there’s a sharp pain in my neocortex
at two in the morning,
an octopus slaps me in the face with one of its tentacles and tells me
“get it together”
i stand outside with you on my doorstep and i tell you about the octopus
you stand there
silence bounces left and right in your mouth and i ask if you like the way it feels
“it’s okay”
a sharp pain in my neocortex forces me to kiss you
my tongue scoops the silence from the inside of your cheek
i giggle
it ricochets off the roof of my mouth and you laugh
i spit it out
you ask, “tastes funny, right?”
i say, “you said it was okay”
you say, “i tell you a lot of things are okay”
i say, “right”
it snows a little bit and i go inside
you come inside
an octopus swims out from under the couch and slaps me in the face with one of its tentacles

All the pain a man could muster in his lifetime:
Compressed to a minute.
Then, send it scattershot through the airwaves.
A morose melody. A lovely female voice inflects....
"May I override your rationality and reason?"
Imprints a depression on the mind;
a rope around the deckhand's neck.
Does her voice now command your neocortex?
Yes, but deeper still: it denigrates.
Instills an insistence toward apathy:
existential treason.
musical notes denote a debt to be paid.
They accept just the one currency.
Trade melancholic fervor for nihility...
A payment must be made.
Posit the ship is a sojourn in deep water.
Feeling A sorrow you can't adjourn.
How quickly you will learn:
Jumping overboard
CAN be an act of kindness.
A slave to that recalcitrant sorrow.
Jetsam yourself to lighten the load on your psyche:
It's ideal over facing another tommorow.

Seafaring folk
assume a siren's song is beautiful.

I felt The Earth shake when she sung.
There goes the air from my lungs.
What more to give? Here.
Borrow my body and tongue.
Sitting in the auditorium
of my own soliloquy.
This state of mind is anti-reverie.
Your falsetto sonnet showed memories.
My family.My mishaps.
An altercation out of ennui-with my father.
Before he left,that last thing he said to me...

But.

Why WAS he levied into conflict
over Antioch?
On a whim prescribed, of course;
The pope demanded A crusade on sin.
Father died inside the walls of Jerusalem.
Bled out fighting alongside other mortal men:
Father, is your heaven more beautiful,
than your grand daughter's grin?

Captain has seven sailors hold me still.
I am suppressed inside the fo'c'sle.
He counts down from sixty:
"Let us see if time sets him straight."
A siren's enthrall doesn't agitate long.
Yet,
Even after the weight of it lifting,
it leaves you forlong.
Sometimes-I still feel-
underwater...is that where I truly belong?

Seafaring folk
assume a siren's song is beautiful.
                          I know better.

A violent storm materializes from otherwise
sunny, fair weather.
I guess the myths of the Tempest here are true:
It attacks ships sailing near the fabled
isle Revenir.
Until then,for my own safety,
I had been enroute to the brig.
"All hands on deck
(including me and my captors)
Secure those loose rigs.
Batten down the hatch.
Cap'n is going to steer us-
Right through this Tempest's heart!!"
Steady now.
Or his hubris will tear the ship apart.

I felt indifferent as waves
pummel us relentlessly.
Contrite as our vessel
won its war with the sea.

                   I jump overboard.

Instant remorse.
Father, can your God please alter my course?
A mistake.
This can't be my legacy.
I'm sinking.
Because of what a siren sung.
I can't breathe. Feel water filling in my lungs.
Siren,take what you won
then leave me undone.
I'm sinking.
Is this how I meet my end?
Shimmer from the sunlight fades
as I descend.
Sinking.
And I'll never be found...
My fear, my flailing. My failure to float.
the ocean swallows it all,
ingurgitates my hope.
Is this how you felt?
Facing your ill-fated destiny?
Father.
You always tried-and failed -to quell my misery.
That last thing you said...
Preaching your god's salvation as remedy.

                        I'm sinking.

All along its been my sorrow
that's drowning me.

-

it's only deep in the night when my mind wanders most that i ponder why another night of drinking alone is the status quo.  it's when i wonder why the wheel that started spinning so long ago keeps spinning, in the same direction and general speed.  deep in the night is when the doubts and regrets run rampant like rioters through the square, flipping cars amidst flaming tires.  it's when the needs and the wants clash for supremacy, assuring the mutual destruction of each.  loves lost carve their names into my neocortex.  where dreams unrealized fill their time by playing ping-ping until they're ****** from the backburner to manic importance.  deep in the night is when blood-shot eyes and blaring computer monitors have a staring contest.  deep in it, thought becomes reaction and the beans spill accordingly.  knee-deep and we're ravaging the calm into frenzy and burning the books of our beliefs and abandoning rationale in favor of the spectre of immediate gratification at any cost, at any loss.  deep in the night where no light penetrates, things become somehow illuminated.

i am captivated
by the fluidity of your text message
you claim you arent a poet
but wow
how you can use 140 characters
to put words out of my mouth
evolving silence from stunned emotions
fantasies flit and twitter
sparked by your wit
the eminent feeling of loss when they fade
out of the temporary reality of my neocortex
and my thalimus
away into the sharpening atmosphere
my discombobulated desires
each begging for my undivided attention
in this sleepy realm of imagination
i contemplate your construction
a worthy demonstration of your capacity to hold
my mind
my eyes
my body
you are great, large, spirited
and your spirit consumes and overflows
my selfish desire to swallow you whole
until you spill out of my ears like maple syrup
sweet and sticky
and then i can have you all to myself
but that isnt fair
to the world
and the good you do it
you have taught me restraint
in my inability to think of anything but you
coupled with my inability to be with you
you manage to intrude into my every thought
conversation
my very being
with magic
your resplendent mind staining my arms
the overly colourful shadow that creeps along my spine
i feel a spectrum of colour
flickering along my horizon
crawling down my thigh like a silk scarf
i am consumed
by your light
crackling and growing
sparking and fizzling
fuelled by my tinder
my eyes swivel and squint
trying to see you through the bright mass you are surrounded by
and i catch a sigh
escape my lips
falling to you
from this new plane of existence you lifted me to
and here there is a woodstove
and a mass of cotton blankets
with a divot in the middle
begging to be filled
and you are there
my hand eases my descent into your warm chest
feet lifted
head filling the gap between your shoulder and your neck
and i rest my hand on yours
you gently sweep your fingertips along the top of my thigh
and you hold my other hand
in life there are times and places
abundant
that we find ourselves falling into
relationships
feelings
people
and so rarely
do we feel like we are made to be there
but here
darling
is where i am supposed to be

I grew up along a gravel road
in a refitted freight house once owned by a slate mining outfit
my backyard was a rolling sprawl of giant scrap-heaps made
of spent
or unusable slate
some slabs were as big as a tool shed;
mossy promontories jabbing and jutting like dull honey- badger quills
poking out of the hills
as they sprawled in their
heaps and their heaves
and their gullies.
it was a regular shangri la for a couple young boys born in the early to mid 80s
our own private wilderness;
adolescent paradise.
sometimes I would look up from my backyard to
the tops of those slate hills and
I would see my friend Joe.
he  was older than i was and I looked up to him and
I craned my neck
looking up to him then
standing at the summit of a slate hill,
hands on his hips
perched and
hiding behind his silhouette-
the Northampton County Sun setting on behind him
blood orange scarlet and
purple gray blue were the colors of those feelings back then.
time ticked on
the way time does.
my parents got a divorce and I moved across town
there were no slate hills in that backyard
and the slate company chain linked all the hills that remained
and so there stood
a fence between me
and the wonderland I once knew.
Joe died unexpectedly some years later in  
some obscure forest of
one of the Virginias
together we nurtured some regrets suspended in between our
childhood and those
terminal woods.
together we held some memories like beads strung along a strand of silk
translucent pearls like drops of dew
condensing
out there somewhere on the
eternal web of the akasha
unknown to even Indra
unknown to all but us.
couldn’t hold on any longer
had to let it go.  

my brother gave me a pencil cactus
it seemed to flourish in my care
I had been neglecting my own needs for years
not sure I knew what my needs even were
but that cactus needed water and light
and this much i knew
and this much i provided.
it turned a red color down near the bottom of the stalk -
looked it up on google;
some kind of pencil cactus rite of passage.
after the reddening
it becomes then the stick of fire.
we were kicking up dust
over all the trails
fading on behind us
we acted like it was eyes forward only…
towns I used to know, sinking without blinking
absorbed in the horizon on behind me.
I acted like I couldn’t take my eyes off the rear view.
we pulled up and parked on
another
orange
lane
me and my stick of fire.
we landed in a
townhouse -
plenty of legroom
even had central air.
I put the cactus under a window
on the second story
didn’t think about the air vent on the floor
blowin all that dry air
and my stick of fire
withered and wrinkled up
and it shrank and shriveled
I couldn’t bring it back
and i tried
but i
had to let it go.

a giant scooped me in his hands
he was massive
40 feet tall
the war horns blew in the distance when he walked.
he
cocked back his hand and tossed me
through the air
on over the horizon
i was surfing the high skies
on thermals and the slip
streams of vultures
and peregrine falcons-
all of us then dive bombing
all the skinwalkers
like a 2 dimensional love spiral made of
peaks and valleys
and deep trenches swimming in the waters of the
mystic arts….
I held the sun in my hand for exactly one moment
but i blinked and turned
back into a clanging cymbal
a vessel of divine prophecy
going on babbling in tongues.
now a raptor eats my liver every day at noon.
I heard the sun rising in my hands for only just a moment
it was warm and held me in a present bulb of space
I breathed it in
and held it
before I had to let it go.

the architecture of
the Wyoming Valley downtowns
are like frozen songs
crumbling into puddles in a *** hole.
the steam engines and the breakers
are empty skeletons
and dry leaves.
weasels and other vermin making homes inside of holes
the soul was laid off in the vacancy
conflagrations once able to burn down entire cities
at the top of golden arche, and
now the place smells like the smothered ashes of a
single
dwindling
ember .
I yearn for a smooth good-bye
you go ahead and talk and then i’ll go-
yet i ****** up another one
open throats and
another
wire barb in the
neocortex…
I had high hopes
but I had to let it go.

I had high expectations of an early grave
“here lies such and such”
stiff in the long stillness like a possum caught inside a headlight
what a relief that would of been in the brimstone of my twenties
but the roosters kept on crowing
the morning sun kept rising
shining
death away
the big sleep was a false hope
had to let it go.

By Jordan Gee