An Ocean Swell From Back Then.

I'm easily wounded.

Her eyeliner's the fur of the puma.

Dark like a cave.

I looked back and saw all that youth and wandering like something missing.

No cure for old noise.

Wonderful inside this cavern.

Brave brave brave.

This midnight hour telling as it is, a loss.

Traumatic though it may be.

Still I'm not willing to give it up.

Tin type, lead type, the alluring type.

Waiting for a reply while my heart yearns tired.

Sending desperate pleas across the wires.

Lovesick, homesick, in sickness and in health.

If it was, it'd be like a panic.

A gridwork within my veins that holds me like a web.

And those daggers, smart like mischief.

Mellow, drama.

The dim glimmer in the periphery like simple, elusive possibility.

Or needles...or pins...

Some sort of wreckage out there in the distance

cannot seem to rid myself of this feeling.

The Script Yearning.

She wears her dress like scripture. Falling to my knees, I've got nothing to offer but let me feel something. I keep writing it down but the words don't stick. I fail to save the tree and those twigs are brushing against me like stones across the flesh. They may hurt me and so do words. So do birds fly or do I? Am I falling? It's all a matter of context and the ground seems to be swimming ablur and teeming with crocodiles. And insurance salesmen, and professionals, and all of them just killing time so nicely. Their hours all sequestered in a microphone booth so you can hear them eke away slowly yet not feel their grip. Removed and out of sight but heard nonetheless. I read up on you and there is no salvation, only blood tinted teal and pandering to my naivete. And you wear a mask like a wrestler. And you wrestle with something unseen. And yes, I suppose I do learn something from reading your eyes. But nothing of your body language. And nothing of your dress keeps me thinking. Only wondering; does this thing we call the world just spin because of our wants? Because of our fears? Aspiration and admiration aside, I love the way you sway and fall and get back up again. They wrote it down for a reason.

Reading into the Daily Paper.

The racing is bleeding wrong. I'm most surely a fuck up, mewling about absence of heart and hope with a touch of humanity. The pacing's an impeding song. I'm frustrated and the sun goes down on another tirelessly adult and lonely night of sheets drawn cold. The sun stalks the tears away from my eyes, slapping my dry face with shine. I realize I'm barking up the wrong tree. I see she has her edges gilded with heartbreak. The safety nets are booby traps and the agents of the law beckon, drinking chartruese as they fall through the gaps. Vacancies. Who am I to listen to when I sense that my only tryst is one of shot up reason? I saw you once: the image of a piece of my heart falling into your palm refracted through tequila and whiskey. Each tin flask fills and empties with the sunrise running, bloodied by the sunset. Thus the truth: I see the malice of my heart writhing from blow after self-wrought, melodramatic blow. To say I built this mansion just to tear it down is an understatement. Understand rent and pay it. The dues are what come second. I feel the breeze of a personality history and it tickles painfully. Pins and needles.

My hairs are pointing at one another, deciding which of them will go gray next. The crowd is bristling aniticipation. Confetti twisting in the air; each piece aspin within a thin little orbit each their own. We are dancing this dance quietly yet the din is overwhelming.

Those that kinder warmth are all mixed up with those that want to: like blood. We draw from one another randomly. Strawberries and tar paper and the letting go of affections. We're sick to death of staring out at the pall of another inebriated set of circumstances. We are getting the sense that time is dwindling. We send messages in the dark while a quick shock dissolves under soil erosion disasters. There you are waving. Here I am debating. I'm just here and the one who's there gets no closer with the circling. I turn the hour glass. The birds swarm like flies. The grains of sand let me know of the slipping away. And there you are, my possibility: all beautiful amber avoidance. I'm here with your loss dropping off and I empty my pockets, shining white. These sheets drape about my body like a white flag of surrender.

Dream Review.

I see you out there. And I'm far away, there there. Just me who mouths, "where?" And time spars and stares. Because this is ridiculous, heeling to fictitious malignments. All drawn to the hilt frivolous, peeling fruit, vicious laments, tall fawn, a boon feels contagious. We are running softly upon pillows filling up with dead memories. Fighting amongst those weeping willows, I feel an empty tender release. I said what I did to walk into the woods without my lunch. I did what I did to let the lessor be known. I know what I know to keep the help at bay. I think what I think because I have no one to tell me otherwise. This four sided room has two ways out. No ceiling, no floor: up or down. I look laterally and each way is a dead end. It is either descent or ascent. An assessment of assents has me saying yes to this and no to that and getting a confused look on my life when I open my eyes and my body was there the whole time watching. It kept it's aches overnight. And I was drunk when I said I didn't believe and sober I feel an absence like nothing. I drive myself into a hole, a whole, a holy set of circumstances all my own. I drive myself into this.

Hands Up.

I can feel you sneaking around out there, anxiety. With dreary leaves plastered upon your face; those ones that fell from the trees after hanging on the entire year through warmth and death and the end of things. You lurk around every corner with vestigial faith pouring from your palms like kool-aid flavoring. Or like blood. And you fear yourself. It's so effervescent: your power is self effacing. You humble yourself with the way you tear everything down. I am wrapped up in you like the traces of a past spent losing oneself in manic drug intake and breathing techniques. We find ourselves on our last breath together in the diving bell looking into one anothers eyes saying in unison, No Need. No Need. No Need. There is no need for all of this confusion; this earnest yet tense desire. All of this unease scratching our wrists bloody as we climb rooftops in an electrical black out. All of this tiresome writhing in the blood speckled crawl space of this life we work together to pacify. We work together to convince ourselves of the woods and their looming darkness. We work together to haul up the mossy remains from the sapphire labyrinth of salt surrounding the land. We work together to make the wreckage come back together. But it won't will it? Until there is a defining crack of lightning across the lonely prairie where the cattle wander with bellies full of dust, the pieces won't join hands. Hacking and losing our tears in the once fertile soil, we won't bring it back together until we reason with one another that we must distance ourselves from one another. There is no need for us to hold eachother so tight. For intimacy of destruction begets goodbyes, and loss is a gaining of a future: There is no need to tell ourselves we are the same, anxiety.

Wasted for Nought.

Yes I will die faster than you. But I will live faster than you as well. I believe a degree of recklessness is needed to get through this life. And if it is not realized the whole thing will fall apart. We are alike because we lose ourselves all the time. But it takes loss to gain love. It takes and it takes over and over again. Cursing the sun as I do my duty. Telling it to just go down. Sitting here, stupid, feckless, pensive, taciturn and aligned. Sitting here gaining premium access to drawn lovely creation while the poor sick brothers cock their wrinkled brows whilst the camera shoots a mug shot inside this skull of mine. And I will find myself after a dozen tears and countless beers. They lap against me and I feel such freedom like shattered glass.

A Goodbye to the Past.

Inexhaustible space traversed like a waking dream.
And feeling the goodbyes well up from nowhere.
Back to the beginning after everything,
all cluttered is over here.
She offered so much,
my stolid refusal already smarts.
Where we leave our hearts is always a mystery.
Like this windswept city off the coast of Antarctica.
Dwelling all duty without and kindled clean.
I am reaching an end to means.
I am witnessing the endurance of the lonely.
I get up with pains and retire like a broken window.
Though taped up and shattered the battering subsides.
Another weekend and this homecoming of sorts:
really just the loss of another head.
A brain that calmly lets itself hold onto the past,
though it has just happened.
Forever out of reach,
the distance that lays,
enrapt and conversational.
Saying, "You found something there,
you had something there."
But as all temptations are,
the future is alluring.
We'll put you off as close as we can.
Yet you know not of your destination.
This kindly driver just winking.

Take the Good with the Bad.

Yes the shakes and yes they come and go and they're all a dealt hand. They're all to melt sand. Into glass real fast so I can see clearly for now. For there is a bird in flight with amber green eyes glinting like diamonds roaming through my heart making decoration decisions. Setting it up so cozy and the shadows are shed with light. They bathe and they recede. And they're response is one of bafflement. An exclamatory grimace ebbing into the crimson felt walls to echo through the skeletal system and leave through the ears and eyes; a depthless demise cries out fathomless. The drum is a cavernous one and there is room for the faithless, the faithful, the lost, the found, the leaves, the roots, and the crown. There is everything found in here: it is no surprise that we see through the tears in our eyes as the tidal pool glimmers with youth and problems. Because I do have these sorrow and triumphs. I don't let go of one thing to grasp another. I keep it all together and it makes itself known that it makes me up. The shakes are all part of it.

Red Hot Gothic Rage.

I will try not to let it get the best of me: it can take the worst. Like those aches and pains. And that devious longing that creeps up like a rerun? Oh yes. Just the worst. I have a feeling I'll need the sharpest knife to cut the deepest wound. A removal of sorts to straighten everything out and make me seem crystal clear. A tuning fork spine with a bed full of scars. And it scares me how long it takes to wake up from my recurring dreams. I think the house is falling around me. I'm convinced there is a crowd noting my every move. I rear and buck. There is the red anger. There are my eyes losing sight and glowing white. This is the cause: you are convincing yourself of a lie. And it just gets better and better. The worst is a debt that you can't fret.

There There Misconceptions.

I felt along the lines of the insane.
And I don't know why I say I felt because I still feel it.
But I distance the lines and I get the feeling that they are further from each other than possible.
The treble kick and the feeble sick,
the weather rip and the feather tip.
I do not know.
But maybe they're all inter related and I just don't see it.
And I don't see why.
Maybe the honeybee and the ant are working together and I'm falling over myself trying not to fathom the truth.
That I could never be the same again?
It's a possibility.
That I couldn't work with who I was?
It's possible, somewhere along the line.

Don't Let Me Go. Keep Me On.

All this operational tension and employment bartering: the sea is a seasonal thing as in you see and then you don't. It evaporates like the spendthrift type outside the apartment. And he's lost when the time shift turns past the appointed work shift. There there. This feeling of utterances in the ear; hot and soft. The stipend is beyond over. The trickle down is hot wax and spearmint. Stunning cool and explosions out across the permeated economic landscape. The tycoon weeps bloody dollars while crushing the menial underfoot. Some sort of juggernaut steamroller bringing the blue bloods to their present situations so the crystal can clink together in a toast to present situations. The foreman has one eye rolling like a bowling ball. And he keeps the fabric of the infrastructure sutured together with clothes pins. And he keeps the water flowing even though it means nothing anymore. And the lake drains down to the constancy of collapse. The constancy of ebb and flow. The near and the far. The world careening and letting us just sway with it for now. And the things that we forgot how to love are supporting us. Remember green? Remember blue? Remember salivating and drowning and loosing yourself from the taut rope wrapped so secretly around your neck? Would you gargle with raw sewage? Would you jump rope with a live wire? I thought so.

They Dropped Us Off Here Without Our Consent.

This scent prevails: penniless little kids and those lives fast forwarded in an email stream to return to sender with a defunct address. The Rest Home for the Wicked has gone bankrupt and now the teenagers are drunk and flying out into bread winning casts along the roadways. You call me what my credit card says. The bones are the ones that hold us up aren't they? Then why do I feel this sense of deflation when I feel so empty? They are all in this procession that is leading to the horizon where a slow burn of beaten hymns and depthless pallor shine unadulterated like nothing before. I fucked it up. I sent it out without. I fucked it up. I feel my hands shaking into blurry messes while the tome of this increase writes itself without me. The bricks in the deathly palindrome that is our lives folding so the ends meet: Rest Home for the Wicked. And yet, no rest. Be there or lose hair. From stress.

The Ah-Ha Moment.

Where do they all come from, these things that swirl around my ever blurring vision of myself like this vortex of tell tale signs in a horror novel. Coming together and pulsing and getting me all wrapped up in bandages and string; crepe paper draped over saturated crimson pinata bloated with candy. And the sweets are my doubt. And the bat releasing the inside is my search. And the kid that keeps swinging is unknown to me. The waking dream lets me wander into the foreground while the camera continues to focus on the background. I become all fuzzy and silly and there's this creeping sense of disbelief. A snapping back to context: I really am here where I was and now I'm not. A quick realignment: I'm me. The cardinal swings lazily in the wind without a care, dying and living all together now. Coming apart later when I leave. I look down and the pebbles I disrupt reach their present points where they map out prisms and geometries. They come together just this one time and I leave it alone. Because I wonder, "Is the smoke still all over the place?" Are we not solid but swarming the air like atomic bees? My thoughts like a bubble in a comic book above my head.

I'm Like a Mirror: I'm Nothing 'til You Look At Me.

So here it is: I don't know where I'm going and I wish for you sweep a flashlight out into the darkness to pierce the fog of where I'm headed.
Do you understand how close to you I am? Do you know how close I am? Do you know that I'm asphyxiating before your eyes? My face plump and ripe. Maroon with eyes like pinballs bouncing through whatever it is you've become. You look like this sighting of the Mother Mary on the underside of a bridge; a stain that we all hope is something with the attributes of mystery and salvation. You look like a brindled little expression of my aspirations two decades ago, where I spanned an ocean and looked up at the stars with a twinkle of bonfire in my eyes way off in the distance of my inner self. Like this set of plates slowly jettisoned into the pained sky with skeet in tow. Just before the pewter is shattered and the binged redneck with bleeding tattoos shutters with delight. You are a creation of my own. You are what I think people think I am. You are completely made up and yet I live my life by you. Wrens and larks keep flying in and out of the fissures in the sky and I don't see where they go or why they keep coming back. That darkness beyond this world is what we all put together; what we all work towards to self create our selves so we stop thinking our lives are going no where. The more I think of myself in this way, the more I become that way. The way, this ever winding path: like father, like son, like a rather excessive pun.

This Certainly Missed Connection.

Who
you
thought
I was,
I am
not.
Who
you
think
I am
I will
not be:








Oh so good it is to be like that one wisp of air
drawn across your lips so fleeting it isn't fair.
Just this one moment to be striding in your eyes,
at this age it has to be easy to sympathize.
Like a thin sheet of ice on river bend,
my exterior can be torn thin, set to rend.
I have a tenderness inside of me like small animal,
looking bleary eyed with hopes to run but crawl.
crawl, sprawl, it's all that my sensitivity can muster,
after all, this is a blizzard it survives, a bluster.
Coldness at every turn keeps it to its knees,
at times it lies down, but springs and careens.
When instead of my lips longing to be the gust of wind,
they are actually making connection with your grin.
That longing little creature keeping me alive,
makes plans for the future to strive.

A lost little thing written for you two winters ago. When I was first introduced to your smile.

Brothers, In a Sense.

I feel like writing myself into a corner. Trauma skin period piece: the size of a mouse with the weight of a gravestone. Dislike of specific people with regards to their passports and how they talk. Mental masturbation without climax bringing red eyed madness jogging often with presidential candidates and stopping for a slow motion fast food meal. The cash register appears to be malfunctioning as the buttons are greasy and the keys are jagged with the whetstone running quickly like some recent jailbreak. French people having animated conversations while the cold ekes into my arms. Everything seems to be happening together. Looking out the window of the internet I see that Tom Waits has a daughter my age. For some reason this inspires a vague feeling of longing and despair. As if her life must be a testament to my self worth. It's better over there and worse over here. A flash bulb explodes above the bouncers shiny dome of a skull and there you are. Waiting in a line for something that will bring shame and loss into your life. Street drugs lessening the blow and this is why we do them. This is why we let go of the reins fastened to our stampeding panting rueful waking dream. I don't see you out there, lover. I don't see you anywhere, lover. I don't even see the possibility of you. Lover.

Echo Echo Echo Echo Echo.

Where is this going? This line of fresh daisies and acrid smoke. This line drawn taut like fishing line bringing up this total abandon and friendly parents across the street from the depths with the calm breeze of blue and gray. Crashed out with a streaming fire dolled up with blisters and cracks along the ever present freeway of your heart that circulates the longing and interruptions of freedom. This isn't going anywhere. Is it? I'm just gaining weight. Emotionally speaking, all this baggage. And the brain surgery didn't help. And these ink trails leaking down my sides: the dramatic dripping off me like pinstripes. Ah well. The emptiness is like silence and the filler is just a cacophony. If I could hear correctly I wouldn't want to anyways. Get it over with, take out the parts that aren't doing it anymore. Cut off my limbs and paint gaudy smiles upon my upper arms. Take off the lampshade and squint at what was dampened before. Feel along the underside of the crease. Fold in my heart where likenesses of foolhardy explorers were carved to the disappointment of me, myself, and cry outside near the casting glance of a river that fills up with the clouds all so blue and clear. Is it pink or blue? Is the mind a tone? A hue? Does it change color when it deceives itself? A procedure will be needed soon to make sure this doesn't go too far.

Is Anyone Even Listening Anymore?

Be careful when your fingernails stop growing. I am in a sea of milk: cloudy supine like roots growing around a baby's bottle. I am in a sea of ink: depths unlike the shallow bathtub blooming with slit wrist flowers. But different somehow, when the serene twilight looks down on you like a father. When your hair curls around your cheeks like my desire. When I lose sight of my want, there will be the moving of the feast from far away to right here. My hands all atwinkle and stupid with fright shaking delightful. The fingernails stop growing: yes, just be careful. I want there to be this unfolding mystery getting darker and darker with every light we turn on. I want to drink of lactating nipples and draw upon soils tasteless and auburn. But I want to stare it down as it descends and let the knife slowly enter my heart. I want the blood to pump hard and sear metal pins through me with a driving rain. My knowledge of my own mortality. It comes quick. It bears a fuzzy little pill that shuts down my very function. It lets me off softly. To just drift, oh, just to drift out there with the tons of often forgotten aspirations. This life is funny when you pretend. Just pretend. Say nothing when you feel yourself slip away. Hold your tongue. Like a fine catch upon a crystal hasp. Hold it there writhing.

Almost Museum Quality.

Crinkly: The only way to describe a thirteen hour work day after three hours of fitful sleep. These tender hands like frills on a rug and the body billowing without conscious wavelengths. Empty tender: sallow, creased eyes rolled up like dollar bills loosely piled upon something for someone with a predisposition for lamb destruction without a purpose. They're grazing upon the bedspread like tiny balls of cotton and my eyes lolling, looking out upon the expanse of tailored squares led to believe they are some landscape full of tiresome creatures made to grow hair and die. Made to blow fair and timely winds across this verdant patch low down on the planets waistline. Upside down and harpooned with the urban lightplay shooting up in my eyes I've realized the seasons are reversed and I'm having a holiday barbecue with someone I abhor. The alcohol is a calm hand upon my brow and the tears leap into the pores like pre-drowned kidneys all wasted up in the long forgotten inebriated early morning hours. Where someone drained a bottle and someone looked out upon a city landscape with a sentiment akin to infant gurgles. Where something fell without sound. Where no one heard: I've lost a good thing and gained a good thing. Where no one saw: I've severed a good thing and attached a good thing. Where there was an abduction in the woods and at that precise moment, the preteen debutante was released from her horrifying ransom grab situation into the loving embrace of her preternaturally endowed financial predicament. Some sort of arrangement must be made to keep a logical ratio of sleeping and waking lest the zombies walk out into the fields to become me in a moment or two.

Incredulous Drunk.

The knife of my mind continues to pare down my heart like a coin operated fortune teller with automated responses. And the coins I insert are my memories. And I will nurture my vices like children and give over every rapturous moment to the reckless abandon of a bottle getting drained while the gutters run and the alleys sag and the buildings loom and the men slink. The cutlery hangs upon the magnetic knife holders nailed into the particle board. You have this passion around you like a static charge and you don't know where it goes or why it's there. You have this sense of pain that lets the blues ink your vision very slowly. You have this way of letting me know that I am not going anywhere with the self deception turning in my mind slow like a cement mixer. It's all there, waiting to be laid out and leveled out, but it's liquid now. It hasn't hardened, this silly sense of sorrow. Those bottles and those smokes are a double edged blade that sends those thoughts running while inviting them in. I want to live a life with a real sense of pain. Not an imagined one. I want to pare down my melodrama into a catastrophe of reality. I want the car wreck out there on the plains where the ever droning countryside wraps itself about the misery like an electric fence to be something fictional and forgotten until it's real. Until it's real, I want this tired dramatic affair to lose itself amongst the branches of my temporal thought patterns. The forehead is like some runty little child holding a magnificent object behind its back, clutched in its sticky hands the source of that which causes us to be what we are. So here we are, hiding everything behind our skulls, leaving behind that which torments us only to turn the corner to fall straight into the loving grip of systematic sadness. The realization that the drama is self imposed is a quiet victory.

Affluence: Breeding Ground for Self Pity.

When the eyes of his lover meet his, he folds his arms; as if he consciously wishes his limbs to resemble the frail crosses bridled with plastic flowers along the freeway underpass. Rest in peace they say. "It's funny that our bodies fit but our minds don't." He whispers it coyly and she doesn't hear him and smiles, taking the murmured statement as positive, just as the tone was. Positive and sexy; uplifting, even. Yes, it is funny that the emotional realm can have everything to do with what isn't physical. His perceived empty inside just blowing cold and scary, depthless, not the truth, not truthful. But not depthless as in endless, depthless as in shallow. As in a matte gray expanse held close to his eyes; so close as to render his eyes useless, all blurry and unfocused. And that is what he champions in this life: disconnection, loss, puerile subversions, massive blood loss (of the mental sort), creation of doubt, anonymity, the feeling of dull aching. Problematic and decisive. Self fulfilling and all inclusive. This club welcomes us all, her eyes seem to say as she slips an imaginary knife in his gut. "You've just gotta be willing to see what's real and what's imaginary." Don't let this ever present heart pull you 20,000 Leagues under because there isn't anything but ropes, razors, firearms, exhaust pipes, and pill bottles down there. The stereotype of melodrama prowls down there. Down there where you can't see that these fantasies of abandon are immature because of the lack of sunlight. Just sulfur burning your eyes and a single blinking light attached to a predator. Glass bones and pressure sensitive frames, well we've got those up here too. "So don't," she says, "don't go down there."

Sincerity Assured.

Another bridge burnt, she places with steady hand two years on the chopping block. A baby bird alights upon her shoulder and looks into her eye like the past. He's been having dreams of her, contemplating some way to go back in time. He's been leaving behind traces of guilt like spent up moments loose in the current. He wants what he's lost. She coos in his ear as a mother bird would. He realizes that he's in love and there is nothing there but an empty memory all cut up and groaning with all of the dreams and anonymity he knows now. What were those times on the platform connecting the dots and feeling like there was no way to feel but good? The moment when a confession of affection was given he had a stitch in his step like the yarn wrapped around his heart strangling. It was because of the hurdles in the track, the entire three years dwindling trying to pretend he didn't have the feelings he had just so he could say he wasn't a home wrecker. But he was. And he still is. And it just pours out like a scarf wheeling from the needles of that endearing old woman on her porch caring and dear. Knitting something for the past and now the future. Oh this ever present heart forces him against the winds. He'll just continue flying against it and curse the barriers that he doesn't even know exist. And mother bird lets out her wings so far away as he just flutters and wheels across the sky like some tender moth spun up in the web. He sees it though. And he wishes he was there.

Storage Space for Past.

He's got no cure for old noise. As in to say he'd follow you through the underbrush near the interstate, around the bridge embankment and towards the foundation of the concrete monolith to where all the burnouts tear holes in themselves with crystal pipes. And the old noise would be a metallic and vintage reproduction of a Roy Orbison song, and Patsy Cline and Howlin' Wolf would sing duets as the tenuous grasp on reality fell further like a tattered old curtain keeping the environment from steeling too steady a gaze upon your existence. He's got immaculate style and that ain't all. He's got spit. And teenage blues. And severed ties. And a switchblade that springs from the pocket like a broken tooth on a clown. He sneers at you in the halls of the haunted house knowing you'll always be older than him. He takes your ticket at the box office with a bubble of spittle keeping him company. He gets paid in wooden coins and bark chips. Minimum wage but it seems like more than you'll ever have. Those tennis shoes keep in time with the pulsing beat of something that seems old but is new and you are not one of them because you have a memory and he lives in a shoebox torn from a treeline while you have a garage door opener pinned to your lapel like a brooch. He presses the button and the door opens really far away, all rusty and sallow. But you can hear the creak of it. You can see the way it creaks in his pinkly rimmed eyes looking at you like you should've been done with this a long time ago.

That Halo All Shiny.

When he opened the door in the back of Roosevelt's head it felt like pissing on a national icon in a fit of passionate inebriation. The L.A. Lakers swam about his mind, pumping up their high tops before jamming on his hoop, shattering the backboard. Abraham Lincoln turned his head just at the right moment to the surprise of John Wilkes Booth and Truman hesitated with his hand over the switch with a single tear rolling down his cheek like a stampeding buffalo traipsing along the great plains with the arrows whispering amongst it's ears. All of the canals were built when malaria was taken away. And he is a National Treasure as he walks amongst the inner cognitions of a nation's makers, within the brain of the past that made the future. The big stick is still there, except now no one speaks softly. The exclamations echo off the walls and foreign policy is a game changer with a red face and urban sprawl growing like acne upon the face of the earth. The Monroe Doctrine feels like a long time ago and all those tired souls stumbling to the desert are still cursing Manifest Destiny. And it's wasted. And we're here. And we've lost the pill bottle that held our pharmaceutical escape. And as the final shot hangs suspended in the hush of the crowd as the clock clicks to zero with a plethora of dreams and destinies hanging on the results of this game, Mount Rushmore just sits there, all five of them knowing they are made out of a mountain that was sacred to those they helped destroy. The guilt is like a glimmer in the periphery; a superfluous idea amongst concrete pillars of dust that shouldn't be hard. But they are.

Beam Me Up. Jim Beam Me Up.

Keep close and listen now: those that know you will be left to wonder as you ascend up the tractor beam. Who were you? Where are you now? Did they ever know you? Well, now the answer is clear. Probably not. For one thing, they never thought you to be the type to be abducted by an unidentified object, let alone a flying one. And in the darkness of the trembling woods, no less. And they're sure you'll return with a corncob pipe swinging from your toothless gob while lisping a diatribe of accusations. The conspiracy theories will tumble from your mouth as if your esophagus was the favorite playground slide. As if the the nations children were all just minute details in an overwrought plan designed to make us believe science fiction had taken you for a ride. You took a Star Trek. You went where no man had gone before. You lost fifty dollars to a space card shark and dived to the bottom of an ectoplasm fifth of space vodka. Good for you. When you're watching the documentary film the fringe director arranged to cast a light of derangement upon your structuredly unstructured plight to the chagrin of your family lawyer, notice the glimmer of amber light in your eyes moments before the pine sways eerily to the futuristic whir of the cataclysmic obstruction in your life, to the start of your eccentric life of ravings, the stop to your melodrama of mundanity. Notice that you had a light in your eyes like coils within the toaster as your breakfast slowly burns. You had something annoying and subtractive fleshing itself out in your mind even before this tragedy of interstellar proportions descended upon you. You were something all unspun and poorly dealt to begin with. Jean Luc Picard had nothing to do with you.

Well Done. Burnt.

Use a crayon to edit me out. For my celestial insides are orbitting too fast. They should not be published. My flap waves in the wind whilst the careening shipwreck of a life continues to confound. It's a white flag for a feeling. It says I give up. These tiny bodies are squishy and give way easy to the touch but to no avail. They still scare me when I feel them move around and making plans. I truly am sorry for what I said but I apologize as the dramatic drips off me like pinstripes. The tommy gun kicks back in a mist of pain and pink and those figures in the distance fall indinstinct amongst the tent sites for the wicked and abandoned. I can't seem to squint hard enough to make them out; the daily inconsistencies are the ever strengthening force of the blurred life. Each day keeps me wondering how to live. I know that it is a step by step process, this binding of the hands to get work done. Yea I know that it's continuous and winding. But there must be a chart somewhere that predicts the eliptical path each piece of myself will take. It can't just be random can it? Or are these tenuous journeys of essences just random flashes in the night sky? Is the sky falling just to reveal yet another endless dark expanse just behind the previous one? The curtain could be burning down but the audience just applauds enthusiastically as the flames reach the first aisle. I'm inside a building eating itself up and I can't help but cheer. I love it.

Thrasher: On Death and the Clean Slate.

Within his mind there are two states: one where he is dead and another where he is vomiting all his past out upon the clean slate. It's either one or the other for him, posthumous or empty. There he is: Thrasher. A writhing bit of this world shaped like a human and wrenching the depths of the comic carnival up to the surface for the ooooooo's and aaaaaaah's of the crowd. His countless chins tell a tale of mispent youth where motorcycles ushered in an era of LSD mind benders and screaming aside bonfires to the pulse of a boombox emitting static and fog. He wandered the desolate landscape of a stricken valley. He transcribed an account of something unspeakable. He tore his hair out at the roots for lack of a thing to do. And his skeleton was left behind because the slate just wouldn't stay clean. It was marred from the beginning. He was already dead to it. So this duplication of selves recieves it's reason through the trials of a man with a passion all burnt out. Thrasher is a tough sack of shit and he lost his pension when the warehouse collapsed. But that was just a premonition. To him, it all happened before. The naivete and the disillusionment are waking dreams. Within Thrasher is the coming together of the babe and the geezer for one last wrestling match. And this bout? Oh this bout is the one that determines who gets to pin the Death Notice on the front door of Thrasher's gut.

Yes this is the Way.

Beaming down from heaven, a globular iridescence feeling green but with orange teeth. My Entrance Exam. Where my tears are meaningful and the dark umber hues of this room are shades of what is to come in their life. Dangling wooden limbs attached with coils of copper slowly emulating the movement of an alien with hands like night lights. A halo splashing a tawny glow of verdant neon upon facial ridges and cavernous wrinkles. This room is multiple choice. The fourth choice is all of the above and it must be the truth. A Number Two Pencil with a single leaden eye scrawls passionate essays of listening skills and comprehension; a yellow cyclops on a stupid rampage. But the meaning is lost and there isn't much to be said of this simple test that will determine my entire life without even asking what will become of me in my day to day journey through this pretense. Here: You hold your arms this way, with your wrists loose and your hands dangling. Here: You let those oceans swell past your eyes and drip endless and salty down your bright cheeks. Here: You paint your mouth like fire. Here: You are on the verge of passing. Passing a loved one in the street. Passing the crevasse where the fauna breeds and has it out for you. Passing into another whatever it may be. Passing the point of no return: An Entrance.

All the Rest Mixed Up.

And here are the pieces of ourselves arranged in a pleasing manner. So that we can feel ourselves pull slightly. Draw tight the strings of our hearts and knit them together. A pattern that will strain each part of that emotive muscle equally to avoid emotional bankruptcy. Tie ribbons around the ends of each finger. Attach the loose ends to the trembling branches of the family tree so that we will know our way through the brambles of history and fate. Set fire to the funeral pyre and let the light reach into the depths of your chest all taciturn and delicate. Don't bear the weight of the world alone while the birds dice the gray canopy of clouds into manageable sections with rain for tears. Tend to these pieces with a simple bow upon your head: your mind all wrapped up like a gift to the one who gets you.

Dreams of Space Child.

When he was a child he had facial recognition surgery and they sent him up way too high with a knapsack full of tired ideas. The dishes were all dirty and his mother spent hours scouring the silver with a look of shock on her face. For there was her child blasting off into oblivion with teeth like razors. The moon spilled across the night like a glass of milk and still she cried; spilt milk be damned she couldn't get over this. Spatial trinkets floated about his withered little suit of clouds in zero gravity. He wakes up with the landlord wailing on his door. Sitting up in his soiled bed the detritus of his existence surrounds him like an interstate gut splatter. Where was his mother now? Had he ever returned from the empty vacuum of space? The answer is hard to come by when he reflects upon his life. He sweeps the kitchen floor and avoids the clock while the teapot reaches a boil. Ever so slight are his steps across the expanse of this rented room. As if each step was another statement in an argument defending the worth of his life. He looks through the skylight and has a panic attack remembering the look of the lonely planet we all live on through the space port as the rocket swept him far away.

Coal Condenses Into Diamond.

Their pieces are of the same puzzle but the pieces are too many and doused with lighter fluid. Their arms intertwine in crooked serious paralysis as a match is held between his thumb and her forefinger. Just as when they first looked into each others eyes; that drop of a feeling like the piano falling thirteen stories with a cerulean backdrop of pulsing strobe skies fast forward. In love for the first time and the last, just so quick that it couldn't be taken for anything but an offensive measure. Strike anywhere and yes, that is how it was. Everywhere they went their love was aflame engulfing the maps of their cities and homes until every urban silhouette was on fire. There was no escape because they had it all and nothing would suffice for they would tear it all down. And their map became ashes. And their story became legend. And their loneliness became the past. The search party looking for completion found the orphan there in the woods and we're holding each other close and it's not all in vain. Years dispersed the histories over decades and there they had a life and a marriage and a black mirror omnipotent told them their lives were predictable. And like a trumpet falling on a flat note after the solo where the musician just stopped having that blue glow after quitting the heroin, the heart steadied then hiccuped and it didn't have it anymore. Something unnameable was gone and it was irretrievable. Their love is the lighter fluid and their fingers work together to flick the match. With the flame dropping down upon the pieces their lives flash before their eyes and they are there in there forever. Their romance was a run-on sentence and they will be edited down because the lives of the irrational will be documented in a logical fashion and the smoldering remains of this thing that was a puzzle completed and taken down will go down in history as something digestible and succinct.

The Undoer.

I feel you under there getting the bills paid and
riling up the gold fish so that it continues its lap about the bowl to the cat's amazement. And I feel you under there giving the tightness to the spider's web and shaking the air molecules to rattle the leaves of the tree upon which the spider glides and catches the dim recollections of a short life within the glimmer of the fly's eye before wrapping up the prize for sustenance. I feel you under there. Taming the word in order to break up the long term relationship between understanding and action. I feel you under there letting our mindless actions deviate all our conscious wants. Stacking the blocks up very high married blind and garishly fine, up there in the sun and stars and moon. A green diamond up there. A simple mark upon my arm to let me know I feel you under there. A symbol of the knowing, the gone and done it, the tell tale sign, the lessening of dread, the yes and no, of the feeling of you under there. Oh, Undoer undoing everything to make it seem like where we are isn't where we want. Undoing the storm that passed without event to instead drop gracious lightning bolts down on the birdhouse that was the object of affection for the single woman who stared longingly out the picture window at those cardinals and bluejays streaming through the clouds like streamers of the pageant. Undoing the work of the earthworm and leaving the soils barren where we can see that what we do here is futile until there is a realization that we are on a path towards our own undoing. I feel you under there and it tickles.

Paisley Femme Fatale.

Can she be like Anne Oakley reigning supreme upon a braying steed slathering with comic books shredding down upon the trails browning and brittle amongst the bridled adolescent dreams of the boys fallen asleep at last watch. Or could she be like tin girl soldier all arms and legs awkwardly snaking one skinny limb around the corner to carefully replace the cosmos to their sense of order without the penny eyed young man noticing. A perfumed doll of glare and shadow is perched upon a mountain of lacy white pillows and bloody neckties. I'm easily wounded. Her eyeliner's the fur of the puma. I sit with a frilly smile embroidered on my face with the past laid over my brow like a shroud. I could've just said I'd let her take her time. I could've neared the wreckage with the steely gaze in my eyes bludgeoning my surroundings. I could've acted for the Oscar and held the broken hope in my hands like an award. But I rode off into the horizon of a bottle for six months and came out on the other side of the Pacific rim. And the doves are swirling with the future in mind. The dark shapes are waving white sheets and darning the socks that would've been used for the bandits costumes. The ones that would've taken everything. They didn't and I've still got this grin up there where the emotion comes from. They didn't, those bandits, take everything. The paisley kerchief hanging there slack does its slow bobbing in the wind and never unveils the lover that shot me through the heart. Surprisingly, life is going on and that lofty idea still lingers undisturbed and waiting to happen. She waltzes slow through my dream, waiting for me to find her and finally fall in love.

That Man's Dreamcatcher Earring.

Don't look into that dreamcatcher earring too deep. Inside that tiny red jewel lies all the nightmares that tried to get into that man's mind while he slept with a stuffed lamb clutched in his arms. Inside there is the tearing of a universe where the love and loss all come at you together. Arm in arm the insane and the destitute red rover across the yard of your childhood with eyes aglow and dripping iodine stained brown with sadness. The orange streaks ordain you into the ministry of memory loss and catatonia. Your madness roams out upon the dearly defiant desert a thousand miles long and your dehydration escalates into a frenzy while the vultures whisper loving tunes of digesting your body rotting. Your mind is carrion and you are trash floating in a gutter should you look too deep into that man's dreamcatcher earring. These desolate feelings are why he wears it at all times, this stylish dreamcatcher earring. Should he fall asleep, he'd be protected from the cacophony swirling about in the cyclone touching down at this moment. Should he take a catnap he would not be the mouse. His protection is a guarantee that there is a black death rearing it's ugly head for everyone lest they erect a wall about their souls to hold back the chorus of massacre and pestilence. Yes, it seems melodramatic, and yes, it is. But what if it weren't overreacting? What if this man's stylish dreamcatcher earring was the only thing holding him from oblivion? The crimson jewel like a pulsating heart catches your eye for a reason.

Empty Gray Landscape.

On the road westward and trying to keep to the left where the ocean stands silent like a 1920's picture show; black and white and cold. Ashen gray, we all look into everyone else's eyes and keep our lockets clasped with our hearts betting on the failure of the other. Our trip lacks a sense of direction. He's self conscious and she is immutable and the other stands upon the outcrop of tossing sheets like clouds in negative relief. Developing mute tones in the dark room they are three little personalities without working senses. They just want to keep moving for the possibility and hope of it all. Their lives are all wrapped up in folds of taut skin enveloping them like crepe paper. They taste acrid. They would be bitter if they could feel. They are like statues and I have a feeling it won't end well. Because the ocean has stopped and they three stand on the shore in a freeze frame. The reel has stopped and the crowd breathes in a guttural breath of stale air. A realization spreads across their collective consciousness; it's like a mirror breaking. The history was written for failure, for neither side winning. For the trenches to be dug and the stalemate to continue even after the tide has ebbed. There is no way out, these stolid figures in profile seem to say. The closed sign swings in the window of the teller booth while the stork stands there with an infant swaddled in plastic sheeting looking to make a deposit. Looks like another orphan is born through gone-for-broke transactions. Looks like we'll just carry ourselves onward down the road ever westward. Those three sculptures just look forward enrapt with the silence of the sea just there no matter how improbable. These words are unraveling and I'm not here to make sense of them for you.

An Absence of Choice.

He awakens in a sweat and looks in the mirror. He is looking more and more like the man who is doing it in Mulholland Drive. It's because of that poor thought in his mind that keeps coming back. Like a lazy susan in a diner stooped upon a dead highway; those sickeningly sweet desserts revolving, coming back again and again. Here is the idea: there is a woman out there with no face. There is a woman out there with two scalps and no face. There is a woman out there without eyes to look into, without tongue to form syllables, without cheeks upon which tears spill over; with none of these but a personality like a whip still. This plagues his evermore tormented soul and he awakens over and over thinking of what this could mean. What would become of him if should she walk in the door with hairstyles done up well. If she should storm in full of spite and begin her diatribe on his worthlessness; all these words pouring from a hole, an absence. All these arguments irrefutable due to the untraceable nature of it all. How can he defend himself if there is no source? If there is a black hole where there should be a target? No, he won't do it, he'll just sweep the iridescent blue box into the soiled paper bag and he'll keep her in that fantasy where she is falling in love and where the suicide and murder has yet to occur. He will be the torment, he will be the ghost in the hallway. That difference between loss and gain is blurred when there is a choice. She'll stay back with her visage like mist and he'll continue pacing in the alleyway wondering when the wall will crumble to reveal his plan.

Sunken Rainbow Voodoo.

I thought that the dark arts would give me some sort of perspective on that which stalked me in the night. Waking upon cool nights with a lightning bolt teasing my chin, my hair prickly and brazen, my eyes dance fantastic. My toes are lost years of my life keeping me afloat. My ears lean out over the chasm of the sonic landscape like tormented antennae. My skin is a blanket of oil billowing out over the surface of a sea unknown and uncharted. All the organization under the surface fights and breathes and longs to see the burning coal of a sun once more before sinking to the depths beneath. My hands are crooked gangsters screaming down lost highways towards the nuclear glow teeming upon the horizon. They lost their motivations to two bit bookies years ago, their direction askew across the torment of a bet that took everything. My feet are tired junkies spilling their guts in methadone clinics, unable to take themselves anywhere. The needle crowded with disease looks like a parole officer in the effervescent moonlight. My brain looks out across the jagged water from the lighthouse with a toothpick hanging from its mouth. The toothpick is a method of acting that helps to lose a sense of being. And two voodoo dolls just fell down from the heavens. And the darkness gathered and I felt a pitch in my belly like an ocean's swell. And a rainbow broke through the clouds and a pattern of reds and browns categorized the landscape before me. These teeth are men with batons beating back the riot and these eye sockets are rubber bullets leaving welts. The blood rituals are the only things keeping the daily melodrama from wreaking havoc upon my normal mind. Each of these vestiges of sanity, these sunken and spectral dolls, are like delicate strings holding up my swaying heart. The meaning of the ceremony is lost amongst the feathers and claws and tired moans.

The Grief Family.

They remember like it was yesterday, The family Grief. The tired moments waking up in the dim twilight wishing it was morning, getting the coffee ready so no one collapses in a waste leaving skid marks on the pavement of the kitchen floor. The grandmother keeps time with a cane across the swept tiles and pretends that these people were what she had hoped of her loins. The mother awakens with a gasp and stares into the depth of the ceiling without remorse. The father gives a sideways glance to his faithful wife and knows that today will bring nothing. The young boy rolls restless in the sheets keeping time with his ever present heart. The toddler writhes in his onesie feeling an absence unknown like the coming of an entire life without premonition. Something like the inescapable has descended upon this family; a net across a dog frothing and tongue lolling with eyes all keen with understanding of what won't happen anymore. And the matriarch that is this grandmother sits, statuesque and stony, in the sparkle of the immaculate sideyard with a psyche prone to control and tight grasps. They all get up in sync, a sort of marionette show with strings and cogs and tears that never come out but lay within the bearer to stay where they are. I can't seem to figure out what is making me feel so frightened, thinks the young boy as he lifts his hand to his face. I've felt something like a phantom across my mind for years, thinks the mother as her Clinton suit coat wraps her shoulders like a shroud. I know that this is the one track I'll be on for decades, thinks the father as his cup dangles from his finger shaking. These pajamas make me what I am, thinks the toddler as his toes wriggle and dance in their impersonation of a cantor. This. Is. For. You. Grandmother we've gotten you something to make amends. You don't know what I've felt this last century, you've no way to atone for what I feel is missing, thinks the grandmother as a collection gift passes into being from the only people that will ever love her tired heart. They've been trudging ever so presently into being what they are: something that is buried up in personal tragedy and pawns that moved without their masters. A game like a pinball machine and the family Grief looks into the silver balls coming towards them like glistening eyes in the tunnel. This life just bounces them about and they rattle. They drip their insides out when the other isn't looking. Just tip the bottle to the dregs and you'll see a bit of their sentiments roll out like daggers. There is a well of feeling underneath the foundation of this house that roils and trashes. These tired souls just walk unsteady and unlikely upon the trembling skin of their past and wish for the best with entrusting eyes. It keeps them upset and waking up and lost and feeling unkempt. The barn burning of the past is gone and they're left with clinical ambience to miscalculate their passive aggressive gambits. The poker game just goes on and on. The grandmother knows she'll never go all in while the rest just keep their faces sewn up tight.