Walking Home

Mulling eyes through electric tundras
procrastinating amidst the text and the
facsimile of a gleam - I'm playing this
piss-poor broken piano nearly silently
punctuated, hell; inundated with my
hesitating.

Every one ends sooner than expected:
each corrected mis-step stumbles headlong
into another the second time around, but
re-shuffle dry canals into melting banks -
trace worn tracks until the path through is
Acceptable.

It grows, sprawling madly with raw momentum
one blanked out night as if all inspiration
is the snake in your head, fangs mouthing
a call and response transcribed in glowing
black etchings on a shining blank slate.
My fingers dance, alive for the first time
in weeks.

Floating.  Is there nothing like going
to sleep knowing you'll wake up in your own
bed?  Lightness, as if a body just went
and gone. Dark lights in colors that have no place
on the rainbow - watching dreams born in
fireworks.

I walk with my father.  We are in a house I
don't remember but felt like home when I couldn't see,
and he is scolding me.  I just think:
you're dead.  I will never see you again,
and I'm awake.  I force my eyes open.

Blacked out briefly, but that's all it takes.
Stupidly careless with everything important,
or miracles go both ways.  Search it out
like dredging stony rivers for a corpse
but all that was saved: a tired couple,
known by heart.

I breathe easy sometimes walking home.
It's not yet summer, but words spring
to mind.  I keep drinking frost
but colds are hard to catch when hands
remember bloody eagles on their stomachs with
tiny wings.

After 4/20 freewrite

I get the point sometimes in the old push and pull when the spaces are too small and squeaking
bloody lungs beat flatly against living glass all full of holes, the rolling and ripping out
blade to blade, grassy matte-black in preparation so tunnel-visioned that you don't see the
dandelions pray as you walk over them.  Next year your yard will be filled with the triumph of
those seeds you're scattering now and you will press them down, lay each airy head down to the
womb it can't get out of.  One day we will fall drunk, whining of heat in a field of ripened
angels ready to float, seeking the rise of the other end that started with our thud and fell
like soft, warm snow hesitating on our bodies.  They will sleep and never take root in concrete
when we have gone.

Bank on Tourism

Numbered from the first off-white brand that came
Smoking for a good few seconds that must have been
Hell!  For an eternity of bubbling, popping, sizzle...
And off again soaked in steam from the head up.

Breathes good, clean lightly here, high on fingertips
Once princely, these cragged frosty peaks supplicated
Like statues but can choke a Chinese monkey in a prank's length
Wearing ink so heavy it forged mountains out of skin.

It was spiderwebs of fog spinning into the trees that day.
They rode on down in frigid air farted out by a bronze Buddha
Whose shit was speckled with jade and gold and bled
All the peoples of the world onto the pyramid beneath.

A Narrative Poem

Why does it begin?
Here, I say, because it’s me,
I’m the one doing this.
Let’s start now.

It’s heavy and cold,
Needy, clinging desperately
All over, I shake –
We haven’t even started.

Last look at the frozen paint
Of God’s creation melting away,
Last look into the rain at
The smell of earthbound tears.

Blackness and lights.

The world is filled to bursting.

Shadowsturntored.
Blood dripping from torn skin.
I look sightless on:
Flames of hell burning bright
as the graceful nature of the divine.

This will end when I close my eyes again.
Amen.

We Didn't Have a Real Winter

Smells of fuck the spring of averages,
All summer days and winter nights and
Meanness slimming in laundry buckets.
Sharp and hollow salted seas, underspiced

The trade and public transit to market
Hawked molasses, tobacco and weed spit,
The signs point upriver and it’s buy, buy, bye
Spun riches in so much blasted air,

Come easy, go easy, any time
To duck the sun and skirt the sky,
Pessimistic sweating the good return,
Smells of fuck the spring of averages.

So... If anyone reads this I just updated with what I've been writing "recently."

A Haibun About Acid Snow

A Haibun About Acid Snow

Slightly glassy-eyed, envision these frames trapping trees dissolving into ash. Frigid pyres stream in the wind – where there is smoke there is fire but with this pale, ghostly echo there is only a mournful howling rising over snow-covered tracks. The sky is falling in increments, soft static dancing along blackly iron rails. They run perpendicular to us: we walk away without a second glance. Conversations were never given a chance to live and wander, we kept closed the entire time wrapped in warm layers, seeking comfort and finding it only when speaking through facades and recycled words. Open doors hurt. Darkness and faded red bricks – sometimes golden – these are familiar and distant. Every home passed houses another dreaming demon. But when the mouth swings open there is a world inside breathing and reaching out and the shadows crawl in insidiously with a biting wintry inhale. Shut that gaping, wooden wound and look at me. I never leave the ground. White snow stains the concrete brown sometimes and I wonder what twisted plants would take root in such bitter soil. Salt the earth in one practiced motion. Dead oceans crackle underfoot. And we shook, but at that point when the unrelenting wind deafens the world with its demanding susurrations, and blinds eyes wide as windows lying open and forgotten with frozen tears, you have to throw yourself into exposure and smell the chemical twang in the air. And for a little bit it’s so warm this could be the dust from every cigarette we smoked down to the filter tonight.

It’s so beautiful
When it’s not us under it
And when it is – ouch.

Nothing lasts forever. For every last
morsel of tasteless white meat,
Someone brined and cooked a chicken properly.
It’s not the end of the world to overpay for a meal and a show,

Some pay with their lives for KFC.
I love the dark sometimes, but only when I think
of electric bodies jolting rhythmically,
strapped to a draconic halo

So white men can’t dance. Neither can I
which is why we go out only at night, right?
They turned the snow machine on
over the city, I hope someone loses control,

a cold monster slobbering and slipping and sliding.
I hope someone dies. Nothing personal
I just wish we’d have something to talk about.

Shining A Light on Dilated Pupils

These ancient, stony silhouettes
seem too soggy to burn in the
early dusk of wintery rains,
But torches drive the suns to set
farther from our cold wet shoulders
on a smaller horizon every day.

We are magpies with pitch black eyes
that drink in greedily all the
dull and lustrous lights in the trees,
Chirping powerless words that die
with ephemeral plumes of smoke
far too scattered to defy extropy.

Turn back on the road so traveled
and worn that rotted logs appear
to be the corpse of fallen gods,
Barren limbs become unraveled
collecting all the failing snow
into an earth-bound comet as it drops.

April 4 Freewrite

Thursday a whale swam at the sea
And the biggest wave rolled back to me,
Green yesterday but too gray now
A-daze, not hearing a sound.

Smells of mucus and pesticide
Now these cracked glass shells’ve no way to hide
Fire awoke in a blooded choke,
Cloaked in a stilled, shivering joke.

Call me Ahab in my own tongue,
I’ll crunch young bones as blood fills my lungs,
And crack black ribs around a pounding heart
Unzipping skin to look the part.

To Years and Years of Poems and Lots of Rock

This was given time
And time again.
Present for gratitude,
Gone again, turned back,
No turning back.

Dedicated music running
Collapsing air-waves,
Sign read shrunk
Too fast to see a difference,
Different all the same.

Years and years,
Poems and rock,
Stranger, stranger, the outsider
Reads, re-reads, misunderstands
And understands and then

Google recursion.
Definition: recursion.
I wonder if this was intentional,
And I wonder who this gift
Was meant for in the first place.

Printer Sheet Blanket

The clouds storm in to blacken me,
Darken me with thunder, muted
Lightning: one bolt consumes the sky.

When did night fall blood red,
Speckled with shifting oblivion
Closer? Uncomfortable proximity.

Morning dawns, a hidden sunshine
Frozen inside burning shivers,
Outside turning, beseeching the blizzard,

Twilight a blurred line, uneven
Burned in season, foreign dreams
Of summer melting into autumn.

Life will break one day slow,
Eating frost greedy and dripping
On the lifeless below.

Scrabble

They’re playing it like a numbers game
Or chess: one move and two hundred responses
Air-conditioned, with no room to breathe
The rush of tension, brief suspension,
Think for moment – the spurred plans
Never made will live like burning forests
Fenced in concrete and glass.

We language in the fall out of put-downs,
Musical from the ground up to a pointed lie
Of a land heavy, unsaid with creation
and tectonic rulings, perpetual quakes
In the perceptual shaken head: imagine
Potential unbound, spinning cloud-ward
And following the directionless storm through empty space.

I’m going to force the game, hands where I can see them.
We will shake. We will laugh. We will say
The things we’ve all heard before and we,
We will not think, we will not judge, and we,
We will pretend we’ve never heard it before.

Synedoche

We’ve only ever made it as far as the gift-shop:
The best museums in the world
Discount me at face value
Saying “Well, aren’t we the best people?”

It’s like someone died or something:
An awkward two-step to the door
All false cheer like this were a funeral,
Stop worrying about the kids and let yourself feel something.

Every vacation is a spectacle:
While I’m chafing at the comfort, we keep
A steady hold on our baggage
And pretend we’ve done more than stare at cheap exhibits.

Horror Vacui (Or Hopefully One Day I'll Stop Being Terrible at Writing)

I meditate on an empty parking space
With wide, bored holes in my face
That the light streams in. From the darkness
I drink to smooth over the starkness
Of a dry mouth, I drink to feel numb
From the coldness and dumb –
Unable to split apart these clenched teeth
Afraid of what might spill out onto the street.

I close my eyes on the gaping vacuum
Watching brilliant flaming flowers bloom
In my blindness, I remember to dream
Of the emptiness tempered, of the vacant scene
That I’m no longer sure still remains,
But guitars strum softly outside my brain
And voices sing of angels to my blocked-up ears,
And when I look up again I find a parked car sitting
Here.

Frame By Frame

Tick quietly, soft clock,
Talk small those big words,
Hollow voice echoing nothing at all.
I’m mashing electric gears
inside you, too excited
to find you worth listening to,
This egocentric dialogue
becomes a monologue in time.
I’m drowning.
Coughing up wet laughter,
My lungs on fire, my heart beats
brittle. It’s simple economics:
Abandon ship, shop around,
Find a new organ at a discount,
But the comforting stutter
of sinking convenience.
Throw everything at it,
Throw it all overboard until it goes away.
Don’t watch the slight off hands
No, they’re wings in the corner of my eye.
Ready to fly?

PAT

It’s clearer, you know? Twisted neck, broken, craned
Over shoulder overshadowed by your own silhouette,
Do you enjoy the regret like I suspect I do
Or do we just watch reflections in dirty, used windows,
Mistaking the outside for in, inside for passengers
Shuttled from their lives to the end stopped line?

Kill the driver, not you but your destination,
It keeps howling along in your ear no matter
How many times I bang my head off tremulous glass,
It never stops, it never stops. It never keeps going
For long unless abandoned by an outside force.
Simple physics applied to the world by us physicists.

The city you call home is a strange and craven blur.
Where the fuck do we get off on this?

Counting Mountain Tops

Half of the moon hangs heavy on the horizon,
Ground zero where the sublimated clouds drift
Apart from one: chicken shit little cartoon duck,
Two bleeding bullet holes for wings enslaved
Firing front-load impulses from stoned nerve endings
Three times singing silent swan songs in convulsions.

Cough blood, this low harmoniously untrained voice
Forced out from four black feet smells like burning life rafts
Reflected in eyes that drink the ocean, but can’t give five fucks
To extinguish the six sick silken fires, a candle
Streaming with every seventh wind that carved valleys
When every other weary artist slept in inspiration.

The other half of the moon waits to see how this will all turn out.
Eight small feathers touch down, soft as brushing fingers,
Heavy as judgment. Those bastards who scale regret
Touch down on the ninth piece of sky without a cloud
In their heads, breathing seems shallower – lungs smaller.
Bury them with formaldehyde dreams of paradise.

The Streets Make This Sound

The streets make this sound as they go by, they whisper curses in tongues of smoke so that, though spoken softly, the warm breath of night rings loud enough between our silences. These pockmarked volcanic statues are adrift on a soot-blackened sea, let splashed salt and ash fill these holes: they’ll keep our heads above water. But for how long – to go unasked so many times is not just carelessness and disregard of opportunity, it’s deliberate fear of our reflected faces in the spilled glass and stilled oceans underfoot. You must hear the talking shadows watching without eyes, breathing in without mouths, feel the growing chill as I do. They wait and feed and grow louder in the vacuum. Eventually, what will be left is our universal bodies and disgust at the nucleus of every dying sun. We will be torn apart. Take a shuddering, hesitant breath but once and hold the first dying leaf – still green – to your lungs. Twice someone has tried to crack this open and free the toxicity everyone has slowly built resistance to, but every cough sounds like a choked confession, every time vomit is tasted it’s swallowed so that the hypochondriac doesn’t panic. Picked scabs reopen scars, but I want you to be hurt because I feel like I need to be the one to bandage your wounds, unwrap them to expose bloody sketches in a similar vein on myself so that hopefully we can watch them both one day fade – beauty is fleeting. Nothing is ever completely forgotten, but seen once is enough. Do we need to always remember the dreams we shared before we wake up?

Smoke in the distance

Flares once but when you’re turning

You see nothing there.

London Fog

This is a valley where London Fog
Hangs heavily like bloodied hands
Torching gallows to fuel the lingering caress
Of addiction rising in smoky spirals.

Drowned in sound these flooded trees
Burst apart in the bitter stagnant silence
After an echoing one-handed thunderclap
One day they will never have been whole.

When that day comes the fog will yield
And the world will be laid bare to be seen
As it once was and as it now is
And to be asked, “What was so important about the difference?”

The forest was once here before the frost,
The cities before they were razed to plant the seeds
Of respite from cacophony and memories,
But we will live on until we die.

In the smell of cigarette smoke behind closed doors
In the chirping of life crying at our loss for words
We will live on and never forget
We will live in the past as who we are now.

Mr. Sandman, Bring me a Dream

When dreams have given way to the abyss,
In closing like the flaming maw of hell,
There is no last, raging desperate flare,
No memories fighting not to forget themselves.

Like a light in august, the setting sun,
Longing for the lost time of a wasted life,
The last dream will be of a dying summer,
Succumbing to an autumnal twilight.

Eyes bolted shut to obscure the darkness,
Fearful form constants become surreal phosphenes,
Photographs of fantasies fay and unvisited,
Their dim light upon the death of dreams.

Ragnarok (Pretentious rap)

As a hard rain falls and drowns a dying flower;
The graves upon graves stacked below are by the hour
Rotting like your mind when you've given up your power
Like the intellect decays from the acedia of a coward.
What has the past then died for if atop the ivory tower
All minds, all thinking is concentrated outward
Cuz our souls can't bear to listen to the never-ending shower
Of all of man's creations coming crashing down around us?

Let us build these empires on broken bones and broken minds
Dancing joyfully upon the graves where even dying has died
A tarantella atop those who've been forgotten by time,
Lives less gone now than having never been alive.
A cynical hubris given to self loathing and pride
Introspection is masturbation when there's nothing inside
A fatalistic weltschmerz is as innocent as the divine
What do you think you live and die for when the apocalypse is nigh?

The sun dawns on this floundering Earth, a twitching fish
Simargl, gargle, rinse, wash rinse
A solar flaring wolf descends upon the world
Rotationally energizing and demoralizing this oyster's pearl
From the ashes of the past let the ziggurat of hash
A sacrificial Franken-phoenix that's been burnin' through the stash
Be resurrected presently as a facsimile of intellect
We razed our cities to plant more trees but now being circumspect
What was once called ennui we know mostly as self-disrespect
Cuz if you're not living to die well then what else would do you expect?

The News At 8

5 dead on the evening news
What more can be said? It's more or less through.
Five families will mourn, will never be whole,
As five warm bodies slowly grow cold.
I wonder about their lives now that they're gone,
Did they gave their parents hell, if they had a single mom
A single father perhaps, but that's slightly less common
I wonder if they grew up living on ramen?
I wonder where they went to school, if they ever got bullied
If they were studious, if they were unruly,
If they smoked and drank and seeked nepenthe
Or escaped their sorrows through spirituality,
Or lashed out at people to hide their fears,
If they dreaded the end of the passage of years?
What did they major in, what were their dreams,
Was there a difference in what their world was -
And how their world seemed?
How did they live every day, how did they think,
What memories and people now circle the sink?
What will be wasted and forgotten and buried deep down
With five dead on the news and six feet below ground?
Five universes died in their entirety at once,
How big and how small is a genius, a dunce?
How much is a life, when it's all said and done,
Five dead on the news, might just as well be one.
The difference between infinity and more of the same
Means nothing to someone watching the grains
Of the sands of time slowly drain on a screen
While electric sheep populate these robotic dreams
What do five deaths mean to those who still live,
What can five rotting corpses still possibly give?

Dandelions

The stale cigarette's earthy aroma,
Battling with the cloying scent of Chinese take-out,
Hung in the air, part gray smoke,
Part intangible presence I knew nothing about.

A single blinking inferno eye,
Winking knowingly through the growing mist,
Gave light and heat to all
But me – I shook, torch in clenched fist.

I dropped the sun, smoking like a funeral pyre
Gathering storms like picking dandelions,
I wrap them around me for warmth in vain,
And hanged beneath the falling rain.

I Dream of Stars

There is no sound, there is no time,
Just a burst of heat and searing light.
The last hurrah of a dying star
Reaches far into infinity,
The glow fades, it remembers:
Planets waltzed, 'round and around,
It smiled and gazed lovingly,
A proud mother when life arose,
A proud father keeping his children,
Grieving when life ended as all life must,
How empty the planets seemed.

It tears itself and everything around it apart,
Collapsing into itself as it dies.
Everything in its proximity shakes
In light of its awesome wake and past-grandeur,
The black hole is born:
The planets descend, one by one,
Following in its deadly stead,
Lost lambs being lead to the slaughter,
Children dying with their innocence,
Wondering what lies beyond,
This is the destruction of worlds.

Nothing can escape its terrible grasp
The black hole grows and grows.
Someone watches and whispers lines from the Bhagavad Gita,
“I am become death,”
But even as the words pass their lips, they wonder:
The star is dead, but does the black hole live,
Does the Destroyer of Worlds remember its past life,
Does it remember giving,
Does it remember shining,
Loving and grieving for its children,
Can what once was ever truly be lost?

Ice Cream

I saw an ice cream cone
In the middle of winter -
In the middle of a blizzard,
Snow settling on the frozen treat,
A thousand crystal sprinkles camouflaged in white
A thousand pinpricks of starlight
Landing on the treasure,
Standing discarded on the sidewalk.
It was pristine, untarnished by man or God,
So I left it there, hoping that no one will eat it,
That its innocence will last,
That it will survive people walking by,
And knowing that if it does,
The ice cream will never melt.

Or in prose:
I saw an ice cream cone on the sidewalk one day, just standing there upright with a beautiful swirl of what appeared to be vanilla. It was one of those cheap flaky cones with a flat bottom and really not enough volume to hold everything it was supposed to and it was standing there in the middle of a blizzard, but still it was a tasty and delicious treat and the child inside me was screaming for me to pick it up. Snow was settling on it, studding the whiteness with glittering stars so that every immaculate curve and line was outlined with incandescent sprinkles. The snow, coupled with the chill of winter, preserved the cone in its pristine state. It was amazing.

As I stood there staring at the heavenly dessert and wondering who would discard something so beautiful without so much as a taste, I realized I had come to a complete stop in the middle of a crowded sidewalk and was quickly becoming a large nuisance to just about everyone. Grumbling loudly and mumbling rudely to themselves, people were stepping around me and by association the ice cream cone as well. I felt slightly proud that I was contributing to its continued existence, a feeling that was quickly erased when I picked up the cone and brought it to my lips.

And stopped. Who was I to destroy this work of art? It had survived man, it had survived the elements, and it had survived god. Who was I to come by now and do what so many before me had avoided out of deference? I put the cone down and stood up slowly, watching it carefully. I kept staring at it as I backed away; I couldn't turn away. A car honked and jolted me out of my reverie. I spun around, looking wildly for the source of the noise and then, remembering the cone, turned back to see it disappear into the crush of pedestrian traffic.

Stolen

The poetry of cigarette smoke in the air
Twirled eloquently, mouthing the words
That between the two of us were left unsaid
To be briefly seen and never heard.

Watching each other amidst the ambient clink
Of aluminum bats and the thud of leather on leather;
The sounds of an America trying not to change,
We smiled at nothing and the unseasonable weather.

Conversation and cigarettes burned and died
I looked off to see barren trees framed before the flaming sky
All I remember is thinking how quickly night descends
And the taste of her lips,
Words and cigarettes and all on mine.

Ding Dong

The blackest magic and eldritch rites
Haunt this idyllic village at night
When the silent stars are rent by screams
That turn fancy into nightmarish dreams.

The demon spawn of hell's hottest flames
Slaughter the harvest and leaves livestock lame
As milk sours and the most innocent die,
Their souls to limbo before they can cry.

In a bitter chill they dragged forth a crone,
Snow melting in the inferno of her home,
The black cat, her familiar, they stoned to death,
The witch left to choke on the winter's breath.

Flowers grew over the grave they never gave her
The most exotic colors, scents, and flavors
The harvest came rich and full the next year
In time they forgot the old women had ever been there.

But the cottage is perfumed with the colors of honey:
The wealth of bees, and the green of money,
No one talks of the riches that came from the ruins -
Besides, there are things still that need doing.

The blackest magic and eldritch rites
Haunt this idyllic village at night
When the silent stars cast their ephemeral gaze
On the demon that kills by fear and malaise.

Karaoke

I remember falling in love with songs
For the first time, sober, drunk, and / or high,
If I get the lyrics from the start,
But more often than not I have them wrong.

I love what I see there of myself
A reflective canvas, a notebook mirror,
With me creating another me
In hopes that another sees my world as well.

But I get the words that mean so much
Completely and utterly wrong so often,
So that all it is to me is music
And cryptic mumbles and gibberish in a brief poetic snatch.

Eventually I'll stumble upon the truth
The words that were meant to be heard
With the music as it was meant to be played
But occasionally I'll secretly wish to never learn what is truly being said.

To Elysium

I've stolen the heart of winter from a forgotten crypt
Watched it glitter like a wish upon dying lips,
Fluttering tremulously and weak for all its brilliance.

I've quelled the swelling of a berzerker's rage,
Imprisoned the spirit that should never be caged
Such that the immortal man never knew old age.

I've claimed whole kingdoms as my own domain
Securing both great riches and undying fame
What other man purloined a nation's purse for his own plaything?

My name and presence has meant pain and death
I've felt the caress of countless last breaths
After a thousand battles I am the only one left.

I am the greatest hero that you will never meet
For having lived this life unfettered and free.
Now I willingly walk to my own defeat.

Ode to the Mud

My fingers are lead, my shoulder is dead,
The palm of my hand is swollen and red.
All of my joints crack in staccato,
Unseen by eyes that need aid to see evil.
My body shivers, weary, in wait,
Of an ankle that pains to keep itself straight.
I suffer to keep a malfunctioning organ
That deigns to leave me dying or broken,
A head of hair that wishes to flee,
Each follicle struggling with esprit
Unlike my belly which grows ever flaccid
Or my libido which was fun while it lasted.
But mind over matter, and that worries me most
What spirit there was long gave up the ghost
There is only silence and thoughts of malaise...
I grow catty now with all these dog days.

Tomorrow May Never Come

When you feel the weight of tomorrow
Bearing down upon your shoulders
Feeling like Atlas and feeling the sorrow
Of beauty's converse in the eye of the beholder
Remember that tomorrow may never come.

When you feel yourself trapped within the amber
Of this moment gone that we call now
Unable to move and unable to tamper
With today, that which will you see cowed
Remember that today may come again.

When you feel the mistakes of yesterday
Break through the clouds of retrospect
And the expository glare betray
The remains: remorse and stark regret
Remember that yesterday has come and gone.

A Product of GM

What good is a broken refrigerator
Resuscitated on a regular basis
Only to slowly putter and die again
Killed by the perfect freezer atop its ivory tower?
It can't keep milk from curdling,
Vegetables from rotting within its rancid depths
And poisoning the unwary,
But the freezer with its ever-frigid air
Has never faltered, and as it beavers on
The coldness it collects clutters and chokes
The lungs of the body it rides upon.
I've watched strange men come and clear the ice
And the refrigerator come to life
A breath of fresh, cool, air
But sure as the frozen debris that litters my sink
Cleared from the icy realm where time holds no dominion
Will melt and spoil in a place so full of life,
The refrigerator will fail again as the freezer beavers on.

What good are these broken lamps
With crooked stands and flickering lights
Like the glow of embers in a still night
Winking into nothingness and forgotten
Or any light at all, for that matter
If all they can shine on is wreckage,
Scattered papers and ravaged books,
An untuned and ancient piano
That renders every tune unrecognizable,
An ancient house cat, once beautiful,
Now covered with matted fur,
And other debris of lives spent in futility?

What good is the queen of this domain,
Desperately trying to be proud of nothing,
Needing to be a mother?
She is a homemaker, a loyal employee, and an instrument of order
And yet her home is chaos.
It is a filthy hovel at best under her care,
Cluttered and reeking of urine and resignation.
At worst it is the end of the earth,
Expanses of the indeterminate dregs of wasted lives,
Piled upon themselves and compacted.
Oh mother, her children can't stand her
They resent her more than anything else for she made them
Cynical and weary of her world,
The only world she ever showed them.
What is good is the father,
Who does not deserve the title “king”,
Who could have been so much more
But worked two menial jobs for a decade,
Squandering his potential,
Taking his anger and frustration out on his family
Until now he has become almost obsolete?
Now he tries be useful again,
Unemployed and dying,
He monopolizes as best he can as much as he can
So that his passing will cripple the family
So that he will still be needed,
And so that he will be missed.

What good is the American dream
To the son of those who came to this country
So full of hope, potential, faith
And other such things that suckers are made of
Only to see the dream fail?

And what good is that son
For whom the parents will dare to dream again
Who doesn't even want to live for himself anymore,
Let alone let others live through him,
Who asks “What good is a home, is a family, is a life
To those who see only broken refrigerators,
Flickering lamps, shattered dreams,
Dying old men, and their own demise”
And other questions no wants to hear
Or answer?

Product of General Motors

What good is a broken refrigerator
Fixed repeatedly of the same problem
That still can't keep milk from curdling
Vegetables from spoiling and poisons
From the mouths of the unwary?

What good are these broken lamps
Dim, if they're ever gotten to work at all
If all they can shine on is wreckage
The debris of lives spent in futility?

What good is the mother's pride
Her need to be a homemaker and to be orderly
When her home is chaos
Filthy, cluttered, reeking more than faintly of urine?
Her children can't stand her, resent her for she has made them
Cynical and weary of her world,
The only world she ever showed them.

What good is her husband, the father,
Who could have been so much more
But worked two menial jobs for a decade,
Squandering his potential
Taking his anger and frustration out on his family
Until now he has become almost obsolete,
Monopolizing as best he can as much as he can
So he's still needed now, unemployed and dying?

How much solace can one take in acceptance
If it is given in resignation
For Sisyphus can only have despaired,
Knowing his beginning and his end
His smile is the Cheshire grin of mania.

What good is teaching the American dream
To the son of those who came to this country
So full of hope, potential, and the other adjectives suckers are made of
Only to see the dream fail?
And what good is the son for whom the parents will dare to dream again
Who doesn't even want to live for himself anymore,
Let alone let others live through him?

Face First

A two-faced man hangs over a cliff
Swaying in the salty breeze
That stirs the waves to gently lap the rocks.

He dangles from the tree of life
Its roots entangled in the cracks in the Earth,
Making the ground it stands on.

The sun sinks into the horizon,
The ocean bursts into flames,
Setting the canopy of night ablaze.

The string comes undone, cut by unseen forces
The two-faced man twists and tumbles,
Hitting the blazing waters face-first.

As You Lay Dying

As you lay dying swaddled with wintry sheets
Barely conscious and unable to recognize me
Or any of your family who shuffle in
Daily to awkwardly stare at you, emaciated
Perhaps hoping they'll make a difference
Perhaps hoping for a sense of closure
So that they can mourn you now
While you're still but barely alive
I'm reminded of the stories I've been told
The rumors, the gossip, and even then
Not much reached my ears.

I think of your colleague who looks so much younger
But studied with you at the university
He told me that while you were studying
You worked two jobs and gave blood to support your siblings
I'm trying to see something of that man left in you.
I think of my brother telling me that you taught yourself English
By reading Faulkner.
I wonder how he knew this
But then again, you always liked him more.
I saw The Sound and the Fury on your bookshelf, well-thumbed
But I was too young to recognize it,
And far too young to appreciate it.
I think of the feud my father told me about
Between you and an old family friend,
How you kept his son from coming to America with him
Because he was too young,
And how he didn't talk to you for years.
The son is an engineer in Maryland now -
The father retired in Buffalo.
I was told the two of you made peace years ago.
I remember the pride in my father's voice as we walked around Tufts
As he explained how you started an exchange program
Sending promising young Chinese students to the medical school.
I heard that same pride in the voice of another colleague
Showing me your articles, written in English and Chinese,
Telling me of the advances you made in... god knows what.

I try to think about what I remember of you,
And all I can see are hospitals and your quiet suffering
And how every few months my aunt calls to worry my father
Filling him with stress and dread as she describes your worsening condition
As he argues with my mother I can see his concern for you,
His anger at his inability to help,
And I think of his tentative hope when you recover slightly.
He will be mourning the death of a father,
A man he admired, who he was so proud of,
In who's footsteps he tried to follow and failed.
I think of your wife, all alone in your apartment
When your time comes and your family returns from America
She will notice the absence of her eldest son
He's been dead for months now, but for her
He would be freshly buried,
And she will have lost two of the most important men in her life at once.
I think of those doctors and scholars who talked to me
Sympathetically in the suite they gave you
They will mourn the death of a colleague,
The death of a dedicated teacher,
And the death of a friend.
I think of my cousins and my brother,
All of whom knew you better than I,
And they will lament the loss of a grandfather
Even though I know my brother will not be at your funeral.
And my mother, who you did not approve of,
Who's union with my father you and your wife at first condemned
Will shed a tear for you, because she's grown to care for you as well.
But I know that when I see you again
To pay my respects and say good bye
I will not be mourning a teacher, a friend,
A colleague, or even a grandfather.
I will be mourning the death of a stranger
Who I heard so much about,
But was never able to meet.

Two Brief Spur-of-the-moment Vignettes

Wish You Were Here
The earthy aroma of a stale cigarette hung in the air, battling the cloying greasy scent of cheap Chinese take out. I kicked a foot out, scattering Styrofoam trays covered in greasy sauce, and gently lowered my leg onto the small empty strip cleared off the cluttered table. I exhaled and watched a stream of smoke disappear into the light. From somewhere behind me a cheap stereo asked, “So, so you think you can tell heaven from hell?”

My foot was starting to fall asleep. I awkwardly swung it off the table, cleaning off another large swath of varnished wood at the expense of the crappy rug underneath, and leaned forward. The cigarette was automatically raised to my mouth. Take a drag. Exhale a small cloud. I wondered if it were possible to make rain from tobacco smoke. Everything was drenched in sauce and liquor and futility anyways. A tiny concentrated storm would either wash it all away or pound it into a soaking indistinct mess.

I hung my head over the cigarette smoking like a funeral pyre.

“How I wish, how I wish you were here.”

Snow
Outside the snow is falling sideways. I'm sitting at a beat up, marked up, fucked up desk, a hot cup of steaming coffee next to me perfumes the air, and as my restless fingers beat a tattoo upon the gaudy monstrosity that is my oversized keyboard, I'm staring out the window at the snow that is flying horizontally by.

The desk is blanketed with white shit; paperwork and my works on paper. It's piled high, and every time I look up I'm briefly amused by what appears to be a mountain range at eye level. I lean back and put one knee up between me and the desk, resting in that position. A deep sigh is heaved. One hand leaves its post atop my ridiculous gaming keyboard replete with useless functions and shining lights to cradle a drooping forehead. Everything becomes a strange swirl of colors and shapes before a deep blackness. I hold this position for a while, my cold fingers resting lightly on my temple, the warmth of my palm putting my weary eyes to rest, and relish the peaceful darkness.

The strange, almost wobbly fluttering of a single sheet of paper falling shakes me out of my reverie. I lift my eyes to watch the avalanche descend. It's slow at first; everything moves into position in preparation for the chaos that will follow. And then it all comes crashing down at once.

Maybe god knows how long it takes for me to resort everything and put it all together, but I sure as hell don't; I just pick it all up and shoved it back into shelves and crevices at random. Chances are I'll never look at them anyways. The mountains will just grow bigger and bigger as time goes on and every so often there'll come another avalanche just so that I don't forget that they're there. I look out at the snow. It's still falling, and still falling sideways. I open my window to stick my head out and maybe see where it's all going.

Papers fly everywhere, borne aloft by a frigid wind. Snow and bitter cold assail me. Before I close my eyes against the stinging and the window against the whole of winter, I see the snowflakes spinning in wide circles. I realize that they were just flying around and around outside my window the entire time. They never left that small space right outside, and I don't expect them to until the wind dies down and they melt upon my sill.

Later, as I'm sitting around a crowded table full of friends, I remember the feeling of snowflakes gently touching my face amidst the gusting winter wind and shiver.

The Sun Sets Over the Morning

The sun sets over the morning rush.
Betrayed by where we were once welcome,
We are all alike, in this way flushed.

Painting storms with a decaying brush
Obscuring strokes with a hasty thumb,
The sun sets over the morning rush.

The dam once broken will always gush
Till, nearly drowned, we at last grow dumb
We are all alike, in this way flushed.

Night becomes day, cries the singing thrush,
Our own ringing songs have left us numb;
The sun sets over the morning rush.

Our silent harvest grows ever lush
As we wonder what it may become,
We are all alike, in this way flushed.

The most simple word will find me crushed
As I wait in fear for what may come
The sun sets over the morning rush.
We are all alike, in this way flushed.

What Dreams May Come

The infinite extends before me,
Ancient yet timeless, old like the stars -
Like the shapes within flickering flames,
And the perfumed scent after it rains -
The inscrutable rhythms of all
the pristine verses, my night time dreams,
Tantalizingly intangible.
These essences of words unwritten,
More real unsaid for all the base tongues
For so much is lost in blust'ring lungs.

Before the canvas of time and space,
Like the life of impermanent Man
Held fast against the countless eons,
These brief poems flicker and are gone,
Each one like a candle burning bright
Only to trail smoke into the night.
Brief player, listen to these shadows,
Listen closely to what dreams may come
For they are dreamt for you,
And you alone.

Narcissus

We are all all the dimensions in and of ourselves
Perceptions removed by degrees and parallel;
Despite what we say we'll never feel what others feel
Or dream those dreams that, to them, seem real
We draw on our past experiences as we're building ships
To visit others on their isolated islets
But on this tract of land that they alone call home
We can visit but it will never be our own

As we whisper lies and hollow nothings
All things strive – I'm here striving for something

We're all like ethnocentric anthropologists
The tortured, outmoded, Freudian psychologist,
How else but through introspection can we view the world
We impose ourselves on others so what do we really know?
Those of us who are drawn to similar things for similar reasons
Are only on the same tide in the same season
But we have our own rides and god forbid if they collide
We can but barely steer ourselves if we're trying not to die

And I try to avoid whispered lies and hollow nothings
We all strive – I'm striving to be something

More than the pretenders who visit foreign shores
Good intentions or not, you can't foster understanding with force
But we all want to see these invaders every so often
It's them or feel like we've finally been forgotten
So we try to make these structures, made in our own image
Less hostile to others and they'll do the same
Asking ourselves is it better to lie, to ourselves and to other people
Or is the truth alone enough to define what is real.

The whispered lies and hollow nothings
At least, I guess, at least they're something.

At Eternity's Gate

I came to a clearing at the edge of the woods
Leaving behind me the arboreal blanket
That had mostly shaded and hid me from the sun.

The sun, unrestrained, beat down oppressively
A stifling heat misjudged, catching me unawares
As I, tremulous, gaped at the tremulous scene.

Standing upon the edge I saw, looking ahead
Infinity playing at my periphery
And some distance from the woods I'd only just left.

At first I quite eagerly made my way across
Spurred on by the temptation of exploration
Lost in the hold of fantasies of the unknown.

But I soon grew weary and my footfalls slackened.
Sweat dripped from my brow; I saw my spirit blacken
As I burned beneath the indomitable sun.

Oh, how I wished to turn back knowing I could not
I had gone too far now from that which I once knew
And knew that there was only forward: nothing more.

So I trudged on and after an eternity
That seemed too brief, my quest ended but in its stead
I could only see a different forest ahead.

Commence to Begin

Dear god please grant me sweet nepenthe
As the sinners in outrage cry out “Repent, ye”
“Little of faith, less of heart and soul,”
“What blasphemy you utter, you do not know.”
And yes this began in medias res
If this midlife is my half-life I'm less than blessed
This is where your aimless faith will get you
Unanswerable questions do not beget truth
But this is all a ruse I'm sure you'll see through
Fuck these bitches and let that money accrue
If we're lost when we die I'd rather not cry at rain
This total perspective vortex will destroy your brain.

Yo enough stalling, let's commence to begin
This'll be the first track I say the title in -
And the first I assure you, where I'll be direct
At least more than you should've come to expect
Let's go way back when to when all this shit started
Woke to a gray morning, weak and broken-hearted
Rubbed sleep from my eyes but nothing was there
There's no rest for the wicked or so I hear
But the steely gray sky like life past prime
Belied the warm morning that met me outside
And as I breathed deep I knew the sleepless nights
This illusion of time ends with the sunrise.

We're all like Prometheus – we know too much
And try to steal things that are hot to touch
Each little moment like we're thieves of time
Each day we awake to confront our crimes
But there's no eagle coming for our livers
Just one before whom we'll stand and deliver
So count the hours that you lose to sleep
And count the hours that you lose to people
And count the time that you spend on yourself
Does the weight of your soul slowly tip the scale
Or would the weight of the world borne on your shoulders
Look any lighter to another beholder?

Let me ask you, would that balm in Gilead
Finally conclude this unending Iliad
Or must we traverse mountains and valleys of shadows
To find a Pyrrhic victory in these hollow battles?

Winter Wondering

The ground is covered with crack cocaine,
With the same upon cars' window panes
Yet the streets are black and dull as coal
Look! Modernism and chiaroscuro!

The winds hold softly the dancing frost
To places where they are found or lost.
Entropy in times of stagnation;
References and personification!

This is the start of the end we fear
To die is to have resolved affairs
For living is just like to splinter
Pretensions! This ain't just about winter!

Arboreal

The seedling too small to sway in the wind –
How frail is life when it first begins! –
Will as time flows and it grows and swells,
Hear the tolling of countless funeral bells.

The sapling's first halcyon snows –
A tremulous life in the bone-white glow –
Will, if it braves the bitter chill,
See a time again when all is still.

The flowering tree in the rising sun
Before the harvest has even begun
Knows that the fruit it will come to bear
Can not last long despite its care.

The summers gone and long since passed
Though slow to go never seem to last
And so hearing the end of another season sing
The tree marks off another ring.

It stands amongst the grassy graves,
Roots entrenched against the end of days,
But a stump and rings is all that's left,
They came and went and the tree is dead.

450 Degrees

The wind whispers, how trite it seems,
Broken words through shattered dreams -
Stained glass shards upon concrete -
Who cares if they'll ever be complete?

No more will shine the colored lights
That once was God for proselytes,
And now with no one left to see
Who cares about what we believe?

The scent of ashes: heavy, cloying
Like playful sprites, more than half-toying
Upon these dead and empty streets -
Who cares without hearts to skip a beat?

If any souls looked, flying by,
Upon this beast that's slowly died
Upon the threshold of eternity,
Who'd care for thoughts that none can mete?

Weightless and hollow in an empty world,
Who'd care if all this sand were pearls,
Or who'd care for burning memories,
If the city were razed to plant more trees?

Tique Toque

Spreading shadows cast by a melting hand
Over the blank alabaster face
Briefly darken its pristine countenance.

Softly, the fragile facade obscures
Obscure reminders of potential times
Burying them in the growing night.

Silenced voices grow monotonous,
Overcoming the stifling sounds:
Broken and inevitably entropic beats.

Soon there is no hint of it remaining -
Only a blank intangibility
Bearing heavily down upon me.

Don't Go Swimming With 40 Dollars In Your Trunks

I've never skipped pebbles from the beach
Onto the waves into the sea
For I know that on that final dip
I'll have let more than a pebble slip
Into the timeless waters where
It seems that time is always there.
It never changes but always moves -
We can never find the things we lose.

The shifting sands feel warm with life
Beneath the sun but dead at night
Or when they're scattered and torn apart
As I dig for shells and natural art
And ignore the paintings my fingers make
Of their own accord - but they quickly fade.
By the time I can truly understand
What is lost I have only empty hands.

The waves, the ocean, the sea air
If I were told that they're not there
That I could step off from the sand
And plant my feet upon dry land
I'd head to the horizon and then no more
Then walk myself back to the shore,
And only stop to tie my shoes
Or pick up a pebble that someone threw.

Life is good sometimes.

I decided to clean off my cleats at 12:30. My eyes felt like they were filled with molten lead - burning and heavy as hell at the same time, and the world tilted alarmingly with each step. I opened the door and stepped briefly upon a wet welcome mat before clearing the threshold to my home. I was struck instantly by the brisk night air and a disquieting moist sensation on the sole of my foot. With cleats still dangling weakly from both hands, I breathed deep and felt the night within my lungs for the first time in weeks. I'd forgotten how electrifying the night air could be. I stepped away from my door and loudly clapped the cleats together, dislodging a small clump of dirt. I heard the clap echo through the streets, weaving in and out of the houses and shadows. I was struck then by the incredible beauty that is a tranquil urban setting, and for a while there were no cars to intrude upon my musings. I struck the cleats together again, and heard the sound like a clap of thunder running wild through an empty city. Still no cars.

Diving Board

Stare into the abyss and wave to a philosopher
Don't you know if you disseminate your observations to a gossiper
They will propagate mindlessly the agenda of the void
Slipping in their insecurities like their names collectively were “Freud”?
When did the word of mouth become something other than language
And take on deeper connotations while the literal languished
Are we not just simple animals aspiring to something greater
Are we not just existential crises rebelling against their creator?
But hey lets not get heavy handed with the conceited rhetoric
Pretensions are just pretending that verbosity's a successful shtick
Dive deep into the meanings and ignore the aestheticism of words
It's the shallow end of the pool but you can still drown, ya heard?

You can call me opaque, assert I'm obtuse
I'm just circling and angling to try to get at the truth,
Stretching and skewing before your very eyes
A professional doctored image worth at least a thousand lies
Or a hypocritical oath sworn before an iatraphobic
Court to protect and serve, twisted around a broken rubic's-
Mind-fuck, Necker, abstract and subjective
Cubist insanity but be sure the primary objective
Of the rambling words is to get at your soul
The encultured byproduct when men were first bought and sold
Not just as property but as what made them the fact
Humanity isn't worth much but it's worth more than that.

At Five

My eyes open wide but my body's dead
My mind's alight in my matter's stead
And this stark sobriety from the nascent draft
Is my perception cleared or have I succumbed at last?
Is this the awakened senses of a primal beast
The instinctive struggle to die on my feet
Or am I just insane when my thoughts are clear
No worldly influence to keep me here?
But I see through the gloom that I'm not alone
Another empty soul in an empty home
She's as dead as the grave on a moonless night
Is this what is meant by a “waking life?”
But the grave's at peace I can see, god damn
That's how she is, is this how I always am -
More wasted potential I don't understand
Another byproduct of the ascent of man?

Once again I'm off to the daily grind
How trite, I guess, but I no longer mind
Numbed to the disappointment of reality
Cut off from the fantasies I'll never see.
But I see her smile as I wave good bye
And beneath it all I smile back inside
Thinking how well her Sisyphus bears its load

Incredible. Indescribable. I just. I don't know what to say. It's humanly impossible for me to convey the incredible joy and affection I feel. I can't say enough. And I can't thank you enough. And nothing is enough. You're worth more than the world can offer.

Life's happy pursuits of liberty.

I don't LIKE this.

Her criss-crossed, tangled, fucked up mind
Had failed to leave the past behind
Where it was she couldn't find
And without it she was not alive.

He tried to see with his own eyes
The world as seen by other guys
And completely failed to realize
That he had given up his life.

I worried that with man's demise
He would be forgotten by space and time
But then it hit me that when I died
I would no longer be alive!

A Final Disposition

I saw a Cheshire grin as sweet as sin,
Golden in Glasgow when it first began;
A forced smile wider for a friend
Than lips would part for me again.

I saw a renaissance grin of smug delight
Enlightened by an ephemeral sign;
A worse smile had at my expense
Than I would ever see again.

I saw rapacious grins as black as night
Take to my person like a deadly tide,
Their smiles betrayed their intents, alas
What I saw next was what I saw last:

I saw bullet-teeth in a leaden grin,
Golden halos around a violin,
Or silver coronas like the angels' wings.
And it was a fitting passage to Heaven's end,
More than I would hope to receive again.

Thoughts on science (ignore the TERRIBLE punctuation)

I've recently been reading H.P. Lovecraft and while I've greatly enjoyed the strength of his writing and his imagination with all things horrific, macabre, and science fiction-y, it was not his Cthulhu Mythos – the reason I looked into him in the first place – that most impressed me, nor was it his attempts at writing “scary stories”. The single piece of work in the collection I currently possess (but will not for much longer) that had the profoundest impact upon me is, interestingly enough, one of his least-liked stories by most of his fans: “The Silver Key”. Now, I must admit the actual story itself is not particularly well-written, and the rising action, denouement, and ending truly left quite a bit to be desired, but uncharacteristically I was able to overlook these flaws, their impact mitigated by my identification with the protagonist who, as many have suggested, in based upon Lovecraft himself. This character is described in some length as having once been fascinated with the fanciful and the fantastic, with worlds far beyond the understanding of modern man and with things that, truly, man may never have been meant to know. However as this character grew older and supposedly wiser, he was indoctrinated in the sciences and logic, a process that eventually stripped him of his foreign landscapes and credulity surrounding them, replacing the childlike wonder with half-hearted skepticism. This is a process that many undergo in their lives, and had the story stopped there, I do not think I would have been struck as I had been by the sense of fellowship I felt for the protagonist who's name - which I neglected to mention previously - is Randolph Carter. However Mr. Carter did not strictly adhere to the scientific and worldly mentality, recognizing that the constructs of man were inherently flawed and uncertain, perhaps even more so than fantasy. This is a thought that I've also often entertained, wondering why is it that ancient knowledges that were once so certain have been replaced by sciences which make unfounded assumptions and indeed even expect their subscribers to accept in faith that what has not been discovered eventually will be. I can not, though, say that I am a follower of ancient ways and beliefs, raised as I was on a curriculum of modern-day logic and science, but recognizing the shortcomings of both, I've come to adopt an unskeptical view of antiquity. I maintain that there are things man does not know, and that everything man has discovered can be quite different that what he believes, or simply incorrect. I've often wondered anyone can be sure of the formulae they place so much stock in, or in the truths they believe they've discovered. Newtonian physics were once the accepted norm until Einstein, working patiently for years, shattered those long-held tenets with a radical conceptualization of reality. Then Einstein too was dethroned by radical re-imaginings of quantum mechanics, which created a world of uncertainty and probability and, in Einstein's view, improbability. My point with the very short and extremely incomplete history lesson, is that each time the workings of the world were made anew, the concepts and formulae used were vast departures than those previously held, though they undoubtedly stemmed from their predecessors. How can one be expected to do anything more than take these new developments “with a grain of salt” as it were, understanding as they do that if the foundations are weak, that eventually the entire structure must collapse? I've often wondered how we know that the systems of primitive man are worthy of developing vast empires of knowledge upon. Another thought that worries me is the homogenization of knowledge and scientific pursuit. True there are many conflicting views and beliefs, but none of them deviate from the accepted views of the world. There are none that are truly revolutionary, simply derivative-yet-dissenting. In the end though, I am forced to admit that while I have entertained these notions, they do not trouble me very much. Arithmetic may be wrong, and the entire foundation of mathematics be full of incredible holes as a result, but what of it? If two and two does not equal four, what does it matter? If logic and the like are false, what would change? They suit our needs and in our current lives major upheavals in knowledge may not be met with much personal change or indeed much gravity. The point is, regardless of whether or not microphysics is based upon a dice roll, life still prevails and no one would be duly concerned. How many of us notice the effects of the machinations of atoms? How many of us are worried about the location of electrons? It may affect us, but what can we truly do about it? And if we could tamper with it, would we want to? In the end, the questions that Randolph Carter reminded me of were all answered simply with: It doesn't matter if the world is run by science or magic, because in the end there isn't much differentiating between the two and so why worry?

P.s. I would like to clarify that I am not advocating apathy or disinterest, simply suggesting that man should not be so jaded in his beliefs. Nothing is certain, nothing is concrete, but that should not cause undue worry. Life prevails, does it not?

Moths to the Light

For each brave astronaut,
Each intrepid explorer of unknown realms
That dares trespass where none have before -
Into the blinding light of knowledge
To flutter fitfully before enlightenment,
Then lie exhausted and wary -
But not defeated,
I notch a roll of newspaper
With the dusty smear of broken wings.

More Weight

Sunlight plays into my waiting pupils -
A school of eyes blank, unseeing, open wide,
Receiving a tender caress and a warm embrace.

The lingering miasma soon dissipates;
The sun is left to beat a tattoo on a blank board,
Stifling without the comfort of the shade.

Shielding my eyes from the glare,
I traverse vibrant desert places,
Seeking shadows and knowing
That if the day does not kill me, the night will.

This Still Life is Electrifying

Crazed scribblings of rotten minds
Dance across a porcelain canvas,
Dripping venom from tarantella footwork.

I ask the primordial brew for entrance,
Exhilarated by the nascent cosmos
My mind is taken to pieces by the darkness.

Shadows being devoured by shadows
Flare novas before a tremulous stage,
Shunning allegory in stark colors - contrasts.

I send my soul out from a hollow shell
Feeling its ascent into the world,
Leaving its insane dreams behind.

Ephemeral jaws fleck the cosmos -
I see the flash of rabid organs detonating like depth charges;
This still-life is electrifying.

Men die as the army
Soldiers on, stoic
As the holocaust dies down.
Excited by the flames of victory,
It marshalls its
Obliterated limbs,
Ignoring the knowledge that
By tomorrow its life,
Limbs and excitement and all,
Shall be spent.

WIP: 99% completed (Revisions Possible)

Watch the clockwork losing time
On gears of glass and teeth of light.
Worn smooth by their consistent grind
Scarce can they catch a brief respite.

Watch the machine's unending dance -
A mesmerizing, unsteady affair.
Its peculiar, almost arrhythmic romance
Turns slowly upon the autumn air.

Watch the gears grind on with dread
As the facade eventually shatters.
Its final act before its dead:
Its immaculate innards scattered.

Watch the hands grow limp and and cold:
As its face reflects the world no more,
And though a clock will cease to toll
Time continues moving forward.

Narrow Streets of Cobblestone

Our progress on a narrow road
Is patient with nowhere to go,
And though the earth quakes at our feet
(Just cobbled stone and not concrete)
The path we walk will never yield
Its treasures for our hands to steal.

Believe me now, you can not leave;
There is no stopping or reprieve,
No going back to times before
There's only forward, nothing more,
And though you twist your neck to see
There's nothing out there you can reach.

Now ev'ryone we know is dead;
The only path we knew to tread
Led us astray into the night
Can you imagine what that's like?
We only have a single way
And it's just leading to our graves.

Well still walk on, we'll soon be there
Beyond all time, beyond the years
Beyond the coming end you fear,
When even nothing's disappeared,
For there you'll see the one-way road
May have a better place to go.

"I wouldn't call it a song" of Myself.

I’ve a father like a broken record
A dusty vinyl to a needle
He keeps repeating himself on and on again
As he gets old and it gets old.

I’ve a mother who I can’t really say
I know well enough to love
But I love her more than I love my dad
Who I know even less.

I’ve a brother who I wanted to be
For reasons I never knew
But I grew older and more cynical
And he grew more human every time I saw him.

I've friends who I know I don't deserve
But who don't know who I am
Because I'm different around each of them
And they're all different around me.

I’ve a mind that’s warmer than it seems
And cloudy as an autumn day
As the wind blows I grow colder
And catch people unawares.

And this mind of mine asks questions
To which no answers can be found,
But the funny thing is, it seems to me
I never ask questions about myself.

Mother

The sun and earth waltz round and round
The size of earth goes down and down
Until our mother, breathing hard,
Is flatter than a playing card,
With the sun still going round and round.

In the darkest night where horrors lie
We dream of what it is to die
And what it’s like to fall and fall –
Our mother can’t be seen at all
To whisper to us soothing lies.

But where are we falling if not to Earth
For Hell is not our place of birth
And our father lost in paradise
From where we are is cold as ice
So who will catch us if not the Earth?

All Men are the Same

Dead men tell no tales they say;
They’re silent as the grave.
But it's the funeral bells in the depths of hell
That drown their voices with each beck and knell.

It’s said that no man listens well
They’d rather tell than hear a spell
But one man would listen and he’d heard it all:
He heard the voices on the wind in the fall.

They came from far to come and call
The hale would walk and the butchered crawled
They came and went to beg for aid
From a man too kind to turn his heart away.

He helped thousands but they did not fade
Their voices shook him night and day
But he saw within them men in need -
Their sorrow unending ‘til their souls were freed.

He closed his eyes and in his dreams
He heard their pain and saw their screams
They could not rest and they could not sleep -
Until his quest was over, nor could he.

The voices rose to a cacophony
And he found HIMSELF yearning to be free
Free from the spirits who like a spider’s thread
Trapped him, enslaved him, in their stead.

They would find him later in his bed
A message written could be read:
“They would not rest until I bled,”
“All men are the same,” it said,
Even when they’re dead.”

Apples to Oranges

They cut the grove -
My garden of Gethsemane
where I planted my apple trees,
And watched them grow.

I can still see them reaching out
From severed stumps;
They strain then slump.
Like hands - their trunks, fingers – their sprouts.

I watched them die,
Wither like flowers and decay;
Bursting in the heat of the day -
the apples of my eye.

An eye for an eye
Leaves the whole world blind
and so I was told,
To grow oranges next time.

Erosion Poem (Take Two)

They spoke of a split near the end of a road
With two distinct paths to where no men dare go:
There’s one bathed in shadows while the other drinks light
One cursed by the sun while the other by night.

They say one holds nothing while the other holds all
One road to the void and one road to the sprawl.
They say one is blinding, but the other one blinds -
These roads I desired and swore I must find.

I encountered a stone when my quest first began
Worn smooth by the ages in an unchanging land –
Where the sun scorched the earth with its infinite faces,
And the moon stood alone over those cold desert places.

With the sand long behind me I came to a dale
Cut deep from an ancient and mountainous veil
By men I first thought, but I soon saw the truth:
‘Twas carved by the rivers of the Fountain of Youth.

And I found that these rivers led to a shore
Where once there was life but now lives no more
For the land had long fallen away to the sea
And the sea was left barren by unforgiving debris.

I thought of the stone that was once jagged now smoothed
And I thought of the valley whose life had been soothed
By the rivers that fed into a dead sea
And thought how complex the simple could be.

But at long last I came to stand at the path,
That diverged and became the first and the last,
They’re said to be opposites, but differed in none -
The division: eroded, and two roads became one.

it's still rough, but i may decide not to edit it simply because editing shit usually goes downhill for me.

Erosion Poem (Take One)

Endless shifting sands of night,
The sky unmarred
By the intrusion of stars,
Mirroring the still-life
And forever-dead,
Of the world beneath.
The wind is biting and dry;
A bitter cold that cuts anew,
But subtly as not to numb
And not too quickly kill.
A sand-blasted rock stands,
Worn smooth to the touch,
A queer venture into the world
By something a great deal more complex,
And a great deal more simple.
Give it the ages gone by and it too like the sky,
Shall return to a nothingness unmarred,
By the intrusion of the stars.

The Invisible Man

He sees nothing he should not see
And thinks nothing he should not think
And is nothing he should not be.

He’s trivial in every way
The layman’s layman’s everyman;
The face forgotten every day.

And this man is queer for you will find
He’s both invisible and blind.

Literal-Minded

Lo! In the sky you see the bear
And sisters Zorya in perpetual fear,
Or a menagerie from old and far
But as for me I just see stars.

Look at the inkblots upon the page,
Is it a wineglass or is it a sage?
Do you see memories of your past?
For I just see a black-white contrast.

And the seasons who are ever long,
Do you see them or Demeter’s mournful song?
For all I see is rain and snow
And sometimes Apollo’s golden glow.

How It's Made

Imagine I wrote a piece of prose
And not knowing how it would go
Sliced everything-
The sentences apart
Just for the sake of flow.

Imagine I then took that prose
And innocently enough at first
Switched the wording
To be less direct
And placed it into verse.

Then imagine I called it a poem
And I was as proud as I could be
To have been for once a poet
And to have created poetry.

The Land of the Free

They asked what was America
And what it means to be an American
And fed up with history and philosophy
I told them I had no idea, nobody did
And so they asked me then are you proud
Proud to be an American?
And I told them my parents were Chinese
And so am I it appears,
The son of unromantic immigrants,
And no one calls me American
But I’m called Chinese a lot.
And they said You’ve got to be an American
You were born here right?
And I told them, no longer fed up
With history and philosophy
What they already knew
That America was a land of immigrants
And that while people see me and say “Chinese”
And see Jews and say “Jew”
No one looks at the German-Irish-British-Scandinavian-Italian-Pole
As anything but American,
But hell
The blacks are still called Blacks
And African-American.
American simply means
That’s where you were born
Or that’s where you’re living.
American doesn’t mean who you are.
So I’m proud to be an American I guess
Or I’m proud to be where I’m living in America
Where the housing rates are steady
And the people are good
But I’m not proud of who I am
And no one should be
Because who you are is made by other people.
And the people who asked me about America
Gave me a funny look
And all walked away
But the last thing they said was
“Fuckin’ chinks don’t know what it means to be patriotic”
And I guess they were right.

Recycled Relics

Believe me they will find Excalibur
Or even the Honjo Masamune
But when they find it they will say
“You get don’t metal like this these days”
And they’ll melt it down for scraps.

They’ll one day find Christ’s crucifix
And cut pieces from the cross
For the wood is holy and not much is lost.
And they will recycle whatever they can
But the rest they’ll toss.

They will cut down the trees at Gethsemane
And at every other sacred grove
For the trees all filled with the people's love
Will make more books and Starbucks trays
Than the Amazon.

And at the end, when the treasures are all gone
All the recycled paper all up in flames
They will burn the countries and they will burn the land
They will burn the states, the constructs of man
They will burn the buildings and they will burn the cities;
They will burn the cities down to plant more trees.

Fucking ENGLISH Major, Man

Who IS this talentless four-eyed fuck
Whose words flitter listlessly upon a page
And who without his Pulitzer prize sized crutch
Would never deserve to take a stage?

Who IS this burned-out druggie cunt
This gonzo-douchebag piece of shit
Who writes between hard-hitting blunts
As if sobriety is holding back your wits?

And who IS this raving lunatic
If not just a wino with a pen
Who thinks that keeping just one shtick
Will win him a fucking prize again?

Who ARE these arrogant pissant sods
Who think they’re witty when they’re just verbose
And worship none but themselves as gods
And suck equally in verse and prose?

They’re nothing special, just worn out hacks
Running on empty and weed and crack
Who somehow make the words seem more
Than overplayed, overused, overestimated WHORES.

Head Into the Light

It was a darkness unlike any darkness
Any darkness ever seen before,
For it was complete and in its starkness
In its starkness there was nothing more.

I was swept and drowned in colossal waves
Waves that would never crest before the shore
That lay where there was only me
Only me with nothing to wage war.

I could see naught and I could feel naught
Not even a soul within my core,
For the darkness had spread within myself
And within myself it spent my ore.

Though I was blind I heard the silence
The silence that grew to become a roar,
Which would take my body away from me
And from me would grow to spread and soar.

I knew nothing then and it knew me
Knew me more than I had known before
So that I was nothing in its heart
And it was nothing I would abhor.

I saw a flicker and knew myself
Awakened by some force of yore
That bade me head into the light
So that I may not suffer anymore.

But the light was blinding; the contrast too stark
So I turned and sought refuge in the dark.

:Inspired by the flash game Closure.

Bzzzz!

In a blur it strikes
A tiny blight
Upon a dozing giant.

Wake, you fool,
For fate is cruel
And you shan’t be defiant.

It drinks your blood
And steals your love
Are you to be compliant?

It’s kill or die
Before the mosquito bite
*Something that rhymes with giant*

more or less intended to be humorous. it's kinda late and i don't write well unless i've been clean for at least a few days

_EZ

You’ve been
Here before it’s
Nothing you’ve never seen but
Somehow
It’s still different now.

It sounds
Weird - more hollow
Just one speaker
Playing music
The other’s
Dead and silent.

All so
Distant and yet
As you’re fading in and
Out it
Snaps you back to life.

Open
Your eyes the wider
You’ll see
Nothing that you
Thought that you would
See.

Keep on
Reading your book
The other
World will just look
More real than this
Life you’re living
Now.

Do things
Work the way you think or
Do they all know
Something
You’ll never figure out?

Fever Pitch

Waves dancing over
Crashing slower
Oceans burble in
White noise circles
Droplets like white
Tidal waves might
Burn like fires
For drowning pyres.

Smolder, flaming,
Sulfur’s raining
Burning on edge
Water looks red
Lights so abstract
God in all black
Let the world die
The end is nigh.

Pulsing, shaking,
Throbbing, quaking,
The earth moves slightly
We die nightly
Nothing more and
Nothing at hand
Nothing less for
Them to cry for
Nothing in store
After this war.

Where’s your rapture
Christ is captured
Your cathedral of lights
Is just a blight
Sacrilege like claiming God’s touch
In your soul like you need a crutch
Descend into chaos and order
Fuck the blind-sight on the border
Look in hindsight, just a quarter
Of what we are lost as mortar.

On and on it just gets longer
Growing weaker, never stronger,
More complex with less to say but
We’ve become more afraid of what?
Life moves and nothing changes
Life moves on and we’ll be strangers
The metronome is off beat but we’ll
Finger frets and still turn that wheel
‘Til the day when it all ends and
We’ll be left without our dry land.

Break down
No ground
Clover’s
Over
Luck of
Above
No more
No love.

Single Serving Life

One tree
Surrounded by ashes
Its leaves flutter
On the warm spring wind.

A wolf
Howling at the full moon
Memories it will
Never understand.

A boy
Crying in a park
He doesn’t know
Who he’s waiting for.

Cities
Full of cars and buildings
Where nothing stirs
And there’s no life at all.

One world
Surrounded on all sides
The infinite of space and
Yet it’s all alone.

Deus Ex Omnis

I know of god in every paradox
Every lie that becomes the truth
Every evil from Pandora’s box
Existing to be good.

I feel god in the frigid air
Of a warm spring’s eve
It’s perfect scent, as I stand there,
Is chilling and killing me.

I see god in my city sprawled
Lain out before my eyes
Above the chaos, above the brawl,
I see no order in its life.

Within the calm I see the storm
Of my ambiguous, faithless thoughts,
In their struggle to be born
I know and see and feel my god.

A Happy Painting

Your life’s a picture
A pastel painting; a fixture
On an empty wall
Next to nothing at all.
So picturesque it’s
Perfect in every way
And time won’t mar you
Won’t burn and scar you
Just leave you hanging alone.

An empty museum
With just one exhibit
You have it all
To roam the halls
Late at night when you’re alone.
Day breaks; no one ever comes
Why would they?
What do you have to say?

A happy painting has no appeal
A happy painting isn’t real.

Time is leaving you behind as
You grow old it’ll just get worse:
It’s been too good
Far too good for the likes of you.
Nowhere to go, to run away to
The paint, as it’s dying it cracks.
Perfection rarely ever lasts
So end it, end it all before you,
Lose control; you’ve peaked
There’s nowhere left to go.

End it, end it all now
You can only go down.

Iatrophobia

How do you tell a doctor that
You don’t care if you live or you die?
How do you tell someone
So afraid of death, who’s purpose is
Just to prolong lives
That longevity is not the driving force
Behind what you do
That living longer is not why you do it.

How do you tell a doctor that
You disagree with what they do
That they’re just playing god
Deciding what’s good for you
And tampering with nature
And tempering your free will,
How do you tell someone so hell-bent on doing good
That what they’re doing is bad?

How do you tell a doctor that
They’re arrogance goes beyond
Pride of a job well done,
Pride for their charity and altruism,
That they now lack the most fundamental
Human feelings, that they see us
As no more than their quarry.
How do you tell someone, anyone,
That they are evil, obsolete, mindless,
Pointless?

More importantly,
Will you believe it?
When you are sick and dying
And pain wracks your body
Will you give in and make amends?
Or will you just let it run its course
Knowing that if its time
Then it is time
And you won’t let no damn
Hindu in a lab coat
Be your god.

One World

One event seen twenty times
Is twenty memories in twenty minds
Of things not happening the way that they say
Cuz half of them weren’t there anyways.

It was misrecollected and blown out of proportion
A victim of their cerebral distortion
Reality warped whether they knew it or not
Folded and molded to fit their own thoughts.

The world breaks down and their heads reassemble
The fragmented bits until it resembles
A semblance of the world that they knew
With tiny touches they each misconstrue.

They say frame of reference or personal preference
Cautious and trite, it’s done out of deference,
Too wary to doubt that it happened that way,
Even though you can't trust the things that they say.

Of World Eating God Whales

Logic tells you that everything was made by something else, and for the most part that has been true. But because of the way we are structured, because of the way our lives work, we can never understand that some things, inexplicable and ancient, were never made, and just WERE. Long before atoms and energy and things like that, there was something else. And there was nothing before that. I don’t mean to say that the “something else” appeared out of nothing, I literally mean that there was nothing before it, that the concept of “before” does not apply here. What I mean is that this “something else” always has, and always will exist. It’s not God or gods, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, it’s so ANCIENT that nothing really knows what it is. It’s just one of the THINGS of life, undeniable, unquestionable, and unperceivable.

Earth was not one of those italicized THINGS of life. In fact, Earth was tiny and completely insignificant by comparison, and though no one living there would agree, its inhabitants were too. But they thought they were important. They feared their own deaths as the loss of something great, not knowing that once they died they will have always been dead, and would have been in no condition to ponder the implications of such a concept. Once the World-Eating-God-Whale had eaten the planet and all its inhabitants, it had always been eaten and would never be missed or seen again, at least until the God-Whale felt the need to expel waste, as all living creatures must.

It was a hard concept to grasp, that the invariable “truths” of the universe found after eons of development did not apply to the universe at all, but only to the miniscule microcosm of the finders’ existences. Basically, what I mean is that the way things work in one planet doesn’t work the same way on all others. There are planets where energy can be created and destroyed, just as there are flat planets orbited by suns. Like I said, it was a hard thing to understand, that nothing was under your control and that you really didn’t know anything at all. It was particularly hard for the people of Earth, because we were, if nothing else, immensely proud of what we knew. So proud, in fact, that mere moments before the W-E-G-W devoured the planet and killed everyone on it, the greatest minds alive were all joined together in an attempt to disprove the God-Whale existence. Imagine their shock then, when they found themselves slowly and painfully being digested by WHAT WAS NOT THERE.

I know what you’re thinking, all of it, and I’ll address the questions one by one. The first question you have is, “Why was this quaint little planet destroyed?” Well let me explain. The God-Whale was hungry. That’s it. On earth we had two abstract concepts known as Good and Evil. I expect you people also have similar concepts. Well the God-Whale is not evil, far from it in fact. Evil requires a sentience and a distinct knowledge of “Goodness”, both of which it lacks. There was no malicious intent in the eating, and once the world had been eaten, nothing was thought of it. These things just happen. The second question you have is, of course, “Who is this doing all the talking?” Well, I am an earthling, and the only one to escape death. It may seem to almost be a betrayal of my kind, surviving while everyone else dies, but I say in mitigation that it would have been impossible to save anyone and that trying to do so would have resulted in failure to save myself.

Addiction

Smokey spirals
The smell is viral
It has you once
And you can’t let go

It’s what you know
You’ve been brung low
You hate the bitch
But you can’t let go.

In blinking cursors
The time grows worser
Where’s relief
When you can’t write?

It’s not coming to light,
It’s a sad, sad sight,
‘Cuz you were prolific
But now you can’t write.

Imagine cliffs
And Mafia stiffs
You’ve done it all
And it was better before.

Your ideas are poor
And you're not getting any more
So you recycle the old stuff
But it was better before.

The cycle is vicious
But oh-so delicious
Like another cigarette
After failing to quit.

Sometimes it’s just shit
At least you wrote for a bit
Even though you told yourself
That you’d try to quit.

What you couldn’t say
For days and days
You put it all together
On one single page.

Cuz you’re so happy and gay
That the block went away
You forget it’s just temporary
And fill up the page.

You lose some stuff
Some ideas are gone
And the end result
You feel is just wrong

But whatever you know?
It’s real at heart
And that’s all that matters
When you suck at your art.