The self proclaimed writer

Jerking himself off to exhaustion daily

(Never touched, never connected)

To play roulette with his circadian rhythm

And turn an otherwise docile daytime delinquent

Into a nocturnal creature's fear

All to avoid the cliched train wreck of a family

The alcoholic mother

The never proud father

And the always beyond reach sister

Yes yes, feel the waking nightmare

This insomniac desperately craves sleep

As the titular picturesque life

sobriquet to family cat

Is slowly causing his dormant degeneracy

To blister and boil the brain

And he feels like he is losing his mind

In this otherwise ideal world

This grotesquely pictersque

Fevered upper class dream

i stick the plaintive letters
of friends and family amidst
the pages of my favorite books
they mark choice passages
concerning our species and the
fate of this ancient universe

one desperate plea for me to
return to the hypocrisy of Christianity rests in my copy of Camus's essay "the Rebel"
tucked nearby Dawkins'
"god Delusion" and Bakunin's
"god and the State" which share
a space with unholy texts on science
art and philosophy on the top row
of my overflowing
alphabetized bookshelf

on a silent Sunday drive home from
church some years ago i
once asked why it was such
a crime to believe in myself
my father imparted it was
an insult to my 
invisible creator
well here’s a ******* to 

my mythological maker
i don’t need you
i’ve got two feet 

planted firmly 
beneath me
i stand strong beside the ones
who resist a culture of misanthropy

i am what i am
a wanderer waylaid in the chasm
of gray matters
i no longer see the world in
shades of black pitch and white snow
your absolute truth is sharp
and out of tune with the
empirical realities of nature
i am not a zealot inculcated
on the drug of elitist predestination
i refute the elixir of everlasting life
heaven is a dream that keeps
us numb to the hellscapes around us

i face the unknown sobered by a
measurable cosmos which wasn't
made just for me to see
but spawned all we call
reality in the throes of a fourteen billion
year old eruption that flung planets
and stars into existence

we are amiss upon a floating rock
adrift in outer-space and instead of
utilizing our capacity for ingenuity to
cultivate a sustainable community
we looked towards the skies
and fashioned gods in our own image
we made god compassionate—a benevolent  
creator who breathed life into nothingness
we made god hideous—a malevolent
dictator deciding the destinies of the unfortunate
we engineered division where once was
sanctity and instigated violence on the
premise that one faith was better
than the other but
they all ring hollow
if you ask me

i am not a sheep and your Christ
is not my shepherd
i am not a timid and pitiable creature
stumbling along after some imaginary master
Jesus of Nazareth was a revolutionary
executed for instigating rebellion
against the Empire of Rome
he said nothing about waging endless war
in fact he urged his followers
to turn the other cheek
i imagine he'd be rolling in his grave
if he could see them know—provided
of course
he hadn't so famously vacated it

riddle me this
why do you hate two men who cherish
each other when your savior said
the greatest commandment was just
to love and be loved by one another
if the etymology of Christian is
Christ follower why not cherish the
lines of red in your holy book
your god bled and died for

even the most progressive of faiths
pale in comparison to the certainty of
evolution or the terror of global climate change
why mythologize that which we don't
understand when history shows that
we only learn more and grow with time
when we question everyone and everything
why dwell in circumstantial metaphysics
when we can just as easily admit
we don't have the faintest clue

i arraign myself against any warped faith
that privileges bigotry and arrogance
i reject the religion of atheism and
buddhism and Christianity
i stand apart from the ethos of
Hindus and edicts of Islam
i have no gods and no masters
my conscience is my only authority
i'm the only one who can
save me from me

in my father's latest letter
packed safely away in Carl
Sagan's "the Demon-Haunted World"
he informs me that i'm
the prodigal son that some
doting deity awaits me
at the gates of heaven
to put a ring on my finger and
slaughter a fattened calf for my
welcome home dinner but
how did an omnipresent god
not deign to ascertain
i'm a vegetarian

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then I ate my own wickedness."*
- Aldous Huxley

i let my head hit the brachiaria.
cyan sky rolled past,
and it seemed to me as if

my past itself was dragged out of my body,
excorcised and pulled up
and traveled with the sky's current

the sky is moving,
impossible and slow.
the clouds jog with a rush.

sometimes i think i have never
felt at all
with my year ****** up,

on their way to Mongolia or
Philadelphia,
I tried to desperately recall

sullied at the thought i couldnt.
I thought about how i always embarrassed you
in public

how i'd turned into an embarrassment
at this point in time
my pure innocence

that flowed in the past gently
uncomfortably shifting and
wondering how certain things felt

i don't know
manhood devoured me like
an apple.

in the garden
i walked
tried to spot all the perennials

and i did
and i thanked mankind for taking up the
habit of finding wild plants

bringing them into our lives
i see a sign, the museum is holding an exhibit on
british pastorals and hellscapes

i tell her we should go.
she agrees
walks across the street to buy a wire.

my blood ran down my body
onto the linen
Egyptian cotton

like the princesses who
married at 14,
at 13 i laughed

when they asked me to go the square
and at 15 i felt it my responsibility.
the fetid collapse of my

sincerity and my serenity
flowed through my being
patrolled round

my purity like
a culpable
sentry

i closed my eyes
and i felt the sheets heavy with
plasma

i blinked and
everything turned to burgundy
the subway grates licked at my ankles

the poplar and elms
in firestone
laughed at me,

who had so eagerly
held on to a fray
consumed by mankind

gutted with
certain
toxicant.

if i **** myself, will i wake from this dream?

a half-remembered reverie floating
at the periphery of my anxiety.
will death free me from ennui?
will my final breath
bring me liberty
or will this life be but the passing
of one ship too many on a moonless eve?

if i **** myself, will i wake from this dream?

the doctor told me to
swallow a fistful of pills.
whatever you say, doc.
i've been striving for lucidity
so i might achieve some measure of restraint
a way to constrain the hellscapes
when i drift unconsciously
listless within my psyche.
can i project my whims
into the astral plane
to attain a degree of peace?

if i **** myself, will i wake from this dream?

endless possibility rests
just beyond my fingertips.
to soar serenely
over lavender mountains
past fields of magenta glass.
magical realism birthing infinite possibility
from the labyrinth of night-terrors.

if i **** myself, will i wake from this dream?

it's been said
that if you dream of falling
and you reach the end
you won't wake up ever again.
but my deja vu is transpiring endlessly
as if i was trapped in an abyss spanning eternity.
am i caught in a vacuum of space-time?
am i adrift within a void?
am i going through the motions once again?
the doctor told me to
swallow a fistful of pills.
whatever you say, doc.
repeat. repeat. repeat. repeat.
...
is this a dream?
is this the real world?
am i already dead?

if i **** myself, will i wake from this dream?

They are all the Stonehenge slabs waiting
to topple over, granite foundation
of the cosmic cardhouse.
Expressionless: blank stares
Like the ceiling of the sky with
wall-to-wall cloudless gray
Warmed over with a vague upset -
The sun still tries its damnedest
Underneath the folds somewhere

Some of the grim flock re-picturing
bedspreads they snuck under with
lovers passed on long-since
(Stop, dash, as good as dead
Dash, stop, resume again)
They felt trapped,
they motioned Your Honor for bust-out.
New apartments, new partners,
new town centers eventually
seemed all the same and they
were stricken apathetic:
dead end

New installations of municipal plotting
erected in a Cold War mindframe,
Brutalism put to shame.
Rising above an alma mater
Those who stayed pass by,
Itinerants late-stage en-route
To spiritual tent cities to remain.
Rising above the rest of town
Squinting producing the pitched
Concrete walls, the barbed wire vein
Circulating among borders
Teeth of ******* razorblades.

Another life they’d never graduate
Now all that’s left is ponzi schemes,
billiard hellscapes accented with
deep-discount tobacco flames,
greasy spoons caddy-cornering
shuttered gas stations with their
mummified attendants left
moaning with desire from
beneath the boards:
Broken glass glints on felled horizons
of the ever-present post-industrial plains
What a waste slog on what a waste
What a waste slog on what a waste
Your Honor we request another stay
Your Honor we request another stay