Brothers, In a Sense.

I feel like writing myself into a corner. Trauma skin period piece: the size of a mouse with the weight of a gravestone. Dislike of specific people with regards to their passports and how they talk. Mental masturbation without climax bringing red eyed madness jogging often with presidential candidates and stopping for a slow motion fast food meal. The cash register appears to be malfunctioning as the buttons are greasy and the keys are jagged with the whetstone running quickly like some recent jailbreak. French people having animated conversations while the cold ekes into my arms. Everything seems to be happening together. Looking out the window of the internet I see that Tom Waits has a daughter my age. For some reason this inspires a vague feeling of longing and despair. As if her life must be a testament to my self worth. It's better over there and worse over here. A flash bulb explodes above the bouncers shiny dome of a skull and there you are. Waiting in a line for something that will bring shame and loss into your life. Street drugs lessening the blow and this is why we do them. This is why we let go of the reins fastened to our stampeding panting rueful waking dream. I don't see you out there, lover. I don't see you anywhere, lover. I don't even see the possibility of you. Lover.

Echo Echo Echo Echo Echo.

Where is this going? This line of fresh daisies and acrid smoke. This line drawn taut like fishing line bringing up this total abandon and friendly parents across the street from the depths with the calm breeze of blue and gray. Crashed out with a streaming fire dolled up with blisters and cracks along the ever present freeway of your heart that circulates the longing and interruptions of freedom. This isn't going anywhere. Is it? I'm just gaining weight. Emotionally speaking, all this baggage. And the brain surgery didn't help. And these ink trails leaking down my sides: the dramatic dripping off me like pinstripes. Ah well. The emptiness is like silence and the filler is just a cacophony. If I could hear correctly I wouldn't want to anyways. Get it over with, take out the parts that aren't doing it anymore. Cut off my limbs and paint gaudy smiles upon my upper arms. Take off the lampshade and squint at what was dampened before. Feel along the underside of the crease. Fold in my heart where likenesses of foolhardy explorers were carved to the disappointment of me, myself, and cry outside near the casting glance of a river that fills up with the clouds all so blue and clear. Is it pink or blue? Is the mind a tone? A hue? Does it change color when it deceives itself? A procedure will be needed soon to make sure this doesn't go too far.

Is Anyone Even Listening Anymore?

Be careful when your fingernails stop growing. I am in a sea of milk: cloudy supine like roots growing around a baby's bottle. I am in a sea of ink: depths unlike the shallow bathtub blooming with slit wrist flowers. But different somehow, when the serene twilight looks down on you like a father. When your hair curls around your cheeks like my desire. When I lose sight of my want, there will be the moving of the feast from far away to right here. My hands all atwinkle and stupid with fright shaking delightful. The fingernails stop growing: yes, just be careful. I want there to be this unfolding mystery getting darker and darker with every light we turn on. I want to drink of lactating nipples and draw upon soils tasteless and auburn. But I want to stare it down as it descends and let the knife slowly enter my heart. I want the blood to pump hard and sear metal pins through me with a driving rain. My knowledge of my own mortality. It comes quick. It bears a fuzzy little pill that shuts down my very function. It lets me off softly. To just drift, oh, just to drift out there with the tons of often forgotten aspirations. This life is funny when you pretend. Just pretend. Say nothing when you feel yourself slip away. Hold your tongue. Like a fine catch upon a crystal hasp. Hold it there writhing.

Almost Museum Quality.

Crinkly: The only way to describe a thirteen hour work day after three hours of fitful sleep. These tender hands like frills on a rug and the body billowing without conscious wavelengths. Empty tender: sallow, creased eyes rolled up like dollar bills loosely piled upon something for someone with a predisposition for lamb destruction without a purpose. They're grazing upon the bedspread like tiny balls of cotton and my eyes lolling, looking out upon the expanse of tailored squares led to believe they are some landscape full of tiresome creatures made to grow hair and die. Made to blow fair and timely winds across this verdant patch low down on the planets waistline. Upside down and harpooned with the urban lightplay shooting up in my eyes I've realized the seasons are reversed and I'm having a holiday barbecue with someone I abhor. The alcohol is a calm hand upon my brow and the tears leap into the pores like pre-drowned kidneys all wasted up in the long forgotten inebriated early morning hours. Where someone drained a bottle and someone looked out upon a city landscape with a sentiment akin to infant gurgles. Where something fell without sound. Where no one heard: I've lost a good thing and gained a good thing. Where no one saw: I've severed a good thing and attached a good thing. Where there was an abduction in the woods and at that precise moment, the preteen debutante was released from her horrifying ransom grab situation into the loving embrace of her preternaturally endowed financial predicament. Some sort of arrangement must be made to keep a logical ratio of sleeping and waking lest the zombies walk out into the fields to become me in a moment or two.

Incredulous Drunk.

The knife of my mind continues to pare down my heart like a coin operated fortune teller with automated responses. And the coins I insert are my memories. And I will nurture my vices like children and give over every rapturous moment to the reckless abandon of a bottle getting drained while the gutters run and the alleys sag and the buildings loom and the men slink. The cutlery hangs upon the magnetic knife holders nailed into the particle board. You have this passion around you like a static charge and you don't know where it goes or why it's there. You have this sense of pain that lets the blues ink your vision very slowly. You have this way of letting me know that I am not going anywhere with the self deception turning in my mind slow like a cement mixer. It's all there, waiting to be laid out and leveled out, but it's liquid now. It hasn't hardened, this silly sense of sorrow. Those bottles and those smokes are a double edged blade that sends those thoughts running while inviting them in. I want to live a life with a real sense of pain. Not an imagined one. I want to pare down my melodrama into a catastrophe of reality. I want the car wreck out there on the plains where the ever droning countryside wraps itself about the misery like an electric fence to be something fictional and forgotten until it's real. Until it's real, I want this tired dramatic affair to lose itself amongst the branches of my temporal thought patterns. The forehead is like some runty little child holding a magnificent object behind its back, clutched in its sticky hands the source of that which causes us to be what we are. So here we are, hiding everything behind our skulls, leaving behind that which torments us only to turn the corner to fall straight into the loving grip of systematic sadness. The realization that the drama is self imposed is a quiet victory.

Affluence: Breeding Ground for Self Pity.

When the eyes of his lover meet his, he folds his arms; as if he consciously wishes his limbs to resemble the frail crosses bridled with plastic flowers along the freeway underpass. Rest in peace they say. "It's funny that our bodies fit but our minds don't." He whispers it coyly and she doesn't hear him and smiles, taking the murmured statement as positive, just as the tone was. Positive and sexy; uplifting, even. Yes, it is funny that the emotional realm can have everything to do with what isn't physical. His perceived empty inside just blowing cold and scary, depthless, not the truth, not truthful. But not depthless as in endless, depthless as in shallow. As in a matte gray expanse held close to his eyes; so close as to render his eyes useless, all blurry and unfocused. And that is what he champions in this life: disconnection, loss, puerile subversions, massive blood loss (of the mental sort), creation of doubt, anonymity, the feeling of dull aching. Problematic and decisive. Self fulfilling and all inclusive. This club welcomes us all, her eyes seem to say as she slips an imaginary knife in his gut. "You've just gotta be willing to see what's real and what's imaginary." Don't let this ever present heart pull you 20,000 Leagues under because there isn't anything but ropes, razors, firearms, exhaust pipes, and pill bottles down there. The stereotype of melodrama prowls down there. Down there where you can't see that these fantasies of abandon are immature because of the lack of sunlight. Just sulfur burning your eyes and a single blinking light attached to a predator. Glass bones and pressure sensitive frames, well we've got those up here too. "So don't," she says, "don't go down there."

Sincerity Assured.

Another bridge burnt, she places with steady hand two years on the chopping block. A baby bird alights upon her shoulder and looks into her eye like the past. He's been having dreams of her, contemplating some way to go back in time. He's been leaving behind traces of guilt like spent up moments loose in the current. He wants what he's lost. She coos in his ear as a mother bird would. He realizes that he's in love and there is nothing there but an empty memory all cut up and groaning with all of the dreams and anonymity he knows now. What were those times on the platform connecting the dots and feeling like there was no way to feel but good? The moment when a confession of affection was given he had a stitch in his step like the yarn wrapped around his heart strangling. It was because of the hurdles in the track, the entire three years dwindling trying to pretend he didn't have the feelings he had just so he could say he wasn't a home wrecker. But he was. And he still is. And it just pours out like a scarf wheeling from the needles of that endearing old woman on her porch caring and dear. Knitting something for the past and now the future. Oh this ever present heart forces him against the winds. He'll just continue flying against it and curse the barriers that he doesn't even know exist. And mother bird lets out her wings so far away as he just flutters and wheels across the sky like some tender moth spun up in the web. He sees it though. And he wishes he was there.