and now i dont even ******* know how to care for myself because i was never told this could happen to me,
i wasnt supposed to get sick. i wasnt supposed to get sick.
all my clipped nails, my chipped teeth piling up like letters at an empty house,
spilling from the mailbox, a papercut waterfall.
the car sputters & stops. the pen scratches without ink and i try to read what a different version of me wrote,
what a younger self thought was poetry.
my mouth is empty but my pockets are full -
pepper spray/my tía's ring/a lighter i never use.
a lighter kept for strangers, for burning dry leaves, old letters,
my own tongue because blisters make it feel fuller, less hollow.
skinny lips, strong teeth, black tongue sharp and sleeping.
never had a cavity.never broke a bone.bandaging my feet before the blisters form, what do i do now?
you took my hand.
you took my hand.
you took my ******* hands. in a california summer,
dry golden grass like a wildfire dare, you said please don't leave me,
it's drought season and i'm choking on my spit,
you're taking all the rings off my fingers. you're swallowing my tía's ring.
does it taste like her cigarettes?does it taste like my sweat?
ive been thinking about you, you've been on my mind:
how do you burn a sunken bridge?
its broken but the the pieces lie heavy below the water,
twisting the current.
how do you open a letter five years unread?
avoided/ignored/forgotten as it slides onto the floor.i'm so afraid that ill never respond,
lay here till i petrify, a living thing turned stone.macerated in my own ******* self-pity,
dripping blame from gaping pores. you did this to me, you broke me,
you poured lead in my ears you left me deaf and afraid, i just want to feel absolved,
it's not my fault im sick. its not my fault i cant fix myself, its not my fault i dont try -
to try and fail is worse than to surrender before it starts.
excise the shame, cauterize the wound.call it a battle scar,
a mark of bravery and survival,
not a coward's brand, not the mark of cain.
killed your brother. slaughtered your counterpart, your mirror image,
an alternate you where you made different choices,
the ones that made you a good person and not a tumor,
bloated scourge in what could have been a healthy life.
empty fortress decayed behind the walls, i didnt build these to keep you out, i swear,
i just wanted to flesh myself out.
boundaries building up an empty breath,
making me appear more than i am, feel greater than i could ever be, but when you get inside there's nothing.
that's not my fault.thats not my fault. some people are born forests,
vast expanse of redwoods, moss softening the air;
some people are born exhales.
breathed out and dissipated.  
less than a lack.taking nothing; making only a still room,
stuffy air encased like innards; its funny how just a sigh can make me feel like im faking it
even though im the only one there,
even though i can still feel the ache in my skull,
eyelashes stuck to the palms of my hands.how does it feel not doubting life?
how does it feel to know in five seconds, air will swell your chest again?im on unsure footing,
a crumbling ***** (i know its just me.i know im being paranoid,
chill out you said i held my breath while you climbed dont fall dont fall oh god)
when did this happen?who poured fear into me like
swampwater in a wineskin,
never feared falling when i was young.
i just want to not hate myself but i guess thats a pipe dream,
******* stupid, ******* useless ******* incorporeal ******* fake laugh when theres no one to hear,
fighting spiders for the right to sleep. (do your friends know youre a liar?
******* traitor, dropping love from burning hands: your silver tongue is tarnished,
youve been vomiting again,
stomach acid eating your throat from within. can you stop?)i just want to stop.
theres a ******* burning sun in my chest and god i know i should feel lucky but i dont wanna ******* live i just want to SURVIVE,
what ******* good is living if i just burn myself out by the time i reach 25?
im scared to die but im ******* killing myself and i cant ******* stop,
i just want to sleep but theres still a bite mark on  my wrist from my own ******* teeth there are so many people i feel sick,
they talk so loud,
i feel like i could ******* disintegrate
******* degrade into dust please i just want to leave but i dont want to be alone, let me stay dont let me burst,
i want to be so skinny my bones bruise my skin,
i want to be so strong i could ******* rip myself apart, dont lie to me.
dont love me just sit next to me touch me tell me im alive.
im alive, right?im real im here im not a dusty phantom,
gasping ghost ripping oxygen into incorporeal lungs,
god i want to SCREAM just so i know im not ******* DEAD past the skin is there any sensation past the surface
i want to wear my ******* throat raw tear my muscles to shreds to know i can feel something that isnt shallow surface nerves, PLEASE!GOD!
make my lungs burn make my bones crack i want to feel something that i know is REAL prove im real prove im not an empty shell please im still alive but bites dont go past the skin,
i want to see my ******* heart pulse like the realest part of me,
proof i need proof i want faith i want to believe in unproven things, how can i ******* believe im real?
im ******* faking it just like everything else,
bluff till its true but i never ******* learned how to be TRUE I NEVER LEARNED TO LIVE PAST THE SKIN and if you peel it back all you'll ******* find is
rot,
gangrene, necrotic flesh and electric fear, dont ******* touch me i feel like i could ******* explode,
i feel crushed compressed into a space too small for my body and itll crack any second.
please ******* punch me in the gut. please ******* crack me open i dont ******* trust myself to keep my heart beating,
please rip it out im ******* faking it!!
faking laughs for an empty space faking fear for phantom spiders and thoughts of death, im ******* faking it but how do i ******* STOP
I DONT WANNA LIVE LIKE THIS BUT IM SCARED TO ******* DIE

Says Vernarth: “Khaire to my beloved beings that surround me, including my ***** that move their tails to the rhythm of my awakening. To you my dear Brother, I stayed with my ceramic asleep and I could not sip from the last harvest of ideas and its temporary forks, which came from my parapsychologies. I am delighted among these blankets that smell like cornfields that prevented me from seeing him closer when I already had them in my hands. Now I not only see beyond what my arm measures in its omega, where my own estimating what flower I have to carry and see what it will have to carry in me!

Once upon a time, seven donkeys woke up, the first one who did it went to look for bread, milk, and honey, the second played the tambourine for his master, the third sprinkled the flowers with holy water, the fourth was vernacular in the others, the fifth was in charge of carrying stones and logs in bundles to make the elbows and the masts of the beams, the sixth reconciled the morning with the sun to have a clear day, and the seventh brought the akratismós on a tray, which brought a colt on its back and in a wineskin, bringing juice from the Procoro winepress and Akratos wine, which the colt eventually moved with its leg so that it could be served. Seeing that he gave signs of awakening and opening his bleary eyes, the seven of them laughed and brayed when they saw that he could not hold himself, but when he saw one of them who had had temporary amnesia, he faced him in the sunny morning so that he would face to the wind from the coast that began to bring them figs, like an Ariston or early lunch to strengthen him on his head, more remote of all because he thought too much. The third donkey would make two tortillas from neighboring cornfields that had just been baked, these he used as plates or trays to roll the fruits, vegetables, and barley bread. Vernarth laughs along with them and hugs them again. The containers that accompanied him had the solidity to fill with a few liters of water enough to bathe, after having fiddled with the ******, which reminded him of Orion, but of the meatus that would now be used to ink the thread of the spindle, which pretended to be divine. with hemp and cotton to rub the woods that he had destined for the main timber of the façade. Then he puts on his himation and on it the fibula that protected the serum from his right shoulder. He takes some pieces of logs and lights a bonfire to cook infusions and chalks of his personal medicine, from the collection of his private demiurge, Borker. He placed his tools behind a florilegium, where he received his astragalus by means of his jumping donkeys, and sometimes they would turn around him for hours to soften his immediate floor so that he would not be bothered by the rubbing of the grass and his pectoralis would over-sensitize. But in the end, they traced with him as seven divine golden numbers, which were added one next to the other, for each birth of his mother having to use a third of the womb to shelter them, like equid specimens in their 14 months of age. gestation. As if they were pollen sacs that were the origin of the androecium of all creation in the gynoecium sector. The morphology of this analogical floral relationship alludes to the anthos or flower that matures in the expression of the animals that surrounded Vernarth, and its filaments that derived from the spindle and its promised threads that connected with the fertile connection of the donkeys, making present the cellular magnetism of father and mother for them. Almost like a sordid weight that could not be supported in his genome, it was the serum that sweetly emerged from the nectary of his shoulder, rather close to the sternum, but his burritos produced good moments of the company for him, knowing that if he ran his hands over his satin back, he also longed to ***** the bristles of his stiff hairs, which decided his species, like bristly donkeys only pending his immunity.

Saint John and Etréstles approach and they say to him:
Etréstles comments: “It is said that I must be near you, just as I was in the forests near Piacenza, or after setting sail from Sardinia or Hylates. Then arriving on the coasts of Florence, La Spezia and finally Genoa, it is said that not far from here in Messolonghi, there are books that are written for you, they are wonderful, and everyone reads it, it is called Vernarth Alexandri Magni Macedonis officer Primum "Vernarth First Commander of Alexander the Great." It is said that there is a dispute over the guarantee of your magical verses for those who write it and for those who read it, as an experience that most pleases those who transcribe it because when you stop your verses, they mention that their infantry tale has not reached them. , which is being reborn in all necropolises, such as the Koumeterium of Messolonghi. It is said that there is an extreme reason for unity in the Divine Number of Gold that extends through the seas of Troy and Athens, in the patronage of Fidas for his agora of with the disciple of Agoracritus. It is said between June 21 and 24 the Sun or Shemesh for you, it begins to move away and flushes in its suspicious perihelion, it is said that we will dance in the sacred space, and Archimedes will dance together with us with his Elves, and it is said because I say it! We will have Mother Nature knocking her down at our melted feet, full of ****** Bern olive trees and rotten grasses that announce the freedom to be united, together with all the books in the world, under her great Hellenic library that will never stop going and running after the last leaves of the apocalypse "

Saint John intervenes: "My half reason, is my whole heart, my whole heart is my extreme half, which totalizes the segments of the magic of always surviving and resurrecting in the golden number, thus its length squeezes the shortest way to go behind of the donkeys and lose their memory, if not half sheep of my reason and my heart guiding them "

Neither the Oniros duo nor the third would impede Verrnarth to embrace them, but he was in his purging, behind a severe veil, but from the ductile ectoplasm that already separated them from their ethereal physical plane, it was only possible with donkeys to pass from one dimension to another. other. Thus the arcs of the circle of the sun surpassed the rule of being contained in the supreme analogy from above and below, only the points of ab / cb went beyond the spiritual eclectic portal, to attract them to ab / ac, hinting at the midpoint of the Equidae that brayed to thank Saint John for the Apostle who could be close to him and caress his ears, which were the highest and golden point of his omega garden.

All the skin that covered
All the skin had died
After all I tried,
Turns out truth is how I lied

Living life in envelopes
Sitting on a couch
Over and In my lover
My heart is covered in a pouch

the grass, leaning in the south wind , seeming
as if emeralds,   had sent tendrils up
to suckle at the yellow breast, now,   high above     inflamed...
over soft new grass  
      
like
strands of green gemstone,
as delicate as humming-bird tongues
teasing nectar
from a titan,
in the sky
                        
triumphant in the void,
a golden bead in the baffling blue !
cattails, curling in sway...and two brown eyes bob upon the surface
of a myriad fertilities.
as if
nature itself had known, one day
a poet would come ~
to roam the rambling renascence of these remote ramparts
in awesome humility ~ and so prepared
a path afflux
that ambled near

and yes !

an anonymous nomad
with nicotine skin and a scabbard of scandalous quills
would indeed
stumble in    as if returning home
to a mansion restored to glory
and seraphic randomness....
a place
              that in youth, sustained a quiet, soulful troubadour
              by gospels of granite and grain,  grass finch
              and faun - ennobling an oracle ... but now
              enticed a scholar  from his cot
              to jot ephemera
              of outlasting spark
              before dark-fall

and so... there
amid all allurement   and soft machines

              a word-smith gathered
              poesy and prose.
            
              muse-driven
              this one served
              an invisible
              sovereign
            
              one  

              of unsurpassed virility
              who charms       kaleidoscopes
              with  offhand sketches    
              rescued
              from
              a landfill
            
              a basket weaver,  
              that unravels to
              achieve pure
              forms
            
              a wineskin was decanted in dianthus and hollies -
              as ampules of anagrams
              were sold unscrambled, to dyslexics
              without hope
            
              a falcon   frolicked above the lowborn lilies...  
            
              with eyes  
              too keen
              to see a
              blur
              as the hand
              of god
            
              or a vole
            
              as a lifeline
              on his
              palm.

At noon I left the vineyard
With a wineskin newly full
But soon a half libation lost
While running down the hill.

But though I longed to share a taste
With some fair passerby,
I stumbled, and the last drops dyed
The ground beneath a tree.

Athirst and lonely, all my dreams
Of feasts and love resigned,
When suddenly the ground broke forth
And upward rose a vine.

At last I raised my trembling hands
And plucked its yield in haste,
And found the fruit that I expressed
Surpassed the last in taste.

And so I left my garden tomb
And—drunken with delight—
I sang that Love would be my portion
'Ere I reached the night!

the old ones
cannot hold new wine
causing them
to split and crumble..
the new ones
are fresh models
prodding for recognition
midst the crumbling..

we seek explanations for
revolutionary changes which
surprise and frighten..
religion and science
and politics
struggle to place
new thought and findings
into old wineskins..

and the shocking news
is that each one of us carries
the new wineskin in
our own experience:
recognizing now the
unity and peace
of inside and out..
and more shocking:
this intimate wineskin
never has been old..

Unafraid,
she makes
red braids
wrapping
death
around her
soft wrist.

Her pliable
flesh
screams
fresh
mercies.

Inside
the porcelain
prism
pain
is no longer
her prison.
Life
is no longer
her poison.

Once crushed
life’s fluid
is now
a stagnant wine
that drips down
her limber vine.

For all that abused
drank her dry
felt her up and used
all the tears in her life
she is now
an empty wineskin
with no more life
to hold in.

Death was hers
and she told him
where and when
they would be
meeting.
It was
the only game
she was capable
of winning.

No note,
no warning call,
no shot off the port
From a cannonball;
She just dove
headfirst into
the dark black that
will eventually
claim you to.

Parable Dying with God: “In the seventh year BC, a Bedouin was going through the desert of the rabbinical princes, this man was going with his beard of a scribe or rabbi hurrying him, consequently and obtaining a doctorate in the law of the flock with camel hair that strangled by the neck and marked him with a thick and contoured baldric, for the first manly minutes of his vocal settlement that invited him to fully insert himself in Judea, in the Holy Spirit and in the fire of two Glasses of Vine, before two heralds and Masters who carried in their hands a silver dressing table, with kites of Abraham's vines, and which also hung from his back in gutted viper hides, shaking with proselytes that unclamped more life from a root and from the angelic tree. When he approached with a ceremonial formalism, the Bedouin focused between them, in the universe that separated them from the fangs of the vipers that surrounded him from the outburst of their fangs that he smeared with ink and litmus to write again to his family that in the vicinity awaited him. In case he did not arrive before the sixth day of the birth of Mariah of Nazareth, saying in his epistle: “Pretended and worthy tree of my family, I reveal to you a few days after my arrival in Nazareth, that I carry with me a good flock and vines that they are scattered in his Phylakterion, in two wineskins that supported following my epistle - continue with a pistol…; “Between the offense of my past lives and how not to separate myself from the water that still flows under it, I manifest miracles before my disciples, breaths, and before the rite of writing to them between two sitting next to me in the middle of the desert, to toast in two wineskins with wine and sticky fats drained from the Mezuzá, to then sit in front of you, in the distance of my arm that is not greater than the hand that separates from my wrist, and she herself from my elbow, telling them that in the saddlebags in my pantry, I carry the custody of two heads of crows that flee from the prejudiced pitchfork of my flock, separating the litter that splashes in my mouth with sieves and appropriates, with grains and wines that the fire will never extinguish "

Knowing that the heralds who accompanied him saw how they were exalted from the rancor of overseas and their designs, they became monarchical in their adherence by protecting them from where they were, without knowing if they were with their family, but if they were paralyzed by an idolatry of the sun and his fever in the ordinance of the Bedouin genre.

It continues: “with an irregular viper's tooth I write my feelings to you, as in daring baptismal purification of water that runs through the grains of the sands without evaporating, only in the cushion of Wine between Two, which I support with my heralds and their intricate gargles, with humility among them, shouting the ardor of the dove that will come from heaven with its holy solitude, individualized in the beings of the straying of the truth... "

Impelled by his epistle, the Bedouin absorbed himself from the beasts of the sunset and his communal patronage in other Bedouins who sat in their alleys through the desert, from other quarantines of wine and prayer, that tormented their thirst and hunger, before the surviving limb of devouring children who will never die for others who will satisfy their appetite, to control thirst and hunger, in bodies that will never feel it.

The Bedouin continues; "As the birthright of food in the bread and wine, during long episodes, I have separated from you. Today I proclaim myself in eternal patriarchy for the kinship of purging in this life, and their abstinence from death, mother and children will be seated on my right and my flock on the left, merging with the remains of the right hand...; in the anguish of my flesh, which cannot shine in yours, to supply them with miracles, isolation, and constraints of the attribute of a God-Man in the hoarse opening of the night "

After gathering the ink from the viper's fang…, he raised his arm that dripped the same other sooty serum, which differed from the smiling night to warm him with sweetness from what remained to write. Perhaps it would be Dying with God, prevented by himself that he did not do it in a hundred or a millennium where he declared the independence of a spirit, or in another faculty that provides extra-personal satisfaction of flushing on the battlements that awaited him to make crows and doves rest, and in all the lapses that do not speak of another chance that is not his own figure of breath, knocking on the gates of heaven to extend his prayers in existence and his sacred appointment with the most illustrious mystique.

The Bedouin continues “neither hunger nor thirst I will entrust to whoever does not know how to guide my flock, less the guardian who does not pick me up from stumbling from the empty desert that hurts and cuts more to whoever wants to be rescued from the pillars of the chandelier. I cannot resist your opinion, but I know that they are far from doing it, as father and son in golden graves with doctrines of name, before my superiors desire to catch on from some capes in Jordan, prompting the temptation to run between fires and mists of black prodigy and to die with God in the dry grass of the Lily "

Before the sophistry of probabilities from a quantum of the desert, this same one contracted and invigorated his ring finger to finish the lines that separated him from oblivion by his divine wine, which remained in his wineskin and then finished it together with his heralds, which They solemnly outsourced themselves to take them with the strength of the Simun that evaporated from the sweat and the suspension of the silica that suffocated them, rising swiftly for a third Wine proposal between two, inciting themselves in the power of their plenaries and the herds that they carried to their children minors.

The insolence of the person who called himself or named himself did not possess the incarnate verb that made him release the viper's tusk from his right hand, pre-existing elegies that held him in servitude, suffocating in the dark clouds, pointed out by the lamps that held him. from Aorion, as part of a gaunt progeny of immortal spirit. In this unthinkable way, the Simun withdrew absorbed, taking the viper and its inked tusk of speculation and triumphant apocalypse, to some corners of some prostitutes who were undermined in the keys of the redeemer's free will, depriving themselves before all who remained in the shin guards of man, and what is vulnerable from head to toe. The Bedouin, forcing himself to reconcile, jumps on the little blade of the Simun and climbs on it, to go after the viper's tusk, burning with courage in the ministry of temptation and the epistle that sinned before his eyes wanting to rewrite himself, to revive in it and leave aside the razors that circumcise the urgency and disobedience, on the hair of the camels that went with him, the honey that was in his head next to his hands that had stowed it, with some bees full of holy water feeding on temptations in which they have to flourish and in the hives of derision that were hung saying to him save yourself "

(Procorus was forced to deal with the battlements of the Bedouin station that wanted to continue in him, but determined to take the place of his consort, to finish drinking the wine of two and to help him Die with God)

In the copse where the green is noble and remote
and my wineskin sings whatever tune
my besotted soul applauds…
As I gather no moss, no stranger to rough canopies.
as there; i serve agendas beyond
my craven absolution
to arrive be-darkened and be-knighted
in the very crescent of my
incorrigible descent
erupting from a tomb of my own making
with a sprig of mistletoe
in a goblet of Sangria
star-struck by
moonshine...

We’ll season our greetings
and
salt one another’s
wounds for free.

We compare our flavorless
lives,
without ever investing
in one another
or
ourselves.

No deposit,
no return.

Give as good as you get,
or better yet,
give better than they deserve.

You’ll get more than you think
in return.

To be leaving,
to have left,
to start over,
to be bereft.

What else is there
but to walk away?
So sorry a state
that only God
might stay.

There was no mercy,
there was no sin,
shook dust from boot,
beginning again.

We’ve set the fires,
the windows are broken,
only shards remain,
the building is gutted,
the staff is insane,
where once we cared
only shells remain.

Oh,
the night is a swollen
wineskin,
the moon hangs high,
I only
wanted to live,
was
left behind to die.

Sated on hatred,
collided with skin,
bones are broken,
teeth are pulled,
pliers grip
incisor again.

The clock is punched,
its wires yanked,
limited options mulled,
the senses dulled.

The hands are dealt,
the aces laid down,
all bets are lost.
they’ve come to collect,
my wallet is empty,
my life
is wrecked.

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2019

I am always missing signs
and the standard question here is
Can’t you read
And the only answer here is
Yes, I can read, but I can’t see
Long ago, when I was upset I could shut off the camera feed
Do away with my eyes like removing a pair of goggles
And one day I misplaced them and have not been able
To set them back down atop my nose
And the question of course is
Why would you do a thing like that
And the answer is
It isn’t really so injurious
These days it feels like I never see the stuff
Inside of other people that other people are always talking about
The greed and selfishness and the cruelty and the lack of care
And it has been so long since I’ve glimpsed and
Properly identified these shards of glass
I’ve almost convinced myself they aren’t even there
The only problem is I know about them really
I did see them before, the persons unshelled
The coals and flames and pieces of
God and Angels and Demons
The burning cargo inside the wineskin
That when you ****** a foolish glance you can only say
Oh sorry
Before blinding yourself in humility
As if there were enough apologies for seeing
As if you could shut a door and forget what’s on the other side

Living is a refurnace fire
in the awaken age
oh thou sweet fellowship of meditation
& the satisfying worship of supplication
the highest form of medication
(Maintenance & protection of balance & virtue).

They who acknowledge principle
will avoid all extremes
& appraise living in equity.

Come to my lake of living fire,
all of you who ignores the ways of the ant
come & refine your mind
as pure gold with furnace removing dross.
 
As wine poured out of a new wineskin
yes, of wine served only to noble'
so are the sayings of the wise.

Who has gathered the curious song
of every gale of the wind
properly adorning his garden
free from distortion,
beyond time's winged chariot.

Words are life,
and silence is priceless,
so listen carefully as much as you can.
for pure care to reign
in your abode.

As seduction is to death
so also is truth;
as a cool breeze of the day.

Understanding is calm & joyous
love is care & happiness
peace is cheerful & comfortable
wisdom is comely & sweet,

Every word of the enlightened one
is flawless,
everyone who comes
must be silent
or only ask of thy Creator's will.

Wonderful counsel
In the Promised Land
're as pure silver to the moralist
& a perfect gold to the literate,
It's morning is as a sure milky sun
It's evening a true honey moon.
Eternally wiping away
all awry days
as an oasis of happiness
to the thirst.

If your mind is ill
treat your innermost sight and see,
the eyes is the lamp of the body
if the eyes are dull
the whole body will be darkness,
a blind cannot lead the blind!

Oh, sad I see
yes, far I see
the path of all who breaks principles
& the time when the cup of their consequences runs over
yes even a time as this.
their season is called
evil under the sun!

Where men are guided by principles
& Orderliness leads every heart
there's no need for many prayers
or rebuke,
but there is an illitracy of Ignorance display
I have seen.
they who do not count their stones
before they build,
thinks they'll be heard by many words.


He who loves pleasure plays with his life
he who loves pleasure pays with his life
he who loves pleasure is never satisfied
they who craves heavenly gain
seek no earthly vain,
just a little piece of advice.