Unedited 2

high speed staring out my window with the bravado of someone that believes there is a difference between wet black and jet black while the asphalt eats everything it touches, you could fall into both face first, you can only lose yourself in one. mending old wounds on the floor kicking fire into shoeshine eyes, lucid pupils eating planets burning time. I’ve never lost control only wished someone could do it for me, never lost hold of the things I fold into my chest, white knuckle fighting.

Petal Gospel

looking for words between books and secret spaces where only secret words could fit and get stuck on something more concrete than myself repeating “planet eater” for a week because liking the sound of a voice is not enough to breathe it into a body. I am trying to make up a word to fill some hole in the air not yet eaten by a planet but I am not a planet eater and the hole is just an outline of two old words forced together. what philosophy is this, bastardized frustration in ethereal dress. what would it take to hop a train from the backyard and disappear night after day into the modern boxcar king millennial giving away a buck for a bottle and a kiss on the mouth devouring scenery with wine soaked minds, true planet eaters, true angels sweating bullets in high desert skies, true religions asking nothing but cactus flowers at man-height left to prickle your eyes with petal gospels true angel in the sun, eyes closed angel deathwish, holy water on the streets, two on the ground six speed in the wind, electric temples on side roads buzzing angel lights til we all come home, rubbing bright into our eyes, dirt in our palm lines and dusty angel minds. dreaming of longer roads, dreaming that two planets collide like a cosmic ouroboros daylight eating time.

Whiteboarding

lightning head
thunder head
three coffees before 10

freight train before bed
throwing axes in the backyard
plinking shot at empty cans
six-star pattern, shoot til you miss

five points for five points
my only aim
as world record holder
is impressing the smug
railroad fox

kitsune trickster
in the back of the house
blink back / Adderall
whiteboarding corporate structure
with mandatory spirit
and merchant taxes
 
charged for daydreaming
a small coffin in the margin
or a crystal ball emoji
entertaining office characters
and becoming one
small talk about Tesla
with dead pennies in the bank

no free electric future
its cross-threaded stars
with heart static perpetually
zoned out, low time is no time

Unedited 1

end of summer seasonal ego death, the end of earth eating itself whole for hibernation stasis while all us little planet eaters eat seventy-year servings of entropy after spending half your life spitting sharp diatribes at the weather weakening your bone denounce all sunlight after 7pm because you’re tired of the need to be endlessly productive. daylight belongs to bees all the angels retreat while everything before dark disappears I’m looking in my mouth for a flood gate switch open for alms from everything I’ve ever skipped because I was scared when my eyes were closed.

Alt Cinema 9

I watched a man die on the concrete pad behind a house vining its own history in conversational ivy a few minutes after her mouths wet lace dried on my cock in a stained-glass pattern with the afterglow of effervescent violence. he fell handing me a dream and stared up flat with understanding that the blood pooling slick under his head was a permanent exit and I thought about breaking a rib with compressions but I thought about her curves profiled in the doorway silhouette across the street as I walked away.
his last breath spilled into my distraction
fucking a perfect face like my faith depended on it.

Unsolved Mysteries

there is an eclipse coming and everyone can sit on lawn chairs in backyards watching two
celestial bodies devour all the light in our eyes,
planet eaters in protective glasses, private screenings at the doomlight drive-in,
end of summer and October eats the whole world while I’m learning how to get lost.
I want to disappear into the forest like a case on Unsolved Mysteries--lost in the frame of a 1999 camcorder, immortalized in impenetrable black like the saints of found footage
staring at the screen with unfortunate solitude so people wonder if I stepped into a portal between two birch trees because I had to investigate the bare white bark shining at night.
I’m looking for something deconstructed in two ways
mental desolation
  paired playfully in juxtaposition
with environmental dissonance
served in alternating chaos by a Cenobite with an interdimensional puzzle on a platter in the shape of a cube hiding the shape of a star, creating a form so unrecognizable that after six seasons the audience believes that everyone on the island is already dead because purgatory is a more distinguished form of disappearing for American households believing that the afterlife might be a tropical island with menacing corporate overlords and a formless cloud terrorizing the extras.

ScreenTime

angel fire evening
watching clouds clear
the softest spot in the sky
draping moonsmoke velvet over
halo-hanging earth
I brush screen time from my eyes for repatriation,
and forgiveness for not being part of every thing asked of me.
masking would be a better term if it meant that I
loved Halloween and not that every new person makes me feel under siege.
pounding afternoon war drums in echo on a daylight coffee date
and I’m smoking again. the ballad of bad habits like a moth in the light
because I’m still wondering if my mom liked me when I was a kid.
I was paralyzed by endings that I couldn’t recognize a beginning.

looking for a love like hallelujah in the dark
and hearing the heartless sex of bodies sweating bodies
(infatuated) everyone ending on different days of the week.
asleep—I dreamt of Death sauntering grey snow and TV static, scrolling left to right like Nintendo at the end of the world—I hung him in my arm between myself and my younger self, a trio of time belted by corporeal boundaries.
this scene, this small room sanctioned all light,
seeking alms for Death in a dream lamenting colorless landscapes with the backbite of remorse.

something like a door opens in the middle of the night.
robe to the floor and I wake up twice
miniature suns unfurl
like morning ferns
something like a door has opened in the middle of the night.

Hot Rain

Lightning bug summers exploding stars from our baseball bats.
Lining the porch steps with mason jar prisons like forever homes in hot rain 1994 with glass museums of over exposed yellows and tired greens.
Fireflies remember--outback by the dumpster, picking up secrets for nighttime listeners.
July thunder thinks through something bigger than itself,
and it’s wetter than I remember.
Walking old summers, before the infinite suicides of being loved on the inside
/before/
I wanted to run into something dark and permanent and breathless.
Some endless green like Annihilation, shimmering, a song soft enough to break and remediate.

Barista

the barista looks just like my aunt
get out of my head
some things should stay unsaid
I hate being informed of a twin--suddenly, a copy
wondering if they have the same cracks and the same crooked eye
from an incident that could’ve been avoided at 22
the walls around me are
impenetrable forces of separation
characters sharing dreams in daemonic chorus
if you collect enough lives the end boss enters the scene
and it’s you, shining without armor

Remade

the burning season leaves my body like the shape of the sound of a name. coming around every three years to seek and destroy in the spirit of formlessness, soft to be remade. making efforts to look at old pictures of myself and only recognize the background geography. heavy every day wondering why can’t I exist in accumulation, stuck on small time aberrations looking for the skeletal glyphs of a conspiracy conceived in the junk drawer. time is a circle, the circle is a snake, the snake is the ouroboros eating the head at the mouth. every third-year drips with decided expiration and I walk away on fire in self-righteous immolation too fast but too slow. holding on to sharp objects that cut self-affirming slices of once rendered feelings into a patchwork of scant ribbons. the aftermath looks like things I cared for but was too afraid to care more and the snake aimed to swallow something vital between my shoulder blades. I am left on the couch pretending not to know who killed Laura Palmer again in a non-existent mystery of shedding skin and the demons of misperception. transforming slow enough for distant viewing, like substance without direction in a series of low light vignettes to be seen and not shouldered.

Atlantic City

the first time I went to Atlantic City was a Tuesday afternoon
no one told me Atlantic City was not a Tuesday afternoon place
daylight casinos for desperate money
there hasn’t been a tourist here since 1987
star-eyed ages, cocaine glitterati turned greatest hits
seeing slot machines from space after 10pm
the preacher lady on the bench is the town historian
delivering a pigeon sermon to the flock of fleeting locals
with pizza communion on the boardwalk
throwing ten-dollar darts at a balloon inflated six days ago and showing
the Ferris wheel feigns beachfront dominance
from empty baskets whispering post-apocalyptic secrets
sign of the times
I didn’t brave the end of the boards
that I might wander out of space
into Virgil’s open hand to abandon hope
all ye who exit this Jersey Shore sanctuary

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.