at the corner I hit both crosswalk buttons
and wait, eyes closed, to see if I can follow
the walk sign chirps like the blind men

I choose the first street that whistles to me
and walk to the opposite corner
the way the lights rotate, you would walk circles
if you followed the signs
eventually you must choose some arbitrary avenue
and either wait for it to welcome you
or test your luck in traffic

I choose left

then look up, hoping
to invent some new constellation
but the big parking lot halogens
bleed like blue inked milk into the sky
and the stars are specks, painted over

maybe for the better, I know too well
that I would see those galaxies spiraling
and dig dig dig into big big big questions
hitting all the major points
time and space and self and purpose,
purpose

and the mental ******* would be
a million endless tangents like a million little bits of magnesium
flashing in a firework, brighter than those parking lot halogens
but like every independence day
they flash and fizzle and then the sky is just smoky

and I start to feel small
so I walk into Big Lots to calm down

rummaging through the shelves,
not a single pad of paper outside of monthly planners
not a single blank sheet, not a single open page
not a single ******* one

no one wants to buy anything unless they know it has a purpose first

otherwise, it’ll end up in their desk,
blank and staring every time the drawer gets cracked open

and no one will have an answer for it

This terribleness. The blur of traffic lights and puddles paints Los Angeles on my face at night. It's so hard to know who will doze in my blind spots. Sunflower seeds and ******* lining the carpet. I sat on the front porch for five hours gutting the wolves from my appendices. Usually the headaches go away with the squashing of the lights. Fluorescents are the worst, halogens second, and 60-watt 120-volt light bulb the bane of my existence. I look at my phone but I cannot summon a quirky 120 character quip. I need excedrin but all I have to grape flavored children's aspirin. I should have asked for the water. How many unfinished glasses of water have I left around this world?
     Maybe Bruce and I will squash after work. I can hear his weekly catalog of two night stands with those married transient women who drive from Santa B. I hate golf, I could have made carried a career in this resentment. Maybe rolling down the window will alleviate some of this pressure. Maybe it's barometric pressure, The Baby is here in time to drag the houses out to sea. It feels like Michelangelo is carving The David in my head and it's the chiseling I've never wanted. It's Tuesday and the drugs were horrible. They killed five of them today. We wrapped their heads in blankets from the Thrifty, and had to have the interns find clothes that would fit for the Christian caskets. Two days until Giving Thanks Day.
     I am wrapped in copper and stuck in amber. I am acquitted by nonsense and stipulation, sick with nausea and pushing my forehead into the steering wheel. This is all terrible. The lying I've never told myself. The people that don't even know it's lying. Her and I always seem to escape with our happiness and pleasure in tow. The odds are slim, but our clothes have never fit too tightly.

Handing out wings

like they were portions of God

this narrow asphalt

made by architects of tourism

movers of time and space

reaching out like insane astronauts or genius heretics

breathing our iodine

becoming halogens

the sky moves sideways

dystrophic airwaves

feeble beacons

eerie radio silence

here come more perils from the sky

The sound of small plastic wheels
On the ridged metal lip of an escalator
Bookends each trip between home and birthplace.

The first two uptempo, eager
To race to the smell of marble and leather,
Perfectly cooked fish and pastries with blueberries
The next two, piano, as I cross back,
Result of exhaustion, arms full of clothes and sorting small bottles into bags.

But on exit
Not due to vents, air conditioning, or the sensory assault of shopping under halogens,
Home smells of rust.
Of dirt and smoke - burnt.
Home smells more damaged and ****** up than its neighbour
And it's apt position on the map
Behind our back
Peering over the shoulder of the small ursa, overbearing and controlling.

But it's not the smell of burning petrol and tissue in glass,
Nor riot shields and plastic armour,
And only slightly of over emphasis on Northern Irish poetry during exams.

It's the stench of friendships, bouquet of break-ups,
Awkwardness and overconfidence,
Fake tanning and too much tea.

And like bonfires and cigarette smoke,
Burnt wood and tobacco embers,
It's the one perfume I can't get out of my clothes.

The green combusts, the cherry sclerotized mask dances above
the invisible paper carapace.
Stuffed full with Rotten skunk innards and burning,
tongues of heat sweat away its crystalline hairs.
Aren is hunched and crooked, all teeth and lungs,
under the mixed halogens of suburban porchlight,
being bathed in bluescale waves from the
strobe of the neighbor's telescreen.
Ropes of smog pour from the slats between his picket fence ivories and get frayed.
I drink the filth, choking down the viscera of the vermin.
It doesn't seem to get easier.

Stumbling inside, my feet detach and I throw myself on the door
until I've locked out the sickly tide pool light of dawn,
and I'm rolling toward his bedroom.
Jolting and sputtering, and
grasping at the hands of the clock,
listening for the steady metronome to
count me through.
And then numbness.
I know the feeling, and next come the
pins, digging into my
fingertips and the pads of my
toes, and then I'm all body and silent prayers.
And I'm whispering sick thoughts to Aren -

"Those adrenaline demons
will do me in,
and if only I could relax,
and my dear mother
used to have a stalker,
and I almost got run down
by a car on the highway when I was five,
and asthmatics are five times as likely to have a
generalized anxiety disorder."

The adrenaline demons gather my tendons in pincushion palms,
tugging at the strings,
panicked arthritis and my fingers are
twitching and curling backwards
while I glare on with shallow breaths and cataracts.
The organs moan in the cavern of my body,
with thick wet air pouring from the opening.
I'm standing now,
a fetishized devil doll,
shaking out the pins
and the needles
and the sick splinters of glass
and the long holy skewers
and I'm breathing again
and I sit and
I breathe.

Push false math theorems between slices of white bread.
Shove it down my throat.
When I choke,
refuse to perform the Heimlich.
Open up my insides.
Force the twisted logic through my intestines
like a broken machine.
Sew my mouth shut so I can't throw it up.

Carve the periodic table into my arms
with your sharpened Swiss army knife.
Smile while my skin is replaced
with ****** atomic numbers.
Saw my fingers off
so I can't use them to cover the halogens.

Glue my eyelashes to my eyebrows so my eyes can't close.
Color my irises black with permanent marker:
just like yours.
Force me to see the way you do.

Tear from my mind every original thought.
Shout at my dreams until they run away in fear.
Vacuum my favorite memories out through my ears.
Fit the remaining contents of my brain into your incorrect physics equation.

Extract my heart from my rib cage with kitchen tongs.
Watch my skin go pale.
Watch my eyes go still.

Tell my empty body it's for the best.
Tell this shadow of my soul that you love it.

We trace back our origins
As we breath in the toxic halogens
Time and space are deteriorating rapidly
And I’m losing all sense of me
Everything’s becoming intertwined
Nothing is easily defined
The lines are blurred
I do not know what has or has not occurred
I experience past present and future as one instance
My mind offers no resistance
I have become a conduit for all creation
Through that I have found salvation

Setting clocks back that
one hour
I only see daylight through
the windows of the lunch
room.

night all day.

Oslo Skyline lets me
recall one of my earliest
memories;
from a baby seat in the
back of my uncle's
Citroën, hypnotized by
the yellow lights of a
Shell station we were parked
outside.

something so comforting
about the brightness of
a whole, little day
within the darkness of way-
beyond-bedtime.

warmth within winter.
adults in conversation.
I hope the bus driver keeps
the overhead halogens off in
here.

there's nothing unfriendly
about this lack of
daylight.

Born in the landlocked month of February, somewhere between tragedy and Tuesday, the tornado sirens matched her first cry. They called her vague and passionate, giving her adjectives where others gave affection. But still, I saw past pretense, and I was lucky enough to know her. To see her through green glass lenses and stretched allegory, to witness the wind behind her coke bottle eyes. She spoke in questions, in coffee shop conversations, clinging to claustrophobia as if maybe it could save her. Maybe I could’ve saved her. But still, I remind myself, I was lucky enough to know her. When she spoke, her hands would shake, calling evidence to the unadulterated genius lurking inside her borrowed veins. If nothing else She was brimstone and birdsong, Sunday morning service and burned bridges, a mystery to all who tried to love her. She left on an insignificant day in July, when the Sun pushed down on bare skin and our blood mixed with mercury and halogens. She didn’t say goodbye. They carved a meaningless bible verse into her headstone as an afterthought, and the pastor spoke of ‘better places’ and ‘peace at last’. They danced around the word suicide, as if that made her anything less, only sending her to heaven out of guilt. And me? Well, I was lucky enough to know her.

Dream yourself back in the 70s
have a thunderbird wine
and recall Soho
with their ***** mac brigade
Blondes grow galore
under the halogens lights
Stars they strike a memory
Ride a White Swan
a serious Yellow Ford Cortina mk 3
and a fine mettel of a DIY  Judo book
with your thousand island sauce
served at eel pie island