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.

Karaoke

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

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

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

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

To Elysium

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to the Mud

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

Tomorrow May Never Come

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

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

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

A Product of GM

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

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

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

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

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

Product of General Motors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Face First

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

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

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

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

As You Lay Dying

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

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

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

Two Brief Spur-of-the-moment Vignettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sun Sets Over the Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Dreams May Come

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

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

Narcissus

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Eternity's Gate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commence to Begin

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

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

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

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

Winter Wondering

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

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

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

Arboreal

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

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

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

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

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

450 Degrees

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

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

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

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

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

Tique Toque

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

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

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

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

Don't Go Swimming With 40 Dollars In Your Trunks

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

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

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

Life is good sometimes.

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

Diving Board

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

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

At Five

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

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

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

Life's happy pursuits of liberty.

I don't LIKE this.

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

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

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

A Final Disposition

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on science (ignore the TERRIBLE punctuation)

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

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