I feel as if my head is sliding off my neck like ice cream melting down the cone. I am a witch melting, shrinking smaller as my spine stacks horizontally like shiplap. My body has been refurbished into a pinball machine. Something so tiny as a silver ball destroys so much. It bullets through my body, shooting off like Cuban missiles. I feel the turmoil and chaos seeping through the gutters of this old home of bones. It's like spilled oil sludging through my blood vessels or rats scattering through a sewer, nibbling and feasting away on these muscles of mine until they are frayed like gnawed-on cable wires. At odd hours of the night when time is propelled by the safe travels of breath (that weave in and out like Victorians at a ball) from sleepy children who have yet been touched by monsters or nymphs, whereas each of my breaths steer Odysseus's weather-beaten boat through ten years of treachery. My heavy, melting head slowly sloping like clay off a bust makes its home on my dingy pillow as I lay on a prison bed with cold shackles around my ankles that make my bones shatter into a mosaic as if that could shrink my ankles so I can slip out. I feel like a chained hawk at these hours of the night when I just want to fly until I screech to a halt and flail over the cliff that waterfalls into the ends of the universe. I'd be reluctant at first, perhaps, but what other escape does one have other than to make an autopsist's Y-incision on one's body, then slip out like a hermit crab freeing himself from his heavy shell? Embarking onto a new dimension where there's hope for a radical swap of atoms that don't shape a crippled, deteriorating human is the only choice when you want to live a life other than what you were cursed with. May we then find peace and live as naked souls bearing no heavy shells.

Today I woke in the  d e p t h s  of the ocean.
I opened my eyes.
It was like they were closed.
Thick, seeping, cold, black  d a r k n e s s  ,
   forcibly embracing me from behind
I opened my mouth to scream.
It was like my vocal chords had been  c u t  .
Bubbles of air popped desperately out of my mouth
   empty, useless, oxygen
I moved my arms.
They were heavy as pale sacks filled with thousands of metal beads,
    sludging around in the  a b y s s  
I listened.
The silence was so loud it screamed my thoughts into a head-shaped megaphone.
I felt my heart pound out every painful  b e a t
I was shrinking with the pressure,
    pressing down on me like a wine-press on all sides,
    turning my skin into  t e a r s
Emotions picked at my bones like little silver scavenger fish,
    blind to truth and light
I fell to my knees.
Everything was slow,
    slowing and slowing
    the more I wanted it to go
    faster and faster
Sediment of history, ashes, feces,  d e a t h  ,
   crumpled at my knees
I cried.
Too bad the tears are invisible,
    blending into the salty atmosphere
    with no recognition to be found
A shadowy  b l a c k  form rested on the floor in front of me.
I stared at it,
   a sense of dreadful familiarity
The  c a r c a s s  of something once beautiful and living,
   rotting
   decomposing
   fading
   fed on by the bottomest of the bottomest creatures of the ocean

E m p t y . Carcass.

It's the shadow of the future of my soul,
  dying at the  b o t t o m  of the ocean,
  what I can become down here while refusing to ackowledge truth and love
I breathed.
And oxygen rushed in my nose,
   fell down my throat
   embraced my lungs
   soaked into my muscles
   rubbed my heart
Was I  f r e e  ?
Suddenly I realized what I should've been hating all along,
   the cold
   the darkness
   the weight
   the chosen death of my soul
But I had a choice...I  s w a m
Up and up, moving my arms in new, synchronized dance,
   reaching for the brightest light
   for my own water sunrise
And as the warmth stroked my face,
   the light burned my eyes,
   my fingertips  b r o k e  the surface
I took my first life breath.
And I saw your face.

How I precipitate within and around
trash to steam factory's super chimneys
Ideas *******
amongst rising glow of cantaloupe colored sky
And why am I?

Beholden to a notion
of fanciful or foolish, concept of nuptials
puffing pother  
or why bother to effuse such ******* encumbrance
Trouble sweats unease

Cold feet, that can't afford proper socks
know the sludging embankments
of Camden Crick (colloquialism of creek)
As it were, a driving force of elopement
An eschewal of plastic bottle heap

Knowing fictile landscapes
with condensations murky in skies,
chance entices
Grasping for refuge
from refuse

i am wounded. a soldier with a broken heart marching through life because that’s all i know how to do and all that’s left to do even though my heart is bleeding down my chest. there is no where to lay to heal. no one there to bandage me and mend my heart. i will only get blood upon those who come near enough to touch. is that all there is? just life an arm’s length away from the gaping hole in my chest where my heart used to be? the sludging along through the muck and slime foraging ever onward toward the light shining at the end of the path of life? does my journey consist of my heart being missing for so long? how does one live with a hole through their body for so long? why haven’t i succumbed and fallen to the ground my life fled from my body like the birds from the trees? is there something holding me here? i try to look at the sky with optimism. i want to know the joy of the sun on my skin again. i want to feel embraced by the wind again. i want the rain to soak my hair and run down my face again. i am glad i’m alone. i don’t think i could stand to have anyone see the state that my soul has come to. i am in limbo and many thoughts from others keep me here and prevent me from stretching toward the sky with my arms raised pleading for release…..limbo. that is where my soul is crushed. where i am held hostage by this heart that no longer is my own. it belongs to those who want me in their lives, but i have no wish to stay here. i long to move beyond limbo. to go where the land is green

one time, i saw it.
in the window,
a father--the wife,
a couple of kids,
alcoholism
a loveless marriage
a little girl--
right before it turned black,
a thick, sludging like ***** oil
from an engine
shifting over,
black. i didn't
see a childhood,
i saw
abyss.

that's the
only time
she ever spoke
about it
to me. her
darkness, i understood
then, why she would run
from shades of grey,
and lived
with that fake light
in her, the one that
will laugh
at anything
you say
the one that
agrees with everyone
the one that
is loud about having fun
when no one is.

i wish i were king midas.
id turn the moon gold--and make you a pseudo-sun
in the dark, in the night,
to sheen endless reflections
of the real one
so that you are always in light.


if i were king midas
id touch everything
inside of there,
and you'd never know
the night
ever
again.

it starts with the masses.
heaped upon one another in grey, wet bodies
and from the amalgamate of ruined life
rise the silver, brilliant winged
filthy sog and bones sludging off
their unmatched, magnificent light

like shooting stars they ascend
to the enormous white clouds
garnered with the span of their great feathers
wearing masks of divine neutrality

and we

in the masses

stare so longingly at those divine heavens

some of us with patchworks of feather and bones- hopeless things we can barely call wings-
tattered and ripped but still determined, like the writhing of a starved beggar-
flatter unsteadily up
groping desperately at the clouds
with bony, aching fingers
only to meet
solemn and unforgiving
stone

and pushed
back,
tossed

back

into the masses


and like comets, they
rain down

                                          the fall of the inadequate




crashing into the hideously wet festering:
into the decay of the mundane and ordinary


and thus the procession commences
great silver wings nailed with dignified
steel stakes
graceful hands and feet
mangled unforgivingly with hammer and iron

we, the inadequate and mundane and ordinary
we wail, we scream we cry
for the destiny of divinity
in anguish and desperation, our cacophonic chorus
becomes
the great symphony
of the decaying and dying
bathed grotesquely in the light of the holy
we continue to beg and shout and call

the opera of roaring voices:


                                     the crucifixion of the prodigy



as we continue to decay
the weathering, spreading
and becoming, morphing into something no longer
recognizable


slowly we die off
each of us, clawing and howling to our very last moments
in succumbing to mortality
the symphony, melting in its desperate, rabid energy
until the echo of the last
haunted cry-

silences


hence closes

the fall of the inadequate

the crucifixion of the prodigy

and


                           the decay of the mundane and ordinary

Drag out of

Bed and into

Clothes for the

Day. Stumble into

The bathroom and

Brush, rinse, spit.

Line eyes: one,

Two, three. Each

eye, each lid

Gets three. No

More, no less.

Slide down the

Stairs but do

Not forget the

Gate. Throw on

Shoes and make

Way into the

Kitchen. Grab something

To eat – wait

Don’t. Coffee won’t

Make sick so

Just pack a

Lunch for later.

Leave for school

And brave the

Day, take it

In threes. Count

Your steps: one,

Two, three. Earbuds

In; can’t hear

A thing. Class

Passes ever so

Slow, sludging along

Until all the

Threes are up.

Make playlists in

Threes to make

Sure it’s enough.

Everything done is

In threes because

Anything else would

Be too much.

Even in twos

Or ones. Take

Care of body

Of mind of

Living space in

Threes. Clean and

Nourish to remain

As healthy as

Can be with

Allergies and sensitivities

To almost everything.

Do the best

That can be

Attained and maintained

Without a toll

In the long

Run. Remember to

Go by threes.

Listen, breathe, be.

One, two, three.

The world is whooshing and sort of sludging by
And people are the streets of consciousness
And I am just an eye in a city, spying on itself

And there is this little box that changes colors,
And I chase that box around
Pull it up, put it down.

It is a new part of my old body,
An expression of the species I am.

Classical objects exist, quantized in suspension
All seems apart from what it once was
The blood has spilled over yet another tier into a stranger world,
And I am made to love it

I have forgotten who i am,
And in the midst of my anxious preoccupation my worst fears have been elected leader
With real hope sitting in my treasured gut like a stone
In a world apart from my solemnly knowing mind

I want, you want, they want,
in want,
sludging through want,
wading shin-thigh-waist deep,
as we sink-or-swim
this ******* swamp,
with a raised chin
just above this slow loss
of living want.

I want, you want, they want
in a new normal
right state of want.

can you even begin to envision marxism
with a foundation in kant,
rather than hegel?
             just a thought, what became
a critique of lecture notes, just that,
                   and no critique of a magnum opus,
even heidegger forgets kant...
                 sludging along with hegel...
who i have no desire to read,
     much akin to karl popper...
          because? the jews are too practical
a people... they haven't been endowed
with a philosophical craft, i.e.
                  making problems out of nothing...
these people are too practical to
read, or write philosophy...
                     the asiatic currency of thought
is built primarily on a function
          of silence, a terse association with
a breath...
                     i pity my mongrel soul,
but in a land that's mongrel through & through,
sure, i can cook you a **** good curry,
        but to have it for breakfast?
       not so much...
           breakfast for champions,
             a sharpshooter,
                   or just a straight gulp of amber...
because you know that alcoholics
have their own slang...
               that i am drinking and that i am
drunk is one thing...
  but that i am also spatially aware
      for posits of necessary argumentation
is another thing...
           oh i'm not in this game for
the natives,
                   i'm in this game for the zunge!
the tongue, the tongue!
               otherwise in hades:
the lesser known fluss:
                               die zungenfluss!
how many definite articles does
a german need?
           probably as many as it requires
to make centimetre splinters from a kilometre...
ad reductio: to the milimetre...
   and then fervently past nano-
     to the crux of an atom.
              but of course
some might spew a diatribe,
                         dialectics of a tribe?
opera, perhaps...
                 papa emeritus as the prolonged
presence of freddy mercury,
     in terms of mannerisms...
                 came the nazis came the communists,
island dwellers freak out when
   their defences have been breached...
the thesaurus then, and categories...
          polishing the expression to
give a smoothness to a flit stone...
            red...
             crimson and burgundy are
apparently synonyms,
   albeit with a noticeable variant to
expose...
                                                    ­   hue...
            like yellow might be both lemon
and canary...
                            original "thinkers"...
          well... those who have settled their
ethics and now entertain a lapse in
making further judgements...
                      because the ones so far cast,
          can be deemed bearable, to live with;
so on this footing,
             i serve the origin of
                              the thought,
                                    but not the ought;
or rather, the: ought i?
                            crystal ******* clear,
          because sometimes the tongue
needs the clarity of ****-profanity,
               not in synch. with a mimic of
airs, ahs and circumstances of presenting
         high-brow perceptions...
                   i can believe in the nonsense
of chopsticks, only because i know
how people behave when given forks, knives
and spoons, seated at a table,
       in some grand manor,
                  slurping oysters by candlelight.
- a river of tongues...
          well... a mighty addition to
                           the already bulging styx.