rich soul which to her heaven is gone,
     Whom all do celebrate, who know they have one
     (For who is sure he hath a soul, unless
     It see, and judge, and follow worthiness,
     And by deeds praise it? He who doth not this,
     May lodge an inmate soul, but 'tis not his)
     When that queen ended here her progress time,
     And, as t'her standing house, to heaven did climb,
     Where loath to make the saints attend her long,
   She's now a part both of the choir, and song;
   This world, in that great earthquake languished;
   For in a common bath of tears it bled,
   Which drew the strongest vital spirits out;
   But succour'd then with a perplexed doubt,
   Whether the world did lose, or gain in this,
   (Because since now no other way there is,
   But goodness, to see her, whom all would see,
   All must endeavour to be good as she)
   This great consumption to a fever turn'd,
   And so the world had fits; it joy'd, it mourn'd;
   And, as men think, that agues physic are,
   And th' ague being spent, give over care,
   So thou, sick world, mistak'st thy self to be
   Well, when alas, thou'rt in a lethargy.
   Her death did wound and tame thee then, and then
   Thou might'st have better spar'd the sun, or man.
   That wound was deep, but 'tis more misery
   That thou hast lost thy sense and memory.
   'Twas heavy then to hear thy voice of moan,
   But this is worse, that thou art speechless grown.
   Thou hast forgot thy name thou hadst; thou wast
   Nothing but she, and her thou hast o'erpast.
   For, as a child kept from the font until
   A prince, expected long, come to fulfill
   The ceremonies, thou unnam'd had'st laid,
   Had not her coming, thee her palace made;
   Her name defin'd thee, gave thee form, and frame,
   And thou forget'st to celebrate thy name.
   Some months she hath been dead (but being dead,
   Measures of times are all determined)
   But long she'ath been away, long, long, yet none
   Offers to tell us who it is that's gone.
   But as in states doubtful of future heirs,
   When sickness without remedy impairs
   The present prince, they're loath it should be said,
   "The prince doth languish," or "The prince is dead;"
   So mankind feeling now a general thaw,
   A strong example gone, equal to law,
   The cement which did faithfully compact
   And glue all virtues, now resolv'd, and slack'd,
   Thought it some blasphemy to say sh'was dead,
   Or that our weakness was discovered
   In that confession; therefore spoke no more
   Than tongues, the soul being gone, the loss deplore.
   But though it be too late to succour thee,
   Sick world, yea dead, yea putrified, since she
   Thy' intrinsic balm, and thy preservative,
   Can never be renew'd, thou never live,
   I (since no man can make thee live) will try,
     What we may gain by thy anatomy.
   Her death hath taught us dearly that thou art
   Corrupt and mortal in thy purest part.
   Let no man say, the world itself being dead,
   'Tis labour lost to have discovered
   The world's infirmities, since there is none
   Alive to study this dissection;
   For there's a kind of world remaining still,
   Though she which did inanimate and fill
   The world, be gone, yet in this last long night,
   Her ghost doth walk; that is a glimmering light,
   A faint weak love of virtue, and of good,
   Reflects from her on them which understood
   Her worth; and though she have shut in all day,
   The twilight of her memory doth stay,
   Which, from the carcass of the old world free,
   Creates a new world, and new creatures be
   Produc'd. The matter and the stuff of this,
   Her virtue, and the form our practice is.
   And though to be thus elemented, arm
   These creatures from home-born intrinsic harm,
   (For all assum'd unto this dignity
   So many weedless paradises be,
   Which of themselves produce no venomous sin,
   Except some foreign serpent bring it in)
   Yet, because outward storms the strongest break,
   And strength itself by confidence grows weak,
   This new world may be safer, being told
   The dangers and diseases of the old;
   For with due temper men do then forgo,
   Or covet things, when they their true worth know.
   There is no health; physicians say that we
   At best enjoy but a neutrality.
   And can there be worse sickness than to know
   That we are never well, nor can be so?
   We are born ruinous: poor mothers cry
   That children come not right, nor orderly;
   Except they headlong come and fall upon
   An ominous precipitation.
   How witty's ruin! how importunate
Upon mankind! It labour'd to frustrate
Even God's purpose; and made woman, sent
For man's relief, cause of his languishment.
They were to good ends, and they are so still,
But accessory, and principal in ill,
For that first marriage was our funeral;
One woman at one blow, then ****'d us all,
And singly, one by one, they **** us now.
We do delightfully our selves allow
To that consumption; and profusely blind,
We **** our selves to propagate our kind.
And yet we do not that; we are not men;
There is not now that mankind, which was then,
When as the sun and man did seem to strive,
(Joint tenants of the world) who should survive;
When stag, and raven, and the long-liv'd tree,
Compar'd with man, died in minority;
When, if a slow-pac'd star had stol'n away
From the observer's marking, he might stay
Two or three hundred years to see't again,
And then make up his observation plain;
When, as the age was long, the size was great
(Man's growth confess'd, and recompens'd the meat),
So spacious and large, that every soul
Did a fair kingdom, and large realm control;
And when the very stature, thus *****,
Did that soul a good way towards heaven direct.
Where is this mankind now? Who lives to age,
Fit to be made Methusalem his page?
Alas, we scarce live long enough to try
Whether a true-made clock run right, or lie.
Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow,
And for our children we reserve tomorrow.
So short is life, that every peasant strives,
In a torn house, or field, to have three lives.
And as in lasting, so in length is man
Contracted to an inch, who was a span;
For had a man at first in forests stray'd,
Or shipwrack'd in the sea, one would have laid
A wager, that an elephant, or whale,
That met him, would not hastily assail
A thing so equall to him; now alas,
The fairies, and the pigmies well may pass
As credible; mankind decays so soon,
We'are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon,
Only death adds t'our length: nor are we grown
In stature to be men, till we are none.
But this were light, did our less volume hold
All the old text; or had we chang'd to gold
Their silver; or dispos'd into less glass
Spirits of virtue, which then scatter'd was.
But 'tis not so; w'are not retir'd, but damp'd;
And as our bodies, so our minds are cramp'd;
'Tis shrinking, not close weaving, that hath thus
In mind and body both bedwarfed us.
We seem ambitious, God's whole work t'undo;
Of nothing he made us, and we strive too,
To bring our selves to nothing back; and we
Do what we can, to do't so soon as he.
With new diseases on our selves we war,
And with new physic, a worse engine far.
Thus man, this world's vice-emperor, in whom
All faculties, all graces are at home
(And if in other creatures they appear,
They're but man's ministers and legates there
To work on their rebellions, and reduce
Them to civility, and to man's use);
This man, whom God did woo, and loath t'attend
Till man came up, did down to man descend,
This man, so great, that all that is, is his,
O what a trifle, and poor thing he is!
If man were anything, he's nothing now;
Help, or at least some time to waste, allow
T'his other wants, yet when he did depart
With her whom we lament, he lost his heart.
She, of whom th'ancients seem'd to prophesy,
When they call'd virtues by the name of she;
She in whom virtue was so much refin'd,
That for alloy unto so pure a mind
She took the weaker ***; she that could drive
The poisonous tincture, and the stain of Eve,
Out of her thoughts, and deeds, and purify
All, by a true religious alchemy,
She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou knowest this,
Thou knowest how poor a trifling thing man is,
And learn'st thus much by our anatomy,
The heart being perish'd, no part can be free,
And that except thou feed (not banquet) on
The supernatural food, religion,
Thy better growth grows withered, and scant;
Be more than man, or thou'rt less than an ant.
Then, as mankind, so is the world's whole frame
Quite out of joint, almost created lame,
For, before God had made up all the rest,
Corruption ent'red, and deprav'd the best;
It seiz'd the angels, and then first of all
The world did in her cradle take a fall,
And turn'd her brains, and took a general maim,
Wronging each joint of th'universal frame.
The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then
Both beasts and plants, curs'd in the curse of man.
So did the world from the first hour decay,
That evening was beginning of the day,
And now the springs and summers which we see,
Like sons of women after fifty be.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world's condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetic force alone,
To draw, and fasten sund'red parts in one;
She whom wise nature had invented then
When she observ'd that every sort of men
Did in their voyage in this world's sea stray,
And needed a new compass for their way;
She that was best and first original
Of all fair copies, and the general
Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast
Gilt the West Indies, and perfum'd the East;
Whose having breath'd in this world, did bestow
Spice on those Isles, and bade them still smell so,
And that rich India which doth gold inter,
Is but as single money, coin'd from her;
She to whom this world must it self refer,
As suburbs or the microcosm of her,
She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou know'st this,
Thou know'st how lame a ******* this world is
....

Crippled child, crippled man,
crippled lame man,
who could ask more of me than God,
who broke me, before I even came.
and so, gnarled little stump of a boy,
who only felt shame,
he who could have known love,
felt only shame.
How could this happen
It wasn't supposed to be that way,
brave little boy though,
held his head high,
and walked forward,
but who could know the fear he felt,
terrified, he took the next step,
and at every turn, the looks,
laughter and jeers sounded beyond the senses,
How it felt, horrible,
but still the head held high,
such strength and valour,
oh, beautiful child
I am here now,
I am the light in the darkness,
and I can see,
you have returned to me,
and what can a father say,
except forgive me
even a God will cry, at times....

I could write about all of the things that make you wonderful,
or all of the things that don't,
but either way you'd be getting what you want.
I could write about your eyes,
and how they make my bones vibrate.
The way that they morph into hollow chestnut soldiers who have accepted their dreadful fate,
Or the way they surrender to your smile prompting fire to question it's purpose.
I could write about your lips,
and how they're the strongest magnets I know.
The way they ******* my elbows and make my fingertips tingle,
Or the fact that they taste like my favorite flavor of euphoria.

But I'm sure you've heard it all before,
So instead,
I will write what I feel.
Because your eyes are yours,
and your lips are yours,
but my feelings belong to me.

You know that feeling in your lungs when you've just run a thousand miles,
that pain in your head after you've cried a thousand tears,
you are that feeling, you are that pain.

I used to be a granite countertop,
shiny and cold,
as still as a living stone could be.
My eyes were a place for people's empty glasses,
nothing more,
and my smile was a painting made from the grease of half eaten pizzas.


At first, you managed to make gravity give up on me,
the granite shattered and I became something else,
hovering above success and failure,
elation and pain.
Unable to touch down because none of the above sounded okay.
Afraid of the good as well as the bad,
no laughs and no tears,
no daydreaming about future love affairs,
just an observer,
a hot air balloon.

Then you touched me,
And it burned like a cult of dragons,
Breathing fire down my spine.
Your hands turned my skin into sparkling water,
Bubbling and fizzing,
Unsettled razzle dazzle.
Each time our lips touch,
I taste a bitter happiness,
Sour, spicy, sweet,
Pixie dust and dragonflies.
Time has lost it's steady pace.

I am a slave to your existence,
Like the way that jellyfish move, without control or purpose,
or the way the sand can't run away from the sea.
Somehow you've managed to pump wonder into my lungs,
and fill my head with weeping willows.
the dancer in my beating heart, found her rhythm in yours.

Some nights, after you've fallen asleep,
I imagine myself sleeping atop your eyelashes,
cuddling with constant contradicting comparisons,
snuggling with smug smiling faces,
spooning the speckled souls who speak without thinking,
tangled in your secret stash of picturesque ideals.


I wish we could jump in a death cab,
and go somewhere brand new,
because baby, I could stare at those bright eyes for all of eternity.

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-****** Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her ***** milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a *******,
The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,
Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble
Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,
And stake the sleepers in the savage grave
That the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded
The wild pigs' wood, and slime upon the trees,
******* the dark, kissed on the cyanide,
And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,
Rotating halves are horning as they drill
The arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death's feather? tremble
The halves that pierce the pin's point in the air,
And ***** the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.
The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,
******* their bowels from a hill of bones,
Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.
The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,
Drip on my dead house garden.
Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth
The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn
Through the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
Bearding the unborn devil,
Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.
The tongue's of heaven gossip as I glide
Binding my angel's hood.

Who blows death's feather? What glory is colour?
I blow the stammel feather in the vein.
The **** is glory in a working pallor.
My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,
The secret child, I sift about the sea
Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

This is who I am and it will always be ILLOGICAL, IRRATIONAL and above all, STUPID.

I miss you.

You don't understand me. Its not feasible. Everything won't work. You won't work. I won't work. We won't work. You can't reason your way out of this. Not enough time. Not enough time for me. Not enough time for us. It would've ended anyways he tells me. I tell myself this over and over. Convince yourself, I AM INDEPENDENT. I will vitalize and intoxicate myself by myself. Thats what people do everyday. The issue being, I am not a genuine person. I persuade and assure myself I can handle this role and it satisfies my craving for normalcy. I'm not a gifted actress. I lose more and more social contacts due to this complication. I must learn from the independent ones so I can stop breaking apart these silly boys limb by limb.

You must stop making them care for you. You are not a whole person and therefore cannot be an authentic concern of others. You are imaginary. You are empty. Two opposite minds, insanity and sanity, fighting over the same body is an immense misadventure. Insanity wants to ******* boys, intently watching the peculiar escape routes they design. She sneers as they try and try, withered by a constant sense of defeat, each of them exhibiting exciting, unique and new qualities. She forces the body's muscles into a terrifying object. Then she denies his superiority complex of its primary function as he realizes that this damsel is in a permanent brand of distress. Sanity, however, is fleeting. Sometimes, she truly gives a **** about others. She is the pure example of meek, anemic and decrepit aftermath. She is selfless for selfish reasons. She wants them to adore her. She will exceed expectations, impresses and astonishes them. The product of this relished humanistic quality, acceptance, nourishes her. She savors boys who tell her she is strong and capable. Lies lies lies lies lies is all they speak. Its been too many years. She's forsaken by insanity.

Never enough time for this. Nobody has enough time. Who will give me the time? These days the clock shows seamless progressions to worse and worse. Sleepless nights remind me of night after night after night of our restless, unsetting and ineffective dialogues. Lets just go in circles for a little longer. Why not a little longer? Where do I find someone willing to linger with insanity? Just give me more time. I need a few more moments with real people to feel okay. Let me practice my part with you. Coach me. Tell me what to do next. I'm craving a sense of reality. I trusted you with it. Give it back. Give it to me. Let me have it. Feed it to me. Now.

I kid myself. If you get to know me a bit further I might let you peer at my Dali-esque picture of the present. Wonderland has me descending head first down the rabbit hole. Alice found herself stationary, bruised and filthy with temporary madness years ago. I've kept plunging for decades after and suddenly I'm gaining speed. Momentum, its all about physics. They throw ropes, then yarn, then thread to me. Once again the thread brushed my skin and I found possibility. The sensation of active nerve endings engaged my curiosity. I search for the sort of matter that could interrupt this regression. One faint wonder to what could have been is met by pathetic and pointless conclusions.

You are so associated. Everything and everyone is marked by inclinations. What affects you is the fact that you are now aware of it. You recognize that I see something different in you. I see something unusual. I see a habit. Nouns are consistently becoming verbs. You are not beneficial to this at all. I allowed you to be my unhealthy. I linked you to infection. Is that why I need you so badly? Is that why I want you back? You gave me composure from your expectations.You raised questions and I gave you the appropriate answers conjured from my ideals. I store a list of rules that are rarely followed. I let you in on every ***** secret so I had to abide by constructs of sickness. I had no other choice.

Will I ever be able to do this? If this is me and I am me forever who will swallow it? Who will take responsibility for my downfalls? Faults that are too confusing for explanation are menacingly sweet if you hold inquisitiveness, in place of a heart, on your sleeve. I can't understand. You can't understand. There is no more on and off switch somewhere in a dark basement. I'm not twelve anymore. I can't blame mommy and daddy. Its all my fault. I got myself here. It's my transgression. Don't you dare blame them. Recognize my liability. I ****** up this time but I found an oddity; I found perfection in this imperfection. It's something of a conundrum.

Computer science is fruitless thinking. I AM NOT A MACHINE. I am not a computer, not a mechanism, not a problem. I am not a riddle to solve. I am contradiction in every sense of the term. Its broken, shattered and pieces have gone missing. They were outdated and oppressive. They were thrown out, burned, buried, and forgotten. Once treasured, they became cumbersome and then dropped along the way. With them, logic vanished beneath my feet. Its gone now. I'm gone now.

Weightlessness necessitates a higher being than the imperfect human. It requires me to remain underwater, letting go of the compulsion to meet the surface for air. These ancient seas compel me and draw me further down with their loveliness and passion. I am mesmerized by the mania involved. You won't spot me in the engrossing waters. The black surface holds many afflictions.

RUN. FAST.

When fantasy marries reality, it is your fairytale
You know what you think; you know what you mean,
Whether your heart speaks your mind or the other way,
While you are sewing the threads of your fantasies,
You are multiplying the perimeter of your boundary

When desire meets needs, it is your fairytale
You push the envelope or prefer to keep it inside
You do it when the time is ripe
Certainty is always prime,
What happens, happens for good
But change can be the devil unlike itself

When honesty meets passion, it is your fairytale
Insane as it can be, sanity may ******* sometimes
Truth should never leave you away or you may die
But praise yourself for once, because you never cease to try

**** the bee of the fear and insecurity
That hums in your mind constantly,
You ought to believe you are the queen bee
Alone or with your colony, you always remain to be
Even if you didn't make for the honey
You can still make it for the nectar
It will always be your fairytale; whether too many flowers, one or none.

Some voted for freedom from that rusty  EU shackle.
Discussed immigration issues they were unable to tackle.
An establishmentarian North, South divide. When poverty strikes there's nowhere to hide.
Deep trenched anger rising from the disenfranchised vote. The pound devalued as the right wing gloat.
Uncertain times causes a global ripple. Bank of England acts to avoid economic *******.
But what of our neighbours? Our brothers in arms? Democratic victors, do they know who this harms?
Young against old, divisions laid bare. Political wrangling, do they really care?
The Prime Minister resigns and a new chapter to be written.
Democracy wins in a diverse, Great Britain.

It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares

about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.

So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes. I was like a box of dog bones.
But now they've wrapped me in like a nun.
Burst like firecrackers! Held like stones!

What a feat sailing queerly like Icarus
until the tempest undid me and I broke.
The ambulance drivers made such a fuss.
But when I cried, "Wait for my courage!" they smoked

and then they placed me, tied me up on their plate,
and wheeled me out to their coffin, my nest.
Slowly the siren slowly the hearse, sedate
as a dowager. At the E. W. they cut off my dress.

I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!"
and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name
is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device,
a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame.

The orthopedic man declared,
"You'll be down for a year." His scoop. His news.
He opened the skin. He scraped. He pared
and drilled through bone for his four-inch screws.

That takes brute strength like pushing a cow
up hill. I tell you, it takes skill
and bedside charm and all that know how.
The body is a **** hard thing to ****.

But please don't touch or jiggle my bed.
I'm Ethan Frome's wife. I'll move when I'm able.
The T. V. hangs from the wall like a moose head.
I hide a pint of bourbon in my bedside table.

A bird full of bones, now I'm held by a sand bag.
The fracture was twice. The fracture was double.
The days are horizontal. The days are a drag.
All of the skeleton in me is in trouble.

Across the hall is the bedpan station.
The ***** and stools pass hourly by my head
in silver bowls. They flush in unison
in the autoclave. My one dozen roses are dead.

The have ceased to *******. They hang
there like little dried up blood clots.
And the heart too, that *******, how it sang
once. How it thought it could call the shots!

Understand what happened the day I fell.
My heart had stammered and hungered at
a marriage feast until the angel of hell
turned me into the punisher, the acrobat.

My bones are loose as clothespins,
as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop
and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins
revved up like an engine that would not stop.

And now I spend all day taking care
of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred.
I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,

for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were ******* together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

Yet lie a fire alarm it waits to be known.
It is wired. In it many colors are stored.
While my body's in prison, heart cells alone
have multiplied. My bones are merely bored

with all this waiting around. But the heart,
this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
this ultimate signature of the me, the start
of my blindness and sleep, builds a death creche.

The figures are placed at the grave of my bones.
All figures knowing it is the other death
they came for. Each figure standing alone.
The heart burst with love and lost its breath.

This little town, this little country is real
and thus it is so of the post and the cup
and thus of the violent heart. The zeal
of my house doth eat me up.

The hurdles I must *******
gauze against breath
within this gripe
of well patrolled
polite sobriety

What clarity can I operate ?

take a breath
expel a myth
pattern a thought
create an action
reset and repetitude

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that ******* drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

“Have you not any legs?”
“I do not”
“Have you not any arms?
“I do not”
“Have you not any eyes?”
“I do not”
“Then what do you have?”
“A heart”

I saw the smooth hands of children grow calloused,
sanded by the empty hopes
that the cold has whittled down and sharpened into crucifixion nails.  
Dragging their feet through broken glass and street waste, one shoe one sock,
I thought they were just urban children, or the ones
in malaria countries. But I see them stagger now, older, defeated
baring their bodies and chewing on their brains, teaching the little ones
how to polish shoes and hide in alleys that smell like **** and assault.
That one looks like me, his guardian about my size, so I pull my coat closer.
I recognize him from school in the smell of unwashed hair and the gurgle of
A self-digesting gut, nothing to soak up the acid that burns his throat.

I watched the world ******* them into hunched shoulders and boney legs
that have forgotten how to hug and run, trapping them in a constant state of shuffling
to the music of moans and cries for help. They come together in an urchin clan underneath bridges and on the exit ramps of highways.
Prophets of the future clutching at signs about war and veterans, the bad economy and the children they can’t feed.
Ten dollars to the one with the mut. Offer him a smoke.

Politicians act like clean-up crews, counting them like statistics;
This one is gone, the one on Brown street died,
We got rid of the one looking for cans in the student neighborhood.

Charity elevates them into a an opportunity—
A little money to the unfortunate is like bleach for your soul. Just enough
to get the smell of affair out of your hair, or to clean up the poison in your veins.
God helps the outcasts; five dollars ought to do it.

I shudder at our similarities. Brown hair, brown eyes, smart.
His sign ignores no rules of grammar and deserve credit for its precise calligraphy,
The dog at his side is ***** and worn like the stuffed toy
I covet from the nights in my crib—the same. He is a victim of people, I am a victim of people
Both someone’s child, both like dogs.
I watch as he turns into a younger man, and then an old man, and then a woman,
A child with no shoes and crucified hands, the boy in my class with eyes that devour.

I walk home, wondering what kind of charity will save me from myself.
And that is the problem.

The world shames
The people hate
The shooter aims
The helpless bait
Sitting on a rock
Admiring media talk
The reckless beings
Torture and stalk
The naive generation
Into the shocking ration
Shall I say the world is cruel
Or the people
Have turned this world half
*******!

©sim

a ****** of crows gathers
over Hamburg, carrion carrying on
with business as usual.
feeding on the festered flesh
of a gentrified populace.

in private jets coughing carbon
they fly from the west on turbine wings,
engines screaming as they dive towards a nation
secured by razor-wound walls
and barb-wire borders.

they pitched a battle in Germany,
convinced that austerity
would ******* the resistance
and give justification to premeditated violence.
but the tables have turned on the thieves again.

we are the end result of your failed policies,
globalization has destroyed our homes.
if your cabal rallies like a kettle of vultures,
you will do so behind closed doors,
cowering in your fortress' halls.

you shall not pass. watch as the power shifts
like the melting gears of torched BMWs.
we will tear the vestiges of your authority down.
we will black out your surveillance cameras,
smash your windows, and block your limos. no pasaran.

flee, while you can still run. this city belongs
to the wild ones, a black bloc, thousands strong,
dancing amidst the tear gas, tossing molotovs.
marching to liberty's sturdy drum,
equal in our solidarity song.

Its science versus religion
And cognitive thought versus deranged fantasy
Wars fought for love where loves lost and heroes are burned, cherished, forgotten
Little boys with ***** faces and sticks
Teenagers with cars
Young adults with assault rifles
Men in jail some with bars some with front doors a fax machines
Trees that reach the sky and some that wither crack and die
Burning thoughts of the afterlife a fire fueled by fear of death
The chance of being wrong
The opposite thought of being right keeping you grounded in the daylight
But fleeting in the night escaping just like the sun to comfort some other being
The loneliness of lying awake with a deranged mind running free
Clawing its way from your brain
Grandpa’s dead and dads on his way out
And moms still preaching the gospel
And gods still ******* on ashes but not putting out fires
Cities crumble and rebuild and repeat
Everything is a cycle love, hate, lust, love, hate, die, repeat
Breathe in oxygen exhale ***** and regurgitated knowledge
Of free press movements and the civil war
Fighting, sleeping, *******, eating, drinking, smoking, hurting, smiling
Fields of crops that feed nations and economies
They grow then comes harvest and their end
Just like us harvested in the end to feed nations and economies
Words that burn politicians and inspire masses
Bombs that end lives and ******* children
But prove were right and your wrong
Our god is bigger than yours he has more firepower too
Wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of the ocean
Worms eat dirt what a pathetic existence
They eat dirt, **** dirt then die
We eat love **** love then die
We’re just worms
Bigger, intelligent, more aesthetically pleasing worms
Hateful thoughts and bold words
Worldly views from the comfort of a laptop
Medication and frozen dinners
Sick, fat and dying
Life is beautiful

Jackie Robinson is exalted
as the first Black man to play,
but far fewer fans remember Glenn Burke,
the first ballplayer openly gay.

Like Jackie, he played for the Dodgers-
(different coast and a different time.)
Glenn came up to the Majors
In the summer of 79’

Burke was strong and tall and fast
And some teammates called him “ King Kong”
Though he roomed with Reggie Smith on the road
most nights Reggie Smith slept alone.

Burke befriended Young Tommy Lasorda
which was why he was traded away.
Old Lasorda couldn’t deal with the rumors,
Nor acknowledge his own son was gay.

Glenn Burke rode the pines while in Oakland
Billy Martin never gave him much chance
When Burke injured his leg in Spring Training
That ended his time at the dance.

He drifted, his playing days over,
He used, he stole and did time.
An accident left him a *******
Unprotected *** ended his line.

No shock was the A.I.D.s diagnosis-
His sister had long known he was gay.
When she took him in he was dying
when all others turned him away.

Sandy Alderson, with the Athletics,
took pity on Burke in despair.
The team paid for his A.I.D.S. medication
and covered the cost of his care.

Sad is the fate of the Athlete unsung,
dying apart from his team.
Glenn Burke showed that a gay man could play,
That a Gay Athlete also can dream.

Glenn Burke passed a long time ago
But his story deserves to be told.
He said when your suffering, dying of A.I.D.S.
Even days in the summer are cold.

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy *******, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and *****.

In early eighteen-forty-four,
In Cornwall’s heart; on Bodmin Moor,
Charlotte Dymond, a young farm maid,
Had her throat slit with a steel blade,

She crossed fast streams and deadly bogs,
Found her way through mists and fogs,
But couldn’t stop that fatal blow,
That stole her life and laid her low,

She walked to meet someone that day,
Just who that was ... no one would say,
Found days later beside a track,
Laid on a cart; her shroud a sack,

The surgeon, Thomas Good, was fetched,
Had in his mind, her white face etched,
Charlotte untouched by fox or crow,
Had she been moved ... he did not know,

No evidence was ever found,
But her young boyfriend had gone to ground,
Fingers so quick to point his way,
Matthew Weeks panicked; ran away,

The hapless *******, was soon caught,
No other culprit was ever sought,
The judge was just a rubber-stamp,
Bodmin Gaol was dark and damp,

The scaffold built, the crowds arrived,
Matthew swore he had not lied,
The floor gave way, the rope drew tight,
Was justice done ... the verdict right?

"The iniquity of the fathers upon the children."


O the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.

I do not guess his name
Who wrought my Mother's shame,
And gave me life forlorn,
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
I know her from all other.
My Mother pale and mild,
Fair as ever was seen,
She was but scarce sixteen,
Little more than a child,
When I was born
To work her scorn.
With secret bitter throes,
In a passion of secret woes,
She bore me under the rose.

One who my Mother nursed
Took me from the first:--
"O nurse, let me look upon
This babe that cost so dear;
To-morrow she will be gone:
Other mothers may keep
Their babes awake and asleep,
But I must not keep her here."--
Whether I know or guess,
I know this not the less.

So I was sent away
That none might spy the truth:
And my childhood waxed to youth
And I left off childish play.
I never cared to play
With the village boys and girls;
And I think they thought me proud,
I found so little to say
And kept so from the crowd:
But I had the longest curls,
And I had the largest eyes,
And my teeth were small like pearls;
The girls might flout and scout me,
But the boys would hang about me
In sheepish mooning wise.

Our one-street village stood
A long mile from the town,
A mile of windy down
And bleak one-sided wood,
With not a single house.
Our town itself was small,
With just the common shops,
And throve in its small way.
Our neighboring gentry reared
The good old-fashioned crops,
And made old-fashioned boasts
Of what John Bull would do
If Frenchman Frog appeared,
And drank old-fashioned toasts,
And made old-fashioned bows
To my Lady at the Hall.

My Lady at the Hall
Is grander than they all:
Hers is the oldest name
In all the neighborhood;
But the race must die with her
Though she's a lofty dame,
For she's unmarried still.
Poor people say she's good
And has an open hand
As any in the land,
And she's the comforter
Of many sick and sad;
My nurse once said to me
That everything she had
Came of my Lady's bounty:
"Though she's greatest in the county
She's humble to the poor,
No beggar seeks her door
But finds help presently.
I pray both night and day
For her, and you must pray:
But she'll never feel distress
If needy folk can bless."
I was a little maid
When here we came to live
From somewhere by the sea.
Men spoke a foreign tongue
There where we used to be
When I was merry and young,
Too young to feel afraid;
The fisher-folk would give
A kind strange word to me,
There by the foreign sea:
I don't know where it was,
But I remember still
Our cottage on a hill,
And fields of flowering grass
On that fair foreign shore.

I liked my old home best,
But this was pleasant too:
So here we made our nest
And here I grew.
And now and then my Lady
In riding past our door
Would nod to nurse and speak,
Or stoop and pat my cheek;
And I was always ready
To hold the field-gate wide
For my Lady to go through;
My Lady in her veil
So seldom put aside,
My Lady grave and pale.

I often sat to wonder
Who might my parents be,
For I knew of something under
My simple-seeming state.
Nurse never talked to me
Of mother or of father,
But watched me early and late
With kind suspicious cares:
Or not suspicious, rather
Anxious, as if she knew
Some secret I might gather
And smart for unawares.
Thus I grew.

But Nurse waxed old and gray,
Bent and weak with years.
There came a certain day
That she lay upon her bed
Shaking her palsied head,
With words she gasped to say
Which had to stay unsaid.
Then with a jerking hand
Held out so piteously
She gave a ring to me
Of gold wrought curiously,
A ring which she had worn
Since the day that I was born,
She once had said to me:
I slipped it on my finger;
Her eyes were keen to linger
On my hand that slipped it on;
Then she sighed one rattling sigh
And stared on with sightless eye:--
The one who loved me was gone.

How long I stayed alone
With the corpse I never knew,
For I fainted dead as stone:
When I came to life once more
I was down upon the floor,
With neighbors making ado
To bring me back to life.
I heard the sexton's wife
Say: "Up, my lad, and run
To tell it at the Hall;
She was my Lady's nurse,
And done can't be undone.
I'll watch by this poor lamb.
I guess my Lady's purse
Is always open to such:
I'd run up on my crutch
A ******* as I am,"
(For cramps had vexed her much,)
"Rather than this dear heart
Lack one to take her part."

For days, day after day,
On my weary bed I lay,
Wishing the time would pass;
O, so wishing that I was
Likely to pass away:
For the one friend whom I knew
Was dead, I knew no other,
Neither father nor mother;
And I, what should I do?

One day the sexton's wife
Said: "Rouse yourself, my dear:
My Lady has driven down
From the Hall into the town,
And we think she's coming here.
Cheer up, for life is life."

But I would not look or speak,
Would not cheer up at all.
My tears were like to fall,
So I turned round to the wall
And hid my hollow cheek,
Making as if I slept,
As silent as a stone,
And no one knew I wept.
What was my Lady to me,
The grand lady from the Hall?
She might come, or stay away,
I was sick at heart that day:
The whole world seemed to be
Nothing, just nothing to me,
For aught that I could see.

Yet I listened where I lay:
A bustle came below,
A clear voice said: "I know;
I will see her first alone,
It may be less of a shock
If she's so weak to-day":--
A light hand turned the lock,
A light step crossed the floor,
One sat beside my bed:
But never a word she said.

For me, my shyness grew
Each moment more and more:
So I said never a word
And neither looked nor stirred;
I think she must have heard
My heart go pit-a-pat:
Thus I lay, my Lady sat,
More than a mortal hour
(I counted one and two
By the house-clock while I lay):
I seemed to have no power
To think of a thing to say,
Or do what I ought to do,
Or rouse myself to a choice.

At last she said: "Margaret,
Won't you even look at me?"
A something in her voice
Forced my tears to fall at last,
Forced sobs from me thick and fast;
Something not of the past,
Yet stirring memory;
A something new, and yet
Not new, too sweet to last,
Which I never can forget.

I turned and stared at her:
Her cheek showed hollow-pale;
Her hair like mine was fair,
A wonderful fall of hair
That screened her like a veil;
But her height was statelier,
Her eyes had depth more deep:
I think they must have had
Always a something sad,
Unless they were asleep.

While I stared, my Lady took
My hand in her spare hand,
Jewelled and soft and grand,
And looked with a long long look
Of hunger in my face;
As if she tried to trace
Features she ought to know,
And half hoped, half feared, to find.
Whatever was in her mind
She heaved a sigh at last,
And began to talk to me.
"Your nurse was my dear nurse,
And her nursling's dear," said she:
"No one told me a word
Of her getting worse and worse,
Till her poor life was past"
(Here my Lady's tears dropped fast):
"I might have been with her,
I might have promised and heard,
But she had no comforter.
She might have told me much
Which now I shall never know,
Never, never shall know."
She sat by me sobbing so,
And seemed so woe-begone,
That I laid one hand upon
Hers with a timid touch,
Scarce thinking what I did,
Not knowing what to say:
That moment her face was hid
In the pillow close by mine,
Her arm was flung over me,
She hugged me, sobbing so
As if her heart would break,
And kissed me where I lay.

After this she often came
To bring me fruit or wine,
Or sometimes hothouse flowers.
And at nights I lay awake
Often and often thinking
What to do for her sake.
Wet or dry it was the same:
She would come in at all hours,
Set me eating and drinking,
And say I must grow strong;
At last the day seemed long
And home seemed scarcely home
If she did not come.

Well, I grew strong again:
In time of primroses
I went to pluck them in the lane;
In time of nestling birds
I heard them chirping round the house;
And all the herds
Were out at grass when I grew strong,
And days were waxen long,
And there was work for bees
Among the May-bush boughs,
And I had shot up tall,
And life felt after all
Pleasant, and not so long
When I grew strong.

I was going to the Hall
To be my Lady's maid:
"Her little friend," she said to me,
"Almost her child,"
She said and smiled,
Sighing painfully;
Blushing, with a second flush,
As if she blushed to blush.

Friend, servant, child: just this
My standing at the Hall;
The other servants call me "Miss,"
My Lady calls me "Margaret,"
With her clear voice musical.
She never chides when I forget
This or that; she never chides.
Except when people come to stay
(And that's not often) at the Hall,
I sit with her all day
And ride out when she rides.
She sings to me and makes me sing;
Sometimes I read to her,
Sometimes we merely sit and talk.
She noticed once my ring
And made me tell its history:
That evening in our garden walk
She said she should infer
The ring had been my father's first,
Then my mother's, given for me
To the nurse who nursed
My mother in her misery,
That so quite certainly
Some one might know me, who--
Then she was silent, and I too.

I hate when people come:
The women speak and stare
And mean to be so civil.
This one will stroke my hair,
That one will pat my cheek
And praise my Lady's kindness,
Expecting me to speak;
I like the proud ones best
Who sit as struck with blindness,
As if I wasn't there.
But if any gentleman
Is staying at the Hall
(Though few come prying here),
My Lady seems to fear
Some downright dreadful evil,
And makes me keep my room
As closely as she can:
So I hate when people come,
It is so troublesome.
In spite of all her care,
Sometimes to keep alive
I sometimes do contrive
To get out in the grounds
For a whiff of wholesome air,
Under the rose you know:
It's charming to break bounds,
Stolen waters are sweet,
And what's the good of feet
If for days they mustn't go?
Give me a longer tether,
Or I may break from it.

Now I have eyes and ears
And just some little wit:
"Almost my lady's child";
I recollect she smiled,
Sighed and blushed together;
Then her story of the ring
Sounds not improbable,
She told it me so well
It seemed the actual thing:--
O keep your counsel close,
But I guess under the rose,
In long past summer weather
When the world was blossoming,
And the rose upon its thorn:
I guess not who he was
Flawed honor like a glass
And made my life forlorn;
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
O, I know her from all other.

My Lady, you might trust
Your daughter with your fame.
Trust me, I would not shame
Our honorable name,
For I have noble blood
Though I was bred in dust
And brought up in the mud.
I will not press my claim,
Just leave me where you will:
But you might trust your daughter,
For blood is thicker than water
And you're my mother still.

So my Lady holds her own
With condescending grace,
And fills her lofty place
With an untroubled face
As a queen may fill a throne.
While I could hint a tale
(But then I am her child)
Would make her quail;
Would set her in the dust,
Lorn with no comforter,
Her glorious hair defiled
And ashes on her cheek:
The decent world would ******
Its finger out at her,
Not much displeased I think
To make a nine days' stir;
The decent world would sink
Its voice to speak of her.

Now this is what I mean
To do, no more, no less:
Never to speak, or show
Bare sign of what I know.
Let the blot pass unseen;
Yea, let her never guess
I hold the tangled clew
She huddles out of view.
Friend, servant, almost child,
So be it and nothing more
On this side of the grave.
Mother, in Paradise,
You'll see with clearer eyes;
Perhaps in this world even
When you are like to die
And face to face with Heaven
You'll drop for once the lie:
But you must drop the mask, not I.

My Lady promises
Two hundred pounds with me
Whenever I may wed
A man she can approve:
And since besides her bounty
I'm fairest in the county
(For so I've heard it said,
Though I don't vouch for this),
Her promised pounds may move
Some honest man to see
My virtues and my beauties;
Perhaps the rising grazier,
Or temperance publican,
May claim my wifely duties.
Meanwhile I wait their leisure
And grace-bestowing pleasure,
I wait the happy man;
But if I hold my head
And pitch my expectations
Just higher than their level,
They must fall back on patience:
I may not mean to wed,
Yet I'll be civil.

Now sometimes in a dream
My heart goes out of me
To build and scheme,
Till I sob after things that seem
So pleasant in a dream:
A home such as I see
My blessed neighbors live in
With father and with mother,
All proud of one another,
Named by one common name,
From baby in the bud
To full-blown workman father;
It's little short of Heaven.
I'd give my gentle blood
To wash my special shame
And drown my private grudge;
I'd toil and moil much rather
The dingiest cottage drudge
Whose mother need not blush,
Than live here like a lady
And see my Mother flush
And hear her voice unsteady
Sometimes, yet never dare
Ask to share her care.

Of course the servants sneer
Behind my back at me;
Of course the village girls,
Who envy me my curls
And gowns and idleness,
Take comfort in a jeer;
Of course the ladies guess
Just so much of my history
As points the emphatic stress
With which they laud my Lady;
The gentlemen who catch
A casual glimpse of me
And turn again to see,
Their valets on the watch
To speak a word with me,
All know and sting me wild;
Till I am almost ready
To wish that I were dead,
No faces more to see,
No more words to be said,
My Mother safe at last
Disburdened of her child,
And the past past.

"All equal before God,"--
Our Rector has it so,
And sundry sleepers nod:
It may be so; I know
All are not equal here,
And when the sleepers wake
They make a difference.
"All equal in the grave,"--
That shows an obvious sense:
Yet something which I crave
Not death itself brings near;
How should death half atone
For all my past; or make
The name I bear my own?

I love my dear old Nurse
Who loved me without gains;
I love my mistress even,
Friend, Mother, what you will:
But I could almost curse
My Father for his pains;
And sometimes at my prayer,
Kneeling in sight of Heaven,
I almost curse him still:
Why did he set his snare
To catch at unaware
My Mother's foolish youth;
Load me with shame that's hers,
And her with something worse,
A lifelong lie for truth?

I think my mind is fixed
On one point and made up:
To accept my lot unmixed;
Never to drug the cup
But drink it by myself.
I'll not be wooed for pelf;
I'll not blot out my shame
With any man's good name;
But nameless as I stand,
My hand is my own hand,
And nameless as I came
I go to the dark land.

"All equal in the grave,"--
I bide my time till then:
"All equal before God,"--
To-day I feel His rod,
To-morrow He may save:
            Amen.

Adversity is one of the things we can’t escape in our lives; it is also one of the biggest hurdles that we must overcome for us to become better individuals. However, is this meant to be a negative, cynical assessment of what we must look forward to? The answer to this question is no. There are several effects that adversity can bring to our overall being, it can be either positive or negative depending on how you evaluate them in your perspective.

One of the best things about adversity is that it’s a forceful being that tears us away from our comfort zones. It is like a strong wind that brings us to the places that we want to go but with hesitance to do so, it also removes the things we have grown fond of but are holding us back from what we should be, leaving us to be in the best shape that we can ever become instead of just imagining it from afar.

Despite the best thing that we can get from adversity, it can also ******* us if we become too stuck in an unfavorable mindset wherein fear and pain comes to play. We think so much of the unknown that we forget that we have to move on, until when we do so, so much time has been wasted.

Adversity is like drowning in a river of neutrality; we drift to the currents of the same common thread and forget every bit of unique trait we have upon us, and while we face life like lost ravens drifting through the darkness, searching for traces of non-diminished skies, we find meaning in our lives as we find that small patch of white light at the end of every misery we have conquered.

Love is majestic, love is blind
Love can be plastic; it can be unkind.
It possesses; and it takes control
If it's an obsession; it'll take a toll.

Love overwhelms with feelings so sweet
In your heart it floods, sweeps you off your feet.
With subtle voices, it inspires and incites
Render you almost senseless; love excites.

Love is a drug; a tiny invisible pill
Love can do damage; love could also ****.
Like a puppet it'll get you strung taut,
An illness that debilitates; it can't be fought.

Love is beautiful; bundled up with string and bow
Your eyes might not see it but your heart would surely know.
It could travel vast distances and bridge many gaps
It sets your soul dancing, with well rehearsed steps.

Love could hurt you plenty; it does have a bite
Love could burn you completely; it does it with spite.
It stabs it's precise dagger with it's prized serrated edge
It could hold you at knife-point; and force you off the ledge.

Love is the beauty in the birds and butterflies
It is the awaited glow in everyday's morning rise.
Love does bear the sweet tasting fruit
Of the tree in your heart that it takes root.

Love would grow with fury and consume
Beware of the dangers should you err and assume.
It'll set you alight, may you crash and burn
It'll char you black to the point of no return.

Love would come to steal the breaths you take
It'll grant you flight with the actions you make.
It'll make you sleepless and stay up all night
In the hopes that forever will soon come to light.

It'll squeeze you tight till you can't breathe anymore
It'll pull you down and crush you down to your core
It'll take away the sleep and make you quietly weep
In the hopes that this love is what you'll get to keep.

Love is carved immortal as a smile on your face
In the way you walk, with a spring in your pace.
Love is the light you see when no one else can...
The good you inspire in every woman and every man.

Love is not the gifts and the sweet worded poetry
It's not the gallantry; nor is it the chivalry.
Underestimate it not for it possibly could *******
It claims the heart and setting everything else to rubble.

Love could soften the most hardened of hearts
Love gives opportunities for fresh new starts.
Love could heal; make you better than you are
Love is like a beacon on the brightest twinkling star.

Love could plunge you in darkness
Seed potent thoughts that will you reckless.
It tears at you leaving you all bled and dry
It'll leave you resentful; love is a lie

Love is war; waged by your heart and mind
Be free from it or relish the ties that bind.
Love is a foolish venture or is it essential?
Never let it be planted or embrace it special?

I know that love can never come alone
Pain accompanies like flesh to bone.
I have my thoughts, and I have chosen
Love will always happen; cherish what you're given.

there was an audience... there is still an audience...
i wonder about it...
i'm such a conservative deacon in the comments
that... i leave very little traces of interaction...
i tried getting ****** into the whole affair
of leaving comments - like i might have left
grafitti tags on the pillars of bridges...
                   there was an audience... there's still an
audience... i imagine...
or i rather: translate with metaphor what i'm:
trying to imagine...
              three moths have attempted to fly into
my room to spend the night free from fear...
i caught two in my hand... put the clenched hand
to my ear... no... not the sea trapped in a seashell...
close... sound effect of... rain on a tin roof...
a moth trapped in a cage of a hand...
it hasn't rained for days... weeks even...
       the most... bountiful of springs in england...
and everyone is... supposed to handle the affair
like the 2nd coming of ribonson crusoe...
          i can: because i'm used to it...
                    peacefully anti-social...
                     it's hardly bragging but:
there's an audience... there's always an audience...
here's to me: getting regularly milked...
or... laying some eggs with the sunrise and the moon...
i am... at a stage of maturing from...
a phase where... i did... once upon a time...
care about what i wrote... for my own gratification:
but... not any more...
         i've reached a point where...
i can join the ranks of the 4 Dada Suicides...
     'the four' (who) 'took nihilism of the movement
to its ultimate conclusion, their works are
the remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast
aside with nonchalance and disdain'...
Vaché (overdosed)... Rigaut (shot himself)...
Cravan and Torma (disappeared)...
        the latter two... probably lived a life in
approximation to what might have happened
to... Richey Edwards...
born on...                  disappeared aged 27...
death is the last clue...
    not that i'm going to imitate what's already
claimed...
but... a mile from my home...
i can... find... ample resources... hemlock...
the stems are poisonous...
      i've tried... lilac mushrooms... dog mushrooms
they call them...
i don't know whether i ate a poisonous
one or not... it wasn't...
    a muhomor... amanita fly agaric...
           but... when the circuses have died and
the bread is still there...
no new movies... no sports...
what can beat: the old tease of mortality...
the grain-of-sand per month's worth of movement
added... to the tally and
the curriculum vitae of vivo per se...
                   the theatre of death...
     if i don't think about death with a joke...
i stop being... ridiculous in life...
                   i like the thought of death when...
life doesn't preserve any... sense of...
any... alternative... "light" entertainment...
it's not like i'm planning an escape...
rich and about to clone myself...
   and teach the clone "me" to be: a "future" - and me...
i almost can see how someone must
have tried to cheat death with the available
avenue of cloning...
but... the subservience of the clone...
the clone being what?
       someone must have learned the hard way...
i just interjected the question as an: and...
which is a conjunction...
          but if you're gonna go...
hell... seal a room and yourself in it...
and buy a... metaphorical tonne of lily of the valley...
go to sleep... and never wake up...
death... even death has to become entertaining:
in thinking terms - at the very least...
the only real eventuality among...
half a dozen of impossible things to think about...
daily... and here's that apple...
   if nietzsche... sentenced the source
and future disease from the 19th century...
well... so much for overcoming nihilism...
         nihilism... after all... is not... apathy...
   and even with the death of nihilism...
                              at least nihilism still asked
for moloch-esque sacrifices of will...
     apathy? what does this slug ask for?
it asks of you to... well... wrestle with yourself...
hence that "overlooked" quote:
if a day has many pockets...
       yes... those pockets of self-realisations that
provide a glitch of proof...
a proof of... having to find dominion in
settled dust... oh to hell with grand metaphors
of staging revolutions brought down
from mountain-tops!
- and i'm literally drinking my way through...
what 19th century nihilism became:
a 21st century apathy hangover...
      i'll spare the 20th century the rites of...
a mythical new beginning... a year 0...
        100 years give or take... each side of the end
of the 20th century...
but... nihilism is no longer... the standard:
to overcome...
             as much meaning can be derived from
a peanut as from a falling star...
to be this: subjective sanitiße everything -
                       i hardly think... a dickens would
require an objective reader...
what is an objective reader?
someone who studies: rather than reads...
newspapers...
someone who probably proofs reading...
by also ensuring citations are... made abundantly
clear... archives... etc.
well... better contemplating the theatre of death
than... say...
"normies":
    ahem... the critique of china...
       point: can you imagine... if... communism...
was thought-up... when...
the french revolution began? the only revolution?
rather than the russian oopsie?
well... and communism began...
when... engels and marx... went to the north
of england... and... prior to the manifesto...
wrote of the details of child-labour...
this is not my thing but...
it gets to the point where:
you can criticize china all you want...
but there's no smart... or dumb way...
to go about... pretending to be at war...
with a population of a billion people...
that... if push comes to shove...
could be conscripted instantly...
              to point out... is to exhaust the argument:
to have an argument for:
"western" principles of democracy...
here... have some balloons... here's a keg
of helium... 'ave fun...
by now... saudi arabia is secretly planning
a jihad into the Xinjiang province...
saudi arabia: the vatican of the islamic world...
is secretly trying to... blah blah...
no... the saudi princes are strapped to their yachts...
the bangladeshi slave labour blah blah...
yeah: but whittle ol' england needs
the Neds of Lahore and their tier up from
the chimney top: crescent moon-lick... slick...
- but to be this... fired up...
                it's simply exhausting to have:
a freedom of speech for such high demands...
not need to hide behind the ideals of love...
or being misunderstood...
             in no defence... but... under the guise
of that grand word: capitalism...
the sub- thorough: made in china...
                and what now? the jaw dropping
counter to the very delicate status quo?
it's beyond nihilism... when such upheld
values allowed for artistic rebellion...
to the moon: been there, done that..
europe the old man... h'america the newly
acquired *******...
       you want politico jargon ******* squeezes...
sure thing...
     stoic india... always the stoic india...
to **** off the competition - cheap soviet steel...
the soviet union's nuna 2, on 13 september 1959 -
in between: frank sinatra's:
fly me to the moon - 1963...
and thus... r.e.m.'s yeah yeah: 20 July 1969...
it's hard to compensate / compete with
that sort of a trojan hard-on ***** of
the elgin marbles...
                              at least the germanic peoples
played and understood the ping-pong
with the slavic peoples -
the hungarians on the side...
but not this... african trash for beijing...
the mongol capital of crimea...
and golden hoarding project: typo...
   when they came riding in... smeared
in **** and week old **** and horse blood...
to make... the labyrinth of the baghdad library...
a pyramid of skulls...
squeeze me: to this tired state of lost
the head to a guillotine chatter-box...
even the events of napster unfolding...
and all that's being streamed and...
now's the time to kiss and cuddle prostitutes...
and wet mr. whittle dicky for second
chances of a lost digestive... in that pond
of brew...
                easy fools to fool: those camel back
rich in dino-blood: soul black...
like espressos of mecca... flowing rich
and dying with a soothing...
from amnesia and diabetes...
and amputated limps when... sugar ingestion
leaves them... dancing ballet on only one foot...
because: porky pie and ms. amber: ha!
all bad!
                so much for... what's waiting
the white girl pornstars...
the liberated afro-h'americans and the service...
of beijing shrimp ****...
double edged sword... the height and...
all those attaches... of a fine... fine...
procelain piece of ***...
no-man's-land... the middle ground:
of... mercedez-benson-and-hedges...
        on my way out... the apache / sioux /
dodo / aztec / mayan / dodo (again) projects...

semi-closure...
   gary glitter - rock & roll part II
     ian watkins (of lostprophets) -
                      shinobi vs dragon ninja...
sorry... that one was a paedo...
              toddle-****** for the latter...
and it's not like... i enjoyed the music
to begin with...
i can't see an ad hominem argument
for the former...
                 toddler-******: esp. if the output...
well... it's not trash...
   it's: dad mantra... it's dad claustrophobia...
my take on:
mahler contra pergolesi....
            counter: invest in 100 years to come...
of which... you will...
find a future reader: being alive...
not having re(a)d you...
1986... the reader is born...
1997... you die...
you are discovered... come...
2K and 7... 8...... perhaps 9...
  a time-reference of...
         13 years from the readers birth to your
death... it's Glasgow... a very rare...
sunny... afternoon...
psychosis of the reader...
         1997 through to... 2008...
              that's 11 years... so...
what matters most is... how well you walk
through the fire...
that one about the crow and the madmen...
and each: having his niche:
his "social distancing" clause...
writing was fun when one could
stomach the: in the background...
when people lived their: very troublesome:
important... surgical precision...
nobel prize winning type / typo lives...
writing via a sense of voyeurism was...
well... hardly the self-evident blatant it has
become...
escape into fiction (lies you tell others)...
escape into imagination (choking ties of
tier-a: as above... with tier-b: as below)...
or escape into memory (lies you tell
yourself)...
but i rather the memory...
the cinema of it...
i forget to blink when: blinking is akin
to... signatures... autographs of famous people...
bull... shyte: philately...
         lepidopterology... half closure of the semi-
closure... a brilliant metaphor...
      when the **** or the latex gimp suits
are not available...
there's always that 14 year old "idea"...
of... a tamed *******...
well... if you imagine it as... love at first sight...
you're 16 she's 14... and...
you're dating her older sister at the time...
and then... she disappears...
within the confines of her first and last
unflowering...
but the pristine first-impressions become
less metaphor and more: idealism...
it's fun... when there's a concensus of it being:
forbidden... it's what drives both the hunger...
and the feeding...
that it's never actually realised is beside
the point: made... in... lars von trier's
nymphomaniac...
          too catholic of me: born into it...
but... repressing the urges... is as much as...
delighting oneself in them...
ergo: the necessary *******...
so much for... *****-******* and oyster
slurping... when... you have been...
ahem... told to **** it up...
with the: "excess of skin"...
excess of skin / chemical imbalance
in the brain...
how about... i allow... a triatoma infestans...
to quicken my: dementia...
the myth goes... along the lines...
a horse with a grain of sand...
via its ear... will bash and ram and ram and bash
its head against a brick wall:
in an attempt to rid itself of the irritation...
conformity:
cul de sac queers and kwerks...
i lampoon on a sunday...
the rest of the days i'm free...
clued into: cwown...
which is... somehoo: velsh... in parts...

- by death i imply a riddle...
                 by death i imply:
          freed from the cinema of highly edited
pseudo-living...
not even among the stage of the theatre...
but at least...
cinema got one thing right...
   the suicide of christine chubbuck -
the urban myth goes along the lines of:
a cockroach was found... alive... 2 weeks...
after its head was guillotined...
       it's like that... bane quote:
and... the andrei chikatilo... reality...
non-verbatim:
                 'perhaps he's wondering... why
someone would shoot a man...
before throwing him out of a plane'...
rephrasing:
   'perhaps he's wondering...
why someone would shoot a man...
after throwing him into a prison cell'...
unless... he wasn't... expecting...
to wait for him... to die... of a urban myth...
2 weeks if not more...
brain-dead: heart still pumpking...
horrors from Kiev... Chernobyll the *******
icing cream topping the gwand:
godzilla: pie in the sky...

     i cared... once... once... that was:
upon a time...
these times don't really require much focus...
the space itself poses enough
liberty... no need to look as far back
as there's to look forward...
     the 20th century killer: zenith...
****** and ferriswheel of events...
                waking up to the new mandarin
plateau... it's like...
waking up from... the refreshing cain
mythos relatability...
always from h'america...
otherwise... bullet to the head...
king soldier: human rights...
   yeah... nice... the shame of homeless people:
there's an alexander the great...
a a diogenes of synope: with a hippocratic
oath... loitering around the corner?
hell! go wit' the flou...
                 jump-start a prison adventure...
less... high morality ****-pants
asking questions on the way...
people of high morality
and high: low social status importance...
**** someone...
better than becoming philosophically
homeless... blah blah...
                         i'm so little i actually
define myself as:
at liberty to preserve the lives of moths...
yes... well that's nice...
for anyone asking to: ride the easy... roulette.

In an instant, I’m back in that two-bedroom
apartment on Monte Park Ave, in old town Fair Oaks. Where family photos and live plants cluttered the already small space. It was a Monday night, February 13,2012, the day before Valentines Day, doing a routine visit to see my mama. The woman, who had birthed and loved me, as best as she could, with the tools life had equipped her with. This visit was different I could sense it. The moment I stepped foot onto that beige carpet and looked into her sunken green eyes. The cancer, cirrhosis and hepatitis C that had eaten at her liver the last two and a half years was coming to an end. My mother was a hardened woman, hardened by life. Crimes that had been committed against her and crimes she’d committed against herself continually ate at her. She was still able to shower an immense, unconditional love on us kids; in the days she was able to function, without the inevitable numbing. Those days didn’t last long, until she’d check out again.
As an adult the childhood ghosts of her past, were relived through her. So much to the point she allowed the destruction and pain to take ahold of her thoughts and entire being. The darkened corners of her life would begin to suffocate her.
As kids we’d often wake to her drunken blackouts after the town bars closed. She’d destroy the furniture in my home, demolishing anything within arms reach. Police would come often, we would hide…fearful…always fearful. She would sober up and check herself into rehab and do well for a while. We always hoped it would just one day end and she would be okay. The cycle just seemed to continue, for years, then decades. We would see fragments of her amazing personality, deep gentle heart and willingness to love hard and stay tough. Then it would be wiped away and knocked out of her when she’d run. Slowly, we lost pieces of her throughout the years.
My mom came to know a relationship with God in the last years of her life. I could sense a peace within her, but it was plain to see, she still carried regrets. Alcohol and drugs were her numbing medicine of choice to drown out the pain of the past. Even in her last days, she’d attempt to drink away the pain. I’d hold her feeble hands, sitting on her couch and pray with her. Pray for peace to finally consume her mind. Ever since I was a child, I had always felt like her mother. I wanted to save her, protect her, help her to see her worth in God.

It was just three months prior to her diagnosis, and I had found her cold and almost lifeless on her apartment floor. She had attempted suicide. It was late at night. I hadn’t heard from her in two days. I had that motherly gut wrenching feeling that something wasn’t right. Remembering the key I had to her apartment, I rushed out the door in only a bathrobe to check on her. I unlocked her front door; my heart hit the ground as I carefully turned the living room corner, to see her body, still, by the foot of her bed. In a numb haze, I checked her pulse and lifting her off the floor, I wailed and called on the name of Jesus, Jehovah Rapha – the God who heals, El – Shaddai – an almighty God. Peace flooded the room as I claimed this womans broken life and soul in his name. I laid her on her bed and held her, waiting for the ambulance to come. Those next four days in the hospital were torturous. As her body fought to rid itself of the toxins she’d consumed in an attempt to end the misery. Handcuffed to the hospital bed, I watched her sweat, cry and wail. I would pray. He’s here. He’s the healer. Even in that state God loved my mother, she was his child, even when she was most unlovable, he held her.

It is now, less than three years later, that I am watching her life slowly drain.
I can distinctly remember the aroma that I woke to, on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012. Having slept a horrid nights sleep, on my mothers’ living room floor the night before. I knew the end was near.
I would wake hourly to check on her, while she was asleep on her couch. Normally, she would take her meds every three hours. This night, she had slept more than ten straight hours. Drenched in sweat, she awoke. She called to me to help her to the bathroom. Her husband and I each held her arms and pulled her to her feet. Halfway to standing she began to hemorrhage blood. Gallons, literally gallons of blood spilled out of her. Her husband began to scream. We were never prepared for this. Never was hemorrhaging mentioned in all of the hospice nurse and doctors visits. Unable to call 911 due to the DNR (do not resuscitate) forms my mom signed. We slowly walked her to the bathroom. Blood poured out of her body in what seemed to be the longest walk ever, leaving a trail of what was left of her life down that hallway.
Expecting her to collapse, doing my doggone best to act calm as her husband cried and screamed frantically. We laid towels over the toilet and sat her down hoping to stop the hemorrhaging and call the hospice nurses to come to her home. Once I let go of the grip I had on my moms arm, I grabbed Drews face and ordered him to breathe and quit screaming. My mother sat, silent, she looked up at us, our hands and feet covered in blood, both frantically searching for the nurses numbers in our cell phones in a shaky mess. She quietly said, “please calm down”. I wrapped my arms around her, sitting there looking faint, expecting for her to hit the floor at any moment.
No child should ever have to see their mother bleed to death. I felt as though I was in a dream. Everything was hazy. Yet, God was there. I could only rely on his strength to keep me calm, to handle the situation, as Drew lost his mind and my mom was quickly losing life.
This couldn’t possibly be the end, I said to myself. Gently lifting her to her feet, we guided her down the remainder of the hall, to her bedroom; to the hospital bed she would spend her remaining days on. I stripped my mom of her blood-drenched clothing. Bathed and diapered her, as she had to me for many years as an infant. Those last days felt like an eternity. Going home to shower and take a short break from the death unfolding in front of my eyes, I was fearful she would slip away in my one-hour absence. I went to the store to buy my momma the last bouquet of roses I would ever give to her. I lit the candle next to her flowers. I played music, read and sang to her in those last hours. Massaged her hands and feet with lotion, as I’m sure she did to me as a baby. I prayed for her and over her. Watched her husbands’ heart break into a billion pieces, as he would walk around their apartment and cry. Still then, God was there.

“ With all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love”.
Ephesians 4:2

Amidst the pain, the known regrets, fear and sadness, he’s the comforter. Not understanding why my eyes and heart had to burned with such tragic memories in watching her suffer, Gods peace lied there and he strengthens when we have none.

“ I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me”.
Phillipians 4:13

That final night, I had known. Sitting in the living room with one of my dearest friends Shawna and Drew,
I stood up “ we need to go check on her “ I said, as I stepped in her room, she was struggling to take her last breaths. Her husband ran to the far side of the bed and held onto her, wailing. I grabbed her hand and my friend grabbed mine.
She was fighting to breathe, her arms flailing.
I told her it was ok to go. To finally let go.
I fought to speak those words to her and to make them sound believable. Wishing she could just climb up off of that bed, healthy and smiling and hold me.
When she took her last breath. I watched her body lose its vibrancy. Shaken and strangled with anxiety, I threw up on the floor next to her bed. Having known the struggles and regrets this precious woman bore in her lifetime…and how at that moment…she’d have given anything to redo it.

“As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.”
Psalm 103:12

Do I know if my mother truly believed an all-consuming savior that died for us wholly loved her?
I don’t.
Do I have complete contentment that she passed with all the peace that God intended for us to have?
I don’t.

Which has led me to this. When the fateful day of my existence here on earth, ceases to watch another sunrise…what will my precious babies have to say of me?
I have nurtured every one of them; kissed chubby piggy toes and sang silly songs.
I, like many, have made heart-wrenching mistakes despite knowing Gods love for me.
All in an attempt to fill a God shaped whole in my heart.

“Those who rest in the shelter of the most high will find rest in the shadow of the almighty.”
Psalm 91:1

What will my beautiful daughters and handsome son be able to reflect upon, after my passing?
Perhaps this was his plan after all.

“It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes”
Psalm 119:71

He is in fact the author.

“O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off”
Psalm 139:1-2

Every intricate detail of my life, from the gory to treacherous to beautiful and serene was written.
God gives first, second, third, fourth, fifth , sixth and beyond chances, just waiting for me to see who I am…in him.
In this short 30 years of my life, I’ve fallen short.
What matters, is the here, the now and the tomorrow.
Can I actually attain all of the attributes of the woman in Proverbs 31?

“Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also praiseth her”
Proverbs 31:28

Will my children be able to say this of me?
Will my sleepy eyed babies awake to drunken rages, as I did as a child…or a woman on her knees in prayer at suns rising?
I will strive daily, hourly, minute by minute to fight back the rising of my flesh, any hateful words that might ******* and distractions from what life is really created for…all on my knees before a God whose love consumes.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding
In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Proverbs 3:5-6

I am of different mind.
Strong convictions about
The guilty, the right and the wrong.

And with the Devil on my back,
I scream this strange song.

Sins of the father, falter farther.
His downfall will be my ascension.

Through the manacles of manipulation,
He offers cries of peace, of mending.

A piece of a puzzle, which drew me life,
But the business ends there,
I'll not be intertwined in such affairs.

I'll ******* the old man, in mind and spirit.
The blinding goal of this obsession,
But these fruits of labor utter no confession.

And true, such an unwavering soul,
Is dark, toxic and hell.
Though, with black magic, it is for me to sell.

So it happens, that the devil is me,
Then I'll sit with that in evil glee.

Good, bad, or ugly.
I am left only with myself.

My ears were ringing, the pimple on my upper lip stinging.
The words they were saying, drowned in the harsh love they were playing.
I know how lovely you are, how kind you can be.
Oh! How I want to believe.
The large weight on my shoulders made my eyes and nose run.
Tick tock went the clock, reminding me of how wrong I was.
Internally my heart stopped for a second, a second too slow.
Her wisdom baffles me all the time, his warnings ******* me time and time again.
While the rope around my neck gets tighter and tighter, the days go faster and faster.
Their advice I would take, hoping and hoping its not too late.

When people say that life is full of surprises I thought I knew what they meant
Like instead of getting that new bike you get a scooter whose handle is bent
Or instead of marrying your high school crush you spend the rest of your days with you best friend.
Yeah he figured they meant just simple things like that.

But life is full of surprises
Ones that turns over your life
That changes
Everything

Life changes as fast as the tides
Something you struggle just to stay afloat instead of enjoying the ride
For years he struggled to stay afloat.
His mother once told him she will try her best to support whatever he handed his heart.
He was way ahead in planning for the future. He would have a wife whose presence would always put a smile on his face despite his day. He would have four kids just as his mother and father.
If he had done Lady Luck enough favors one of those sets would be twins. Two boys two girls, the perfect family for him.

But life is full of surprises
Ones that blind and *******
That changes
Everything

His small world was colored red. His favorite color, one he knew how to handle it. His love, whomever she was would come to him in the brightest of red, a crimson goddess at dusk.
His world was bathed in red and he loved it.

But life is full of surprises
Tumbling and shifting  tides
That changes
Everything

His eyes that only saw a familiar red now also saw an impeding menacing blue.
A blue whose existence only brought calamity
Whose existence he shunned and tried to bury; yet the more he tried the wilder it got.
It crept from his left eye up to his left brain even down to his left toes.
His world no longer painted only in his beloved red. Now he saw two sides to the world. His little world now had unexplored areas.

He thought they just meant simple things

But his life was no longer simple
He was taught that we should live with red
The red of the only son of God that was spilled.
But his red was tainted.
Confused and scared he prayed
Night after night
Hoping for his world to be purified
Weeks after weeks he prayed
Asking to rid himself of the impure blue
Months after months
He cried for a solution, a sign for who he should be
Years after years, his tears joined leagues with the Nile.
His blue was a sin he could not rid himself of.
His blue was a sin that made him the father's son
A sin that drew them together.
Again he prayed for a sign that he would still be accepted. With his blue and all.

Life is full of surprises
Ones that turns your world over
One that unknowingly
Reveal  who you are.

Surprises you can’t hide nor run from
Yes we are to live with red that he spilled for us, but we can also live with the blue that dripped down his mournful face.

The blue that was shed for him to come back when he drifted away.
His decision justified by the sign
The sign that has given him the courage to open his heart to the blue.
To his blue world.

He lives in a world bathed in red and blue, one world two sides
A world he has yet to share.
Whose secrets he has yet to uncover.
A world that doesn't give his heart a chance to rest.

He knows life is full of surprises
Ones that make you rethink how well you know yourself
Ones that bring storms
But after every storm there's a rainbow.

He learned to love whatever his tie dyed world throws at him.
His dreams still the same
Only difference are the characters who will be cast.
So he asked his mother once more
“Would truly love Whatever I give my heart to?”

The voices in my head are telling me to slit your throat.
And I want to torture you, so I guess we're on the same boat.
It's okay, we'll make it painful as can be.
Oh, you'll love it. Just wait and see.

Wait, what tool should I use?
I want to leave more than a bruise.
A dagger, hatchet, drill, or a knife?
Either way, you know I'll take your life.

Just lay there and be real still,
As I drill into your heart with all my will.
I said Be Still
My intentions are only to ****.

Why didn't you see this coming?
Was I too distracting with my psychotic humming?!
You started this. Oh, yes you did.
Didn't it bother you she was only a kid?

Let me ******* you.
And rip out your ribs, too.
You dont need them. Ribs are the cage of the heart.
You never had one from the start.

I'll pull off each nail. Fingers and toes.
Maybe put a wet towel to your nose.
Do you feel that? Do you feel yourself drowning??
That's what she felt like, everytime her heart was pounding.

It hurts, doesn't it?
Wonder how it feels to have your skin lit.
How does it feel? The fire's melting you like a lit candle.
That's how her soul felt when everything became too much to handle.

One last thing to do.
Before I am through.
How would it feel to have no ****?
slice
Now, maybe you'll stop being such a *****.

I smoked. There was a good hand in the sky. It looked like a peach draped over tatty buildings. Hemisphere broken open at the end of a fist, and then at the end of an arrow shattering the pieces of night surrounding it, as the moon clouds shot, devouring it.

I flicked my cigarette down on the floor of the fly over instead of flicking it into the avalanche of cars below. Who knows what something as miniscule as a flying tab **** might make a person think. It would not be a fly. It would be a tab ****. It would be something that distracted a driver on the motorway, which they traced back to my finger flicking it.

It would be rude and imprecise, a car loses control and then flips over for a second, then paints the carriageway with ten multiples of itself flying and screaming. The driver flys inside the car. And I continued to cross the fly over. Outside the bookies at 10pm there is a dog looking up at me, his head tilts like he is asking me something, as he starts to follow me, leash dragging.

"Oi! Oi! Where the **** are you going?" A mouth from the ****** says, "Oh me, just down here." I reply, "I was talkin to the ******* dog you ******* mug." The gentleman added. The small white staffy was still looking up at me. Well, one of us is going to have to answer him, his tail said. "Oh ******* then." The mouth says changing back again into the building. "I guess we're going down there then." Schrödinger says, or 'Schrö', as he allows me to call him.

I light another cigarette as more arrows are fired from the sky, more like wet arrows now. "Well you'll need to pick up my leash mate; I don't want to look like a ******." Shrö says, "Ah sorry dude," I say picking it up as we continue to walk.

"Most of the people who talk to me are a little mad." The small staffy says. But why am I called Schrödinger? The staffy asks me. Ah come on, you don't get it? Well I do apologise but I am not that sharp on my quantum theory philosophy, and I am also a dog. Oh yes, I concede to him in my flat.  "Do you mind opening the door to your balcony pilgrim?" He asks me next.

"Sorry sir?" I ask him, "Well it either goes on your floor or I do it outside." He says. I open the door as he asks, and then lean against the frame as he takes a ****, and I watch him. He scrapes his hind legs on the concrete as if forgetting that it is concrete and not soil. You remind me a lot of love, I mention to him, smoking.

“You know what pilgrim? I think I prefer the name Otto Gross.” The staffy says looking up at the mixing night and I hatch open a new can pouring some into his bowl on the balcony. Cheers love. He says. He puts his two front paws on the meter high wall where my balcony overlooks a junk yard, and begins to speak.

“There is my lover! As screamed across sense and filled with conjoined gait, of my eye and hand, I am jealous of the city she walks in, by me, as I am half departed, myself, near a fox that gathers in ball, by me and is a better *****, than me, here, so I learn, from vermin, how to hide, how to fight, and how to re-appear. How to have humour, like theirs, and there unplanned joy-“

Woah “*******”, I’m spewing, a poet dog! A pile of dosh in the equilibrium! I rush back into my flat and grab a pencil and paper, shake a bit, take a sip, keep on listening, then nearly fall **** forwards returning to the balcony scribbling. And there’s a ****** dog talking.

“I trit-trot across roads with my last owner, winning jobs only within tasks of cemetery light, inside and on, the wall; so curled so, as I sleep outside, so sojourned within, grey dusk, car rivers- I spit! Not so far as giants can, just a piece of spittle, just shadow puppets dancing, just marionettes laughing-”
Schrödinger sang on my balcony beginning to howl, making the lid of the box open.

“To ******* the rain. To share within it, its fire, its knowable drench, of skin like hymn, that is so far penetrating, and mingled past flesh, opened and quakeless to the onslaught of lightening swans! The quickening fury, of several slow days, and lives, devouring the metronome of salutes, upon heart buildings coming down like tetrahedrons drawn by many hands, of dusk filth opening to the arrays of data goods and gods, and produced from the pockets of gibbous mooned skies, and I whisper to the tsunami: mood unhung, bellowing away from the dog fights, and unpainted streets, I seem: To be praying...”

Monday may come soon I doubted, watching the staffy speak.

“Planets growing teeth, in the stars and the junk-yarded iris, succour comes, and so do the sad journeying flies, flying in the mouth of many gales, as extremities to the planet’s engine, affordable, losses, condensed in- and danced solarlessly -in, dances of mortuary, and wedding sung precipice, the edge of a gale, happy to blow my face, away, just gust gust gust! And yes. I do pray a little, and past holocaust of saccharine tune, our shame is forgotten in the simple, rhythms, of a cup- a hand, a castle flock of gulls, landing in water.”

A dog wags its tail because it has just shat, his owner gone, bag ready below ****, I feel streets clean with loving owners hostile to the madness, of the furious dozen dozen flies- lobotomised drool, ready and alive enough, to laugh, and if you are knifeless, maybe a lil knackered, from work - - we might haul up: eternity, my love, and have a lil more, humour! In our sheets and face and sky, an take a **** holiday, right where you are stood or sat, walking, or resting.

And there are no gods, but the ones that let you see them creasing their soft cheeks and aging beside you, together, letting time die, parapets soak in the weather, and say: ‘hey’, here are my bones, there has been a lot of twisting done, but all they need, is yours.

I've been meaning to write you, but my words are all too stuck in their ways. They wish to be spoken and long to be felt, but to be honest they all lack virtue. All they can do now is hurt you.

Drenched in dopamine
These words swim within
Gasping for air  
They plead for solace
In the jungle of thought  
They inhale agony
And exhale apathy  
They are jaded implicitly
These words
I secretly imprisoned
Still inconvenience me
They ******* my heart
Despite their innocence
I can not trust them
Hence my silence
Hence the look in my eyes
My stomach was weak
I saw novelty in every lie
But to be honest  
I been meaning to ask
Is it too late for us?

Arachne’s Shadow

Silver spindles manifest, each one
unique; artistry
at the tip of eight long
fingers--crafted carefully to
catch curious creatures;
trapped by the allure of Circe’s
web of lies. Glistening
and bright from distances, yet
dead upon impact; sticky, dull.

A corner, so decorated with
cobwebs and dust; Arachne
spins her loom in the dark, a room,
that is used seldom, with the exception
of the dinner show;  always
on time, 8 o’clock sharp. Witness
the cunning I lack, benevolence
she disregards; a fly—simple in intelligence,
but chaotic when trapped
in a small room; nuisances
that need dealing with.

Once caught, the struggling ignorant
victim chokes on
mistakes of days past, cheating on
a test, beating the ******* boy; observed
errors of judgment, punishable by death.
Every victim is different, but each is caught
screaming, praying, gasping
for life, only to be
muffled, hushed, stifled;  No remorse
during mealtime.

In sophomore year, I was top in the county, one of the very best.
The school even made me a mug:
Johnny McCarthy: World’s Greatest Running Back.
There were so many times I saved our ***,
so many moments, four downs in, that I came through for them.
But then I my knee exploded in bone, and they all suddenly forgot.

I never really had to care before that; about anything, really.
Everything was given to me – friends and girlfriends and grades.
Especially grades; let me tell you, teachers are less sympathetic when you’re in a wheelchair.
And that’s what ****** me off most: when I felt most pathetic and most hurt, people cared the least.

My mom would kiss my forehead whenever she saw my eyes looking beyond the TV screen,
and she’d say something like “a leopard’s stuck with its stripes.”
Sometimes they wouldn’t make sense, but just hearing her sing proverbs with such confidence,
well, it was comforting have a self-proclaimed-sage living in the house.

As I rattled over the gravel walkways to the student parking lot, I would see the football fields,
see the guys practicing, laughing, and looking at everything but the sad *******.
It was then I learned that I hated football – well not football itself,
but what football meant in this west Pennsylvania town.
I hated how it was everything, and without it, I was nothing.
I was the overweight cheerleader to them, I was the equipment manager.
I was even worse than that to them, now.

I charged my wheelchair to our sixteen year old Dodge Caravan, and lifted myself in,
leaving the chair outside the driver’s side door.
I tore onto 270, and aimed myself north.
Driving on the stony stretch, between the strip-mined mountains and the blanket of pine,
I thought about what was left for me back in town.

I thought about my recently ex-girlfriend, who was like a butterfly,
in her ability to float from flower to flower, and **** as much life as she needed
before fluttering away to some other unlucky ****.

I thought of my high school English teacher,
the only one who pretended to care about me after I was drained of reputation.
He gave me a book, the Catcher of the Rye. I haven’t read it yet – it looks really long.
I want him to thing that I did, though, so I guess I’ll tell him what he wants to hear.

I thought about the half-black kid Christopher, who started up the anime club.
It was cosplay day, so we took his gym clothes and threw them in the toilet.
He had to run laps dressed like a samurai, and ended up ripping his kimono.
We all laughed, though I always wondered how hard he must’ve worked on it.

And I remembered my mother, with her free promotional shirts and forest green sweatpants.
I thought about her tiny piggy figurines in that case in the kitchen,
and how proud she is when the Hamburger Helper isn’t burned.
I imagined her kissing me on the forehead and saying:
“Home is a dangerous thing, and there is little knowledge where the heart is,”
or something like that.

I remembered every individual in that tiny high school, and how in my last week there,
I felt like I was choking on everyone’s endless spoken noise.
I pulled onto one of the camp sites at William’s Lake and collapsed out of the car.
I dragged my leg to the shivering shoal of the stagnant pool, and dipped my casted knee in the water.

I felt its bacteria swim in the wound, the exposed bone now pressed beneath my false flesh,
and infect me with a slow disease that felt like a long warming hug.
The water was shifting to a higher tide, and I lay there, feeling every knot of its slow ascent.
Its green-grey film floated at my chest, and I felt determined to let the algae find its way above my head.
As it creeped its oddly tepid sheet up and up my neck, I thought of telling off my ex-girlfriend,
and reading that book my teacher gave me,
and letting my mom know how much of an artist she is.
I twisted over, and pulled my extended leg back into my minivan.
The van smelled like the lakebed now,
like a great many microbes dying and re-birthing silently, in the cracks of the tan pleather carseat.