There Is Someone Else In Here.

I turn a corner in the maze
and there you are.

I whisper,

I've been in here 29 years. 

When I look up I see 

all these stars eaten up by light.
When I look down I see 

all this dirt turned out by the worm.
She puts her finger to my lips -

sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh

them trees just beyond the walls
swaying in the wind 

oh you can hear them 

same as me

sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh

oh there there 

we're here but for being here.

There where those trees near,

fourteen esses, thirteen h's;

we just count down

while courting messes

and skirting itches.

Self Consumption.

 

I try to walk diagonally
and hope for sciatica leave.
Get me up and out of here
stop eating this circular tear.
The step echoes wrong.
This world sung as requiem.
There was a shooting
in an online article.
There was a shooting
star hung from a sickle.
I attempt to be constructive
with my agency gone in a fifth.
Solipsism the everlasting prison.
Internal Sim City such elastic fun. 
Thinking:
How to apply the unthought...
as much gone awry as held taut...
So I figure no more oh wells
it fills a bottomless well as far as I can tell.

Such a Good, Cloudy Day.

As the sides tangle with one other
my eye twitches with the other one;
such a surprise,
they convulse together.
The followers don't always make up the cult.
The cell may oppose the body.
The opposite is true of course:
The lifer screaming to be free of a locked room.
Always the same dilemma,
you get better at the expanse
between your head and your feet
while your current optimism
of the current within
positively drives you to discomfort.
Continuing a compulsion
in order to discontinue progress
towards all those intrusions swarming
around your heart like bees.
Cheers.
Good thoughts are scarce.
They bear through with honey,
they carelessly dispel with sting.
All them fuckers that fight
with one another within your chest.
Oh well,
we are a billion different cells.
We are more space than matter.
Each room inside us
contains a singularity.
Yet the reverb from yelling
escapes to join the multitude of vibrations
to coalesce into something undivided.
In harmony, some days,
in others, dissonant.
It is nice to know it can be sunny
despite the joy of being overcast.

Le Crackman Originale.

Remember when you surprised yourself,
within the dawn of adulthood,
while the minutes barreled into decades.
You sat before the bloom of neon cigarettes
held within a faux gold kitsch from a previous era:
a pen to untie a knot of lines,
a crumpled piece of paper relaxing into a creature.
Drugs were floating around
and you wore sunglasses at night.
The barrel of the pen loaded with ink.
The white of the paper a blindfold.
Pulling the trigger, lines splashed out
and the blood organized itself.
It was a wonderful thing.
An awkward and extravagant gentleman
with obvious tension.
His bald beauty.
His odd lashes.
His temperamental gesture.
His creaturely vanity.
His reaching around your waist.
You were enamored, amazed,
taken by surprise.
He told you that your teeth wouldn't be ground down.
He told you that your eyes wouldn't be painted over.
Any number of things:
they were nice departures.
You followed him around for a decade.
An ink blot keeping that tint rosy.

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.

Lay the Needle Down in the Groove.

It comforts me to listen to dead people.
With the ghosts whispering I hear,
their spirit talking with the still walking.
That record continues spinning
long after the button is pressed.
So death took them.
So the living still have them.

For years you lived as though
you'd just woken from a dream;
snapped to with a whole life
on the tip of your tongue.
Yet you could not recall the details.
The specifics eluded you.
You knew it was epic,
and it was long;
you knew the river was long.

You left gifts.
I got what you meant.
When you said,
your heart is living forever,
isn't it?
I said,
it seems that way, yes,
I agree it seems that way.

I don't know where things go when they leave
but when they do I go ahead and grieve.
The records all stacked up with notes to cry to,
the letters he wrote to live up to, at least try to.
I remember he said I would be successful
with whatever I used to make my head full.
He said I was a good travel companion.
I took the trip his head unraveling demanded,
and in the eventual I held his cold stiff hand.
I sat and wept with what was his end.
Though he passes far and away,
his world is just as mine and does not decay.

Do not misinterpret the signs.
What falls away is only the flesh.
Their are many kinds,
than just the bodily form of death.
We are not watching memory decay,
but witnessing legacy find it's way.
And so,
farewell father in body,
hello father immemorial.

Roots.

Booking flights to where I came from,
I am going to see who I came from
so as to see where I'll go some day.
The underneath from which we come,
and where we go to when we leave.
Complete circle.
He left a while ago,
on vacation, on leave, on business.
It was not by choice but it was natural.
His body of work kept being left
scattered about his body.
In the infancy of my adulthood,
there were fledgling thoughts
that forced themselves into questions.
If I left would I know where'd I'd left.
If I left how would I get back to what I'd left.
What's left when you lose it.
What's loose when the wind blows into the darkness.

Out there in the whispering
where the trees stand
the branches do not resist
the wind that pushes cold
across their sticky blood.
The tapping of their trunks,
the tapping of the needle spinning:
side A is over.
When we break fast and pour out their insides
the horizon cracks open with light.
And the b-side gets up as an anthem.
We can say it is cultural,
not to think too hard of where things came from.
We will reassure ourselves.
Where things come from are fully left behind.
There is no thing with nothing left behind.
There is no thing with nothing.
We assure ourselves.

Color Theory.

something like cowboy.
something like feeling.
unable to figure it out.
something like a horse.
a horse carved out of stone.
the myth shooting me right between the eyes,
and coming out of the television.
tumbleweeds and dust mustn't make me sneeze.
the desert is vast and symbolic
and the sickness never comes to light
because we are legends.
we won't experience death.
we pretend with the end.
we see beauty.
an exquisite corpse,
such an exquisitely dead body.
the wind discontinues its ebb.
it never stops pushing and pushing
so as to keep
the black horse
rushing further and further away
from this blank sphere
we all spin on.
when the lights turn on
there will not be white,
only shades and shades
of yellow.

Business Grief.

Even though you place
the plastic crown on your head,
the thoughts still leak in.
You binge on self awareness.
You still, self aware mess.
And you'll still abuse your body because of it.
Waking up and noticing
that the water is deleted
from the map on the wall.
Walking down a lonely alley,
stooping to pick up a piece of paper.
Written in lavender ink,
You keep telling yourself 
you are nothing
and you will be nothing.
I'll dance.
I don't give a shit I'll dance.

Empty Light Pouring from Some Holes.

When the roots took hold
of everything inside me
I knew that I'd have to take a tab
to keep myself lit up.
And when that happened,
all my hues and tones
were filled in with neon anxiety.
Poison plant lay your underpinnings within me.
I am nutrients.  I am support.
I know the out there in the darkness.
Where one tree sways unlike the others.
Where one light shines dead matte black
while the others twinkle.
Where the singular planet wobbles gracelessly.
There are deep wells like empty holes.
Chalkboard coarseness scrawled
with random scratches of light.
The whine of the camera after the flash,
the red light bobbing in the after image.
I am surprise when the india ink tips over
covering everything effortlessly.
The whirl pool that stands
perpendicular to the marble hallway
is faster than your quickening pace.
The man just outside the window screen
is asking to be let in.
There is an air conditioner on,
no one will hear him slip in
through the hole in the wall.
And he can hear your footsteps.
He'll stroll amongst the parts,
the reoccurring nightmare,
the empty universe,
the ever present discontent,
the twinkling beauty.
Can't you see what I am doing?
What I am doing.
What am I doing.
I am a wasted guru.

Grief Funeral Procession.

We can make things less empty
if we all pull up the wreckage underneath.
We can turn it around in our minds
and let it completely unwind.
We can let the body burn slowly,
let the tears at our edges mend knowingly.
We can get the loss to recede in fits.
The sun wedges in our broken heart as a stint.
We can crystallize and turn into pink ice.
Our organ no longer an over used device.
We can get the cold.
We can lose to it.
We can come back from it.
We can live further then die from it.
We can be laid to rest.

The Bog of Eternal Insecurity.

I know you are a monster.
Your monstrosity has nothing to do
with why I want nothing to do
so wholeheartedly with you.
Within you prowls creaturely anxiety.
You shoe gaze to assume some sort of piety.

When your milky violet eyes
creep over my skin
the fog of the lagoon
turns into a blanket
and I get damp and sour
with your gaze left like dairy
on my skin for weeks.

I am sorry for you, monster.
Sympathy without sorrow.
Empathy rotten with malevolence.
You are a monster of the heart.
You are beautifully deformed in your emotive strikes.
My hands grow wild with decay as you stare into me.
Tears leap from your eyes as flames do;
the lonely descent of a suicide falling from the ledge.
The smart phone notifies, forgotten under the hedge.
My feet sever their ties, yet no farewell to the ankles.
You drill your eyes into me and take core samples.
This layer is empty.  This layer is full.
This layer looks all crossed out and null.
The bog has lain traces of itself all along your skin,
fissures of silt stratifying the stupidity forthcoming.
Something that is wasted without knowing it.
That breath, that voice, that fear of showing it.
Wasted for everyone to see you unclear.
Your struggle of expression leaves you further rather than near.

The middle of the earth just wants to give you away.
And the outside just wants to take from the middle.
And that is life. 
The transfer of electrons.
You give it and I don't want to take it.

There is cowardice in feigning internal struggle.
Hiding behind yourself, your emotions are a muzzle.

The Heart Run Skyward.

There is a steamer trunk with all of the things in it.
Oil rags piled on the lid, it sprawls next to the wood stove.
The soft fuzz of the fire sheds upon the room;
a gauze of snake skin fog drawing a cataract across the entire vision.
The trunk holds all necessity.
Whatever is in there should be.
What isn't shouldn't.
His gaze pours from
the slivers cut out of
the leather of his face like kerosene.
It lavishes the lacquered wood,
the gilded edges flicked with rust,
with an amber attention.
There is a play premiering in his mind every day.
No one is watching but him.
The writer of the fiction is psychotic.
His eyes twinkle like distant planets as he seeps into the dead room.
The moon lounges in the milky daylight,
it's chalky eye desaturated by the desert glare of the auburn steppes.
It is peeking in through the cigarette burns in the blinds.
He pays no attention.  He has no intention.
He has blood that runs when the cops round the corner.
His organs swing from ropes.
His eyes pace the hallways within him
and the delinquents skitter back to their places.

A transistor radio slurs out rust at a cantor.
Whatever song it sings is no matter.
He hears Tom Waits,
"House Where Nobody Lives,"
despite the tune the station plays.  

And the things inside the trunk.
They are ideas left tangible.
It is as though the plains were burned away into nothing.
Only leaving the roan horse spinning blindly through zero gravity.
The breath quickly zipped away to leave a vacuum in the lungs.
The fleshy walls trembling in that split second before they collapse.
No matter but the singular entity lost within itself.
No way to interpret itself.  No self perception.
All these things in the steamer trunk.  All the things.
Who ever he is.  No need to pry.
Where ever he is.  Do not linger long
What ever this is.  The space does not matter.
Why this is.  Try not to fathom.
However, a twinkle through the curtain, out in the bright:
The moon whispers,
It's okay, it is okay to find out.
The moon offers,
It is okay to simply see the outside of things,
and make up a different part for the inside.