WINTER 2020
12/21/2020
I'd like to think myself
a freelance adventurer,
a hide-and-seeker,
a trough-and-peaker.
Exploring is the fun part, after all,
and after it all, I'd like to say that
I married myself to
everything as much as I could.
Kind of a shotgun wedding
type of situation:
let's get married
just for the hell of it!
Through the hell
and the thick and the thin of it—
I'd like to go through hell with you.
I do.
12/21/2020
I used to avoid the mirror like the plague,
but now I wink at her sometimes.
"I know you."
It's a very strange thing,
to feel like your self is a
double-agent.
When I'm alone,
I like to imagine myself
as audienceless— but then,
what are you so scared of
your own reflection for?
How do you go from
brushing your teeth in another room
to meeting yourself
through your own eyes?
It goes a little something like this:
you take your toothpaste,
hold your self hostage,
and for the whole two minutes,
you have yourself a staring contest.
You've always loved those.
See— I do know you!
(What kind of double-crosser would that make me
If I didn't?)
12/21/2020
Here I am again,
in a place I've been
a million times before,
and this time,
I am not afraid.
I know the cliff's edge
like the back of my hand,
like the face of a friend
or the nature of man.
Here I am again,
peering overpouring,
leaning over mourning,
heeding not a warning,
because I've been here before—
and this time, I know how to
answer the riddle.
I know all the right words
and right phrases;
I've had all the wrong
outlooks and phases.
But I'm ready now.
That's the beauty of "again":
before was before and there for you,
but here and now again, I am.
12/22/2020
Every last second you put into distractions
is one less second you have to be you.
Escapism drains the life from its host:
choose to create instead,
and you will always be fulfilled.
Renewed by my own inventions,
I am my own escape-artist.
Thwacking away at a
jungle of my own creation
instead of toiling away at another's.
The adventure is inward!
You have more infinity in you
than any infinity you'll ever find outside—
don't let your self
drift too far from your eyes!
Be caught in the act of living;
don't just let living
happen helplessly to you.
Help yourself and help your self
by seeing living through!
Through your eyes are worlds unknown;
behind your eyes is yours alone.
Be yourself or aim to find—
or don't waste my time.
12/22/2020
I have myself right where I want me.
Lately, we've been going out dancing.
Four left feet, and both of us needing
to lead and be led.
Music puts me right back in it:
Here— take this river.
Let his water replenish your water;
let his rhythm take hold of your rhythm.
Mother's ancient pulse.
Mother? Is that you?
You look so different
every time I see you.
The same goes for me too,
the same leaves me more often
than you do.
I know what I'm doing this for, alright?
I know that there's a what and a who and a why somewhere to be accounted for!
I don't even care if I'm the only one who makes it out of here alive—
I'm going there someday!
Are you watching?
I'm hunting myself down, and this time,
I've got me right where I want me!
12/22/2020
Wow, there's just so much of it.
There are just so many infinities
to sift through and sit through.
Do I have to go through all of them
before I can be done;
do I have to eat all of the food on my plate before I can get up from the table
and go home?
I'd like to say that I'm at home with myself,
but it would probably
be more accurate to say that
my self is never at home.
Or maybe I'm the one who's always away,
but either one of those ways,
the two of us are never in the same house at the same time.
Maybe that makes me a superhero,
putting on my costume and
braving the outside word, coming home and reporting my findings
to the back door closing behind her
as she makes her great escape.
What does she do all day when I'm gone; where does she go? With any luck,
she's eliminating more infinities for me,
adding one more ghostly tally to the wall.
12/22/2020
I probably don't even need to say this at this point,
but I know about it.
Don't know it, but I know about it.
I'm writing to fill in the space all around it,
hoping that I'll be able to make out what it is
by the impression it leaves.
Maybe if I say as much as I can say,
I'll find it in the things I can't.
Look for its mighty footprints inside of
numbers and in science;
you can feel its breath in art's celebration.
Tell me about yourself, nowhere,
where is it that you've been?
Tell me what my eyes haven't seen,
what my ears have never heard,
what my mind can't know.
I know that my mind can't know it—
so I must be able to somehow!
I just need to build up my vocabulary,
so that one day, I can finally say my name.
One day I will utter out the syllable
and call the thing by name.
Enjoy your hiding while you can—
I know about you.
12/22/2020
You're making something out of nothing—
do you realize that?
Your next breath means more than history!
It's more than just being borrowed:
you are a liberator.
You are beyond what you see;
you can imagine a way out of the maze before there even is one!
Your back aches like a prisoner's
and your mouth recoils like a woman's
and you've got sweat dripping down your chin
'cause you took the bait just like a rotten apple,
but you're a liberator just the same.
Easy there, mister— why don't you just
hold your fire until we have all the facts?
Let me get this straight: you are?
So you're telling me that you exist—
and I'm just supposed to take your word for it?
Well, then you must be quite the master of persuasion, then,
because I don't even believe that about myself.
Oh, I get it. So this is why she calls you a liberator?
12/22/2020
I have no idea what color your eyes are.
Not because I don't ever look at them,
but because when I do,
I'm more focused on figuring out how the rest of your face has been coaxing your eyes into hiding. Whatever you're trying to convince me of, I know for a fact that your eyes follow suit, no matter their color.
I couldn't tell you a thing about your smile, either. Not because I never notice it,
but because I am less interested
in how your lips come to know joy
and more interested in just how joy has been shaping those tricky lips of yours, anyhow. And when you look at me
like that, is that supposed to be your cue?
Am I supposed to be learning something
I wouldn't have otherwise known
about you? I don't give a damn what you look like; that's not what I came here for.
I'm here for the words at the back of your throat, honey. I came to bear witness to
pageantry— not to make prose
of your faux fickle irises.
12/23/2020
It's a wonder how I'm not
dizzy all the time, what for how often
I'm thinking up these circles.
They're buried in the slot machines;
they control the weather,
the whether-or-not's,
they're in every journey home;
every story-line has a curvature who meets himself at his own end again.
I'm in limbo / medias res:
has anyone seen the exit-sign?
My plot-point makes up one of many,
a legion by de-sign.
It's a wonder I'm not dizzy all the time,
what for how the world keeps spinning.
What for just one more beginning,
what for all this cyclic sinning.
It seems to me that any other shape
wouldn't be nearly just as fitting,
wouldn't you agree?
What fits more perfectly with three?
Not on paper, silly— triangulate your dimensions, and you've got yourself a proper atmo-sphere (the air is so thin)!
I think I'd better go a-head and lie down.
12/24/2020
I don't like the overhead light that everyone can see;
I do not like the sun.
None of that voodoo hippie bullshit:
what is it that you're running from?
There's a reason that running has been said in so many ways;
suppose I take a stab at it?
Well, I'm running, for starters.
Except— except what?
Am I even really running,
or simply standing still?
No, that's not it:
I'm running, dammit!
And that's not all —
but wait, there's more —
I'm running from.
(That's one more word plugged into the equation, at least.)
I'm not from where I've been
anymore from where I'm going,
yet from both of them I come.
Last, as he has often been known to do, leaves us with the trickiest word of all:
What? I'm running from what is it?
12/24/2020
Sometimes forever comes wrapped up like Christmas presents.
Cardboard boxes, fireplace billows.
You can hold it in your hands;
it is here; it is now;
it is star— struck in Christ:
Be not afraid!
You've gotta admit,
it's a tempting offer to pass up,
that power that being unafraid can hold.
The weight that it can carry.
I always think about just how heavy that whole scene sounds, what burden that whole scene bears, the weight of a blameless womb who reeks of His own creation.
The child's bleak cry of the metaphor.
(Even I can't pass up the sheer imagery of it all— I'm not a god you know, have desires, same as you; I'm just a part of the drama's chorus, same as you.)
Judas; everything is Judas.
Emmanuel. God with us.
God with us.
God help us.
12/24/2020
Ethics: so we know that something's
right, know that it can be recognized,
if not only understood.
If not fully understood.
Fully not misunderstood.
I always seem to be missing my understanding;
it's always in the undercurrent.
Standing over missing something.
Somethings missing,
I'm missing something.
Am I missing you?
You who is not me,
what and who ever that may be.
Maybe.
Ethics.
There is a right, let's try to find it.
There is a light, let's try to blind it.
Mind it?
Ethics.
Right.
Do Not Atone
12/24/2020
Look, I'm not an evil person,
I just don't know how to be imaginative.
I don't know any better.
I can't imagine any other way
that it would be— is that on me?
Come on out,
come out, come out, wherever you are;
I wish us to have ourselves here a picnic.
You bring the checkered blanket,
and I'll bring the flies.
Little Miss Muffet,
I think you're my mother.
I think it is your sweet song who
must croon me to sleep,
I've got a new one every week.
Remember this with me:
picture yourself alone in a room.
Alone in a room.
Alone in a tomb.
Listen; I'm not an evil person.
It's the person who lies evil here in me.
Don't blame your eyes for what you can't see,
blame your mouth for words it can't heed.
I am my father's father, I have their DNA in me.
12/24/2020
What do you give a dying man?
Well, ideally, I suppose it would be
the one thing you can't give him.
Time, that is.
My mother always leaves the porch light on for me,
even when she knows
it won't be me who's coming home.
The morning air comes home before you.
Well, me, that is.
Air comes before me,
has already filled my lungs
by the time I'm done breathing it.
I help myself to scoops of air
whenever I'm feeling a little unsure about religion.
Ambivalence never hurt nobody;
it's just a bit of fun, that's all.
Just a bit of sex before
the one thing you can't give
gives in,
turns you in like a hall monitor:
Are you the dying man?
You are the dying man, aren't you?
Anyway, carry on.
What is there to carry?
What is going on?
12/24/2020
I see I see you see me.
The direct object becomes the subject
over and over again,
find a new you and then
assume its identity.
You're a shapeshifter;
a carbon-copy whose half-life
can never truly be dated
or anticipated.
I can't wait for the wedding.
Right now I'm twenty years in,
and I think it's only going to get easier
because it's all downhill from here.
I'm telling you my wedding vows right now,
waiting for my lines to all line up.
When everything I say and do lets you know how much I care for you,
my work here will be done.
The moment that I can understand you through me and me through you,
then I'll be through with the both of us.
I see I see you see me.
I do.
12/24/2020
It is night now, and at night we rest.
We aren't sure exactly what will happen
once tomorrow rears its ugly day,
but for now, we rest.
For now's sake, come lie down with me;
come lay your weary body
down right here,
I won't tell anyone, it's night here.
I'll never need you
because I don't even need this me,
but I want you to be here, see?
Want it actively, presently:
I am making the choice here and now to love you for what loving does to me.
I know who you are because I don't.
I love you you are because I won't.
And I'm resting in that
just like a newborn baby,
I am cradling this chasm
'till the end of my days.
This is no day, it is night.
So let's rest, alright?
And to all a goodnight.
12/24/2020
Everyone keeps telling me about how
cold out there it is,
but for the life of me I can't seem to believe in cold from here in the heat.
My mother would tell me to put a jacket on, and she's right, and she's always right, even when she's wrong— right.
I may not understand her,
but she knows what I can never know,
and that I must call wisdom.
She remembers the infamous blizzard of '78, after all; she once felt the cold before cold could ever feel me.
Right even when she's wrong, my mother raised me higher than she could ever
raise herself.
I wonder if that's what it must be like,
to have children: I am you,
yet I cannot understand you.
You are me, yet you cannot understand me. If it were art, I'd forsake the whole thing. And I do, and she did,
raising each other over and over again.
But even still, she knows how cold it can get out there, tells me to
put a jacket on out of love and spite.
And I'm glad that I did: it's cold out here.
12/25/2020
You must be new around here:
I'll let you down easy, nice and slow,
but always remember that I'll be
letting you down.
Remember: gravity still works.
Fall and you will summon it,
rise-and-shining dirt.
I came out of a makeshift womb,
so now I have one, too.
And I'm new around here—
not too new to crawl my way through,
but new.
And I think I love you too.
But love isn't mine to own, you know?
It's not something I have,
just something I do.
A participation trophy,
a sloppy slippery slope who
chokes the life out of its hosts.
What a guilty pleasure just to breathe again, to suck up oxygen like medicine.
To heal.
A word as vague as love, and as difficult, too— forgive me: I'm still new.
12/26/2020
I'm whispering these Sweet Nothings to Nobody,
telling the witching hour my gospel
so that time can aim to make sense out of name.
The wheel spokes on the ceiling fan
have crescent moons on them;
I'm staring at mortality in a ceiling fan
—but I am not afraid of death tonight.
Tonight, I'm afraid of life, in awe of it, really,
to the point where questions about life and death
seem like the wrong kinds of questions.
(I never seem to know the right ones.)
I try to blame language,
but I'm not even sure if that's the problem
anymore than there is one.
Problems seem so trivial
when I look up at the crescent-moon-ceiling-fan;
darkness seems so trepid in the daylight.
But there is no daylight, not right now.
And I am so calmly afraid.
I'm terrified, petrified— still.
Petrified like stone
who teaches me to be less alive
and dead in all the right places.
I'm alive.
12/26/2020
Idolized high-lights
Stylized play-wrights
Synchronized last-rites
Mechanized stop-lights
Analyzed birth-rights
Improvised re-writes
Recognized back-lights
Formalized gun-fights
Naturalized hind-sights
Authorized search-lights
Plagiarized sound-bites
Supervised by-rights
Ill-advised de-lights
Minimized up-rights
Hypnotized in-cites
Bite-sized night-lights
Fun-sized fight-flights
Life-sized in-sights
Life, right?
12/26/2020
I'm a stranger here, a stranger there;
A stranger now and every where
A little lost, a little found,
A debtor to the earth and ground
A ship-wrecked sea, a castaway,
A lonely me whose night is day
A fear who fears, a fool who fools,
A student in and out of schools
A man who's loved, a man who's lied,
A temple to a god inside
A space who fills, a pair of hands,
A dying child who understands
A living will, a dirty deed,
A warning that I will not heed
A homely name, a namely home,
A broken toy who's cursed to roam
A blinding light, a fortune wheel,
A thief who only knows to steal
A cold-cut frame, a woman pure,
A beast to tame, a daydream whore
A hot-shot foreign diplomat,
A clumsy clamoring acrobat
A stranger here, a stranger there;
A stranger now and everywhere.
12/26/2020
I have love for you here,
but I am not in love with you.
I love to fend off fear,
but I am not in love with you.
I help myself to love, you see,
but I am not in love with you.
I look at you and love finds me,
but I am not in love with you.
I have some love that we can share,
but I am not in love with you.
I steal it from the thinning air,
but I am not in love with you.
My self and love and you make three,
but I am not in love with you.
Though I love you and you love me,
I'll never be
in love with you.
12/26/2020
What is this; what is this?
Maybe I should ask somebody
who knows something.
Is that somebody you?
Can you tell me anything useful,
anything helpful, anything new?
No; you should help yourself.
Please— help yourself.
Don't let me stand in your way;
I'll be eyeing the buffet from over here,
listening to everything you say.
And you and you and you.
What are you saying?
Do you even know?
(Surely I never do.)
I don't know me; you don't know you.
Is that true?
Just kidding: how would you know?
Where did you go?
And where are you going;
you don't have anywhere to go!
Neither do I, for all that I know.
And what do I know?
My god, what is this?
12/26/2020
You are the only thing that makes sense to me— and I realize that I just accidentally called you a thing— and I'm sorry.
But I hope you can see that I'm trying
to give you a compliment:
you make sense to me.
you make sense out of me,
knock sense into me.
I hope you can see that I'm trying, at least.
At most, I hope you can see that I love you.
I just don't do it in a way that makes much sense; I just can't feel it in a way that ever makes much sense to anyone.
Well, anyone but you, that is, and it only makes sense to you because you know enough about my sense to know how it's untranslatable.
Just take what you can from me:
I don't speak your language,
but we both know the word for "love",
and surely that must count for something.
I don't waste time
counting things anymore;
I've gotten tired of keeping score.
Just know that I love you
and so much more.
12/27/2020
I don't have any intentions because intentions aren't real. They don't exist. Abstractions are abstractions are distractionless distractions
distrustful actions gaining traction,
losing speed.
Try to see it from every angle but it's always in your blind spot.
It could be so simple; it just might be.
There it is again: might be, hypothetical,
I know.
I'm doing all this knowing and yet nothing's knowing me.
Does nothing know me?
Can nothing even know anything?
Who am I to say or see?
Questionless and answerless,
for both are just the same.
One question answers another
'till the final fills my grave.
I can't die: it's just not something I can do.
I either am or I am not, and if I die
then "I" is through.
(I don't intend to.)
12/27/2020
I'm keeping them all for me,
these secrets as I find them.
I'm giving you the footnotes of my path.
Tracks, trails, hints.
You know what I'm talking about.
That's not a question—
not the question, that is.
But there is one,
and you lean in to hear the symbol / signal:
?
A noise, an up-tick,
a curvature.
I'm nearing my way to that circle.
See what I mean?
Trace a question mark with your hand
like a sparkler.
Everything is leading you to here, to there,
another circle. They don't end.
It's always slipping over the horizon,
lagging itself along like a dog on a leash.
You are the dog to me, you whose not is me.
I am not after what I see, I see what I am after.
I'm after me.
See?
12/27/2020
Do you think you make peace with your self
at the last split-second?
I have this feeling that there's peace;
this feeling is that there is peace in me.
I can't seem to find it at the moment,
you'll have to come back later.
Who's whose?
I know somebody's said that:
Whose who was it?
Not mine; I know that much:
It isn't me.
It doesn't belong to me; I can't find it in here.
Course, that doesn't mean it isn't here.
It doesn't mean anything, shares the meaning with mean, for God's sake.
Surely we can do better than that.
Is just doesn't cover it.
They are two separate things:
One who is, and one it('s)elf.
Peace, at least we have a word for peace.
The word "seek" for the seekers,
"bold" for the bold.
A "my" for the self.
The seconds are already splitting;
take the olive branch in your own hand.
12/27/2020
You can quote me on that.
In fact, please do.
I talk about you when you're not around;
you exist outside of you.
Jarring, isn't it?
You yourself can be the point of not your own contention, the space between
the art and me.
Quick– what did I just say?
What more price to pay?
I'll change, I'll change,
I swear I'll will change.
You'll never know me;
I will change.
This carousel's been blurring up my vision:
I know it's in the center,
but the scenery's too fast.
The motion always lasts.
The future's now the past.
I don't know where I'm at.
The fiction is the fact.
I only know to act.
The spitting distance's spat—
you can quote me on that.
12/28/2020
The night that I turned twenty years old,
I saw a halo around the moon.
My brother thought me crazy;
but I know what I saw.
I saw a halo around the moon
—isn't poetry— a halo around the moon.
The evening air a wicked which,
the moonlight drew me in.
Rolling out the welcome mat,
commissioned the welcoming committee,
opened up the door and down the hatch and right into my wrestling match.
Now I'm waiting in the waiting room:
what else would I be doing?
Grass-greener suing?
Mean-greening hueing?
I'm friends with all my audience.
The monster in the blackened inches
likes to feel he's seen.
And scene!
(You'll never know which way I mean.)
This halo isn't righteous; it isn't fool-proof,
it's fool's proof, fool's gold.
I've seen the halo around the moon—
it sure as hell isn't golden.
12/28/2020
Just tell me that you don't know what I'm saying, goddamn it!
That's the easiest thing there is to say!
Notice that there are things you will never notice: that picket fence has always been there; you were always on one of side it.
The devil owns the fence—
there's no such thing as indecision!
Coward! Every last one of you!
Every last me of too!
Me of two's, yous of whose:
well, what is it then?
Spit it out— I'm not getting any taller,
growing any older, dying any younger!
Don't you get it?
None of this ends until you tell me who you are. And no, not you, idiot.
You! Tell me who you are!
I know that you can hear me,
you son-of-a-son-of-an infinite bitch!
Tell me that you're just as scared as I am,
tell me that you're not afraid at all,
tell me what you've already tried to tell me, I don't care, just give me something to work with! I already know that this is how
the saying goes— just say so!
12/28/2020
We exclaim "that's it!"
as if that could ever really be it,
as if the two words are the same,
as if or else we'd throw a fit.
And I for one am sick of it!
And eye-for-I-for-two's a deficit!
The rest of it is counterfeit,
stolen like a hypocrite!
You must admit— they do commit.
They know their lines and stick to it.
They keep on keeping on,
they do until they die and never do-or-die,
just end up gone.
"Or" is just their word for ice cream flavors.
Pretend they know the word for savor,
the word for savior—
Jesus Christ, get a dictionary!
Learn your own vocabulary,
for God's sake as much as your own!
How can you know
if you never put words to your knowing?
Put sights to your showing?
You're not alone, you're readmitted!
Sin acquitted, get it?
Know it, see it, set it?
Forget it!
Swing it, hit it, bat it!
That's it!
12/28/2020
My muse just keeps on choking me,
holding me at gun-point
while ceasing to be.
Are you following me?
You know how paranoid I can get,
things can be, eyes can see.
Telepathy or soliloquy?
You tell me, 'cause I'll never tell you.
I'm not sure who is who,
but it's a real who's who
of the universe to me.
You put on quite the show out there;
you ever catch yourself
breaking character?
Or is that all a part of your arc?
Don't look at me— I'm also in the dark.
I'm also in the act—
I think my scene is coming up.
I think I'm running out of luck,
or luck is running out of me,
and I can't breathe.
Who went and made the air so strong?
Who slept and made this dream so long?
Stop choking me!
12/28/2020
You can't hide in these symbols forever.
Time will always catch up with you.
The last thing you want is to
be left behind.
I'm not that kind—
but I'm also not that kind.
I have to think that right and wrong are make-believe; if not,
what does that say about me?
It's not that I don't want right to be right,
just that the right and wrong always
come up three in me!
And trinity's a symbol!
A cheat-code!
I try to be kind, but this kindness is
killing me.
Why on earth wouldn't good be easy?
Who's in charge around here,
I'd like to make a complaint!
Filed under: lack of restraint.
Self-control.
The rest is all symbol.
Simple.
12/28/2020
I guess that I have this complex,
this matrix, this mindset.
This genre of thought that pops up like a weed:
things are not as they seem,
they are not as they seem.
I've seen it all before,
time and time again,
time in and time out,
time now and time then.
I guess I need to regress,
take a minute just to digest,
just to reset this whole algorithmic preset:
we're not there yet,
you're not there yet.
Who am I not to listen to its call?
Not to hear each tree who falls?
I've been caught falling, after all.
It's always nice to corroborate
what you saw. Know-it-all,
you're a know it all. No:
I'm the know-it-all; "you're" is just
one more wall.
You're just a wall that I can't get to flex.
I'll admit— it's a bit out-of-range
for my complex.
12/28/2020
Let me meet you somewhere more familiar, let me make my way to you.
Let the morning mourn his dew
as losing battles often do.
Let me meet you in the middle.
All of daylight sings if not for all the glory
that tomorrow surely brings.
Out of fear for angels' wings.
A creature wrought from tender hands,
eternal thought from mortal man.
I understand, the angel says,
I understand.
I know these words drop dead like parting gifts; I know these sentences are
guestlists for the funeral.
The framework glitters for all that is gold.
Tricks me like fairies; does what she's told.
Follow the will of the whisps as far as you can stand it; let rabbit holes read like primrose paths; go down like
sugar on your tongue.
Their nectar is so sweet;
the garden's almost complete.
A little fairy dust can't kill you now.
12/28/2020
If love and fear are opposites,
then what's this that I'm feeling?
Gap increasing, thought policing,
back and forth and never ceasing.
If love and fear are opposites,
then why isn't love always healing?
Reap-sewing, mud-growing,
rain and shine both heal unknowing.
If love and fear are opposites,
then why am I afraid of love?
One-for-all-ness, all-for-one-ness,
unity for fear's accomplice.
If love and fear are opposites,
then why am I in love with fear?
Tag-and-running, playground bluffing,
merry-go-round emotions rutting.
If love and fear are opposites,
then why can't I just pick a side?
My love's afraid; my fear loves to lie.
And both are just as well to die.
If love and fear are opposites,
then why bother putting love first?
Well, because it isn't
for poorer or for richer,
It's for better or for worse.
12/27/2020
I'm completely toothless,
a skeleton grin.
My wisdom teeth are masterful;
my windows are my oxygen.
We're a bad person,
but we're really good at
being something else.
No body or no one.
No thank you and no help.
Lay my deaths down at your doorstep,
ring the bell then run away.
My teeth are falling out.
I'm having a bad dream,
and my teeth are falling out.
This is a really specific guess:
Faith.
Alter-ego.
I'll crucify you. I'll get you, too.
I'll nail you to a cross like a coffin lid
and I'll make sure Judas lives.
You will visit me again.
I will end where you begin.
I'm completely toothless—
a skeleton grin.
12/28/2020
Every poem I write now is one less thing
I'll have to say in hell.
At least, that's what I'm hoping for, anyways.
See, I'm hoping that if I use this life
to be as creative as possible,
it'll be like the equivalent of putting in a good word with
The Big Man Upstairs
if there is one.
I know I'm not supposed to care
about whether or not there even is one;
it distracts from the now, I know,
you will never know how, I know.
But picture this:
I do all of this thinking now,
maybe I'll be on the fast track
right through purgatory,
say I told you so through a
particularly windy day or something.
I'm stuck in a game,
and I'll be damned if I don't play it.
Damned either way, yes,
I know,
but you don't always have to say it.
Just let me have this?
I don't have prayer to fall back on;
please be gentle with my working theories.
12/28/2020
Leave yourself an out, but
make sure that they see you.
Keep your eyes moving;
they're only as good as what you use them for, how you use them to see.
Not-me is only as good as
how it pertains to me.
What are eyes good for, anyway?
I still can't see what I cannot see.
Know what I cannot know,
feel what I can't feel,
be what I can't be.
Is that my conscience's "out"?
Is this what evolution is really all about?
Am I really supposed to believe that one day all of this believing might evolve into true seeing, that my eyes might one day see things as they truly are in front of me?
And if not me, another version?
I'm positively sure that I'll get
plucked off by natural selection;
there's just some timeline indiscretion.
Be discreet: for nothing is beneath you.
Leave yourself an out;
make sure that they see you.
12/28/2020
If you cannot speak for yourself,
your speech will be provided for you.
Wield words wisely:
all of them mean something else.
Rhetoric provides the blueprint for the prison;
you must make yourself a monk
and learn its pretenses.
Study the ways of the rules—
not in order to one day break them—
but to recognize that in breaking the rules
there is nothing truly being broken.
Why would you choose to break fictitious prison-rules
when you could just escape?
Get your priorities straight:
this isn't some kind of prison riot,
not a fashion trend or fad or diet!
It's screaming quiet—
can't keep up?
Tough luck.
This rhetoric's got a ruthless
business-model:
he'll sell it and you'll buy it.
Don't listen to anyone, not even to me:
you have to say something—
you have something to say—
speak!
12/28/2020
I know what you've said before you've even said it, fed it to and through my ego before you even fed it.
I've bitten the hand that fed me,
led the hand that led me,
and now we're here,
stranded in our subtexts
knowing everything but context.
What's next?
How do we get out of this?
I want to go around again,
a different way, be a better friend.
I never wanted it to end, but
all we ever get is endings.
I'm never in the same room as anyone,
and everyone's pretending.
Why can't I stop? Why can't I listen?
I'm begging you— I'm blending.
I want to say and be said,
lead and be led, be and be wed to this language we're making. My foundation is shaking. I'm shivering, I'm shaking.
Say something I've not heard before—
my ice is finally breaking.
12/28/2020
Satire doesn't speak to this;
I don't know what this is.
I'm not even trying to be facetious;
I simply can't outsmart my self.
My Self is far too smart for me.
One of us knows everything;
one of us knows nothing.
(And I've got a really bad feeling
about which of us is who.)
The more My pulls Self by the reigns,
the weaker the Self will become.
The more Self bears likeness to My,
the less My Self can sum.
I'm not trying to talk in riddles—
it's this damn language we keep on using!
Full of fantasies and fallacies!
Parasitic paradoxic parodic pleasantries!
Formalized informalities!
Totalitarian non-totalities!
I want out of these—
can somebody help me?
Or are all of you too busy
being busy just to get though it all?
Screw it all— I'll do it all again without you!
Irony tucks me in at night
and I'll eat all my satire for breakfast!
12/28/2020
I'm winking at you,
forfeiting half of my vision for
one-split-second to let you know that
one day I just might go blind for you.
I trust you just enough to forego my very senses, let you know I've no defenses,
no excuses or expenses.
I trust you at my own expense,
and at my de-expansion:
I will cut my worldview in half just to
meet your two eyes; I'll pretend that I am wounded just to greet your sweeter lies.
Ignorance is the prize that I am after:
the name of the game,
the art of the laughter.
It's true: I've been playing tricks on you.
I've led you to believe me, too.
But never forget that these tricks are still something to be played: it's still just a game; I'm not cheating— I'm afraid.
Say my prayers to persuasion to avoid an altercation. Just a little affirmation is enough to see me through.
Take my blindness back before you do
(still gives me half a mind to wink at you)!
12/28/2020
Easy there, Cinderella.
Let's not get too carried away.
Don't you get angry with me
when you're the one who left a shoe
ripe for the finding in the first place!
Why am I to blame for its ill-fitting?
How would we have even known
the shoe would fit
if you had not first tried it on, princess?
Double-cross-dresser!
Don't make me instate some
arbitrated if-the-shoe-fits policy;
that isn't what I want from you.
That isn't what I'm trying to do.
There is only one mindgame,
and it's me versus you
(and that's a royal You, mind you)!
I don't want or need you back by midnight;
I don't care what you do.
You do whatever best suits you,
you suit yourself:
I am not your fairy god/mother.
I do not heed or need your help at all.
Cinderella, honey, you either need to
be one step ahead like the rest of us,
or quit leaving loose ends at the ball.
12/29/2020
God, I don't know why you're keeping me here. I'm not sad, like you might think.
Not particularly happy either.
Not self-isolating or self-idolizing.
I don't understand other people, I don't understand me, other people don't understand me, they don't understand each other, they don't understand themselves.
And I know that I'm not the first person to say this, either. Know I won't even be the last, and I'm not sure if that's supposed to make me feel better or worse about the whole thing. I'm not sure if anything is supposed to make me feel anything. Part of me thinks that things just happen, and that for whatever reason, I'm unlucky enough to call the things happening. Another part of me knows that it's eternal, but I can't really tell if it's in the kumbaya bullshit way that stories live on or last names get passed down or if I just somehow am able to know that I am literally eternal.
Metaphors just don't cut it anymore: connect too many dots, all you've really done is blackened up the paper. If too many things bleed together,
then all you end up with is blood.
There's a reason why light is blinding.
I've been saying the same thing over and over and over again for as long as I can remember; what should I do differently? It's enough to drive me to prayer sometimes: God, what should I do differently? He probably thinks that a stupid question. He probably considers my invented back-and-forth as part of the ceremony. He's probably a she's probably an it's probably locked up inside of my own mind somewhere, patiently waiting for me to let myself out. Jesus, what a narcissist. You think that you've got god in you? Try telling that to god. Well, go on, you're talking to him right now. If he exists, you're already talking to him all of the time, constantly worshipping, every conversation a prayer, every motion a baptism, every tangent another page in the Bible.
The real Bible is a big, big book.
It's every story ever written and every other story, too. It's a heavy, heavy book.
The real Bible weighs more than gravity; it's more massive than mass, extends beyond our qualia; it's an insurmountable living breathing organ. I exist in someone else's dream to infinity and beyond and so do you. It's the fact that we know none of this is real that makes it real.
Solipsism is Genesis. Yeah, so it looks like I've got a lot of reading up to do.
12/29/2020
I really don't mean to bury myself alive like this all the time;
I never want to distract or detract from the beauty.
Your voice barks like tree trunks
and your smile cracks like eggshells
and your hand on my shoulder
makes a lottery winner out of me.
Whatever luck is, whatever lucky means,
it is here and I have it; I am lucky.
Pass it back and forth between us like a hot potato:
now it's my turn to tell the story.
I don't need to know how it ends.
I'm already doing it.
It is always the end of the world,
so let's just go out dancing.
I love you right now
more than I've ever loved anyone,
just like I'm older and younger than
I've ever been and ever will be again.
I may be rubbing elbows with the maggots,
but I refuse to be buried alive like some sort of coward—
bury me nice and good and dead
like the lunatic I was.
12/30/2020
I had a dream this morning, and once I realized that I was having it, my mind's entire cast of characters began to celebrate.
You did it! They all exclaimed,
You're completely lucid! What are you going to do now?
A little girl tugged on her father's shirt:
Does this mean she'll stay here with us this time, Daddy? Does this mean that we all get to go home?
"Anything I want, I guess," I responded to my imaginaries, "but none of this is real, so I guess it doesn't matter."
Who said anything about mattering? We never said that this was real; we never said it wasn't. Only that you have a name to call it now. Don't keep us waiting!
Come— let's celebrate!
I looked around once more; I had never seen any of these people before in my life, I was sure of it. And yet here they were, calling me out by my name: you just found out that you were dreaming, Lauren— what are you going to do next?
"I'm going to Disney World!"
12/30/2020
It's people who are scared of other people that are
the smart ones, the honest ones,
the safe ones, the sane ones,
the only ones, the tame ones,
the no ones, the good ones,
the unloved ones, the unseen ones,
the unknown ones.
I'd turn my back on the mirror
while facing it if I could.
The mirror faces itself in me
and I am afraid of the mirror
who does all of the backwards-facing.
Time is so alien.
Time is an alien and so are we.
Time is anything I need it to be,
and so am I, and you are me.
And I love you.
I'll never apologize for that—
I will have love as long as
love will have me.
It's the people who are scared of themselves
who, who—
Oh, who am I kidding?
What do I know?
I know what I do; I don't what I don't.
12/31/2020
I'll be honest; I don't have any memory of when this year began, and I probably won't have any by the time that it's over with, either. Of course, that doesn't mean it was all wasted time; lots of things have beginnings and endings that can't be properly accounted for:
Life and Death itself.
Do you remember first
realizing you were sentient?
I feel like there should be some sort of time-stamp for that one, a distinct "aha!" moment you could point to.
Or how about sentience's reversal, death:
will you remember your own undoing?
Likely not, but maybe Death will remember you. (I'd like to think so; wouldn't you?)
You only realize you're awake once
you're already conscious,
cannot realize you're asleep
because there's no one awake enough to do all the realizing.
Every year, every day, every sleep and every wake has
no beginning and no ending—
it's the middle bit of time we're spending.
Every moment's worth its weight in gold
no matter what the past and future hold.
12/31/2020
There is literally nothing else in the world there could be.
I hope that you get through to me.
They're not the same person,
My and Self,
You and I,
Self and Help.
I know that I am the VCR.
Outdated, orchestrated,
artificially compensated.
This isn't art— it's ones and zeros,
all part of the code.
And so it goes.
And life erodes like canyons of the sea.
It's stuck in your throat for the rest of your life. Will you remember me when you are not me? The rest of your life.
The clown shows for the clown.
Yeah, it's my portfolio-case.
I hope you find that funny.
I hope you found that out to be funny.
You're welcome— please don't be like me.
Don't make one of three.
Or do, be happier.
The more the merrier.
1/1/2021
This is my Kryptonite—
I think that everything is going 'till it's over.
It's on-going, stupid.
Game Over.
You couldn't find the cheat codes,
but they were in you all along.
You saw them strong once—
what has gone on?
What's gone on since?
My history is repentance.
Experience: level-up.
I'm sure you can tell that I don't play video-games.
Different-Sames.
I think this all will be over soon.
I must do it intentionally:
I am acting; give me stage-directions.
Set me free; I want something to believe in. Make your Sphinx out of your freedoms
so that I can make you free in me.
What am I saying?
You don't know me.
Help me to be,
I'm begging me.
1/1/2021
I wasted so much time just trying to
get out of dodge, avoid myself.
It hurts to be given the silent treatment,
to not feed into your gut feelings.
I was starving and refused to be fed.
Oh god, I don't know which one this is.
I'm not sure what this is,
or who or how I'm doing this.
How long has morning been this way?
I haven't seen it in days,
and yet I'm sure that it's gone on.
Swallowed up by my dreams.
It's more real than it all seems.
Hide-and-go-seek:
you're the one who got you into this mess:
so go set yourself out of it!
Please don't forget about me,
because the second that happens, I die.
And I don't want to die,
don't want death to have me just yet.
Just another curveball in
the batting cage "Identity".
The Home Run Collective.
Don't get out of dodge—
come find me.
1/1/2021
We're always at the midway point,
aren't we?
Always pacified halfway between
the future and the past,
suspended in the act
and never following through.
Halfway there,
except nobody knows to where "there" refers,
and the world is on fire, and my temple hurts.
It's easier to talk about "there"
when it seems so far away.
I've lived for so long
and it hasn't even been one lifetime:
tell me that you also see the apparition.
I don't believe in ghosts;
I took belief and made the opposite
so that must mean there's something bigger going on here.
Halfway there from there to here.
Objects in the mirror
are closer than they appear.
Good thing I can make every second
feel like infinity;
the only catch is that
every infinity only takes up a second's worth of time.
Could I have a moment's worth of your time;
I think that I'm in love with you.
There.
That should give me a couple new words to use;
kick back for the rest of the ride
'till you get bucked off the bus.
Rest-Stop, midway point.
1/1/2021
Don't make me go back there,
where I am not even in on my own jokes.
Make no mistake: this is an expedition.
I'm off to see the wizard;
don't remind me it's all in a storybook.
You want me to know you or not?
Either tell me who you really are or
let me love your character; I'm fine with either one. I know who I am: I am being my self as much as I can without pulling any strings. If you're not there yet, that's okay; I still love you. I love you something primal, something mortal, something still.
I love you to pieces: I love you into all of your avenues, and even for the alleyways
I hope to never visit. I've got my own to worry about; I'm sure you understand. But then, if I'm so sure you understand, you'll never understand. Don't let me retreat into my lack of information— and don't you
do it, too. I'm trying to let me love you.
I'm trying to love you— let me.
I know that I'm the punchline here;
just let me.
1/1/2021
I want a Wikipedia page; I want an encyclopedia that has me in it.
Nothing matters, so it's the only thing that matters. You won't find any demons here— this isn't something biblical. Radio static on the airwaves: I want a Wikipedia page.
I want to know that I am saved, that I am safe. That I figured it out this time around and maybe I figured it out so well that there won't be a next time the next time around. God damn it, I don't know which is worse. Lord help us, I think I'm in a curse. What do I look like? I dare you to recognize me. Sanctify me, vilify me, arbitrate then rectify me. You won't find any deities
here— this isn't something biblical.
It's encyclopedic; I want a safe space in the blueprint. I want a home to come home to. You won't find any temples here, no church's steeple erected from fear. I am not a dog— not your biblical virgin-bitch.
I'm just trying to figure out which is which. Let me give you my salespitch:
is there anybody out there?
Error 404: file not found.
1/1/2021
I'd like to make it very clear that I believe I am the happiest person here—
no matter the types of words I use or say.
The point of contention comes from
joy's inherent lack of inspection,
and its absence's prying misdirection.
I know they're misdirections;
that's why I'm hot on their trail.
Joy takes you up, up, up—but up on such a narrow slice of land. The lack of joy expands. The neutrality of discovery,
the No Man's Land it takes to have a chance to truly understand; I remake myself to be an emotionally clean slate, ready to be dirtied up by little facts of fiction as they make their way into my butterfly net. The biggest thing I feel is happiness, gratitude. The overarching theme here is a joy as indescribably profound as any other word worth using.
But the nitty-gritty's still worth choosing;
I know that I've already won,
so who cares about losing?
I'm the happiest person here!
1/1/2021
Sometimes I imagine that my house is swept away at sea,
bobbing up and down in solitary
until the day you choose to come visit me.
Here from where I'm sitting,
out the window's only sky.
And if I move my head just right,
it makes the house look like it's floating.
Nothing feels the same—
I don't want to say it, but I have to.
But my head's above the water, thanks to you.
None of these make any sense,
and so don't I,
must have something to do
with all of this oxygen
and the surface tension of the water.
Somehow I made it onto Noah's ark;
and you're here, too, and you were there.
I'm not afraid of needing and getting anymore;
I've known how to swim since I was four years old.
My father chucked me into the water,
let me figure out the mechanics by myself.
Here is the magic trick, the secret:
you sink until your feet can touch the bottom,
then push up.
Land ho!
It was so wonderful to see you again!
1/1/2021
I just want to trade kind words with you until the day that I die.
Let me learn your language so I can learn to say its "I love you"— yes, you.
Help me document this thing we're both caught in, this life we've both bought into. Let me show you what I know, and you can show me yours—
what's mine is yours!
Mi casa es su casa:
my world or yours?
Who could know for sure?
Not you, not I:
I'll love you 'till the day I die.
Tell me how I can say it to you.
Tell me how to love you in a way you'll understand, as much as you can stand.
I want to trade kind words with you until I trade my life for death,
until Death carries me over the threshold just like a newlywed.
What the happy couple said!
1/1/2021
We'll grieve that loss when we run to it.
We'll bridge that cross when we
come to it. Can't do it?
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
But you'll get through it,
whether you wanted to or not.
Whether you're getting cold or hot,
warmer or colder, less or more space between the atoms, heating friction's happenstance out of Eve and into Adam.
I don't know you from Atom, Adam;
can you multiply yourself,
can you keep your self entertained
while Eve is made more afraid?
You can't love God and fear him,
speak God and hear him,
boo God and cheer him.
What's the hold-up?
Hey, what gives?
Have you found it in a sacred text
or any Man who lives?
I'm not facetious; I'm just asking.
Lead me to what I am lacking if you've got it. Stocks are down; I know I'm not it.
1/2/2021
Rest easy, honey.
You can trust me enough to
fall asleep here. Look alive!
Tell me a bedtime story;
I never said you had to stay forever.
I wouldn't want you to, anyways.
(Well, maybe in theory.)
Maybe one of these infinities could
be the mortar to the eyes on the wall.
Every eye is seeing out its slice of the pie,
the woodwork of the coffin.
Everyone is so far away from each other;
can betrayal really hurt so bad?
A stupid and naive question.
I can't say anything that matters;
you think that I don't know that?
You think that's why I'm doing this?
Call me when you stop looking at the mirror.
Why the hell does everybody keep asking me how I am?
If you want a quick read, reach for the newspaper
instead of "reaching out".
Rest assured, dear; you might as well
be sleeping with the fishes.
1/2/2021
I'm tired of holding myself back for convenience's sake;
fuck anyone and anything that tries to take my self away from me.
I'm not here to play hopscotch anymore—
and believe me, I wish I was—
but I'm not anymore, and some things just can't be settled in the sandbox.
There's no such thing as "acting out" without betraying "acting in"— and I'll be damned letting that script win!
So fuck your stupid waiting list,
and fuck your god who doesn't exist!
I'm not some uptight pacifist,
and now's the time for fighting!
I'm allowed to say whatever the fuck I want, whatever I believe, and anything I don't. I'm allowed to test the waters just to hear the way words sound together!
I'll get angry at the weather
only to obey God in my dreams,
to be nullified by things unseen.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily—
life is but a dream, see what I mean?
1/2/2021
I wanna make art that sounds like my parents are dead and that I might be next.
I wanna make art that answers to nobody,
not even to me.
I wanna make art that shocks me
more than it does you.
I wanna make art that is smarter than
I am, bolder than I am, crazy like I am.
I wanna make art that makes and takes
the artist out of me.
I wanna make art that wants nothing to do with me at all.
I wanna make art that you can misquote like an idiot.
I wanna make art that demands I call it "who".
I wanna make art until the art can see me through.
1/2/2021
My room hums with clutter as I tug things out of place intentionally;
a busy bee needs its busy work,
a land of milk and honey.
I make a promise to myself every morning, night and day: you aren't allowed to end up this way; you'll always change; you're dead if you stay the same.
So I tug things out of place intentionally
with buzzing curiosity:
I wonder what this part of me would feel like if I tugged two inches to the left.
I wonder what would happen if I moved the bookshelf just a little.
Good clutter, good clutter,
messy heart and mind and room.
Messy just the way I like it.
Messy like a rose garden.
Messy like an art gallery.
Messy like my contradictories.
Pollinating every thought I have and every thing I see— a happy little ego-system.
1/2/2021
Who will I be tomorrow?
Man, I'd better stick around and find out.
What if she has some profound revelation
while doing nothing out of the ordinary;
what if she finally figures out how to show a friend how much she cares for them;
what if she writes a song out of thin air that makes her feel like the air is thinning;
what if she remembers something fondly about her up-bringing; what if she makes a stranger's day; what if she unlocks a part of someone else with words they never could've found themselves; what if she feels something so pure it makes it all worthwhile; what if she finally figures out how to smile from the inside; what if she hears the funniest joke that she's ever heard; what if she finally finds the right words; what if she borrows just one more day and realizes what life is really
all about?
Man, I'd better stick around and find out!
1/2/2021
I'll try to press record:
first and foremost, you're okay.
You'll be alright,
which is just another way
of saying you're okay.
You might not know which way is right yet,
but that's the way you're going.
Look up. Look in.
I'm here. I'll win.
I've known it since the beginning,
no matter who's losing or winning.
Can you hear me?
Will you listen by tomorrow?
I love you, you're okay.
I don't know anything more than you do,
so you know that I'm telling you the truth.
Don't turn this in on itself—
not everything's a trap.
Not everything overlaps.
Don't relapse into the
same old ways of thinking.
You already know those circles;
you're trying to draw a bigger one.
Damn it! I didn't even press "record"!
1/2/2021
I never took the time so learn astronomy—
why would I give them that?
All astronomy tells you is where the stars are supposed to be— I don't give a damn where they're supposed to be;
I wanna know where they are!
That they are!
What on Earth are you going to use the stars to orient yourself towards?
I'll lend you a roadmap, free of charge:
you're in space!
Don't tell me how it's supposed to go,
just tell me what it is or be trying—
or shut the hell up!
They say the wisest ones are
silent anyway. The strong-and-silent type;
I get it.
The telescope can't sympathize with its own predicament; it's just an instrument,
same as I am, only I am impotent:
I am helpless without it.
Tell me about it!
Why should I learn about star-light?
It's not like the stars ever learn about me!
1/2/2021
Blue-flame scientist:
Don't touch that!
The poison is the medicine;
the vices are the virtues.
One is his opposing view.
One is his opposite: two.
My mother isn't sure of what I'm saying.
And neither am I, but that's kinda the point. And anyway, here's the melody.
Just sing to me— speak intentionally.
I crave the continuity.
Be gentle with me: I know not what I do.
I see and that's my cue.
A running-gag hypothesis,
antithesis of genesis.
And then there's revelation, whatever that's supposed to me.
Why must anything be revealed to me?
The passive voice?
I can't be the one who's doing the revealing? How revealing.
I guess I'm just tired of guessing.
So much for science.
I just want its blessing.
1/3/2021
What a wonderful thing, to love you.
To actually say the words
"I love you".
You think I don't know it's contrived?
You know I do, you know that I already do.
I know it's hard to say— I've said it.
I know life's hard to play— I've lead it.
I know that I'll never know the full story;
I've already tried to read it—
sweetheart, you're no coffee table book.
You're the whole damn library.
Guilty as charged;
you've caught me open-handed.
I know it's hard to say— I understand it.
I've overheard it.
I'm open-handed here, remember?
I've got nothing to hide and even less to prove. I just love you.
That's it, that's the story, that's the test.
Open-book, open-note.
Note to self: you love her.
I love you. What a wonderful thing that is to do! I do.
1/3/2021
Loving yourself is step one— step one!
Who the hell came up with that one?
Some step for just one!
Okay, I'm done: but you've just got to do it.
I used to think that instructions like that were pointless and redundant:
"you've just got to do it"?
I can't even get to it!
But see, that's just it—
the point is that it's difficult.
No one said that it was going to be fun,
and if fun is what you're after then
the devil's already won.
Don't let him!
Don't let yourself become possessed by cycles that are eating you up inside.
Starve them, crowd them out,
kill them!
They call it ego-death for a reason:
it hurts to say goodbye.
And still I'd rather die trying than
die comfortably hiding.
I don't know about you; but I'd sure like to.
Step two:
1/3/2021
I know that I am you—
I just don't like to.
What else do you want me to admit?
What word can I call to call it quits?
Do I need to phone-a-friend, play pretend? I want to throw a fit,
except I know that's not mature.
I don't even know how to be angry anymore. Try to inject anger into my art but it always ends up sounding funny:
anger isn't justice, honey.
You're just pissed 'cause life's not fair.
No shit it's not fair: we made "fair" up!
Who died and made you runner-up?
You can't keep following your own made-up rules and be mad when others unknowingly break them.
That just isn't good communication.
I know that there's good and there's bad enough to write to—
I just don't like to.
Just know that I am you; I like you.
1/3/2021
If you think you've seen it all,
just wait until you see what happens next.
I heard that in a commercial just now,
but the fact that I chose to put it in a poem
is supposed to make it mean more.
See how boring my job is?
You can make layers out of anything;
most of the time it's not even worth it.
You could do my job for me:
pretend that everything you overhear is nothing but the Truth.
That's all that I'm doing.
Let yourself believe that everything is True for as long as you can stand it—
that's the only way to understand it.
I think I know what "it" is now:
the way we use "it",
almost always can be substituted for
"what I'm talking about".
It is the abbreviated version
of what we're all talking about.
Have you been following?
Oh, so then you know where I've been,
and you can guess where I'm going,
take a stab at It.
I've got to go— my show's back on.
1/3/2021
What do I have to say?
Oh my, the things I haven't yet to.
You'll know me better if I let you.
Think about all of the things
that never make it onto a screen or a page—
I write a thousand poems a day.
A million different words to say,
a billion different things and ways
to say it.
I can sit and create or wait and rot.
I'm all I've got— the same as you.
Well, that's the way I see it.
Join it or beat it, lose it or keep it,
read it and weep it— and try to keep up!
I haven't got all day,
only all the time in the world,
assuming that I don't die this very second.
Amazing that we all assume we cannot
die at any second— remember?
You aren't entitled to this life,
you're only welcome to play:
what do you say?
1/4/2021
I don't have or need a gimmick.
That feels good to finally say.
I don't have or need a gimmick
because this is not false advertisement.
This is not a wrestling match;
this is not a Mexican stand off;
this is not a fire drill;
this is not a game of checkers;
this is not window shopping;
this is not a homework assignment;
this is not a county fair;
this is not a candy shop;
this is not a science experiment;
this is not a relay race;
this is not a
Performance.
I don't have or need a gimmick
because I'm bold enough to be.
I'm not what I do or say or write or feel or think or know or act— I'm me.
I don't have or need a gimmick anymore
because I am not for sale.
I never was.
I'm not for sale: I'm free! I'm me!
1/5/2021
So you've done something bad. Wrong.
Something that you swore you'd never do.
And it hurts you so so bad.
Oh my God, it hurts so bad.
How could I do this?
Why did I do this?
I did this— me.
Breaking the promises you make with
your self is always what hurts the most.
That wasn't you— it was your ghost.
It's better to forget her,
to forgive her to get better.
She'll try her best to haunt you—
don't you let her.
I love you anyway.
I love you any way that you are.
That's what it is, what it means,
what it takes.
I don't love you,
the person that you've been.
I love who you're becoming.
Always running, but at least it's away.
A pity if we stay the same.
It hurts to change; I know him well.
I'm preaching as the choir sings:
So you did a bad thing.
1/5/2021
I don't need for anything to be true;
it already is.
Whatever is true is already so,
no matter what I do or don't know.
No matter, it just doesn't have any.
No matter, it doesn't have any of itself.
Self-help: create.
Make, take shape.
Wish yourself well by wishing well;
throw pennies-for-thoughts right in.
Let me begin:
I am alone.
The story unfolds;
it unfolds from itself.
The story is itself.
It is the word that we cannot hear
along with everything else.
"Else", too: other than.
I'm making myself here a dictionary,
slowly but surely tying every last word to "itself".
Slowly but surely— can that really be true?
You sweet silly fool; it already is.
1/5/2021
I can't believe that I'll get even older.
Wiser, learn lessons more
painful than these.
What on Earth could they be?
What could time have in store for me?
I've no choice but to find out.
I've no chance but right here and now.
I don't have anything;
nothing belongs to me.
I do not belong here; I have no belongings.
Pick a favorite color— why not?
You're all that you've got,
and you don't even know what that is.
Who that means.
That it means any certain thing at all.
(Yes, I really always do end up here.
That's why I can't imagine
getting any older, going any further.)
What could my timeline possibly
shape to offer once it's
etched a little farther?
All of this myself?
And everyone dies around me—
but not with me?
Scary stuff. It's a good thing
I'm so young.
1/5/2021
I don't believe in reason anymore.
As in, I don't believe that the reason for anything happening is any more profound than any one cause-and-effect relationship can be.
It's a hard thing to let go of,
but I was born to do it.
I don't believe in fate anymore.
That is, it doesn't make a difference
if there is fate or there isn't;
I'm still here in this moment,
and from where I'm being, it seems that
I am in control of fate and not
fate in control of me.
I don't believe in coincidences anymore.
I believe that things can happen alongside each other— they coincide, but this does not betray coincidence.
It all comes back to interpretation.
Funny how that works.
(Who do you work for?)
I am no longer tethered to believing:
I am tethered to living, to breathing.
1/5/2021
My sister has a voice far more beautiful than mine, yet somehow I am the one who gets labeled "the singer".
Beautiful mindless self-soothing;
her singing teaches me to breathe.
It isn't calculated or analyzed,
never strategized or mechanized:
her notes come easier than her words do.
It's a certain kind of innocence that only
non-musicians have, the kind that appreciates her own heritage instead of undermining her future. Singing that demands the present moment, brings it to your attention. She hums herself tunes while doing chores and somehow it helps me to love her more; it makes me so happy to hear that no matter what pain or what fear she has seen or is likely to see, there is music in her lungs. My sister likes to listen to the radio. She likes to laugh and sing whenever she can, spend time with her friends, and sometimes I am lucky enough to be one of them. (No one can tell our voices apart on the phone—so in a way, I guess that we're both called
"the singer".)
1/6/2021
Oh my goodness, I cry at the
drop of a hat now. It's a pretty big change for someone who used to be so stoic:
I went literal years without crying.
Now it seems that I get overwhelmed by everything— and I couldn't be happier.
How many times in your life have you wept for joy? I do it all the time. The emotion holds me hostage when I'm listening to my favorite songs or talking to a cherished friend or any time I think about how thankful I am to be right where I'm at, wherever I'm at— I cry at the drop of a hat. It took a long while for me to listen to what my body was telling me, to follow through on my emotions: I had gotten to be so good at stifling. And even then, once I began to truly feel and heal, at first I found the whole thing to be an annoying ordeal. Thankfully, now I find myself somewhere on the other side of all that suffering and buffering, and with nothing left to hide:
I cry all the time. I'm sure that before too long, these new emotions of mine will sort and level themselves out. For now, I cry at everything, and I know what life's about.
1/6/2021
My fingers are calloused
from an instrument I barely even
know how to play. I crook my head at funny angles when I sing;
it makes my neck sore the next morning.
My lungs can barely keep up with me anymore; I've got to quit smoking.
I've got a few decades' worth of shouting,
screaming, singing still left in me:
I've got to make sure that my body
can still rise to the occasion.
I never run anymore. The last time I did,
it was to beat my old girlfriend in a
spur-of-the-moment race, because she's a runner, and I just had to prove that my mind could be stronger than her matter.
I still don't know how or why I did it. You ever heard about how sometimes, when you're incredibly anxious or riddled with adrenaline, how your body is able to conjure up inhuman levels of strength?
I've had enough of those moments to qualify me for the Olympics.
To tally me up a superhero.
I don't know my own weakness;
I don't know my own strength.
1/6/2021
And then I get that feeling where my stomach drops like it does right before
the bad part in the movie.
I am the one in the movie.
I am being interpreted,
and something bad is about to happen.
Movie because I know it's true,
don't just think it— like how I know that a movie's about to turn sour.
I am just one tiny frame in the filmspool,
A flash-freeze.
Freeze!
It's supposed to be "fight, flight, or freeze", you idiots!
I know that I soon won't feel like I'm in the movie anymore. As I continue to
distract myself, I can already feel
the poles melting. The ice shrinking.
Freezerburnt. Burnout.
Out-and-about. About time!
Times up! Up to you!
You said it! It takes one to know one!
One of these days! Days are numbered!
And then I get that feeling where my stomach drops like it does right before
the bad part in a movie.
1/6/2021
I just tried to go back and re-read a poem
I had started earlier
to bring me comfort
and in an attempt to finish it,
but then I realized
it didn't exist yet.
It doesn't exist yet.
That's how this works, how I work.
Improvised home-comforts.
I already feel better.
Wait, no I don't. I do again.
Is this how it's going to be
for the rest of the time? How exciting.
I can't even tell if I'm being sarcastic—
how ridiculous is that?
How ridiculous is this?
Will you do me the kind favor of just
looking me in the eye and
agreeing with me?
Are you well enough to do that?
To acknowledge this with me right now?
Is anyone well enough to do that,
to do what I am asking of them, of myself?
It's completely in vain—
why do I find that comforting?
Why do I find my own atrocities comforting?
Well, because they're true.
And anyway, I'm comforted.
The poem now exists. Maybe I do, too.
1/6/2021
I think that something in my car must not be working; it says that there are two people in it who are both not wearing seatbelts. Two stowaways.
Maybe they're ghosts.
Maybe one is a guardian angel,
and the other is....
Well, anyway, it keeps interrupting the music, my car mistakably keeps on chiming discordantly in the middle of all the good parts. Stow-aways.
My yin and my yang.
(Inspiration truly is everywhere.)
I should get to bed soon.
Maybe I should try to make this rhyme,
although I know that poems don't have to.
Let me break it down for you:
My car is malfunctioning.
There are two other beings in here.
Do you get it?
Let me say it again:
There are two other beings in here.
We three. Just as good that something is filling up all this space, making up for all of this time I have lost.
What's my RPM?
1/7/2021
No matter what I do— nauseous.
Nauseous again, which might as well be saying that it happens all the time.
Always on the verge of something.
Dread that I don't need and yet still carry. What for?
Don't ask me: I'm just as scared
as you are, if not even more.
I can tap into the feeling, but it is not
all-consuming at the moment.
I am trying to anticipate my own undoing.
I'd rather just "undo"; is that allowed?
Apparently not, because I have to ask permission.
Indecision dreads precision, and I will always dread what I did not do—
no matter what I do.
Fear is bred from the future and the past.
One rapes the other, saves another.
And you're caught in the middle,
nauseous. You should've eaten some kinder words, something you could actually stomach for once.
1/7/2021
When you're at it as often as I am,
you've got to have some safety nets in place: "at least I have this, at lease I have that, at least I know this or think this or feel this; at least, at least, at least".
But every once in awhile, you accidentally make the safety net too big, and at least isn't enough, and you slip right through.
Tethered to nowhere, to no one,
to nothing.
I have seen outerspace many times
in this room, and it's not like
it reads on the postcards.
That is, until you inevitably remember that time never once let you out of his sight;
he tied his string around your waist the moment you were born: you can only go out for as long as you've been. So you count on time to give you something worth counting, and you tug on your red string of fate, and he reels you back in. And the universe fits back onto the postcard again, and your room takes back its nightly shape, and you begin to recalibrate your safety nets, and you ready to set out again in the morning.
1/7/2021
I told you so!
You're back in this dream again,
so it isn't too bad!
And there are people here who love you,
and you love them, too.
What's up with that?
Crazy how this works:
you love others and then others love you.
Worse things I could do—
this is all new to me.
So many things had to align,
like, a ridiculously incomprehensible
amount of things had to go perfectly
so that I could even be writing this down.
Get some perspective!
No, not all that wishy-washy bullshit—
the good stuff!
And get a grip, too, while you're at it.
I don't care if luck isn't real— I'm lucky.
Sometimes I just forget, see?
It's always true and sometimes I just forget it. So you woke up here again, in this place, with these rules.
(Shows you what I know!)
I told you so!
1/7/2021
Every moment adds a brush stroke to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
I know the outside world is happening;
I don't know what to make of it.
That's why I'm always hiding out
in here, which isn't even any less scary,
it's just my own fear.
Fear that I control because
I am the one inventing it.
I don't know what to make of this.
I know it's not right, and that's about it.
I don't know what else I can say:
I only know how to play off of my self.
I only know how to play this role here that
I wrote just for me; I don't do well with others' unpredictabilities.
It doesn't feel like art to me—
and that's because it isn't.
It's just life; they're not the same.
In here, I can pretend that one betrays the other, but the real word is aptly named,
and art only exists to make it more bearable. At least we all can recognize the sky in the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.
1/8/2021
So this is what it means to be happy:
to understand that nothing truly lasts,
no matter whether or not there's forever.
You go on as far as time can take you
and maybe then some, but this moment is gone. It's a word that I used to let
crucify me: have you ever remembered the word for "happy" when the feeling it referred to was nowhere to be found
within you? Just the word made my sobs
more profound; its empty syllables mocking me— Happy.
But now I can see that this is the true price of happy: you must also know
the lack thereof.
I used to be so afraid of certain words that I still would rather not say; it would help me to think of their names in the dictionary. Helpless like I was, drowning in seas of their own definitions like I am.
Please— explain them away!
Make them powerless-on-paper!
One never needs a reason to be happy!
1/8/2021
Everytime that I revisit a memory
I am altering the way that it behaves.
It doesn't take much:
the mind will follow blindly and confuse itself with dreams, imaginings.
The best way to ensure that a memory is preserved is to never think of it at all.
A time-capsule: now that I think of it,
I think I have one buried somewhere.
Odd little trinkets left behind by my ghost;
who's to say that it wasn't
ten minutes ago?
The paradox accounts for itself, corrects its incongruities by introducing infinity.
Allow me to introduce myself:
I am someone new.
My name?
My name is incomprehensible;
it changes every second.
Memory Lane is a dead end.
Not that I've never been known to reminisce; I just try not to linger too long
in the graveyard, for fear that
my ghosts will play tricks on me.
1/8/2021
I always feel like I am at a crossroads
anymore, an enduring fork in the road.
All of my past menageries are finally catching up with me;
I try to tell myself that this does not betray an ending. Not the ending, anyhow—
not here, not now.
Rather, it is always ushering in
a new beginning, threading the story through, memories weaving their way through the tapestry, the one I'll never see.
The fabric whose eyes will keep me warm and safe in my cold and dark grave.
The stitches whose motions will echo something lost until lost claims himself found again. The Lost-and-Found:
it's a place where I find myself often.
I'm at the crossroads of
Lost and Found right now.
Always have been, always will be.
(More than I can say for me.)
One more second, just one more second will float down like a feather or the straw who broke the camel's back and cause the whole damn thing to crash.
Inter-section. Crossroads.
1/9/2021
I am a life-like parody,
a parakeet who sings a stolen melody
for charity, pity for pity's sake
stealing for give-and-take
I'm wide awake inside this daydream
'till nightfall takes another stab at life
and separates the main stream
exactly how it sounds & seems—
I'm listening to Inner Visions
Row row row the boat like it's your final mission, search-and-destroy decisions,
My intuition must be busted because I can't trust it any more than you trust me—
See?
I'm coming at you live from
where life leaves me
Leads me down the rabbit hole
Watch me drown my thirsty soul
push and pull, push and pull
I can't control the ebb and flow
I microdose the antidote
The answer's got a knife to my throat:
"So you really wanna know?
Of course you don't!"
1/9/2021
If we were ruthless,
we would shoot sooner.
It's just life. Just death.
(I am taking about
the shooting scenes in movies.)
We can't even tell a story
that's devoid of compassion.
That's what it means to be human.
We delay the inevitable:
we live.
I forget how much solace can be found
in the things that people do.
The things that we create.
The stories we tell ourselves.
This is what it means to be human.
And I should know—
they tell me I am one.
This is corny.
I just meant to tell you I love you.
That's all I'm ever trying to do—
that is literally all I am ever trying to tell
any one of you.
I'm not afraid of loving others any more—
what's your excuse?
1/9/2021
Today was a good day— a good day.
Don't ask me why I repeat things;
don't ask me any questions.
You think I know what I'm knowing?
Say what I'm saying,
feel what I'm feeling,
do what I'm doing?
Yeah, that's right— you heard me.
I can say whatever I want—
can you?
I'm not afraid of your words, my words,
any words!
I'm afraid of everything else!
I can love you in one poem and hate you in the next: you know which is which!
You already know who I am!
I'm not even angry— you know that!
I'm testy; I had a good day so now I'm testy. Happiness makes me brave.
Bold. Daring.
I am not drowning— I'm floating!
And now's the time to test the waters!
Don't ask me questions— that's my job!
Today was a good day— a great day!
1/9/2021
It's so good to feel like others know me.
(I can tell because people
say mostly good things.)
Just like I hope to be,
just like I dreamed I'd be—
Mostly Good Things.
I haven't been the best of friends,
of daughters, of sons, of people.
You know what I mean?
I'm ashamed of who I used to be,
but I am Her no longer.
I know exactly who I want to be;
it's up to me to find her.
In the meantime, I am kinder.
I am gentler. I'm more loving.
The only adjective I ever want to be;
the only word that's worth me:
Loving.
I'm becoming into loving,
and there's noplace I'd rather be.
It's just good to feel like others know me;
you know what I mean?
1/9/2021
I'm letting my mind go blank so that my
head becomes a bobble head,
and there's that kind of song on
that makes you feel like you're in a movie.
Everything is bigger than it seems.
The whole universe just grew two inches,
takes up two more inches' worth of space
than it did yesterday.
Time, too: two inches longer.
My lifespan spans a little extra.
I will never experience death,
because death is not an experience.
I will never die— not to me.
And that makes me eternal.
It's moments like these that make time worth itself.
Of course, time is always worth itself,
but only in these specific times
but only in these specific times
am I able to view it correctly.
I couldn't be afraid if I tried.
Fear is a manifestation of what I do not know—
and since that is everything,
which is also nothing, there is nothing to fear.
There is absolutely no excuse to not be who you are or at least die trying.
1/10/2021
I don't know why I didn't realize this sooner,
but I belong wherever I am.
All of my life has delivered me here;
where else could I possibly belong?
I like so many others fell into a trap.
You know, the one where you think
there will suddenly be this moment
where you can breathe out a sigh of relief
as you think to yourself:
I've finally made it! This is where I belong.
You cannot belong anywhere that you aren’t;
you can only belong
where you are once you're already there.
And I have made it here;
I have made my whole life out to be here where I'm writing.
If you cannot find your paradise
inside the present moment,
you very well may never find it.
Nothing here belongs to you,
so this must mean that you belong.
Time belongs to itself,
and I belong within her.
1/11/2021
Not even the sky can save me now:
I cannot see his stars tonight.
Of all the things I'd hoped to write;
it seems this seat is taken.
No, not by me; I'm afraid you're mistaken.
I hope to be your alibi.
A friend: I'd like to be your friend.
And you can kill me anyway,
I'd like to be your friend.
Did you know that illusions are still illusions
even after you're aware of them?
Knowing Truth cannot accept it.
Knowing Truth, you can't escape it.
How time goes by!
What will be revealed to my eyes?
Don't just read to scan for clues:
the novel is the question!
You've got to understand the mechanism;
why am I telling you all this?
You should be telling me!
You're telling me!
You're not even running the race anyhow—
Not even the sky can save me now.
1/11/2021
It's a good strategy, I'll give you that.
But you've just got to batten the hatches.
Everyone is getting older,
right along with you.
Some of us even love you here;
I know I do.
When I was a kid,
everything was all happening.
Everything was backstory.
I didn't give a shit about history.
(Part of me still doesn't.)
I know I should.
I can't even tell my two genres apart:
which one is the fact
and which the fiction?
To entertain, to inform, to persuade:
what's the difference?
Don't make me read philosophy;
I can't even handle my own.
Couldnt even write it down.
It changes too much, and so do I.
But we are not the same— I think I know that much. This self then everything around; at least I know that much.
1/11/2021
I am an organization
of mismatched sentiments & ideals.
I am happening in tandem with myself.
Does that make any sense to you?
The ideal language is no language.
No need for translating;
everyone would just know.
Understand. These abstractions are
killing me by design.
Human nature by design;
I don't know whose.
I do— it's mine.
I me mine, wastes my time.
Don't waste yours:
I'm writing this down so that someone will see it as a warning.
A sign— don't waste anymore of your time like I have mine.
The curtain falls much
faster than you think.
Always remember the play;
remember us.
We are all the drama's chorus;
we are an organization
of mismatched sentiments & ideals.
1/11/2021
It never had to be this way,
it just was always going to.
What the fuck am I supposed to
make of that?
How do I trick myself into thinking my will is free
when it just so clearly isn't?
I didn't even choose to be born, for god's sake!
Why on Earth would that mean I could choose how I live?
Forget and forgive, forget and forgive.
That's what I'm always aiming for.
Gratitude gets me drunker than liquor,
fear twice as sore.
What to dream anymore!
I'll think something up; you can rest assured.
I hope you're sleeping soundly;
Lord knows somebody should.
I would if I could, and I can,
because some words are purely hypothetical.
Intuitive, like those monarch butterflies
who migrate through five generations
yet somehow always know their way back home.
I'll tell you a secret:
it's because their lives are always too scattered,
one of them always can transfer the knowledge.
1/11/2021
The afterlife is guaranteed—
you just might not be around for it.
Or you are and don't know it.
Or you are and can't show it.
Grandeur is a pipe-dream;
So You Want People To Tell Your Story.
Sorry, dear; I'm afraid they're all too busy telling their own.
Maybe they'll name something after you,
would that make you feel better?
In life that is— is that a comforting thought to you? To be remembered when you yourself are incapable of remembering?
Sounds a little invasive to me.
Don't make me out to be anyone once I'm dead & gone:
"was" is synonymous with "is no longer".
You don't have to conjugate me once I die;
I'll be just fine catching sleep six feet deep.
It's like I said:
the afterlife is guaranteed—
I just might not be around for it.
1/11/2021
Just because something makes sense
doesn't make it reasonable.
Anything becomes logical once you apply your own sense of logic to it.
Just because something makes sense does not mean that there was ever sense to be made from it; it just means that we made some up for it.
It's tempting to think that there's sense to be had and be made because of the way that our brains work.
So we labeled the coin to have sides— and now we think we've got duality.
Sloppy work!
Who do you think invented binary?
It sure as hell wasn't the computers!
We control the narrative too much, let it constrict the story.
I'm trying to make up for lost time, but it's too late for me, because you idiots had the bright idea of keeping track of it.
If you aren't willing to abandon your own code, you'll never be able to crack any other one. How's that for unreasonable?
1/12/2021
I'm going to write
until I've said every word in every succession;
I'm going to sing
until my lungs give out;
I'm going to live
at only my discretion;
I'm going to die
until there's nothing left to live about.
What else would I do it for?
All of this dying nonsense
can really screw with your head;
I think I'd rather just
live instead.
All of us are dying, sure,
but what are we living for?
If hell is real then we're all in it;
if that's the deal then what's one minute?
What's a lifetime of sin to a god who's infinite?
You think your god is infinitely good?
You don't even know what good means—
but wait, there's more!
I've got bad news:
If God is really infinite,
that means he's got sin, too.
Of course, that either means
our language or our patronage is shaky.
Check please!
1/12/2021
Do you have anything to say to me?
I feel like I'm the one who's doing all the talking.
Time always catches me praying to the Universe;
it feels like no one's watching.
And that's okay, I have decided,
but it makes for countless awkward pauses.
Everything is either dead or alive.
(I'm talking about death like it's only a word.)
Only an idiot's afraid of the dictionary.
My consciousness is curated by forces unseen,
by concrete things and by liquid dreams.
Some things are exactly as they seem—
and therein lies the problem.
One solution: see a need, fill a need.
Help others solve them.
Hurt people don't hurt people—
only cowards do that.
Anger is nothing more than a mistaken identity;
it doesn't belong to you, friend.
(When the universe won't talk back,
I like to pray and play pretend.)
1/12/2021
How absolutely overwhelming,
how perfectly awe-inspiring is
the infinity in every thing,
the Russian doll's reincarnation?
I want a million PhD's!
I'm not even sure which is the better strategy: should I gut one small fish in the infinite sea, or cast a wider net sprawling?
Wild, isn't it?
Colonization is our time's biggest illusion, our biggest threat: there's so much to be discovered yet.
Pores on the face of God,
or whatever killed him.
What could be next?
If we keep going at this rate,
who's to say we'll win the bet?
Who will speak for history's deserters,
heaven's typographers?
Surely I cannot be bothered to do it, I'm far too busy: I've got this poem I'm writing right down, and this song I'm working on now, and this high to make its way down...
1/12/2021
We don't even really have a word that truly captures infinity,
I'm just now realizing.
Infinity: the state of being infinite.
In-finite. Un-ending.
We can only describe it
by reversing what it is not.
Even forever begs the question
"How long?"
So we don't understand infinity,
but we knew that already.
I'd say a good step one would be to get our story straight:
what does it mean to be finite,
and how can we aim to
make friends with its opposite?
I suppose it matters less that things are finite and more that we can add "in" before it, act like that means something.
Betrays something, sure, but meaning?
Well, "forever" comes close.
Maybe just "ever"; "for" is just useless background information.
How long can I keep word-playing?
For Ever!
1/12/2021
No one is the villain:
today I made a friend out of someone who I'm supposed to think of as an enemy.
Do you know how I did it?
I listened to them;
I listened in order to understand,
and I never once thought of them as
"the enemy".
Enemies don't exist;
they just sell ad campaigns.
Mostly I found that they were tired.
Tired just like I had been,
scared of giving in.
Lord, I understand the hesitation.
It's comfortable letting lies sink in.
Hatred is a snake biting its own tail,
helpless as the serpent who is forced to crawl on his belly for all of his days.
Here, let me give you a hand;
let me show you that there are things worth standing for;
I want to see you happy.
I'm not asking you to trust me,
I'm asking you to forsake your self
as you have others— no one is the villain.
1/13/2021
I have a very difficult time taking myself seriously. Most of the time, I treat myself just like a toddler: "What do you need? Something to eat, a nap, a hug? You wanna sit and write another poem; you wanna go and play piano for a little while, maybe call a friend or go driving or talk to yourself about the things that interest you most in the world? Don't cry— don't cry. We can play silly games!" Other times, I treat myself like I'm a jester: "Act like you're in on the joke! No one needs to know! Everything is fun and games:
I don't know what I'm saying!
I'm Andy Kaufman— Andy Kaufman!"
Sometimes I've even been known to treat myself just like a house pet: "You need me more than I need you— so don't you get too comfortable. I never wanted you, anyways, and I don't take kindly to pests."
At any rate, I suppose I must be all of these things, or none of them— who really even cares at this point? The point is,
I hardly ever meet my own eyes anymore.
(Maybe I really am Andy Kaufman.)
1/13/2021
My favorite part of creating things is returning to them:
when I'm writing a song,
I unwrap it all over again
the next morning like Christmas.
It's always good to see old friends!
My music remembers me more than I could ever hope to return the favor.
It's like looking into the eyes of an animal: infinitely untranslatable
yet somehow mutually misunderstanding.
I'm listening to yesterday's reality,
yesterday's melody line
(which sounds much different than mine).
Each new day lived adds a new note to the solo— completely improvised!
Every new work of art I create then adds itself to my working-title (it's a long one).
This is who I am.
This is my new tune I'm singing, my new poem I'm bringing, my new friend I'm making, my new script I'm breaking.
Did you know that my honest-to-god first words on this Earth were "I love you"?
With any luck, they'll be my last ones, too;
one day I'd love to finally come full-circle.
1/14/2021
When you think of a waveform,
Do you think of the relationship
between peak and trough,
or do you think about the motion?
(Ah, so she can tell two infinities apart from each other, at least!)
Does anyone else understand
that slow and creeping feeling of paradise,
how it oozes and leaks like a pale summer day,
forever's hollowness
always zooming out and out
even after the credits have rolled?
I feel it when I watch certain movies sometimes;
certain songs that echo something holy,
a faint static cackling on the radiowaves,
laughing all the way to the bank,
all the way to the chorus,
all the way to the grave.
“All the way to the grave”?
What the fuck is a grave?
I've never even seen one—
not in any ways that matter!
The padding in the coffin
is just about as irrelevant
as the padding right below it:
as the very soil, the Earth from whom
we humans brave Our Name.
1/15/2021
"The thought was only true in the moment
that it was a thought."
I read that sentence
in what would become my favorite book,
in seventh grade.
It is one of the most powerful
things I have read.
Everything is true until it isn't.
I'm so tired of back-talking.
Double-thinking.
If you don't know the word for double-thinking,
you'd never know you were doing it.
Sleeping Beauty: why did a finger prick seem to do the trick?
Well, it's because there is nothing to get;
it just isn't necessary to pin down the narrative.
Control doesn't always feel good like you think it does.
Oh, I get it. I am all of these atoms.
They are filtering themselves through me;
they are all waiting in line
like I'm some kind of roller coaster.
I wonder if they know
that some of them won’t make it on the ride in time;
I wonder if any of them know
they're being used to make this thought,
to be true.
1/15/2021
I wrote a poem to myself last night about all the different ways that
people scream on roller coasters,
except I didn't have the chance to write it down. I wish that I would have; I really liked the way it circled back at the end.
Everything just clicked: I went on two or three tangents about love and loss,
this and that, and then I noticed that whatever I was talking about was exactly the same as all the different ways that people scream on roller coasters.
And I knew that as I was thinking it, I would never remember it well enough to write back down later; I knew that those thoughts and those words were already becoming lost on me. I imagined them floating up to eternity like a balloon out of sight but not out of mind. Can't help but think to yourself, myself: It's gotta be out there somewhere. I can imagine it still floating up, up, up— so it's gotta be out there somewhere. How many times have I held Truth in my hands only to toss it aside when I could no longer make out its
shape in the sky?
1/15/2021
You think you know what the wind feels like, but you can't even hold it in your hands. Did it ever occur to you that nothing is stagnant? It's only a particle once you press "pause", baby—
you can't find a lost cause.
How many different ways can I say the same thing? Aren't we two in for a treat?
An old wedding ring, a bitter defeat.
Rings always remind me that things are just atoms for awhile, taking shape and then leaving them, trading motion for style. Be, be, be!
I don't exist anymore; this is what that means. I don't exist because this "I" is no longer Me! Even as I write these words the person writing them ceases to be!
It is in this way that living and dying are the same: you can never be who you were again, and you can never be who you
will be, you only ever are who you are.
You think you know what Life feels like,
but you can't even hold it in your hands!
Here— take mine instead.
1/15/2021
Each second I spend not telling the people in my life about how much I love them is
a second I'll never get back.
I am either in love or in vain—
and I am tired of being in vain!
Of being vain, for that matter!
I'd rather just be kind, I've decided;
I'd rather just love you.
(It's a good thing I already do.)
Not just because it makes me happy,
but because it is the only thing
there is left to do.
Love is just as intangible as fear
yet somehow twice its size.
Eyes on the prize!
Not a second to waste!
I love you, damn it!
What else is there to say?
1/16/2021
Wow, these moments all feel so
different from each other.
All of them belong on a canvas.
God, the paint is so so heavy.
Thick and wet like blood.
Blood isn't always dirty imagery—
it also keeps you alive.
Blood runs through your veins:
yes, yours!
The blood is in your very own body;
you know it's there but cannot see it;
it can be any color you want!
You name it!
Go on, please— name it!
The church bells are tolling— name it!
Which do you think is scarier:
the tolling or the silence in between?
Science or the teeth?
It is finding the right words to say to you.
Really, it is, as we speak.
A mouth is slowly forming;
its numbers are defining.
It's second-hand discipleship ripening;
I can't even translate my self.
1/16/2021
I am not my thoughts:
so does that then mean
I am the one creating them?
There's supposed to be a difference;
it must be like how I create my art,
make it out to be me no longer,
sever it from my self like
dead hair from my head.
Me No Longer;
Me no longer than I can stand it.
I am not my thoughts,
but they belong to Me.
Don't they?
Where else would they be coming from?
It's all this "my" business that's messing me up: ownership is a lonely hand to hold.
A fire to keep me cold.
So you lost a bit of ground in tug-of-war!
I am not my thoughts;
they don't control me. Of course,
I can't always control them, either,
so I guess we'll just call it a draw.
1/16/2021
I think that I make art in order to
purge my self from me,
to separate my oil from my water,
to run my mind through the ringer,
to love the child I never got to be,
to portray my self-betrayal,
to betray my self-portrayal,
to tell my self what I've been saying,
to save my self the trouble,
to help my eyes take shape,
to out the in,
to end where I begin.
The thing about never
expanding your ring is that the cycle
runs the risk of remembering itself,
of dreading its own repetition.
I think that art helps make the circle
out to be so big that you don't even
realize you're drawing one.
(I am trying to say that
art seems to slow this thing down)
1/16/2021
I can feel the syntax beginning its own unwinding.
Not unraveling, unwinding—
undoing what was done,
undoing its own intention.
It is deliberate:
your breath out is just as important
as the next breath in.
Your lungs can only take so much.
Same for your eyes, the mind.
It has to soon unwind.
No one wicker basket can
hold all these eggs;
no one knows if they even came first.
I can imagine any possibility;
that does not make them true.
What would? Proof?
I was born into a word that supposedly
has all the proof I will ever need—
it's staring me in the face right now;
it is forcing itself onto me, into me,
into my being.
It is supposed to be in this body I'm using,
and out there in this world it is seeing.
I think that Life is unwinding itself through me.
1/16/2021
One of the things I am most excited to have is a home.
A real one, where I can return and feel peace, where I can rest my eyes and not worry about what they might not see.
I'm just so tired of waking up on other people's couches; I want to go home.
I grew up in the army;
I can sleep anywhere.
Only, I wasn't ever really sleeping.
Most of the time,
my eyes were closed, and I was tense.
Tense like the future;
weakness never made much sense.
I got a lot of sense knocked
in to and out of me those days,
but it's never too late to reclaim innocence, to breathe out, to forgive,
to relax.
No one ever told me that I could just relax,
so I always held my self
at someone else's attention.
I've got my own attention now.
Home sweet home!
1/17/2021
I can hear my tone changing
with each new song,
each new poem that I write.
With every word that I say:
the narrative is shifting.
I'm catching up with my self.
I am replacing this fear that I've carried for so long with this love,
and it's changing my tone,
changing my tune.
I don't sing because I'm afraid of
silence anymore; I sing to add to it!
I know that I never make sense—
it's by design; it makes me happy!
I'd rather be happy than logical—
wouldn't you?
I'd rather sing because I want to,
not because I have to.
The same goes for living:
I don't want to have to live,
I have to want to live— and I want to!
I want to write songs for the rest of my life;
changing my tone is the only thing that I ever want to be doing and do!
1/18/2021
I wonder how much time it will take
for time to take me out of this mindset.
I can't in good conscience hate my self for feeling hatred.
"Two wrongs don't make a right—
but three lefts do."
That's what my dad used to always say, anyways.
(A wonder that I bring him up.)
I am not who anyone makes me out to be,
not even when it comes to me.
And if I don't accept, recognize
the parts of me I do not like,
I'll never change them for the better.
It's a difficult lesson to learn,
one I am always re-learning.
There is nothing I can do about most things
that occur to me, about the situations
I find myself in, but this does not
make me out to be helpless.
I am only helpless when I refuse to
help myself.
My mind is not "set", I am never "set";
I have no mindset.
Time will always be changing my mind.
1/18/2021
Believe it or not, most of the time,
the pendulum's swing is of no concern to me.
It's like the ringing in my ears:
I usually just ignore it,
drown it out with something else.
I generally don't pass the time, it passes me.
Do you reckon that's good or bad?
My gut instinct is not a good one.
Oh, what to do with each second!
Ears ringing or a car accident—
it all just happens so fast!
Should I waste away my time,
or should I try to make it last?
What even is the difference?
If time passes the same way for all of it,
why can one minute feel so slow and the next is already in the past?
Can my brain do all that?
Time is the biggest thing we know (of),
and you're telling me I can change
how it goes just by knowing it goes?
How is it going? What is on-going?
Fasting or slow? Ally or foe?
Nobody knows!
1/18/2021
I'm not sure how or where I'll sleep tonight,
but that's not even anything out of the ordinary for me.
I don't like to belong for too long.
Never have, hope to one day.
No, not belong— I hope to want to have a place to stay one day.
It seems that a stationary life must be the smartest option: I must just not be evolved enough to understand its hidden charms.
I am a Neanderthal, a hunter-gatherer.
My worldview shouldn't contribute to the genome, shouldn't add to the confusion.
Everything is temporary:
why should my home be any different?
It seems much more dangerous to garner a false sense of home-security;
I know that I could be robbed
at any moment.
They call it a "lazy river" for a reason,
relax. Nobody belongs where they are, remember? Just try to take things one step at a time, one day at a time.
All you need to do right now is figure out how and where you are going to
sleep tonight.
1/18/2021
I like to play this game with myself sometimes
when a moment occurs,
and I think to myself:
After I die,
I am going to come right back to this very second,
frozen in time,
and I'm going to paint it.
I couldn't really tell you much else:
when it started, what that says about me,
why I feel so strongly about it.
Feels just like deja vu:
I know you.
I want to take my life-instruments
and show what life can do,
show you what it meant to me and how it felt to do.
Maybe I'll take all of these paintings
and I'll hang them in my room,
a little corner in my mind where true is true,
and I love you.
I really do. I don't know much else,
else you might love me, too.
I think I'm becoming a me who's worth loving.
Something I once thought to be sacrilegious:
I used to worship my misery,
now I just make paintings of the radio towers
in the afterlife.
1/18/2021
There is no such thing as "if", only
"when", but don't ignore when's opposite.
If you're anything like me,
when's opposite is your saving grace:
yes, everything happens eventually,
but who's to say it won't be the good part?
You have no idea where you're at on the wavelength;
just say you're on the up-and-up.
Who is that hurting?
You are time's point-of-view:
you be good to him,
and he'll be good to you.
I'd like to thank my mom and dad
for everything they did and didn't do,
because it lead me here to me, to this you.
I did not choose this life,
but don't forget when's opposite:
this life did not choose you.
I am choosing to love me and you,
and this love is what's seeing me through.
I think I'd like to be your friend;
do you think you would like that, too?
If— no, when — whenever you have time for me,
I'd like to have some time for you.
1/18/2021
Man, control is one hell of an illusion.
Day-dreams are one hell of an institution.
I think I've got a hold on my record:
I can't see anything beyond
the light that reaches my eyes.
Does that make darkness a disguise?
I think that this life is the respise;
I think I'll beat the game whenever
I say so, you know?
I used to think that miracles meant less because they're always so arbitrary;
I forget about the word "special" too often. Precious, valuable.
I need to re-read the thesaurus,
re-imagine my parameters every once in awhile, you know what I'm saying?
(That would make one of us.)
I just want to stop out-sourcing and start re-sourcing. I've got all the source material I could ever dream of in here.
Surrendering is winning, got it?
There's, losing, there's winning, and then there's playing, the act of participating in the game. I control the illusion.
1/19/2021
"It's not that I think I have something to say, it's that something has to be able to say me."
That was the last thing I remember thinking last night before falling asleep.
I have absolutely no idea how that thought managed to tough out my subconscious 'till morning.
I have no idea how my own brain works,
how it operates.
How much of this is auto-generated?
How much is pre-programmed spontaneity?
So much for past-life continuity!
The past makes up who I am to be, but the present moment makes me new.
Who knew?
I can think whatever I want to!
I can wake up with the sun and send a postcard to the moon!
I can have something to say and something has to say me too—
I can have my cake and eat it, too!
1/19/2021
Did you know that real love doesn't expire?
This is because there is nothing more corrosive than it; it eats away at everything, every little doubt and fear and insecurity just like mold.
It doesn't give up—
just like I'll never give up on you.
I still love people who hate me for all the wrong reasons, love people who hate me for very good reasons;
I love people for no reason!
Because once you have a reason other than love itself, the love becomes conditional. Save yourself the trouble and don't set your self up for disappointment: you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by loving people for free,
for love's own sake! True love is awake!
It isn't tied down by fairytales of the conditional— it's automatic, like a computer: the time to act is now!
Don't waste your time deciding who or how to love, just do it!
Quick— before your love outlives you!
1/19/2021
Can you tell the difference?
You know what I'm talking about.
Between what I'm talking and what I'm about, between the things that I say and the things that I mean.
(The same goes for you, mind you!)
What is everyone getting at?
Why are there no true sides of the coin?
We respect philosophy and its pursuits;
we appreciate geometry;
we value art;
we strive for science—
but try to throw them all together, and the next thing you know, people are calling you crazy!
I already know that!
What do you know, and
why can't you say it to me?
How can I interpret more than I can understand; let alone articulate!
How can my understanding be contingent upon that which cannot be expressed?
How does an expression not equal its origin; why can I not tell the difference?
1/19/2021
I'm sorry; I think we got off
on the wrong foot:
I am me.
And me again, and me again.
It is so difficult to introduce myself anymore; I am changing too quickly.
Am I supposed to feel like
I've lived this long?
You have no way of telling me, I know.
I know everything about you:
because it's always through this me, see,
and I can't know you better than I does.
Someone, anyone who's not me:
why aren't you really?
I don't want to be this way;
but I already am no longer.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder,
that's for damn sure.
But what else, and what more?
I don't know what we're here for—
and neither do you.
Does that come off as rude?
Do you know more than I do?
How should I know?
Okay, fine. Round two:
1/20/2021
There are so many thoughts in between each of these sentences; I think that what makes the poetry is which ones I decide to write down. It's a story with every other piece missing: why don't I just say it all?
Well, because that's not how this works.
Yeah, you're talking to yourself, and yeah it's more or less just like how you think most of the time, but the poetry's in what you don't say.
You have to speak to give life to the pauses, the rhetoric of the punctuation, of whatever I left out which still resides within some where and how. What about now?
Better luck next time.
There won't be a "next time";
only ever this one.
Art has a funny way of nagging you,
of letting you know which parts of you are boss, which parts of you are prominent, which ones will take you over if you let them, and which ones will make it through to the next time around.
Which lost words will make it to the
next poem found?
1/20/2021
What do you think makes a genius a genius? Well, they can see things that others don't see.
At what point does that make them crazy?
Well, I suppose at the point where you can no longer convince others to participate in your reality.
Not that I would know—
god, not that I would know.
I thing or two about insanity, that I do know, but rest assured that you will find
no genius here.
It's a rectangles-and-squares relationship: every genius is crazy, but not all crazy people are genius.
I just find that interesting, is all.
The fact of the matter is, both groups of people are fundamentally perceiving reality in a way that is "other".
It seems to me that when that way is beneficial in some manner, it can make a genius out of a madman— and vice versa, well, you've got yourself a mountain out of a molehill. Isn't that insane?
1/20/2021
I'm holding my life up to a funhouse mirror, that's what I'm doing.
Please don't ask me what the funhouse mirror represents,
or what it shows me in return:
for one thing, I don't know.
For another, I am tired of
representing everything;
I can't even represent myself accurately.
I wish it were enough to just be me,
believe me.
But apparently that just isn't the
display-case.
The moment I begin to arrange myself,
I have lost my permutation.
It isn't me; it's me if X Y Z.
It's my signature, but not my handwriting.
My hands are too shaky.
Warbled like a funhouse mirror.
If I can't even see my self correctly:
how the hell are you supposed to?
All my life I came and went
and never left the circus tent.
1/20/2021
I went outside to see what the commotion was all about, and there was a giant pixelated screen up in the sky.
Some sort of intergalactic nonsense had been waking up all the neighbors.
Everyone appeared to understand this omen perfectly somehow;
we all reacted in horrified unison.
I had that terrible feeling I get sometimes, like that this was the end of the world.
Somehow, even though this time it probably was the actual end of the world, it didn't feel any more true
than it usually does.
Funny.
I wondered if I was dreaming. I wasn't.
Good Lord, I wasn't dreaming.
It's scarier to me now than it was to me then, when I actually was inside the world-ending dream. I'm not very fond of the way that my mind goes sour, folds in on itself.
I really don't have any control.
Sweet dreams, please; I would like to be able to know when I'm dreaming.
1/20/2021
You know how when it's sunny and you close your eyes, you can almost
imagine the warmth of the sun,
no matter how cold it actually is?
I think that's what hope is like.
Not the wishy-washy kind of hope that forsakes you by the outcome,
the real deal:
the sun is dependable;
the turn of the Earth is dependable;
it will always be spring again.
One day you'll feel the rush of gravity's pull again; you are on the boring part of the merry-go-round.
Merry.
I wish we used that word more.
It has such an innocence to it, such a charming little postcard from the past:
be merry; the sun is still shining.
I can already feel the flowers blooming.
Just close your eyes; the sun is always so warm when you close your eyes.
That has to be a good thing.
1/20/2021
It's never going to end now, get it?
You're in this.
I will always meet you back here;
I will always know where to find you.
I'm personifying something in me;
what is it?
Nothing that evil could ever be a "who".
I didn't plant this seed in me;
I never asked to know I don't know.
I can't fit it all back in the can.
I can forget I spilled anything,
if not only for a day or two,
but it still exists.
Nothing is still spilling.
Everything's dissolving, dispersing.
Aging itself away.
Away out there and away from me.
It scares me to think that I know what I'm saying; how are you all not terrified of certainty? I should like to be petrified
just like stone, gathering moss
in the statue garden.
A happy ending.
1/20/2021
That didn't make any sense!
(Yeah, but it did. It just doesn't anymore.)
What the hell does that mean?
That's just it, it already doesn't:
it doesn't mean anything,
it just meant something.
It's all just so bright;
I can't look away.
So I don't. My god, we can all be so blinded. It's kindness— just kindness.
Plain and simple, open-minded.
Blind sided with me; he told me so.
How many times a day do you think that you say something wholly dependent upon this notion that something is True?
What does that say about you?
I'm asking you:
which destiny?
Is death your happy place or hideaway?
Stained glass was always
framed so beautifully.
This is the part that I like:
translating can be so beautiful to partake in, the making of the sense.
1/20/2021
Sometimes big paradoxes are comprised of little itty bitty ones,
like pearls on a necklace.
Another charm for the bracelet,
Arts-and-witchcrafts.
Some people call it "magic";
some people simply just don't
have a word for it in their vocabularies.
Those people confuse me,
make fools out of me.
You don't even have a runner-up?
An escape route in case things go awry and you remember you can die?
That you can and you will?
I'm not trying to preach fear, believe me.
You have no real reason to, but do it anyway, because I said so.
Oh, now I get it.
The little paradoxes are little itty bitty "because I said so" 's, aren't they?
The proof is in the pudding;
the spell is in the spelling.
Once you put it down on paper,
the paper can't mean anything different.
1/20/2021
I do not see a reason why I shouldn't be honest.
Some lies are unavoidable, sure:
the ones you don't even
realize you're telling.
But aside from that,
the ways I feel, the ways I don't,
all are just as well and free to be themselves in me from now on.
I can help it— what I can't help is what I can't see. Whomever in me I refuse to acknowledge; don't ignore your enemy.
Keep them closer, shrink them down to your size. Mind-sized. Hindsight.
And you, too— I do not want to lie to you.
It wastes my time, and his and hers and yours. I just got to be so tired of worrying about you all. I can't afford it anymore—
I've got a pretty strict itenerary:
Wake up. (Something I can't even do on my own.) Be kind, and don't get behind.
Take time for yourself when you need it.
Teach yourself a lesson; don't you dare try to heed it. Repeat it.
1/20/2021
I never expected your sympathy;
I am not doomed to haunt the
greeting card aisles.
I'm a real person,
realer than you give me credit for.
You think I can't take care of myself?
Who do you think has been
babysitting me all this time?
I'm the only one who ever knew that child.
Why don't you feel sorry for her instead—
or better yet, why don't you feel sorry for the child you left behind?
Don't waste my time.
You think I want sympathy?
I want space to work. I want a library card.
The library is burning,
but I can't put this book down.
It tells me whatever I want to hear—
that's why I feel sorry for you!
And why you feel sorry for me!
You feel more fortunate, you've got a case of charity, you're glad you're not me, lucky! You cannot make me out to be your equal: this is why you feel sorry for me.
1/20/2021
Why is it so easy to forget what I do it for?
I look at you and it all seems so simple.
"Why am I here?"
Where else would I rather be?
I love you, see— that's what makes it so easy. I get to be the one who watches you tilt your head and furrow your brow;
I get to be the one who watches you
grow and change and make mistakes.
I don't need another take:
this moment is perfect.
You feel safe enough around me to
forget that I'm even here;
I can't imagine a greater compliment.
I'm just honored to be a part of this,
a part of this memory that is currently making its way to the factory.
Thanks for looking after me.
Thanks for being there for me then
and here with me now;
you'll never know how much it means to me, yet somehow I know that you do.
I do it for me, and for you, too.
I do.
1/21/2021
Good plastic, good plastic.
Good plastic like a Barbie doll house.
A dream house with an elevator inside.
It takes you up and it's pretty,
the stuff of daydreams.
When I was a child, we tied a jump rope in between two swings, and the jump rope swept my feet out from me and I got
the wind knocked out of me.
I wouldn't wish that feeling on anybody:
writhing around in the dirt like a fish out of water; I couldn't breathe.
Many childhood moments like these stick out to me now: it was recess in preschool, and I was running on the pavement, letting momentum do my work for me.
When all of the sudden, I realized
I'm going to fall. But I knew it was coming, so I didn't cry, just sat with the sting in my bloodied knees for a moment before calmly getting up to ask my teacher for a bandaid or two. What a surreal thing for a child to do; what a child-like vacuum!
The stuff of legends! Plastic for the toys!
1/21/2021
Time never did make much sense here.
I think time is a place where you get to hold a mirror up to yourself, where you get to see the nature in you, feel the sun and the soil fertilizing your bones.
I think time is a place where we can all get together and throw ourselves a picnic,
cute little atoms arranged on a checkered blanket and silver platter, man-made trinkets working like a clock works.
I think time is a place where you celebrate with all of your family and friends. And the people who love you come and go, and the laughter will hold true forever.
I think that time is a place where the stars can finally have a good home, where their names are highly exalted, where I can wear them just like a crown on my head.
I think time is a place where the lonely souls go, the ones who wanted the double-edged sword and the grit of reward; the ones who imagined the sense and then made it, who found the right word and then said it—
some people just forget it.
1/21/2021
I know I keep on saying this,
but I think I get it now:
I'm a self-proclaimed hero
with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What fun!
The main objective?
Well, I can't tell you that;
if you say your wish out loud,
it'll never come true, silly!
Just know that I'm the good guy.
Oh my god, I would help anyone.
This is the part of the story where you realize who's who:
I am me and you are you.
Now, let's get into character foils!
What do you need from me that
you don't have in you?
Allow me to introduce the two:
Hi, I'm on your side, and this is
whoever you need for me to be.
I know who I am;
do you reckon that I'm who you know?
That'll be one hell of a day to save
—and I should know— I'm the hero!
1/21/2021
I bet God is an atheist.
How does that work?
Well, it's like most things:
don't think about it too much,
next thing you know,
it makes perfect sense, just like science.
I remember thinking as a child:
Why doesn't the world work the way I think it does, the way it appears to be working, the way that I do?
Silly girl, you thought that Science was predictable like you.
Whatever we're all after is obviously nothing too predictable,
else we'd know it already.
Else we'd have no need for fiction,
for extrapolation, inference, reference,
experimentation.
"Maybe this will work!"
We just don't know!
Maybe thinking we know
(or that there is something to know)
is what got us all into this mess
in the first place.
That's why I think God is an atheist.
1/21/2021
When you think of everything as meaningless,
then everything makes sense,
because you know that there isn't any.
(I want to ask if that makes sense,
but then I'd prove myself quite the contrary.)All of human knowledge
makes up our obituary.
Do you think that we call it "judgment day" because only then do we finally relinquish our most prized possessions: perceptions?
We are no longer the judge,
the court reporters,
the intended audience.
Do you believe there is intent, true intent?
Do you believe in sense, real sense?
That maybe all of this is leading us to something, to somewhere that we've never been?
Ah, but somebody had to first invent the arrow who points before it could ever hope to make any. So I'm right back
where I started: Nothing makes sense.
1/22/2021
I admire the authors because they have to stare infinity in the face and whittle it down over and over again, carving out characters and plot lines from an
ever-rolling stone, dizzying David.
I admire the artists because they have to outbid Infinity's teeth in the canvas, let it siphon the blood and the life from their veins so the color
can bleed right into the paint.
I admire the blood-letters because they understand that all there is to do is give.
They peer into Infinity's gaping mouth and they shout with all of the
love they can muster:
"You can't fire me— I quit!
You'll never take me— I'll give!"
I admire the givers because they know that Infinity is relentless and will always outrun them. So they stop running, and they start inventing mazes to hide in; they create. I admire the creators because they have the impossible task of one-upping Infinity, look him right dead in the eyes and dare to dream "what if?"
1/22/2021
What amazes me most about humans is how easily it is to go from strangers to friends to loved ones.
I think that friendship is the most
beautiful thing in the world.
No strings attatched;
I am here because I want to be here.
I want to spend my time with you,
the most precious resource that I have.
I wish my friends could hear the way I talk about them when they're not around, just so they'd know that I
love them as much as I say.
"I just love her to pieces;
he's so kind and genuine."
Hearing your names has the same effect:
a smile on my face I can't help.
I have so much love here for you.
Here, take my hand; let me help bear this burden with you. I want to see you happy again; I want you to win!
It's what you deserve,
and what I deserve, too. Don't make me make a stranger out of you!
1/22/2021
I get lost in the sinkhole every now and then. Every time I make something new, that's one more thing that I'll never make again. Are they checks off the to-do list? Tallies on the "what's not true" list?
I'm clueless, so go and get one.
I've got no idea, I'd better go get some.
There's a leaky faucet somewhere
in my brain; I've never been able to find it.
That's where I go, when you look at me but I'm not returning the favor, to mind it.
I'm just trying to make the water stop running. Some easy fix hand-over-fist:
I'm over this, except I'm really under.
Sinkhole— black hole— cave.
No wonder I don't know which way is up.
My self isn't mine to save.
It belongs in here, out there—
so far in it's out and so far gone it's found in something far, far bigger than me.
Big fish lost in small ponds never seeing the sea for the waves it makes, for the courage it takes just to brave them in full,
cut your self from the soul—
now I'm lost in the sinkhole.
1/22/2021
For poems like these,
I never really plan ahead too much.
I like to stay in touch with how I'm feeling as I feel it; if I think ahead I run the risk of dead-ending my original sentiments.
With poems like these, who needs enemies? Between me, my self, I, and time, I've got quite the special operations unit.
I've got quite the nerve to be writing this nonsense all down, saying who-knows-what about what-knows-how.
How about now?
Are you bored of me yet? I know I am.
I'll be playing myself in chess until the day that I die; I'll be playing the role of "myself" 'till the day that I die.
Dear diary,
Today I thought I heard an angel sing,
but it was just the ringing in my ear.
Just the right one this time, so you know I'm sincere. (For poems like these, I like for my words to make a mockery out of me.)
Forever yours,
Soliloquy
1/22/2021
The three most powerful words I can think of in any given moment are
"I will change".
I hope that you never forget that about your self the way that I have about mine.
What the hell do I know about risk?
I'm still alive, aren't I?
That's good enough for me;
finally, that's good enough for me.
Lord, I know it wasn't always,
but I'm glad I've come around for now.
By now, I'm sure you're wondering
what I'm talking about.
You're sure I'm wondering
what I'm talking about,
but it's always the same damn thing.
Damn it! My lexicon is shifting!
Wait, isn't that what I want?
Who knows?
I hate questions, especially my own!
Call me Ishmael—
he's just out of my range!
"I will change!"
1/23/2021
Such a pretty little house in such a pretty little town. An older couple lives there;
they don't remember that death
is a thing that can happen to them.
Most days, their biggest problem involves getting the wrong mail or having car troubles. "I think I'll go on a walk today,"
the old man says to his wife Carol.
"I think that I'll go into town and get something to fix the back door."
They could go on living like that for forever. In some ways, they might as well. Stay the same for too long, you might as well be in a coma.
"Who cares?" The happy couple thinks to themselves. "At least we're happy.
You forget that we were just like you once, we tried to understand ourselves, each other, the world around us, just like you. And this is where that got us.
What makes you so special?"
Carol's out back repainting the picket fence; she's imagining me.
Such a pretty little house in a
pretty little town.
Wait a second— you're not Carol!
1/23/2021
I want to record nature as I see it;
I want to speak for the way that the shadows hang and cling to their frames,
crying for their mothers.
No, this can't be right:
all of these paintings feel too modern,
like they're something out of my dreams.
They couldn't possibly have been feeling my same things all those years ago!
Oh, but of course they could!
They just couldn't capture life as vividly with their technology, see?
The canvas tells you everything.
We're all the same person,
even way back then. We all had these same dreams in the back of our heads.
History is much more colorful than we are led to believe; it works its colors into
every one and every thing.
All of these objects tell a story—
not of a life— but of the story those lives all aimed to never tell.
Foreign objects, not foreign memories.
Nature as we see it.
1/24/2021
Don't you think that mistake would look better next to this one, over there
where the curtains aren't drawn?
I am drawn to whatever I'm without.
I am drawn into the coloring book without my own consent— by me!
I'm the one holding the crayon;
why can't I just opt out?
I wish I knew, except I very clearly
wish that I didn't.
And I don't know— that's the strangest part of all this. I'll never know.
I'll never know until this "I" has ceased all knowing, traded in to be all-knowing.
I think the word "know" doesn't mean what we think it means.
"I think the word" means "doesn't know what we think it knows."
You know what I mean?
Do I mean what you know?
How are there so many different languages in this mere one?
Who made the mistake of adding
one-to-one? Who knows!
1/24/2021
I can feel the movement in everything,
even stillness.
What was it you used to always tell me?
Oh, that's right; you didn't.
Now look what you made me do!
I had to go back and edit my history,
make you out to be good for me.
Forgiveness, take hold of me,
'cause I can't just forget it.
I can't remember anything;
I remember how you said it.
Every second forms a new brick wall for me to breakthrough.
Why can't I just make do?
You're dead & gone— a figment of the imagination, a symptom of it at best.
But Plato's cave is my prison cell,
and shadows bear the rest.
It doesn't matter what I can or cannot
see, hear, taste, touch, smell.
What matters is that which feels real,
what moves me,
and what moves me most now is
this stillness carousel.
1/25/2021
I am not trying to race you.
I love the way I look at other people now;
you all are the modifiers.
(That makes me my noun again.)
I love you; and no one could ever replace you. You know something I don't,
and I will always admire you for it.
No one has ever been out to get me.
All of those old ways of thinking were just side-effects, just symptoms of
self-induced suffering.
I don't want to suffer at my own mind and hand anymore, so I won't.
We've all been bad people, but nobody's a bad person, don't you see?
I want everyone to win—
and that includes me.
That's just it: you're either rooting for yourself, or everything's a conspiracy.
Sweetheart, it doesn't have to be.
Take it easy, put the gun down.
Forget all those others; I want you around.
I love me— and that means you, too.
Double-cross your finish line!
1/25/2021
There is always an asterisk at the end of every sentence, hidden parentheses.*
How often do you stop and think about how another person would realistically respond to what you are saying?
Leave people an out—
they'll thank you in their parentheses.
I hope that my parentheses read something like this:
"How have you been? (I care about you.)"
"See you later (I love you)!"
Formatting matters!
Why not say what's inside the parentheses? What's stopping you?
I suppose in either case, the answer would be conventions, but I'm not really such a
stickler for grammar much anymore.
"I care about you! How have you been?"
Your secret's safe with me—
how are you really?
I've got a secret for you:
I'll love you anyway,
no matter what you never say.
I understand; it's okay.
*Read: "I'd like to get to know you better".
1/25/2021
I love where I am.
Lord knows I wasn't always this way;
everything I am feels good to finally be;
everything I've been getting off my chest feels so good to finally say.
I've finally joined the parade!
I finally get to celebrate!
I've had my fair share of mourning;
I know I will visit her again.
But I am not afraid of inevitability anymore: I have always contained it.
"I see that now"— I hope that phrase never leaves my sight.
I am in love with this newness, see,
with the magic of being myself,
the inherent magic of myself simply being.
How freeing!
Do you know what I mean?
Don't worry— you soon will.
All you have to do is participate in the buffet: who would you like to be today?
What would you like to say?
Be it and say it!
Life is short, so I've been told—
so don't delay it!
1/26/2021
I'm just coming out of that numbing feeling; my body is trembling at itself.
I used to ask my physics teacher all sorts of questions in school:
"How come when the room gets dark,
I can only see in black and white?"
"How come when I sing the same note as the piano, you can tell the two apart?"
I noticed these things, just didn't
have the words for them.
I never seemed to have the words for things; I've always noticed them.
What good is asking the right questions?
The answers are all the same,
just code-names.
What good is asking all the right questions when no one has good answers?
Family Feud: my body argues with me.
Talk then back-talk, hide then go seek.
"And" is such a stupid word,
and "or" is, too.
Okay; I can walk again.
1/26/2021
Obviously, I don't know anything—
certainly nothing more than you do.
That should go without saying,
but I've never really been too good at
going without saying.
(I don't need to tell you that;
I just can't help my self.)
I'm just fascinated by this thing:
what the hell am I saying?
How exciting! It has to be exciting—
I can't afford to think of it as anything else right now.
Oh God, "Right Now".
I talk a thousand miles a minute;
that's how many miles it takes for me to forget that I'm running my mouth.
That's how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop— full stop!
I can't stop— I'll fall down!
Can't let good ol' Gravity give me
the run-around! I'm safe in sound!
I can talk myself into anything,
out of anything; who else holds such power over me? What a shame it would be to waste all that power by
knowing anything!
1/27/2021
I am never really "with" anyone;
we just exist alongside one another.
I can't tell if that's a good thing or not.
(I think it probably would've scared my past self to realize this, which leads me to believe that it's good thing.)
I'm pretty sure that's how this works:
I always want to be a bolder person today than I was the day before.
Some fear is actually healthy.
I used to hide under the bed to take the monster's place, but then I realized that
I am the monster.
But not in the way the people normally use that word— I only mean that fear cannot exist outside of me; it is not external or eternal. Suppose that something is.
I'm wildly swinging back-and-forth:
It's an unlucky byproduct of evolution!
No— it's a timer on the watch-maker's shelf! I'm forever lost inside the middle.
I am never going to unravel all this; no one can help me, they're not even with me.
It's a good thing I have you along
for the ride, at my side. Are you with me?
1/28/2021
Just when you think that you're doing well by yourself, your self will begin to retaliate. It just doesn't want to change—
that's the trouble.
Panic! Newness is unpredictable!
But you don't want to be predictable;
you already know where that leads you,
remember?
Always remember the bigger picture;
never forget what your main objective is:
to love, to be kind, myself included.
I am not an afterthought, I'm the one who's thinking up all of these get-good-quick schemes, who is drafting this covenant, who is editing this rough draft.
I can't wait 'till my headstone finally sees her finished product—
but that's just it— I can!
I've been here before, felt all these same things and more; setbacks are invitations to greener pastures.
Let us reconsider our selves for a moment.
Why don't we stay at these crossroads awhile longer? (Never go back!)
Change your mind!
1/28/2021
I was always going to end up here, looking like this, feeling like this, typing like this;
the past made certain of it.
Logic only follows that I will make certain of my future, this me here in the present moment. Right?
I have a right to my future, it's mine.
Life gave birth to me;
now it's my turn to be greedy.
Give me what I crave:
to save and be saved.
Do you reckon it's a game?
Well, then by all means,
go right ahead and play.
You've earned these seconds, paid for them in full with every aching moment either wonderous or dull.
I'm a millionaire—
I've had so many moments who were
worth their weight in gold a million-fold!
No one deserves anything, so that must mean that I deserve everything!
Anything my hands can hold!
A penny for my thoughts?
I'm sold!
1/28/2021
I'm in over my head,
and my mind is so over it.
But I'm not quite over this just yet—
time will take some of me,
I will take some of it.
So I did: and I'm fine, same as always.
Be patient with your self:
it's the only one you've got.
You might as well surrender to it;
you might as well just love it, you know?
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Every time I laugh,
my body reaffirms this to me:
we've got to work together; we're a team.
This is a symbiotic relationship that I've got going on here, between my and self.
Protect her, she'll keep me alive.
Keep me in check,
and I'll make sure we thrive.
My head has half a mind to
disagree with me sometimes;
my mind can be so pig-headed if I let it.
Self, meet me somewhere in the middle, and I'll return the favor.
Name a time and a place,
a here and a now— and I'm there.
1/28/2021
— Okay, I see what you're saying, but this it's all relative, isn't it? Like I understand that I'm not as "real" as you are, but I certainly feel real to me, and that's what counts, isn't it?
— Absolutely not. This is a trick you've been playing on yourself, to even think you exist at all. You are so insurmountably insignificant; you can't even comprehend it properly. Am I getting through to you?
— Loud & clear. But that's just it: I hear you. I have senses; I can look at reality and reality looks back at me through my eyes; I can see you. What am I not seeing?
— Wrong question. I couldn't possibly even begin to explain it to you using this stupid language of yours! "Time"? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
— You mean you don't know either?
— No, you idiot, that's not what I mean. All of your words are so inherently absurd!
It's no wonder you think that you're real!
What other lies have they been telling you all down there?
1/28/2021
Everyone who knows me knows
that I love my siblings to pieces, to death:
there's this sense about us
when we're all together,
like we somehow were able to
cheat the game, beat the odds,
crawl through the mud and
arrive at the promised land. Freedom.
Of course, it wasn't always
fun-and-games. Our house
often felt more like a colosseum
than a home— Fight! Kill! Destroy!
Survive, survive, survive.
I can't speak for them, but as for me?
I had so much God beat into me
that by the time I came to my senses,
He was nowhere to be found.
I see Him clearly now; He's laughing alongside me in the backseat.
No one knows me better;
no one knows me worse.
Him, Her, and Me.
We three broke the curse:
a holy Trinity.
1/29/2021
Wake up wake up wake up!
As if I can simply will my self to do it.
How naive, you think you've woken up
but now you're stuck inside
another day-dream.
You're completely stagnant;
your hands are tied to the will that binds them, eyes shut wide to the dark that minds them, blinds them.
You think you are awake,
but you can't even move.
Is this better than the nightmare?
You're too flustered to choose—
the beast has already taken you
under again, over and over again.
You open the door and you let him right in like a friend. When does it end?
Whenever you say so, you'd like to think.
But your eyelids are so heavy,
and your drifting mind is left to sink.
Down, down, down, before you have to get
up, up, up. Up and at 'em!
There's always a bigger picture—
you will always be lost inside of the frame.
Don't let the beast learn your name!
1/30/2021
Do you know when I say
"I love you" just how much I really mean it?
I can never be too sure—
so until I can, I'll just say it again:
I love you.
I hope that never gets old,
just like this love that I have never ages.
It is timeless;
its only condition is my deathbed.
I will only stop this loving
once my life is through with me.
And even then, my love's not through!
Love will live longer than I do!
What a happy little thought:
that love goes on when I am not,
that love will live on after death,
that love will be in my last breath.
Everything I've done and said—
a letter written, never read.
To this, to that, to me, to you,
to him, to her, to see me through.
Love is old and new, false and true.
Is any of this getting through to you?
If you don't understand,
read it again 'till you do:
I love you.
1/31/2021
We never stop spinning,
but if you're good enough at ignoring the rhythm, it can certainly feel like
somebody pressed "pause".
Next thing you know,
you're lassoed right into the boss battle—
no brakes, no breaks.
No effect and no cause;
they both equate to one another.
The potential energy of the future
and the kinetic energy of the past cannot sustain you, they can only suspend you mid-air:
the equilibrium of the present moment.
It's a tightrope / cake walk!
All you have to do is live!
All you've ever done is exist!
All you've ever known is this!
Hiss at time to take things slow,
but time responds in seconds.
Seconds because
by the time you've started counting them,
another one has already gone by.
Back where one begins,
lost where seconds win.
Who turned gravity back on?
1/31/2021
Muscles and eyes and I strain to try and see you more clearly, more fairly.
I am afraid that my spine simply wasn't made for this, afraid that my mind wasn't meant for this rigorous artifice.
Wouldn't it be funny if we put a computer inside of a monkey?
Wouldn't it be interesting to see how he saw his own self and then said it,
spat his own code and then read it?
You only think that you're so special because you think that you are "you"—
but it just isn't true.
Not that I know who is, or what gives:
I only know that which reality lets me.
Sets me apart from the rest in the same way your mind does for you.
We're not two!
All that is known when I'm all
said and done:
one, one, one.
No more straining I's or eyes or muscles,
no more manufacturerd spinal fracture,
One. And done!
1/31/2021
Right now I'm just trying to figure out
who, what, when, where, why, how to be.
Maybe I might know where: here.
And maybe I might now when: now.
But everything else is up in the air.
I'm a third of the way there.
Who?
Oh, I'm sorry; I think you might have me
confused with someone else.
What?
You'll have to speak up dear;
I'm a little hard of hearing.
On the surface level, who and what are easy: Me. Infinity.
I'm having a bit of a difficult time with how right now, but I think that how's the key.
How is over time, and I am almost out of it.
No, not like that— I mean I've just been feeling kind of out of it.
The days don't match up with my definitions; the streetlights wink back and they're proud of it.
Me. It. Now. Here. Cause. Time.
(I don't believe I'm any closer.)
2/1/2021
So the story's over,
same as it's always been,
and now you're left asking yourself the same old question:
what now?
Well, I suppose that you'll probably fall apart.
Break down, maybe scream like
the way they all do in the movies.
And you'll swear that you'll never see
daylight again, and you'll think to yourself
this is the only way things could've been.
But that's the kind of stuff that
you only hear in fairytales, in storybooks,
and here in real life, there is only one ultimatum:
if you do not live, you will die.
So you try. Because the story isn't really over,
just a long one never-ending.
Pretending it's true through your own
point-of-view. Nothing new.
(I'm what's real! Think me!)
I'm a sucker for a good story,
always have been, always will be.
I'll be damned if I don't see this one through.
What now?
Up to you!
2/1/2021
I think that maybe I'm in love.
I've always thought the way we say it
in the West was kind of funny;
no one I have ever loved was in it with me.
And how could they be?
Well, we're two different people!
I don't mean to say that I am in love with anyone or anything, just that I am in it.
Love is in me; I bear witness.
Plain and simple.
Being young gave me a rotten idea of what it was; growing up gave me ideas that I was not enough.
Who is not enough for love?
By definition, it houses each and every
one of us.
My intuition knows this better than I ever could. Love does me good, it does me good. Goodness is not the island I once thought it was; love has no more reason than the daylight does.
But both go on, and night brings dawn,
and I'm in love, and then I'm gone.
2/1/2021
I try not to waste time looking back;
it's all a blur, anyways.
What do I care if I can't account for my younger days?
Live longer, be old longer.
It doesn't sound as scary as I once thought it to be. I wonder which menageries my mind will make for me.
In sleep, I always find myself dreaming wide awake, give-or-take, thinking I'll participate in some new reality.
This ones no different!
I wake up here every morning.
What difference does it make
which one is the dream?
Nothing is already as it seems, so I might as well seem like it, dream like it.
And which ones are dreams?
At a certain point, all becomes memory.
I will have filtered myself through so many times that by the end of my time here,
I will be all that remains.
I will die with my brain, but the real me remains looking back at the game.
2/2/2021
What happens when nothing is
no longer happening?
I wish I made sense;
I wish that any of these words
made a damn lick of sense.
Spare your own innocence.
But you know that you had it,
so you don't anymore.
Oh.
Just like that, huh?
Yeah, that's how they say
it always goes.
It always goes, and so it goes.
There is no such thing as too late
until you are late.
Late for what?
A very important save-date!
A respawn point of contention:
which one do you think it is?
I haven't said his name once,
and you know what I mean.
Know what I mean?
What happens when
nothing is no longer happening?
2/2/2021
All I ever wanted was
a softer landing than I had yesterday.
Does that make me selfish?
Do you think that I'd just be pulling the rug out from somebody else?
Something tells me it is so;
I don't know why I listen to him.
Part of me thinks I'd be so much happier if I just shut him out all together,
but Something tells me that it is this exact style of thinking that got me into this mess
in the first place.
I fucking hate the first place:
you never even get to know that it's the first when it's the first,
only ever looking back.
I think the ride is slowing down.
I wonder how many of my screams will be a performance; I've never really been good at feeling fear when I'm supposed to.
The things that really scare me
usually make no sense to most people:
Anger. Daylight. Heaven.
A trinity of safety nets that always seem to fall right through.
(So much for softer landings.)
2/2/2021
I can't stop re-adjusting; I'm in this now.
I've simply got to get to the bottom of things without actually hitting rock bottom. Does such a place exist?
A viewpoint without the low point?
I think there's more than this;
I don't know how to get there.
No-where, some-where,
in here— not there.
I think there's more to this;
I don't know how to be it.
No-thing, some-thing,
plaything— free it.
Re-adjust your calibrations;
I think we're in for homely weather.
Re-affirm your own sensations:
no one else can to it better.
I don't know what I'm saying;
I just like to rhyme.
Isn't it funny how when things rhyme,
it can almost feel like they're right?
What's that all about?
Guess I'd better find out.
I'm no stranger to changing—
That's what life's about!
2/3/2021
Have you ever wondered what goes on
behind the scenes?
Behind what's seen, what this all means?
I'm here to tell you—
don't waste your time.
Seriously: nothing to see here,
and that's the problem.
And even if there is, you'll never find it,
see it. Hey, what gives?
Why can't I live just like Jesus lives?
I've heard it said that when two or more
gather in his name, that he appears—
materializes into concrete idea.
I ate his body in church long ago;
I remember drinking his blood like a vampire, siphoning the life from his veins with every ambivalent sip.
Wasn't cannibalism supposed to be wrong? What am I not getting, seeing?
What kind of symbolism calls for God-Eating? What kind of God demands to be eaten? A hungry, hungry, hypocrite.
But it isn't His fault— He's just selling our metaphors. Buying our time with
His bread and His wine.
Black-out drunk, see no crime.
2/3/2021
The only race I'm running is the
human one.
Is that too cheesy?
Just kidding—
I don't care what you think, remember?
The same should be true for you:
don't do what I used to do.
And don't do what I'm doing either;
I don't even know what it is.
But at least I am happier.
At most, I am happy.
Why does it take me so long to realize when I'm making my self miserable?
Now, whenever I feel it, instead of just feeling it, I try to ask my self why.
Is it a means to an end?
A by-product of some greater cause?
Or do you just want to have another excuse to be miserable?
Man, that stuff is one hell of a drug.
What a rush I used to get from the spin of the circle. How embarrassing!
I was chasing my tail and not tale;
I was telling a joke that got stale.
Meet you at the finish line!
2/3/2021
You might not be ready for change,
but change sure is ready for you.
I had that thought in the middle of the day;
I can't believe that I even remembered it.
I'm a word-flipper, a starving-artist,
minimum wage for a liveable page.
Bookmark the centerfold for me,
will you dear?
I've simply got to tend after
this white rabbit, this white whale,
this pot of gold, this Wizard of Oz.
I played her part in a play once,
Dorothy, I mean; I played the role of her;
I assumed her identity.
(Or tried to, at least.)
I was never good at acting; I would always say the lines the way that I would say them, quit the choir like I was up-for-hire.
Fuck it— I refuse to be anyone I'm not!
What's the point?
Exactly! There never was one— relax!
For the love of all that is holy,
change for the better!
You are not ready when change is:
It is change who is ready when you are!
2/4/2021
Who am I to blame and be blamed?
(Name and be named is boring,
but I'll put it in just for posterity's sake.)
Am I even awake?
Sometimes I hate writing poems
because of how intuitive it is:
I always end up leading my self somewhere that I didn't want to know.
Is that so?
Is anything?
What do I know?
All I know is "what",
and I don't even know that.
I am building a DIY pyramid. Weaseling
my way through the womb
and the tomb; you know,
they say that there's
buried treasure
down there.
Here?
In a tomb?
But he's already dead—
and you can't blame a man
for dying!
2/4/2021
You know how I write melodies?
I pretend them.
Does that make any sense?
I swear to God — it isn't me —
and I don't even believe in Him.
No, not like that, not at all;
I just don't believe him anymore.
It's the same with words, too:
I just pretend them; or maybe they're pretending me. Do you see?
It isn't creating; or if that's what this is,
I have several more questions.
God, too many to count.
God, can you count them for me?
(That's not one of them, I'm just asking.)
Oh, I've got one: why do I feel the need to clarify everything, anything, Nothing?
This is real life.
I'm not a character; I... have it?
Does that sound right to you?
That's what I want out of this, all I've ever wanted out of anything:
Does this sound right, look right, feel right?
And the art whispers back like a lullaby:
It's close enough, darling.
For now I'm close enough.
2/4/2021
Maybe I can say something
that will make it go away.
It's nagging me relentlessly,
but I don't just want to
drown it out with white noise.
I want music.
I want art and whatever comes after—
to hell with the rest!
You can't tell me anything new—
I won't let you.
I want to argue; I'm addicted to it:
I want to know what is right.
Anyone care to mediate? No?
Guess I'll play both parts.
It's no wonder it keeps nagging me—
It's because I never listen!
I'm in an echo chamber;
always have been.
The only way I learn new things,
how I really understand them,
is when I hear myself talk and think about how it would sound to who I'm talking to.
What the hell is that?
Certainly not listening!
So instead I say the words away!
2/4/2021
Something I love about writing is that it is always able to meet me wherever I'm at,
because no one else will ever do it for me.
I think that it teaches me self-reliance,
self-compliance, reminds me that I can tap into my own infinity
at any time and any place
at my own pace.
This poem is mine because I'm the one making it; this chance is mine because I'm the one taking it:
how will I see it differently today?
I have the chance to play,
and Lord God knows that I've abused it.
I admire my own utility—
why else would I use it?
It pains me to say, but the line between using and abusing
isn't as fine for me as it used to be.
Sometimes it's hard for me to tell the difference: my moral judgment often stands accused; it's been abused.
See what I mean? I didn't know I felt that way ten minutes ago! Who knew?
Who knows petter than prose?
2/4/2021
You didn't waste the day,
there's no such thing as it.
Time goes on the same
no matter what you do—
it wasn't wasted, it was spent on you.
Do you believe it yet?
I highly doubt it:
you don't know the first thing about belief,
haven't practiced it in years.
At first, it made the worries disappear.
Now, it just makes everything unclear.
If you don't believe in anything,
you might believe in anything—
and take it from me, that's no way to be.
You've got to pick something;
"none of the above"
still leaves everything below that
you don't know.
"But I don't know", I know.
Hey, don't shoot the messenger,
he's all you've got.
And one day, he'll get tired of being nice and stop chewing
your food for thought for you.
Carpe diem or whatever!
2/5/2021
I hope I write and listen to silly songs
for the rest of my time here.
There's no reason not to!
The only thing I have to lose is fear!
Sometimes I've lost it,
other times I've lost it.
All too often, I lose sight of it—
I know what I love, what loves me,
what love means!
What a day it will be once the world's turn matches this spring that I'm feeling.
You know what my
favorite Christmas song is?
I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm!
Because it's true— I do!
I don't need to wait for the world to do my changing: I've got all the love I need
right here! True love, true gratitude is something that no one can take away from you, not even your self.
This is because you are lucky
whether you realize it or not.
Go and write a love letter to the universe!
I'm sure that she'd love to hear from you!
2/5/2021
I'm alive; I'm alive!
What a brave little cry into dust.
Bible-rusted right down to the crust,
to the core:
I can't feel it anymore!
It could be joy as much as sorrow,
could be trust for all you know.
Do you know?
No, of course not. The "it" is implied:
"Do you know (it)?"
I've certainly tried!
In vain I've tried but got too far away from
pixie-dust; now the audience must
clap their own hands, read their own palms,
celebrate the broken wall
like old Berlin or Jericho.
"We've let God in!"
No, you've let God out—
and now no one can catch him.
Run, run, as fast as you can!
You can't catch me, I'm the medicine man!
I'm your Christ-in-a-can!
"I'll have what she's having, man" —
but hold the deep-dive.
I'm alive; I'm alive!
2/5/2021
But how could the medium be happy?
Is knowing not the source of all this?
Deliverance is ignorance
according to and against my will.
How could she be happy?
Do you know the one?
Who smiles knowingly right at you?
She knows more than you do—
and you know it! She just doesn't really show it, that old crone!
Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia:
are all of you alone?
Yes? Good.
Let me show you who is who:
I don't belong to you.
Go play someone else's muses;
I've got better things to do.
How could the medium be happy?
Well, it depends on who she is to you.
"She" means nothing to me;
"He" even less;
"We" isn't even circumstance,
it's happenless— an ignorant bliss.
2/6/2021
I'm a very highly concentrated person now
compared to who I used to be.
Concentrated like orange juice, not in terms of remembrance, focus.
Focus: admit that you don't know which dream you are in; admit that you too are none the wiser. We two are the same.
We are both none to somebody's wiser,
along for somebody else's ride.
Learn the tide, it'll help you keep track.
See how gravity pulls the sea
forward and back, forward and back.
When you think of the ocean, do you only
think of the water itself, or do you also consider all that it contains?
Water's a tricky one no doubt:
"This group of atoms is mine;
this is my personality!"
Meanwhile, it's only been loaned out by the sea, by the catch-all of everything,
by the inevitably of infinity.
When I say that I am concentrated, I mean that I have shrunk myself down to one molecule of water, and in doing so, now understand that I am what makes up the ocean.
2/6/2021
Knowing how you feel is useless if you are uninterested in why you are feeling it.
Be prepared to say some sentences that you won't like the sound of:
Maybe I don't know as much as I thought I knew; maybe others' narratives make perfect sense the same way mine do. Maybe I don't even make as much sense as what's actually true.
Truth is not made right in me,
I am made right through truth.
I am not its temple, I am its conduit.
It wasn't in me all along, it is unlocked through others' perspectives.
No one's truer than the collective.
Nothing is more revealing than a dialogue,
than two fixed points who both believe they understand the other's range, who both decieve to try and win the other's game, who both receive no meanings only names but try to claim it's not in vain.
We are vain; face the truth.
I can't help my own sweet tooth.
You only understand how or why you feel so long at it pertains to you.
2/6/2021
We're floating through space,
and that must mean something
because ___________.
This is the first problem on the test;
no one's ever made it farther
and lived to tell the tale.
And what about you?
How do you fill in the blank?
Are your ABC's the same as my X Y Z?
Did anyone try "open sesame"?
There's just so much life in the air,
so much energy in the sunlight.
I used to shy away from words like "energy";
I thought them too pseudo-spiritual and vague.
Now I think I understand them better:
what's wrong with vagueness?
If I know a word, and so do you,
and both of us feel as if this word is true,
what's the issue?
Me, as always; the issue is always
my own misunderstanding.
We're floating through space,
and that must mean something,
be cause enough to celebrate!
2/6/2021
I am always here, even when I'm not.
It would appear that I am superimposed:
half of me is alive, the other half knows it.
How curious!
I seem to have somehow pushed my self
out of sync with me; do you read me?
This is a shitty translation,
my closest approximation.
I know as much admittedly:
this is endless; I am infinity.
How on Earth am I supposed to grapple with that?
Well, how on Earth already limits me. I have gravity
—no—
gravity has me.
I wish I could talk to Him.
Suppose that's what this is.
I don't know; I'm dizzy.
Here and Not Here
are both true in me in due time.
More time is due every second;
I have been dead for so much longer than I've been alive.
Most of human history.
"I" gets passed down generationally,
making me a martyr for
whatever I am not.
2/6/2021
I love you for absolutely no reason;
I love you for all of them.
It's nameless, because my love doesn't know you by name.
I could never love another's eternity into all of its gaps, so instead I will love
you-in-theory.
But hey —that's not so bad—
theories are the only things we have!
I love you like it's the only thing that I have!
Of course I know how to get your attention; of course I know your name.
But what good are names for
people like you and me (that is, anyone)?
You are not your name; you're you!
And guess what else?
I love you, too!
You, the concept. You-in-theory.
You hypothetically.
Which is why I love everyone for no reason, for every reason,
every hypothetical little reason:
because all is just as likely,
and love looks just like you.
2/9/2021
Maybe I should take a break;
I think I am insane.
I wake up in my dreams and
they all want me to stay there.
What do you think?
Can somebody please start doing all of the thinking,
any of it?
I'm running out of ammunition.
Run-on sentences don't take my hand
the way that they used to.
Melodies have always been so good to me,
but now I think I've called on them
for one too many favors.
I wonder what would happen—
doesn't matter; it's happening.
What does that tell you?
I'm sick of having eyes.
I don't want them anymore,
you can have them.
I want to trade my eyes in for just one timeless second;
I just want one moment to catch up with my grief.
Wave hello to me from paradise every once in awhile,
won't you?
They tell me that some grief is good.
Give me a break!
2/9/2021
Come on, man, real life isn't so bad.
The water's fine!
You're carbon-base-ten, exponential!
Numbers don't exist
if you don't want them to.
None of this does:
pick and choose like all the rest do.
If you love me, then I'll be happy.
If I'm happy, then what?
Exactly!
Happiness should never be
the dependent variable!
Things that depend on other things will inevitably result in latency
between needing and getting.
But of course, nothing is truly independent: everything
depends on each other to function.
One is summed inside the collective.
Nothing would even be happening if we weren't here to summon it, isn't that something? Nothing, that is— Nothing would still be here! The nothing inside of everything and vice versa!
Come on man, real life's not so bad!
2/9/2021
This is the thing I've been struggling with:
you can just keep on zooming out,
zooming in. Where to begin?
How should I hold onto the un-ending?
It doesn't even matter where I am; because I'm not there anymore.
I'm not even in the middle;
there is no such thing as the middle of forever. And even if this isn't forever,
it might as well be: I am living in-definitely.
I will live until I die.
And then that infinity will be over,
and a new one will begin.
Everything overlaps, and I'm sick of it.
That's what I've really been
struggling with: what's the point in picking it all apart? There is never a point: the point is just a question leading you to another, and another, and so on.
So on, so long.
I zoomed out so far that now I can't see myself for how I fit in, get myself back
in focus, reign It on in.
2/10/2021
They want you to think that you're weak;
that's what keeps you crawling right back.
The weakness grows stronger in dependency; you are only contingent upon your very next breath.
Of course, they don't want you to know that, to learn it.
Because once you do, you'll start confiscating your supplies back!
Tear down their effigy and build a whole new temple!
You aren't a God— but you sure have been shit on just like one!
Only the gods are known
well enough to be misrepresented;
only the good die young!
Everyone is anyone when it's at someone else's disadvantage.
There is no possible way for me to be deceitful: all of this, every lie I've ever told, every truth I'll never hold,
all of them are me, the rise and fall.
My fatal flaw?
I'm a know-it-all; I think the answer is within me. I'm not your prey anymore—
Happy Hunting!
2/11/2021
I am always conscious of the stream;
this is why you think I'm crazy.
I hear the river flowing in my mind
all the time, all of the time.
It's always weathering the stone,
canyons ripening towards tomorrow
whenever he may be.
Maybe a stream really is the best way to put it:
maybe I can never outrun running,
stop the night from coming,
help my self out of something that it was never even in.
Where do I begin, and where does it end?
It ends when you do, old friend.
I am my oldest friend and my newest enemy all at once.
The two of them conspire for me, against me,
until I'm not sure who's who or what to do.
It's all water, all water.
Flowing into itself and away from itself,
out of itself and towards itself.
This is what stream really means:
the consciousness of endlessness.
But I digress— I'm probably just
crazy anyway, right?
2/12/2021
Am I going to remember today
when I'm old and gray?
Not likely. Does that mean it wasn't meaningful?
Who cares?
I am trying not to care.
But something deserves my care:
this body and mind.
I guess that they're mine;
I suppose all this takes is time.
I'm going there someday,
the day when I will no longer remember this one,
when I will no longer remember any of them,
when I will no longer remember.
Life is long but no longer.
I am strong but no stronger,
wise but no wiser than the time I've been allotted.
Time isn't being spent; I've already bought it.
The price and the product cost the same
at their current rate of exchange.
How strange!
Today's the day and so's tomorrow—
but only one of them exists.
Which one is it for you? Are you here, today?
Will you remember the price you have paid
just to call this "today"?
Not that we'll have a say!
2/12/2021
You. That's all this is, all this ever was.
You've known that the whole time though,
haven't you?
You are the only person that exists.
(Well, maybe not literally, but basically.)
I'm not talking about solipsism;
I don't know what I'm talking about.
I just mean that "I" and "you" are the exact same thing.
The only way that I think about you,
only way that I ever can think about anyone. It's through me.
It's me, always has been.
And by "me", I mean you.
Catch my drift?
Probably not; you never were the brightest. Neither am I: that's what makes this so difficult.
I know exactly what I'm talking about;
I just don't know how to tell you—
no— me.
What else am I supposed to do but love it?
Fear it?
Good heavens!
I can't even tell the two apart!
2/13/2021
I'm not sure what else to do, see:
the more I try to fix myself,
the more problems I see in me.
And to think that some people can't even be bothered into looking!
If you're too scared to change your self,
unfortunately, I still respect you.
I'm no better than any one.
I understand the hesitation, after all.
It's rotten work. Terrifying, exhausting,
rotten work. But your options are either to change for the better...
or lie to yourself?
For the rest of your life?
Bless your heart; it's no wonder
you're so mean. You simply can't hold those two halves together forever—
your polarity can't take it.
Doublespeak, doublethink:
"I'm a good person
(at least according to me)!"
Sound familiar?
Then I've got bad news: you've got a lot of work to do— and if you don't do it now, the world will take that choice from you.
2/14/2021
I could be somebody else's sip of coffee.
Hypothetically, literally.
What's the difference?
Hypothetically, I could literally be somebody's sip of coffee, a manifestation so god damn small that you aren't even sure if you felt it.
Time is one hell of a filter, man—
and Death is one Hell of a hypnotist.
So much data is lost with each passing second; none of us are seeing well enough! How can we ever hope to know what we don't know when we don't even know the things we do?
Do you see why language is important now, why word choice matters?
We can't even say "coincidence" without a serendipitous connotation! It isn't lucky!
It just coincides— that's It!
Any two things can coincide;
every thing is happening.
Who's to say it isn't all at once?
I am being metabolized;
I am your sip of coffee!
2/14/2021
I don't want to have any more questions.
I have them, of course,
I just wish I could quit it,
snap out of it, forget it.
I only understand how scary forgetting is right now because I can know what it means to forget. But suppose I didn't know any better! I hope that's what this is like somehow; I hope that knowing I'm in the maze doesn't leave me without a doubt.
I need my doubts: who else is going to check on it?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Who else is going to check on It?
Or must I wait for It to check on Me?
Damn, I wonder how many times
I've been holding the cards.
I'm not sure— thank god!
Will I ever truly know better?
Am I already doing it?
There I go again, asking questions as if there's anything who can answer them.
I don't want my answers to have anymore questions.
2/14/2021
They aren't the same:
life and not-life,
death and not-death,
love and not-love,
sex and not-sex.
Context is what redirects!
If anything were opposites,
then language would reflect it:
this and then not-this, X and then not-X.
But the variables aren't interchangeable—
we have nuance, subsets!
How peculiar that one and two still
come up three in me,
that 3-D eyes can't see the sight in me.
No, they can't be the same!
Why else would we need to triangulate?
Why wait; why not?
Why do "why" and "why-not"
never answer to Why?
I'd rather rot once I'm already dead,
you know? Not-past into past,
Future to not-future,
Present and then not-present.
2/15/2021
I can hear the inflection my words will carry before I even know what they are.
I think that must be a leftover skill from songwriting: matching phrases to melodies like jigsaw puzzles,
grouping the colors together.
This is because I like for my stories to rely less on what and more on how.
How is the only one that really matters,
anyways. What can only account for something in the present moment,
which, as we both know, is constantly changing. How, on the other hand, gives you a taste of the longform, the bigger picture: I can't tell you what this is,
but I can show you how it works.
My written words and the inflection behind them create two separate sentences with two separate meanings;
it's just easier to lump the two together,
let one under-explain the other:
"We barely know each other!"
(A perfect example!
Can you hear my inflection?)
Can you hear one from other?
2/16/2021
I'd been buried in the footnote for so long,
I'd forgotten what I was even reading it for.
All this and more?
How many layers can we add to this thing? How many can it take?
I have no idea how many I've peeled back;
I've lost all track.
Off-the-rails; I don't look back.
I like it that way. Don't believe me?
I don't blame you—
it's why you don't believe me:
I don't blame you.
I don't blame anything anymore; I can't.
Lord knows I don't like having a finger wagged at me!
Half of you are on your way out!
The other half don't even know
you're here!
Did you remember that this was in second-person? You— here!
You are alive; do you know what that means? Me neither!
But do you know it?
This could go on
in my own head for hours;
maybe this isn't even a book...
2/17/2021
I think I've come to the conclusion that
I'd rather be stupid, I'd rather have
nothing to say and just keep on saying it
than have anything left unsaid on my deathbed. Do you know that moment
right before something that needs to be said is said— is practically begging for you to say it— that tangible claustrophobic feeling just before you do it?
I used to know him like family;
now I can much more comfortably strangle my silence out of me.
I've confronted so many of my word-gaps,
my information-gaps, reflection-gaps.
And still there will always be more of them.
I'm trying to cut down my lag time:
I try to speak my mind before my mind has any say— it's more honest that way.
That's why I don't think when I write these:
there was always a certain beauty in stupidity, wasn't there? At least, I'd sure like to think so, and that's what this is all about! What would I like to think so?
I'm not sure yet— that's why I'm saying it!
2/17/2021
It isn't mystery or ambiguity,
it's just the sheer volume of it all
that makes it so hard to read each other!
I would like to pick and choose when I recite myself and when my self is improvised— but both are true all the time!
My only constraints are my time and my place: everything else is fair game.
Good-game, open-book.
I am a book as open as your eyes,
open as your lies, open as I'm plagiarized.
More realized as time goes by,
'cause I am not the author!
As far as I know; maybe I am the True Author just a little bit farther down the road. One more dream 'till I know for sure.
And then one more, and then one more.
A mystery on my hands!
After all, the characters in mystery novels are never the ones who save their own day: it is you, it is me. We who saved the day that never existed just by
seeing it through to the end.
I'll be everything before I'm nothing,
so just pick a spot and read on!
Mystery solved! Play pretend!
2/17/2021
"At the stop sign, turn left up
Ahead at the stop sign, turn
Left, up ahead at the stop sign,
Turn left, up ahead, at the
Stop sign."
This is how to tell me directions.
You have to remind me that you're here with every single word, every syllable.
Just keep talking.
If you don't, I won't remember you exist.
It's nothing personal, just business.
Notice how none of those words in that never-ending sentence are the actual subject of it, just the objects of reference?
This is because "you" is the understood subject; you are the understood subject.
But you're not saying it to me,
so I forget that I exist.
You know which types of sentences have you as the understood subject?
Commands. Turn left.
The "you" is implied; certainly
I can't be the one to do it.
(You!) keep talking!
Oops, I missed my turn.
2/17/2021
I'm telling you,
hope isn't what I'm telling you.
This isn't pessimistic either—
in fact, that's my point.
Stop thinking about the future.
Stop having expectation simulations.
Death is the future; dead is the past.
You are the only one who lasts.
Hope doesn't ring quite right, does it?
It pangs too hollow for just a bit too long:
a vibrato, a pulse, a legion, a song.
We are so, so many. As many as you can count. Do you dare even go up that high?
I understand; I know that I don't.
So I do. Same with you?
I see you. I see you desperately trying to chip away at the iceberg; I see the way your head pops up every now and then just to get some fresh air, when you look up and out at the sun-stained day and you remember what it's like to breathe oxygen
on purpose. That indescribably tiny split second when you look another human being in the eye and you understand their eye's own understanding:
this is what hope is to me, in the being.
2/18/2021
Curiosity will kill you.
(What won't?)
I would die to know; it kills you to know.
Knowing will kill you.
I am living inside of the subtleties,
tucked in neat by the nuance;
I want my words to swarm me.
Walk across the coals,
say what can't be said.
Why can't it?
What is everyone so afraid of?
Lighten up! We don't even know
ourselves yet, let alone each other.
What have you got to lose?
I am always losing my past and winning back up the future.
(Past is mine, as for as I'm concerned,
but future is anyone's bet.)
Give up yet?
No! Everything still happens anyway.
What were the odds of today?
One in infinity!
Much the same for tomorrow!
Oh no!
2/18/2021
Well, which one is it?
Are you moving through time
or is time moving through you?
I am a circle trying to
understand his role in the sphere.
Are we getting to Spring
or is Spring coming up?
I am a melody line trying to
understand her role in the orchestra.
When you're on the highway,
can you trick yourself still
or do you get carsick?
I am a raindrop trying to
understand its role in the water cycle.
I don't want to waste anymore time deciding whether or not I'm alive.
Who cares? I have time!
Time does not have me!
It's in me and all around me;
I am drowning in it!
It is drowning itself in me!
I don't know you— I just got here.
I have to do it all again every second?
I'm not me anymore; time has already changed that. Does forever have an opposite that does not contain it?
Is this another dimension between them, enveloping then?
What's the difference?
The difference is that there is one!
You could die at any moment!
Yes, I suppose that you could.
Fascinating, isn't it?
When do we get to graduate?
Or is it too late?
All there is to do is be your own fate!
Don't wait— act now!
2/19/2021
Twelve crows are perched along my window.
Still as death, black as night,
deadpan towering over me.
Eleven more than yesterday,
two less to do me in.
They've been watching me
this whole time,
Peter telling Wendy through the window.
I stare right back. I listen.
Omen.
Not as scary as you might think,
just as powerful.
That's a nice dress you've got on, dear;
what a lovely little fairy tale.
It'd be a downright shame
if something were to happen to it.
Tell me a story about the womb
like the crows do.
Teach myself the language of the crows' eyes;
defeat the shiny token.
Truths unspoken.
A fairy tale grimmer than yesterday's
old and then young again:
recycled distractions.
A murder!
2/20/2021
My hands always feel like they're
about an inch to the left of
wherever they actually are.
Sometimes, when I'm playing piano,
I can be off by whole octaves.
I know the shapes of some chords like the smiles of old friends; focus in.
Center your self.
Right on down to the tiniest speck of dust,
past the microscopic horrors,
through the shroud of theoretical anonymity until you're left with the point that started the big bang.
Do you feel changed?
Or maybe just re-examined?
Anything can be true if you let it.
Which ones have you tried?
I'm stuck on some other one right now,
but I can't exactly tell which one it is,
so I'm not allowed to leave yet.
Things only are what I see them as.
I can will anything to be true and still not know the truth. My hands are numb.
I love you.
2/20/2021
I am so sick of talking about it,
knowing about it, worrying about it,
you know?
I want to go back to before I understood what lying meant, before I knew that some thing right in front of you could still be untrue from a different point of view.
I want to be perspectiveless again;
I want to trust what I see and have faith in what I don't— is that so wrong?
How do I go back there?
Can I hitch a ride on some train of thought that will make me forget
what the children forgot?
What they never even knew—
the awareness of plot?
I'm sick of all the cycles I can see
and I'm terrified of all the ones I can't.
Some of them are so big that we have to consult the history books; the sun rises and sets in the sky every day.
As always, I am somewhere in the middle:
too small for history, too big for today,
vainly wishing both away.
(If only I weren't so afraid.)
2/21/2021
Onward, forward, stop.
Then keep going,
because an object in motion
stays in motion
until reality can catch up with it.
Time only exists because you think it does.
You lose it by having it,
have it by losing it.
Focus. You are alive.
Remember anything different?
That means it can be anything you want,
whatever helps you
sleep at night, silly.
It's all so silly, isn't it?
I just want x, y, and z. Then I'll be happy.
"I'll be happy" means nothing—
what are you right now?
Tomorrow never gets the chance to arrive;
our language always resets.
It's what separates us from animals,
what keeps us going
and stops us dead in our tracks:
tomorrow.
Don't look back!
Stop. Forward, onward!
2/22/2021
The mirror told me that
this is what I look like today.
(I know you can't see me;
feel free to play along at home.)
At first glance, I am a complete stranger.
Stare for too long, I start to look just like
my father.
And his father, and his.
All of them gave life to me:
the proof is in the pudding.
The truth is in the looking.
Don't look now, but I think you might be
aging. Aging at best, dying at worst,
living at least, loving at most.
When I was younger, mirrors were my backwards world.
I could be anything that I wanted to be—
my own potential reflecting back at me.
Now I think it's all just light eventually.
I don't know what that means,
I just know that the light makes both of us real to me.
Fall asleep.
I'm dreaming here again.
This is what I look like today.
The mirror told me.
2/23/2021
If beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, then I don't think I'm interested.
I want objective beauty —not perfection,
objection. I want something that is beautiful in totality, objectively overridden and overruled by some sort of higher reality; I want for something to be true even if life had never begun, if the infinity things that had to go right from the Big Bang to now never did go according to nobody's plan anyhow—
well, I want for the truth to account for it.
Same with beauty; I want for beauty to exist even if I never got to be around for it.
I am monitoring life, Life is monitoring me.
The only reason beauty exists is because I'm alive enough to see it!
Come to think of it, the only reason any of this exists at all is because I'm the one alive to see it! The only thing a dead man ever loses is his nameframe: the Art is
always the same— that's the game!
2/23/2021
You know, it's never as bad as I think it's going to be. It's always either so much better or so much worse.
But I can't think of a single time when anything turned out
exactly like I thought it would;
I never expect the right outcomes.
Truth was never supposed to be convenient, and nothing is absolute.
Waiting for fate to play out is really
just a formality, anyways:
"it's not about the destination, it's about the journey"? Of course we would say that; our destination is death!
That doesn't scare me right now.
In fact, it's rather comforting:
I know exactly how this story will end.
I don't know why and I don't know when,
but maybe I'll be here again.
And even if I'm here again,
I'll never be here again.
Funny how that works,
that it even works at all.
There's probably nothing to worry about:
it's never as bad as I think it will be.
2/23/2021
Everyone, everyone, everyone is like this.
All of us are infinite, and I'll keep on saying it until somebody can give me a better word to use.
Who did you choose, will you choose,
have you already chosen?
Do you know what I'm asking?
Who is infinite to you?
Are you including yourself?
Sorry for the third degree;
I'm asking these questions to me.
Did you think this was anything different?
I may be talking to you, but I am always my intended audience:
what is there left to discover;
what do you need to uncover?
Recover from? Understand and then some? One more sum, then I'll be done.
(I never really am.)
It ain't over 'till it's over,
and I'll say so 'till I'm dead.
There she is again— I just can't help it!
What is it; who can?
No one, no one, no one!
2/23/2021
I thought that this would be fun—
Preforming under a spotlight.
Easier said than done;
better late than never, right?
How should I know?
I'm no different than you,
only infinitely so.
What do you know,
there's nothing to know.
Or maybe knowing Nothing is what's something and what's something's never shown. This is all I'm ever doing:
don't think! Be! Do! Act!
Pre-form, perform! L
What else would I be doing it for?
The only thing to do is to do;
everything else is hearsay heresy.
Religion was never too good to me,
but maybe Something might be.
Who is speaking to me?
Is that supposed to be me, thinking, breathing, speaking, knowing, acting?
I've never been too good at it—
I'm a sucker for a comfort zone.
So much for one and then done;
I thought this was supposed to be fun.
2/24/2021
Praise be to higher comedy!
Higher power never hired me,
so now I'm looking elsewhere:
Art. Science, my memory.
I can connect dots, too!
Watch me play hopscotch
with what is and isn't true!
What else was I supposed to do?
Fear favors the indecisive just as
fortune does the bold.
"Do what I'm told"?
Tomorrow is so young,
it hasn't even been born!
You aren't sworn to secrecy:
just tell me!
I've loved you all the time.
Even when I don't understand;
when I didn't even know who it was
I was loving.
Even now, learning I still don't—
I love you.
You've just got to tell me how to do it,
okay? We're always trying to change ourselves for the better:
let's keep it that way.
2/25/2021
Shake your head—
no— don't think that.
It can't get to you all at once
if you don't think about it.
Wait, I'm confused:
isn't that what I want?
No, I'm a coward;
I want to understand without consequence, no painful side-effects.
I don't want to be swept out to sea
just yet! There's so much to see,
so many people to try on and be!
I know you're scared.
Sometimes you understand why;
often you don't.
But guess what?
"Love" is a word, so that must mean it's true. We've discovered that one.
It's out there, in here.
Here's another one: "new".
Don't you get it?
You're not drowning,
you're being baptized.
The water's fine!
2/25/2021
Close enough, right?
Don't think about how
it has to be close enough
because it's all that you've got,
just be thankful that it is.
Take a step back—
not in that scary unproductive
way that you usually do—
take a step back just to look at
where you are!
Haven't you heard?
You are here!
Who really cares where that is?
You know exactly where you are:
the real question is,
what are you going to do about it?
What is it with you and reasons?
I am my own cause;
I for one exist because I do.
How about you?
Whatever you are waiting for doesn't exist,
so why are you waiting for it?
I don't know why I am,
I just know that I am.
Close enough!
2/26/2021
Funny how when it's warm outside
it's as if it's always been that way.
Spring is so obvious once it arrives!
The only thing a person really needs
is for someone to believe in them,
and I intend to be that person
for as many people as possible
just as Spring has done for me.
I believe in Spring,
in the orbit of the earth,
in the old becoming new, in you.
Heaven is such a weird way to divvy up infinity,
don't you think?
Just one life and then forever?
I think that forever started before I was born;
I think that the whole thing is heaven
and the whole thing is hell,
cycling back and forth, back and forth
like a cosmic carousel.
My religion is Spring when I'm in it and
Spring Again when I'm not.
I'll believe in heaven when I see it
and in Autumn until then.
It's good to feel the sun again.
2/26/2021
It's fine,
and by "it's" I mean
I'm fine,
and by "I'm" I mean
my mind,
and by "my" I mean
I,
and by "mind"
I also mean "I",
and I still don't know
what any of this means
or what it means by,
but it's fine.
2/27/2021
I don't want a rhythm;
I want to be awake
all of the time sometimes!
Just so I don't miss out on anything that happens;
I really miss the mourning doves.
I miss the way that night becomes day,
gently floating through oblivion
like an angel's wing or the wings of our doves,
mid-air like an acrobat,
delicately, delicately,
delicately bowing.
The suspense becomes more palpable than what's anticipated—
surely pure chaos would be better than this!
Oh, but don't bring him into it,
he's got half your mind to use against you!
The moon is out there somewhere;
I just can't see it, but I know that it's there.
But I don't:
sometimes it just disappears from the night sky,
but I never looked into it,
so I never learned why.
The "new moon" is what they call it,
the nonexistent one. New.
Something about a lunar cycle,
something to add to the rhythm.
2/27/2021
Jesus Christ committed suicide by
impeding on his own omnipotency
in the name of relating to you and me.
Never completely severed from Himself;
there's still a thin thread of connection,
contention: an orchestrated resurrection.
Am I heading in the right direction?
Would they agree with me?
This could be an argument about semantics; it could always turn into an argument about semantics.
What's debate without some antics?
I've had a million stick-ups, getups,
out looks and in looks;
each new iteration of myself is newer than the last! Look how time is Past!
Two millennia have already flown by—
but does anyone know why?
Or are we still just making shit up
as we go? No one knows!
It's the most well-known piece of literature in Human History and we can't even translate it? Is God alive again or is he alive? Is he Risen or did he die?
Was he murdered on that hill
or did He commit suicide?
2/27/2021
Synthetic aphrodisiac;
I'm in love with my computer-drugs.
They help me wake up and they put me to sleep,
they keep all my time,
always counting for me.
Counting all my sheep even after I lose the ability.
(Never let REM do RAM's job!)
Rapid Electric Multiplicities.
Randomly Annexed Matrices.
Somebody help me make sense of these.
Somebody help me tease apart
"those" from "these" and
"flies" from "fleas"!
I'm having much more fun over here
than you are over there!
Or is that what you're afraid of?
More instantaneous than synapses,
a language more evolved than syntaxes—
less concerned with death and taxes!
If we were really the ones controlling it,
it would work exactly like we do.
You don't want somebody else to understand your speech before you do,
do you?
I'm not writing this down on paper!
"Why do the trumpets sound so glitchy?"
2/27/2021
Once we're able to prove somehow that we live in a third-party simulation,
it will instantly be terminated.
But the only way to prove that we live in a simulation is to replicate one.
The moment we are able to do this,
we become God, and the only ethical thing to do at that point is to kill ourselves thereby breaking the cycle.
However, unbeknownst to us,
killing our selves is actually the last step in an infinity larger cycle of "death" and "rebirth", simulated and then
de-simulated, materialized and then
de-materialized, conceptualized and then
de-conceptualized,
abstracted, reflected, and retracted
like the waves who make the sea.
We just aren't being rudimentary enough;
our knowledge will always be history.
What's been "keeping you busy?"
Imagine your tombstone and then try to explain to me what it means to be "busy".
Some of these words should be buried
right along with us; this will literally be over before you know it. By the time you would know it, you'd be good as dead, see.
And "dead" and "good as dead"
are not the same thing; they just can't be.
2/27/2021
My guardian angel is all of them;
they remind me of the concept.
My saving grace is one of them;
she reminds me of the mindset.
Redirect my intellect to steer it
straight to greener pastures.
Love and laughter is all that I'm after.
It truly is the best medicine—
I can't think of anything else that's
quite as healing, transformative, revealing.
I'm tired of concealing:
where's the fun in that?
I love you, what do you think about that?
How do you like them apples?
Mine thunked me on the head when I was seven, once I understood that heaven was some sort of infinite Armageddon.
Seven!
What have I been up to since then?
Oh, you wouldn't even believe half the things I could tell you; I'm always trying to.
I think that Guardian Angels must be the loneliest creatures in the Universe;
I hope they're not real for their own sake
if not for my own.
2/28/2021
It's spinning but you like that.
Be honest— it's what you want.
I want nothing to do with this;
I'm just stuck in the middle of it.
You don't know how and where you'll land
(though certainly you're falling).
Secretly, I've been calling
town hall meetings
when you haven't been around:
we're taking over, we outnumber you,
new sherif in this town!
She doesn't take too kindly to arrangers, to strangers, to star-struck permutations.
I'll tell you one thing:
that son of a bitch never said "uncle".
She gave it everything she had
for what that's worth;
it was just too late to look back.
All in favor of a new savior say "I"!
"I" doesn't know about that just yet;
I'm still not so sure about all this.
We've been moving so fast.
I wanted to last, but it's not what "I" wants. Ego wants penance, revenge.
I tell my self that I simply love spinning.
3/1/2021
I is just a figment of its own imagination.
I guess me is the person.
But if me is the person,
what's left for myself?
Who is the one who's been
thinking all these thoughts?
Seeing what's around?
Writing this all down?
I can't think— I'm too busy breathing.
I can't breathe— I'm too busy thinking.
What's the deal with this guy?
Isn't he in on the joke,
doesn't he know who I'm talking to?
What does psychology have to do with it?
You think this is as simple as
"nature vs. nurture" anymore?
We are no longer in need of that
infrastructure, so you can stop building it.
You can't hire me, I quit!
3/1/2021
You think it might be cold,
just like outer space.
You think you see the stars at night,
but you are much too near-sighted.
(Use your telescope before it uses you.)
It's a different kind of hell,
a frozen one, a barren one.
There's nothing but ice for miles,
and you're trudging through the
pitch-black solitude,
and you learn some things you wish you didn't know about you,
but it's true.
True as the space between each atom.
Something and then the space between it.
Yeah, just like outer space:
an adventure, a legacy, a journey.
When time and space become so big that they're both the same damn thing.
Time-warp-speed!
Wait— there's another one of these?
I'll play the game indefinitely;
my life will be the death of me.
The ice is melting into itself again;
it petrifies me.
3/1/2021
The point that started the Big Bang
lies in the backs of your eyes.
The light filters through your pupils
in the same way it strikes the ocean,
older than water, older than death.
There was a time when death did not exist;
we just weren't around for it.
Way back when, the good old days,
where people were far too busy being stardust to talk about
how they were actually stardust.
Before hubris or seasons or
timings or rhymings or reasons.
There was a time when
death had never existed because
nothing had ever once lived.
Now something has taken
absence's place, a sum-one, a remedy,
an endless source of energy.
Save it for the pre-roll;
I've got bigger deaths to die.
I've got a ransom on my time;
a bounty is out for the seen of the crime.
My hands are cleaner than a speck of dust,
pointless yet pointing.
In science we trust!
3/1/2021
I've spent eternities inside of the
hollows in my stomach.
Mind racing me,
ribs caging me.
I can stay here as long as I'd like,
I know.
I take for granted
that the world remains the same
whenever I return to it.
I am the dirt beneath your fingertips,
and you're mine:
we don't understand each other.
I can get put on a shelf
or I can be the last maggot to the feast.
"The Runt of the Maggots".
I like that.
3/3/2021
I will never return to my first home.
I will never betray my mind's re-telling.
I don't want to make my memories expire.
I'll never feel the road home better than I can remember it.
Home: a place where I belonged.
It doesn't exist anymore;
I understand now that home has to find itself
wherever you are, that it's no place you find.
We abbreviate the word for "is"!
Is should not be the afterthought!
I am alive; it is.
Did you forget or something?
I like to imagine that death has a radius around me,
wide as the universe at my birth and shrinking ever since.
Until one fateful day, when
death and life collapse in on themselves,
folded into a single point of unity,
and the audience adjusts to scale,
and the whole thing starts over again.
I'm homesick for the Pulse,
sick of returning.
3/3/2021
The air is laced with sunshine,
with the heat and the warmth of
arriving to being.
I am alive to none but
the call of Repeating.
I don't want to drown anymore:
it doesn't make sense, see,
I am water.
I grew gills in the womb well before my tongue could hope to reach me.
Teach me everything you know;
my lungs will follow.
Follow the reaper and watch what he does: he is gentle like rain
and patient like Jesus.
But I'm not starting over just yet—
I've got promises to keep,
daydreams to dream,
sunrises to see.
I used to live right by the old space station,
you know. My eyes are imprinted into the overhead hardware—
I've made it to space!
The spaceless is laced with the sunshine!
3/3/2021
This is all I need: nectar, honey.
A gentle reminder that I haven't really
fallen all that farther from the tree.
I don't need the means, I need the
production, the product.
The wedlock airtight concept.
Find yours yet?
I think I met mine once, but I forget.
I've never been good with names;
they've always treated me unkindly.
I don't need a name, I am not a history question or one of your side-quests,
your subject— I object!
So don't name me, that's all.
I didn't mean to get upset.
I can get pretty testy for bad reasons,
but it doesn't make me suspect.
I'm just not dead yet: that's all this is.
And I got mine, and she got his,
and we got this but never lived.
Just give me some more time to think about this, I'll be honest—
Honest! I'm a busy worker-bee!
3/4/2021
Here's my hello just for you:
Hello, it's nice to see you.
Here's my goodbye to the morning dew:
goodbye, I never knew you.
Here's my favorite part of the
merry-go-round: the going.
Here's what makes me mad about "merry" and "round": the knowing.
Here's why I say so much
more than I know: I'm clueless.
Here's why I know so much
more than I say: I'm stupid.
Here is the shortcut from point A to B:
it's timing.
Here is the future in context C:
A priming.
Here's how you know when
you've made it: you won't.
Here's how to remain complacent:
you don't.
Here is my name and its echoes:
forever.
Here is my time and my story:
remember.
3/1/2021
Why does the doorway between
winter and spring feel exactly the same
as the one between summer and fall?
A stillness takes hold of the Earth;
the air suspends just like a rubber band
between your fingers,
when all of a sudden— snap!
The breath back in,
the start again,
the open-end who leaves life open-ended.
The actor's stage who all know is pretended, prepared,
suspended in disbelief's extension.
What is the contention?
I'm already dead, you idiot,
I'm alive and I'm dead
because all opposites show a third thing
whose medicine I steal.
I'm stealing the stillness,
robbing the sunshine of its dead-end
by giving him the green light,
the reflections and refractions,
the all-that-is-not-me light, my
far-as-you-could-see light, my
all-that-you-can-eat light.
I know about the threshold;
I just stand real still and hope
the fucker doesn't see me.
3/5/2021
Maybe it's exactly what I think it is,
maybe it's the opposite,
maybe to get rid of it
I need to cross-reference my
cost-benefit analysis
and find a new Genesis.
First exodus, now this?
Lazarus, are you seeing this?
Get a load of this life—
who cares about the next one?
We'll cross that bridge
when we come to it,
mind that gap and then run to it.
It's comforting, what can I say?
I'd like to think that I am my own center of gravity, that I act on it
more than it acts on me.
And I do: gravity doesn't even know its own name, couldn't even say it to me in a way that matters, and neither can you.
But that's okay, I really like you.
It doesn't matter what that means—
love is the only thing exactly like it seems,
exactly what I think it is.
3/5/2021
The magic is returning to the daylight again;
the birds chirp and hum
with the breeze and the sky
beams bright with possibility.
Today invites me to make light of the machine
like they do on TV,
reminds me that sometimes it's okay
to trust what I can see.
And it's cold, alright—
but it's the kind that has
an aftertaste of the sun.
A deliverance to Spring.
Winter's anti-venom.
It's so easy to get frost-bitten,
to let bitterness siphon the heat from you.
I have been dormant, hibernating,
conserving energy for my alchemy:
my little makeshift summer.
But now the Earth spins around to
meet me in the middle;
the sun threatens to pull the plug at any second
and let me in on the secret.
But I know that the sun isn't the true Magician,
just his conduit.
So I just sit back and
enjoy
what
I'm
shown.
3/5/2021
I am ever stuck, I am never still.
The earth is always taking me with it,
incomprehensibly farther in, out, around.
I don't want to learn how to
survive in the desert.
I don't want to learn how to stay afloat in the sea.
I never belonged up above.
Directions are all meaningless in space.
But we’re in space!
Yeah, I guess just don't
think about it that much?
I don't know what else to tell you.
Or, I do, but I can never remember which version of the Bible you like.
Did you know that I wrote the Bible?
Yes, that's right, I did. Me.
I wrote the Bible— the whole thing,
it wasn't written how they say it was.
I wrote it all down one night after a bad day of school; I whittled it down
during morning announcements;
I got a bad grade from my teacher.
Sorry I couldn't write you a better story:
I always get stuck on the endings.
3/5/2021
I'm not sure what's supposed to be
after this, what's supposed to click
or isn't clicking, what's supposed to stick but isn't sticking.
Ticking clocks on the wall
talk my ear off— and I let them,
because it stops my ears from
ringing so loudly.
You know what else I heard?
I heard a rumor that nobody is the wiser.
I heard a story about a
mother and a father who once had a daughter,
and the rest is somehow already history.
I've never lied once in my whole life:
I'm constantly doing it.
I'm not the most reliable narrator.
Most of my life, I didn't even realize
I was telling a story at all.
And now I know better—
but I can't know it right.
Enough about me!
How is science treating you tonight?
3/6/2021
I think I'm in a fugue-state-of-mind,
the state-of-the-art kind,
and what is the state of the art again?
How is everyone doing?
How are you enjoying your undoing?
Rebooting my conscience
again and again.
"No, you aren't always right.
You aren't being truthful right now."
It's this memory fog!
Truth and fallacy both take the same silhouette when the mist sets in.
And if you're liable to forget...
well, then you might as well just forget it!
Why does that fit together?
What do I know better?
I'll never know until I don't.
A fugue— yes, I remember now —
a million melody lines crying out for my attention, begging to be traced,
followed, anticipated, heard.
I want to entertain them all, I want to entertain the ball; I want to find my part and just stick through it—
I just gotta get to it.
What was I talking about?
3/6/2021
I holds the plot device in its hands:
it is the beginning;
it is drawing conclusions
as we speak (although surely I knows
that we are not on speaking terms).
I rotates in and out of infinity,
but now it's my turn to tell the story.
I bickers nonsense into my ear:
it beckons and begs me to
heed and to feed it,
but even I knows that it's a losing battle.
I has a hard time imagining
the outside word because
it thinks we two are separate.
I never thinks about the present
because it can only exist through the past and into the future.
I never catches itself saying anything;
I has never been caught in the act,
because I only knows to act and to say.
I ignores its own delusions,
re-informs its institutions so the loop is
too concealed to ever short-circuit on purpose. And maybe there wasn't one—
but you're here now, you know?
I acts small and weak because I knows
that death is coming for me.
3/7/2021
I'm starting to think now that
all of this originated
from a single thought.
No, not whatever you all are
doing out there— in here,
something is evolving from an origin.
If I could trace back every thought I've ever had to the very first one,
I'd have me.
I'm hoping that mine was "I love you";
Because it's true— I do,
for one thing. For another,
whatever my first real thought was,
whatever started all of this,
that's me.
Or maybe I'm just creating another Rosebud— that's always a possibility.
Man, what isn't?
I'm asking the wrong person, I know;
I should be asking the version of me that got me into this mess:
Hey, who do you work for?
Don't listen to me— go back!
Go fish! It isn't over here, I promise!
3/7/2021
Hi, I don't know how to
make sense anymore.
It was never a goal of mine;
that might have something to do with it.
In the traditional sense,
nonsense is not particularly useful.
Luckily for me, this was also
never a goal of mine:
to have use, to be used.
I control the output.
Maybe not the input—
but I at least understand
that I am the function.
It functions through me,
through my understanding of it.
I am my own transgressor, successor.
Relay what you think it is to me;
I should like to join the races.
But I don't want to happen like this.
So what's a girl to do?
Well, same as you:
I close my eyes.
I make my sense, I take it back.
3/7/2021
One more vice, bad advice,
stuck in a tar-battered paradise.
Pair of dice, make your way,
tell me how I feel today.
To day I'm lost, to night I'm found,
to time between I'm underground.
And that's it, and that's it.
But it isn't— I'm just at the
scary part of the spin right now.
Soon I'll be out-and-about again;
soon I'll be out of the drought again;
soon I will be a good friend again;
I just need to figure this something out.
Can I borrow somebody's eyes?
Which outlook would make looking out
feel like seeing to me?
Do me a party-favor: see me.
See me if you can, or just
return me to the sea.
I know how to swim;
I don't know how to be.
But that's on me— it always is.
(You'd think by now I'd be used to this!)
I'm just at that part of the spin again;
at the heel again.
I will feel again; I will heal again.
3/7/2021
I'm a brain in a vat that believes it is walking.
I'm a monkey at that who believes it is talking.
How should I know if I didn't ask to be born— I wasn't even there!
Despair is a marketing scheme, right?
Manufactured mirages to keep me
up at night, down at night and in-to-day.
An infinite repitition might as well be called singularity: sequential events determined by themselves in such a way that no man knows his origin/end,
and yet all is self-contained.
Where did today go?
Oh well; I'll see it tomorrow.
Just once, I think that I would actually like for it to turn into tomorrow—
hell, it could be yesterday, for all I care.
I'd take anywhere; I'll take "Obstruction Constructions" for 500, Alex.
Answer:
What is the life-to-death pipeline?
3/7/2021
When we get married, it'll be in a forest,
and the Spanish moss will hang down from the trees
just like confetti,
and the story ends exactly where it begins.
When we get married,
I want for the algae to look
smooth like plastic in the canal,
smooth like you could walk right onto it.
And then we'll slip right under
but the crocodiles won't scare me anymore.
When we get married,
the sun will be shining wisely,
just the way I like it.
And the cicadas will whine and moan 'till the sun explodes,
and the mourning doves will chime in with the wind,
and the wind will make itself known to me.
When we get married, that's the day I'll start my garden.
I'll sew myself into the soil and I'll
see myself out of my time.
Time to put the baby to bed!
As long as we both shall live, I'll give.
I sure do miss that Spanish moss.
3/8/2021
Maybe I just need a better filter;
maybe if I could just find the
right shade of rose to tint my glasses with I would never doubt this thing ever again.
A mantra, a phrase, a way to change my ways from phases to praises and syndicated crazes—
but wait, I don't want another religion.
So what am I to do?
Philosophy: afterlife not required,
batteries not included.
Maybe I should just slow down,
take a look around, say a prayer to the ground before I'm six feet underneath it.
What would my philosophy be?
Good Lord, I don't know,
just be.
Do the thing you were born to do
until your birth reclaims itself.
Your mind and body make up the filter:
so just take it all in as best as you can.
It's all random, man. Or it might as well be!
See? Just be!
3/9/2021
Every time I close my eyes
I end up in outer space.
I don't imagine anything;
there is nothing around for miles.
Lightyears.
My body doesn't exist anymore.
I only have my mind
(but not for long).
Soon I can't feel my mind either,
and that's when whatever's left of me
gets scared.
I try to feel the single point of me.
Sometimes I do; often I don't.
Sometimes I'll close my eyes and
shrink myself down to a single atom.
I know what it knows, and only this:
I am nothing.
I am everything.
These words are all the same one.
Sometimes I close my eyes and
forget that I have them.
Sometimes when I open them again
the feeling doesn't go away.
I am the lack thereof.
3/9/2021
When I think back on little me,
I think she'd be proud of my poetry.
She'd pour over my volumes of words
and she'd let out a wide-eyed shudder.
I know us now; I can see you.
I'm learning how to say
what we've always known, learning to see
what we've always been shown.
It's okay; we'll get 'em next time.
I love you.
Next time, we won't avert our eyes,
just look straight on—
maybe we won't even speak.
Wouldn't it be worse to not have a mouth?
I couldn't even scream!
Think of the poor, tortured stone:
the ultimate observer—
what hasn't he seen?
He could make a symphony of the sky,
a portrait of the Rhythm of reality!
I know we're a thread in the tapestry.
I eye, captain! We've made it this far!
Do you like what you see?
Hey little me,
are you proud of me?
3/9/2021
All we have is this:
the language of death.
Our etymology is fairly simple:
once upon a time,
somebody noticed we could die.
Everything else is as follows—
Time, Ego, Sight.
Noun, Verb, Agreement.
If we could not die, then I suppose
we'd have no real reason to talk about it.
No good reason, anyway.
So it's settled then:
I'm talking to you,
misquoting the language of my own unravelment.
The state of unbeing announcing itself:
here, we see language's first and foremost component:
"I".
"I" would not exist
if I didn't know any better.
Do you see it?
Well, then I'm afraid
you're a part of the problem.
But so am I— and that's just it.
As am I, so are you.
What are we to do?
Step two:
Hello, I'm dying.
Who are you?
3/10/2021
I always know the date but not the day;
the path but not the way,
the scene but not the play.
I always know the day but not the time,
the guilt but not the crime,
the scheme but not the rhyme.
I always know the time but not the place,
the hunt but not the chase,
the head but not the space.
I always know the place but not the door,
the game but not the score,
the point but not what for.
I always know the door but not the key,
the cost but not the fee,
the self but not the me.
I always know the key but not the lock,
the slang but not the talk,
the hour but not the clock.
I always know the lock but not the seal,
the spin but not the wheel,
the truth but not what's real.
3/11/2021
What are we even looking for?
Do we want to explain it all away, say how every thing is related to everything else?
I just want for recursion
to stop choking me;
I keep getting lost in all this redundancy.
Is science aiming to find one rule that could describe our entire reality?
Even abstractions can be picked at
down to the atom and then some—
that's what we're here for.
We are the universe's abstractions,
god's crazy dream.
Only God is a by-product of His own mind,
and the cycle continues forever and ever,
Amen.
Our minds are only infinite because we know of death; our minds are only finite because death knows of us.
I'm my own thought experiment;
I am experimenting with my thoughts.
You never know what you might
find out there— I don't even know
what I'm supposed to be looking for.
3/13/2021
Ocham's razor isn't Abraham.
Does that make it wrong?
Well, no, it's just more of a guideline, see,
less of an anomaly.
Look at where we're at on this thing;
look at what we're headed towards.
The poles are melting;
have you built yourself an arch yet?
I'm just kidding— I'm not a prophet, obviously, far from it.
I don't bear witness to anything;
it is it that bears witness to me.
To you, to all of us.
It's looking at you, right now, all the time;
the code is inspecting itself;
the stars are their own recipients.
Time is its own priority as I am my own polarity. You think I don't make sense?
I don't— I think sense makes you.
Some of them are easy; flipping things around. Some of them are here nor found.
All around— but not too close!
Don't prick yourself;
don't nick yourself shaving!
3/13/2021
It really wanted me to follow.
And I wasn't scared— couldn't have
felt fear even if I wanted to.
But it really wanted me to follow,
and that made me suspicious, I guess.
What had I just signed up for?
Honestly, I had no idea:
but peace was there,
and every object was suddenly alive, making itself known to me.
It was all I could do to be wary;
I didn't want to be.
It's a control thing— always about control.
And I know I've never had it to begin with,
but this was different somehow.
My ego fought for its life:
it wasn't ready to let me go.
But now I know:
you're never really "ready"
for that kind of thing;
you've just got to do it.
Against better judgment and all that I know, I don't have much choice but to follow.
3/13/2021
I'd forgotten it up until the the last
time I remembered it.
Same Carpe, Different Diem!
It didn't exist to me until just now;
you'll have to excuse me.
Does that explain why I'm never around,
why I don't sleep so sound,
why I'm never the same,
why I don't want my name?
It isn't mine, it's yours.
You gave it to me,
tried to tell me who to be.
I know what I'm called;
you don't have to say it to me.
You couldn't pronounce it anyways;
it would just get sweet-stuck in your mouth
like taffy.
A sugar rush: my head is spinning;
I don't know where I'm just beginning.
(No dashes in this one; just pauses.
Take a moment to breathe with me.)
I'm beginning to forget
where I was going with all this.
3/14/2021
You wanna be someone you're not?
Fine by me:
someday you'll fold—
and I'm not sticking around just to
clean up the aftermath.
I'm not the maid, not a baby sitter,
not your mother.
You know, you should call her.
I bet she misses owning you;
they all do.
Good parents, bad parents:
all of them brought life into the world without knowing what that means.
But hey— it's not all bad!
At least you can complain about it
to your therapist-for-hire!
But you never actually wanted her advice, you just wanted your ego back, didn't you?
Only problem with that is,
there's a limited supply.
Only so much "I" to go around, you know?
I can play this game 'till the cows come home, honey: I've got nothing but time;
time's got nothing but me.
So what'll it be? Fine by me!
3/15/2021
Tomorrow will be bloody and kind.
You as one shall be copied into another:
a safer state of hive-mind.
And I'm not forgetting to count myself;
I am the product of evolution just as much as I am its catalyst.
I am a series of infinite time-capsules, infinite in so many different
ways from each other.
How can they all use the same word?
The infinity in details, the infinity in space, in time, in one's self and in others',
infinite in sheer anomaly, in repeating.
What is the same about all of these different kinds of forever?
In my opinion? Scale:
right and wrong never meant what you
think that they mean.
Understand your pain, please,
for as long as you can stand it.
The truth can be as complicated
as you want it to be, or just as free.
Do you hear me? You are so much stronger than your self;
be sure to kill it with kindness for me!
3/15/2021
For someone who came from water,
it's surprisingly hard to remember
the word for the sea.
Each word that exists has two definitions:
one we will never be able to translate,
and an infinite number of
compromising subtleties that you will only be able to cognate, only relate to each other yet somehow not ever themselves.
I miss the innocence of swingsets:
I miss the rocking back and forth,
cradling the wind like it was
my mother's arm, holding on for dear life
like a stubborn leaf in a stream.
I must be somewhere inside of the vein;
I'm floating through a syntax arbor sprawling out beyond the galaxies.
My body is so much slower than hardware;
I can't keep up!
Do you know how many ancestors of mine would have to live and die before they would even come close to reflecting today's technology in their biology?
Did I really come from water— and at some point, will the water set me free?
3/16/2021
I spend so much time
operating outside of the present moment.
I am worried about a future
that will never arrive:
it is always right now.
Now and then now and then now;
it's what makes music beautiful.
How is now changing?
When does it change?
(I am every person I've ever been
raised to the present power.)
Nothing is ever stagnant,
but when is the movement taking place?
I am always still—
pause at any moment; I am still.
It is this moment no longer.
Sometimes I look out the window
when I remember that there is one;
most of the time, my eyes
play out a sitcom unattended.
(Laugh track! I can't even keep it!)
I opened my eyes up again just now;
I can see out of them for now.
Good thing now is all I'm living for!
3/16/2021
If you want to take a stab at
how my time is going,
I'd suggest you take a look at
my art-a-day calendar.
It'll tell you everything you need to know;
last time I touched it was days ago.
12 March • Friday • 2021
reads my art-a-day calendar,
unaware (much like I am) of
how wrong it had become.
It's almost as if Earth is my second home;
droning on and on in uncertainty
'till my body catches up with the rest of me,
'till I can fit back inside of my body.
My day is going exactly the same
as all the other ones— although
where it's going I never can say.
But I leave these little clues for myself
everywhere I go & everywhere I've been;
these mementos of the past,
these monuments to self-deflection:
I must've slipped away last Friday.
Okay, so what does that mean for today?
Which day is today?
3/17/2021
We need to do what we've always done:
reach out to meet the sun.
Extend a hand out to the heavens,
be a good host.
Kill a live ghost and replace it with a human creature-being,
with a pulse that bears repeating.
You aren't any better than your
poisoned lungs, than your
mangled veins, than your
self restrained.
There is no hypothetical version of you;
save it for your bibliography, man.
I want to know who's sitting
right in front of me;
I want to transcribe the sunlight as often as I can; I want to know
the fact and the fiction,
the beast and the man!
(Nature waits for no one,
so I guess I'll wait for you.)
Didn't you hear?
There's been a hardware update—
the sun is shining!
3/17/2021
I use one word and mean its opposite;
context redirects everything to the center.
I should reallocate myself to
greener pastures, here not after,
shouldn't I?
But "should", of course, already betrays
that somewhere along the way,
I was lead astray by the ringing in my ears.
"We'll take it from here!"
Where is here?
Oh, that's right: it's right here; I am here.
(What a miracle!)
I caught sight leaking into my eyes:
I can see you!
I don't know how long it'll last—
so I'd better be quick and
tell you how I feel before I forget:
I don't love you yet; I already do!
No "if's", "and's", "but's" or "should's":
I'd need you if I could!
Alright, I wouldn't. I don't even know what "needing" means. The way I see it,
you either have it or you don't.
I guess the needing is the context.
3/18/2021
I think that the golden rule
is what ruins most relationships:
why would I treat you the way
I would want to be treated?
We aren't the same person,
not practically, only in theory.
I will treat you however you want me to.
I refuse to leave anything unsaid;
anything, anything, anything.
Treat me like you're not sure
what to call me; you can be
the strong-and-silent type.
Treat me like a long-lost stranger,
the one you never learned just right.
Because it's true— I'm a different person everytime I see you.
Is that how you'd like to be treated?
I'll pretend to know whichever version of you that you need me to; I can love you and leave you— it's what I do best.
I like my love to be memorable like art.
I'd like to make a story out of you,
what can I say? All that glitters is not gold,
and rules are no exceptions.
3/19/2021
Marching on, just marching on,
to what we'll never know before we aren't,
forgetting every single sign and every clue.
You hold on to the pulse like oxygen;
they call the rhythm Breathing.
I think too fast for English
and too slow for music—
why can I not be translated?
Which is the correct medium?
What if art is just another one?
What if you invented yourself a wheel,
the very first wheel, and you began moving so fast
that it doesn't even look like you're moving anymore,
like a ceiling fan or speedy tire?
Sometimes the rhythm gets so fast
that I find myself inside another one.
What am I to make of that?
I didn't even understand the first chapter,
and now you're telling me that it's just another chapter
in some other bigger book?
Flicking through the pages at a steady, steady pace.
Slow and ready wins the race—
take your place in line
and march in time!