I feel like sumi ink running down a wet media paper
Like I’m getting ****** up into its fiber
Before I ever had the chance to make the right mark

I feel like a tear that has been wiped away
It pushed from a cheek to swift, in hope haste would make
Feelings wash away, before they have time to settle
Be recognized for their real self, their actual impact

I feel like a under developed painting that wants to be an original
But has been put under too much pressure
To feel free enough to make an original mark

I feel like a statement that wants be made
But only finds things that have earned titles as cliché

I feel like a book that has been put down and forgot before
You ever got to the good parts

I am a heart wrenching sob and tear streaked cheeks
I am a sumi ink layered in perfect complexity and visual texture
I am original, authentic,and the best book you haven’t read yet
I am full of good endings, beginnings and all in-betweens
I am, I will be, stop trying to rush the ending

I try to live Here. Here is humid-sticky-underground-dance-hall hot. I’m caught tight in a mess of limbs- bodies stretch and sway from this to Eden. I have never been more lonely. Together we inhale metallic Old Spice. Together we exhale stale tap water hymns. I am breathing all alone.

My tired tongue kicks awake to cheap nail poison as I tap each fingernail against bottom teeth and lightly push three times.
(Four times or eight times. Ten times in one quick, heart-drop minute but who’s counting?
Me. Of course I’m counting. There’s not a beat, rhyme or giggle that hasn’t busy-bee buzzed around my foggy brain. Each thought its own color, each touching down on a different set of crumb-glazed quilts or a different tower of gutted magazines. Each bee is long and thin, pointy in a terrifying way. Each bloated and dripping with a grand idea- which they leave like droppings and are so specifically intense they will never make any sense a breath apart from this moment and this context which crumpled and blew away while I dully, dutifully checked my pulse. I'm alive but my thoughts took off. I can see their exhaust but they fled fast, like they knew I could only begin to gnaw on them. They were born to quickly, maniacally live and die- in and out and there then off and gone.)

Here. Here the walls are chipping off one hundred years, one hundred lives of lead-based paint and are dripping onto the frayed denim of my ****** cut-offs. Impossibly long hair, absurd to call it mine, hangs heavy and wet. The strands shed drops of atmosphere on my (and their and your and-) bare feet. I’m my own sumi brush- my calligraphy is not words, but a footprint-marked path to treasure. Braided bits cling heavy and soaked to the curve of my neck and then billow like sheets hung out in the wind. My sharp, slick scapula must be the laundry line. It’s one of the good bones. Good bones only exist while jutting. The scapula is the beautiful ******* of my skeleton and we finally have made nice.

Here the music is so loud. The bass ignites my dental cavities. They sting and pierce as a reminder of how terribly I’m taking care. Lights blink, the room quakes and I need water.  I’m throbbing and flickering and faces attached to bones slither between each other and grind up into my own perfect focus. They’re smirking.

One at a time they appear with a warm, grainy hand on the small of my cold-sweat back. Each face of bones lean in close, dry and cracked lips that graze my own fever-hot ears. Goose bumps sling up and down limbs and the lips, all smudgy red lipstick and cigarette breath, whisper something to me that is absolutely crucial. It’s something beautiful or something hilarious or something crude but I can’t hear it. I’ll never hear it. They throw their bones back and cackle-laughing so hard it must be painful. All I can hear is my eardrums cracking and breaking, laying the bass for a high pitched dial tone.

One by one they do this and then, with a huge play-dough smile and eyes as deep as I feel, they slowly back away from my flimsy, electric body. I know they’re relieved they didn’t get stung. This goes on for forty straight hours. I feel like the Queen bored and still as they file through to kiss my ring. I feel like I’m at my own wake. I am beginning to erupt. I am lightly vibrating with the burden of militant creativity. I think I'm melting from the inside out. The bones still laugh and the bees, diving like war missiles, are screaming that it’s time to flesh out that novel, string precise words together in a huge, monumental way down golden strings that will change the world for the better and forever hang on God's graceful neck. It's time to record that beloved lullaby and sculpt that masterpiece or put on black clothes, sneak out and vandalize monuments. It is all absolutely crucial and so very urgent. Everything is wailing and I’m nodding slowly because if I do not do it, ALL OF IT, now- right this instant and quickly- I will die having said nothing. I will have wasted my opportunity to matter.

Here. Here the bone-bodies continue to mock me. The room stays dim and damp and I don’t think I’ll ever get clean. After twenty minutes or seventy years the crowd thins out, lights switch on illuminating exit signs and the room slowly, sadly, empties. I am sticky and aching and have never felt dumber. The bone-bodies left their blurry sweat, their empty bottles and their void inspirations like blank fortunes trailing across the bar top. There’s a real, fur, calf-length coat and a fake Birkin bag in the corner. My feet are filthy.

Here. But I’m not really Here. Here is bougy and exclusive. There’s no list but you probably can’t get in because actually Here is utter *******. Here is the moldy bricks and pre-war ceilings inside my head.
Leaving Here is too easy. You blink and you’re gone. Then I try to remember what party I even went to but I’m sitting Indian style and cramped on rough carpet and my back is in knots and everything I’m thinking is slow, melting taffy lose and inconsistent.

The sun starts to rise up pink through broken bedroom blinds and I know that I went way down deep and danced and gripped tight to flurrying ideas and made a big mess and now I’m stuck ripping papier-mâché, three inches thick, off coat-check walls and trying to read the graffiti-ed bathroom stalls but the Sharpie is dripping and I might be illiterate.

The Somethings I came to flirt with are hiding and won’t answer ‘POLO’ no matter how loudly I scream ‘Marco! ******* Marco!’ I’m reeling and under-breath begging ‘and please come find me and let’s make stuff and we can’t waste this and I can’t be a waste.’ But below all the pacing and knuckle-cracking I know that there are no Somethings listening to my panicky prayers. They sneaked out while I was braiding my hair for the sixth time, humming something old and Johnny Cash-y that I remembered and liked and had to Google and perform eight times for a mirror. I sneeze and I want to cry. I don’t think I know how to read. Edges start to blur and the alphabets a mess.

In defeat I’ll wash my face and slide under one light blanket and quickly sweat through it. I’ll lower my heavy, thick-thought and dizzy head onto a stack of three pillows. My vision will fall away from me and stars will explode in a chatty whisper that has be immobile and straining and sore. I will treat them like a sky full of fireworks blazing just for me. I'll ooh and ahh and my heart will palpitate under the weight of them. (Really I do know they're just amphetamine snowflakes falling slowly and burying my wasted night.  I swear next time I won’t waste it.) But at that moment I'll watch the show and feel safe and small and inconsequential, at last.

usually when i begin drinking, after the day's
sober stretch, sometimes unbearable, sometimes tense,
but then the night comes, one of the cats
keeps watch with me (head out of the open
bathroom window, me on the steps into the garden),
making sure the moon doesn't suddenly
change into a sickle of red, while the exhausted
clouds buckle their would be hoofs,
with mickiewicz eyeing castles in them, but not here,
not now.*

with a bias for theology, i say ol' chap,
would that be a toast of making things appear
rationally adequate should they be two words
expressing one word? like **** sapiens
for mankind? i dare say ol' chap by jove
you are right!
well then, a conclusion:
all the greek gods were crafted by
the greek poets as scandalous and immoral,
slowly losing their immortality
by mingling with a one too many mortal women
to give us demigods like hercules and perseus...
but then socrates came and said: 'why
the gods immoral if we aspire to be kindred
with them, and ourselves immoral justify
our immorally forced nature by being fed
the immorality of the gods? what if gods are
moral: deus sapiens (the compounding trick,
seems rational enough) - and we simply fear them
so, and use poetic illusion to justify our immorality
by the blasphemy of poetry to justify it in the gods?'
a bunch of cinema goers i presume.
well that would explain a lot, like the origin of
madness - with deus sapiens, we can get momentary
flashes of **** insapiens, the supra-moral beings,
who without genitalia crafted the biggest existential
choke... sorry, joke of our lives: holes, pistons, trains,
lollipops - but your mouth where your ****** is / ****;
after all, jesus died for ****, not that i particularly care:
better an honest insult than brown nosing myself
with his fake delight in it;
but given that the greeks took delight in writing
the new testament, all that olympian philandering
paid off as nonsense - after all irrational gods
gave man reason, gave us the genesis of philosophy,
for only irrational gods can provide man with reason
and respectability... rational gods can't do that,
they can make fluctuations in man's reasoning
(however sensible)... but then there are the gods of
continuum, of tradition, or a hierarchy that's rarely
shaken to rubble... i look towards india and see it...
there's also the inverse-nihilism of the far east...
i don't know why i attributed the word nihilism
to what i am about to define, but i define it with
an example, so it might be easier to change the word
and not use the horrid ditto marks of ambiguity...
the japanese perfecting ensō sumi-e(h) / not ***, eh /
uvula back of the throat e; or brewing tea for a
very long time, longer than the english i'm assured;
but i derived nihilism from the etymological origin,
latin nihil, i.e. nothing: i.e., if there's nothing, no deity
not heavenly encore... we might as well take our
time about it... live to a hundred and twenty.
in conclusion i was thinking of a taking out something
from quantum physics, and put it into a theory
of linguistic (call yourself a theoretical languor
of phonetics you might say, sure, why not):

quantum         qua-                     -ntum
                      as being              don't know,
                                           looks pretty though

now the best bit, re-coupling the prefix qua-
with vox (voiced, voice), and akin to quantum
must but another letter in the word to make it
exotica of belgian farmland... hey presto!

                          quaevox (kwe vox),

i realised that the latin ae provides not only an
interchange (but because no one really uses it),
but also a w wound, if there's a u involved,
obviously because we say w is a double-u.
so what did i just create? definition...
drum roll please!

in the english alphabet there are 26 phonetic symbols,
but there are less quaevox in that realm,
the symmetry of c and k is a good example to have,
basically: different symbols that have the same
amount of "energy" in them, but are of different
open-geometry (straight lines bended that do not
confine to provide the pythagorean c (squared) =
a (squared) + b (squared) - where c is the length
of the hippo... hippopotamus... hypotenuse...
ah you see! i knew that c & k weren't alone...
there's also q... and queue... y why and lie and i;
obviously this term quaevox is still in its infancy,
but that also means it's in its prime.
don't say i didn't warn you... there's
art blakey & the jazz messengers playing in
the background... the classical music of the africans
if mozart et al. are to the europeans.

Now I remember !

He once told me
there were a leash of foxes
heeding and sniffing at mydoorside
without making a sound.
when I fell asleep on the otherside of the door.

From where did they come?


I do remember
when I heard their howling in distant
hold my father tightly.

Now I am neither scared of its howling
nor its blazing eyes.

An entwined memory of paternal bond and fearfulness made us life long fellas?

Are they still looking at my doorside?

A leash of foxes!

From where did they come?

Did they leap out of some forgotten shrubs of memories?
©sumi

you would not have jumped on your own

you can remember your toes
gripping
the cliff's edge
you can remember his hand
pressed into yours
how firm it had seemed
how sure you had been
if there was doubt
you did not listen

you do not remember jumping
just glassy eyes mixed calls hot confusion
you forgot how it felt to be
safe inside only yourself and now
you are falling
and you scream:
How Did I Get Here

the hand that was pressed into yours
is not there
you do not know
exactly when the fingers
uncurled and slipped
away
you search the sky
rushing past
you can see his colors but
not his face
as you plummet
you realize
he is flying

the darkness catches you like a net
it swings itself over you
the thickest brush of sumi ink
the softest blanket the womb
it is still but
you are throbbing
there is a tiny needle in the center of your chest
a red halo is formed
tender like a splinter
you do not understand it
you are afraid

there are beautiful people everywhere
but you do not see them
you know he is flying so
you do not look up
instead
you bury yourself into the dark and
wait
you hold your own hands
they are warm and calloused and familiar

days and days and days

melody begins to
trickle
into the darkness
you don't know
if it is coming from inside of you
or outside of you
the music brushes the side of your face
you nudge it away
more persistent it grabs you
from behind
playfully
you snarl and swing around
you are standing in the daylight

the music grows and
you follow it and follow it
and when you get there you realize
you have forgotten his name
and can recall your own

an: i, Chinese water tortures the: u,

of the word: thrum.

--till it becomes: thrim.

sound over writing...

rice paper bulges of wind-water.

as a cold case parrot named: Rainy,

taped to a lamppost by its stricken

vocabulary teacher.

jumbles the wind-water gradient of numbers

& characters it inhabits.

sumi ink bars, with an escapees tropic strokes.