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.