Weaving

I am at the counter tracing lines by the knife that guides slitting mysteries into the substrate fabric of a consciousness that is definitely someone else’s and definitely not mine.

I am face down in the couch trying to recall memories of friends saying they saw someone that looked exactly like me--the guy at the gym, the guy at work when I was in denial and decided only one could survive, the guy that Beth used to see at Temple parties and send me pictures of. do their fears taste the same or is that just popcorn lost in time.

I could be an archetype NPC of many names--different haircuts repeating a few lines and a side quest, offering sage advice, reading fortunes in a spiderweb from the corners of a dusty hut with a futile asterisk in the form of a wink that I’m not sentient enough to grasp. I am the reader and never the web weaving weaver distilling fate with rhyme.

I am in the car, always leaving, always materializing back at start straying from this one-bedroom apartment in minor subplots once or twice a week: 8pm, 7 central--same place same guy. scratching at the walls of my shortfalls hoping that instead of plaster and paint and sheetrock I open a hole of 1’s and 0’s like a DMT laser experiment revealing a source code only Neo and Smith could see.

I’m in the shower with all my shower thoughts pelting skin naked in hot rain. if I collect all of my doppelgangers to one room we might be able to make a simple life-altering choice about moving/dating/living/not living/short breath at bedtime, confronting the regular acts of violence and abandonment I used to encounter in my dreams from 2010 to 2020 when everyone took turns at dying and I got bit by a snake covered in heat and venom inducing alternating views of concrete and humidity.

I am in bed with Fox to my left and I can just reach him if one of us is uncomfortable enough.
relief in the dark under the weight of two blankets that I’ll throw off in frustration when I can’t fall asleep, sitting on the edge of the bed finding a grip in the fitted sheet and quiet review of things I’m grateful for flipping through the notebook in the nightstand defining two good things each day--
12/23: Superheaven – Ours is Chrome
11/21: poetry night at Char & Stave
10/18: went to Mt. Rainier in the snow
11/28: showed Conor and Liam how to shoot pool
11/9: finished Twin Peaks
--I lay down counting back from 100 hoping I don’t reach zero.

The Lizard

I am in the desert and I am the desert. The lizard is a Monitor. The lizard is a Gila Monster. The lizard is actually a snake. I’m following tiny tracks. I’m following a trail that resembles a log dragging in the sand. I’m following anything moving without my consent. The lizard is six inches. The lizard is six feet long. The lizard has stopped in the path of the sun. The sun is a dart. The sun is trapped in bead black eyes. The lizard is looking up at me looking down. The lizard is a statue. The lizard is a rock. The night is hiding. The night is a thief. The night sucking heat from sand. I am waiting waxed in moonlight. The lizard is a cricket now. The lizard is a cactus looming long and hearty. The sun is moving now. The lizard is a skeleton. The lizard is an ornament. The ornament is skull-rib-tail. The ornament is dust. The sun demands a sacrifice. The sun is screaming at me. I am looking up. I am looking at light. I am lost and my eyes are black. I am lost and my eyes are little suns. I am lost. I am low in the earth. I am the lizard. I am the answer
to the sand. I am starving for starlight. I am the rock at night.

London/Pt.5

Twenty-four hours home, my apartment was waiting to remind me of regular stark silence contrasted by the violence of a high pitched buzz razing my ears. Easy to forget in the background of the city, loud standing still. The constant chorus of unregulated feelings and devout ignorance to over exposure warnings.

People are going to ask about my trip so I should prepare an acceptable agenda for them. A story about skipping Buckingham Palace for a tattoo and solace of taking photos of dead memorials thrown in dense English greens. I could forget so much laying in that grass, notes of who I was whispered in little blades biting the edge of my ears. Stories stilled from the lips of the current tenants six-feet underneath and screaming. My favorite tourist activities involved dead things. Shrubby graves reaching out and reformed predators of the past looking back at spectators for thirty-dollars without consent—empty spaces where their eyes used to be. People moving in waves of honorary congregation, bewildered with the possibilities of another Earth and the things that ate from it.

Domestic terrorism is a union of previous routines and whatever kept you alive for the last week. I am actively evading mine, sleeping on euro-time. But the dreams are back already, and so must I attend to all my attachments now.

London/Pt.4

I should tattoo the city to mark its temporary arrest on compounding years of sadness. This is the indecision of the day, where I battle myself and submit to a coinflip. Heads and tails, I can commit to chance, I cannot commit to the unknown. I marched into The Circle like a rite of passage pending, spoke my name and asked for a memory drawn into my belly in the form of a vase.

Staring up from the table I’m remembering a beautiful face of freckles in a Soho coffee shop, where eye contact became a mournful medium for art and longing. Wordless, I hoped the smile I drilled down as I walked out became a mark on her iris in the way this stoic city has shadowed mine, bright and velvety, as I let life drift me toward a thirsty lust to fuck it until only one of us is left standing with a transient stamp that causes a reptilian flinch at recall.

Days end. Trips end. Early, but not prematurely. Walking 24 miles in two days like a street ghost looking for a little light in the tunnel and the possibility of starting something good in the face of an untimely ending. There is a point where one city blends into every other city. The pub signs (another color, another animal), the ornate architecture, and the belief that age is equal to wisdom rut the long face of London like blitzkrieg scars of a stern grandfather.

London/Pt.3

Resolve is temporary immersion into a place that displays loneliness on the front porch, am I hiding or haunting? The cemetery of the morning is overgrown, overcrowded, and under adored by the running clubs speeding through Brompton to avoid death while I stand in archways holding my breath in a sunlit spell --gold at every angle, watching my shadows steel against a light that only loves it in opposition. Most graves are ageless, something obscured, one hundred and eighty-five years of rain and too many footprints for the earth to remember the perpetual pressing of leaves into mud. All dead things left to hide under ivy while the city sprouts around it, plotting against the plots in defamation, stones left nameless, visionary carvings with pigeon adornments and the prosperity of future urban explorers.

The London Underground is a dystopian invocation, too deep for anything but bad dreams and claustrophobic breath where everyone is sneaking a finite amount of oxygen in unacknowledged competition, people are not meant for this proximity. The Borough Market is an open-air synonym on a Saturday morning and everyone in this city is a foodie on the weekend.

Despite the crowds I feel further isolated, no one to share the experience and commentary I was destined for. I am a collection of 10-second stories on the internet and narrative texts to someone gracefully infiltrating my insides as if I was unaware of the connection and it's panic inducing fallout.

Hundreds of hungry people are herding one another several feet behind me, but only a handful in my immediate vision; I wonder if they would love me the way I love them, briefly--intense eye contact and ecstasy followed by one hundred immediate hours of longing. Snared by the life I envisioned for us in the heart of a heartbeat and the spell of nostalgia accidentally summoned from my mouth in the bottom of my stomach.

Tense

I got lost in the future and didn’t like it. I couldn’t see myself anywhere but stuck, staring into diode static at the same desk, waiting for an external wake-up call. The resurrection of movement after a sleep and a longing.

I got lost in the present hoping for a different future, interrogating forces I shouldn’t be fucking with and wondering if I’ve been sad over having too much control or too little.

I got lost in the past mulling over things that used to be mine. Phantom memories like limbs with brief ownership, serving no new purpose but a constant refrain for nostalgia on things I only miss because they ceased to exist.

My spirit animal is a bundle of Christmas lights with a single burnt bulb. The knot so tight you can never unwind to find the fix and spend the rest of your life looking for a second & third reason for its inability to shine. Adopting new personalities like local heroes at corner bars in Delco until you no longer need to mask your face under the glory of the glory days.

It's scary to be seen for your skeleton. Bones are dense feelings unsuitable for flesh, taking form for protective measures giving shape to something that represents a person.

Tired all the time, I would like to be seen naked for the bones carrying me without being scared into a portrait of thirst traps and sarcasm. But I no longer know how to lay under observation with the required stillness to be loved.

London/Pt.2

I am more alive than yesterday. An ex-pat wraith, aimless on the morning streets seeking sun and affirmation while stopping at every church that’s older than my country for photographic evidence of a religion I could lean on--hoping to see the face of god in the soft moss; a miracle beyond mortality and pareidolia. This is a dream within a dream, and the Green Man extends a hand, offering remembrance of my own face in the moss for posterity. I have been here and will always be here in this house-body birthright. I am in your memories in a different light if you knew me at all—my face in a photo, my face on the wall. An obvious plea for my fantasy of transient tomes and fear of permanent bones. Two luxuries that only daydreams can afford, and lovers understand.

I’ve known myself in wandering, I’ve known the city in tryst; twenty-four thousand steps and sweet on London. Sipping my way through peaky architecture and I saw crooked beams in a crooked ceiling holding wavy glass in a crooked window at St Martins. Woozy with the choir, loving the holy terroir knowing I can only appreciate this grace at close range for a few minutes to preserve in an anthology of epithets about churches I didn’t belong in.
I went to the Deadhouse at Somerset, but the dead wouldn’t have me for fear of security. I went to the café in the crypt under the church, but the idea ate bitterly at the reality of children crying prosaic grievances at bored parents (complete with ads!) leaving no room for brooding in the basement of saints.

Time is softer at night. Bordeaux in my bedroom, soju in the street, the ghost of Nell Gwynne poured Guinness perfectly under red lamps, yet I am suspiciously sober despite my prerequisites.

London/Pt.1

I love airports, but I’ve never liked flying. This year is starting with new experiences, like my first time panic landing, staring down the aisle with the immediate urgency to vacate my seat, space, skin. Gravity became a kaleidoscope weighing down, spinning ground to distort those previously adorned tones of warm color to cold confusion and switching the location of every bone in your body on a whim. It hurt like some stolen thing you only know in reflection, words you didn’t know you needed to say when they mattered—the realization that the last time you saw your grandfather was the last time you would see your grandfather and you didn’t get to prepare a self-sure elegy confirming his belief that when we leave we are gone. I wonder how he would feel if I told him about the dream I had where his spirit lived in a bush with sentient flowers that knew me from a distance and sang in hymns that made the air glow. Return to earth, grounded, still staring down the aisle remembering all the reasons why I didn’t want to be on this trip.

I’m outrunning myself. Curled to the interior of a train southbound to London, suitcase, backpack, empty seat at my side. The Atlantic grey is a heavy coat making me nauseous, creeping with fog knuckled fingers around my throat demanding a breathy sacrifice while that atmospheric crown adorns the countryside. A father and son sit across the aisle sharing snacks from a plastic bag, this is their space. This is the ritual of fatherhood, and I should only know it in observation. The last three years have seen fathers falling all around me, and though their numbers remain confident, I am nursing scars that like to bite back often in public spaces. Three mothers board with three babies in strollers and stand in the doorway. Everything on this train is now a conversational ploy for parenthood and neither the window nor the volume in my headphones can compete.

 It’s raining when I get off The Underground and no one knows me in this place. Down the sidewalk soaking it in—past a palace in Hyde Park but my socks have taken on water and the hotel bed is the only cure for wet feet and foreign streets. Exhaustion and isolation are laying horizontally with my feet over the edge preparing to leave, dressed for an activity I am uninterested in. My immediate future is The Goats Tavern, all the pubs in England are animals, all my thoughts about English pubs are romantic and sitting by a window watching the rain--wondering if fog and England synonymous.

Landscape

a few days in London will (not) fix me
but keep moving to outrun life
and the dreadful, urgent grey in pursuit
while the dense Atlantic chokes landscape into belief
and I,
to feel…
something
countering the foggy creep.

the smoke monster from Lost wasn’t real
because it never had a name.
being scared of nameless things is the electric lick
of anxiety that wets your brain before bed
when all you want is to love something in
the darkness
without
conductors.

the many tulpas of being…
alive
  /alone/
  in love
    in mourning.

I was a reverse tulpa, form over thought
given a name that I would breathe
against my will on a southern train in January.

Conspire

I used to be conspiratorial, now I’m just conspiracy-lite

Like there’s a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald hanging in my kitchen
But I’ve only listened to one 5-part deep dive podcast on the JFK assassination

Like my dogs name is Fox Mulder
But I forget the name of every X-Files episode

Like watching that UFO dance above Kuwait
Laid dark on smoke-pit roof
But it disappeared before I could show someone else

Like I used to read the Above Top Secret forums when I was twelve
But I don’t believe the government made ALL the frogs gay

Like I take the absence of light personally November thru February
But knee-deep depression is only in my head

I told some friends I needed a big change
And a car accident sounded better than a haircut
Because comedy only exists through tragedy
Everybody laughed

Flipping a coin is freedom from life decisions
This year I don’t believe in intention
Only continued self-deception
Conspiracy/conspire

Trapping

Houdini gets too much credit for being history’s greatest escape artist. Handcuffs and chains acquaint the trappings of reality, I dare him to enter my mind and try to escape the illusions, blurring life like ghosts in the imagination. Some of it was real <my immediate surroundings, maybe> but you can’t quite remember and the ropes tighten with every nameless situationship or a dream of a giant alligator in a small room. The man would free float, bonded in a void of oversexed encounters, Walter Mitty mindfucks and daydream nightdream deaddream escapades. Time is the end boss escape room villain, and we are talking over each other in pursuit of clues like alchemical glue. You can never age if you stop looking at clocks proving that ignorance is the fountain of youth.
Houdini trapped himself inside the trap for regular rebirthing to restart time. If freedom only comes from defeating underwater obstacles, I think I’ll pass, anxiety is already living with chains across my chest in constant search of the right breath.

Weaponized

Weaponized sentimentality sneaking up in the final weeks of the year, alone. It’s the end credit sequence that you want to fast forward but force restraint for a possible hidden final scene and esoteric payout, dividends springing from the bathtub too hot for the skin I was given.
The last thirty minutes are not in reverie, they’re exile and hope of passing through unscathed save the accrual of scrapes and self-inflicted boil-burns from bathwater three times a week. I’ve seen everyone I love and given alms to images of the past that come back when I close my eyes, unholy still.

Distorted

rainy day diner dream
coffee from a booth alone
(I wanted it all day)
different than coffee in a booth with you
the diner scene is desolate here
full of people with too much money
to remember loneliness
and other distorted sigils
in the form of a raindrop
navigating the full length of the window
another streak in the wet and
me envious of its purpose in a straight line
lips damp with the last sip

Doom

Wake up, it's time to doomscroll
7am and my eyes are allergic to light
15 minute minimum to feed the machine
Earth’s posterity guaranteed
Validating fake headlines after midnight
Proving my worth while
I lay in early bed dread
Not being a morning person
Bolting out of bed like
Frankenstein’s invocation
I am glued between two layers of soft
Suffering the horrors of
Money fiend modernity
Waiting for the day when
My dreams are full of ads
And other taxable content

Alt Cinema 8

Midnight movies always leave a mark
Stacking subconscious laments
Is it morning or mourning
I spent the night in backstroke evasion
Of a giant octopus
Eyes above the surface and black
The water black
The sky black
The skin black
Proofed by the moon in menacing highlights
These long legs of entanglement
Find me fleeing for my life
The deep seat of making the wrong choice
Is a retreat from making any
The snow on the ground this morning speaks back
Confirming the need to stand still
Because it's cold outside and
The tentacles have reduced their longing
To careful lurking
Enough that I can’t forget as I reach the shore
In early light