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.