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.

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.