Saint Lavender - Fall 2020

FALL 2020

9/6/2020

Sometimes,

I swat at the air, poke at it.

Just to see if this is all really happening.

I’m not really sure what I’m expecting to find, if I’m honest.

Maybe a hole in the net or a ladder to climb.

If reality falters, I want to bear witness.

If the faltering is reality, I’d like to be in on the joke.

And if the joke isn’t funny, I hope I can find the courage

within myself to laugh anyways with reckless abandon,

as if laughter was the only thing keeping me here.

9/24/2020

It’s in the mundane, they’ll try to tell you.

It’s in a rotten apple or your grandmother’s hands or in the stillness of things.

But this never quite scratches that itch.

So you pick a white rabbit at random, just to see where It goes.

And you suppose, in the middle of your hunt,

that perhaps that’s It, just seeing where It goes.

But It’s too late now for suppositions,

because you’ve already gone to the trouble of

building yourself a proper maze around the thing

(and I hardly think that you’ll be coming home any time soon).

Air sours in your lungs and folds in on Itself until you’re breathing in 2-D.

You’ve molted your spine and your voice doesn’t recognize itself

but you have to keep going because the rabbit just made a sharp left

(At least I think it was left).

There’s nothing I can do but wait.

Finally, you catch a glint of something out of the corner of your eye,

But It’s not the rabbit— It’s the world you left behind

(I’ve been calling your name for hours.)

Somehow It’s enough to pluck you right up and out of the maze,

out of the hunt.

Your eyes adjust to whatever takes shape in front of them;

I remind you that you are alive, alive, alive,

That the maze doesn’t exist if you don’t want It to,

That whatever “It” everyone is always going on about is no concern of yours.

(And while we are busy coaxing you back into your skin,

the rabbit twitches patiently in plain sight.)

9/21/2020

There’s a mitigated alchemy

to be found at the end of my nose.

Little infinities sprout up

from the space inside my shoes.

Everything is waiting with bated breath,

just like me.

The sun and I have a complicated relationship

(We’ve been playing tug-of-war for thousands of years),

But today we talk like old friends over dinner

who’ve no need for niceties.

Paradise is no longer lost in translation;

It is the very act of translating.

9/23/2020

Matter clings to itself

(the old coward)

Because it’s the only thing that it has.

We take our time, abuse it in vain

Take our numbers, pull harder on the reigns

Pray for slumber and choose pleasure over pain

All for another cliché,

For art that can’t understand you

anymore than you beg it to

You’re a god in your own lonely universe

Hoping that your creations will somehow

know you better than you know yourself

so you force words where they don’t quite belong,

funnel sound into fleeting decorations,

rape atoms until they tremble at your

closest approximation of a soul.

And for your final act,

you trick yourself into believing that this is what it means to be

Human.

9/26/2020

You get bonus points for not having fun, you know.

(God told me that himself.)

You get a gold star and a kiss on the cheek

before you go

where all of us go.

It’s eating you alive, isn’t it?

The static tumbling and heaping into tomorrow

you try to call “heaven”.

(Can you still feel it when the seasons change?)

A sunny day for a thousand years

Never did learn the magic words

(And you’ve been eating yours for breakfast).

9/27/2020

Who wins?

Three is more surreal than one or two could ever be

Black and White you can count on—

It stings you when it’s comfortable,

It burns you when it’s cold.

(It’s all you know,

but at least you know it all.)

Add uncertainty to the mix, and you’ve got yourself

a proper trinity:

A time, a place, a name.

A known, an unknown, a game.

This and That and something in between.

Who wins?

(I never cared much for dichotomies anyways.)

It’s the third party that I’m interested in.

There’s a baptism to be had inside of every misunderstanding,

a funeral in every victory.

Won’t you entertain our guest?

The Holy Ghost is getting to be impatient.

(Who won?)

9/25/2020

Imagine how much scarier living would be

if we didn’t group our days together.

For so many people, the only bit of sanity

threading through their lives is found in words like

Thursday.

(As if Thursday has anything in common with the day seven names before.)

Imagine if we spent our days how they actually are:

One after another after another,

never repeating,

always Today.

In earnest, it’s been today

for as long as any of us can remember.

It has always been now,

always right here,

forever and ever and forward and back again.

But please —by all means—

feel free to cut the cake.

Chop the daylight into hours,

Hack the solar system into seasons,

Poke your head out into the cosmos

and announce to no one that you once had lived

because you called it “Life”;

Save me a slice if you’ll have me.

9/30/2020

I look up,

And the sky still manages that

pale blue grin,

Mocking me at arm’s length,

spying me from a distance.

(I never even had the home-field advantage.)

It’s come to know me a million times over

through a billion different eyes,

each pair laced with the same

mangled wonder.

When there’s nothing better do to,

the sky’s even been known to

return the favor.

At first glance,

our eyes glisten much like the heavens,

(glitter back up at him in golden vanity)

fed by the endless search of the starving.

10/3/2020

The wary become the weary much too quickly if you let them.

Let us boil inside of ourselves for just a little while longer!

Let us spill over onto every shoulder we touch, into every gaze we meet.

Let space and time find themselves

at home inside of our lungs,

Let the joy we shared ring true for always,

Let us be so much of ourselves that we are incalculable!

Let infinity be ashamed in its nakedness

so that we might be humbled accordingly, let our bodies settle in before they settle down,

let us find the courage within ourselves to laugh at you with reckless abandon, as if laughter was the only thing

keeping us here.

(Amen.)

10/4/2020

No, I’m not in love— never have been,

although I’ve seen how it goes on more than one occasion now.

I’d never meet a person halfway just to take the pressure off,

never contort who I am to fit a narrative.

It’s a lot more brutal

than they’re all letting on, you know.

People are always talking about who they hope to become but never about

who they had to become.

No, I’m not in love— never even given myself the benefit of the doubt.

(Some claim they like it better that way.)

Although as far as I’m concerned,

I’ve loved every person I’ve ever known

to the extent that I knew them.

Loving people like that is ugly.

It doesn’t make any sense.

But how else can I love a person for who they are without first loving them for

who I know them to be?

No, I’ve never been in love, but I love you right where you are, however I can

(surely that must count for something).

10/5/2020

Time absolutely refuses

any and all investigation.

There will be no trial,

no penance to be had.

It’s the perfect crime—

always this and that to keep us occupied,

and all the while time still passes

(time passes in stillness).

The same new disguise,

The weapon of choice,

the primary suspect, the starring role—

the Devil or whatever’s left of Him,

made before and after

(and during and enduring)

His own image.

We understand so little

that we try to worship

our misunderstanding,

sanctify it.

Sanctify— make holy!

Holy war!

War and peace!

Peace and order!

Order!

Order in the court!

Order!

10/5/2020

I want to possess myself.

I want to inject my limbs so full of character that my stride affirms free will.

I want to be filled to the brim with suchness,

I want to channel life,

Siphon it through the senses,

Filter it through my veins.

I want to be Saved, crowned, redeemed by the present moment,

I want to be exalted through each next breath, each next thought, continually baptized by the newness of being.

I want to be a happy medium of reality,

I want to feel seen by the morning and unraveled by the evening,

I want to dissolve into action,

I want to take this body and

give it an honest try,

I want to take my name and set it free

just to see where it goes;

I want to possess myself!

10/7/2020

It was such a joy to be alive those days.

Growing up in drunken youth,

making mountains out of molehills

and hiding out in the undergrowth for

hours on end.

Always out of time; it was so foreign to us.

We held it in our hands,

poked at it like it was

just another curious thing—

And once we understood the gimmick,

we tossed it aside,

threw it in with all of our other old toys,

and went back to playing pretend.

10/8/2020

There’s a rope swinging from the sky—

And I’m not exactly sure why,

But sometimes, when I sit in the stillness of the day, I can see it in my mind’s eye,

Swaying back and forth like a lullaby.

It is always gentle there; maybe it’s in a field somewhere.

Yes, that’s it.

It’s in a tall, grassy field where the wind runs low and the clouds hang high.

Up, up, up as far as the eye can see, (weathered and tethered and free as am I)

And for whom the rope swings I’m afraid no one knows.

Still, I’ll yield all my time to find out,

I suppose,

yield the rest of my days just to see where it goes.

10/9/2020

Sometimes my father smiles through my eyes and I feel like the devil.

I’m swallowing flies like gumdrops,

Pin drops on the hardwood floor,

quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

(The subtlety of everything, the terrifying little subtlety of everything!)

It could be as simple as a shift in posture,

A settling of expression,

and all the while fear is

frothing at the mouth, begging to be fed.

Sometimes my mother smiles through my eyes and the devil feels like me.

A child, much too young to carry the weight of right and wrong,

and much too tired to learn the difference.

I don’t want to be the one to say it, either.

But all of us are hiding behind it,

behind that craving to be understood.

We need it so badly, can’t be left alone—

so we mitigate ourselves by holding others hostage in our own suffering.

Except it never turns out like we thought it would, and now someday I’ll smile through the eyes of my children as the devil just laughs.

10/9/2020

Time isn’t linear for me anymore.

Everything circles through; threads right through itself over and over again until you’re twitching like a mindless old spinster, that damned Arachne!

Doesn’t even remember what she’s doing here anymore— a true creature of habit!

Her memory’s been wiped so many times that she thinks she’s happy.

Poor thing! Let’s see if she notices.

Let us, please let us, oh but who are we talking to? And why do I need his permission?

And why can’t I ever seem to remember your face when I see it so unmistakably?

Too many questions.

You’ll have whatever face I give you, take any shape you can get, so long as you still have a mouth to scream.

Our name is legion; what’s mine is yours.

Even the dust huddles together, you know, to shield itself from the frigid space in between. (Gravity!) The more you matter, the more you have matter, the more matter you have (— and then the spinster seemed to have lost her train of thought)!

10/11/2020

I never can tell how high up the clouds are supposed to be from the ground.

There’s just too much air to see through, too many inches of nothing that shrink the distance between what I see and what remains above.

Today, the clouds are all one, drawn tight across the horizon like a bedsheet.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Keeping up with the water cycle sure does get old after awhile.

We all get old after awhile, try to make up for those lost inches in the sky.

Reach up— but there is no up, just out,

out into the thick of it, the thinness of the air, the space between atoms and the lives between the stars.

I hope it’s not too terribly serious for you down here; I hope you know that you can always find solace in coincidence, always make peace with the shapes in the sky, connect dots lightyears away from each other just to spell out your name, just because you can, and because you might as well— because you never can tell.

10/12/2020

Raise your glass

And don’t you spill

Here is a toast to the time we kill

Take my hand

And don’t let go

Here’s to the love and the joy we know

To the love and the joy we know, we know

Raise your glass

And don’t you spill

Here is a toast to the space we fill

Take my hand

And lead me through

Here’s to the best and the worst with you

The best and the worst with you, with you,

The best and the worst with you, with you

10/10/2020

—home right now,

but I never lock the front door, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in.

Please, feel free to stay for as long as you’d like; it’s really no trouble at all.

I actually quite like having visitors, despite my apparent disdain for housekeeping.

I can’t exactly account for all the mess you’re liable to encounter, either;

you might find things tucked away in places that I can’t quite explain, abandoned home-improvement projects, odd little trinkets I keep around for sentimental value.

I’ve been waiting for the seasons to change, see, to do some spring cleaning.

It hasn’t been spring in so long.

Not here, at least. Not for me, although I’m sure you didn’t need me to tell you that. I’m actually out right now getting supplies, giving my ghost some time to pack her things. She’s a bit testy for a gossamer, always needing to be reminded of where she doesn’t belong! The truth is, we both just absolutely adore having you, but I’m afraid I was just leaving. I’m not—

10/13/2020

Every time I smoke a cigarette it’s like I’m meeting my mother back in time,

listening to her sing me a lullaby I never knew she was singing.

My father’s eyes always caught the light in such a sinister way.

He never caught light so much as he trapped it, lured it somewhere deep inside of him where no one dared to follow.

Sometimes he would look at me as if to say that he’d happily rot in jail for the rest of his days just to have his way with me.

I try not to think about it.

I light another cigarette, watch the flame and remember what it was like to feel so afraid, learn one more lullaby as her aching voice crumbles back into

the cool night air.

10/13/2020

Today I think I’ll write a poem about how happy it is just to be here.

(It’ll make me happy to say it because that’s what I want it to do.)

Tomorrow, I might write another about the fear I’ve known or the trouble I’ve seen, but today sees no trouble—

no trouble at all!

Yesterday is too far away from here to change my mind, I’ve decided,

and so today, I think I’ll write a poem about how happy it is just to be here.

And I did, and it is, and I am.

10/13/2020

I had to earn this, you know.

Suck it up through bloodied teeth

eye for eye, pound for pound.

I had to let it wriggle around on my tongue until I thought it might kill me,

then gracefully swallow it whole.

I had to cage it behind my skin when all it was itching to do was peel itself back out.

I had to break my bones and wedge it in my marrow like a splintered Russian doll.

Kindness is a choice

that some people chew like candy.

10/14/2020

Lord, I’ve known you.

For whatever that’s worth,

whatever that means to you

(whatever you hope it doesn’t mean).

I’ve known you for the person you are

and for who you’re trying to be

and who you’ve been and then some;

I’ve even made friends with the skeleton in your closet.

We talk about you sometimes when you’re not around, wonder why you’ve

been giving us the cold shoulder.

(Was it something we said?)

Knowing you, you’d probably say

in so many words

“I just haven’t been feeling like myself.”

Well, then, if you aren’t feeling like yourself, who is?

Dishes only run away with spoons

in fairy tales, you know,

and the further inward you go,

the stranger it gets.

I can’t even promise that it’ll be worth the trouble; all I know is that

I miss you so much more than I know you.

(And Lord, I’ve known you.)

10/14/2020

What a strange little joke we’ve been playing on ourselves;

what a strange little story we’ve been writing down for nobody.

There’s a stillness that the earth is hiding.

The wind told me about it once.

The sky betrays it when it thinks

no one is watching.

Only fools think the world turns for them

(no less because we call it turning),

and yet only fools can truly understand what beauty lies in reason.

Cause never was the reason,

we only dreamt it so.

(Still, I’ll be damned if dreaming doesn’t ache like wisdom.)

In knowing you can lose, you’ve lost.

In learning there’s a price, it costs.

In holding onto truth, you’ve none.

In laughing when you can, you’ve won.

10/16/2020

Something tells me

that I will never be here again,

that space and time are quite

the unhappy couple.

Joined at the hip, shackled, never to be left alone from one another—

the poor Siamese twins;

it’s a wonder they don’t self-destruct!

Something tells me

they’ve tried but to no avail.

Something tells me lots of things, and I’ve no choice but to take her word as sage.

Something is something of a double agent, creeping up as close to the beast as she can without making herself known.

She spins me stories of a dimensionless mound of flesh and fear,

its crazed whisperings enough to force any mortal man to his knees in worship.

Something tells me all of this in a way she hopes I’ll understand, with her last martyred breath, as the monster closes in on her from all sides: she tells me

that symbol is our scripture,

that love is our effigy,

and that I will never be here again.

10/17/20

The other day, I bumped into an old friend,

brushed shoulders with

the man I used to be.

He put on his best behavior for me, though we didn’t have much to say.

(I know better now than to call on him for any favors.)

We parted ways like old lovers do, with a sweet misunderstanding in a silence dearly departed.

Yesterday, I met a new friend for dinner, the woman I’m destined to become.

She smiled at me from across the table

with a sad brand of reverence.

(She knew better than to call on me for any favors.)

We didn’t bother keeping up with appearances: no point in saving face when the face is your own, we supposed.

The millions of questions I had planned on asking fell mute on my lap; she answered them all with the wave of her wrist .

Just this morning, I waved “hello” to my friend who lives & breathes in between

(and it was truly good to see them again).

10/19/2020

I wonder who has known me.

Was she very kind?

(Had she any wool?)

Was she sound of mind?

(Had she paid in full?)

Did she stand up straight,

her head held up by string?

(Was she running late

from some Eternal Thing?)

Did she pick her words

like apples from the ground?

(Did Saturn lose its rings

for all that she had found?)

Did she stop to stare

when Nothing was in view?

(Did she say “hello”

but sound like someone new?)

I wonder who has known me.

10/20/2020

These can’t be the same four seasons

I knew in my youth.

Something has changed about them— they’ve been mutated, iterated, copied so many times that they’ve

lost their original charm.

It used to feel like Winter;

now it only feels like another winter.

Another spring, summer, fall,

these months I’ve known for all my life

have shed their emperor’s clothes.

One day always slipping into the next when nobody’s looking:

“I can’t believe it’s October already!”

Trees molt their leaves just like they’ve always done, accepting orders from

some great cosmic coordinate.

Earth marches along obediently, too,

trudging once more through gravity’s rut.

As a child, the world moves when you do, mimics your joyous little tempo.

Each season knows a treasure to be discovered, a mystery to be unveiled.

(Heaven help the child to whom the earth reveals itself.)

10/22/20

Meet my gaze— I dare you!

I mean you no harm;

I’m only terrified is all.

I only love you like a sinner loves his guilt,

like the clouds love our eyes

and the wind loves the birds’ company.

You of all people know how it sprouts out of itself and into itself all at once!

Humor me, wont you?

It’s so easy to do, doesn’t cost a thing!

How simple it is to partake in the daylight!

How intimate it is to stop and say “hello” before we have to say “goodbye”!

Hello!

10/23/2020

Left— no, right— straight.

Don’t go down that road again;

can’t you remember

you’ve been here before?

Tell yourself it’s fate, tell yourself you don’t know how you always find yourself in circles. (Who could blame you?)

Right— no— straight. Right.

No, you’ve definitely been down this road before. You can see it in the way the trees gnarl and furl so innocently. Those trees, that barn, they’ve always been there.

They’ll outlive you, see days you’ll never know. Know. No. This time will be different.

Straight. Be positively sure of it.

(That porch light has been winking at you all night long.) Keep going anyway; don’t even bother relying on your so-called intuition. Just keep going until you’re

out of the frying pan and into the fire:

a much much larger circle.

Straight, no, right— left.

10/23/2020

Somehow you looked into me

when I wasn’t even looking out,

didn’t even think that I was accepting any visitors.

Poked your head wistfully

between the aisles, humming Curiosity

from a bird’s-eye-view.

Who is it that you love?

(Can you introduce us

to each other?)

The way we grow up informs our personality, but it also distracts from it:

I never was—never will be—but I am right now. (Or at least we can remember when things used to be so simple.)

Maybe love is the only tool blunt enough to whittle down the waiting list.

10/25/2020

I stow my body on its shelf to let it rest and heal itself for a few hours.

(What a curious miracle it is to heal,

to let time have at things!)

I coexist myself an architect.

She lures me away with pipe-dreams so that she can have some peace and quiet:

“What’s this she’s been doing?”

She has half my mind to give me a taste of my own medicine— gives me some of hers instead. It’s all Greek to me, alchemy.

She oversees entire colonies, delegates empires without ever uttering a single sound. She has no need for names or the Profound; she simply does (and in doing, there is no name, no abstraction to be had or found). Meanwhile, I am pleasantly lost, strung along by some timeless spaceless ploy: a crib-made-wonderland by design. She returns the mind’s eye tenderly to my nowhere-hands as the body begins to stir languidly in the wings, churning with apprehension that her Character might take a liking to its newly-mended toy.

10/26/2020

There is no way to gap the bridge.

Better men than me have tried (and very well may have succeeded for that matter).

But for those of us who remain, the canyon sprawls out all around us:

below us, above us, within and without us.

It isn’t a void— a lack of space,

but the space in between who lacks everything and has nothing, too.

Petty semantics!

Life is like nothing found within it;

it is “like” no thing because

it contains every thing!

After all, a box of chocolates cannot be “like” its own sweets: its parts are already summed, and within this summation there can be found only parts.

(Serves us right for trying to force a box inside of itself!)

Things can only be like what they are not, and definition and expression are two sides of the same rusty coin

(although to what exactly “coin” refers

I could never truly say).

What’ll it be today, dear—

Heads or Tails?

10/27/2020

For the love of life itself

For the life of love itself

For itself unto love and life I speak

For ever and ever and forward and back again

amen on the apex

fifty-two card deck with no aces left

to pin to my sleeve-chest open wide and let the breeze get its kicks from the secrets we hide but who’s counting? theft and robbery never pinned their hopes onto me and I will not return the favor.

What is there even left to savor?

Savoring is tethering and tethered things don’t tend to weathering but weather knows where the evergreen has shed its lowly feather. Steeped in forever like deciduous trees weak in the knees week after week no release from the cold machine that leaks its bloody vengeance onto me. And as for thee, what shall I compare thee to? What could be said or done of the favorite that tears apart its own wings? Sings like the devil sings but no one hears his word-for-words.

At least we are all here together.

10/27/2020

Countdown, countdown!

Weekdays and circus clowns

The days don’t stop and start, they only slip and slide (quite messily)!

No referee, either.

Nobody up there or down here to

make the close calls.

Or, if there is a body, a No Body, could you please speak up a little?

We’re all having trouble hearing you.

The only thing we hear anymore is our alarms, they never leave us alone!

Screeching out the numbers that we fed to them, crying out their boastful metal rooster’s crow:

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Countdown! Countdown!

Time is money!

The year is almost through!

But what then? Another one, of course! The two-thousand-and-twenty-first anniversary of our Carpenter’s death! How will you celebrate? Pick your poison!

Countdown! Countdown!

10/27/2020

I am a kind of Man,

a Man kind, a Mankind,

and I know exactly what I am saying.

I am a history not found in your books;

history is mine and I am a Mankind.

(I am also called “Woman”, sure,

but surely never your Woman pure

and only as much as you take me one for.)

I’m a man in my anger,

a man in my own image after my own heart and mind.

I am Man and so are you, Woman,

we are a kind of Man, a Man kind,

for Man would not know kindness

without his mother’s

womb and love and time,

without his lover’s

tenderness and patient lies she whites,

and this is why

We are Men.

A kind of Man, of our own Mankind,

And we know exactly what we are saying.

10/28/2020

You’re the only other person in the universe and I will never understand you.

Everyone you meet is their own macrocosm, pick at them with your words.

How can you all say “I love you”?

How can anyone say “I love you” and know for certain that

all three words are true?

(You don’t love me,

You don’t love me,

You don’t love me.)

Is there some sort of tipping point

where all of a sudden

you are you and I am I

and love means love?

Or is everyone throwing

caution to the wind?

I’d like to believe that love is shameless:

you don’t know me,

and I don’t know you—and neither of us know love,

but maybe if we risk it all and bare ourselves in earnest, love would find itself at home among the chaos sure to follow.

10/29/2020

Sometimes, if you lie perfectly still,

you can feel the daylight strengthen and widen,

contract and expand.

A perfect bull’s-eye every time:

picking everything up

exactly where the second before left off,

precisely where time intended for it to be.

(Cause and effect effect the cause.)

Something begins where the tip of your nose ends;

it is constantly prying and picking away at you.

But the only way to beat it is to join it,

only way to understand it is to become a part of it,

so you toss and turn in protest like magnets in heat

until the day arrives

when that something works its way

into your tired old lungs.

You know everything there is to know now,

know what it means to have meant,

know what it means to have known,

know what it means to stake claim and surrender,

to be cradled by the soil

that welcomes you now like an old friend.

And sometimes, the body you left behind

can still feel traces of the daylight

strengthening and widening

in its long silent rhythm.

10/30/2020

The greatest love story never written

lies between whoever you are and whatever you aren’t.

Take a thing as terrifying— no, beautiful—as Life itself,

Separate the “it” from the “self”;

Fall in love with both.

10/31/2020

I miss the bathtub in my second home.

Miss the way the curtains scraped and draped against the ground,

Miss the burgundy fabric folds and the pattern of a wallpaper that only exists so long as I’m dreaming of it, is only alive as long as I’m thinking it so.

From a memory, they are formed.

Liminally spaced and spaded,

Sliced and birthed and wired and jaded.

Our eyes all laced with some fool’s gold

at the end of a promised rainbow,

Bobbing and lopping

above the bloody flood,

Lapping our tongues

like a dog laps up slop.

Stop and flip the pages back to when the imagery first started—

wait, whose story is this?

Do any of us even remember anymore?

What is the game of this name?

10/31/2020

I am something or another,

Something of another,

Something of a someone of a

something and another. Are you following?

I wouldn’t recommend it; I’m afraid I don’t know where I’m going, either.

But at least this path is mine.

At least I poked and prodded my way through the undergrowth and made a choice, didn’t just

let choices happen to me.

I’m an active response and a passive caller, a passive aggressive happenstance who was crafted from

mother and father.

A retroactive chain reactive

second chance who’s holier than water,

rising like oil— anointed and slaughtered.

A fortunate daughter,

a poster child, a fly swatter.

Battered and bartered and barely even started. Martyred by choice—

dearly disregarded.

10/31/2020

The clock’s jaw gapes a happy open mouth— stand back!

Don’t you dare reach into that cage, try to sneak passed (past) the twelve-headed Cerberus— he’ll gnaw your fingers

right down to the bone!

Bite the hand that feeds him

‘cause it’s all he’s ever known!

Twelve toothy knotted grins

as willing as a mannequin’s,

as chilling as a grounding spin,

as spilling as the minutes thin,

as killing as the space we’re in.

We’ve wrought wrong life in that thing on the wall— mark my words!

We’ve taken a perfectly good ignorance and vainly tried to

tug it up from the ground,

extract it from murky waters

as if we were not born of its

own muddy rib,

as if we aren’t water lusting after itself.

Resurrection indiscretion:

everybody’s got some.

Be sure to bow your head

as the hours bark at us again!

11/1/2020

I was just losing it—

Just now, and never not before:

If you think I know what I say then that assumes that you’ve known “I” and “what” and “say”

(and in which I know nothing).

But I’m also joking— “cause I love you.”

Love need all you is: see how none of this matters? See how else you could have worded this? See how syntax breaks apart like honeycombs, like the morning dew in the misty mountain risings, like literally any other meaningless mundane thing you can name-drop?

You can name-drop like flies and yet still the shore will toll like a mourning bell.

But even still, I am glad to have

known you.

Color me lucky, color outside of the lines, speak for me,

Color me. Color me. Color me three.

11/1/2020

I don’t think that I’m lying,

not trying to be—

so why can’t I say what I mean?

I like my vacancy neat

and my urgency sweet

(vice it then versa, then bear to repeat).

My vices and verses still steer me like hearses, still plague me like curses,

create universes.

It’s never been versus!

It’s all universal:

misfortune reversal without a rehearsal

a curtain missed calling, a landing stuck falling (your audience is showing,

your character’s been stalling).

Crawling-for-the-exit turned

lost-among-the-aisles

a rotten paradise assessment:

try my mood on like a suit

then do my best to suit its trials.

Being known for this and that then going all the extra miles.

I don’t think that I’m lying, too rash for regret— so why don’t I tell the truth yet?

11/1/2020

I think that hell must be an unscratchable itch and that heaven is the lord caught scratching, must be the stitches in an unfathomable quilt and heaven the lord’s worn patching, must be the pitch in an unsingable song and heaven the lord’s tune matching, must be the birds of an unborn feather and heaven the lord’s foul hatching, must be an unlockable door and heaven the lord’s lock latching, must be an inflammable flame and heaven the lord’s fire catching.

11/2/2020

My technicolor reaper

with his sickle and his cycle

hides his face among the windows—

history’s most hailed disciple.

Eyes adjust to white and black,

pull the plug and circle back.

See the way your ego loosely hangs,

daisy-chains reactions just to

yank them by the name-game?

Calls you by your sacred sound?

Any song to sing your rebound blues,

any wrong to right your clueless clues:

crown a bruise just to watch it turn color

just to find the hidden sunset

in its sore and holy hues.

(So my reaper pays his dues.)

11/2/2020

A woman I intercepted in my dreams last night cupped my face in her hands and tried to tell me about what a joy it was to be given life again, to be visited by me.

So here and so now and so real that it almost left behind the swirling fear of

no longer being— she told me to please stay for as long as I like, as long as I can: for when I go, she goes, and it was always good to see me again. A drowsy peace washed over me: I told her I had another dream I must be getting back to and asked when I’d be seeing her next.

It could be hours, it could be years,

she began slowly,

and we very well may never find each other here again. But for whatever it’s worth, no matter what happens

—her face was wet with pearly tears—

I want you to know that you were my angel. That we are all each other’s angels.

11/2/2020

It’s a fool’s paradise and a masochist’s heaven, it’s a pretty pity party that I’ll get tired of by seven.

It’s a silly damn distraction

(I’ll be damned if I don’t take action).

Damned if I do and damned if I don’t

damned by my will and I’m damned by my won’t— where’s the satisfaction?

Where’s my milk and honey—

buried deep in all that money?

(Could you spare me from the “deep” shit

and go back to being funny?)

I want sunny in my veins,

I want pleasure— hold the pain.

I want something of a give and take

to save me from the sane.

Pure insanity, putrid vanity.

Petty perks and no humanity.

What inanity! What immunity!

(What a wasted opportunity!)

Is it wrong to want security

at the endpoint of obscurity?

(Fuck maturity!)

11/3/2020

All my life I’ve pitted gravel—

always trying to say my peace,

always trying to say my piece.

Gathering all the sweetest flowers

that my calloused hands could hold—

gently heeling at the tail,

gently healing at the tale.

Happy little singsongs

tugging lightly at my hair—

always leading me to hear,

always leading me to here.

11/3/2020

What am I to do with all this?

I’m stuck in a mold:

everytime I move

the universe rushes in to take up

the space I no longer fill.

Seconds’ severance and atoms’ penance!

What am I to make of all this?

Should I try and make sense

or just make do?

See the way the sky swims by without you?

Lift up your head

and there’s the moon again—

he’s been saving

all of his night light just for you;

he forgives you for not noticing

his silent slip above the horizon,

winks at you knowingly:

See you tomorrow.

There will always be another tomorrow.

Even if I’m not alive to see it.

Tomorrow I can count on,

tomorrow counts me back.

11/3/2020

And what else? And then what?

Everything we say is a continuation!

This and then this, always more to be had, more to be said and then some—

never done!

A million tiny avenues and overtures trickling like water in a stream, through a life that’s but a dream—

that’s in a dream, but dare not of it:

like water in the gear-shift’s steam:

a labor toiled in jest to seem.

In vain we wane and wax our ways

(so long as we see fit decay),

a preacher to an empty choir.

(Hear their echo chamber widen

like the barbed and wired gape

of opened mouths—? Liar!)

The congregation twitches in their seat and eye, enraptured by their holy Fantasy.

I’m not sure when luck began fogging into unlucky mornings; when intuition

became married to its own ambitious warnings. Coaxing contradictions

met with lovely intermissions.

And what else? And then what?

11/4/2020

The truth is, I get dressed in the dark, too.

I’m not exactly sure what or who

pulls up my sleeves, couldn’t bear

to look her in the eye.

She’s always wondering

when we could talk,

when we could see each other again.

I don’t know what to tell her.

Why does it feel so much

safer to separate?

What is it about unity

that makes it so terrifying?

Tell myself that I’m apart from the “outside world”

and not apart of it— whatever that means!

Do you all know about the outside world, too?

Put your clothes on in the dark

and pray that darkness doesn’t clothe you?

How easily our eyes adjust to it again!

How quickly we learn to suppress and start over,

returning to the same long dream just to pass the time

out of fear that time is passing us back—

and forth, too: like monkeys in the middle!

11/4/2020

Do you believe in me?

(Is that what makes me real?)

I’ll never be as real as some things:

that’s the deal.

The Easter bunny is more real than me, for god’s sake!

(Well, probably not for God’s sake, but who’s counting?)

Does counting make it real?

If you give a man a number,

can he teach himself to feel?

Is that all there is to it?

Is this all there is— through it?

What of loopholes and imaginaries?

Make, believe; make, believe.

Is that what makes me real?

(Do you believe in me?)

11/5/2020

I take ahold of angels’ wings

as if I’m playing tug-of-war,

hopscotch on their halos

while my body keeps the score.

I am nothing without them;

they are nothing within me.

Bloody backs chant holy praise:

the lord’s Eternal Song.

Feathers flap among the ground,

crawling and inching

their way to the keystone.

Hungry halos inch their teeth

and sever ties from sacred scalps.

(I am not a hero in this story.)

And yet their faces still betray to me matrices,

gimmick the galaxies.

And yet oil and water

will surely never mix:

anointing, holy, or otherwise.

It’s all pretend— all pretend.

No body you can point to,

no body born of flesh was slain in the end.

They are nothing without me;

I am nothing within them.

11/5/2020

Eyes open to greet whatever light happens to bounce back at them.

They are helpless in their interpretation;

they were doomed from the start.

An organ all the same— what little bits of magic must slip through its filter completely unscathed?

What mystery and majesty must fall right through the cracks, forever remaining completely intangible, undetectable?

Masked by the naked human eye,

plain in a hidden sight.

Badly behaving like a particle when the sensation can only be realized through a wave, through the motion of itself.

Funneling the ancient early rhythm:

frequency! A crest and trough

and an equilibrium all at once!

Stopping for no one, repeating for all,

making even less sense to our senses when we try to dissect and stall.

Light can never truly be paused:

and love has such a way to go.

(For love is so so long, you know.)

11/6/2020

We’ve always been singing.

From the dawn of time, men in caves cried out against the darkness,

against the suchness.

An ode to a fear well-received.

That grief— that moaning nature of knowing that surely all of us will come home to eventually (surely everyone falls prey to the mighty Apple, victim to Pandora’s boastful Box, allows themselves the indulging terror of Wonder, entertains the beastly guest which lives inside his own head). Singing— in protest, singing in spite of ourselves, for the sole purpose of purposing the soul.

Of repurposing the time we fill.

Singing cheery vacant celebrations in reeking glory. Insane mourning laughter reverberating forever

like quivering ribbons of vibrato.

Singing like we’ve always done,

horrors drenched and doused with song.

11/6/2020

Where do I stop and my body begin?

What bounds us together,

what tethers our sin?

Why can’t I be more

than the space that I’m in?

My body doesn’t know me like I do,

keeps secrets from me.

Muffled whisperings arise each night

from the marrow in my bones.

Who is speaking to me?

Do they see what I see?

Is it calling for you

like it’s calling to me?

Does it lure you away from yourself,

hushed and lulled?

Do you know that you live

in your skull which is you?

That you’re trapped in your own skeleton?

That you contain yourself

contain yourself,

contain your self and self again?

Contain yourself then!

11/6/2020

If you really want to know the truth,

then that can be arranged—

but you have to be the one to do it.

That’s all art is: arranging truth.

Scrambling up the pieces,

puzzling them together however you feel.

There are no degrees of separation, either.

Not really: in the end,

the pieces always reveal the whole.

Art is not a passive thing—

it moves and breathes like you do,

it aches and moans like you do,

it gently holds your hand, it sends you off to wonderland.

(And, because it loves you, sets you free.)

You can try and lay claim to the river where you stand,

but by the time that you do,

the water has already been replaced by itself

a million times over.

But then, it was never about claiming or naming or taming,

was it?

It’s about truth and its never-ending search-party:

and the searching is the truth,

and the finding is the truth,

and the knowing is the truth,

and the lying is the truth....

11/6/2020

Everything is a triple-entendre:

duality is inescapable;

it’s her tricky lucky third that holds the key.

All of this is about itself, can’t you see?

It and self, it and self,

it and self and something three.

What else can be but mimicry?

The third dissolves the other two,

mitosis of soliloquy.

All is all is one—

and this is nothing new,

but I’ll say it to you

with a brand of pointless hope,

a hopeless point to thread it through.

There is a point—

there has to be, even if unknown to me

(though likely just humanity

imparting her desires on me).

Nothing changes

except things’ relationships with themselves.

Things aren’t as they seem:

this is our three true god.

The plot, the ploy, the scheme.

Maybe things could really be so simple.

11/6/2020

Whatever happened to the covenant?

I wish I knew more about the Bible,

wish that the Bible knew more about me.

Wish I could see how things were intended to be— don’t waste your time with asking who’s whom.

Don’t spare your breath just to breathe air ‘till you prune.

Pruned from grapes of wrath and

squeezed to sun-soaked wine.

Ripened vines.

What else is there to say?

(Lord knows I’ll try to find a way.)

How long can you stand to look at yourself, to just meet yourself in your own wary eyes?

But they’re not your own; they belong to the mirror, to the light bouncing back.

Day: and The Lord saw that it was good.

But what does he know that you haven’t had to tell yourself first?

Why invoke the thing when you could simply let it sleep?

(For as long as possible, at least— if not for forever.) Please, not for forever.

11/7/2020

We’re about to be back at the start again.

Nothing we can do to stop it,

heaven’s known we’ve tried.

Only we weren’t exactly us, and the trying was much too steeped in denial.

Too many false positives:

why not go another round

just for old time’s sake?

For the sake of old time?

(Why is it that opposites always

reveal their own polarity, that a lie

is just as useful as its truth?

And if true and false together

feel so much truer than the truth alone then what are we to think

about the truth?)

Time’s old name-sake,

buried beneath the steeples

and the sky’s wake.

You need not wake him anymore:

he’s so, so tired of wrapping himself around your pretty little head.

Just lay your unlike body

right on down to rest, dear;

we’re about to be back at the start again.

11/7/2020

When you come back, you’ll have to find this same door again,

all the way at the end.

Do you think you can manage that?

Oh, of course not.

That’s what they always say. They’re always so sure that they’ll remember, that ‘this time will be different’. And what for?

Humans are so fickle,

so dependent upon serendipity

that they somehow never realize

they’re taking part in it.

Constantly reassuring themselves:

Mutually Affirmed Destruction.

‘We’ve learned a valuable lesson here’, they always say, except the nasty lesson is always wrought the same,

cold and unmoving

(though the scenery may change).

Right.

Yes, this one— all the way at the end, yes.

How many people have you

had to give this speech to-day?

Are you even happening?

“... all the way at the end”.

11/8/2020

Everything bleeds together;

everything bleeds and lives and dies together. Or maybe not— but it’s all the same, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

Every thing in totality is its own same thing

and because of that

doesn’t have matter in any way.

(And to think that this is what

we’re actually saying!)

It’s everywhere within our language—

it’s in every possible “where”,

both with and in its own self:

hinges entirely upon the hypothetical!

Is contingent upon the non-literal!

The non-physical! The subliminal!

(Why do some phrases almost betray themselves, come so close to giving

all of their secrets so away?)

Language is a spell cast by a devil called “Before”. Called, given a name,

a sound in reference: I have a “you” and I think about it. Makes us all feel like

this is really happening.

11/8/2020

Colors encode a culture,

camouflage it in ways that I will never comprehend.

Shapes become sounds in the movement of them,

through the motion of your eyes

as they trace another’s ancient hands.

Sometimes slender, sometimes sharp,

staring back at you with an alien curiosity:

Who are you? Do you see me?

Supernaturally simple,

deceptively itself.

Indescribably apart from me;

the artist sneers at me through

my own point-of-view.

Every artwork is an eye

stating back at you.

Frozen wide open,

tempting you, teasing and tasting you.

Knowing things you never will,

daring you to call its bluff.

What horrible intimacy lies in looking on

in spite of these missed connections!

(Pry each other open, I won’t tell anyone!)

11/8/2020

Hidden figures speak to me,

colors suspended in spirited conversations.

An enduring key in the lock,

technicolored stagnation, rejoicing all the same.

Perma-youth: enveloped with childish laughter.

A laughter who boldly claims his own fear.

Imaginary friends who meet the eye,

pretending that there’s no more to what may meet it.

Lonely as a child often is,

pitted against a world who would rather see him

self-contained than self-attained.

No questions asked:

why break the pattern there?

Why choose this color over another?

Arbitration for its own sake: and in that sake,

the choice to arbitrate

becomes his own successor.

Desensitizing the tenses,

distracting from the senses.

Alphabetizing and cataloguing the

space between our letters,

commodifying algorithmic permutations.

Pulling our logic apart like love-sick taffy.

Indulging in our sweet teeth.

11/8/2020

Iron sharpens iron:

some of it acknowledges itself,

takes me out of the story.

(Or is this, too, a part of the story,

to jolt me into my own self-awareness?)

The mangled nature of nurture

snarls from the stark canvas-jungle.

To the stars an ode to symbol calls,

a shrine to lonely heavens:

the dressing room of softer dawn.

Don’t be fooled by softness—

it isn’t as easy as it sounds,

just as heartfelt as any other latent sorrow.

No one needs to know another’s hardships

in order to understand them;

truth can always be found

in the celebrity of art,

in the celebration

of an attempted A and B.

Vain self-soothing: healthily wilting,

a good flattening out and sharpening up.

11/8/2020

Why does art feel so life-like, so artificial and artifice in its own stunning cruelty?

Begging us to qualify it,

quantify it with our words.

But there will always be

so much more to feel than to say,

always another tomorrow but still L is u

Yy to peek behind. Lonely in our declarations, buried in our own reflections. Together in our need to speak. Good art moves a you like shooting stars, like a comfort in the dark,

like a sign too bright not to impart.

Take lifeless clay and mold it to

look like you, to sound and move like you.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, someone will look at it a bit too closely and swear they could’ve seen it breathing.

11/8/2020

Whittled-down somethings cry out to me in all of their humanity.

See the way the marbled fabric heaves and sighs, sways and drapes

between the present and the past,

headless of her future?

Feel the subtle deliberation in her posing prose, the deliverance in the culmination

of a moment’s hesitation?

Weathered amalgamation,

forced finality from its in-totality?

Feels so cold and set in her own stone,

left alone for fear of chiseling

below the surface,

petrified in fossilized abandonment.

The naked human form:

wise and unwavering.

11/8/2020

Death’s jagged edges

carefully smoothed over

as if they were only a minor detail.

It’s the smothering that matters:

it’s the warmness of the flesh

that only life can lend itself to.

A rosy little cherub asks for nothing but your hand in time.

Wonder takes ahold of you purely,

clings to your dizzy chest.

The sun asserts the breaking day,

spilling over onto your

shoulders like pearls.

The clouds are all untangling.

You’ve made your lamb in me

through these tender eyes,

and I will lightly follow you to slaughter.

11/9/2020

My mouth is always trying

to float away from me.

Sometimes, I’ll become aware of its absence, my teeth and tongue hovering ever so slightly throughout my puffy jaw.

This is no metaphor: it’s a physical sensation (or a lack thereof). Parts of me occasionally aren’t tethered to my body’s gravity. Running away from me like kites in the wind. Not just my mouth, either— sometimes it’s my whole skin.

Just a few inches outward (or maybe even inward), shifted. Try to rein myself on in, wedge and click and snap myself back into place. Only, I can no longer feel my hands, can no longer tell where my fingers end and the kite string begins. My voice echoes out of me, but it doesn’t come from within me, not from my chest— it rattles and ricochets around my rib cage, funnels out of my throat

like an automated voicemail.

(Am I even making any noise?

Can anybody hear me?)

11/9/2020

Oh, alright— but only because there’s nothing better do to, and since the daytime seems so sure of itself.

Isn’t it curious that the day is a time and the night is a place,

day a verb and night his sore subject?

We don’t do things at day,

we do them during it.

Night, on the other hand,

is someplace altogether strange.

It’s a place we all find ourselves at, eternally recurrent.

By day, we must do. At night, we can be.

The moon asks nothing of me

though the sun demands so much.

But at this place called Night,

sun slips out of sight and mind,

and so do I— so am I, rather,

since time tricks itself stiller

once the safety’s set from numbers.

Sooner or later though, space and time must reconvene: surely we’re bound to run

into day, to day, today.

Very well then. Happy now?

11/9/2020

Come back down to earth, dear.

It’s only me here, and I already love you.

You don’t have anything to prove,

no one to impress.

Who am I to pretend that I know you?

Isn’t this all a bit contrived?

Let’s just have fun for fun’s own sake,

because I’m happy in my confusion,

because love is so easy and free!

Come with me!

Let’s go down to that old train station

just to see what’s left there—

it could be nothing for all that I care!

Let’s have a hearth in each other this winter;

let’s play life for the game that it is and run wild with the fools.

Joy is its own reward—

why can’t I always see that;

why do you lead me straight to it?

I love you, whatever that means—

isn’t that exciting?

11/10/2020

— bribing me with the open air.

Take that, muse!

Am I behaving well enough, dear?

Any complaints?

Who cares; at least I’m having fun.

This really makes me happy:

just to have the chance to try.

Joy in the craft; my poems are far too serious for my liking, to the likes of me.

Riddles pass the time like winding tree limbs, like oaken silly mossy pride.

A rolling stone gathers no moss and whatnot— remember that one?

11/10/2020

Time ushers me along

like the wind moves itself:

I wonder where I’ll end.

It’s anyone’s guess but mine, really,

any sun’s turn to shine but

here’s this one again.

I’ll scour the holy texts:

honey comb the trodden down

for fear of what comes next.

Scarecrows don’t say who they are,

they only proclaim what they do.

I hope I’m not the same with you.

I hope there’s more to be said for me—

I don’t scare crows,

I don’t want to be mean.

Yet sure as it all I’m still made up of straw.

Can’t be trusted to find

where the needle pricks my side

in all of this hay stacking.

Unravel me, sure, but there’s always more string.

Funny things.

Shiny in a twilight’s beak

like parchment paper the evening sings.

I am not here to make good by your eyes;

I am only alive for the life that it brings.

11/10/2020

It’s safe inside a cage because

we fill in gaps between the bars

to make ourselves a wall.

Pretend we can’t see out and

force our mind opaque enough

to just get through it all.

Your peripheral vision

forms the corners of the box.

Nothing exists outside of them—

not to you, at least. Not to

anyone at most. A sinner’s ghost

has lost his eyes for you:

what will you do?

Doesn’t matter;

you are welcome and

you’re laughing in a fishbowl.

Goldfish blues his way

through troubled waters

(more than I can say for you).

11/11/2020

Just look where we are, whoever you are!

Whoever you want me to think you to be.

You don’t know yourself far,

and you sure don’t know me.

Gravity’s what we call it.

What the rest of us are after.

Always fight to stop and stall it

will our billowed lungs to laughter.

(Will things to be, you will them.)

Future tense, it’s so tense in some times.

Makes no sense yet still rhymes.

How upsetting! Things don’t have their due causes! No returns and

no pauses! Try, pause it!

Let me know how that works out.

Let me watch you turn your back on plot then crawl back to your doubt.

You don’t know what you want,

you don’t know what you are.

Didn’t think about “what”

‘till you made it too far.

Now just look where we are,

you whoever-you-are!

11/11/2020

So call it like you see it then—

but don’t assume you’re always right.

This is all just practice;

don’t get too caught up in what for.

If something feels good then it likely

may be. Maybe not, but you’ll see

and then act accordingly.

According to my sources,

everything I think’s distorted.

Every thing I feel and hear

will just as quickly disappear.

This is true without a doubt

because I think that it is so,

and when I think some thing is so

it roughly translates to “I know”.

Translate what you’re saying:

this is my advice to you.

Take these mismatched words and phrases

and then wield them to be true.

Wield them into truth

out of love and out of spite—

but don’t assume you’re always right.

11/11/2020

I don’t want to be here, but I don’t want to be anywhere else, either.

Time doesn’t tell me anything useful,

nothing new.

I tell time everything.

Passing minutes wherever I am make up my confession booth.

I am a placeless thing stuck in a place and a timeless thing stuck in a time and surely I have sinned.

Should I pray to change god’s mind about me, or should I pray to change my mind about god?

Should I pray?

Does this count as prayer, too?

I’m not writing to you, so it must be to

Him, it, or them.

Life itself. Time who tells.

Break this spell. No— call my bluff.

No— don’t you dare make a sound.

Either you’re already all around me or you’re just as real as I—

and either way I sure as hell don’t

want you as my alibi.

11/10/2020

Men and women are sisters;

is that a good way to put it?

If only they would understand

just how easy love is to partake in.

How powerful are the gentle!

Just because you can be strong

does not equate you to that strength;

the strength lies in restraint,

in the surrendering embrace.

You’re a human first, you know,

you were “us” before “him” and “he”.

Give yourselves the grace and the space

to be tender and watch what happens.

Watch how your self blooms and grows

towards the reaching sun.

(Aren’t you getting lost inside that

cold and bitter winter?)

Spring awaits in sprouting solidarity,

budding in and out like sisters often do.

Please, let us find our sisters here in you.

11/11/2020

Hello:

I thought I should address

the reader this time.

Isn’t it funny that this is

commonly referred to as

“breaking the 4th wall”?

I wasn’t aware that we were both

in the same room

(except, of course I was, darling, but isn’t that half the fun at the same time?).

If you think that I know what I’m saying then that’s on you.

Of course, that’s assuming that anyone ever reads these in the first place—

and if this is the first place,

I’d hate to see the second.

Wouldn’t you?

Would not you?

Funny how quickly

language breaks apart, isn’t it?

(Is not it?)

I love you; that’s what matters.

That is what has matter.

Atoms. Quarks and whatnot.

Things I’ll never understand.

Was that so bad? Nice talking at you!

11/12/2020

It just keeps on going, and I suppose

the bravery lies in loving that fact

like a brother.

I suppose the bravery lies.

I suppose that either way,

I’m telling the truth, so why not pick

on the truth with the puppy-dog eyes?

You’re already stuck in half;

why not choose the better one?

Surprise!

Something’s changed again.

Upside’s down, inside’s out,

the universe just had another growth spurt—

what was that all about?

It seems like only yesterday

I could hold you in my little arms,

hug you like I did my baby brother

on the day he met his life.

So young and wise, young and wise.

And now I look up just to meet his tall eyes,

look around and fall in love

where the bravery lies.

Surprise!

It just keeps on going!

11/12/2020

It’s time— it is time.

That’s all it is, all it takes.

Take your time.

Take it as far as it’ll carry you

and don’t look back.

What’s there?

Nothing you didn’t have to imagine first.

What’s ahead?

Nothing like you’ve ever seen.

No thing, just some thing, another word for it.

Another way to put it.

Tonight I think I’ll call it hopscotch,

what about you?

Tonight I think it’s Russian roulette,

tonight it’s fun-and-games,

tonight it’s that book I haven’t read yet

and my mother’s old perfume

and the way my bluff can’t call me back.

Tonight I love you

and that might as well mean forever.

Tonight time feels like butter,

and I don’t have my butter knife.

What a life!

11/13/2020

Everyone goes to the zoo sometimes,

becomes their own spectator.

Pokes and prods, hums and nods,

adjusting himself in the mirror each morning.

The only one who will ever

look you in the eye, your real ones.

The ones you barely even show yourself anymore.

Come feed the monkeys!

Twenty-five cents!

Hear no, see no, speak no evil.

Am I damned by the word itself?

Evil and absurd.

The word is the thing, thing is the word.

The skin is the one

and the mind is the verse.

Universe, all one song—

Oh, I know!

Tell me the one about all of the people who go to the

zoo sometimes!

11/13/2020

I don’t want it, but I have to have it.

I tell myself that things are out of mine,

but still I’ll always try to

reach out and grab it.

Use it on others.

Show it for myself.

Pretend it doesn’t bother me that

some things I can’t help.

To help myself— no one else was going to.

It’s not like they could do it any better.

Try to forfeit onto someone else

just to snatch it right back up

at the first sign of trouble.

Okay, fine, maybe I wait

‘till the second sign sometimes.

But trouble is trouble all the same,

and I’ll be damned

if I can’t take mine back when I say so.

Don’t listen to me;

I don’t know what I want.

But I do know exactly,

just don’t know when I want it.

A greener grass to sanctify the paranoia.

I have to have control.

11/13/2020

“Revelations:

Coming To A TV Near You”

Does that sound right to you?

I don’t watch the news—

I can afford not to.

Onlookers look on

and soon we’ll all be gone.

Where’s the fair?

Where’s my share for wear-and-tear?

For anyone, for anywhere?

So many anyones;

where did they all come from?

And they alike to me?

Are all things really sea?

Waved hello to wave goodbye,

and never knew the reason why?

All we know are words we knew,

‘cause thinking makes it so.

“Thinking.”

What a silly little sound

to give you up and take you

so far down.

11/13/2030

I wish it was the other way around—

can I go the circle backwards?

I didn’t do so well in geometry:

did I miss the part where we

wrestled with infinity?

Treated it like a thing beyond

number and symbol?

(As if ink on a page would suffice it to humble.)

How precautious; how does it work?

How can you work with things

that don’t work the way we work?

That jeopardize themselves!

That laugh at you in the way that

your own laugh mouths!

The human body is a strange place to be.

How we ever looked to hands and saw numbers and not fingers is far beyond me;

I haven’t even made it past

the walls of my own skull.

11/13/2020

These are for me, and so is this.

Can’t you see?

I’m all I have, just like you.

The only person I have to deal with for the rest of my life—

and I don’t have the time to be having you, too.

That’s between your and self;

what was I supposed to do?

I am not your mediator,

navigator or your waiter.

I’m my own debater.

Call me traitor, that’s all right.

Paint me pretty black and white.

I own everything I see, every one I’ve had to be.

Every thing that I’ve been through

that never made our rendezvous.

You don’t know me— I don’t know you.

It’s just that simple, sad, and true.

So save your breath and hold your piss:

these are for me, and so is this.

11/14/2020

Let me break the breaking daybreak

like an eggshell;

does that make it any clearer?

I want to crack the sunrise open.

It’s all so so gradual,

never just that night

trades places with the day.

It’s a slow dance over the horizon,

a kiss on the forehead.

The sky’s gentle temple somehow

softer in the trembling air.

Everything buzzing with life slowly

inching along with the daylight there.

Blush leaks a rosy oxygen from the

tall proud trees.

What a pretty slowbleed;

what a terrifying tumbleweed

tumbling larger than life itself across my

sleepy eyes in front of me.

Watch the world draw up its mighty curtain, frozen wet with morning dew.

Does the world’s turn speak for you, too?

11/14/2020

Restart!

You wake up again, but the world

is just a few degrees ahead from

where you last left it.

Feels like your body couldn’t quite match pace,

feels like your head’s a little out of place.

If only you could get the space out of your mind

and give your head some time and space.

Memory wipe— mind erased.

Mind encased in layers of a dream

like the layers of a cake

or the echoes of a scream.

At least the sound reverberates,

reaches farther than you can.

Sleep talk, sleep walk,

sleep and wake and— man,

the universe just keeps on getting bigger.

Too small a frame for such a big picture.

Eyelids close like shutters,

slow things down enough to process.

Music always sounds so much slower in my dreams;

it seems

that sleep is only slowing and not stopping all that seems.

Too vague and warm to pick apart—

restart!

11/14/2020

We say that we love unconditionally,

but we only ever have one condition:

the human condition.

And I promise to love you

as far as mine takes me.

Give you my permission

since both are one vision

inside of this prison.

What’s it matter?

Because I say so, that’s what.

I love you and I say so.

I love therefore I am—

and you are too, because you can.

Is this so bad?

(Don’t answer that,

just know that

I love you

wherever you’re at.)

11/14/2020

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, one.

Twelve won.

Much the same for twenty-four,

maybe even more.

You’ve got to go the whole thing twice as long;

you’ve got to levy a sprint with a marathon.

It’s good to see you at the start again,

just to look into your eyes

every once and a while, you know?

Do you know?

Does anyone?

Doesn’t everyone?

Aren’t they all just one’s?

Another day, another hour,

another finish line to

race across with fingers crossed.

Maybe this one will be different;

maybe this time will be different.

Maybe it really will be,

for how little I know.

Look at me until the minutes go away.

11/14/2020

I taste the ashes I’ll return to in my mouth.

I simply reek of smoke.

Something’s burning—

did I leave It in a bit too long?

Can I keep my right for wrongs?

Not too long, but something is.

The longest day or week or hour—

I’ve seen a million moments in an hour.

What’s it been like since I’ve been gone? What has gone on?

Can you tell me where I’ve been?

Who can?

Can any of them tell me,

the places that I’ve been?

The things that I have seen—have they seen me?

Are we two eye-to-eyes,

or something in disguise?

Something itself.

The damned summed

thing stuck in between.

11/14/2020

Halfway between the future and the past,

and it very well could be

all downhill from here.

You know what you saw

but aren’t sure what you’ve seen,

isn’t that right?

I know who we are.

Outside of this thing called time,

things are very, very strange

(said with all the weight

that strange can carry)!

Very, very strange indeed,

as if I know It by her name.

Time makes old of all our friends,

sport of all our fun and

fun of all our sports.

That’s the spirit!

That’s the corpse!

That’s the ticket!

Read the room!

Room-and-board all your remorse!

We are all each others’ guests.

Playing opossum ‘till we’re lonely,

‘till we’re bored or out-of-sorts, pet.

11/14/2020

I have to— otherwise,

I’ll hear the wind whistling

in a field far away somewhere;

I’ll feel that stillness

of a childhood fairytale

burrowing into my chest again.

Or else,

I’ll go mad drawing boxes

just so I can play the jail-breaker

(searching from my prisoner

for my prison is no easy task).

If not,

I might have to go

looking for it out there in wonderland,

in paralyzing bits of bliss and

in my wondering wandering landings—

circumstances, understandings!

Never missing missing chances.

Chances miss sometimes, have bad aim.

And only love has time to tame.

If I don't,

I'd prove nothing more than name.

11/14/2020

Harmonies creak like twine,

wickering and bickering and

beckoning my time.

My tithe, my holy offering, my bread and my wine.

The body of Jesus Christ

fluttering about in a tiny tinny satin bowl.

Crumpled dollar bills.

You've got a lot of nerve to be singing in here, kid.

The angels are all scared of you.

All you are is nerves

(but if that's really true, why is it that choirs at church could still move you?)

It's the name "Jesus" being sung aloud, you think to yourself.

Might as well be saying "hush, hush".

Coaxing faith and trust and rushed tough love

that's bound to rust right through

if left alone for long enough.

Oxidize it one more time, give it lungs to fill with air and let the air be named from dust while it still can.

Moral Christ, mortal man.

11/14/2020

All under the sky,

all of this happens under the sky.

But sky is just a safe-word for space,

space only a euphemism

for something else altogether.

Something that by definition

cannot bear a name.

Does it fill you with awe

just to think you're so small?

Every so often, the eye dialates just wide enough to house the earth and sun inside.

To really see the scope and scale and shape of the make of the stars.

Of the scars of the past and the pitch-black enormity of all that lies ahead.

Far beyond the likes of you and me.

So incomprehensiblly big—

and yet, I still find myself tempted to call it my friend,

let the poor thing hold my lonely hand.

11/15/2020

Everyone is making hints,

but I don't really want to talk about that right now.

All of these places to go

and nowhere to be;

surely someone's put it like that before. Well, I agree,

you whoever-you-are.

I'm acting—

sometimes that's all there really is

left to say.

That being said, I don't know how to be anybody else.

Anyone else, rather:

I am stuck in this body.

Obviously— nothing new, I know.

God, there's always more show.

Always more show, more to be shown.

Passive voice— why does that exist?

I'll add it to the list, I guess.

A safer set of complexes,

fascinatingly incorrect.

Nothing compared to

whatever comes next.

11/15/2030

Recontextualization—

that's what matters.

Taking the same melody line and playing it over a different set of chords.

The blues:

some things change, while others

always stay the same.

A waiting game, that's what they say

(or what they try to, anyway).

It's good to play pretend sometimes.

Good to decorate the wind with chimes

and playthings of a different kind.

Play kindness like a melody line.

The only line loud enough to hear over the howling of the wind.

Sounds almost human now and again.

Take it at tempo right back

from the top again.

11/15/2020

I open my eyes and still I'm here,

a genuine surprise each and every time.

And I couldn't even tell you why.

Couldn't even tell you what that means—

why is it that I have to ask my own self

what I'm talking about?

Who knows?

Who else would know if not me?

What comes from two if not three?

Trinity's what spins me round.

Around in three dimensions.

Height, width, and depth.

Then why does everything

feel like the same shape?

Why can I take hold of the atmosphere

just like a paper cup?

Grab ahold of the up and up

when the going gets tough

like it's nothing but luck?

I'll never get stuck,

just get pulled through the mud.

One more round in the ring

with this internal eternal thing.

11/15/2020

The Doppler effect makes everything sound like sirens—

everything one long siren

beautifully rising and falling

'till the falling dawn's true calling.

"Oh, Auntie Em! Auntie-Em!"

"And you were there...

and— and you were there...."

Don't you wag your finger at me;

I'm just as confused as you are.

Not even a bit closer in figuring out how we even got into this barel,

let alone how we're going to get out of it.

Do you reckon it's inside-out?

Snap out of it!

11/15/2020

I've been better

(but I've not been much worse).

Hidden parentheses everywhere!

Drop you dead like a curse!

Disappear, redispurse!

No man even knows his worth!

Pain like giving labor

but the end is your rebirth!

Trepid hoax and hearses,

hear-say heresy and happy high horses.

Prideful verses, reimbursement

for fair disclosure and party searches.

Vultures perched along the pavement,

nodding wisely, on your way then.

But you don't know who or where you are

and things are always changing.

Rearranging like a decorator:

who's to play the illustrator?

One true perpetrator, victimizer,

god-on-paper.

One-by-one-by-one-enough.

Good to know you're just as well

and twice as much.

Better than where you've been and such.

11/15/2020

Maybe if I just keep my head down,

make sure that I'm doing okay from the

neck down, outside not in, head out.

Just giving you a head's up:

I'm not who I once was and I'm not sure

if or when we'll be seeing her again.

So much more learning to do

but school has been in session for so, so long,

and I've only been alive for so, so few.

What's new?

Ice cubes in my shaky hands, a stinging skin that understands

what it's like to feel apart from itself.

Peel back the layers tethering my flesh to my mind, pick it all apart

until crimson strings of fate

reveal themselves like shooting stars

or something else that's just as beautiful.

Is there something else that's just as beautiful?

Of course there is, you idiot.

Now keep your head down and pull your self out of this.

11/15/2020

If I keep this up,

there won't be anything left to upkeep.

How can I keep herself from bloodletting?

I don't really even "let" her,

just slips right through the cracks

when neither of us are looking.

Can someone else please

have a turn in looking?

Guardian angel, whatever you may be?

Or is this supposed to be the good part?

Oh, but it's all the good part

and all the bad, too.

"Take care of yourself,

take care of yourself please."

I'm begging you; she's begging me.

Don't let your own free will tempt you into willing yourself free— you wouldn't know freedom if she spat right in your face.

Well, she's got to be around here somewhere—get to it!

One thing's for certain:

she isn't where you've been.

Better find her in the crossfire,

better think up something quick—

before I let her keep things up again!

11/15/2020

It's the next time around,

that's what really lowers her

so cheaply into the cold fat wet ground.

Hear that sound? "Just be yourself"—

was there any other option?

Don't use "your" at me

as if we are the same.

(That's not to say we aren't,

just to say that I am not your

"self" to claim.)

I wish I didn't have a name.

Don't call me— please, don't call me.

Don't remind me that I'm here;

I'm not so sure if I could

catch my own self falling.

Not right now, anyways, though somehow I've managed it every other time before.

Some how, although I'm not so sure

which one, and anyway— what for?

I can't win anymore; this never feels like winning. Just aliving. Just beginning.

Maybe the next time around,

I'll be lowered down nice and sweet

like sugarcane, nice and sweet and slow just like molasses.

11/15/2020

Enough about it;

I have too much to do!

Time to leave it alone and come back down—

down like the pen from my hand

and my feet to the ground.

There is a ground; you can feel it.

Right down there, next to the soil.

You are nature's

machine, product, placement, foil.

No —you're an animal, for god's sake—

so start acting like one!

It's what everybody else does!

This is what's happening here and now.

This is it. All there is.

You can't bring back your discoveries; nothing ever makes it

past the threshold anyways,

so just pack light!

Easy come and easy go

and try your best not to spoil the show.

Thank you and goodnight!

11/16/2020

There's a whole new side to this Life thing

I'm just now seeing:

I don't know where out it's been hiding,

but its beauty lies in hiding.

Enchanting, mysterious, alluring.

Insatiable.

Looking at a window just to see your own

reflection, self-inflection.

Getting lost in a big city,

lost in the crowd, in a shroud

of anonymity.

Picture prize the perfect eyes and idolize

the Kennedy's—

a mystery!

Something funny about mysteries,

how life and death

can so easily trade spots

for the sake of the plot,

for the sake of who-gets-who

and who gets caught.

The ceremony of dance!

A wink of the eye— not the blink of it!

What, don't you trust me?

How can you trust

what you can't even see?

You tell me, I tell you,

and somehow tale is more than two.

What sex!

11/16/2020

You cannot say that the East is wrong—

and all of it is Eastward, dear.

Just smile along;

you love singing!

No one's singing to you, of course.

But all of us are singing!

Primrose paths might always

give way to something,

but at least they're lined with primrose!

Lined with flaxy linen; all flowers.

Flowers in the East somewhere,

beyond where the sun too rises.

11/21/2020

See how your moving body rocks the water?

Fills up the place of it,

takes up the space of it?

The motion of displacement:

back and forth, come and go,

lost and home and sway alone.

We call this nature Mother,

cradles us like newborn child,

presses us sweetly against her cheek like a violin

and tugs her strings along to sing.

Happy little lullabies of waterfalls and what-am-I's

that rise and fall like ocean tides

and break and crash like oversights.

I can't decide—

but there's no such thing as deciding, see.

Only doing now, only presently.

Things only really start to change

once you look back on them,

have something to compare themselves to:

a frozen frame-of reverence.

Otherwise, it's all-just water,

a newer geography.

Take me out to rocking sea

and kiss me on the rivermouth.

11/22/2020

One must wonder,

one can't help but wonder,

full of it so fondly and

sending so asunder.

I simply won't go under—

no, you won't be seeing me there again.

Not any time soon, anyways,

never now from then.

Now and again,

though I'm not exactly sure quite when.

Or where, for all that matter;

I should like some different

turns of phrases.

Likened to some different phases—

but they cannot be by accident.

I'll claim these here as my own,

so long as they never amount me to some

"Mother" or another.

Which came first, I wonder, you or me?

To or be?

That's the price of wondering,

and one can't help but wonder.

Can one help?

Or can one only resurrect and redirect itself? No wonder!

11/24/2020

I feel selfish;

I just want everything!

What's it called

when you just want everything?

It doesn't matter— here it is!

I just can't see it yet.

How peculiar! How divine!

It's all around me. Can you see it, too?

I'm Narcissus' reflection,

the bumpy rippling surface of the water.

I'm in love with that boy, in love with the sky

who calls his own name out to me.

I was born underwater, you know,

I've always known how to swim.

Undercurrent, undercurrent.

No one had to teach me, either.

Eyes who soak up light like gills.

A kid again—

someday I'll be a kid again.

And for just one moment,

all the same one,

anything is possible.

You are everything and you want it, too.

Does that make us selfish?

Wouldn't you?

11/24/2020

Art moves me when it makes me ask myself

are we allowed to say that?

It reminds me that art pokes fun at rules that aren't there, t

hat never existed until we gave them games.

Bittersweet: you have to learn life's names

before you can mispronounce them,

betray the mind to better the spirit.

I didn't know we could talk like this,

move like this, breathe like this.

I am no longer stealing my oxygen,

I'm borrowing it like a library book.

Learning all there is to learn from it,

playing with my food.

This alphabet soup is

braver than you think it is.

Am I allowed to say that?

Funny, I don't remember ever

needing permission before.

I'm commissioning myself for this oxygen,

breathing in atoms just so that I can tell them

who they are on the way out.

Using the next breath

for much the same reason;

making the art that makes me back.

11/24/2020

I suppose that if the answer were simple,

it wouldn't be nearly as fun.

You listen to a song for the way it comes back home,

for the scenic route.

So many weary travelers— oh, so you're in this race, too?

You're stuck in the maze as well?

Wave hello to me from the other path,

let me get a good look at you for just a few seconds,

just long enough to see a bit of the road that you've seen.

So many divergences;

I'm glad I got to walk alongside for just awhile.

A million people just like you

I've had the pleasure to know, a million more I'll never meet.

Or, maybe I will— who am I to say?

It couldn't be so simple, could it?

No, of course not, but that's what makes it fun.

11/26/2020

Are we going to owe each other

five dollars until the grave?

Sometimes I look over at you

and I'm so sure of it.

Who's it gonna be?

You or me? Me or you?

I'll wash those dishes.

You take out the garbage this time.

I love you.

I really, really do.

But what is love from your point of view?

What are we doing here?

Just you and me— not it out there.

Shivers down my spine.

Can you even feel your spine?

What's going on here?

With everything, of course,

but right now, I'm only interested in

how all of this pertains to you and me.

You and then there's me, see?

Something different must be happening,

none of this is the same

but I still know-it-all.

I.O.U.

11/26/2020

Was this good?

What did I say?

Reference, reference,

always another reference.

Reading someone's palm

just by holding their hands in your own.

Sometimes I'm a fortune teller,

The Great Referendum.

Some context would sure be nice.

It's morals that save you:

the legal system.

God, I wish I could see you clearly.

No, not the one up in the sky, idiot,

The word we say to fill the space.

The vowels that we can't pronounce

who try to tame the Hebrew.

Slaves to build the pyramid.

Sometimes the Great Referendum isn't me, but there is one.

Who is one?

Who isn't?

Will this make me good?

Was this good?

What did I say?

11/26/2020

Why did you just tell me that story?

I don't see anyone like I see myself,

don't see myself in

anyone more than I do everyone.

Anything more than everything—

and nothing before the ending.

But I love you all.

I'm allergic to this life;

my body has been slowly rejecting it for years now.

(I can feel my bones cementing.)

I don't belong here, and neither do you.

Say it to me— I dare you.

Tell me that you know what I'm like even when I'm not watching you back,

when I'm not watching anything back,

when I'm not watching me back.

Tell me that I've given you a lot to think about—

but don't imagine that you'll get it all right on your very first try.

Once upon a time, I'd dreamt I wrote the story.

11/26/2020

“A fallen angel.”

So gravity still works in heaven?

So we didn't really win, did we?

We'll always fall victim to

that fizzy fucking lifting drink.

They fell— gravity pushed them,

forced them all down here.

Angels packed in tight like sardines.

By choice, yet still

through no fault of their own.

Angel, please don't contradict yourself.

I need you to tuck me in tonight.

Circles spinning around your heads:

I want to maim infinity,

to wound it and to claim it.

Claim where sin originates,

capture the red flag

before it gets tangled in the wind.

Whisked away by gravity's knotted wake.

From the open sea, any land is heaven.

Any press is good press,

any gravity is good gravity.

Any angel's a fallen angel.

11/26/2020

I will always have more love to give; it's water flowing from a spring.

A fountain of youth:

fear may be old and wise but

love is so young and bold and kind.

(And I'd rather be kind—

I know enough to know about how kindness is smarter than smartness sometimes.)

I love this, not because I have to, but because I want to.

Isn't that something?

This joy that I feel in looking to others, it means something to me.

And with any luck, it means something

to them, too. To all of you.

Love softens all the soul's edges, humbles by reminding us that

time is buried in all of our chests.

It's our most vital organ:

I'd die without it– and I'd die with it, too.

But I'd still rather die in love with whatever death isn't

than in fear of whatever it is.

11/26/2020

I feel settled in this skin and these bones.

I'm not sure how long it will last,

but at least for now, I'm settled.

Sometimes I can anchor myself here;

most of the time I'm just seasick.

But I don't want to talk about

most of the time right now,

because most of the time

and right now can never coexist.

As far as the East from the West

is the present moment

from the rest of time.

My fear is callousing.

Oh, so this is how things are now.

This is what it means to be human.

This is what it feels like

to have a gun held right between

your eyes and not even bat one,

to lazily swat at the millions of flies that

blacken the wall.

I am not afraid—

fear is just something that I have.

I contain it, weigh so much more than fear

that I sometimes have trouble even finding it.

11/27/2020

So here's the deal:

you look like this, and you talk like this.

You think and feel some other way,

but the real incongruity

you should be worried about is between

what you think and feel and

who that makes you out to be.

You are not what you think; you are not what you feel.

You hope and pray that

you are not what you do, but no matter what,

people will call you by the same name

the entire time you're alive.

Another thing: you're alive.

You know that something is happening to you,

and that other people

call that some thing "living",

so that must mean that you are also living.

And because you are living, that means something.

But it only means something because you are living.

And you think that it might have something to do

with all of these circles you keep on seeing,

but you can never be sure. Sound about right?

11/27/2020

Every other time I go outside,

the earth feels like a shell.

Buildings feel like husks

and there's something wrong with the sky.

Sometimes it scares me;

most of the time it just happens.

I imagine a box that lies just outside of

my range of vision, containing everything

I see and implying everything that I don't.

Every other day, the world is much too

still and mischievous.

Something is going on here in this unmovingness,

I just know it.

I'm in a box— someone's put a box around me

and turned everything to plastic.

I wouldn't be surprised if the sky

started flaking just like wallpaper,

started peeling back the wilted clouds

and crumbled at my feet.

Every other lifetime,

I'm reminded that I'm alive.

Sometimes it scares me;

most of the time it just happens.

11/28/2020

Someday it'll all be love again.

I'm not sure where or when,

but someday it'll all be love again.

That's where everything is headed.

Fear is the light that illuminates the path.

Fear is the opposite of love—

but it's also the indicator of it.

I never learned how to play chess,

but I've heard of the game.

Know that there are rules that this all follows,

trailing behind me like a dog chasing his own tail.

Bite the hand that feeds you,

feed that hand that bites you back.

Knowing that fear is just as scared as you are,

knowing that love embraces you both.

It loves itself because it is itself,

knows itself because it has to.

Recognizes that translation is always lost

across the mirror.

The space between you and you.

Doomed to always see you as you see yourself.

Someday it'll all be love again.

11/28/2020

I never had a good reason to stay,

but I never really had a bad one, either.

Forced a gag order on myself:

I don't have to think about this.

You don't have to think about this.

We don't have to think about this.

There is no such thing as "this";

it's just this.

But what happens when you start to look at life like a storybook?

Well, you find patterns.

Read between the lines and find a way to spin your own narratives.

Try to see what you can learn about the author, try to catch yourself when you can hear their voice leaking through the page.

Oh, they must feel this way.

Is that a good reason to stay?

I couldn't say; my words all fall mute anyways. Fall on deaf ears just like snow.

I just don't get the syntax.

How can I reprogram?

How do I reverse-engineer

what I already know?

11/29/2020

Wanton justice is what plagues us,

what keeps us up at night

and rearranges all that it possesses.

Reaffirms our affirmations,

begs us to give names to

our "good" and our "bad".

All of these greater goods and lesser evils

nipping at my heal like Achilles'.

Why no lesser good and greater evil?

Why is fortune reversal a reversal of fortune, a retelling of itself?

Invert all of your inversions

every once in a while;

reinvent your inventions.

Recontextualize your context

so you can mitigate your ego's complex.

Account some time for reflex,

then adjust the other defects.

Criticize and analyze

before it starts to regress.

Is what's good always right and what's bad always wrong—

or was it simply righteous all along?

11/29/2020

Everyone I meet knows your name,

I can't seem to keep it out of my mouth.

"We" trades place with "I" sometimes;

I couldn't tell you why.

I do know how.

So much of who I am with me

I also am with you.

We see each other.

Understand.

Eyes who know you;

I know you.

You love me.

We both have our reasons

which end in some

degree of disagreeance,

but you love me.

And I love you, too.

Whew! And to think I once thought the loving to be the hard part!

Love is the easiest thing I'll ever do.

Easier than death, cheaper than life.

Free.

As true as true can be.

11/30/2020

Sunflower seeds sewn straight into me!

Earth's chest and our chest are the same because each of them

provide something to fill them with.

Such a hollowed out whittled down glory,

like a framework whose intricacies were so much more ornate than the art it housed.

The mother who raised us.

What kind of glory, the kind that garners the question

what other kind of glory can there be?

What other name than glory?

One so big I cannot even begin to fathom;

things are not what they seem.

Things seem to be what they are not.

So then, what makes the seeming?

The framework for the meaning?

My body: this body is mine; I've earned it somehow.

Trudged it through the mud until the oak trees say they've had enough of me

(and I have, too).

So do you.

See?

11/30/2020

Someone has to know that I was here,

that I love them.

You: I have one thing to tell you,

always the same one, I love you,

and I will say it in as many ways as I can,

any way that I can think of to say it to you,

until it all means nothing and that

nothing means love.

Someone has to know.

I'm not exactly sure who yet;

sometimes I see traces in the mirror;

sometimes

there is light between the stars.

There is light between the stars—

squint your eyes and light bleeds over!

Turn your head and shadows dance!

(At least they're dancing!)

Maybe they'll know I was here.

Maybe they know that I love you.

Maybe everything that I am not

will tell me who I am.

Antimatter.

Double negative.

Safe space.

Someone has to know that I was here.

I love you.

11/29/2020

Earlier tonight, I peered into the darkness where the light no longer reached,

realized that the photons would always be faster than it.

Let the dark crawl and furl out from my fingertips; let the magic leak up,

waft up into my eyes.

Curling smoke: memory fog—

the mist knows things I never will.

False rememberings, ink that's spilled.

Time that's gutted, killed,

boiling up at you while your vision flattens,

stagnant fragments warbling

up and up and up—maybe one day it

will all catch up with you.

Maybe one day, you'll be able to see all of the light at once, but for now, it's like

water through a siv.

There's a reason

why the hourglass is suchly shaped.

Wouldn't want you knowing all the sand at once, would we?

Grainy vision on a static night.

Vacant by the daylight.

11/30/2020

I can't even feel my mind,

only the child in me.

Only the animal that I am,

that we all are, no less—

and no thanks to evolution!

Seriously— don't give that guy any thanks. He's not our answer, either.

Evolution bows to time,

and time bows to artistry,

lets art slip by and through and out of itself until the whole thing's turned

inside out again.

The joy-ride, the play-time,

the head-ache, the false-rhyme.

I can't even feel my mind,

only the temples are what's straining.

Only the notion is what's gaining.

Only the windows are what's staining.

Something's changing—

and I'll never hear the end of it!

Why don't you marry it?

Well, you heard me.

If you love it so much, then

why don't you marry it?

11/30/2020

All of this is just a sort of way for me

to work things though;

for the universe to sort and work itself on out.

And you, too, for whatever that's worth

(let me know if you find out before I do!)

Or don't, actually— I think that's preferred.

I'd rather deal with day-to-day today

than wrestle the absurd.

On the rocks.

You know, like the one we all live on.

Right. And hold the devil.

Hold him for as long as you need to,

as long as you can stand it,

knowing one day

you must also let him go.

That's what you do with things you love:

you let them go.

Set them free.

12/1/2020

I took the long way home

to get to this new month,

went down every nook and every alley

every peak and every valley,

higher than I've ever flown

and lower than I've ever known.

Yesterday's ends always justified tomorrow's means, so that

every second was bleached with meaning

and there were no looser ends—

just new beginnings, just new little paths to travel down whenever I had freetime.

Which was all of it, of course,

all free time, death on credit.

Penny for my thoughts?

Once upon a time— only once upon it.

A one-to-one ratio of times and places,

people and stories.

If the sun came up tomorrow

from my birth 'till death

then I can say I have a story to be told.

Surely I've got time for just one more;

let me take the long way home.

12/1/2020

Such a strange lack of continuity

between my mind and my body

when I sleep.

Tossing and turning

while the mind havers oppositely

like a losing slot machine.

Unexplainable limbless dimensions;

my ghost pokes out from me

in crooked angles,

unaware of what space she now fills.

Pinpoint spacetime when and where

my body and I are the same thing

and that thing is at rest.

Where this prodding nodding gossamer

won't haunt me anymore.

She'll no longer jut out of my skin in crooked angles,

won't make my voice echo something lost and far away,

won't numb my hands or hijack my eyes

while my sleepy mind lags sweetly behind.

Try to curl up inside of that tiny point,

the one that started the Big Bang,

and rest my head on the cosmic shoulder

my waking labels "pillow".

12/1/2020

Wow, I think I saw someone

I recognized in me today.

I think I heard a voice I haven't

in a long long time,

longer than I've even been alive

who let me know I'll be okay.

I think I'll let my blessings count on me

instead of counting them away;

I think today has finally been a day

and not just one more tomorrow.

I think that yesterday is jealous of me!

I think that tomorrow doesn't exist

and neither do I,

but that both are just as well to try.

I think I am a liar.

I think the universe is magic-for-hire,

much too shameless to

criminally conspire.

I think I ought to join the choir;

maybe I'll hand them in my résumé.

Maybe you could send more

good news my way.

I think I met an angel today.

12/2/2020

I like my rollercoasters tall,

I like to feel like I may really fall

saved only by humans' codes and liabilities

who ensure my safety from peak to trough.

I like my movies scary, I like my monsters

hidden in plain sight,

I like the chance to pause and rewind

until the monster's framed by

frame-by-frame and I can say goodnight.

I like my lies white, I like to lie and be lied to,

I like to be polite

and hide the whites of black and white

so the whites of my eyes

have a night light.

I like to do what's right, I like to say my prayers

when they're out of sight and mind

and touch and time:

we never had the time for this.

I like my fear afraid, alright.

12/2/2020

As always, as/is always

puts a lens over "is",

pulls the wool over our eyes

and makes us aware

of our emperor's clothes.

Remember when God made us ashamed of our own nakedness?

What'd he go and do that for?

What's the point of knowing better if better doesn't exist when I don't know it?

I suppose we'll never know:

we weren't there, of course,

my name's not Adam; I don't know Eve.

Have you heard from them lately?

Awhile ago, someone said something or another about original sin, but I wasn't really paying attention.

Why would I give them that?

No way, I'm not reading that stupid book—

that's what got us into this mess

in the first place!

If first thing's first,

why reach for the second?

Stupid fucking monkeys! As/is! No, as/is!

12/3/2020

The moon's light houses me,

it contains me so much so that

no matter where I am,

if its light touches the sky, I am home.

It houses me, orients me, tells me which way is up,

lets me know how gravity works.

Compass rose, don't prick me.

I only wanted to hold your minute-hand.

I've got to hand it to you, too,

you're doing a wonderful job.

I've never been so confused, never been so happy,

probably never even been at all.

But sometimes I'll go outside and realize that there is no such thing as inside and somehow that makes it all feel like inside,

like the moon shine houses me.

Like I'm wandering through a giant house and maybe someday

in Earth I'll find my home.

Or maybe home and house are

divided against themselves in wandering

and only the coffin lid will have his house and home in me.

12/4/2020

All of your questions will be answered.

In the meantime, would it kill you to smile?

It'll kill you either way, you know.

So why not do it?

Well, because smiling is hard sometimes.

Euphoria smiles so easily;

laughing at infinity from the inside of her cage.

My ears are always ringing.

God, they just keep on ringing.

Always there; I'm always singing.

When I sing the ringing goes away.

Have you seen yourself today?

I think I've got the milk carton blues.

I don't want another circle through; just give me cross-clues.

Give me a hill to die on.

Give me from myself.

Give me from myself—

I'm begging you.

Who are you?

Who's who?

I noticed my ears were ringing again;

I still don't have an answer for them.

12/4/2020

I get caught counting in loops of twelve.

Three more hours 'till seven.

Soon it'll be eight, nine.

Don't even get me started about ten, noon.

Some part of me convinced the other half

somewhere along the way

that if I fall asleep, maybe I won't ever wake up here again.

What if I just keep dreaming?

What if twelve always rolls over to one again?

Maybe I'll make a religion out of

one again, see if that helps.

If only in my dreams.

I heard that in a Christmas song.

On the radio, just now.

It's the twelfth month another time.

Soon it'll be one again.

No, it won't; there's no such thing.

Again can't hurt you— it's not real.

It isn't real.

12/5/2020

I feel all of my weight;

gravity reminded me of itself today.

The Earth pulls me towards it,

but I don't push back.

Go left, she says, so now left is all I know.

Left turns into forward,

forward to ahead—

and there's nothing heavier than that.

A heavy head held upright out of spite.

Prop up sinking eyelids like a

lollipop on a stick.

Hocus pocus focus,

will it to be true.

Life is both short and long,

good and bad,

black and white—

and gravity doesn't care about any of it.

I suppose that means I shouldn't, either.

Either way is still a way.

Any day is still today.

Tomorrow-esque, but still

today and day and in and out.

Is that okay?

12/5/2020

Love does not belong to you—

so for the love of God, stop hoarding it.

Don't you get it?

None of this rolls over;

your body knows this better than you do.

You should strive to be more like him,

who freezes himself to

heat the outside world,

who starves himself to keep others fed.

Be a good guest and compliment the host!

You have such a lovely home;

won't you let me in?

I love you.

You will always have a place to

rest your head when you're with me,

stranger or otherwise.

And it will get much much stranger—

you can quote me on that.

And still I love on,

because I know just as well as you do

that the returning is always

shorter than the onset.

And I'll still love you when you circle back,

I promise.

12/6/2020

—Oh, so you're just starting out then.

Actually, I'm just starting in.

—How's that been working out for you?

No, not working out, working in.

And for your information, I'm not sure.

But I think that I'm happy.

And I think that this self

I've been lugging around for all these years is finally starting to feel like my own.

And I'm pretty sure I caught her smiling the other day, caught her red-handed

like a crime.

I'm pretty sure she laughs like a child laughs, loves like a child loves,

dreams like a child dreams.

And I could've sworn I caught her enjoying her own company;

I think I saw her take herself to dinner the other day.

It went about as well as all first dates go,

but I wouldn't be surprised if they went for a second.

So yeah, not too bad.

12/6/2020

Everything that anyone has ever

said about you is either

true, or it isn't—

so why are you offended?

It is even a waste of time to be

mad at others' ignorance.

Sit with anger instead of acting on it,

and soon you're left with nothing but denial.

If what was said was true about you,

then why are you upset?

If what was said was false,

then why are you upset?

(This won't work every time—

but it's certainly worth looking into.)

You don't even believe what you think

half the time;

how can you expect anyone else to

get it right?

So many of our emotions act as buffers for fear,

buffers for growth, for change.

No truer self-pity than

if I were to stay the same:

say what you will about me.

12/8/2020

I love you right here and right now—

I don't give a shit about who you've been,

much less who you've had to be.

You don't have to be anyone;

I even love you for who you are not.

Yes, you— reading this.

(Here! Now!) I see you.

I know your name.

I know who you are, right here—

right now, and I love you for it.

Is that so hard to believe?

Well, then you're not going to believe this, either,

but I love that part of you, too.

You can't win, can't escape this love that I have here for you.

Just for you, no one else, everyone included.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

What else is there to do?

Bit hard to miss the thing when you're in around it.

And I should know:

it's fooled me once, fooled me twice,

will fool me again.

12/8/2020

All I can say is thank you,

in a million different ways,

with every breath that I know how,

as often as I can.

I have to tell you about it,

about this joy that I feel;

I can't even begin to contain it.

I'm glad you exist.

I don't need any one of you;

I need all of you.

I need your kind words and kind eyes;

I need your strength in numbers;

I need you.

I wasn't always ready to admit that

to other people, to myself.

But now I know better,

because I am better.

Not best— but better,

besting the past and better together.

There's such a soft spot in my heart for

the future now;

You know, she looks just like you,

sounds just like the words "thank you"

on my tongue.

11/23/2020

Everything can be converted into love—

and once that happens, it'll all be over.

Isn't it beautiful more than anything?

More than anything we know; it's such a pretty little desert.

I'm an oasis deserter sometimes:

sometimes the world looks brighter from the moon.

The other side of the road, the skyline in the distance.

Nightfall through a downtown city shakes and rattles your bones like

gravel, like the mangled roots of history sprawling deep into the earth's crust.

What's this groaning, rusting?

Why's the earth left scared so quaking?

Molted and melting and churning like a carousel.

Spinning dizzy, taking gravity for a ride.

Dizzy spinning twirling gravity

around in my fingers.

Pretty ballerinas pastel in their strained refrain.

Poised and posed in love to play.

12/10/2020

How are you?

As in,

what are you like over time?

What are you like overtime,

off the clock, on the ride home,

after the doing is done saying

and the saying is done doing?

How are you doing?

As in,

why is it that you do what you do?

Do you yourself even know?

Do you even know yourself?

What are you doing?

As in,

what has doing done to you?

Do you do it because you want to,

or do you just want to

because at least you're doing something?

How have you been?

As in,

what is it that you've been like?

Who is it that you are now,

and why the discrepancy?

Why are you doing this?

As in,

what makes you think

that this is the right thing to do?

And do you suppose that thinking so

will somehow make it true?

Some how— not now.

Anyhow,

how are you?

12/10/2020

Take yourself out of the equation:

nothing is your equal.

You equate to nothing,

and everything is in you.

Your precious ink can't save you now,

yet still you try in vain to wield it.

Hold the algebra— stop the presses!

Enough with all your petty substitutions

and false resolutions:

I want real retribution!

I want a trophy for the time I've served,

of the time who has served me!

I want a portrait of the mess I made,

of the mess who has made me!

Wait— try canceling that out—

because its presence on both sides

can only mean its absence on either one.

So many different factors,

so many different likeness to tease apart from such a sturdy frame.

Apart from same, a given name.

A numbers game that always ends in blame: two things are like each other.

Our equal Mother!

12/11/2020

A royal sketch of a fallen king,

a regal wretch of a circus ring,

a rival stretch of a worshiping—

I want to befriend Mr. Everything!

A crooked smile full of twisted limbs,

a creeping mile full of mangled whims,

a crying pile full of righteous grims—

I want to make friends with my synonyms!

It makes us feel good when things rhyme,

when the present sweetly calls upon the past, the past sweetly referring us back to the present; I should like to live in this feeling, taking rhymes' schemes for meaning at every intervening

and at every inconvenience.

Mandated lenience

so your talking point's absurd

and your pointed talk's obscure.

Oh, sure— easier said than done,

I know, I know.

Remember sound one line ago?

I told you so!

12/11/2020

It's a tragedy, plans made

since the beginning.

Everybody loves a good story.

How does yours end?

Well, I suppose we should stick

around and find out.

Leave the ending for the maggots:

they have their homes and so do you.

Be good to this skin that you have,

listen to your ears; see through your eyes.

They are yours, after all,

belong to you on a loan.

This is one big library;

everything's a book.

So get reading!

I never want to stop home-improvement.

Pretty dramatic for something as simple as irony, don't you think?

Pretty ironic for something so dramatic.

Tragedy and comedy, the lowly twins.

But joy is in the middle—

the only thing I know.

A monkey medias res.

12/11/2020

Who-is-who turned one-is-two.

It's "is" that binds them: it and is, common enough to abbreviate.

"I'm", too: I am.

There is.

We are.

Noun-verb is understood.

A time and a place, something exists over time.

Misunderstood subjects and verbs.

Action items.

Three works with death, too: Life and Death and something else.

Elsewhere, everywhere.

I'm talking to myself, through myself.

(And so are you— so don't stare.)

Do you ever diagram your sentences, just to see if reality holds up to syntax?

You know it doesn't (does not), but who could blame you?

Who is who enough to do the deed?

See himself through?

From one make three of two?

(You know very well who.)

12/12/2020

For the love of god, just say

what you think it is.

Do you actually even want to change?

I can only be so vague before my words apply to you, too.

You can't just want to be better;

you have to be better.

No one's going to pull you out of some mythical quicksand:

save it for the enablers.

For the silent majority. I own my inferiority,

so long as I can use it to

hitchhike someplace

where the grass is much greener.

Oh, I can get meaner,

could always be meaner.

(You should've seen her!)

But this kindness is angrier than any anger, more vicious than anything

flying over my pretty dead head.

Burns brighter than your

torches and your crosses—

so don't you double-cross your

losing causes.

12/13/2020

If you can make a temple of a body,

then I'd call you a magician.

Nursery rhymes were always kind to me;

so what if I was really playing in the mud?

I couldn't even see myself through all the filth,

and there was so much of it those days.

I was gutted, peaches from a tin can;

no body told me about my architecture.

The only friend I've ever had—

and she is no magician.

A crime scene investigator, maybe.

A carpenter at best.

Sanctuary, I just need sanctuary.

A self-appointed sanction,

sanctified: to be made holy.

If I could make a temple of this body,

you'd all call me a magician.

But magic tricks are just that: tricks.

And I'm a sucker for tradition.

Reconstruct my definition's

aching mortar, brick-by-brick.

12/13/2020

Where is all of this drama coming from?

To what do we owe these

points of contention?

I suppose some of us like the

give-and-take of unlike-and-same:

let's split reality in half,

take the "uni" out from "universe",

just to see what happens.

So, what does happen?

Something is happening,

much bigger than I— happening!

This time is all allotted,

plotted down just like a play.

Pointed like there is one.

What fun!

A single point from which to view;

a pointed finger wags at you:

don't bow until your scene is done,

don't see the spotlight for

the end of the tunnel.

It's just another funnel.

A B-story, a somewhere-in-between story,

a slighted time slotted,

another drama plotted.

12/14/2020

I don't even remember going out to sea,

yet somehow the sea is now all I know,

the only place I've left to go.

Out, out, out until out feels in, and in sides with out,

and nobody knows what I'm talking about.

(Not even me— see?)

I think I'm getting see-sick;

I think my body must be tired

of holding itself apart from what it is.

Water is impossible to drown in;

you've been underwater

your whole damn life.

(If you can drown in water,

then the stars can drown in light.)

Let your eyes be drowned in sight

until the sea can see its ancestry.

I'm going out to see, alright—

and I'm taking you down with me.

12/14/2020

I think I'm finally beginning to

understand this cipher,

you know, how the days

click in and out of place,

and if you're not too careful,

it feels less like clicking

and more like slipping.

Not to add insult to injury,

but sometimes,

I'd rather bite my tongue.

Pretend that I have a choice,

give in to Thursday,

surrender to the calendar.

Et tu, Brute?

Yes, I'm afraid, me too.

The Roman Empire was always destined to fail,

couldn't escape its own

fate or name anymore than I can.

Anymore than the astronauts'

fight to escape the Earth: not for long.

Escape comes at a price, although

which price exactly I can’t ever say.

that's the catch:

you connect

at the cost of your own isolation,

decode

at the price of your ciphering.

12/14/2020

I told the truth,

but I never told you everything.

Is that what's to be expected?

I don't even know everything—

how can I know any of it?

All of it's a lie:

you know it, so do I.

But it's also nothing personal

on account of it being so personal.

An eye-for-eye,

I, me, mine.

What separates the mind from spine.

I told you the truth,

but I only know truth through

this skin and these bones,

through my own sin atoned.

By its likeness alone.

And I don't want to lie to you —

that's the truest thing you'll ever

hear me say.

I never wanted to lie to you,

I just don't know what to say.

It's just that, that just it must is himself

to be an acrobat.

12/15/2020

Barely scrape up at the note,

just barely strike the right tone.

Nickel-wound and nowhere-bound:

and nowhere I would rather be.

Nothing I would rather see

besides the rest of it;

suppose I make the best of it.

Suppose I don't forget it,

since there's nothing but the present setting which leaves no room for forgetting.

This moment is letting me, so now I am letting

this plot and this setting take hold without betting or placing my bets.

I suppose this is why we say "let us" or "lets": to remind ourselves of our own permission that's so scarcely given.

Only will is what's hidden.

You think I need permission?

Well, I'll do me one better: listen to the mid-night air,

and if she takes your hand, then let her.

12/15/2020

Alf Ownby, Alf Ownby,

you're the earl of Tennessee.

Throw around your wickerbasket

better than you carry me.

Alf Ownby, Alf Ownby,

you can make the river sing.

Take your twelve-string and your casket

and invent our wedding ring.

Alf Ownby, Alf Ownby,

you make bibles out of trees.

Make the blue-jays fly in circles,

make me weaker in the knees.

Alf Ownby, Alf Ownby,

you should stay awhile or more.

Help me read between the bushes,

help me richer or for poor.

Alf Ownby, Alf Ownby,

I'm not sure what I should do.

You're in love with milk and honeycombs,

and I'm in love with you.

12/15/2020

You don't need to tell me my name:

believe it or not, I already know it.

There is nothing you could add to it that would change how it's pronounced,

nothing you could add to me that

would change how I'm renounced.

Use it to get my attention, sure.

Pick me apart from your

him's and your her's.

But don't you dare say it like

you have stock in my company.

For better or for worse

I'll stand my ground—

I've earned my curse.

I'm under my own damn spell:

I don't have time for your wishing-well.

Only I know where I'm going, only I know where I've been.

Only I can do the growing

from the mess that I've been in.

This is just an inter-section from whichever past you came.

Only one voice claims my future;

only one voice knows my name.

12/16/2020

I have this habit of

wanting to start all of my poems off with

"sometimes". I think it's

because sometimes is such a good place

to begin, since everything is all the time

and time is all within.

Without compasses or roses,

time and things turn into proses.

I suppose it's only natural,

since that's the only way to be.

Sometimes my time is telling me,

and all I can do is all that I can,

see all that I am

to pick my self

apart from me.

I never know how these will end,

much less how they began,

for I am just a mortal man.

Mortal, man— and this is some time.

You'll do with yours,

I'll do with mine.

I can't account for every thing,

just this sum here—

but I don't mind.

Try to be kind sometimes.

12/16/2020

Sometimes I even cheat in solitaire;

isn't that funny?

Cut too many corners,

and you've got yourself another

Circle.

Before you know it,

it's already true.

Where does that leave you?

12/16/2020

I'll bet you think that this is so easy for me.

I'll bet I die a gambler,

and you'll die dead in the red.

The only problem with easy

is that you can only say "easy"

once your shoes are off.

I'll bet you think I had noplace to go;

never would've guessed that

Noplace was my home.

I've been playing this game

for a mighty long time,

know my way around the way around,

know my desert from the sea by now.

A and B, A to Z:

how all of this gets through to me.

It's a wild, wild West out there,

what for everything being so

Eastward and all.

And I'd hate to spoil the gun-show.

Tell me: what do you know?

We can barter if you'd like.

Here— trade my gunfight for your knife.

I should like a nimble life

where Noplace is a home and

where matches don't strike

so lucky— 'cause I'm not a betting man.

12/17/2020

To be patient is to be as

unrelenting to time

as time is to us.

To de-ritualize, de-materialize,

to recognize that everything is

Over Time, that Time is overhead.

Over our heads, over and over and out of them.

To be patient is

to treat every haystack as its needle.

To under-stand the overture and

overplay the underhand.

To be patient is to be overhanded,

slowly handled,

longly stranded,

starkly branded.

The mark of the beast begins at the pencil's end.

The hark of the priest much the same.

12/17/2020

"Hope is for suckers—

better not to set them too high,

it only makes the ground hurt more."

I used to think that hope was

a wolf caught crying for itself.

(Everyone is smoking cigarettes

in their cars.)

I look to my left, and there's

a homeless woman standing there.

Give her all of the cash in my wallet.

Hope this helps. I hope this helps.

I used to think hope

was a vaudeville show.

But isn't that the best part of a show,

when the lights dim down,

and the audience hushes itself

in whispering rapture,

and the orchestra flutters its wings?

(Hope is more than just the overture.)

Hope is meeting yourself again,

if only for one splitting second,

and loving who you are to be.

Faith is only stupid when

it's not put into me.

12/18/2020

Welcome to a world that wants you dead.

Would you like me to put on some coffee?

No, we don't have any sugar or cream, you can save it for the socialists.

Now, let's get you started on some paper-work.

Don't worry if you can't answer every single question;

we'll fill in all the blanks for you.

This is really just a formality anyways:

of course we already know who you are.

Is there anything I can get you while you wait?

A hill to die on, a peppermint maybe?

Oh I'm sorry, we're actually fresh out.

Excuse me— no, you're thinking of the receptionist on the third floor;

we don't do that kind of work here— I apologize for that.

Finished already?

Well, look at you; you must catch on quick!

Very good.

The man upstairs will see you now.

12/18/2020

I even hate the word body.

But right now, I'm looking at it

like a monkey first

seeing its own reflection.

I'm looking at how nature

workshops its way through it;

you know, some cultures

use the same word for

body

as they do for

river.

Zoom in on skin and it cracks like scales.

I've never believed in palm readings.

My body is a chore to me,

and I can't even begin to imagine

how hypocritical that statement must sound

to my ears.

You think you're the one doing busywork?

Try keeping you alive.

She's right, of course.

Always is and I know it.

But even now, I still can't help but

whisper my silent prayer,

use my own lungs against me

to mutter beneath my own miracle-breath:

I am trying, body.

I'm trying.

12/18/2020

Wind chimes snap my head to the left—

lock up-and-down, nintey degrees, portrait.

I'm stuck inside a hopper painting,

artificial light turns night to pseudo-day and home back into house.

A house filled with stagnant clutter,

things that were Placed, set down by people who don't exist.

Oh, and my ears are ringing,

but they always do that.

Still, the air is stilling all around me;

I dare not move; everything is perfect.

A train howls very far away.

The light is so yellow, but it could just be the wallpaper.

Even the slightest unexplained creaking

startles me something primal.

I simply can't remember a time when my ears weren't ringing;

I wonder if I'll ever know true silence again.

The train retorts unknowingly;

the wind makes light of chimes.

The light makes still my mind.

12/18/2020

Bound to happen, bound.

I found another one.

That's all poetry really is, after all,

after it all, in the end.

Bound like... well, what?

To what?

I'm not exactly sure,

can never be too sure, that is.

It's all just one great simile.

Meta-phor: bearing understanding.

After-between-beyond-change.

Etymology is fascinating;

all of this is that, too.

But everything is not every thing, apparently—

does that make sense to you?

Can you make sense out of your senses,

or am I the only one

who finds discrepancies between the two?

Why must I make senses out of anything;

why must sense be made?

Shouldn't there just be sense?

Ah, should— eureka, I've found it!

So then bound must be bound to "should"!

12/18/2020

The contradiction is the magic, get it?

They are not opposites;

magic makes them the same!

They are two broken halves of the one,

combining here now to tell you your name.

What other word but magic?

Dissolving is evolving!

Evolving is converging!

All of us are headed towards what we need to hear,

and what we need to hear comes to us in our sleepy graves.

Archetypes exist for a reason: to pick apart the paradox.

Owning your confusion,

inventing your practicality!

I'm practically a magician,

for imagery's sake!

You're an artist— so say so!

You are utterly and completely

timeless, darling.

You exist to satiate existence's hungry appetite,

so take a seat a table.

12/19/2020

One day I won't be here.

No, not at all, you dunce.

Try to follow the story.

Anyways, as I was saying,

one day I won't be here,

in this moment.

Catch my drift?

I'm drifting in gravity's sullen wake.

Can you catch me?

Catch me if you can;

I think I'm drifting.

Reel me in, real me in.

Take me by the hand,

the way I like it, with the pinky to the side.

Isn't that funny?

Don't get it misconstrued, dear,

It's just an expression.

But I do love you—

never lose sight of that.

I'm afraid of loving you,

yet somehow I still do.

I do.

12/20/2020

This next song bleeds into the one who comes after it.

The devil is realer than you think he is.

You know how when somebody dies,

you only really ever think of them as gone?

If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

I really don't know what will.

Where's my will; is it tethered to my leash?

Or is it I who is tethered to she?

Some of the older skeletons of language still prove to be useful to me.

Like vacant buildings, they hint at a larger abandoned blueprint.

Ghosts in the machines.

Have you ever listened to that album,

Ghost In The Machine?

Maybe that's it, for all I know.

Do you know more than me?

I'd sure like to think so.

Because at this point,

I don't even know if I don't know.

I think that I am praying.

12/20/2020

Verbs are the only form of words that there are because

everything else requires

suspending disbelief.

The infinitive form:

to be.

To live, to die, to breathe, to choke,

to laugh and cry and dance and sing.

Verbs are the only form of words that there are because

everything happens over time.

A verb is hidden in every word:

"verb" is to spacify and nounify the time.

"hidden" describes how the thing is behaving to our eyes,

"in" describes where in spacetime that thing is,

"every" tells us which being things we are speaking of,

and words are all ideas, which can only happen through the firing of neurons,

which— you guessed it—

is all happening over time.

It isn't so much about I-ing or eyeing,

just am.

12/20/2020

I have never been cut out for roller skating.

The first and only time I've ever tried it,

I was in the third grade,

and I came home bruised and happy.

But even then, on the car ride back,

I knew that I would never roller skate again,

said my prayers to the streetlights.

To my knowledge and my memory,

I have never broken that promise.

How can I look that stupid little girl in the eyes

and tell her that promises are made to be broken?

I just don't have the heart to tell her.

You know, sometimes I'm glad that this thing

only works one way;

I wonder if she'd think of me as scary.

Back when connecting the dots

was for coloring books

and battered knees

were from playing outside.

I always know when I'm about to fall,

always have.

I'm not really cut out for roller skating,

but I think I'd like to give it another try.

I hope she can find

my forgiveness in those streetlights.

12/20/2020

What a dream that was!

I couldn't even begin to try to explain it,

so naturally, I'll begin:

It was exactly like real life, except that

everything was a game.

People could literally speak things into being if they said them well enough;

rabbits covered the terrain just like snow.

Everyone was operating

by the same rules, but no one dared mention aloud what they were.

I drove myself crazy,

as I have often been known to do,

trying to get my hands on some sort of

rule book, but the rules apparently didn't allow for their own naming.

What was I not seeing?

I never did figure it out before waking.

People would come up to each other, and it was like they were speaking in code, breaking their own intangible scripts:

—I know the password!

—You do?

—Yes!

—Then let's get outta here!

12/20/2020

You know, I used to be left-handed.

(I suppose I used to be a lot of things.

Among them,) left-handed, and it seemed to me that the world was not run or made in my favor.

It used to make me angry:

Why did I have to play the old maid?

Eventually I grew tired of asking questions;

I suspect that was the goal all along.

Surely it would serve everyone more to be ambidextrous.

Well, anyway, I learned to be amphibious.

I evolved from the water after all,

didn't I?

That's what all the scientists like to say, at least.

At most, it just made for more translating

on my end.

You know, I used to be left-handed;

now I barely even know

what to do with them.

Muscle-memory is a dangerous thing:

make sure you don't give

any one part of you the upper hand.

12/20/2020

The only hope we have in ever uncovering the truth is in

finding where the answer lies.

Why is it lying to me?

Maybe I'm the one who's lying,

but heaven knows it's not

for lack of trying.

Maybe I try too hard;

I hardly even feel I'm trying,

hardly even feel.

It's hard to feel when all of this is so alien.

I'm just so foreign to myself—

imagine where that leaves you.

Imagine where you then leave me

in return.

I think I'd like to return there some day,

not to where the answer lies,

but back enough to when

the answer wasn't lying.

Back when people were still

people just like me,

and I could love them

in their easy non-totality.

Why'd you have to go and tell me about the answer?

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