Shadowboxing in the Dark.

Weird sire: sitting there looking at me looking at you. We've both something wrong. Rolls, over consumption. The Rolls Royce traipsing down the boulevard with the starlet enveloped within, crying her eyes into streaks. Rolling the car, rolling the minutes over, rolling the cigarette at 4am. The internal surroundings gleam red hot when I imagine someone else is looking; pokers, coals, errant tasks, lovers, movers. I realize that I half realize everything to the point that we are not in the place but out of it. Nothing makes sense because I am sure someone is watching. But I had a chance and it meant a thing. The thing that seems to whisper out there among the pines with a feather softly swaying from its earlobe. I want the wind to pick up and show this to me: the ever-present anxiety of a lifestyle vague and unremitting.

There he is, his legs dipping into the cold. As old as the fold in the ocean. Nothing. I watched it from afar in a trance, too scared to move: falling through the ice in the soft and narrow and getting saved at the last minute to forever change the course of an entire cycle of family and past. Who was it that was pulled from the current? In the physical it was him, but in the clouds up there it could have been us all. One tragedy is one too many.

They took away the part of the bridge I liked and put something else somewhere else. I don't even know what the problem is. I don't even know where this wanting haunts me from. I'm delusional, thinking, I've got this and not that. The closed door, the muffled sounds heard from the other side. I can't get my head in the present. I'm spending all my time gilding the past like it was something it wasn't. And the sparkle doesn't go deep at all. It only sits on top. Like the truth. It's right in plain sight but I lift it up to look under and there is nothing but what I'm holding onto. My hands are shaking and I'm frightened of death because I feel alone and don't know what to do about it. It's me that's doing it. I'm telling my heart to shut down. I'm willing my love to fuck off. I'm hanging it up and hearing the busy signal while the illusion of what I say I am waits on the other end. This self that doesn't exist. The supposed nice guy, hand cuffed to a suitcase: It opens and the light pours out. Yet, it is never revealed what is inside. I look in there but it isn't me who's looking. Because no one is looking.

All this unkempt feeling. Trying to explain its existence just makes it grow. I don't want this strife anymore. I want a knife to bore deep and cast this exceptional problem out into the past. The last of it moves fast and I open my eyes to see that I'm an adult with a loss for a heart. The part I keep is the broken part. I will box it up with shadows to keep it still.

Rabid Individualism Claims Another Victim.

I felt it and then I didn't and I wrote it down but it couldn't be found. I jumped off a high place with everything blurring around me like headlights on the highway nightscape with the aperture wide open. When I look out over the expanse the sparks keep me quickly throwing my hands to my pockets to make sure it's all there. But it wasn't there to begin with. My face slowly contorts with fireworks making their final entrance with a whoosh of embers and gasoline. These things we are made to think are ours ignite into flash and light. My hands lay down along the riverside and the crew yells cut but I don't get up. The water keeps its current and the clouds lose their path. My eyes rotate: they get red and loving. I want my life to be something that is left behind for the treatable illness. I want to keep sway in the near twilight when the body has given up. A rubber thing all dead and lively, up there in the dark.

The tachometer underneath the skin covering my forehead lets me know pretending is fun and feeling the temptation to take a risk is quite the same as seeing my hands do things I didn't approve. The whole thing that we all do. The everything we say our lives are. The things we say to ourselves. These loose strings are our hands doing things we didn't approve of.

Control, control. To have control over this. Seeing the car that holds your family leave your sight and your hands shake yet they keep going. Its something you can't see; the next track seems to be a big deal, but control is so elusive. They're right around the corner. I tell people things but each statement is a prayer for myself. I tell people what I wish I was. It's just so much easier to tell everyone to be what you want. And deeper is understanding of a thought. There is something underneath everything. I just hope that what is above things I do is something looking down. No more of this kept at bay feeling. You know it's not the truth: its not. I don't want every spark to be my basis for life. I want something to build up, possibly fall. A continuation of things is not giving up.

I put all these things in my body that tell me I can't live without them. I believe them until I'm absent from the room. Getting distracted by the refraction of the sun and knowing the world is a ground upon which seven billion trod. I kept something in my heart to make me special but it's weathered day by day. Because I have a feeling that all these torrents of emotion are nothing. Concession, concession. Why keep this absence going? Closing my eyes, an afterimage of fire dancing upon the insides of my eyelids.

An Ocean Swell From Back Then.

I'm easily wounded.

Her eyeliner's the fur of the puma.

Dark like a cave.

I looked back and saw all that youth and wandering like something missing.

No cure for old noise.

Wonderful inside this cavern.

Brave brave brave.

This midnight hour telling as it is, a loss.

Traumatic though it may be.

Still I'm not willing to give it up.

Tin type, lead type, the alluring type.

Waiting for a reply while my heart yearns tired.

Sending desperate pleas across the wires.

Lovesick, homesick, in sickness and in health.

If it was, it'd be like a panic.

A gridwork within my veins that holds me like a web.

And those daggers, smart like mischief.

Mellow, drama.

The dim glimmer in the periphery like simple, elusive possibility.

Or needles...or pins...

Some sort of wreckage out there in the distance

cannot seem to rid myself of this feeling.

The Script Yearning.

She wears her dress like scripture. Falling to my knees, I've got nothing to offer but let me feel something. I keep writing it down but the words don't stick. I fail to save the tree and those twigs are brushing against me like stones across the flesh. They may hurt me and so do words. So do birds fly or do I? Am I falling? It's all a matter of context and the ground seems to be swimming ablur and teeming with crocodiles. And insurance salesmen, and professionals, and all of them just killing time so nicely. Their hours all sequestered in a microphone booth so you can hear them eke away slowly yet not feel their grip. Removed and out of sight but heard nonetheless. I read up on you and there is no salvation, only blood tinted teal and pandering to my naivete. And you wear a mask like a wrestler. And you wrestle with something unseen. And yes, I suppose I do learn something from reading your eyes. But nothing of your body language. And nothing of your dress keeps me thinking. Only wondering; does this thing we call the world just spin because of our wants? Because of our fears? Aspiration and admiration aside, I love the way you sway and fall and get back up again. They wrote it down for a reason.

Reading into the Daily Paper.

The racing is bleeding wrong. I'm most surely a fuck up, mewling about absence of heart and hope with a touch of humanity. The pacing's an impeding song. I'm frustrated and the sun goes down on another tirelessly adult and lonely night of sheets drawn cold. The sun stalks the tears away from my eyes, slapping my dry face with shine. I realize I'm barking up the wrong tree. I see she has her edges gilded with heartbreak. The safety nets are booby traps and the agents of the law beckon, drinking chartruese as they fall through the gaps. Vacancies. Who am I to listen to when I sense that my only tryst is one of shot up reason? I saw you once: the image of a piece of my heart falling into your palm refracted through tequila and whiskey. Each tin flask fills and empties with the sunrise running, bloodied by the sunset. Thus the truth: I see the malice of my heart writhing from blow after self-wrought, melodramatic blow. To say I built this mansion just to tear it down is an understatement. Understand rent and pay it. The dues are what come second. I feel the breeze of a personality history and it tickles painfully. Pins and needles.

My hairs are pointing at one another, deciding which of them will go gray next. The crowd is bristling aniticipation. Confetti twisting in the air; each piece aspin within a thin little orbit each their own. We are dancing this dance quietly yet the din is overwhelming.

Those that kinder warmth are all mixed up with those that want to: like blood. We draw from one another randomly. Strawberries and tar paper and the letting go of affections. We're sick to death of staring out at the pall of another inebriated set of circumstances. We are getting the sense that time is dwindling. We send messages in the dark while a quick shock dissolves under soil erosion disasters. There you are waving. Here I am debating. I'm just here and the one who's there gets no closer with the circling. I turn the hour glass. The birds swarm like flies. The grains of sand let me know of the slipping away. And there you are, my possibility: all beautiful amber avoidance. I'm here with your loss dropping off and I empty my pockets, shining white. These sheets drape about my body like a white flag of surrender.

Dream Review.

I see you out there. And I'm far away, there there. Just me who mouths, "where?" And time spars and stares. Because this is ridiculous, heeling to fictitious malignments. All drawn to the hilt frivolous, peeling fruit, vicious laments, tall fawn, a boon feels contagious. We are running softly upon pillows filling up with dead memories. Fighting amongst those weeping willows, I feel an empty tender release. I said what I did to walk into the woods without my lunch. I did what I did to let the lessor be known. I know what I know to keep the help at bay. I think what I think because I have no one to tell me otherwise. This four sided room has two ways out. No ceiling, no floor: up or down. I look laterally and each way is a dead end. It is either descent or ascent. An assessment of assents has me saying yes to this and no to that and getting a confused look on my life when I open my eyes and my body was there the whole time watching. It kept it's aches overnight. And I was drunk when I said I didn't believe and sober I feel an absence like nothing. I drive myself into a hole, a whole, a holy set of circumstances all my own. I drive myself into this.

Hands Up.

I can feel you sneaking around out there, anxiety. With dreary leaves plastered upon your face; those ones that fell from the trees after hanging on the entire year through warmth and death and the end of things. You lurk around every corner with vestigial faith pouring from your palms like kool-aid flavoring. Or like blood. And you fear yourself. It's so effervescent: your power is self effacing. You humble yourself with the way you tear everything down. I am wrapped up in you like the traces of a past spent losing oneself in manic drug intake and breathing techniques. We find ourselves on our last breath together in the diving bell looking into one anothers eyes saying in unison, No Need. No Need. No Need. There is no need for all of this confusion; this earnest yet tense desire. All of this unease scratching our wrists bloody as we climb rooftops in an electrical black out. All of this tiresome writhing in the blood speckled crawl space of this life we work together to pacify. We work together to convince ourselves of the woods and their looming darkness. We work together to haul up the mossy remains from the sapphire labyrinth of salt surrounding the land. We work together to make the wreckage come back together. But it won't will it? Until there is a defining crack of lightning across the lonely prairie where the cattle wander with bellies full of dust, the pieces won't join hands. Hacking and losing our tears in the once fertile soil, we won't bring it back together until we reason with one another that we must distance ourselves from one another. There is no need for us to hold eachother so tight. For intimacy of destruction begets goodbyes, and loss is a gaining of a future: There is no need to tell ourselves we are the same, anxiety.