I saw the faceless youth, with hoods and hats, and weapons tucked safely
I smelt the lingering odour of apathy and the tobacco on their clothes
The sadness is a saviour, comforting on winter nights while the owls are crying
I grow tired of writing this drivel and wonder if this is the end
It's not. It never ends.

(Continuing with smatterings of self-absorbed garbage, the keyboard groans
But I persist out of habit and I think of my future, the lands I will never roam
Just roll another, perhaps a key I shall find, in my mind, that narcissistic dome.)

I care not about conventions, writing, social, spiritual, physical or otherwise
I am a free spirit, just as you are
I am weary of my words as I am sure you are
I use the pronoun "I" excessively because I am all I know
I am sad because of that
I am sad also because I feel robbed of existence, mine seems convoluted and unnecessary
I feel - as I am sure you do too - that we are broken, perhaps irreparably
I also loathe the sound of birds as they chirp in the morning haze
and I often lie

Do you,
Dear You
You
YOU, U
(Worry not about sense making, this is life, it makes sense never whence to)
Garbled signals are signals nonetheless.

Redhead on the bus, your smile seemed so pure to me
I wondered if you were married, I saw no ring (I never cared much for the patriarchal imprisonment of singular digits, perhaps you felt similarly)
Are you my soul-mate, is that even a real thing?
Your copper waterfall was radiant though, and I admit to missing my stop
I did not help you when your wheelchair became stuck
I too was stuck, the eternal cycle

Dear Mother, Dear Father, Dear Brother, Dear Brother
I don't know you. That is all.

Dear Me
Don't read this. It's destined for the trash.

Dear Me
I hope you recycle. You should brush your teeth and take a shower. I am bored of you today, do something.

1. Write the world

2. Begin again

I saw the faceless youth and I was chased down back alleys
With sticks of wood and pipes of steel
The shivs to the sides were endemic endorphins
and I cried tears of joy at the idea of feeling

Weary of words today, I stay silent and watch the world
Weary of people today I stroll the woods and find a soup can
Weary of writing today, so I wrote this.

Brown powdered litter, the brain, with ******* I love you more each day
Jumbled, sale, say shell, it's a command from me, the ******
Echo chambers and the maids that dust around the reverb
(Count the errors)

She sang to me, I decided to change
I am a woman now
He sang to me, I fell in love
I am lonely now
I abused myself
I am happy now

Asymmetric skin, a definition of life and the compulsive disorder I never could explain
The outpouring of empathy from loved-ones fills me with ice and I retire to solitude
Tear down the flag and burn it for warmth
Eat the land and smoke the desert
Don't pity her, she is happy

I saw the faceless youth in shattered remains of a black screen, reflecting my apathy from the damp cement of the street as I tore clothes from my body, screaming, wild-man, the world will never know my name for i denounce it.
And the sand fell from my ragged beard as i emerged from the dunes to the city as he burned.

1
I remember her body against me

She tells me she doesn't want to get hurt
That I will break her heart

You can break me like a wishbone
and keep the better half

Sharpen it like a prison shiv
and stab me with it if I do

2
She is the snow
I am a stove in a single room cabin

I have been cutting off parts of this home
and feeding them into my belly

There is sawdust
on the floor of my love

3
Most of this house is gone now
I am still a stove
she is still snow

We both think
this heat is a good idea

I keep burning

Call her iglu
Call her daring
Call me almost homeless

4
I have left the stove

I am a candle now

Slow burning

Call me always hot still

Call her always melting

The floor is always wet

5
I tried to trap the ocean
in a dresser drawer

But we were flooded roofless

I learned to hold my breath

She learned that warmth doesn't really change anything

There was the sun
and it heated her body

I bathed in the ocean
she made
a thin
near burnt candle

I sank down

Her heart was made of winning halves of wishbones
Sharpened like shivs

I did not go near them

I am not afraid of getting hurt
But I have always been taught
to respect the sea

Remember this? Remember this.
When I told you of Parameters.
Built around to self protect?
Well, those walls are not fixed,
The world is wont to move, to change
And how they change!

Sometimes a man shows you his heart's part.
You take it and see; you give your same's key.
Then sometimes you have no choice,
the heart alone breaks down your walls
as the heart wants to do, to break.
And how it does break.

The heart's a glass dagger, and in its struggle shatters.
But even broken glass still cuts and bores,
after a cup, built of diamond shrapnel shivs, falls
and finds a home in a little boy's tender foot.
But even after the offender has been removed,
whenever he steps down, he feels it still there.

And he's afraid to walk ever again.
And the floor is like his personal enemy.
And any glass is like a bomb mocking him.
And he wears double socks when he's at home.
And he sits in the tub and he picks and rubs.
And he lies in bed all morning wondering,

"And when will my heart stop aching?"
And he hobbles along in the world.
And he puts on a strong face.
And he wants to move forward without the pain.
And he wants so much not to fear anymore.
And he wants so much just to love at all.

Gorgeous yet grotesque
way to be oblivious
can you please see us
as more than just meat

and try to meet my inner mess
one woman show, so it goes
expose the jester I kept
sheltered outta fear

they never let her feel accepted
been betrayed about a milli
but still somehow didn't seem to get it
it starts to set in something they said
super prevalent it convinced me

that we are hollow we are empty
always getting arrested by envy
guess you just jealous,
of my comedic intellect,
accidental elegance,
remind me to invest in it

Let me nest in positive intent
& sent messages.. Please,
SHUT UP AND JUST LISTEN
It it the distance dimensions
I might be privy to?
Futile the difference.. between acceptable
and dare not ******* mention

Better get it how you live, For Real fix it
Forget to exist
Cuz I sense you inching toward
a world of archetypes, white lies, and dead wishes
while alone your beautiful
I vow to never fluff you up
because my love your finished

Fully flawed
favorite flavor
**** the flock
I love your layers

gorgeous yet grotesque
forever interestin'
always messy
couldn't accept a dimension
in which we haven't met


see i will bleed for you and **** all these sheep for you
these weak dudes, they can keep it up then ******* get bruised
and although I'm a loser, Its no lie. They can't even see you
and you deserve the moon

your void is loyal
I like the noises that it makes
and I think it harmonizes with mine
better than okay our combined magic made
Never felt plastic even for a second
better reset your clock cause if your not

thankful all them stomach flutters
will become hate
from butterflies to quick little make shift shivs
stay gold, for you are gorgeous
they will gorge on each every blemish
displayed on your skin

don't be afraid to live
because your insides are
just as grotesque as mine
theres something about
that squishy equipment
and how
soft and sacred
maybe it's
slightly contaminated
like satin in a coffin

We were the cusp of devastation
The bellicose swell of encroaching emotional tides
The slaves bound by opposing grip
Sealed within our very silence
With screaming eyes
Layered in film ripples, reflected responses
walking in reverse to the natural pull of the tilting magnetism
The earth turning in anti-advancement
As history repeats to a murmur of distant hope.

I stripped to the bone for you
Tore shackles and shame from its death grip
Left to choke within a brooding storm of love
It was reckless abandonment
Orphaning myself from the last leap of faith
As I laid waste to unresolved anti-satisfaction
As we clashed
As we ripped at each other
As we broke the final glass ceiling with our thrown stones
Jagged words sharpened into hidden shivs

The destruction was beautiful
It was the meteorites that fell from the fire sky
It was the crackle of simmering embers in the morning
A reminder that there was still a spark left
That within the gentle curls of smoke
There was oxygen that breathed, even when I stopped

Yet

I was lying
Lying for the sake of memory
Lying to myself
And lying to you.

I was the pressure pit of a filling gas canister
And you were the loose connection
Bound to my poison
Powerful upon your weakened state
And presidential within your collapsing city walls
You needed me
Because I told you so
I needed no one
That is why I both loved you
And loathed you
The reminder of my broken home
I as the shadow of my father
Looming over you
Puppeteering my wrist
Striking you as the wash against cliff face
Cleansing my history within its repeat

The devastation was beautiful
You were beautiful
Until I destroyed you
And punished you for letting me.
There's never been a moment
That I haven't looked upon you with sympathy
Pity
And somewhere
Somewhere inside
I know I shall eventually let you breathe
When the ocean calms
And the rocks are nothing more than sand
When the fresh footing of another feels you between their fingers
When your castle walls are built in firmer moulds
When the moon pulls me away
When the magnetism of emulation no longer holds me within its anger

Maybe I will say sorry
Maybe nothing at all.
Just watch you
Watch you walk away.
The day I realise I will always love you;
It will be the reason I set you free.

To see just how far I have come from harm
I just look down at the fading scars of my arm
the burn of the flame has cooled
and showed me what in my psche ruled
for now I’ve been schooled
in emotions
fooled
by illusory oceans
I go through the motions

as spirit shows me what’s right
and guides my poor eyes to sight
It is imperative to fight
to live
with authentic shivs
People cry and ask what gives?

Simple thought ships
neurotransmit APC clips
to be played and looped
with these blips, beeps, and boops
Cylab v2.0
this collective insaenity has brought you a show
for those who don’t know
about life and love
the difference between sharing a laugh or a shove
gazing quietly above and be grateful
not hateful
towards both spirit and shameful
This is a plea to understand the thoughts so disdainful

so let these molecules of thought rearrange you
to reconsider a few memories that stain you
tie die the stain
to transmogrify the pain

learn to laugh
learn to cry
hold your friends close
while you fly high
but most of all
never say good bye, until the day you are ready to die

these are the lessons I’ve learned
and the distance I have covered
on my journey to become
the epitome of a lover.

We are surrounded by the lifeless
whether it's the corpses in red
or the horde of feeding undead
we don't see any niceness
in all the ways we have bled
so an idea pops in our head
to leech the likeness
of the zombies instead
of what's righteous.

A possum parades
around in the trash
it's called young and brash
by those it evades
through darkened paths
that harken back
to wild ways
we should've passed.

The possum pals with predators
to avoid the hunters
then those gun toting meddlers
have the gall to wonder
why they got themselves a runner
when everything is a red alert
then The Battle of Fort Sumter.

We track the terrified critter and stone it
a warning from a Kentucky poet:
when society is at its lowest
we'll pray for atonement
not for original sin
but being given a life to give
instead we fight with shivs
this how the lifeless live.

Scraping, scratching sparks
Spinning stone sings;
She sharpens shivs
of what once
were peaceful things.

i threw rose petals into the storm scarred ocean, unto riptides and soft-dancing waves. teeth from teeth. mouth from mouth. they swallow the sky-fed lands to be broken.

somewhere, the stars started falling like dying sparks. somewhere, it lives. it burns.

i hid my starving shivs and burried them in the ocean stained sand. but here is blood of warrior with flowers in his hair. and here is a breathing sea. they watched each other.

This isn’t a tale of snails and puppy dog tails
This isn’t my love opus
There will be no dandelions and daydreams

          This is poetry to fight to
          This is poetry to **** to
          This is poetry to **** to

     This is beauty
     This is art

It’s exhaust in your face
It’s fury after heartbreak
It’s bleeding and *** holes and mold
It’s the ache in your brain and the tugging at your soul
Maddening, hallucinogenic, tongue in and cheek and powerful

This is road rash and asphalt
This is for the punks who spit in your face
This is for thieves in the night
This is for the battered, shattered and abused
This is for those who can’t take anymore
This is for those still truckin along
This is for the addicts, ******* and opinionated
This is for the single fathers ****** over by baby mamas
This is for those who spit blood and get up off the canvas
This is for those crawling out of their skin
This is for those bursting at the seams
This is for those who pick scabs for fun
For those willing to fight and **** and feel

Those who steal at will, who shotgun beers at 8am
Those that fight bears with Bowie knives
Those that saddle burdens
This is for those too smart for their own **** good
This is for the unhinged
This is for those who walk the edge
This is for the devils
This is for the demons
This is for those who can’t put the genie back in the god ****** bottle
This is for those who wear their heart on their sleeve
This is for the ******
          For I am the ******
This is for the lunatics
This is for those with poor impulse control
The saddened and gladdened, miserable and merciful
The maniacal narcissists with delusions of grandeur
The glass half full types, swilling *****
The junkies. The ******.
This Rottweilers stuck in pint sized packages
The nonsensical. The absurd. The unbecoming.
The shivs and the shanks.
The me’s, myselves and the I’s.
The notorious. The nefarious.
The sinners and saints.
The lovers. The lost. The last of their kind.
The ones who broke the mold.
The outlaws and rabble-rousers.
The coke heads and kingpins.
The ones who live in no man’s land.
The beautiful. The scarred.
The demented and downtrodden.
The ones who give up Sunday morning ******* to put pen to paper.
The attention ******.
The anti-social lovers of humanity.
The Molotav cocktails.
The ticking time bombs
The powder kegs and the poets.
This is for those who can’t get enough
And for those who can’t stay away.
This is what poetry is.

depression is waking
with one foot
already in the grave.
a tombstone
with my name etched
into its stony face
is perched
atop my chest.
unable to breathe,
i lay paralyzed
and think,
well, if this is death,
then we'd best
get on with it.

•••

depression is drowning
while the sun peers down,
ambivalent. my fingernails
are splintered fragments.
i've worn weary digits
down to calcium bone
scratching at the icy
underbelly of the surface.
in vain i draw scant bits of oxygen
through the slivered cracks
spider-webbed above me.
the molecules cut like rusty shivs
through my battered lungs,
sustaining my suffering
for just a while longer.

•••

depression is gathering dust
on the top shelf of an oddities shop,
surrounded by the macabre.
while taxidermy goats stare out
with lidless eyes like opals,
i am the thirteenth tarot card,
misplaced and unlucky.
someone forgot to take me home.
tattooed in my parchment flesh
is a skeleton key hanging
like a noose from the neck of Death,
who reads an arcane text and grins
ominously beneath the hood
of a shadowed cowl, beckoning.

Inferiority and humiliation
Are my prison guards.
The body within my outer-self
Creates shivs out of my skills
But...
She is not very skillful at weaponry.
And the wall is plastered with anxiety
And the complete inability to
Express who I am.
My mouth is stitched shut, my shiv is
Not yet sharp enough, and
Its edges keep chipping.

comfort in quicksand
a labyrinth of off-colors
conclusions with a knife

I put an ad in the paper for someone to carve me to the bone
To whittle my bones into shivs
To gently strangle me with cellophane from the cupboard right where you knew it was

You knew it

Let me mention something:

It's how pushing my soul
to the limit had in fact inhibited me.

Shivs in my sides helped enlighten me.
Like gold leaf on the edge of the break up letter.
I'm better for it,

It helped restored me and help me see who I am.

But it's awful hot in the pit now,

I'm a boiler room pal just like all the rest of us boys,
who toil and sell out backs for butter and soil.

Something we can eat and plan with.
Instead it's sand that we find as our foundations.

You can call us the sod and clay nation,
because that's all we'll ever know.
My motivation is my hog, and my puny reproduction is my sow.

Souled up sewings in a demon quilt,
built on lies and loans,
deals and interest
have shown that I'd rather blow out my brains
than abstain from honesty. Honestly.

watermelon patch of bedlam
gourds of organic mess
vines in search for foundation
with flowers in full bloom

green with bristles of transparent shivs  
dirt that's aged from years of acidic drift
humid rainfall drums above this night
pooling inside my garden of life

the fallen rot, inside to out
but birds and bugs will gorge
and feed upon this ever restful seed
to clean this rotten pool inside my garden

There’s a daily ritual
of pain habitual
a desperate visual
when I fall in love
and you don’t return it
so I find a drug
and decide to burn it
as I try out discernment.

You only became hotter
after my ritualistic slaughter.
You cut me open and read my innards
informing you that you were the winner
as you ate them for dinner.

After your painful x-ray
I skipped the next phase
of averting my gaze
so I’m diverting to craze
through my ritual of shame
where I feel despondent
from the response sent
in our correspondence.

All my peers
act like seers
showing me their crystal ball
where I stand tall.
But the Ouija board
had me seething toward
a demon *****
who seemed like more
to eat my core.

The other animals in this zoo
are trying to be you
but I can see through
when they say “me too”.
They can’t impede blues
the way you easily diffuse
so I just drain the goats’ blood
at the shrine of no love
where I cry and eye rub
as they die in the dust.

I kneel before the altar of sorrow
that is my lonely bed
I lose all vision of tomorrow,
it’s replaced by red
and images of the dead
who never really lived
all they did was bled,
that’s all this ritual gives
a million shivs
poking torturously into my sides
I try to use one to cut off a piece of the pie
but end up gouging out my eyes
repeating a ritualistic chant of why.

Candles and pentagrams
are where the deadened land
fed up with the rules of man
I bring Satan my demands,
him and regret hand in hand
offering advice to the damaged ******.

I gave a blood sacrifice
to the needle
I stopped acting nice
to be evil
to deal with people
and their oppressive steeples.

I became cold
danced around an Asherah pole
then begged for mercy for my soul,
the one my rationalizations couldn’t hold
after breaking the hypnotic mold
of having my humanity sold.

These rituals I’ve performed
have summoned a storm
and left me forlorn.
My harvest of corn
came in barren
so now I watch ****
or go to a harem.

Ice
Beautiful, yet beastly.
Creeping translucent tendrils of cold.
Frozen, frigid fingers pointing down.
Crystalline and gelid shivs poised to ****.
It is only day two of the ice storm and there is
expectedly, more to come.
The weight of the world rests upon delicate, weary boughs, and though they're strong, they were not made for this.
Limb after limb encased in ice, cracks and secedes from the once-great behemoths —remarkable evergreens, landing in a crashing heap, only to be collected once the thawing ends.
One tree, if not the most important of them all, is kept under careful surveillance—24/7 watch.
She is called Survivor—for weathering a different kind of storm— though now, 25 years later, will she survive this? She has already lost one great branch, and others now cannot bear the weight of frozen glaze on their spindly arms.
Electricity is yet another danger to many others of her kind.
Fire and ice alike threaten to claim them.