Those Ghosts.

The cold things get to live longer
though they aren't breathing much.
It is as if you want your skeleton
to be gilded with simple glimmer
to brighten the end of sorrow.
Tell me I will die content.
And maybe we do have an essence.
Maybe we don't have to construct facsimiles
of our bodies in hopes
that we may get to see
the sun go down forever.
But oh just to know
that there is something more.
To see those ghosts wink a smile
and leave the room.

Blossom Grief with Imagined Piano.

What the fuck was it that made you this way?, slurs father as Blossom jams his spindles in the air all stupid in rhapsodical parody of a jamstacked to the max piano man real gone on crystal chandeliers and son of a bitch blues.  Blossom lets the unsure beat lure his charred mind through lines of bopping keys and renal failure chords.  He wears stupid stuff that seems like clothing and it is real baggy and charms the shit out of a dog.  The seams don't jive and weave correctly.  He never opens his eyes for he is always in the thick of a sticky imagination with his fingers flailing out before him, his face all screwed up.  His imaginary piano is gilded with rhinestone.

I could slap that face off of you so much!  So quick!  So stupid!, screams father as Blossom sashays around the backyard.  The backyard.  The place where they throw the trash.  The trash seethes wrong in the moonlight if father places it in the bin provided to them by the state.  This makes Blossom scream all night long.  So they must let the garbage blow all over the backyards face.  Father slumps in a lawn chair, his mouth ablur with booze of long gone Sundays still thick on his shirt.  There are palm trees on the shirt.  There is no reason for it all.  Blossom was given to this man as penance for sleeping with a cashier at Petsmart in Gary, IN.  It happened in the birdcages.  He woke up three years later with pink eye and a son named Blossom.  It was, tragically, the mid-90's.  In the throes of a vicious bender, he had named his son after a teen girl lost in the folds of a frumpy sweater on television.  The mother was no where to be seen; she was into dogfood in really weird ways.  Dog parks are not safe.  And the positive emotion movement was in full swing.  And all the children were swaddled in yes-men parenting.  And no one could let the ice cream fall from the lip of the insolent bitch sunk in Barney underwear.

Don't you feel the sneaky self esteem movement convincing you to never stay happy?!  Don't you feel this ever present lust of self preservation slowly squander you?  Don't you see these premium prices tremble as we pay for dump site paranoia personality histories?  I AM LOST ALL OVER YOU, BLOSSOM!  And father just lets a torrent of sickness and rage pour from him like the river that drowns the lovers seeking refuge in the state park.  Blossom does not hear a thing of it.  Blossom lets another fully developed icon of over consumption douche his brain into pristine condition.  He jams hard in his mind.  He gets lost among the lonely pieces of detritus as father sails gloriously into a blackout with urine soaking his zoobas.  They spin as marionettes in a snow globe filled with nothing but their wants of this all to stop; yet another set spun of the Grief Family genes.

No More A Source of Warmth.

She thought she was a lover but she's not one.  Just the pinprick empty, her body all numb.  When the neighbor turns off the lights she slowly dresses.  Argyle and stripes with a licorice whiplash for protection.  She has nimble moves that make no sense.  The sock hat stifles her ghost writing when she scales the sides of suburbia.  A nuclear beauty of a sunset closes in on the tepid landscape of drawn shades, muesli affluence, and branded monotony.  Her head full up with a cloud, lost in there without a sun.  She wants something she's not capable of.  Hopeless romantic...something something frantic.  And without a purpose she cat burgles and drinks from the bird bathes of unknown magnificently middle class pleasure areas.  In the side yard her body manipulates the darkness.  When she gets into the home she wanders around with her mind taking footage like a blank tape.  None of it is recorded.  She doesn't take anything from the break in.  She doesn't mind leaving behind a feeling of unrepentant idleness.  When the occupants of the house awake in the night it is not to a bump in the night.  It is to a nameless grief that streaks in through the windows out there where the mercury vapor decay dreams up more and more roads that lead to work.  The husband gets out of the vague design he sleeps in and stumbles to the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror with eyes like slate;  she lurks below.  She gets out of there long before the husband points at himself.  She gets away and smirks.  For her's is a life of unseemly cantor in unfamiliar pajamas.  Their bed clothes symbolically wrapping her cold abdomen up in a familial congeniality she can't fathom.  She is of the Grief Family: forever getting typecast as the waste that she is.  She strips off the woolen sweater in the steam of a sultry summer night upon return from another redundancy.  The air thickens around her.  Forgive the lucky end to every moon, she muses as she rides herself into another nightly rut.  She lets go of the crimson cane and it clatters to the floor:  she does not hear a thing.  She pulls the stripes down over her nose:  it doesn't change a thing.  She can't seem to make up her mind on whether she is deaf or blind.

Begin, Third Generation.

The grievous procession waves their hands and they seem to be holding their previous relations at bay while the murk gives them another opportunity to get up and fall down.  They are the third generation of the Grief Family.  No more qualms about it.  The matriarch has fallen.  They tie her up in gaudy pink ribbons and close the lid on her gilded rose coffin with sadness and triumph.  Hats off for the hearse, yet curse each remembrance with a statement whittled thin and terse.  They've got the ideas but not the execution.  Their notions just tease them when they should line them up and shoot them.  And with the smell of death on their shoulders they freshen their breath.  They're a decade older and done up in each others eyes with lies.  Throw everything away so as to doll up this romantic fray.  These days of indecision and insecurity steadily overarching, they are overly conscious of who should get them.  Their words are nothing but gravestones lined up, stone icons of suggestions past.  And present:  They stand.  Done down and damned.  When they set the stone in the muddy ground it will sit and wait.  Over the years the birds will drop their condolences upon the marker and make it look as if it were splattered with marzipan.  Sweet shit, mutters the ugly grandson.  In the haze of the funeral party, each drink is a reminder of the essential inability to express oneself.  They swim out in a consensual circle; the human buoys a chart of single points on a black and white grid.  Unconnected they moan within all this stupid swaying, dim noises out there in the crescent moon refracted upon the surface of something.

Click here for further Grief Family lineage.

Splatter Control.

A chest cavity like an attic with fingers creeping through the eaves:  surgeons prying.  The tips are bats and the ribs are slats, you open the cellar door, the surprise is blinding as one flies through.  In the ceiling there is a creaking, each tone groaning and done with the inside even before reaching the outside.  Down below the family debates the spin of the earth, throwing out the steamy trash.  The rest is all lost.  The rest was ill deserved.  Your rest is ruined.  Sleep up there real nice, keep the smoke roiling out the chimney all wrong.  String up words upon the mantle; they sway upon the inanity like paper lanterns.  They're put up to sympathize with the left and the right that hates.  Your hands interlace to replace the ribs.  No more protection, no more hiding:  the darkness shrouds the writhing heart, staining the slats with ignorance and cheat:  It keeps the beat.  An orchestra appears, curbside melodramatic, releasing violin sobs as the structure tears itself down.  This probably shouldn't have been built up so passionately.  The funding should have dried up long before the first flood blooms erupted in the plaster.  Do not tear it down because it is wrong.  Do it because it will make you weep sweat.

Apocalypse.

In the room where one must wait for a face transplant.  Just right now the one I've got is all bunched and tied.  We draw at the same time and its all screwed up, shooting our mouths off.  The surgeon looks in horror at our mix tape sadness.  Our teeth scattered across graveland tar pools like glow sticks.  The party is over, gone, sought after yet doubted.  The lines in the dark are afterimages.  They'll graft smiles upon our faces with skin taken from unknown sources.

We told ourselves our world would be this thing that sparkled bright in contrast to the loss. And the contract we wrote up was written in motor oil and stupid drip. We said the last twilight will be now as we whispered to each other a requiem for ourselves; the loose leafed promises all flying away with the winters getting mild and the icecaps truly drifting. The mindscape becomes foreboding as the sphere spins on further. The signals are not getting out there. The leap off the cliff proves fatal. The lessor in the papers wanders away without a finite return. Dumping grounds exceed demand. We told ourselves with each proactive measure that the context was the decider: should we get too far the rope around our waists would grow taut. But who has the rope tied these days. Proud and ever present, a personality history draws up the will. Can we be what we want to be? Can this tired marble of rock keep us happy? Can we get the jest long enough to laugh? Will it run after the tune up? And our lines are crooked. Dumbed down to the level where we see a reflection in the madness, our gears slip into a hitch and we grab our sides to keep the ribs aligned. Metal teeth all bright in the darkness. Our bodies like armor, our flesh like chain mail; and we know it doesn't work.

The whole thing is ending some day, and I'm not talking about me or you.  I'm talking about the sun and the moon and the earth.  The very source will expand and burn us all silently to ash and nothing.  It was made finite and I've got a feeling my time is and will be good.  The folds of flesh lay decadent upon my skull like a thirteen layer wedding cake.

Calm Stare.

The convulsions go away at some point: bitter begets sweet.  And you wake up in the dream suddenly; the feeling of memory loss doesn't come. You look into the depths of a well with a glint of life at the deep end. The water, the flow, the glistening down there. You have no problem drifting towards the green sway as you slip into the current. It's soft and calm. The electric tangle above the surface crackles in the distance, that sheet of terror with ever present authority. It's back there but you continue on into the environmental sound. An atmosphere like a diorama of Lego men searching the jungle for a plastic jewel; measures of your childhood and warmth. Construction paper and Play-doh palm trees. The feeling envelops you. It carefully lays hands upon you, pulling the wire hangers from your veins and peeling the dead leaves from your forehead. All the dead wreckage slowly moving away in concentric circles like the radial dancing of birds across the unending sky. You don't try to explain why you don't deserve it. You believe the caress and the gaze. Your tears are of joy and pain through gain. You let it tear a hole through you that won't close. It was close, for a while, that old sadness you wouldn't let go. It was a close call; those leaps into self manipulation. Self deprecation, self mutilation. All for the sake of an illusive idea you didn't even have a grasp of. A vague notion of a gift through desperation. Bitterness gave you romanticized depression. You've been assuming the positive is the negative. Your life as a study in photographic science; the silver nitrate blooming into the opposite of reality. Yes you are sensitive. You are sensitive to light. But it is developed every day. Those blue eyes like stars you've finally learned to navigate by are a proof.