Oh ferocious angels,
lionesque children of Eden
on narrow streets and polluted alleyways
whispering cruel things to each other,
you're radiant in your belligerence
and as my enemies you are virtuous.
Beside me in this carpeted rectangle room
a faint glow exhales
from the tall alpine ivory lamp illuminating
firefly wings of blossoms
alluringly exuberant in the afternoon sun-ray
diamond shine and shimmer.
Dusty tin roofs billow
firewood smoke in the thick violet shade fog over-top cabin potted
mountains and hills sprouting firs and rose bushes abounding.
Spectrum cast chandeliers echo staircases which
jot up and up arduous ruby landings,
hardwood floor cracked
and stacks of novels ballast the senescent hallways
of bookshops where poets works and journals diaries and memoirs blur
the serpentine walls with memories.
Angelic the soul which is too often contaminated with
avarice rebellious to concord living
harmonious midst dew grass and calm waters in residential lakes
empathy equanimity, far from Bodhisattva.
Few kinds of darkness transcendental
subduing other darkness to a weak shadow.
There's an importance to admiring the delirium of metropolitan roads on roads
this intricate unspoken connection to those who
rest by stoplights and crawling traffic metallic molten aura of
cars in July heat.
Paying attention to the open window of adjacent apartments
where Mr. Norris waters his tulips and shares this moment
modern meditations practiced
finding a balance in such an anxious
volatile world like this.
Oh ferocious angels, impetuous
forlorn seraphs,
sing! sing and soar!
Boundless is our ardor
and our passion.
Unenclosed is the lion
in it's bloom.

I do not believe in heaven or hell, but I believe
in whatever vindictive god left me here
like an unfinished sentence: incomplete, unenclosed, trailing
commas and semicolons and dangling prepositions
in my wake, tethered to nothing but my own beginnings
in a world obsessed with the way things end—I did not ask
for answers, and yet they were given to me;
I did not ask to be dragged down and anchored to a single story,
trapped between well-meaning parenthetical smiles (“put a period there,”
they say, “and begin a new sentence"—
but how can I start over when I have only just begun?)

I want to feel like king again.

And feel loved and safe. I feel so alone and cold. Like I'm sleeping in an unenclosed barn in some tundra and the doors keep flapping open and my sleeping bag has holes and it's been years since anything besides spiders and moss has lived in here.

I feel like all the warm families and all the soft lovers have vanished and left me to my own devices. Like the last man on this cold, dead earth. I want to have purpose again. A reason to wake up and a reason to not throw a bullet through my brain.

I feel like I have asthma, or the air is so frozen it hurts my lungs. I can't breathe and my skin is starting to boil and my hair feels so unkempt and my beard just keep ******* growing no matter how many times I shave it. ******* I want everything to stop, but not freeze, I want the badness to go away and the goodness to come back.

I feel like I'm reverting. I'm devolving into the lesser person I once was, I'm losing what defined me. I want to fade away entirely or come back in full, not stay at 70% opacity and kind of just float here in limbo. I want to know that I'm not wanted, or be told that I am. I don't want to have to guess and play guessing games with life.

Being born is the most cruel gift I've ever been given. I am so very lucky to be born, such low odds of it happening, and at this golden time nonetheless, but GOD do I suffer in this golden gift. I am obliged to live a life, and a full one, but that life is inherently founded in suffering and constant war with attrition and loneliness and disease and age and heartbreak and cancer and hatred and cold. And we fight these things and it makes us happy, but we have to keep fighting and fighting and fighting for that happiness. We can't just rest and be happy because it will all start to crumble. Your money will dry up and your health will decline and you will get cancer and you will succumb to dark mental places and you will lose everyone you love if you stop fighting. So we don't have a choice we have to just KEEP FIGHTING. God, I'm sick of fighting. I'm sick of suffering for the sake of avoiding a worse suffering. I want to just float. Just put the car in cruise control and coast at a healthy spot. But I can't.

Not with my mind. Not with my wallet. Not with my heart.

Life is the cruelest luck.