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.