Blink fast
Blink fast
Blink fast
Don't cry.
Look straight ahead
Pretend you don't notice
The trembling of your hands
And the clog in your throat
While the pressure
Inside your chest
Rises
With every single breath
As you try to gulp for air.

Why'd you have to bring up your dad?
****.
Your quiet.
Thinking,
Eyes slowly watering
She notices.
Scrible scrible*

There goes my progress
I give up
Let the tears roll in
And the words
tumble from my mouth
Clumsily
Wanting to get
Everything of my chest
For the first
And last time

Pen to paper has a sound and the people have named it: scribble scrible scrilbbe, lift, scrvbl.

The sounds keys made have been named too:

Click
back
click
click click back
click.

(also by the people).

Hoopla says it's all too purposeful and certain.

Borrar. Borrar.

Bukowski says the computer made him efficient at the keys.
He has thousands of post-80's poems to prove it.
**** him (says the people).

For us (you and me),
keyboards are less frantic and poetic,
less thoughtful.

Chuck wrote something called 16-bit Intel 8088 chip,
we call it new-English.

I've written these same lines
about six hundred times

all of them
all of them seeming to rhyme

but not rhyme in the sense of phonetics
or in a repeating pattern of syllables

rhyme in the sense
of a pattern of misfortune i suppose
rhyme in the sense
that every line
is smudged from smeared ink and
tear drops falling on the page
in the exact same place

rhyme in the sense
that every word
of every line is
hard to decipher
because it has been written
in what I like to call
anxiety's beautiful autograph
each letter written like a
scrible and all unconnected
because it's kind of hard to
piece words together
when you can't even remeber
how to breathe right

rhyme in the sense
that these cursed
lines all stem from
every line I
have made on my skin
carved out like the words to a beautiful poem
and the blood still stains the paper

rhyme in the sense
that even when
the pen
hits the paper
and starts a new
I still cling to the
lie
that everything's not dying
and we're all still alive.