We witnessed cataclysmic events not take place, and instead accepted little increments of ****.
That's what life is.
Little increments of ****. Sometimes it's decent ****.
Most often it *****.
But it's always little ****, and it always adds up.

Diversity of motivation among self-harming individuals

An estimated one in twelve teenagers has committed self-harm. Of those many will continue self-injuring into young adult hood. Yet older adults are not immune to committing this act. In 2003-2004 adults age 25-44 were responsible for nearly fifty percent of reported/discovered self-harm cases.  There are many reasons that people self-harm. These reasons may include self-harming as a survival mechanism, self-harm as an outer expression of inner emotional turmoil, and self-harm as a means to exercise control over one’s environment.
Contrary to popular thought, only one in ten people who make the decision to self-harm are suicidal. The majority of people who cause injury to themselves willfully have a wish to avoid killing themselves. The act of self-harm is developed as a “technique” to cope and survive the afflictions of life. How can we know that this is the reasoning or thought behind the action of self-harm? “Cutters” typically reason out the least amount of damage that will “remedy” the stress intensive situation that they find themselves in, and exercise an enormous amount of restraint in inflicting only a measured amount of damage. Cutters’ common logic is that through this expression of injury, further damage to their selves may be headed off. --------, a former cutter, attests to the reality of this when he says, “Every time that I touched a blade to my skin, I would resist making a larger cut, a deeper wound. Every time that I hurt myself, I did so only in response to what drove me over the edge; Each time the amount of physical damage that I did was the very least that I could muster. I fought to do the least damage I could, no matter how intense the pain that I felt became.” He sums it up rather nicely.
Secondly, self-harm is used as an outward expression of deeper, more complex emotional and psychological phenomena. It is not a diagnosis; it is a symptom. It is a symptom of a struggle that is inherited by victims of abuse, those who lose a loved one, or experience other traumatic events during their childhood. These groups are far more likely to indulge in self-harm. One study conducted by Boudewyn and Liem found that of those college students that reported a history of self-harm, fifty two percent had been sexually abused as a child. Those that self-harm do not simply cut to cut, burn to burn, or mutilate to mutilate. There is a deeper motivation. This motivation is commonly emotional. These motivational emotions are often the results of tragic or traumatic life experiences. It is seldom that a cutter’s motivation is a want for attention.  In fact, most cutters are chameleons.
Self- harm is used as a tool to exercise control in a chaotic environment over which one would not otherwise have any means to control. Among chaos and turmoil such as the loss of a parent or close friend, relational betrayal, divorce of one’s parents, or consistent, one time, or sporadic physical, emotional, or ****** abuse an individual is radically more likely to engage in self-harm. Outside reasoning on this is only speculative. For this reason it is valuable to look at the action from the perspective of those who commit it. Cody, the same individual mentioned earlier says something else that lines up with this common scholarly opinion. He says “I remember the very first time I cut myself intentionally. I was in the ninth grade, in the school bathroom. I had just experienced what I saw as betrayal by my best friend of about ten years. I felt like I lost him. I felt like things were spinning out of control, and I couldn’t control the way I felt about it all. The only way I could feel that control was with something sharp in my hand.” This is characteristic not only of ----- but also of many other cutters.
Cutters are not (necessarily) crazy. On the surface it may appear that cutting goes against the ingrained survival and self-preservation instincts in human beings. This is actually the opposite of the truth. Many who cut feel that if they don’t inflict smaller harm to themselves that they may indeed fall to suicide. They feel that by letting out their pain in increments, and escaping in fragments, that they can slay the thoughts of suicide and urges to escape that they carry. When at the edges of rational, some instincts may take different forms. What may seem counter intuitive – an act of self-harm – becomes the definition of an instinct that it seems to defy. The desire to survive becomes so strong that it is necessary to inflict pain. This is not uncommon to survival situations. For example, the movie 127 Hours reenacts the experience of a man trapped under a boulder in a beautiful and secluded gorge. He cut off his own arm with a dull multi-tool in order to escape death. That act is the epitome of self-harm as a survival instinct.
Cutting could lead to a series of events that tailspin out of control. Loss of control could take the form of the spiral of therapies and prescriptions that would follow if it were discovered that one were cutting , or it could be the accidental slip of a blade gone too far. It could end in hospitalization. It could even end in death. However, those individuals who choose to cut, as long as sober, take precautions to avoid discovery or more injury than is intended. They are meticulous, careful even. They reason out how, where, and when they can cut “safely”. They are very much in control over the act, when they feel they cannot be in control of anything else.
It may rationally appear that pain is pain. That it would make no difference whether out or inward, because whatever its state, the pain is still owned by the individual. However, emotions are often harder to process than physical events. A burning rage, hate or guilt may well be harder to cope with than a burn to one’s arm, leg, or hand. An emotional cut to the bone may be less painful than a physical one. It may be said that the act does not transform the pain, but multiplies it. This in essence may be true, but one form of pain allows a man to ignore another. A pinch may allow a man to ignore the emotional pain of a nightmare. A small cut may allow ignorance of the bigger cut on one’s spirit or psyche.
There are widely varying and increasingly complex variations of motivation and cause of self-harm. They may include, but are absolutely and in no way limited to: self-harm as a coping or survival mechanism, self-harm as a tool to exercise control over one’s increasingly chaotic environment, and self-harm as an outer expression of inner emotional turmoil. To believe that cutting is simple is to nearly deny it altogether. Its essence is complicated. Stereotyping self-harm or self-harmers may well lead to opinions that will ostracize or further encourage the occurrence of self-harm.  Since the motivation and causes of self-harm are undeniably complex, to attempt to brush this under a rock would be to diminish its importance, and to deny healing to those who need to understand it.

           Your past, your romantic past, is a shadow. Like all towns, Port Angeles was a combination of rain and clouds, sun and mist, with a chamber of commerce, barrooms and boards of directors, the known and unknown. No one of course is completely unknown. I was known for my tragic love life. She had found another man, a backwoods man, living on the land but not above a night on the town, who according to her would wipe snot on his pants, a statement of poverty or thrift or anger against the niceties of society. All of us heated our hovels with wood but only the rich burned hardwoods, me and probably this guy were softwood gatherers.

            There were few aspects to my life. First, I can remember a nook in the kitchen of the house I shared with a beautiful faceless woman who wore a ring in her nose where I wrote and watched flocks of unidentified birds comb a tree for seeds. This particular day the sky was blue with clean pillowy cumulus clouds floating toward Puget Sound. I believe all the poems written in that nook have been forgotten by their author.

            Nights, for entertainment, I would wander the aisles of the supermarket, admiring everything and buying nothing. I had no money. The fluorescent lighting, clean straight neat shelving and floors, warmth and the fact I could identify nobody attracted me. I lived on cream cheese and honey sandwiches eating them leaning against the kitchen sink. Thinking go back to New York City which is what I ultimately did. Drove cross country nonstop three days and three nights seeing and feeling nothing.

           I populated P.A. during the Reagan recession inherited from Carter. I'm unclear how presidents affect your life but good or bad, democrat or whig, alive or dead you've got to get a job, which I did. I supervised the living arrangements of developmentally disabled adults in what I thought were humorous contexts that gave no offense. They were beautiful and incorrigible having regular *** without protection. Normally harmless they'd sometimes have altercations with their neighbors. I balanced the checkbooks, paid the bills. Supposedly teaching living skills, I had few of my own as evidenced by my sleeping on the floor, I had no bed. One mature woman colleague judged me a short-timer living a useless fantasy about big cities. Still lost in my own history, still didn't know the calculus.

            I had a dog, Shade, black lab, leftover from my near-marriage until she realized I had no economic prospects, no interest in further *** or her logger boyfriend, and a complete inability to translate or imagine nesting and gestation. My homework comes to me in daily disconnected increments. Shade lived in my gray van, a Dodge slant six, which I could never afford to fix. Once the driveshaft disconnected from the rear axle and I tied it on with rope. Drove 60 miles on a knot. Shade was hyper and sad, both. He smelled bad but was a good dog with a lonely heart. When my wife who wasn't a wife finally found a boyfriend who wouldn't wipe snot on his pant leg they took Shade to British Columbia where I believe he runs free on a vast estate by the sea. I once beat Shade like a slave because he attacked a small dog out of frustration and loneliness and until I had kids and started saying and doing things just as bad to humans it was the lowest meanest moment of my life. The farmer who saw it will never forget or forgive it.

            Having confessed all this there's just one last fact to tell. The mountains were cold, the waters clear, deep snow and shadows.

It happened in the dead of night while I was slicing bread for a guilty snack.
My attention was caught by the scuttering of a raccoon outside my window.
That was, I believe, the first time I noticed my strange tendencies as an unusual
human.
I gave the raccoon a piece of bread, my subconscious well aware of the consequences.
Well aware that a raccoon that is fed will always come back for more.
The enticing beauty of my cutting knife was the symptom.
The bread, my hungry curiosity.
The raccoon, an urge.

The moon increments its phase and reflects that much more light off of my cutting
knife.
The very same light that glistens in the eyes of my raccoon friend.
I slice the bread, fresh and soft. The raccoon becomes excited.
or perhaps I'm merely projecting my emotions onto the newly-satisfied animal.

The raccoon has taken to following me.
You could say that we've gotten quite used to each other.
The raccoon becomes hungry more and more frequently, so my bread is always handy.
Every time I brandish my cutting knife the raccoon shows me its excitement.
A rush of blood. Classic Pavlovian conditioning. I slice the bread.
And I feed myself again.

Sacred airs on the morn, averse to fumes and din
Reach for what helps bring all of sane; it came.

Only one voice calling, far from tossing crumbs
Mercy in tiny increments in the lap of assiduous babes.

Lovely millimeters made the *** a replenished act
If a staid soul needs break the pattern, surely that waltz's not lost.....

Facile was of man's habit, a constant battle to evade
The one looking such of sweetness, rather reeks a tainted rag.

we rise from the nests of our joined ashes
again and again - lovers and friends
wondering if change is possible
when change is all that we are -
bodies of re-creation
built to be rebuilt
in dusty increments

Museums as art
Art as museums
Sail the trail to my mausoleum
Psychopaths and physicists
Psychiatrists and philosophers
Philanthropists and pilots and painters


Declare now, that these are our days –
Our hours, and our days
These are our city, our hours
Our time, our days.


This is our world –
At 14:92 I landed here and claimed it
And searched it and found it wanting
Of civilization that I could so easily supply
By means of wounds and iron
And brawn and truth
(and just a tiny touch of influenza darling)
By means of our Lord,
Who grants us all that we desire
If only we **** enough of those he did not choose.
This is our world –
And we shall make it what we will
Make it in our own image
Teach it that innocence is not knowing the difference between right and wrong
Raise it to hate no one
But to love itself so deeply
That all other love seems hateful in comparison.
This is our child, love
Yours and mine.


Here the first shall be last
And the last shall be first
But once the first are last they shall be
Last
Last
      Last
And once the last are first
They shall make it so they can never be last again
This is our primitive accumulation
Of necessary materialism
Let’s cultivate matter
To make objects that we can place on shelves
And in cases –
These are our cases
And we love them as we love ourselves


Museums as mass graves
Mass graves as museums
Kiss me in my mausoleum
Priests and prisoners
Prostitutes and prophets
Pioneers and pilgrims and pagans


This is our time –
And we are dispensing it in spendthrift increments
Buying threadbare bandages for our cavernous canyons
Buying ample earplugs
To seal in the silence
So we can somewhat say
“look there is peace –
Look we have done it
In our time it is accomplished” – 


This is our peace –
And we know it by the signs
The lions and lambs lay quietly together
In our brass-barred zoos
For as long as shelves and cases
Are intact and the first are first
And the last are last
And the civilized are organized and holy
There is peace –
Oh, look
We made peace!

And as for Solomon and Socrates –
We take their words to weave through our new wisdom
And when we re-chart the constellations
We shall give them each a star
And salute them once a year
When they come around the universe
Oh, look
How wise we are!

Mass graves as art
Art as mass graves
There have been no better days
There has been no greater time
Politicians and pornographers
Professors and pirates
Psychologists and pastors and pianists


This is our time –
And we are doing with it the very best we know how
The last are toiling and trying
And the first are trying to think to try –
But there is a shortness in our hours
And a violence in our peace
There is inherent foolishness in our wisdom
And disease in our cities
And there is death upon our shelves and in our cases.

This is our world –
We crafted it and declared our truth to be true
We sculpted this, our colosseum
Please inscribe my mausoleum
With “we know not what we do”

Say if all events:
'Past, present, future'
All possible occurrence
Chosen and averted
Are already on the 'map'
Of spacetime
(Interpreted from Relativity, Einstein)

Like infinite numbers of
Vacation spots

and
Time is merely
Our conscious measurement
Of indivisible increments
Of the ever-present
(St. Augustine)

A record of travelling

And if our fourth dimension of time
Is our one dimensional consciousness
Where we can only travel from
Event to event
Dot to dot
In seemingly constant speed
And one direction

As if a railway passenger

In one of the higher dimensions of time and consciousness
Though unfathomable and would seem omnipresent and eternal yet timeless
To us dots in a three dimensional flatlands

As the wayward of them
Had stumbled or spilled
Into our dreams

We would finally be able to
Run wild and free
Greet our past and future
Embrace familiar friends and strangers
In the wildlands
Of a higher dream

And we would not be
Arriving at a dimension of
Love and intuition

But we would inherently
Be beings of love
And intuition

Though we only seldomly
Physically feel them
And never see them

They're part of us
Only visible
Only fathomable
In higher dimension
Of
Spacetime

I work for Jones & Co.
You are likely somewhere down below,
I have grown used to this unnatural height.
Once, here, as a younger man, I read articles,
working on cases just long enough to cultivate indifference.
My first firm party, I was made to wear an ivy laurel.
We were mingling on the penthouse deck,
when a gust unceremoniously removed it from my head.

Jones is a superstitious man,
he has a dream-catcher above his office door.
He designed a vaulted spiral staircase on our fifty-first floor.
The one separates Jones from his company,
the other, us from below.
Five years of billing in six minute blocks,
labyrinthine increments, Herculean costs.
A kind of optic chiasma where the nerves cross and people get lost.



B.E. Twain

We the citizens, who live as refugees,
We keep earning & see if our life is turning,
To the price rise, we lose savings,
Still we remain rock-bottom in standard of living.

We belong to the middle class,
Whose life always a breakable thin glass.
Our life remains completely unsettle,
Every second, life tests our mettle.

Life chases us with pressure, failure and useless lecture,
We are nurtured with a fear of future,
Happiness remains just a leisure,
Live with the unsecure & unsure present for a secure future.

We keep us busy and function,
We fear, when there arrives a function,
Towards happiness, we run as a pilgrim,
For the corporates, we become a mere victim.

We run like an athlete for salary, food and target,
For this globalized world, we are just a market,
Like hungry dogs, we wait for increments,
We keep running with bitter disappointments.

We live in own house, only in our dreams,
Our hearts cry with hopeless screams,
Failures remain our tutors,
Inability has turned us the irrecoverable debtors.

Our appearance has a rich look,
We have untold hidden burdens,
That keep us shook,
Keeps us forbidden and fear-ridden.


Low class think us rich,
High class always want us to be their *****,
Politically neglected by the rulers,
Economically exploited by the rich powers.

We exhaust ourself for subsistence,
We remain victorious and satisfied only in our existence,
We lose our life to sustain in competence,
We run our life with a mere persistence.

More than the high class and low class, we suffer,
Our lives never progressed as governments differ,
All see low class with empathy and sympathy,
To our difficulties, we are looked with apathy.

On rich, we are not jealous,
Towards our aim, we are zealous.
Never think we are nothing,
We truly have nothing to lose.

We take risks to make history,
Our path is nothing less than a mystery,
You never allow us to come up,
But we are not going to give up.

Hello High class,
Never pretend to live like us, to exploit us,
Gone are the days, we remained fools,
You will stand a day as the super intelligent fools.

Before, we are hungry for food,
Now, we are hungry to rule,
Before, we feared to live,
Now, we are ready to win the world.

We are nothing! We are nothing
We have nothing to lose!
We won’t stop until having nothing could do nothing to us.

My mother enters the kitchen, says that her hands
are dripping, begs my father to finish his work
at the sink.  I observe, for a moment, the expression
upon her face which seems conflicted between
a desire to laugh and a need
                                               to feel clean.
I interject that clearly her fate is to have
dog placenta on her hands for all eternity.
Her disgust and amusement seem equally to rise.
After she has washed herself, she speaks of
Ponyo's last intermission between long
intervals of birthing to nap three fleeting minutes;
another contraction gave way to a wriggling
new mole who squeaked and groaned with
bizarre endearment, seizing my heart and causing
its mother's head, after jolting awake,
                                                          ­     to go limp.
Mom says it's sad-but-sweet.  Dear dog
has spent herself six times already in increments
which, as they increase, draw her spirit still closer
to a totally inevitable chasm of fled energy;
as soon as she falls asleep, yet a new indignant mass
of living parts swaddled in loose skin and wet fur
shoves its way outward, forward, world-ward.
Ponyo is not selfish.  Immediately after birth seven,
she begins to lick her offspring clean and nudge it
towards her belly, where it may feed itself.
"Only just got a break, and already she's
                                                           ­         back to work."
I'm one of five children my mother has carried
and raised--and for a human, five are many!
I'm afraid to give birth even once, despite
that a greater want of mine is to hold
my own child someday.  I wonder if that
is motherhood: discomfort and indecision
concerning the worth of the effort in labor,
in birth, in the weak moments thereafter--
stroking one's child's downy, collapsible head
and feeling a need to protect her, to nurture her,
that is more pressing even than the so-
alluring whispers which Sleep may breathe--
and even beyond these moments, when I have said
to my mother that I hate her (because
to me, it was obvious that I did not,
and was too callous, obtuse, and insensitive
to think that she might just believe it)
and then missed church the next day to stay
with her when she felt ill and tired--if this
is motherhood, I wonder.  It must be more even
than I could ever have thought like wanting
to laugh and to wring one's hands
(and even just to go to sleep)
                                                all at once.

I say ******* to society

I've given up sobriety

Iron man with Iron feet

I will run with no defeat


You don't know the half of it


**** the negativity

I am positivity

This is my nativity


You can't even tell it's me

The future & the past will meet

Everything is obsolete

I travel in infinity


That's why I hit the alt delete

You can check my Windows

No one is controlling me


I do what I *******, please

Apple Fruit and Mac & Cheese

That's how it's supposed to be


As easy as a notice to evict

You're supposed to leave


As easy as a punch to the stomach

Don't expect breath


As easy as can be

Don't expect to be a friend to me


My inner intense sneeze

Rhyme schemes & remedies



I cascade into cadence

of sounds created from synergy


I make friends not enemies

those who refuse will

never hear the end of me


I connect thoughts

Like physical human centipedes


I dissect words like

frog legs & vasectomy


Perpendicular is my literature

Therefore you can't get to me


No gravity

my styles wild

It's outlandish


My sanity is inbound

Like planes landing


You're plain jane

I'm James cameron


I make waves

Then face cameras


I make change

and then hand it


I'd still **** if I was one handed


I'm still ill, I got skills


I'm a digital bandit, lyrically rampant  


spiritually sanctioned


my riddles are of mental chemicals unbalanced

because of Ritalin i spit ballads


how will this shooting effect our generation, public perception

government deception

and of course the voting ballet


tables have turned all is madness

what will the democrats and republicans say about fifty something bodies laying down a decade

It will all sound the same

public & social media hate

what stand will you take?

its crazy how all we do is debate


I stand for humanity, human lives unified not by destruction nor vanity

but the construction of

beliefs higher than religious crosses, Tall Buildings & Canopies


It's classism

Just subtract the can of beans

A ripple of mass ignorance is a brand you see


It's hate

no marketers

Hate is self-marked

We hate the unknown & don't accept

People's accomplishments


It's comfort

Drink your coffee slow

Do you know where a target is?


The same amount of a coffee

equals a meal for starving kids


It's marvelous how important

The stain on that carpet is


When most people don't have a place

Nor know what comfort is


This substance

is brought to you by A sober mind

one that is under the influence

Of motivation injected into the brain

Via increments


My sentences
are a result of elements

Past present & prevalent

I've learned the benefits

of being an optimus

Optimism is key I'm just looking up


I universally believe

that we are capable of being one


just smile when you see Sun

This journey has just begun

- stellarhero

I hurt myself in little ways
In the beginning.
I’d force myself to spend time
With people that I didn’t like,
People that didn’t like me.
I’d end up frustrated as the tears
Cut across my cheeks
Drawing invisible scars.
That was only the beginning.

I began to deprive myself
Of the simple pleasures.
I’d throw up after every meal.
I was dehydrated and malnourished
And it still wasn’t enough.
My mouth burned and
My stomach turned on itself.
I couldn’t sleep at night.
I didn’t want to.

Stage three of my self-hatred.
I secluded myself from my friends.
There were days that I
Wouldn’t leave my room,
Wouldn’t leave my bed.
There were days that my head ached
From the tears that burned as they fell
Onto photos of people that I used to be,
People that I wish I could be again.

After that, the inclination grew stronger.
I couldn’t decide between drawing blood
Or refusing to draw breath.
One bottle of pills, one locked door.
And it would all be over.

Let me straddle your mind until I'm confined

to the empty spaces you refuse to acknowledge ,

taking hostage the inhabitants of this grand mental escape ,

I equate this mission to landing on the moon - you consume

every fiber of my being I intrude ,

wishing to know what you are thinking

it sort of ****** me off when you choose *** over celibacy

just assume it's my jealousy I'd rather have your mind than head

as we lay here in bed I listen to the breath that escapes the dark carven of your lips ,

you kiss me so softly with vocabulary I hear clearly how deep you crave me,

such a sweet sentiment from a sapio ******

someone who can fornicate my mental with intellectual ,

you eat out my riddles and digest philophosy

have me shaking feeling close to God see ,

we get bare naked to the truth

Exposing absolute equations and reasons why , I sigh .

Gagging on your brilliance

you present such increments of human creativity ,

swallowing your mysteries

stroke me close and slow

fill me to capacity with the knowledge of you

tell me the truth you love to **** me

with your words You encourage this insanity

This perplexing wet whirl of words gushes ,

and i demand to see the length of your lyrical havoc

I wish to kiss and grab the sensual sentences you string together

& nothing could compare to the pleasure when we intertwine our minds .

It's ridiculous how meticulous you are with my mental

we lay there , gasping sinful in sections of ecstasy

i watch you vividly , react to my melodic passion

i hold on - grasping my fingertips around your brain

you dig deeper and in pain i give you my vunerability

I .LET . YOU . FEEL . ME

speaking languages I forgot i knew

yet I know I cant dispute

our connection from confessing the truth

you sparked theories bigger than any bang

articulating art using slang

we decode out way of conduct

it was just pure luck we ****** through conversation

Early in the day,
when the sun is still lounging in its bed of clouds
and the moon is casting blue-black light
preparing to add rouge to its love’s fair skin for a finally that hasn’t arrived,
I find hair stuck to my neck
leaving thin ribbons across my cheeks,
to my collar bone

While the moon is flamboyant,
adding a screaming red
to the awakening dawn
the sun is here before her time,
I peel the strands away
and rub at the empty river beds left

The self-conscious sky is the color of beets now,
and the moon leaves,
his work is finished,
he can retire

The blush drains out of the sky’s face,
blue remains  

I close my eyes
and peel back the dawn.

Blush comes back and drains again
the moon comes from the west
black and blue,
light made for pale-skinned beings.

The sun is still biding her time,
she knows the world wakes to her,
not the dreamy shadow planet
who doesn’t even have an atmosphere

I keep the night in my subconscious,
until the curtains are swept back-
exposing the thin skin of my lids to glaring light-
filling my eyes with brilliant orange.

~

Miles of nothing,
beige on beige on beige
The sun is screaming,
blistering my skin,
draining me slowly
as breath is heated
and tastes bitter
Shoulders slung low
I can’t stand straight,
bent over struggling,
nothing is anywhere
and nowhere is here

Leaving footprints
for the wind dancers,
black feather fathers,
winged circlers
High above, watching
sifting time
in weakened increments,
hourglass patterns of
falling granules
sinking deeper

Water is a dream
and this dream, a nightmare
for it is there,
just ahead, I can see it glistening
but it does not exist
nothing exists,
as the oasis in my mind
dries up, leaving
empty indentations
on horizontal planes, flat lands
of arid emotions
drifting in and out
reaching for…
reaching

When I called Katherine,
she talked to me with the same hollow
raspiness in her voice as when we were children.
I had seen her name on a pamphlet for
a historical exposition before finding the courage to call.
To my disappointment,
she seemed more pre-occupied
rather than pleasantly surprised to hear
my voice
after almost twenty years.  
When she said “Thomas,”
it was like a habit,
drawn from a long stream of monotony.  I listened
intently as she dictated when and where we would meet,
like it was a speech
she was reading off battered queue cards.
During the entire phone call,
I imagined her on the other line,
as I’d remembered her;
too bold for such a fragile body,
with curls the colour of burnt grass,
and a dot of sweaty reflection
on the tip of her pointed nose.  I saw her
mouth move faster than her words,
which trickled from behind her lips
like butterflies. When the phone clicked,
I was left with a sort of dead and empty silence,
mixed with a touch of mystical fantasy.  

This morning,
I ate alone adjacent to the window of a dingy, cheap café.  
I drank my coffee black and carefully.  
It vibrated atop my thin,
quivering
hands; as result in spite of itself and too much thinking.  
I got up from the table,
leaving a disputable tip and began walking towards our arranged meeting place.

Outside,
leaves fell like snowflakes in the dying season
and the frigid air
pressed against my body like tightly bound bandages.  
I blew warmth into my hands,
which have always been cold and dry
as clay when it’s left in the sun too long.  

Katherine,
she had laughed at the dryness of my fingers
throwing her head back
and emitting a sort of pleasant growl.  
We must have only been nine,
and the winter had just begun
to melt into spring,
but the air was still so utterly brisk.  
I was just bony hands,
as cold as a winter pole.  
Katherine had looked down
to where I’d had my hands laced
together like a knotted ball of yarn.  She’d told me
that they looked like sticks of chalk
and looked into my eyes with a warm,
doting gaze,
grinning with folly.  I had
simply stared back at her,
entirely expressionless and coy.  
She had reached into her bag
and held a warm stone out,
new flowing blood to hold.  
Oh, what a contrast you were.  
She had been so warm and light
against the bleakness of a winter day.  
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.


While walking in weather like this,
when the cold arrives so suddenly
that you find yourself awfully unprepared, it seems
like you’re getting nowhere.  
It’s like walking up a descending escalator;
you’re aware of the attempted movement,
but everything is so immobile,
that you seem to be in the same spot
for hours.  Each step is a static, solid crack;
the frozen atmosphere freezes bodies.  
Time has briefly paused and become a solid block,
one that I’ve found myself restrained within.  
The harsh coldness is a strong compression
and the frigidity is so stagnant
that movement seems strangely rare,
and when a gentle wind caresses the air,
it’s like a light stream of reality.  
The falling leaves dance
with the breeze,
but when it stops,
they pause in midair
before descending in harsh increments
onto the cement.


The cool of a temperate breeze,
from dark skies to wet grass, had tickled
the bare arms of Katherine and I one spring morning.  
The sun was still below the horizon,
but its illumination was visible
as an iris blue glow at the edge of the field
we had been walking along.  
Katherine had held my shoulder
as she balanced along a decomposing fallen tree.
All had been absolutely silent
except for the few crickets still awake,
and the miniscule scuffling of Katherine’s feet
on the bark.  In the distance,
we had heard a low cough,
and we looked up to see an old man,
sullen and with a stature similar to a refrigerator,
as he continued walking up the way
toward us.  Katherine had stopped
walking along the log and let go of my shoulder,
watching the old man grow nearer.  
The dark blue sky reflected
against her green eyes that induced aqua flashes,
corresponding with each dart of her eyes.  The old man
carried a branch,
using it as a walking stick.  
We had waited attentively
and still as if trying to camouflage
ourselves as part of the forest behind us.
The man had stopped abruptly and
turned his back to us,
raising one hand to his brow
as if blocking the sun
that hadn’t yet risen.  His head moved,
regarding the vast,
recently planted field.  
Following what seemed like a year,
he turned to us, noted that the sky revealed
what was going to be a beautiful day,
then continued on his walk.
The occurrence had left Katherine and I
in muffled giggles.  I gently pushed
her from the log
and we fell in the field,
the wet immature plants covering us
with bits of morning moisture.  
Water droplets had ricocheted onto us
with each frivolous movement.  
That now seems to me a thousand springs past.  


As I approached our designated place to meet,
I regarded my watch and realized
that I had arrived several minutes tardy.
It being a Sunday morning,
with the weather
not so preferable such as it was,
the park was nearly empty.  
I wasn’t able to see Katherine anywhere,
so I took a seat on a vacant bench to wait.  
In the distance,
I saw two young children
attempting to fly kites.  The kites followed them,
as if on a leash,
bounding up and down from the ground
as they ran.  
A sudden gust of wind sent the kites
high into the air, and
the children continued to run,
in hopes of creating their own wind,
once the present one ceased.  The wind
past under my nose and I inhaled,
absorbing the strong scent of dead leaves.


Katherine and I had once built kites together.  
They had been awfully unfortunate crafts,
made from thin cotton sheets,
twigs and twine.  It was one
of the last days of summer,
and there had been a great amount of wind
one particular day.  
We had taken our makeshift kites to the field,
where the open desolation
seemed the most appropriate.  
With only a few strides taken, our kites
had immediately flown.  
The two had soared side by side,
simultaneously.  
They had been like feathers
floating freely in the sky,
but we controlled the freedom.  
The sun began to set behind us,
painting the sky
like spilled oil in a lake.  Our high-pitched laughter
had echoed off clouds,
and that was all that we heard.  
Katherine and I ran in opposite directions,
then back toward each other.  
As she passed me,
I smelled the scent of her skin
and some foreign flowers.
When the kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots.  
We again,
had run in opposite directions,
but the kites remained together.  
To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off.


Since then,
it’s been a book you read in reverse;
you understand less
as the pages turn.  I had pushed
memories of Katherine
to the back of my mind.  
I left them obscured,
tied to a brick and as sweet as a song.


I waited just under an hour
and Katherine still had yet to arrive.  
The sidewalks were empty,
no frail women headed towards the park.  
I watched as the last leaves fell
from a nearby tree, and
settled into a groove between exposed roots.  
Another soft wind
passed by me and I caught a brief scent of foreign flowers.  
Katherine’s memory was here.  
My hands were cracking
like an oil painting,
all white and dry in the cold.  
I’d like her to offer me
a warm stone and
stay warm and light on a winter’s day.
I looked up to the clouds sighing
and slowly rising from the bench.  
I saw two loose kites in the distance falling from the sky,
drawn to the ground in an end to flight.

I think the funny thing
It's not the
Staying in bed for days
Awake and then
Sleeping in few
Hour increments

(and certainly not the night I woke up at two
to the sound of the darkness
how I could hear it whispering my name
I didn't fall asleep until I saw the sun)

but
I think the funny thing
Is how even after days in bed
My every need passed over on a platter
(From six feet away)
Recovery is not a steep *****

Over a week, and I'm still hacking up phlegm
(I realize that's disgusting to picture
Trust me, tasting it is worse)

Oh, so I should be grateful
"It's not covid, so you're fine"
(Not that I got tested,
I have a sensitive nose
It bleeds very easily.
Decided it was safer to stay home)

"I'm sorry, but we have to cancel
Thanksgiving.... No, we don't think we're contagious, but we want to be sure.... Thank you for understanding!"

My sister was showing symptoms
The strep test was negative
A doctor says it was allergies

That's nice, but a 99.8
Isn't allergies

So yes
The funny thing
Is the recovery
But only because there doesn't seem to be any of it.

Tiptoeing over this week
leaving fingerprints of sleep
in every fold of your shirt.
Voices like humming birds,
echo of mint and
train tracks on a hot day.

Respite.
Sounds like its meaning,
feels like a sigh.

Learned a new word.
Cafuné.
To lovingly waltz
fingers through hair,
Portuguese stuck to the back of my hand.
The air smells of limes.

Hiding cherries
every day this month
made my tongue purple.

This is not a poem.
It shouldn’t taste like purpose,
lethargic bubbles rising in a cup.
Drawing peaches and crayons
between the millimetre increments
of your knuckles.

it's a paradox of yevgeny zamyatin, that the true rebellion is caused by a stress of the necessity of dreaming... talk to any schizoid individual and you find they're the dream manufacturers... dreams happen in the safe environment of the laboratory of the unconscious... they're the socially acceptable hallucinations... it's even socially acceptable to interpret them... which i find very odd... why should unconscious hallucinations be socially acceptable and profitable and career crafting and conscious hallucinations be socially stigmatised? ah the safety, the environment of the freduain interpretation of dreams: well... he's ******* asleep, isn't he?! ******.

after my usual walks drinking, i tend to enter the
realm of heat and christmas tree
a little bit too brooding,
i just painted a picasso or a kandinsky,
burnt it, and then am told to "plagiarise" it...
i don't like the approach nietczsche had
taking a notebook with him
and writing his thoughts written,
i like the way my faculty memory
eats the immediacy of thinking
as counter to the translation of descartes'
theory equating existence with thought
as if thought could prove i exist
thus uncoupling it from the original:
thought and doubt.
memory is central by comparison,
i have the revision from the miscarriage of descartes'
aim: memini ergo cogito.
it makes sense, given i started the night off
buying three san miguel bottles at tesco,
buying five beers at the turk,
spotting russell the schizoid-affective man
huntched in a corner...
told him five minutes max...
started talking with him
about the ol' sailor's narrative... turbulent noons
and midnights with a bottle of jack...
wide eyed russell every time i speak to him
reflected...
i remember drinking my first coffee aged 7...
i was born with a heart condition...
i shouldn't have... live dangerously though...
drank it... magic!
i remember the taste even now.
the cognitive me is not the existential me...
odd, isn't it?
i should have kept the original kandinsky,
but i burnt it and kept the plagiarism...
why is it that the function of memory
is paramount to mental health?
this prof. of psychology itemised this girl
who's north mania south an airplane descending
from the height vector with the ears popping...
why is it that i can remember me aged 7
and most people got cheated into total engagement
in life in the orientation of satisfied or dis-satisfied
expression of puberty?
if the faculty of memory is not defended
then diseases enter...
not one of the diseased is like an original adam,
like translation of original adam, i.e. mozart beethoven
einstein...
good enough to be without plain jane as narrator
and puppeteer...
let the strings do the talking, please!
i'm in love with ****-****** literature...
take that **** of yours, that suitcase
of ***** stockings to your mother to give it a eco-friendly
spin of the washing-machine...
**** that crap should that crap enter my heart...
you heard of ****** latin? i think you have,
it's not church slavonic, it's rude latin...
the type of thing that adds oil on the cogs
and makes you adherent to the philosophy:
pause for thought or pause for fake vocabulary?
i sweat with oaths to add fluid...
if you're offended by **** and not fck you
must be really appreciative of pronography...
so they said: we must rid the word of a vowel
and expose the people with **** corn bits between the teeth!
well... it worked...
i didn't tell you remember the pythagorean theory
you were taught aged 12... i told you
to remember you aged 12... like i remember nathanel
with his briefcase in year 8 in math class...
like i remember this english teacher's legs
when i dropped the pen to loon inside the stash-load
of pooddles and *****...
like i remember racing a guy from bałtów
to ostrowiec and winning: he on a tour de france bike
with anorexic model tires and
my on mountain bike fatties...
i told you memory is crucial... given our thought explored
inanimate things as the perfection of our knowledge,
given our thought explored animate things
as perfectly categorising man and animal alike
thus mis-interpretating ourselves, oh the sacrifice of
the perfectly catalogised atom among the toothbrushes...
a convo of assortments...
it's perfect knowledge in relation to inanimate things...
the sort of thing which is question:
but atoms are animate things... calling them inanimate
just because they're invisible doesn't give you a
right to driftwood clung to in robinson cruseo's shakespearean friday.
hence the passing inspiration... so dull now
that i only feel inspired to pour myself another whiskey
and justify the meaning of relaxed.
associate yourself with the world,
hardly many of us will end of with the genius score of don juan,
we're in an environment of strict biology,
we're told that memory governs our world
with the world being on the quest to repeat...
and it does repeat... sounding the encore of biting frost,
sounding the encore of delighted shadows of summer
having postponed snipers to shoot them dead with night...
the world that inquires per se via repeat
only divinites man's faculty that's memory,
and quickly attacks it in revenge by dementia...
imagination is left to the murderers' who fancy
all the hues of red on the face....
this world is not pleasant to those who think,
to those who couple thought with imagination,
and to those who couple thought with memory...
alas... such few increments are left to re-discover
after being taught the uselessness of centimetre
when no centimetre knowledge is used in their
mechanisation of a profession.
that bit monkey less than man already happened
contradictory in theoretical terms
given the diversity whereby man's diversity
per se cannot explain the diversity of each thing
using evolutionary relativism, niche by-product concerns...
penguins will always make it to antarctica...
no banker or plumber on antarctica... just
scientists who started the whole expedition as
worth anything by counting penguin eggs...
indeed... ah this is going nowhere...
i don't believe in evolutionary relatvism
like socrates didn't believe in moral relativism
theft is punishable with the cutting of the hand
that stole... ****** is punishable with the cutting
of the head - it's all really related)...
and the aesthetic relativism is as true as: beauty
is in the eye of the beholder -
to that girl in the night near the church
walking with a concerned friend
concerned by her attractive panda-eyed mascara expression.
most of the time i find the inherent vice of jungian
interpretation of poets
to be a case of narration: poets don't write enough
to be valued! i respect fictional occupants of the
equivalent hammer of a labourer writing long paragraphs!
well, true enough... any idiot would suddenly exclaim
a symptom as: i differentiate that i'm a constant inspiration
for a non-existent narrator, and the symptom i differentiate
from true to fake by the fact it hinders my faculty to think...
pronoun shrapnel i call it... auxillary pronouns
that benefit me to expand my thought on a levelling
that did not want to see in monochromatic divergence
of continued with linear-ism akin to horse blinders
that only exposed a corridor where a valley could have stood
for the eyes to be inspired by.

Like the chef who hates to eat
The playwright who cannot act,
The clothing designer, a nudist,
The brave hero, so shy, a stammerer,
The musician, a deaf mute,
The architect, who live in a tent,
I am a writer who hates to type, for his fingers disconnect his eyes, his brain his insane

I am the father, who knows not his own children,

I am the man who hates to shave, and shaves twice daily,

The man who knows nothing of nature, but writes
in and of it constantly.                                                      ­

The man beset by endless money worries,
Who gives his capital away to charity in increments of thousands,

I am the man that never passes a street beggar,
Even the obvious frauds,
Without giving them a bill, and a god bless you,

I am the man that would gladly die young whose
Mother lived to ninty eight and gene'd up him good,

I don't know what you want from me.

I write to please. But I seem incapable of
Giving, paving streets with words you what u want to hear.

Moon, June, pill, ****, me me me be crap on this

I am the chef who cannot cook
The nudist ashamed of his body
The stammered into silence
The mute who screams inside till deaf with frustration
I writer of thin air, the unfair. I know not what
You want of me.

But I weep with frustration at the paucity of my expression,
Good god my final destination not close enough

In the hands of strangers, rejection
In mine own, verbal strangulation
Even

Whatever

Is
Insufficiently
Disdainful

Painful
I cannot give you enough of/if me to satisfy

What is it you want from me

I will write to displease

Why not do
What I do best
Anyway
Secure that this voice
Is lost among the voices
Answering

*whatever

I think it's pretty easy to see
That i could fall apart from what's in front of me
But i won't- i am valiant
The only nightmare that exists is me vanquishing them as a whole
I wish i could ease the pain in greater increments
And prevent loss and death forever
A hundred lives lost by another act of terrorism
How long is it going to take for us to take care of this threat?
Maybe far down the stretch
Maybe never
Let's go with the first option.

Gears turn
The unnoticeable increments
Cogs meshing with cogs
Under the surface
Unseen
But felt
For too long

I saw you withering
before me, like I felt the air in my diaphragm build up slow
then fall out shakily.

I saw my grandmother wince
put her hand to her mouth,
side-ways gripping this tiny Chaplain
who’s name I’d forgotten, the moment I heard it.

I saw my cousin staring deep into empty space, his nervousness illuminated
under harsh hospital light. My uncle’s red tie screaming in this room of too tired eyes,
wearing reddened faces from crying.

The fear of this reality bit at our ankles. We shifted in place, we talked about the Sox game. We dared each other to keep on pretending to carry on.

Through this blur,
I saw you underneath piles of tubes.
Lain upon the bed a shattered man
shoulder blades peeking upward and out in what was poised to be
an eternal shrug
head hung, eyes fluttering, only held up in increments of straining. Straining to be part of this conversation about nothing.
About your impending death.

Rounds of tears and silence
rounds of nurses coming
and going,
rounds of knowing
then suddenly,
not knowing.

Propped up by a tank of air, a bag of liquid, a ton of pillows and the slow-burning will to live.

cajun family
personalities
dealing with
alchemical transmutation
transactions
changing of values
history for money..

wildly popular show..
biting humor wraps
sly bidding and exchange
greed rises and falls..
initial bid and response
a scaling gap
startled unbelief..

increments then decide
decisions' sharp edge
money or heritage..
convenience argues
bad choices faced
painful needs are voiced
a values paradox..
microcosm of life now...?
snapshots of our mirror...?

Cold and closed, each green
tidal lull lingers over rocks.

A line of pelicans heads home.
Before you arrived, days passed slower.

Th salt-grass, the anemone
blossom in cycles set up by the moon.

I wait like a spring tide.
Photos will prove changes

happen in increments.
Birds wait for sand *****,

limpets, littoral fish.
You practice naming each in order.

If the White-Washed Tomb our Saviour condemns
Would soil my Beatitudes for your Pleasure
A True Friend I'd Fail. Though your Sense indemns,
Spread by some Hippies who plead my Censure
Fine. Be it so for the Loony I am
Though to Toxic Increments you may succumb
Which, praying deeply, prevent this love enhance
Then flow to where your Best Graces become
There are Fishes, after all, for you to feast
Since your Face hooked as Bait will consider
Which an Episode be careless at least
And leave your Bones nipping one another.
Honestly so, these Words I do evade
Which porns my Intent; And brands me a *****.

He smiles with the graces of crumbling eyebrows,
with wit, megalithic in the cavern behind
his unformed eyes; i lowered mine, seeking
elsewhere—that here as i sleep, he is formed
from half memory.

The better part of me
remembers him in increments, steadily handed

our orchard, our healthy fruit. His arms overladen
with fibrous molten undulating movement,
a cacophonous cocoon for my madness’

half love. The truer part of me
remembers him as mountainous, thunderous,
a storm eating into the distances. arms
kneading throughout time, becoming. stone.

I am not one of these leather wearing ******* you see on **** sites. I am real. I listen to 911 calls on repeat. Images of gore, abortions, death, and torture fill me with unbridled lust.

Humans are amazing... Their build, their skin, with billions of embedded pain receptors. Optic nerves, sending horrific images directly into their frontal lobes. I love their faces, tiny changes in their expressions with different types and increments of pain.

There is such a glorious range and variety of pain that can be inflicted upon a human. Few appreciate the sublime canvas of a humans body. Each sense can be tweaked and tormented. All of there emotions can be played like an instrument, by someone with the right skills and tools. Their screams are sublime.

There is a certain kind of scream a person lets out, the moment they realize their own mortality, but it is beyond words. It makes me see red. I lust for it. I adore it.

I am free. I am not bounded by your conceptions of morality. ******, ****, and torture are simply choices. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want to whomever I want. Whether it is one death, a million, a billion, or an entire planet or the entire universe, it means less than nothing to me. I have no ideology, religion, or higher purpose. If the slab of meat and chemicals you call your mind is searching for a word to append to me, just think of me as an artist. My medium is flesh.

I walk among you. I understand you better than you understand yourself. I have studied the human body, peeled back the layers of flesh, the emotions. I see right through you. I am the nice, unassuming person you know. We share secrets. Some of you like me. Some of you love me.*

None of you know me.



I am, *sadist.

Free now from your books, you
walk the path behind the halls
where a bird completes her
pirouette
and descends onto a branch
shaking its flowers. Petals
are released!
and float down in
increments-
Lowering, degree by
degree in a swaying motion
against the gentle pushing-back
of spring air

They land in a pond.