Nighty Night.

That loan sister came out of the crawl space with a cramp in her side like a piece of chocolate.  She claims that no one ignores her anymore.  Her original use is to be unnoticed.  She gets all this attention and she isn't up to it.  She was made for extreme neglect; wandering eyes looking off to the cobwebs where the daddy long legs holds a search party for struggling prey.  And there are eddies of particles shimmering in the air, dust angels lost amid the empty space between everything we make up of ourselves.  Her personality feels threatened by all the questions.  Are your eyes where they need to be?  Do your arms make noise?  Have your hips continued to baffle?  She knew Madrid was a place to go, anywhere was, really.  She knew she could get married and hear her husband whisper bridey bridey bridey in her ear as she fell over a cake.  But it was not meant for her.  Her hands twitch and contort:  thoughts rolling like eyes through her head.  Get me get me get me out of this hospitality.  So she wanders away from the house she came out from under.  She leaves things behind;  her flesh and bone, her biography of Abraham Lincoln, her previous volition to maintain a callous existence.  In front of her lies a haunted jungle, all verdant and stupid with yipping nothing dark and dense.  Behind her is what she thought was a biography of Abraham Lincoln.  Wrong, it is a biography of Gertrude Stein.  And she slips into that humid terror like a dress and wakes up in a stranger's house.  There are glow sticks scattered about the floor like oily teeth on Halloween.  As she sits up in delight, stars erupt before her eyes; neon ghosts are making everything work for her.  

Another Lost.

When my previous son was born I set an oyster cracker on his head and said he was done.  He turned out wrong.  Soggy from the beginning, he let the fascination slip into the soup of his childhood; tasteless, dumpy, sickeningly sweet.  He put a lacy cap on his scalp and let his hands creep into his locks.  The tumbling curls bloomed down the sides of his trembling, perennial glare.  Do you remember if your childhood went out safely?  Does that reel spinning in your head accurately portray what made you in the early years?  My son's don't.  He keeps his eyes open with the sun dumping it's rays in there like garbage bags wrapped around plastic doll parts.  Cloudy in there, lost inside a horse race that goes round and round and gets him up each morning.  The competition never comes to pass.  I know, it's tasteless to keep him in the fantasy.  There isn't a Melbourne Cup happening anywhere near him.  This fascinator atop his head isn't going to woo the venture capitalists.  They won't be persuaded to lay a piece of a poor country upon his finger.  They aren't there for him when he wakes up sobbing from the slight fares he pays in nightmares. But I keep him satiated with perfunctory glances like 24 karat gold necklaces with fake diamond insets.  His eyes glisten and glow and get stupid with thought.  What if.  What if you had what you wanted.

Product Placement.

When the apocalypse laid it's fingers over the edges of the horizon my skin began crawling like ants in milk.  Slowly, my American resolve curdled into thick folds of self serving skin.  I plead:  Let me keep my hands and the way they do things.  An answer reveals itself in the clouds as electronic waste coils around my ankles.  Not necessary.  I lay me down with eyes unable to stop gazing, an interstate mind in a backwater world.  All of the nutrient rich peanut paste is gone.  One day, if one could call them days, I will stop the ceaseless wandering.  I will set things down around me in an oval.  The top side will be what I had before the end of the world.  The bottom will hold what was lost.  It will be oriented in relation to the dead last sun.  The top side will face where the sunset implodes into another dumb end to the dusk.  That lonely star looks like the stained edge of a cork now.  When this thing, the razing of society, occurred, I lost my wallet.  I spent the first 17 hours looking for it as the house burned down.  Now I have it; full of pieces of paper that bank issued to me.  My eyes are marbles as the wind volleys grains of sand over them.  I don't know what it was that brought me here.  I know my consumption levels were great before the end.   It was obviously and satisfyingly too much.  I still find it funny when the sun gets up again to confront these gray defeats.

The Mouth of the Issue.

Those sad eyes barrel through me; setting my esophagus open as a tunnel.  And I said, okay, okay.  This can be good, all these things accumulating in me like lost objects.  A pen, a knife, a rusted nail, a broken coffee cup.  Inside of me is like rustling through the leaves in the backyard:  somethings left behind, some in front of you for no reason.  And all the red blood cells mount their horses like riders torn and ride off into dissipation, leaving abnormal levels of chemicals like anguish within me.  I've got to leave and it is going to have an endless feeling to it.  If you could see me before, then you'll never see me now.  When I said I'd do your chore I was just like a sow. And those flames reach to the waist and keep the waves below your wrist.  Shoot your eyes up into paste and get a doctor to look at that cyst.  I will walk into the woods and lay me down for hours.  I will eat up nothing but the goods and pretend I'm building towers.  Something like what I was is what I was.  Something like what I am is what I am.  Like a silent wind through black trees with the moon unfolding a carpet of light for us to walk upon.  We hear bubbling and cursing as we set the thermostat higher.  Bring me those sad eyes for me to open up, let my mouth stand agape as the wind turns the birds to scattered graphite.

Hand to Mouth.

There is a sadness in me that seems out of place.
That black tree that grew across the yard as I cut my teeth
always scratched at my window in order to get me to come over.
And it said I had a glowing pain.
It said I was unable to be sure.
It said there was a possibility of ruin in my heart.
It was a gathering gleam of empty and it tries to take me
down the lonely path.
And it all grew up in me as an instigation.
A sorrow that looses its seductive smile into me like a string of bullets.
The woods wrap themselves around her and she's gone further into the calm.
The humid blanket of twilight further deepens and I hear her ruffle
feathers and dirt and she make herself comfortable.
Such a fool, to listen to her as I stumble after.
And hearing a shatter I trip and I'm just opening my eyes
inside my bed with an electrical cord in my hand.
It was a thick night but only because I had unplugged the box fan.
And my hands like maps of a place I hadn't been
and my mouth gone because it didn't follow
and my eyes blinking without recognition.
She's gone for the moment.
There are so many trees though.

Those Ghosts.

The cold things get to live longer
though they aren't breathing much.
It is as if you want your skeleton
to be gilded with simple glimmer
to brighten the end of sorrow.
Tell me I will die content.
And maybe we do have an essence.
Maybe we don't have to construct facsimiles
of our bodies in hopes
that we may get to see
the sun go down forever.
But oh just to know
that there is something more.
To see those ghosts wink a smile
and leave the room.

Blossom Grief with Imagined Piano.

What the fuck was it that made you this way?, slurs father as Blossom jams his spindles in the air all stupid in rhapsodical parody of a jamstacked to the max piano man real gone on crystal chandeliers and son of a bitch blues.  Blossom lets the unsure beat lure his charred mind through lines of bopping keys and renal failure chords.  He wears stupid stuff that seems like clothing and it is real baggy and charms the shit out of a dog.  The seams don't jive and weave correctly.  He never opens his eyes for he is always in the thick of a sticky imagination with his fingers flailing out before him, his face all screwed up.  His imaginary piano is gilded with rhinestone.

I could slap that face off of you so much!  So quick!  So stupid!, screams father as Blossom sashays around the backyard.  The backyard.  The place where they throw the trash.  The trash seethes wrong in the moonlight if father places it in the bin provided to them by the state.  This makes Blossom scream all night long.  So they must let the garbage blow all over the backyards face.  Father slumps in a lawn chair, his mouth ablur with booze of long gone Sundays still thick on his shirt.  There are palm trees on the shirt.  There is no reason for it all.  Blossom was given to this man as penance for sleeping with a cashier at Petsmart in Gary, IN.  It happened in the birdcages.  He woke up three years later with pink eye and a son named Blossom.  It was, tragically, the mid-90's.  In the throes of a vicious bender, he had named his son after a teen girl lost in the folds of a frumpy sweater on television.  The mother was no where to be seen; she was into dogfood in really weird ways.  Dog parks are not safe.  And the positive emotion movement was in full swing.  And all the children were swaddled in yes-men parenting.  And no one could let the ice cream fall from the lip of the insolent bitch sunk in Barney underwear.

Don't you feel the sneaky self esteem movement convincing you to never stay happy?!  Don't you feel this ever present lust of self preservation slowly squander you?  Don't you see these premium prices tremble as we pay for dump site paranoia personality histories?  I AM LOST ALL OVER YOU, BLOSSOM!  And father just lets a torrent of sickness and rage pour from him like the river that drowns the lovers seeking refuge in the state park.  Blossom does not hear a thing of it.  Blossom lets another fully developed icon of over consumption douche his brain into pristine condition.  He jams hard in his mind.  He gets lost among the lonely pieces of detritus as father sails gloriously into a blackout with urine soaking his zoobas.  They spin as marionettes in a snow globe filled with nothing but their wants of this all to stop; yet another set spun of the Grief Family genes.

No More A Source of Warmth.

She thought she was a lover but she's not one.  Just the pinprick empty, her body all numb.  When the neighbor turns off the lights she slowly dresses.  Argyle and stripes with a licorice whiplash for protection.  She has nimble moves that make no sense.  The sock hat stifles her ghost writing when she scales the sides of suburbia.  A nuclear beauty of a sunset closes in on the tepid landscape of drawn shades, muesli affluence, and branded monotony.  Her head full up with a cloud, lost in there without a sun.  She wants something she's not capable of.  Hopeless romantic...something something frantic.  And without a purpose she cat burgles and drinks from the bird bathes of unknown magnificently middle class pleasure areas.  In the side yard her body manipulates the darkness.  When she gets into the home she wanders around with her mind taking footage like a blank tape.  None of it is recorded.  She doesn't take anything from the break in.  She doesn't mind leaving behind a feeling of unrepentant idleness.  When the occupants of the house awake in the night it is not to a bump in the night.  It is to a nameless grief that streaks in through the windows out there where the mercury vapor decay dreams up more and more roads that lead to work.  The husband gets out of the vague design he sleeps in and stumbles to the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror with eyes like slate;  she lurks below.  She gets out of there long before the husband points at himself.  She gets away and smirks.  For her's is a life of unseemly cantor in unfamiliar pajamas.  Their bed clothes symbolically wrapping her cold abdomen up in a familial congeniality she can't fathom.  She is of the Grief Family: forever getting typecast as the waste that she is.  She strips off the woolen sweater in the steam of a sultry summer night upon return from another redundancy.  The air thickens around her.  Forgive the lucky end to every moon, she muses as she rides herself into another nightly rut.  She lets go of the crimson cane and it clatters to the floor:  she does not hear a thing.  She pulls the stripes down over her nose:  it doesn't change a thing.  She can't seem to make up her mind on whether she is deaf or blind.

Begin, Third Generation.

The grievous procession waves their hands and they seem to be holding their previous relations at bay while the murk gives them another opportunity to get up and fall down.  They are the third generation of the Grief Family.  No more qualms about it.  The matriarch has fallen.  They tie her up in gaudy pink ribbons and close the lid on her gilded rose coffin with sadness and triumph.  Hats off for the hearse, yet curse each remembrance with a statement whittled thin and terse.  They've got the ideas but not the execution.  Their notions just tease them when they should line them up and shoot them.  And with the smell of death on their shoulders they freshen their breath.  They're a decade older and done up in each others eyes with lies.  Throw everything away so as to doll up this romantic fray.  These days of indecision and insecurity steadily overarching, they are overly conscious of who should get them.  Their words are nothing but gravestones lined up, stone icons of suggestions past.  And present:  They stand.  Done down and damned.  When they set the stone in the muddy ground it will sit and wait.  Over the years the birds will drop their condolences upon the marker and make it look as if it were splattered with marzipan.  Sweet shit, mutters the ugly grandson.  In the haze of the funeral party, each drink is a reminder of the essential inability to express oneself.  They swim out in a consensual circle; the human buoys a chart of single points on a black and white grid.  Unconnected they moan within all this stupid swaying, dim noises out there in the crescent moon refracted upon the surface of something.

Click here for further Grief Family lineage.

Splatter Control.

A chest cavity like an attic with fingers creeping through the eaves:  surgeons prying.  The tips are bats and the ribs are slats, you open the cellar door, the surprise is blinding as one flies through.  In the ceiling there is a creaking, each tone groaning and done with the inside even before reaching the outside.  Down below the family debates the spin of the earth, throwing out the steamy trash.  The rest is all lost.  The rest was ill deserved.  Your rest is ruined.  Sleep up there real nice, keep the smoke roiling out the chimney all wrong.  String up words upon the mantle; they sway upon the inanity like paper lanterns.  They're put up to sympathize with the left and the right that hates.  Your hands interlace to replace the ribs.  No more protection, no more hiding:  the darkness shrouds the writhing heart, staining the slats with ignorance and cheat:  It keeps the beat.  An orchestra appears, curbside melodramatic, releasing violin sobs as the structure tears itself down.  This probably shouldn't have been built up so passionately.  The funding should have dried up long before the first flood blooms erupted in the plaster.  Do not tear it down because it is wrong.  Do it because it will make you weep sweat.

Apocalypse.

In the room where one must wait for a face transplant.  Just right now the one I've got is all bunched and tied.  We draw at the same time and its all screwed up, shooting our mouths off.  The surgeon looks in horror at our mix tape sadness.  Our teeth scattered across graveland tar pools like glow sticks.  The party is over, gone, sought after yet doubted.  The lines in the dark are afterimages.  They'll graft smiles upon our faces with skin taken from unknown sources.

We told ourselves our world would be this thing that sparkled bright in contrast to the loss. And the contract we wrote up was written in motor oil and stupid drip. We said the last twilight will be now as we whispered to each other a requiem for ourselves; the loose leafed promises all flying away with the winters getting mild and the icecaps truly drifting. The mindscape becomes foreboding as the sphere spins on further. The signals are not getting out there. The leap off the cliff proves fatal. The lessor in the papers wanders away without a finite return. Dumping grounds exceed demand. We told ourselves with each proactive measure that the context was the decider: should we get too far the rope around our waists would grow taut. But who has the rope tied these days. Proud and ever present, a personality history draws up the will. Can we be what we want to be? Can this tired marble of rock keep us happy? Can we get the jest long enough to laugh? Will it run after the tune up? And our lines are crooked. Dumbed down to the level where we see a reflection in the madness, our gears slip into a hitch and we grab our sides to keep the ribs aligned. Metal teeth all bright in the darkness. Our bodies like armor, our flesh like chain mail; and we know it doesn't work.

The whole thing is ending some day, and I'm not talking about me or you.  I'm talking about the sun and the moon and the earth.  The very source will expand and burn us all silently to ash and nothing.  It was made finite and I've got a feeling my time is and will be good.  The folds of flesh lay decadent upon my skull like a thirteen layer wedding cake.

Calm Stare.

The convulsions go away at some point: bitter begets sweet.  And you wake up in the dream suddenly; the feeling of memory loss doesn't come. You look into the depths of a well with a glint of life at the deep end. The water, the flow, the glistening down there. You have no problem drifting towards the green sway as you slip into the current. It's soft and calm. The electric tangle above the surface crackles in the distance, that sheet of terror with ever present authority. It's back there but you continue on into the environmental sound. An atmosphere like a diorama of Lego men searching the jungle for a plastic jewel; measures of your childhood and warmth. Construction paper and Play-doh palm trees. The feeling envelops you. It carefully lays hands upon you, pulling the wire hangers from your veins and peeling the dead leaves from your forehead. All the dead wreckage slowly moving away in concentric circles like the radial dancing of birds across the unending sky. You don't try to explain why you don't deserve it. You believe the caress and the gaze. Your tears are of joy and pain through gain. You let it tear a hole through you that won't close. It was close, for a while, that old sadness you wouldn't let go. It was a close call; those leaps into self manipulation. Self deprecation, self mutilation. All for the sake of an illusive idea you didn't even have a grasp of. A vague notion of a gift through desperation. Bitterness gave you romanticized depression. You've been assuming the positive is the negative. Your life as a study in photographic science; the silver nitrate blooming into the opposite of reality. Yes you are sensitive. You are sensitive to light. But it is developed every day. Those blue eyes like stars you've finally learned to navigate by are a proof.

Shadowboxing in the Dark.

Weird sire: sitting there looking at me looking at you. We've both something wrong. Rolls, over consumption. The Rolls Royce traipsing down the boulevard with the starlet enveloped within, crying her eyes into streaks. Rolling the car, rolling the minutes over, rolling the cigarette at 4am. The internal surroundings gleam red hot when I imagine someone else is looking; pokers, coals, errant tasks, lovers, movers. I realize that I half realize everything to the point that we are not in the place but out of it. Nothing makes sense because I am sure someone is watching. But I had a chance and it meant a thing. The thing that seems to whisper out there among the pines with a feather softly swaying from its earlobe. I want the wind to pick up and show this to me: the ever-present anxiety of a lifestyle vague and unremitting.

There he is, his legs dipping into the cold. As old as the fold in the ocean. Nothing. I watched it from afar in a trance, too scared to move: falling through the ice in the soft and narrow and getting saved at the last minute to forever change the course of an entire cycle of family and past. Who was it that was pulled from the current? In the physical it was him, but in the clouds up there it could have been us all. One tragedy is one too many.

They took away the part of the bridge I liked and put something else somewhere else. I don't even know what the problem is. I don't even know where this wanting haunts me from. I'm delusional, thinking, I've got this and not that. The closed door, the muffled sounds heard from the other side. I can't get my head in the present. I'm spending all my time gilding the past like it was something it wasn't. And the sparkle doesn't go deep at all. It only sits on top. Like the truth. It's right in plain sight but I lift it up to look under and there is nothing but what I'm holding onto. My hands are shaking and I'm frightened of death because I feel alone and don't know what to do about it. It's me that's doing it. I'm telling my heart to shut down. I'm willing my love to fuck off. I'm hanging it up and hearing the busy signal while the illusion of what I say I am waits on the other end. This self that doesn't exist. The supposed nice guy, hand cuffed to a suitcase: It opens and the light pours out. Yet, it is never revealed what is inside. I look in there but it isn't me who's looking. Because no one is looking.

All this unkempt feeling. Trying to explain its existence just makes it grow. I don't want this strife anymore. I want a knife to bore deep and cast this exceptional problem out into the past. The last of it moves fast and I open my eyes to see that I'm an adult with a loss for a heart. The part I keep is the broken part. I will box it up with shadows to keep it still.

Rabid Individualism Claims Another Victim.

I felt it and then I didn't and I wrote it down but it couldn't be found. I jumped off a high place with everything blurring around me like headlights on the highway nightscape with the aperture wide open. When I look out over the expanse the sparks keep me quickly throwing my hands to my pockets to make sure it's all there. But it wasn't there to begin with. My face slowly contorts with fireworks making their final entrance with a whoosh of embers and gasoline. These things we are made to think are ours ignite into flash and light. My hands lay down along the riverside and the crew yells cut but I don't get up. The water keeps its current and the clouds lose their path. My eyes rotate: they get red and loving. I want my life to be something that is left behind for the treatable illness. I want to keep sway in the near twilight when the body has given up. A rubber thing all dead and lively, up there in the dark.

The tachometer underneath the skin covering my forehead lets me know pretending is fun and feeling the temptation to take a risk is quite the same as seeing my hands do things I didn't approve. The whole thing that we all do. The everything we say our lives are. The things we say to ourselves. These loose strings are our hands doing things we didn't approve of.

Control, control. To have control over this. Seeing the car that holds your family leave your sight and your hands shake yet they keep going. Its something you can't see; the next track seems to be a big deal, but control is so elusive. They're right around the corner. I tell people things but each statement is a prayer for myself. I tell people what I wish I was. It's just so much easier to tell everyone to be what you want. And deeper is understanding of a thought. There is something underneath everything. I just hope that what is above things I do is something looking down. No more of this kept at bay feeling. You know it's not the truth: its not. I don't want every spark to be my basis for life. I want something to build up, possibly fall. A continuation of things is not giving up.

I put all these things in my body that tell me I can't live without them. I believe them until I'm absent from the room. Getting distracted by the refraction of the sun and knowing the world is a ground upon which seven billion trod. I kept something in my heart to make me special but it's weathered day by day. Because I have a feeling that all these torrents of emotion are nothing. Concession, concession. Why keep this absence going? Closing my eyes, an afterimage of fire dancing upon the insides of my eyelids.