- A Glass Cage For An Animal
A glass cage for an animal, it knows the price of this apparent freedom. Inflatable, the past careens down verdant hills. In caves where night has taken up and solitude does visit, even in the afternoons the sounds of its diurnal creep. I know I'll die, too immune to live too desperate to die. Where is the lever for the reward? Are all words void?
- A Tax
Fear is overtaking me. This land mine mind, and your tripwire hairs. The taste of gunpowder on your lips. Why does my sight unfurl in these moments of desperation? Careening towards the precipice, the plummet I have faced a thousand times. I can only apologize when I am in shambles on the floor. And I will destroy myself before I can destroy myself, before I destroy myself.
- Absurdities and echoes
Glossy light here
Mural arch of trees
She was another holy vessel
For blood
But the gap grew slowly
Rift to canyon
He is a good man
- Apollo Beneath The Whip
The simple slave, in sweat-soaked sheets, aims his shackles, and cuts off his hands. The simple slave, in smoggy pantheon, aims for release, and cuts off his head. Apollo falls asleep behind the wheel. A scar reopens to a wound and pleads in a whimper for infection. And now this great dying beast, that I've chained round my neck, in a torrent of feathers, a face of paper cuts. Fragile tributaries of blood stain powder white wings, framed and catalogued for collection. The simple slave, in fallow fields, shrugs off his burden, and falls asleep.
- Ascend
I am the son of a treacherous hand. Told golden and chosen and lifted to light. Reflected in brass on the casket of hope. In spite I decline, I decline, I decline.
Now gold turns to lead turns to acid to piss. Naked and awake in the kitchen I see myself, two apples and a chair, in a house that is nonetheless collapsing from the corrosion of doubt.
From a life of the mind, from the absence of heroes, just the buckling of foundations, just the ebbing of tides. While this town was talking shit about itself, while I was doing likewise, while I was mouthing hymns to the walls.
Now my wounds close wearily, light is no longer with me, only a weight I cannot lift. A projection on the side of your house that reads I no longer have the energy for breathing.
- Bankrupt
I fashioned myself a hatred for beauty. Envy steeped in alcohol for eight months. I found myself spitting on murals of possibilities and waking up with bloody fists. I sewed into my arm a reminder of the dread of waking. Not that it was necessary, but like a flare shot into the sea, it signaled to the emptiness that I was ready. I woke up vomiting, disgorged a collection of corroded copper coins. Arranging their paltry worth, upon my sunburned chest, and begging anyone to rake them off. I dug into the dew-laden soil, a hole of perfect depth. This accumulated language, bankrupt and tawdry. Throw it in and grasp my throat with fury. Every thought absurd. Every word empty. Every error exposed. Every moment wasted.
- Cannot
these cracking bones corrupted
their way towards your silhouette
sacrosanct and smooth
the flicker of halogen
like candles in churches
i never worshipped
a thing of beauty perhaps
for those with eyes still in sockets
- I Am A Sieve
gravity adds another day
from fettered wings a solemn night
rampant want and
counting rosaries in the grass
to be a decadent slave
pursue my discontent through
these fields onto eternity
- Inverted Soul
his punishment is mine too
against my will i took it on
where do currents go when riverbeds are shores
memories are buried in an immoral mountain
this is but one inverted soul
scratching at the sun or where it used to be
witness normal from a moving car
- Languish
Is this the sensible world or just a sick joke my childhood played upon me? Derivative and febrile, the water always ran too hot. I singed my hair and taste buds looking for a freedom from a jail within a jail within a jail within a jail within a jail. And now you say I languish within myself.
And I may languish, but I do so in a brilliant array of fragments of my fractured former self. Reformed I may be staring at the mouth of the cut. I may be begging for forgiveness from the trampling stampede. Yet still they thrust, the naked horde, showering upon me an embarrassment of riches of circuitous cliches. I bathe in indignation cradling the bastard blade to my bad joker heart. The body against the mind against the body.
I sunk the blade into my shadow, twisted then took off. Feeling favored in the orchard of my discontents. I hung around in waiting rooms, a rotting clementine. Betrayal spat upon the soil and seeping to the roots. I found a break in this recursion, swallowed then jumped in. Sliding splinters into skin, I tried to feel so alive that I couldn't feel alive. This bright heat, I'm rushing toward it. This cold hand, I'm rushing.
Now both memory and forgetting are against me, and the anodyne of time is just the erosion of my brain. Like a photograph exposed in reverse, my neurons decouple in the dark. Too little and too late, to free me of these thoughts, of this unmeasured world. The mind against the body against the mind. A path toward beauty. A path toward blindness. I'm rushing toward it.
- Liver
I'm digging a hole through the veranda, through the pale dirt, through the ant farm, through my sternum. I will lie supine, a trough of disappointment.
I was malingering. You took your gloves off, and reached inside and pulled out whatever you could. Your friends and your family, they gathered round me. Feasting upon my red-tendoned trough, I welcomed them all.
And you can destroy me, but you have to know that, it's only because I asked you to. And you can have me, but if I let you, you have to know I have a suicide pill in my tooth.
- Modern Asylum
I open my mouth to spit on the walls. The words bounce around my head, vault where ego and insecurity make backroom deals to drown me.
My memories of young life were left to me in such a way, stuck rather than cultured, and orphan.
I whisper them to go away. In modern asylum, white walls with all the perks of white walls.
I promised myself words like the sea. I promised myself mescaline and flowers.
- Nausea
it is daytime now, in the summer
even though i couldn't tell
no shutters, no sleep, it follows you under
you were so stupid last time
don't you see how beautiful this moment could be
look at the sky, look at the color
i've got my green dress on
- Spectrum
from this forge
a fraud elemental
rent from flames
unripe and unsteady
it adorned
with muted palette
a spectrum restrained
and blurred
- Stranger, Fill This Hole In Me
Destinations withering, desperate in blue light.
Stranger, fill this hole in me, under beaten sky.
Not unlike you, I am afraid.
Destinations withering, face separates from eyes. I would like to serve myself but if you're pretty tie me up. Strangers wear the cachet shell, shines but it was weakly won.
Not unlike you, I am worth more. Tokens are in place of feelings. A flock that feels of no importance in a web that's permanent and wide and I am at the center. But still I cannot strive to feel. Not unlike you I do not feel.
- The Clearing
The clearing was the only place that I could finally come to the last thought, a correction could be made. That I should get rid of what plagues me, my wayward soul.
If no substance exists but I nonetheless feel it as though an eroding stone in the kettle pitch dark, with water clashing against the glistening rock face. It’s my face that’s sagging towards the earth. It’s drying up, and me, hunched over in the direction that flowers droop down.
She didn’t stand a chance of winning me over any more than I stood a chance of winning her. Because she was always against me, this place was always against me. It molded us, we hardened to a pose, her against me and I against her. The rest of our lives against each other, a polite charade.
But where do you go when the earth doesn’t pull anymore? Where do you go when the current runs out? What do you play when the games trickle from your hands? Who do you talk to when words are scattering sand? Carve me. Do it slowly.
- Winter
there's no longer fear to be undone
on a pedestal that is pure white still
three o clock aporia and pills
only swollen hearts feel a low
violence in a mother left behind, getting cold
monolithic firing squad in black