Just So So Just.

Electric death and we're all feeling it.

The pulse throbbing underneath the soil

like a magazine full of black and white images.

From the fifties where the people are gone

but the building still remains.

The bricks whispering cool serene things past,

the women wearing tall hats,

the men straight backed and sneering,

the children quiet,

the holes in the memories.

Everyone looking but not seeing

the cliff in plain sight.

Because all this is for posterity's sake.

Steaks and freight and Sharon Tate.

Studying the massacres to get it just right.

Writing a book about what went wrong

just so we can say the next one was just so.

We are all feeling it,

and yet,

not at all.

The Black Horse and The Planets.

Within the room they ask me:
Is it medication you need?
It is lamentable
just how presentable
this ghost is to my temperament.
And how terrible
just how bearable
it is to boast of a piece absent.
If you pick me up
the line will go dead.
A vector made corrupt.
Don't untangle the wires in my head.
Remember being the thing that you wanted.
Out there, out there.
Far away birds fly.
The trees dark and things caught in them.
I know that you have seen them.
I know the planet is giving us the run around.
These planets hot and cold saving themselves from fright.
These planets losing steam and too quick.
They get up and that black horse got me.
Remember when it hadn't.
Society has made it a shame to get down in the low between.
Medication has gotten somewhere in between.
Somewhere in between the depression and the expression.
A recession of genuine loss.
An expression like feelers and moths.
The moon is now the porch light.
Navigation nothing but spinning wildly.
And those poor creatures just whir and knock blindly.
Out there, out there.
Nothing so blind as yourself.
Is it hesitation you require?

There is an End.

Watching murder shows with my sister.
And thinking of my father.
He is telling me
should he fall behind:
these able bodied men
should drag him,
they should hoist him.
These able bodied men should place him in the trash.
Yet he shuffles towards a ninth decade and we hope.
And he is convinced I am a stereo when I pluck strings.
And he refers to me from across the room.
And I sit next to him.
He taps his fingers upon the table top.
He feels as though they're arriving from across the country.
Scrubbing his skin I am awash in the loss of son status.
The role reversal gets up and walks out the room.
Son status; the sun's radius.
I do not know my disgust.
I feel shame.
When I get him into shape I see that it is a disease.
It isn't him.
It is not him.
Watching murder shows and the droning fan
getting close and far,
close and far.
My father tells me he will blow this whole place to hell.
The murder show closes and the glow gets thick.

Serious For a Moment.

I've got no stake in heaven's sake.
I just watch from the shore as the waves break.
There must be dirt underneath.
Whatever bit me must've had teeth.
Keep digging.  Keep digging.
Leave the rigging out with what the wind brings.
Keep singing.  Keep singing.
Leave the bringer of the bell to the ringing.
There mustn't be much above.
From the dark wood an urge as a shove.
There mustn't be much below.
To where in the dark I mustn't know.
Keep loving.  Keep loving.
Your heart hovering just above me.
Keep moving.  Keep moving.
This life simply proving to be a good thing.

Nothing Seen, No Time for Vision.

When you are close I tremble.
Such density all held in a thimble.
And it is like a dark star.
The weight of a heart in a tiny jar.
I walk into flat night.
The treble of step without sight.
My gaze lights upon an apparition.
No seams without decision.
There was nothing there before.
From black heat stalks forth a carnivore.
These limbs are detached and consumed.
A raking shot of a blood plume.
I got lost in you and I knew
that when I died among the blood roots grew.
I don't struggle though.
Your gifts are things yet known.
Your hair, your eyes, your jawline.
A constellation to which my heart aligns.

It's Just That It's Just That.

I wish there was a harbinger of truth
above the maudeline clouds
to lend acid laser precision to the dim.
Shine a neon light on the drab interior of my present mind.
I see a hollow cheeked man stoop to pick up a bottle cap.
I wander intangibly through my hopes
of one day feeling content with everything I've been through.
The finality of things must have eluded this man.
The hollow eyes.  The marble.
I'm too young to keep my panic at bay.
It'd be ridiculous to let these conspiracies
echoing through my organs
take me down so soon.
Drastic plans of a tragedy unfold in the movie theater across town.
Everything writ with colors that weren't invented
until we could see at every hour.
Until we could see at every hour.
Until we can see at every hour.
I am here and I fan the fire. 
The scent of slow dreams.
The scent of a pulse running.
Spit and wheel spinning no where.
My face gathering it's flesh together while my eyes watch in terror.
I can't come to terms with what my body wants.
It aches and leans over dumb.
I suppose I'll see something before I go.
I suppose the memory left behind catches on the hook.
I saw you out there in the midnight waving a flare.
I saw you but I didn't stop.
Which is not to say I was not there.
Just let me get far enough to die without qualm.
It's just that the request is just too much to ask.
There are bombs exploding everywhere
and no one will ever see them.
 

Tumultuous Youth, Yet No Proof.

Good looking people come over to me.  Let me see how I compare.  What I was before made me so lost and now I wonder if it's better.  Make use of the self abuse:  get loose of the false proof.

Scratched Upon the Wall:
You are seeking integrity.
You want to be genuine.
You want to stop scaring yourself.
You want to say you are not alone.
You want to mean it.
You wake up alone.
You choose to be lonely.
You know you are growing.
You know that dog growling.
You know you are getting better.
When a ball bounces in
through the window
it doesn't seem like you threw it.
But you did.
You threw it.
And you caught it.
If you keep throwing it
you'll keep catching it.

I'm trying to keep up.  I try to better myself.  I try to destroy myself.  But which one feels like the right path?  Which side of the wheel makes me tense?  Giving up or buying in, it all seems to make the same feeling.  There is a way to just walk out into the dark and know that the bad is good.  When the pen runs out of ink it has to be because I need to stop writing.  When the bike just quits it has to be because I should stop riding.  There is pride in the loss and the gain.  You gaze upward while the nothing comes down.  I have no idea about the ideas.  I tear myself down because I am arriving.  I get somewhere and it is no where but where I've been hiding.  I'm lost, struck dumb.  I'm convinced of a luck numb. If I can manage to be sincere about where I am then I can start losing what I'm not.  All the details in the human world do not add up.  There shouldn't be as much wit invested in the trembling objects lying around my memories.  Think of the moment when you wake up:  Follow the paths into the wood and make no apologies for not seeing the good.

Sincerity pins down what I lack.  Pins share with me the spineless back. My finger probes where my spine used to linger.  A back bone all asymmetrical while my self doubt lies antithetical.  What I think of myself is pink oil, never to mix with the green vinegar of what others think I am.  I used to sail but now I won't.  I've proven I fail at how I won't.  To who I am what I am where I am:  the crew got lost on the sea again.

The want for objectivity drives me wild and a young dog canters up to me from a dark alley keeping his steps in line with the previous ones I took.  My skull is the border of a distant country;  bound within lies something foreign.  I might just walk out on this.  I might just go out of my mind.  Too much thought, so overwrought.  Please lay me down safely and make sure to tie the hands; for these things do not follow logic.  Brindled and bridled, eloping and loping.  Tearing across a landscape bright with darkness.  The moon behind the ocean, so far away yet closer still.  I think of you and I get happy.  I think of you and I tremble.

Junky at heart, yet no drug to fulfill this need.
I'll leave it alone for now; I'll just lie as an amalgam of limbs, parts, and textures unbound.  My fingers entwine the hair upon my head as though each strand is the edge of a cliff.

New Looks.

I thought a plastic bag was a heron,
and knew that it was like the pain I'm bearing.
There's just no more credit to score.
I don't want to be dead anymore.
When I'm writing in the woods
and thinking what I should and that I could,
I get out of my head
and awaken in my bed.
There is no one outside.
I don't need to hide.
I can be as I am.
This life isn't a scam.
All those ex's are incorrect,
what you are is how you affect.
Change can happen when the wind blows.
The bag ripples but the mind knows.
The world is what you perceive it to be
even if I can't see it correctly.

Dormant Unhinged.

It is easy to think, as the process goes dormant, that the months will go by without incident.  But those days build up.  The items of memory tremble in anticipation.  The listless sway of the cords hanging from the blinds sync up.  The blades of grass align together as though there is a wind from nowhere.  The night terrors adorn you exponentially and fighting the mirror brings on the wish to have the right fears.  To not be nervous as the light nears.  The want to lift the curse stalks through the woods the same way the curse does.  Your sexuality is a drunk.  Your sobriety is a monk.  You question why you are questioning. Trying, trying, trying to await the tragedy that must be coming.  There must be, after all, some reason for all these muscle contractions.

They're all still there.  The dormancy exists and tremors seem distant but that doesn't negate your personality history.  They're there.  You wake up in a different world.  The earth is seen through the window.  You are not on it.  Those thoughts and actions and wants and needs and aspirations and sorrow and methods and dreams and shadows and sounds and images and footsteps and the end are all behind you:  following.  Moaning, they've taken on a different shape.  You lurch up from this inaction to get moving again.  They're there.  But they're changed now.  They are so different from the light inaction bouncing around your skull.  What you thought was wrong is a fantasy and what this is behind you is also a fantasy.  You're moving on and the things behind you are getting further stupid and losing.  You are getting better.  And they'll help you to try.  Though what you are is a construction, what you continue to be is of that construction.

This Whiskey Bottle Feels Like a Gun in My Hand.

I wonder why there are things that keep surfacing within my sight:

lonely particles floating in the fluid of my eyeball.  

If I outstretch my hand to touch whatever they are, 

I come back with nothing but phantom pains.  

Give it up already.  

You aren't who you want to be.  

The world that you live in keeps hoisting up a ragged ball of flame to let you see.  

The ex-president doesn't remember tearing any walls down.

The encircled family keeps the media away so as not to ruin the legacy.  

Of ideas.  Of intangible things.  Of wanting it all to be different.  

It won't make you happy.  

If you lined the world's inhabitants 

in a straight arrow 

and let them walk past you single file 

the procession would never end 

because the rate of birth is too high.  

Each time there is a new person put at the end of the line

you see that history is the autobiography of a madman.  

It isn't me doing it.  

It must be something else.  

Risk strolls up to danger and winks a lusty smile.

And there is no crowd in front of the stage.

This won't end but you can choose to think of it differently.

Get out of that head of yours and see for once.

Feel Gone.

There was a whistle he built,
by the foundation of a house yet constructed,
made of green wood with the bark as a slip.
And that house that we lived in
he would soon move out of.
Because no one was happy
after so many changes.
The tones that mingled with the brush and wind
made his pocket knife teem with shine.
And the previous mother he loved
had been shot fifteen years earlier.
The same model of knife lay in his pocket that day.
Yet in the pouring rain there was no shine.
And now here it is,
all leaping up and getting music done.
The summer that was before and after
the bad thing that happened
left us with souvenirs
from a far place.
Because what surrounds the thing
is what makes it remembered.
The story unfolds without heed to those involved.
And we all moved out of the house after he did.

Fold.

Time woke me up in the dead of night
and whispered,
I'll keep moving along
happily if you do.
But I won't, she added,
convince you that I'll stop.
She continued,
Within me there are folds in which men
and their endeavors are lost.
Some are recovered while others are forgotten.
I am wrestled and warped within your memory.
You have transitioned into a world of red dots.
Your ego stretches and pulls me to your selfish needs.
The more I involve myself,
the more things lose physicality.
Where your hand may have been,
your head lies.
Where your sensitivity may have been,
your numbness lies.
I give you logistics maps, pins stuck in,
strings attached, hanging slack.
You pull each line taut to construct a cognitive web of disorder.
The more you think of me this way,
the more I will be this way.
She was gone.
And I felt her threading through me.