Snake Skin Shed.

Fear of death passing forth gives passing forth death of fear.
Walking to work with the dry space creeping in,
looking sideways with worry of strangers noticing
that my intentions are blurry
only because I hope they are good.
Two weeks ago I thought,
ninety one years old,
and not counting.
But of course we all keep track
of how many years the dead would have had.

I can get out of bed.
I just can't get out of my head.

Slow death just brings just death slow.
I write when I am desperate,
when body and mind are separate.
I am self involved to the point
where I'm flexing limbs without joints.
Bones cracking, the nerve.
Pain migration.
No way to know where the unease is coming from.
I am the snake skin shed with the tears drawn yet unable to evaporate.

I can get out of bed.
I just can't get out of my head.

Look Down, Look Drawn, Look Drowned.

What a cop out to make an apology for your creativity.
End up a dropout mistaking mythology for activity.
You look down.
You look drawn.
Thin and tapered, you compromise,
just watch that water rise.
There, the grainy video on CNN of the bridge buckling
under the demand of a flood, just what luck brings.

Should you decide to continue deceiving yourself.
Should you ask of a residue conceiving a shelf
on which to place who you are.
So far you've sparred with nothing insofar as Mylar.
A thin transparent sheet of separation.
A fin on the horizon of the ocean.
Notice of vague danger,
silt moving pages, divine arranger. 
A shark's tooth as a souvenir for your love
hanging from leather thread strung above
a dog stuck and laid low by malnutrition.
Every cognition keeping it chained with a shun.
This sand moves slowly holding lengths taut.
The waters move fast eroding fenced plot.
The development does not matter, being man made.
It will all fall under persistent moisture, slow fade.
Though water may be strong,
just change your bearing headlong.
Raise your head just as the water drowns you.
Whatever was said, it matters less than the sounds do.

Sense Memory #1.

Please remember when you die to just drop it.
These slender senses do vie to trust no pocket.
Dad is gone and I look at his photograph,
had a long glance and took apart his laugh.
He finally found his glasses
and we just keep laughing.
He fought those final matches
and we must keep laughing.
Common place grief runs in to face relief.
Obsessed with death I caress this fret.

Put your hands up.  They are tied up in a knot. 
Eyes behind the arms know memory cannot rot.

Photocopy #5.

I am tired of learning how to love.
I am under the weather, attempting the truth.
I'd love to be content.
Yet the stumbling block:
a self created version of myself
creating a microcosm
in which to wrap its tears up with mine.
My version is no where close to the duplicate.
A photocopier bleeding black ink
and copies of copies
making up for the disappearance of the original.
Anxiety stealing my presence.
I will quit myself.
I will put myself
in the presence
of a present
state of mind
where to transfer meaning
will not be
to take from a construct
of what really happened.
If there even is
something such as that.

Guiltless Age #4.

Things were so much easier back then,
before sunshine promised grief.
I did not know then that sun would eventually
force itself on the planet and engulf the matter
just as the memory of dad's cold dead hand
would encircle all other memories.
And there;
the water moving without strategy to surround the island.
Presently, the world is ending all the time
but we were never sure when it started.
Convince yourself:
it will be okay to be nothing one of these days,
that the universe has no ethics,
that is does not matter
whether we prevail
or whether we destroy ourselves.
Or maybe just deny the insects and their hunger,
with their faces upside down in guiltless pleasure.
I enjoy the fact of weight;
the mass of ants
teeming below us,
dwarfing us.
We are all very silent
compared to all of the movement around us.
We keep making noise about it,
our tongues moving around
inside our mouths.
And I keep learning
again and again
the reasons for the circle
I've drawn around myself.
The approximation of a life wound up
with emotion and meaning
like an orbiting body
surrounded by orbital bodies
that never touch one another.

Illusions Past #1.

All passwords fall out of my head
like the slips of paper after
the news of things passing
are torn up.
The newspaper tore apart.
Not that I would remember it.
The train car is sneaking by
with flesh stacked upon it's back.
Something about the way the sun rose today
made me feel a bit immortal.
It made me sick,
it made me hungry,
and I ate.
I ate heavy.
The people of the twenty first century
think of the late nineteenth century
and make amends with what I am.
Take this chic antiquity;
lose the phrenology and eugenics.
I know the liberal was libel
but I am filling up
even as I speak of equality.
The equation is not adding up
when I heft this ledger.
Held high above my head,
I'm lost in the economics.
My muscles atrophy
with the knowledge
of the world:
All of itself unjust.
Losing myself in the mirror,
a floating particle in the fluid of my eyeball.
All of the hunger,
all of the sickness.
Like all of it.

Snapped Shot #2.

The thin ice upon the water melts
even though no one watches it.
It happens.
Still, it happens,
moving still no less.
The happening belies the anticipation.
There was no need for the anxious structure
to grow around your limbs
as a crystalline facsimile of skeletal bearing.
The mind acts as a rubber band.
The action acting as a subtle brand;
contortions
mistreatment
made up story.
What it anticipates is more real
than what is real.
The miscreants purport of your house burning down.
Oh yes, that did not happen.
But you look down in a nightmare;
your hands all burnt up from the fire.
Wake up.
The house plant is no longer a skeleton of blades.
The shadow is no longer the man
doing things on Mulholland Drive.
I heard through the life I'm living
that water can have
any number of impurities in it:
some are good
some are bad.

real nightmare as a boy.

something like terror.
the force field useless
as the closet door creaks open.
remember how real that was.
keep a picture of yourself
holding a picture of yourself
inside you
so you retain authenticity.

it is one thing to see things.
it is another to feel them.
if things are to be real
we have to conceive of their duplicity.
the imitation can be real as the original
if you let your mind wander
out across that dead field
where some lonely man
thought of himself
when he caught a gust across the brow.
but that was so long ago.
and it is not remembered
the way he remembered it.
we'll all be remembered that way:
distinctly yet indiscriminately vague.
for our minds are not just
when taking note.

I think of you within my mind.
Walking circles, cutting grooves.
There is the deep indentation
of a genetic incantation,
or a selected interpretation,
of a life you allowed through insemination.
Let's not go there,
let's make a ghost.