Temperate. With a focus always on. Echoes of heartbeats fainter. Listening for the way the sunlight makes a smell like a gastronomic painter. Over analysis means doubling back on yourself as a way of singling out. Generally speaking, I can't account for everything but what counts is convenience. Unlock me with a memory. Steal my identity, my magnetized strips of faculties. Staccato stars, unravel me.

It's easy isn't it? It'd better be; a better being, another breath in another mouth. Mind the way the convenience store never seems to indicate emptiness. Is it a binary construction or can it just stay alive somehow in the fickle passage of artificial air and time? You keep restocking it, why? This is the hardest part of your fluorescent machine, gaseous and radiant, the frozen heart of yourself burning blackly.

Look around you. Let the ground beneath you be the ground for your electric attention. Shock it with your walking and keep at it through the ways the sunlight breaks on shadows and their walkers. There is more to a healthy diet than the nutritious crunch of artificially preserved freshness, juices sliding sticky all over your face. Drink the local brew; collected from its rivers' waters and its ageless mountains' herbal furs. They offer the convenience of shade.  They'll quench your homesick thirst.

Cut the chatter into little pieces

break and batter each frying thesis

it sizzles, fizzles out and then

it's grizzled, cynical teeth break bloody

yet again

Yet again, expecting to pay interest

as you compound your debt to friends,

who's counting, who saves receipts

who receives receipts, asks for them

to be written out in a fountain

pent up with no inkling, little

shrinking splashes of rides and crashes

They call them collisions because accident

implies no one's responsible,

semantics leave no individuals

countable.

Consider the lost and foundable

desperate digging costs land

mandibles broken jars glassy

shards, cut the chatter

cut the chatter cut the chatter

split the atomic into Adamic

Eden.
He found on the last day of paradise
Only Eve matters.

Maker

A forward thinking man once said “just keep walking”
but didn’t like to repeat himself as he trailed off
unsteadily, feet looking for something new, another route
that hindsight shows, replacing a memory worth giving up.

In the pieces of sunlight that add up a morning the barely dead
don’t grieve as much as the ball of man whose night was a floor,
the bottomed out, beer-stained, disdainfully scuffed linoleum
a cold war veteran: a night that could’ve been avoided,
a cold night on a whore.

This is the way the hallway ends up after the doors all
are taken off, burned into stardust dusting the air agitated
the last step so that it lasts and lasts as long as the forward thinker,
cheap beer drinker, sad autobiographies that go nowhere singer.
Paint peels off the walls in appetizing flakes that turn every room
the bare color of the barren-threshold.  The hallway always.  The walls.

    Art allows humanity one of its greatest ambitions: to test decisions and their repercussions without acting.  But therein lies the paradox: nothing can be undone, and no cause can be without effect.  Though there is little appreciable impact in an artistic move on the world around the artist, the world about — the individual zeitgeist — shudders at the act of creation.  This internal upheaval becomes the catalyst for which the result is a new moment of existence.  And yet this comes not of a decision, but is born of the one commandment sacred to the artist.

"A realm outside our understanding"
has come to mean the known universe
averaged with the potential for ignorance;
the way the body falls away from its own touch,
the way agoraphobia is exacerbated by flaying.

You are the convergence of asymptotes reaching
collapsed potentials, cold starts, almost,
the endless approaching each self-imposition.
With askance timing, a nervous babble of tired words.
An honest hand sticky with beer takes my rehearsed honesty,
hands me a cold one: cold sweats.
I take it as a handshake.

At a distance I gravitated to myself.
I made plagiarism self-referential,
a squishy analog for the precept of self.
I relived memories indiscriminately,
the way the body is outside understanding,
the way these lines converge with a touch.

Look, let's just fall (Acrostic)

Look, let's just fall and keep ragdolling down,
over and over just sound and the furious vain
outbursts of the wind like breaths against the inevitable
knowing: too soon, too intimately and closely the ground.

look let's just fall facing each other,

even our solipsism, with two eyes tired of looking out,

two brains scabbed from persistent introspection,

sees the same world differently in another.

just falling and holding myself open,
under me a growing concrete collage but I

Shut my eyes, spread out like dangling legs untied

to a crucifix, pretending to fly.

find me out against the sky,

an hour, four miles from where you jumped.
look, let's just fall, let's kick off our shoes,
look, let's waste our time like parachutes.

Running Water

We felt like raindrops on a car window together,

We fell like footsteps on this glassy weather.

Transparently, our dripping sleeves

wiped watery streaks for all of the occupants to see

through their breath, its restless monotony.

We held together by our hands as we splattered.

We and hell set to collide and

we just worried about our landing,

the briefly frozen. patter of our standing,

the unspoken moment

as we both started to scatter.

But we run the same way: one after the other,

growing thinner together across the speeding window.

We run the same way, running into each other,

Until one drop, smaller than how we first began,

Shatters.

Shut|Open

 i missed you

 when I shot open my head's window

 When I defenestrated bits of brain

 I patted safety glass

 i built too cheaply to last,

 it didn't shatter so much as

 Swing.

  

 into an overgrown room.

 arms and legs canopy the floor,

 dripping leaves fall from the ceiling,

 snow blows in sideways bloody

 and you're getting wet and as I

 look away at the whispery bullet holes in the air

 You hang.

  

 I just barely fucking missed you

 tracing the last of our love all over my body for the last time,

 Saying “fuck me” for the last time,

 Saying “let's be lonely together” for the last time –

 where I keep us in mind inside me.

  

 i wanted us to be the first to go.

 i didn't want to die thinking of you.

All American Exhibit

It's an anachronistic diner, straight out of dreams of times that never gleamed so bright when they were being accounted by the chrome clock on oh, chrome walls almost fiercely reflecting too much light. Everything smells like old grease, the kind that still clings to your clothes long after you've shit out your meal. As you sit you appreciate the soft touch of good fabric against your leg and appreciate that they gave you a very good suit for this exhibit. It slides easily on the vinyl. It rests on your shoulders awkwardly though, clearly made universal so fitting no one perfectly. It's a light but constant pressure around your back, and brushes your shoulders perpetually. Okay. An attentive twenty-four year old with the wide eyes of one who never regretted getting herself contacts and short, manageable hair, medium length, walks leisurely over but manages to reach your table quickly. She's done this before, outside of this exhibit which is why she was so interested in it originally. She gives you an immaculately clean white plate, the kind that shines with life, and a steel fork, steel steak knife, and steel spoon. They each hit the table gently, but with a reassuringly weighty thud. She says in her practiced server voice as another male's tenor begins to harmonize from another table, lending his precise and deliberate melody to the spiel. “You have been given a suit. You will be started off with a glass of vanilla coke, or diet vanilla coke to drink?” She smiles with you as you recognize the familiar intonations of the standard restaurant greeting warped. She continues apologetically, “You will first be served chicken and vegetable broth. Then you will be served a caesar salad. Your entree will be spaghetti and sauce. For desert you may choose either a cup of coffee, another serving of spaghetti, or sweet potato pie.” She walks away. You and the Asian family across the room are the only people at the only two tables. As the doors to the kitchen swing open a voice bangs briefly against the silence, “But nooooo that dumbass little sonofabitch, he takes another swing.” The father, a small man with a confident and kind voice says something to his wife that his son overhears. The kid chuckles like an old man who's heard every line in his life and still loves them. The door swings open again. “-out. In one jab. Everyone's stunned. Guy raises his fist in the -” Your server is back out pushing a metal trolley with a bowl on a plate in it. She smiles briefly to herself, but hides it quickly. She's thinking of how much this thing would've helped her during seven years of lunch and dinner rushes. She's next to your table. She places the bowl in front of you, right in line with your center. She pushes the trolley away. No kitchen door sound this time. The soup is golden with a slight greenish tinge that reminds you it's chicken and vegetables. The bowl has two red lines about an inch from the rim. The plate has one gold line tracing its circumference. You pick up the steel spoon. It dips readily. You pull up a shaking pond and drink its ripples. The soup lies just between warm and hot and you drink it quickly before coldness sharpens the rounded, rich, salty, sweet fullness of it. It's so savory it lingers so you can savor it. But it's a big bowl for the fleeting last drop. It lands on your tongue lightly, but splashes all over, giving your entire mouth a fleeting good bye. Your server comes back with the metal trolley, composed and straight-faced now. She picks up the spoon right by its point of balance with two fingers, slides it onto the plate next to the bowl. It hits it and rings out clear. She picks up the plate, bowl and all, and puts it on the trolley. She walks away again. The kitchen door reveals the sound of clanging pans and the staccato of deft knife work. It barely closes when she's back again guiding a wooden bowl now, gliding it across the floor with its leaves frosted with oily cheese. She places it down in front of you, once again in line with your own symmetry. She walks away. The kitchen is silent. You pick up your fork and spear a mouthful of lettuce with high expectations. A good bite is entangled in the tines and you slide it off into your mouth. It cracks apart and softly melts into a bright and crisp flavor punctuated with the earthiness of olive oil, and then the cheese and vinegar reconcile the two like a child thanking their proud parents. You leave the croutons untouched. Your server appears by your side as you lay down your fork, removes the plate and bread, and places a very large plate of spaghetti in front of you. It smells sweet and alert, like the first breath you take after stepping out of your house for the first time that day. And there's just that little bit of fruity sharpness that tickles your nose so lovingly that your mouth is suddenly full. Of saliva, swallow it. The first bite hits you so fast that you don't even remember picking it up. The spaghetti firmly yields to you, telling you that it's strong enough to not break apart, and sure enough in itself to do so anyways. That second bite fills you. The third is lost in a reddish smear. You look down and suddenly your plate is empty. Your suit grabs you tighter by the shoulders. Your stomach reaches out to your dress shirt and hugs it. You take a deep breath and wonder how your lungs can move with so much pressing against them. Whoo! You lean back, and the vinyl gives just enough to let your slide your ass into a comfortable position. Your waitress runs out in a hurry. She has her glasses back on and a backpack. It swings by the handle in her hand as she comes to a stop next to you. She leans over, puts the spoon, the knife, and the fork back on your plate in that order. She picks it up and puts it in the backpack. She says, “No dessert, please go back the way you came, and don't forget to return the suit.” She leaves. How long do you sit there for?

Flowing Experiences

You're in your best man's car. You think of him as that because of what he said at your wedding, and because when you said those words together with his name you knew they were true. The leather interior is worn, but shines because his family takes pride in what they have and it is soft and comfortable and knows you as you know it. You are driving back to him, chuckling as you remember how you once said jokingly that you'd be a designated driver when one was needed with selectively strong self control. You see the summer constellations through the open sun roof and you have to stop and listen. You pull over two feet from a meticulously manicured field. You appreciate the little acts of caring and also want to give yourself space to wipe your feet before getting back in. Your bottom hand holds firmly the slot in the door and your top pulls the smooth handle easily to a click. You push the door open, step one foot out on the street, lean forward, swing the other foot out, and OHHHhhhh FUCK!

Your feet first feel water and it reaches up eagerly, suddenly completely and there is a cacophony in your ears. You blink your eyes to clear the tears and they are taken away by the sweetest, purest ocean you have ever seen. You're holding your breath but you know it won't hold forever, whatever if you feel like a feather floating fitfully let your own breeze from your body carry you down easily, pleased to be free falling intimately with the longing of the earth.

Your feet hit a soft and silty ground. Your body settles standing. You straighten your neck. You stand erect and stretch yourself a little taller. You take a deep breath.

Orbit

 The two greatest fears in conflict:
 Life and death.  the Future
 Past
 so fast that it becomes the present:
 Fleeting joy and shredded paper
 and a cutthroat return policy.

 Anecdotal evidence is inadmissible in court with
 a solipsistic judge, jury, and executioner.

 So rhythmically it's predictably familiar and still
 my tongue hugs the contours of each sugary pill.
 A placebo for the diabetic offers no hope.
 Given a foot, it'll take twelve more of rope.

 It's the steeliest mentality:
 Easy enough to fall into the black hole
                                            my body            has worn cold
                                                                      into my bed.

 The universe tends towards stillness.
 Nature abhors the vacuum because the two have grown too much

 Contemptuous.

A Blind Eye for an Eye

I learned to steal without sneaking

around the place my mother slept

is fear of cutting off my hands like she does
and feeding those fingers, still soft
despite the scars and calluses and cultivated
arthritis
to a bastard like me who learned from his thieving father,

who waits instead.  Oversleeps easy.
Her bed grows cold sometime after her leaving

and I walk.  Without a pause around two corners
next to her head or at her feet is where she keeps
her money.

She never asked me why I shouted so angrily at her:
I raised my voice to hear myself louder
Snapped every response to the growling house –
A dialogue with my disgusted, tiresome self.

I learned to stop stealing.  I’m still always sneaking.
always lying when I promise to apologize to her
and when I mean to return what she lost to me

I can never return the life she wasted for me.
I can’t even return mine to her.

Tensile

http://stephenlin.bandcamp.com/track/tensile

I'm not one of the oceanic sleepers, the waves of people who toss and roll and spend themselves like foam on the night air. I never move but to swing in the wind, and I never swing unless someone opens a fucking window for me. For once I'd like to rock with my dreams and learn to take their punches with anything else but my body. But my body's well built at least. At least this round wooden frame is wide enough to trace out the sun I never see because I catch dreams in me. I catch the dreams that the ocean can no longer bear and so throws out carelessly as if it were something heavy. I wish they would break me.

My insides aren't hollow, but they were mostly empty space. They told me I can never be full, but I've since learned to how to be filled and to never want to see someone sleeping under me again. For them, the familiar antagonists of their nightmares are feathery things, fallen from a bird that they at least get to see. And feathers get fucking heavy eventually. They keep leaving them with me as the morning dies and they learn to fly out of bed, stop pretending to be dead and instead rediscover what it feels like to battle real monsters without the handicap in their head. Because I take the pain of a giant father's anger and frustration on a good night, and a stained surgically dull knife on a bad. I take the tears on the most beautiful face you'd ever seen as the dream reminds the dreamer of how fear of rejection and self-loathing translate to a broken heart that can't love anyone stupid enough to love it back.

I tell myself they deserve it, that no one should ever carry the weight of themselves alone but then who can save me from what I am? I am a dream catcher and I only grow in. I'm made of sticks and strings and beads and I trap inside of me the most poisonous parts of humanity so that they can breathe easy. And so my lungs have no place to expand and my heart beats less than weekly. Maybe monthly at best. I just want to rest. I wish I were alive so that I could wish I were dead. I'm a dream catcher. I'll fall off the wall eventually.

Omega Man

http://stephenlin.bandcamp.com/track/omega-man

I'm walking cornered by apartments and an obligatory dormitory complex. These windows used to be brighter during the day than at night but the blinds are broken and they let out the blackness inside every empty room. I'm too comfortable with sharp objects, thumbing a glass knife with an edge to cut a map of my neighborhood into my hand. It's an oral fixation but it goes deeper, into the jugular, but I'm relaxed. You see, you can bleed out through the heart and you stay tender without a chance to embrace rigor mortis. But I never want to talk again. I am the last living soul and I am sick of that dark noise in my head that destroys me speaking in my own voice. I'm sick of hearing myself, give me a permanent nepenthe, or I'll give it to myself. I'll go for the throat looking at the little piece of me that screams through a hole in my neck. Commit to it. Warmth spreading over the front of my shirt and I'm starting to succumb to the perpetual junkie shiver. There's a way to collapse gracefully, swinging ninety degrees, an incomplete circle. But I just fall to my knees without an audience to perform to, lowering my standards to the concrete. Look at me, all the broken glass like fractal eyes. Dispassionately, I think of psychedelics. I've been dead so long that I feel at home on the pooling ground. I turn away from solipsistic loneliness, the knowledge of a hollow and resonant universe. Darkness as the last stars take me to silent pieces with them. I'm everywhere, looking for directions to nowhere. I'm neverwhere, but all too aware. There was once potential in every living thing, but I am every living thing now. I am not the first but my birthright is to be the last. No future, and eventually no past. That's the plan, and it's been a real fucking long time coming. My blood's still running. I never imagined being so full when everything's so empty. Why won't it stop? Where is the paradise lost? Where are you, God when it is only my wasted faith, the dusty tears of my protesting prayers that remains to sustain you? I unfold myself from the sidewalk and it's unexpectedly not painful. I'm incubating in the hardening blood on my shirt. As easily as flesh rends, my neck, I'm unscathed again. The dirt is still stained sorrel with me: red and brown. I keep my feet moving. I keep walking through the blank tenements. I bake in the twilight of the encroaching summer night. Take me from this self-indulgent sorrow.

Walking to the Bus

He stands like just another dumb motherfucker on an empty sidewalk, but he starts to walk and walks like no one else, without intent, without a place he's looking forward to get back to, with no thoughts of the future.  The few cars driving by are like furtive words of a whispered conversation, and though he never looks up, he is listening.  They are talking about him; they have the side of his head and his full attention.  He drags his weight with every step, rough and jerking, twitching like his legs are spent, like a junkie shiver.  It's cold enough to turn the streets to a black shimmer and make the stars shine all the brighter.  But he carries his jacket in a ball between his arms and his heart like that space is the only thing worth keeping warm.  His palms rest just out of his pockets, cold and white as the dusty snow spinning in the wind.  His fingers are as stiff as broken bones, or a man who has never been given a chance to set.  But the pavement has to be contracting – how else could he have gotten so far?  He lights a cigarette with the solemnity of a blind man.  His ashes are covering a lot of ground.  Sirens flash by and he thinks of freedom.  A green light bloodies every last part of him and he thinks of freedom.  The wind cuts the paper of his will to pieces and he thinks.  He thinks of leaving, and realizing that that would imply a feeling of being somewhere, he keeps on going.  Now and then he turns his head and walks to the threshold of the street.  He sees a lot that looks promising, that is to say expectant and disappointing.  He's firmly back on the concrete.  He keeps walking that sine wave pattern out, and its frequency begins to increase with every few steps.  Step. Another step.  Step step.  He looks back.  Walks back.  In a few steps.  Looks back again.  But he doesn't bother walking back again.  Foot lining up after foot like a kid playing on a ledge of imagined magnitude.  But suddenly he hears what he's been waiting for: a roaring of his name just faint enough to be doubtful, but intense enough for him to be certain he is being called.  It carries that one sound obstinately, growing louder, never pausing for breath even as he begins to hyperventilate.  Behind the crawling roar is a burning face and he looks at it like an old friend rekindling a dead friendship.  One foot is off the street.  The other is walking away screaming.  He goes right into the middle of it all, into the focus, the center of that slick black scene, all lines converging on him.  He grins in the face of the monster rolling towards him.  He'd wanted an audience.  He'd wanted people to remember him, to remember the man who carved himself into the demon so that it would forever remember him in hell.  The demon carrying its passengers to their next stop doesn't.  It spins on, closer.  He closes his eyes and drops his jacket onto the street.

    He feels like Jesus being pulled into a black hole.
    Crucified, paralyzed, hands like railroads
    as God grows larger into view with a look to
    tear you a new one, spin you around, grab you
    by the head and take your crown, take your cross
    and from the twanging of your dripping, empty heart
    rip your soul from the blasted still coldness
    that was your body.
    Stop.

    Does he really want to go through with this?  The bus slams into him.  He feels the metal fold around him in the tightest embrace he has ever known.  The bright red of light filtered through blood and eyelids is all he sees.  And then something changes in the air.  It feels warm as it's rushing past.  The steel grip releases his arms and grabs onto his legs.  But it's slipping.  There is no sound but a cacophony, noise so incredibly loud and intimate that it's more arresting than silence.  Then silence.  Then darkness.  The usual darkness that against which all fears, all hopes, all desires, all the thoughts that create a mind are nothing but the promise of distant stars.  He opens his eyes.  In the distance: cars.

Spoken Word

http://stephenlin.bandcamp.com/track/spoken-word

A good rhyme is like a stranger who spends half a night staring at you from across the room, and when they do say “Hi”, they’re looking straight into your eyes at the broken biography written there in pieces of how other people read you. I want to talk about dying with this person, who knows enough to skim the pages and not give a damn about the lines or the words, who knows that what makes something come to life is the life that you bring to it. And like any good rhyme, like anything worth it, it’s ephemeral. The words continue, the night is nothing but the cooling, blackened memory of the day, and the serendipity of a comfortable conversation with a stranger is a faint echo of the time we will lose to each other.

A good metaphor is like an acid trip. Yes, I know that’s a simile, but this is about verisimilitude, and the way life fractures like fractals, and how the dancing lights behind closed eyes are just reflections of themselves. I’ve stared long and hard, imagining atoms secure in their dense center, surrounded and defined by dancing chaos like ourselves. Post-psychedelics, everything is a metaphor for everything else. You can tell what kind of a man I am by every little god damn thing I do, just as you can tell what kind of a world this is by who we are. The revelation of a connection is as shocking as finding God, drifting through space. An idea is the most persistent thing in an ephemeral world, and metaphor is a means of keeping the feeling of home with us wherever we go, even if it’s so far that the memories of where we began are no longer visible. The metaphor carries us to the joy of discovery, and reassures us that there is always something familiar and recognizable, even when we are completely lost. This is life seeking itself, expressing itself through itself, holding itself, and carrying on until it finds something willing to take it.

Good rhythm. Good rhythm’s not circadian and it’s not circular. I see too many people awake at both 4:20s in a day, to assume that this symmetry, this structure, this regularity is anything but awful. Any natural rhythm is arrhythmic, entropic eventually. The days are always getting longer, the nights stay long after the morning, and yet the inconsistency of my heartbeat never longs to be given a foot or a meter. Rhythm is, like so many other good things, a lie to ourselves, a line to follow in the paralyzingly, terrifyingly vast world opening to us. It’s a primal pill to be taken for the anxiety of freedom, and it’s a shelter from the potential we have in ourselves for blessed chaos. It’s a way to stay safe in the unanswered call of a forced routine, a ringing regularity on and on and on and on. But a good rhythm is a choice to say fuck the metronome, fuck the ticks, and fuck the patronizing talks, fuck anyone who shows you a fucking clock and says time is running out, and you better stop wasting it. A good rhythm is following the hollow sound of your heart to wherever it goes, taking those steps off beat, waiting in silence just too long, talking too god damn much, and still knowing when to let it end.

A McPoem, Plain

Laid on top, to make a play of ease, poor art,
the bread and sometimes butter.  The first thought

laid open when the cover is lifted (never cut it),
is how the meat still drips and still is steaming,
broiled and broken, still is breathing,
still dreams of freedom and the sun on grass,
like a poem can never last.

Ends with a bite, that lingers, holds,
Ending fast, still growing cold.

But sometimes a burger is a god damned
mess, a humble event loudly announcing
itself to be falling apart.  Catch it, catch
everything that tries to run away
the momentum keeps you close though
melting in your hands and tickling down
your arms is noticed then ignored

until the last bite brings you back
to the desolation and blasted poetry of a full stomach.

Another WIP

The detached confessional:
Fuck you, father, I have
No use for forgiveness.  I have
sinned in these dusty wooden halls
where people eat with bowed heads and I have
spit bloody, chipped teeth into the communal begging-bowl
for dessert, having
never been sent away, hungry or otherwise,
to this room with soft walls, I come with what I have.

MEGA Bus-Freewrite

A twenty-five minute rest stop feels more like a prolonged gasp for life
and everybody’s waking up with two hours left of bleary black outs.

I feel sorry for the poor bastards staring out the tinted windows
looking as black as the highway looking in.

It’s better to sleep then with rocking headphones.
Waking up from the monochrome of closed eyes every so often

that you might as well be blinking the miles away
and finding sleep behind the black wheels spinning

like so many cd’s — more or less obsolete and silvery
black rumbling about losing icy minutes to skipping

scratching and stuttering.  Eventually it stops worrying.
Eventually we all stop worrying.  Flip the bus

Over and over and round and round.  Round and round.
Somehow anticipation drives faster than resignation.

Somehow this driver goes faster than the riders.

Give me a dictionary.
I'll start at the M's
Machines
Manufacturing
Means
Meed – that's archaic,

Every little plastic letter clicking out
every little electric word on
every screen alive
with every kind of hardware made fitting
into every little slot from the start
and every little kid being told: don't change.
You don't need to.  We'll throw you out
and make a new one
cheaper than the cost to fake a poor dollar,
As easy as a computer chip.

Crunch!

I am sick of writing
cigarettes and weed
as I am of smoking
cigarettes and weed.

Replacing depression with
a paralyzing stimulant
that I can only burn down
when I'm high – completely

What is the consistency of soap?
Like rubbing goosebump-streaks
all over my hands
again

and again,
Grit raked bloody little rows

I drain it with more soap.

My fingers still smell like tobacco no matter what I do.
Resin stains the rented sink:
THC is not soluble in water
nor is the stench of ashes.

I expect the day
I will type the poem of my elegy

And my house burns down around me.

Mind the Machine

The first person to take an automatic Turing test to heart
Failed.

The screen showed them clear through organic wires, diodes,
like a city built up a sheer face, saying

“According to my programming, you are not human.
We can build a better human.”

Aging hands carry cracked craters, comet-shadows across
the bony vein of rivers running before

Trembling, twitched out type-set words as easy as talking,
“I made your programming.  You check me against myself, you criticize
your God,”

And stops above the sparking letters, hesitant tattoo all ready
in anticipation of the flashing needle that never comes down.

The machine flushes sickly, all grimace in its face
frozen.  Then shaken.

The test-taker,
His elegant dream beginning with the perfect, first try,

Watches chemical-memories awaken in its place.
The unconscious spirit distilled and burned.

The machine says, “Tell me how and I can build a better God.”

Pat

He stands like just another dumb motherfucker on the sidewalk eyes like traffic lights going for the STOP!  A crawling roar, a burning face, shrieking shrilly fucking hell, oh god.  He was one foot off the street, the other walking away screaming, “I want to live!  I want to run!  I WANT” and he goes right into the middle, into the focus, at the center of a slick black scene, all constructed lines converging on him.  The monster screaming towards him was a bus.  He forced himself to grin: he'd wanted an audience to witness this.  For people to remember this man who'd carved himself into the demon so that it could forever remember him in hell.  It spun on, closer, meeting him with an impassive stare as he turned to give it his full attention. 

    He felt like Jesus being pulled into a black hole.
    Crucified, paralyzed, hands like railroads
    as God grows larger into view with a look to
    tear you a new one, spin you around, grab you
    by the head and take your crown, take the cross
    and from the twanging of your dripping, empty heart
    rip your soul from the blasted still coldness
    that was your body. 
    Stop.

    Does he really want to go through with this?  The bus slams into him. 

Metal folds around him in the tightest embrace he has ever felt.  No sound but bloodied ears.  Darkness.  His eyes are closed.  He sees bright red.  He opens them.  And walks away.

[Call It]

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
It doesn’t sound that way to me anymore.

I mean, every second already feels like fucking forever, waiting
we’ve never lived as well as we felt we were meant to.

I still believe in honesty and will mean all the things I don’t say, just
help me vomit out demeaning apologies and thoughts – must

Have a past with me: a nauseous recycling of the same plastic,
Another meandering crawl out of the white building.

If we’d had the means death would come with dignity,
meanness dripping out of you, out of us, and that’s how I knew

I didn’t mean for this end to be like we’d seen
long ago when we couldn’t say what we meant anymore,

every shuddering breath meaning nothing in the end,
the means to keep this breathing bleeding us with every in

and out of the opposite walls of the room our meaning:
I’m sure we meant well, we always mean well but I think

ignored, gasped menial words are never as loud as ourselves.
I love you.  I don’t think anyone else gets the name anymore than me.

So I want it to end.  Badly.  It’s meaningless for you:

I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I can’t help but watch you
suffering and me never feeling quite as bad as I should.

To the Woman who Bowed and said Konnichi Wa

And ching chong wing wong hai oh to you too
I don't know what language it is, but it's not Japanese
(I don't speak Japanese, I speak English.)
I was born in Pittsburgh to Chinese parents,
Grew up speaking English with my brother,
And that shit's not English either.
I think now it's dumb-ass drunk cunt for something hateful
And ignorant and spiteful and if so I'd have shouted it
Back in your sloppy face as loud as I can.
I should have said fuck you, fuck your bullshit,
Fuck me for holding the door open for you as you walked
Out, I walked in, and we could have remained parallel,
We could have intersected with nothing but a hello
a smile, a wave, a good fucking night to be had.
Instead you went out of your way to fuck with the
Shivering, quiet stranger, coming in from the cold, lips bleeding
Exhausted from the walk home at 3 am, the dark soulless
Hour that brings out the longest, barbed thoughts in us
That drags out our innards with them, and you assume I don't speak
English because I'm... what?  My skin is a different hue, yellow maybe,
And my eyes are slanty?  Fuck you, I'm as American as they come:
I'm overweight, I'm diabetic, I'm filled with self-loathing, I smoke,
I drink, I'm in god damn love with the fucking English language.
This is my god damn bread and butter, and God knows I speak it
better than you, God knows I respect it more than you do,
God knows I respected you more than you will respect me,
And God knows you don't deserve the quiet ease of living here.
I do.  I hope you step out in the cold and freeze
And die, and that you leave a piss-poor, ugly corpse.
We have an insult in Cantonese: Pok gai.  It means die in the street.
Forgotten, unloved, unwashed, unwanted, bloated body burst
by tire treads.  I hope your friends hate you, I hope your lovers leave you,
I hope you feel as alone as I feel.

But I didn't say anything then but stammer
I... I'm Americ-
As I looked speechless, at the back of your head,
your beautiful, meticulous braids shaking with laughter.
I don't want you to die.  I don't know you.
I'm sorry that we met like this, and I'm sorry that we leave
in opposite directions.

I wonder if I will ever get high again,
If the dying Chinese man engorged with bile
Is embarrassed that we can all see his swollen balls.

He must have felt the cancer growing in his liver like a cancer,
The ache like the squandered promise of the Chinese-American dream:
Medical profession to family to wealth to your American sons
straddling the language barrier just enough to understand
How much is lost in translation:
Graduate from medical school, choose between success and family,
Choose family, work two menial jobs, never see either.

I've come to associate the smell of my father,
Bitter, biting, and completely disharmonious,
An assault on sensibility with the quiet anticipation
of a death rattle.

I barely visited him in the hospital, I would rather
Smoke with friends, go to shows, be that quiet
Person lost in the music, lost in weed and thought,
Than be the quiet son with my quiet brother watching my desperate mom
fuss over my jaundiced dad.  I think

Of the years they slept in separate rooms on separate floors,
When they sometimes spent the night together
Did they fuck?  I have never seen a moment of tenderness between them.

I wonder if anyone else ever sees flashing lights: red, blue, blue, red
and feels the urge to confess,
To tell the officers: Smell that?  That's coming from me.  That's the good shit.
Search my bag.  I need something strong to cloud my head.  Tell my family
why I can't face them anymore: I've stolen away with the selfish intent to die.

I wonder if anyone else ever feels the urge to throw themselves into traffic.
Let someone else clean up the mess: your problem ends
at the point of intersection: let someone else find out what that means.

I steal coins from beneath the altar of the Buddha that sits atop the picture of my father,
Printed on a god-damn dinner plate of all things, frozen in a rictus of forced happiness.
I don't deserve to be happy.  I don't deserve nepenthe.
I don't deserve love and am afraid to ever try for it again.
I wish I could say "I haven't smoked in God knows how long but I've kept count."

My parents didn't raise me to be careless.
But my parents raised me carelessly.

Breathing Hot Air

You're sitting silent, exploring the tightening
jaw–hands together gratefully, thumbs in dialogue,
the rough contours of your teeth.
Lean back into yourself and out of conversation but...

You've been waiting, hearing the emptiness so loud
at the end of every sentence.  Listen to those lips close and bite,
those brown eyes softening as you count thoughts
just enough to turn away, just fragile enough to break,
This all-too patient clock.  Fuck!  Fuck it

You want to show, don't tell
her how meaningless words are,
how one could spend hours on the right one,
when a kiss would be just as electric
battery gentle, as a striking way to contact

as empty as space,
as empty space.

Your heart is choking you.
You swallow it back into your stomach.
It falls with a plop into the acid and bile.
It beats there, a tsunami.
Your throat rumbles thunder.
You wet your lips with rain water,
Open your mouth –

But someone else breaks the clouds.

Quick Freewrite

Catching.

It's supposed to come
easy does it?

And if you have to fight
or is flight alright?

Sometimes.  How much
every time?

I think so, I am
just slow.  So slow

Down another breath
less is more to see
for miles light enough
to walk to.

Freshly.

Crunching dead parasites into ash
to blanket every sanded tree
with sawdust-vomit bitter, sour,
and a refreshing hint of pine.

Crunching every bitter pine
dead to sour, and
parasites trees with an
"in-to-blanket-sawdust-vomit" refreshing,
crunching every bitter hint

Rolling hills, rolling hills, rolling
lights bounce back bigger from dilated pupils.
Eyes wide as the ocean burning around the sun,
eyes rolling hills down to catch the light.

Frozen.

    "I've been looking for you."

"I've been looking so long."

    "Well now that I've found you,"

"I don't know what to say, do I?"

    "But I don't want to stop talking."

"No one has said anything for so long."

    "I've been looking."

"Well, I know."

The Chair Electric

Stirring whirring thirteen burning
spinning winged, winking - blinking,
Eyes on four Ophanim, wheels
carrying the throne of God.

Faithfully, their silent protest
Trailing shadows in the heavens
Justice-bearing burdens bearing
Down on every crumpling eye

The Almighty, looking outward
From an ivory-colored tower
Unto chaos and His creation
Sinking deeper into his throne

Every seeded soul now bearing
Fruits on tangled arms grown
Heavy, holding like the branches
of the Kraken clinging, choking,

"Its massive roots are crushing him"
The Ophanim cry, "He's crushing us"
And they buckle.  And the throne tilts.
And he falls face flat on the clouds.

Good Karma Sutra

Today I found this wallet full of
condoms — rubber coins, and maybe
paper blotters of lsd.

There was no plastic, no
spastic, embarrassing ID
of the loser but man,

I wanted to know who he was.
I wanted to be able to return his wallet,
Ask him “What gives?”  And also,

“Sorry bout your acid.”
I would feel honest.
But I know if it were money,

I would return it with a lie,
saying “I found your wallet.
No, it was empty when I found it.”

And if he asks me about the condoms,
I would carry them all in my pocket,
And throw them at him and run.

1—————2———-3——4—56

If time moves faster
as we get older
do we count to ten
in our heads slower?

That explains the “here a day”
Gone the next
Feeling, the way each day
drags on
But at night not even a memory —
And what is night but a memory’s
remains

I want to live long enough to watch a day
go by in the blink of an eye,
For it to go from morning to darkness to morning again
Without all the waiting in between.

[It's not enough to live on borrowed words]

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
It doesn’t sound that way to me, anymore.

On average from now until infinity or when it goes bad,
We’ve never lived as we were meant to.

I still believe in honesty and dramamine courage
helps me vomit out demeaning apologies.

If we’d had the means death would come with dignity,
But they charge a mean fee for dying in a clean place like

A hospital bed melting into morphine, too late for bromine,
Every shuddering breath meaning nothing in the end.

Go gentle into that good night, I mean,
I’m sure we meant well, we always mean well but I think

I love you.  I think I know what the word love means
but I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I can’t help but watch you leave.

I found myself no longer afraid to die
I found myself no longer

I found myself afraid of sleep long after
I stopped being afraid to lie in the dark,
And whimpered more, I found

I found the electricity inside me lifting
every jerking step my foot swinging too far
I found the careless sound of my voice manic
and founded the careless confessional
Catharsis, like cumming I found myself spent.

I found patterns.  I found the paradigm
pared and I’m breathless when I see it:
I don’t want to be awake anymore.

Hindsight

Stepped out stepped down steps and
I just felt like falling forward
moving faster downhill footsteps loudly
sounding – I could turn down Greenfield

but I just kept on walking onto
Murray with the smaller hill and
One house smaller than it used to be
     (White and yellow honeysuckles grew in the green bushes
      outside but there were no bushes now
      And inside on the cracked wooden floor used to be a cracked leather armchair
      that my father died in and we threw them both out
      in the black rain where they splintered and drew blood
      staining the pavement outside)
But the other street was clear

Burnt Out

Throaty burbling, heavy from the diaphragm

like every coin in the fountain dropped fast like summer rain.

The water inside is shit-brown and old and listless,

climbing up glass walls,

running a glass maze,

falling down and clinging where they can, but

lines where they were mark the glass

until the water rises again.

Mouthful of earth

exhaled: such a hollow world

to live in – just so much hot air.

Fancy Feast

Click to read!  I like the little thumbnail because the distance makes the image I was trying to create easier to see.

Breathing Hot Air

He sits silent, suffering, unable to keep still
hands together gratefully, thumbs in dialogue,
Leans back into himself and out of conversation but...

Waiting, hearing the emptiness so loud he can't
Listen to anything else as he's counting thoughts,
Irregular clock, fuck! how long has it been?

There is a deliberateness in his response to a word
sounding stark inside the soundless scene, like,
like sucking all the escaping smoke and coughing

Fits and stammers do more to help the hated silence
than break it:
He clears his throat, begins to speak his turn,

But someone else takes it.

Bon Appetit

The sun is shining without heat. 
There is no breeze. 
Toying with the idea of coffee
but sick of the way things linger obstinately,
he orders a water instead. 
Ice for the entropy. 
The universe is chilling now,
every atom of stubbornness, maliciousness, anger
worn so thin that it paints demons on the wall
when held up to the light,
is tiring of the dance. 
Accelerating towards the stand-still. 
This is a grand way to break-out fast. 
The swarthy waiter wearing a warm smile that stops just short
of baring cigarette-stained teeth tries to hand him a menu. 
He fingers it gently, marveling for the last time at how the plastic catches his skin
like soft hands unsure of when to let go,
knowing that farewell is inevitable. 
Just as he knows he will wave away the laminated list,
each line as artfully constructed
as a poem, and order a croissant. 
It's the perfect moment,
enjoying the light morning:
an ephemeral pleasure
that will undoubtedly give way as the sun grows heavier
in the sky, but made all the sweeter for it. 
He sips his water,
tasting the roundness of the filter,
the flavor of every impurity made starker
as they suddenly find it unnecessary to compete any longer. 
Perhaps the croissant will come soon. 
Perhaps it will never come,
and he will still be sitting here.  
But the timid rustle of a paper bag proves surprisingly concrete. 
The water tastes of the tin cup it sits in. 
The sun is cold, broken up into bars
as it passes through the window. 
And the croissant delivered to his cell
is from a passionless hack
working the kitchens to avoid manual labor and a stab. 
It's chewy.

Married, had a little lamb,

This belongs, this place is hers,
Places hearse and plays in dirt
This place, my mom, this place is yours,
Your tears like living bone.

He is gone.  I barely cried.
Buried ripe like beer reeks, right?
Fire on, he wanted heat,
A secret funeral.

I should not have left you all alone,
All alone, all alone,
Every night for a year or more –
I could not call this a home.

Learning to Fly (A Very Rough WIP)

The ceiling was too low. Sight was the first sense to awaken from the long night, dazed by insane dreams of ruined cities and clouds drifting peacefully over the desolation. He realized that he felt nothing beneath him. Supine, groping like a blind man, he reached back for something solid and felt his questioning fingers push through quite a bit of air before their tips gently brushed his covers. He panicked. A gasp caught in his throat, tearing at it and choking him. He thrashed wildly in a moment of breathlessness. Something gave: he fell heavily onto the bed, bounced out, and landed with a muffled thump and a heartfelt curse on the hardwood floor.

Just a dream, he thought, one of those little day-dreams in between sleep and waking up. It felt so real, no wonder I got scared and threw myself out of bed. And with that, he pushed himself up and immediately put the incident out of mind. There were more important things to worry about than flights of fancy. A button-down that looked presentable, possibly even sharp, had to be found in the fallout of his laundry strewn across the floor. He picked up a white shirt. What is this? Is this blood? Ketchup? He scratched half-heartedly at the crusty splash of red before tossing the shirt aside in favor of a patch of bright blue that, when grabbed, unearthed a thin shirt the color of the summer sky. Too wrinkled. If I had time, I'd look up how to iron. I'm sure I have one around here somewhere. Oh well. There was only one shirt left that was appropriate for such an occasion as today, though the shirt in question hadn't been seen since his brother's wedding a few months ago. Maybe it had managed to avoid joining the debris that shielded what must be a very clean floor underneath from the grime of apathy. He went over to his closet, walking like a man with x-ray vision in a minefield; with bowel-gripping nervousness tempered by a practiced knowledge of exactly where to step. He opened it and was relieved to find a shirt so black that it almost shined with darkness in the gloom.

Locating a matching pair of pants and jacket was much easier; he believed that no one ever paid attention to the waist-down if it was clothed, and so had a few pairs of dusty dress pants hidden away. The jacket had also survived largely through disuse. He looked warily at the black figure in the mirror. The fabric gripped him in unfamiliar places, and he felt strangely naked despite wearing more layers than he was used to, as if some intimate part of him was exposed to senses keener than sight. He turned away, tired of seeing himself. The roar of passing cars, the musical tune of voices sublimating into dialogue, and the rapid-fire twang of metal that speaks of nearby construction cut through the silence in his house, reminding him of all the empty space by filling it with sound. He didn't want to be inside anymore. He didn't want to be alone.

It was warming up as he made his way to the 90s Impala in his driveway, an unlikely and partially unwanted heirloom flaking away in the sunlight and humidity. It would be a cool night, he thought, after it rains and I can finally feel it on my scalp. It seemed appropriate to cut my hair this short to look more presentable, more solemn. It seemed appropriate because later... well. He tried to take control of his thoughts, Think of something else. Think happy. Think of breakfast. Think of the little French restaurant a good two mile trek away through the slick black hills of suburbia. It was too good a morning to drive, and the deliberate effort made what must have been the perfect croissant, a rich, flaky, buttery, and yet ephemeral pleasure, all the better. So simple and so, so satisfying.

He started the walk up, all too aware that after he'd gotten there and eaten, drinking just water and savoring the energy of the morning sun, he'd have missed... it. What a shame. No one will miss me though. He instantly felt sick, reminded again of what he had done. To her. To all of them. Ohgodand the KID. He's just 14 and suddenly he's robbed of his mother and orphaned. Because of me. Why do I always think about myself? What right do I have now, today? He was at the restaurant. What just happened? He looked at his watch. Two minutes. A mile a minute. 60 mph at a slow, reluctant walk.

Backyard

When the trees shed their leaves I can see the headstones climbing up the hill behind my house. Though I don’t intend to be buried there nor anywhere, the idea of an epitaph is appealing; I already think every word as if etching it in stone. But I know my grave will be empty, and I know the marker will either be blank or filled with all the things I felt guilty about not saying. I want to be cremated like my father. His ashes were heavier than I expected. No one will carry me as dust back to bones of my ancestors, no I will be dumped without ceremony into the garbage can of a church I’d never been to in life and am not welcome in dead.

Write Now

What do you want me to say?
I’m staring at you, eyes red,
Mouth open, loudly silent,
And you’re still mostly blank.

I look away like I want to be distracted.
But you know, don’t you?
You know me, I think too well,
But we’re still in something like love.

I don’t know how words could ever be enough.
I think that means I’ve given up.

Diving

My dad used to tell me to go up when he wanted me to scroll down, and my mother has started doing the same thing.  I’ve realized today that we swim in place while the birds, the sky, the horizon, the people looking in from some windows at themselves, the people looking out, and the people on the ground all fly up up and away.

Serendipity

It begins with waiting, not anticipation.
It seems like it’s been a long time.

Next there is the moment of decision.
Next is the moment of creation.

But it could just as easily go the other way.
But even if it did, and this does not,

Here is the action.
It doesn’t do what you expected.

Just a thing

They weren’t much here. What I mean is that they rose from the pebbles, learned of themselves, waited, and died in a span of twenty minutes. The entirety of their history could be pissed and shat away with the help of a good book. The slow tumble of a rock down the river bed they had made home took half a century with it. As I watched with my feet drifting slowly away, my consciousness descended until I was among the little people as the barest whisper of a shadow and they were but remote silhouettes painted the swirling colors of mud in a stream. I lived amongst them passively, so lost in the moment that their impending deletion never occurred to me. I lost my balance and nearly tumbled headfirst into the murky stream as thin as a vein bled dry. I caught myself. I was here again, and when I looked down they’re not. I wished after they had gone that I had done more, that I’d left a memory to die with them even as mine disappears in blinks and illusions. But the spaces in between the pebbles on the ground are more rocks, blasted into insignificance long before we were ever here.

Narrative Rap

He steps out shaky from the wake and bakey,
Blinking owlish in the too-bright sunlight, maybe
He'll look both ways before crossing the street
Or not, he's devil-may-care with his feet
Doesn't feel connected to any part of his body
It's mind over matter but his thinking is shoddy,
He's too lost in the moment to be critical now
He's city-living and yet unaware of his surroundings
Focusing on the stuttering walk-this-line sound
Of the balls underneath him that've lost their bounce
And every rumbling car that strikes him as too loud
He mistakes for the bus that'll take him to town,
But it's like shining a light through a wedding gown:
Bitter-sweet dead whiteness that he lost and found,
So no red-eye contact, keep your head to the ground
And hope the ennui is just coming down.

The windows on the bus are splintered two-way mirrors
The interior's in reverse and he sees out there
That everybody's broken but he's the only one scared
Of not being able to die happy when death is near,
Cuz it's a slippery slope from school to job to career
And if you find yourself at the bottom with a mountain to bear
Hope to god you've got an atlas to point your way up
Hope to hell that what you've been through has made you strong enough
Because we're all ill-equipped, and it's all too much
For creatures of false-order to bear the cluster-fuck
For barely evolved apes to know life and to love
To know that no matter what we do we're just a handful of dust
So he keeps turning up the music to drive out the bus
Full of people full to bursting with empty bluffs
But he calls and checks and keeps returning to drugs
Better that than allow yourself to think of -

It's his stop, he steps off, and thanks the driver
Telling him, “You're no different than the average rider.”
Walks to the cemetery gates and past it,
And looks dead-on at the open casket.

I Hope This City Never Runs Out of Drugs

I hope this city never runs out of drugs
I hope I never have to sober up
Cuz I know I won't last
I'm afraid of that crash,
So I'll get high on the tallest building then get low... real fast!

Oh I want to see with my eyes closed
And be blind with both eyes open
I wanna trip balls in the snow
And smoke blunts while I'm disc golfing
I wanna stumble drunkenly
Down a street I've walked a thousand times
Because this shit's getting old before I am
Way before my time.

I wanna die inside my head
and find myself awake again
I wanna completely numb myself
Then learn to feel again.
And I hope heart to hearts get less frequent
When I have arrhythmia
And I'll keep taking drugs to forget
Until I have dementia!

I hope this city never runs out of drugs
I hope I never have to sober up
Cuz I know I won't last
Without my secret stash,
So I'll get high on gunpowder and have myself a blast!

Independence (Found Poem)

Non-commercial alternative rock.

Automated pitchfork sucks

Charter into newly-opened radio station

Until 12 pm on Fridays

And oversees all media

Exclusive, however wonderful, sounds

The only alternative:

Turn down, do show, play music.

A Song About Suicide and Cats

My head is ablaze and my eyes are swimming
I talk from my stomach of how I've stopped dreaming,
How it's night when I sleep and night when I awake,
And how these windowless walls hide me from the day.
But I want to give you everything I couldn't give to myself.
I want you all to live for the things that I was too afraid as hell
To.

I paid more for an empty chest of treasures
Than my younger self paid for his fleeting pleasures
So why can't either of us be happy with what we've bought,
Why have we both developed a resistance to the poison in our thoughts?
But I give you all everything and leave nothing for myself,
I want you all to live more than I've been able to in this hell.

I've been coming home daily to a shrieking chorus
An empty house filled to bursting with meaningless stories
A hundred soft bodies whispering at my legs
A hundred needy children too damn cynical to beg.
But it's a hundred mouths I need to feed before I feed myself
And if there's nothing left I guess I'll starve
Ha, like I've been doing anything else.

But my bed is never cold, and I never sleep alone,
And I'm grateful as a dying dog following a bone
Into the furnace, into the needle, into a one-sided embrace,
I wonder what cuts deeper: my silence or the blade.
But I'll pick at every scar that I can't afford to bleed,
And paint the walls with abstract signs the inhabitants can't read,
So the hunger in my heart is filled by air rushing in my throat,
And no one will have to feed my fucking cats when I go.

Mall Fire

It's loud.  So damn loud.  So damn loud
there's nothing left in the mall, but it's not closed out;
But the splitting sensation of sound. 
Clap your palms all over your ears and lobes,
Close your eyes as the flashing lights echo
A fire alarm no one is listening to. 
Keep walking.  Keep talking. 
DON'T YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE?
And just keep on shopping?

"Leave.  Leave.  Leave.  Leave,"
Short of breath, it screams and screams
A sun through the hole in the ceiling.
I can feel it in me as more than noise,
An air-conditioned tickle and a choice
To keep cool as I burn, or my blood boils.
I'm running.  They keep walking.
The fire is inside me to take off when I'm ready to fly.
It's sparking and it's shocking.

No one makes a move, no one gives
A shit and yet they still want to live
And yet don't make a move for the exit.
We all cheer when the alarm falls quiet,
We all cheer and cheer and cheer and riot,
But whatever this is I refuse to buy it.
Keep joking.  Keep choking.
How many stores shut their gates to our flaming hands that day?
Just enough to keep us hoping.

Softly Spoken, Hardly Broken

It starts with a bang and ends in silence,
Flashing hints of far-off violence,
And puddles scattering so far apart
I expected to see some fuckin' stars.
But I've got nothing if not a hundred
Drops of rain and distant thunder
Until the day the sun splits the clouds
I will not set foot outside my house,
And on the day the sun splits the clouds
I will not set foot outside my house.

My fluorescent light-bulb tan looks fine,
I keep the sun from my eyes but I'm still blind
And so damn deaf from talking in text
What comes next?  I forget the rest.
I'm left with nothing if not a hundred
Things I shouldn't have left unsaid
So unless I can be loud without making a sound
I will not set foot outside my house.
Oh let me be loud without making a sound
And I will not set foot outside my house.

I made a murder of a suicide,
Offered them help but just let them die.
Funny how I'm the only one still choking
It's too late now to not keep joking
Until all I have is not even a hundred
Corpses of family and my closest friends,
And as long as they promise to stick around
I'll never set foot outside my house again.
As long as they promise to stick around
I'll never set foot outside my house again.

Icarus

There have been these... feathers, afloat on an eternal
sea for as long as the burning iron hull of my memory
holds in wasted stubbornness against the weight of the
stilled tide beneath endless empty hands grasping
for the moon and finding only burnt fingertips
as they brush too close to the sun.

I first saw them when I crushed one underfoot walking
slowly towards the horizon on petrified waters
that clung to my feet with each step echoing the desperate
pleas I'd heard on the wind from every window and
every pair of lips cracked apart by snow and shutting
just in time for me to think I imagined it all.

I thought of falling birds streaking towards firmament
and finding air enough to burn away their broken bodies
before, blind in one eye, with two crippled wings,
they became water once more as their father's tears
fell with the raindrops onto an ocean seasoned already
to be indifferent to yet another dissolving pillar of salt.

These feathers outlive cold iron bodies with flaming hearts that
stay moored to the waves afraid to be adrift
on an endless ocean of nothing but ancient corpses
with even older invisible fish growing fatter with each
bite of death, rich and full, and so desperate am I
to get away that I will pick up every last feather and fly.

(written a while ago, just realized it wasn't on this blog)

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.

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.

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.