undulating countenance, and yet again oblivion
when was it that our words became so mature?
slight voice and a subtle tension, that subtlety of how the very tips of your lips quiver
we descend from this bizarre world
nothing more to do or say, with no end, and the strangeness of that dream in which i continue to flip between the same pages
and the synapses of my frontal lobe begin their dance
that comforting rhythm will play no longer
worthless music, and worthless fashion
unfamiliar women seeking esoteric sensations
our tympanic membranes softly molested by scissors
and in that moment where our bodies were captured, our very beings leave the room to which we were once confined
and as if our treasure-boxes were turned over and emptied,
no longer do we seek to escape from singing our songs that nobody else could hear
but, you already knew of my cowardice, better than anyone i had ever known, or anyone i could ever know
our inevitable suicides that we were so ready to flee, the willingness of our self-corruption in the pursuit thereof, the midnight sound of trains passing
and how we both laughed at all their voluptuous fashions, so far removed from our own
does the howling wind make it easy to see? the effort in which it is taking me to make but a single step?
and rather than save the world, we but bided the time until it split open before us,
and we soon followed.
deluded into the belief that perhaps the act of drowning itself would be our salvation, until we could do not more than drown.
and the sound of fireworks in summer, how voices from all extant directions could be heard
how many times is it now?
that incessant beat, cacophony of melody
so obscene and lewd, how it slovenly flows and mixes
and girls of the city, forced to carry weapons
know not but fight or flight
humanity
gasping at the mere sight of the moon
feeling the teeth in my mouth which do not quite align
counting the days before another birthday
how many years has it been, or perhaps will it be?
and laughing, for without the microphone they are too weak to sing
from the heart
i wish i could tell you the answers you seek, of life and love and more, but i lack them myself
impeccably accurate songs and their spawn play inside my head as my gaze is fixed against the wall
i watch the dance of phantom spider legs
it brings me great mirth to say "oh, what wonderful and natural movements their legs have!!"
all i can understand are the things before me
none of that which is beyond or perhaps inside me
and i am so very sorry for that.
a drowning flightless bird requires wings of water!
the strands of hair binding me to my bedframe are before my eyes transmuted into semi-permeable and translucent embers
and though i wanted to save the spiders, i keep seeing them whenever i close my eyes, imposing, battle-ready
in the calm of the storm, a voice i have not one memory of ever having heard before whispers my name
and she tells me, sharply and sweetly
"write it down!"
and at once i am filled with agony. i writhe and sob and scream foreign curses into a pillow before i can do no more than ask, nay, beg, for her to tell me the answer
"what do you want me to write?", my half-mustered retort
my own pretension tells me that i am sad i cannot know the beautiful truths she wishes me to put to words, but somehow, i know this is a lie.
i know that all i wish is that i could ever capture the fleeting iridescence of a voice so maiden, by any means..
Last night, tiny raccoons flooded my bed and bit me all over. Bit me? Perhaps it's more aptly put that they kissed me. It was still cold, but they were there, comforting me.
Syringes, haloperidol, blood pressure alarms, screaming.
I'm here again, in the ward.
I'm always here.
I remember the first time I came here, and afterwards writing "a part of me will always stay in that place." I've lost so many pieces now that I cannot count, nor am I certain I've any left to lose; And every time I return here, I search for those missing pieces desperately, but can never seem to find even a scant trace of them.
Ward nightmares are intolerable. It's my last night here, yet I feel as though I've still a dime left to serve on my sentence.
A nurse asked me what was wrong as I stared past the wall infront of me. I quipped "I suppose 'fear' of hospitals isn't diagnosable criteria in the DSM-V." She didn't laugh, and recited some canned, uninteresting phrase. Rest isn't worth writing.
it is now time to stand up and arise,
all the broken memories of sleep.
your coquettish nonchalance,
leaves me bewildered as i awake once more from the thrall of past time,
staining my conscious with guilt of days i cannot once more return to,
that aftertaste of bad dreams
staring into the night, to find no breathing bodies beside mine,
finding no comfort in the rhythm of breathing of neither sleeping lover nor comrade,
and the ineradicable sense of forlornity, from both the world and myself, leaves me catatonic, unable to find purpose in uttering the words i wish to speak,
under that bridge, where we all once stayed,
but only i remain, convalescing in a makeshift cot under the highway that used to be yours.
and it still is, though you will never return, i'm afraid.
煙草一本の端
まるで灰で出来た蛇のよう、
数え切れない後悔、理解されない言い訳
あの泥濡れな部屋の壁に書いてあったセリフ、
「綺麗にする方法が無かろう」二人笑い合い、
部屋の外にある世界が焦れったいので、
引きこもっていた私達は
なんどもふざけ、何でもないようなことばっかりやり、
楽な日々を過ごした。
ほんま無意味な生活なのになぜが無意義ではなかった。
そう、今よりもあの頃は、
遥かに意義があったと思う。
for some reason the town seems as though it's alive tonight, as if it were actually breathing,
you opened the irrigation channels to your heart and though i tried to walk along the banks thereof,
i lost my way, leaving me to drift at something akin to the edge of a space occupied by accumulated trauma,
and though i could tell from seeing alone,
i had to remark thatyour face was not yours.
i wanted you to say
"this is enough,"
or perhaps
"there was nothing,"
but your words were poorly rendered composite photographs, the intent behind them as unclear as what they actually were,
"trading vegetables for fleshlights."
truthfully, deceiving others is the worst,
but hypocrite i am to think so,
playing with floating dinosaur fossils in the bathtub,
having stolen them from the museum,
and having picnics at a graveyard, insufflating heroin off of a cracked phone screen.
beggars guarding the gates of heaven,
give holy water to their faux flowers. a path splits sevenfold,
the middlemost of its children razed and barren,
but is the only correct path.
unmarked graves laden not with pink petals, but neatly wrapped candies.
a coin split into two halves found inside a jacket pocket, with no knowledge of how it came to be there.
looking for your name in the corner of every daily herald,
and paying for meaningless tattoos on a whim, instead of getting the tar stains removed from my teeth,
because you always said you liked the taste of cigarettes on me.
summer, and the time capsule i could never find,
are buried somewhere, perhaps close in proximity,
but i feel i'd sooner drag that canal and return your bike
than dig another hundred holes in vain.
月明かりの腕の中に
踊れば踊るほど若く絶対なるって
どっから聞いたことがある
そうならば月が太陽より
優しいな。
walking through the moonlit townside, from afar, a tune i've a memory of hearing
on the oh so lonely asphalt
somewhere the dim orange of a lamp,
and the howling of dogs,
my breathing and steps and heartbeat and sniffling so sharply i can hear now,
the house i'd just dashed so madly from in boxers as distant a memory as my own birth..
crickets, and from afar the low rumble of the highway, and right in front of me the sound of the wind amplified by the stillness of the night
in a weak and whispered voice my humming becomes silent tears
for why, i wonder? that my strength has become but nought
and the midnight town becomes the silence of space
and the stars right above me, this melody of mine that continues to ring out through the quiet sobs
that everything may not have a correct answer, i begin to wonder
but even if this humanity was extinguished in a moment
even if so,
my music cannot die.
ineffably tired,
there's a fire in the gears of my cognition
nicotine poisoning? dopamine antagonism? hands with an awful tremor
i cannot bleed this sadness away
the intrinsic need to pluck the hairs from between your eyebrows just one time more
tonight i wonder
"do all birds really die?"
black to move
goodnight!
soft face subsumed into couch cushion
waiting for the afterimage of you,
for the taste of your words in my mouth
to subside.
"i am so unhappy."
endless soliloquies hewn in stone,
underneath the highway,
names unforgotten,
and finally, without false bravado you,
lulled me to sleep with forehead kiss,
which spoke a silent promise to me, that'd you'd be breathing right beside me,
when i awoke
sun hidden, severity of facial trim
oh what tremendous pain to be from the spittle of earthly passion forsook
how a ray of light is so quick to ruin my lovely melancholy of gray
i consider queen's pawn to d4
the treachery of it all, i am aghast!
left to my own silencing of the self
yes, no longer will my subtle motions dance in their intrepid ways,
but in the style of tardive dyskinesia
i take a small white pill to feel better, to feel nothing.
thienobenzodiazepine
i too will join them,
so addicted to their technicolor tragedies and freudian fantasies
flowers are my friends
they've always a cheerful ear to lend
i was crestfallen to see the spriteful figure of a lily in book fold
"gods," i exclaimed, "why be it so!"
but, said the flower to i
"were i not, i'd have never met your eyes."
subcutaneous melancholy
neuroleptic melange
how you soothe the vibrations of my thinking mind
beautiful prose: its lights turned out, filament cold.
to nurse from your courage just a drop
midnight, and the absence of sound once there
torments me so
i shake violently, and against mine own will mutter:
"in vino, veritas"
bicycle spoke eyesight, bloodshot
prolificity once more obtained
i write so no soul need hear.
lured once more to the sweet honeydew of unwakefulness
spitting out chewing tobacco
rain-covered coveralls
the silence of space above me again
hoping to chance upon a kindred soul upon the night-laden beach
no stars, but turtle eggs forewarned
rain becomes a spitting and sharp pitter-patter pit-pat on my bare skin, and i laugh
warm saké in my right hand, i quaff, and curse to the gods and the black mirror sheet of ocean
and the sea she spoke
"love yourself, buddy"
and kissed my knees with her milky waves.
cigarette tar, scorched lungs
encapsulated in these words a life, oh so many minutes therein spent
when did we become so predictable, when did our predilections become decided for us
no one notices that opposite sides on a die all add up to seven
i feel foolish, carrying dice and cards where no man will play
not spades nor skat
the modern poet is bare: he loves words and ideas, but not much else
i toss a pair of dice off the third story, and wonder if it's evens or odds
i tried to write with a feather, but i've not a proper inkwell; oh well
i steal paintings by signing my name
love is: is? was? when?
turquoise vaccuum of the night sky, all the sound thereunder gone somewhere
(where?)
o, subtle delectation of my hubris
what commands you extol, and whyfore do i greet these with arms out-streched as to a lover?
that loathsome desire, path to self-inflicted ignominy
sulfery and strangely fruity my breath, gods, have i imbibed poison yet again!
what verb, do you figure, plays its part in my annihilation of the self?
is it called "missing"?
saepe nihil cogitas!
whyfore should one miss that which begets not weal but woe?
glaucous retinas, pupils hemmhoraged from over-dilation, dried blood, butterflies.
real, imaginary, it didn't matter.
the proclivity to fall in love with a sweet, sharp illusory voice with every catch of the ear she grants;
i focus on the carbon caterpillar crumbling on the cliff-edge of my cigarette.
dessicated lips perform arid kisses: tired bodies perform empty dances.
non-standard nomenclature, and they call you crazy, those regnant experts of physio-psychological topography . . .
no one pursues art, only salaries and sex
i tossed the heart you gave me off twenty two stories, as neither you nor i wanted any part of it.
we kissed; i'd have rather jumped and kissed the wind
is not warmth a basic human right?
partial opioid agonist dentifrice
foreign atypical neuroleptics.
is it not all so strange?
but nobody seems to care, not enough to ask, at any rate
i'm afraid i've outlived the welcome of my tenancy, coming back here so often
waves of individuals come and go, i feel as though i must trudge through the bog of human lives, become assimilated in the machinescape of their affairs
i've not a mask more to wear
have i too, found myself at odds with the grammar of life? am i a misplaced prenominal, awkward and clumsy and wrong?
all i leave is the drafts of these poems, unshared, unread, and unloved.
what a sad gesture! to write and never be read, to be battered with fulsome false flattery, being compared to roses instead of the midnight tinge of kamchatka lilies or gingko leaves
completed gear cycle: work, talk, sex, entertainment, obligation, deceit.
no one tastes the rain or the flowers
no one has time for anything
wind caresses me with its mischievous wisps
as the sky waves goodbye in scarlet amber with its last light
yes, perhaps today is a good day to die
i love the way you look at me when you pretend not to notice: you always give it away
the savage peaks of foamy white cumulonimbus stain my eyes against the listless blue of late summer sky, and i am at one with the loneliness of self intolerable
forlorn though i may appear, i am well-to-do with the screaming of italic braille chalkboard slashes in my mindspace, for, you're never alone if you're quite mad
thumbs outside of pockets, oh how fun!
but truthfully, as i tease ashtray with cigarette, i'm not quite so mad as to be unlonely
and i am all the sadder for not being madder.
in recovery they say that sobriety is cigarettes and sex; why is it so?
goodbye to the drunken nights and drunker promises, to the feeling of understanding the world, and how to write about it, too
money and cars and women and cigarettes and overtime and exhaustion and abject tedium
it seems to me that sobriety is yet another tooth in the gears of society
the pursuit of art is abandoned for installment plans on objects pushed onto you by everyone else
lord only knows i'd rather have my kvass and hallucinations.
men's bathroom and chalky powder and bliss
glossy-eyed and gaining speed we
danced
in artificial disco-ball twilight
faster, faster..
slashing into the rink ice we
laughed, and played
and you fell over a few times but so did i,
so it was okay.
stealing into the night, awaiting the bus i
noticed
the old homeless guy wasn't there tonight:
we'd never see him again.
your showerhead was weak, as usual, but i'd almost grown accustomed to it by then
so it was okay.
i'd hog the water for a while, mostly because it felt good but
also
because i loved to look at your breasts and hips and ass covered in dew like cold morning
but you weren't mad at me, for leaving you in the cold part of the shower
so it was okay.
in opulence
we wither
in imperfect totality
suddenly
without great crash or din
reality becomes too real
the threads that bind your mouth together feel splitting at the seams
you want to scream
but the screaming begins in Borodin and ends in as of yet unwritten bedlam
that breaks you
cochlea boiling with hallucination
alleluia, kyrie eleison
the story becomes non-linear
and you're scared of what comes next.. or before?
so cold i
burned my shirt..
sorry, mother.
it wasn't enough
to go back
and pretend nothing had happened.
i watched him die there
and it scared me.
i need myself a spot
to drink and bleed this sorrow away
for five or ten years.
blackest bile in his eyes
i remember the face of oblivion underneath the stars
how the luminosity of millions d'étoiles could not bring light once more to his eyes
but what rends me with terror, more than all else
is to know that the face of oblivion is not more than that of a man's.
tentative masks adorn aptly adult function
as we rise from metal-framed beds to the tumult of synthetic clock chime
that marks the dawn of the working day.
hands callous as i reach for my alarm,
i can't quite get at it.
oh yeah, i now remember:
i was fired yesterday
my mother stuffed five dollars into an empty fishbowl;
i knew the tooth fairy wasn't real.
i love those avian songsters;
the ones with lovely tufts of blue upon their little heads?
i wish i could befriend one, and that he would walk with me forever
and i would bury him in a cardboard and pykrete-fashioned frigate set ablaze upon the sea
when he died, of course
because all birds die.
courtyard cigarette smoking
i hate everyone here
except the old drunk
tracing my steps in the ward again
the paint chipping from the walls falls in familiar grace
a sick feeling.
my life is passing
i am going no-where...
people don't
realize
how they're hurting people.
deprive a man of his freedom
with skilless elocution thus:
"it's for the best"
like a Stalin-era commissar
the indecorous americanery of them
with community college diplomas
are now the arbiter of one's fate
smugly trading corner couplets
with their severed gestures and immaculate tubes
trade me just a drop, À boire!
but you leave me too parched in endless cul-de-sac daydreams,
sweat reeking of substituted cathinones
because nothing else was there for me to wake up to.
because the poetry is the only way i can speak to you.
we are vile creatures virtued in disguise
restless and without anodyne
breathing fractals of orange lamplight cascade through the tree leaves to our bodies
performing their internecine death-duets.
outlander, recreant, païen!
basking in the simple profligacies of our living
fucking to insulate our sin from theirs,
from their inimical innuendoes
hiding away while love still burns in our innards and thighs
camber of your small breasts,
i'm eerily aware of your every breath,
at last, lust overflows into humid summer night.
i had a lucid dream last night
i hope it's the last i ever have.
i flew and i fucked and it was better than living.
psych ward windows are tinted so you can't see through
what shit, they don't even let you look through a fucking window.
me, the turpentined zingara,
an insoluble imbecile in soluble dreams
the first
time i ever once smelled in that dicacious land of the thief of unwakefulness,
honeydew patch of slumber,
it was your voice, all scathing criticism and whisky,
and it was all breaking down, of course:
the walls and the hugo simberg paintings and the texture of the scenery of it all,
i knew it to be a dream.
moon dripping with blood like honey or honey-blood,
and your face became mine,
and my breath was barbed-wire and burnt-corked,
and how i couldn't scream!
how sound could not be rend from my throat or diaphragm,
how there was no air to which sound could be birthed!
just a night of many, i'll
close the portcullis on it, on me
and steal into the solitude of a bottle.
and when i woke again,
my breath was the rosy miasma of cheap vodka,
clad in dismembered countenance and the sharp amber daggers of delirium tremens,
at 6:59 A.M., under the emetic and blinding lamp that read "LIQUOR"
and he knew i looked like death incarnated onto a plywood sheet and sundered in half with the dirty cistern of a woman's shithouse,
and i knew he knew, and he sold me another two half-gallons of booze anyway,
people are sometimes lovely that way. and some are not.
and again i traveled outwards and not upwards;
and again all the faces were fashioned, and hid they utter shittiness under the guise of semi-immaculate pleasantries,
and again all the eyes were mannequin eyes
and again all my eyes were warm tears and vodka;
a dying man out of many, gravely-ill silhouette slipping into the grave of twilight,
tastebuds all bile and the mauve taste of blood,
and the choir of the common conscience against my fucking ears again and again,
"Why so somber?"
"Why so somber?"
great pretenders on waxen wings,
i cannot share in your unconscious conscience, leave me be to drown myself in it all,
in it all,
while the tender earth swiftly awaits your fall,
your dysprosium hearts with nary a troy fucking ounce of compassion therein,
damning yourselves with the superearthly,
while i damn myself with that which is all-too-earthly indeed,
(it's very possible that we're both wrong!)
my drunken and vicious outrage of words spat through tar-stained teeth dripping onto paper like delinquent tears,
all the while there is no living man to be seen, again and again..
all i have
and all i am
is the gentle closedness of my eyes
forever.
all in the ears, the ears
canine and apoplectic stupidities on the backdrop of empty wonders,
and the dark that is empty,
so damn empty, they lied and they were wrong,
the heroes of yesteryear,
suffering begets but funereal wisdoms you take to the grave,
"we cannot be left to suffer!"
"we cannot be left to suffer!"
i wonder about that...
our blind stumblings to the exit aren't good because they are not bad,
our streaks of hollowed blood aren't love because they are not hate,
my screams are not free because they are grandfathered in,
street signals on backroads go to sleep at 12 o' clock sharp
while i lay awake.
inconsolably blank stares follow me in haphazard grace;
burning tongues like pentecost, blabbering amiable curses my way,
it hurts, good Christ it hurts!
familiar teeth of their chatter still burns my skin like rampant arsenic,
decayed rubber veins bulging in obsequious ugliness,
longing for the death-smothering of your couch pillow or
anything, anything but this thing,
finally they withdraw from the closeness of my ears
and go somewhere to live or die
in coerced madness
endless summer workdays eat all the flowers, all the time for flowers
coming to the end of everything that can ever happen to you
it is the center of fire
the rain too is older, its
droplets performing their once-gentle kisses,
A seasick song of a thousand wayward lilies,
sticking circs until they're dead dead like the park flowers,
smiling all the death-smilings of mouths full with dirty pyroxene;
she was like a perfect cigarette, unsmoked and unsmoldering and never intended for such a thing,
but something unpredictable happened:
she went up in the flames of beautiful and hitherto unspoken words, and her smoke was poetry, too,
and i was lucky enough to be crowned sole witness of her mauve and lovely burning,
and i thought, too, that hers would be a burning of ten-thousand passion-years, but it wasn't.
it was two years and then she left us, maybe because she was better than any of us could ever be, and she probably knew it, too;
and that was it,
my eyes were so adjusted to the blaze that it left me in darkness too profound to bear,
left me stumbling insanely over the corpses of vodka bottles i'd murdered to the last drop, a graveyard
hers and mine,
and when my eyes finally adjusted once more to the darkness of before there was nothing any longer to see,
(or maybe there never was)
just ordinary people reflecting the same baseless nothingness to each-other,
all hollow ghosts full of hollow love,
invsible dances and perpetuation of fatuous superficialities,
and i came to understand why you left in such a damned hurry:
there's nowhere here to go to!
what an horrible emptiness we all share.
i find myself a foreigner in this bizarre dream of living,
and everyone's laughing and crying and full of stomach acid and sertraline,
how good for them! their vicious merrymaking,
society full of silicone bones and august radiowaves gone all too sour,
it's so.. uncommonly ugly, so steeped in gratuitous violence, in refrain!
"rain shines, moon pours..."
dollar bar and sleepy whores,
we're all rooted on a plane of taffy stretched far too thin,
and the weight is too much! far too much!
we're in freefall and we're too damned occupied with nothing in particular to do anything at all.
hell, it'd be worth dying if it was for something,
for anything,
but we're not often too good to our thoughts,
we just tend to waste them on flashy nothings, waste like nose-waste into a tissue,
blow, wad, flush..
it's a perplexing notion
how terrifying and meaningless it all seems to be,
how each tick of the clock brings us ever the more close to that
personal darkness we're all soon to slip into once and for all,
all the little songs dying here and there on the way,
all the accidental eeriness of discordant dreams of homes-no-longer,
stalked ceaselessly by the vague apparitions of those ungodly blue maggots called sin,
undue hearts heavy with due rent, and the infinite solemnizations of our perpetual uselessness,
yes, life has too often little to do with feelings...
a slight life and a smaller way to go..
palpable melancholy pours from improper death-beds,
languid convulsions into the last dying light,
called home, maybe,
maybe it's home, after-all...
winter sleep, and wine-stained poems for the dogs.
sometimes the dark makes sense
in this
play without a plot,
this endless waiting for the familiar pull of strings that will not come;
sometimes, the dark just makes sense
in the monotony of before-dawn,
when being and nothingness become a semantic blur like cockroaches and their shadows close to the wall,
when you can just vaguely pretend it's not all emptied-out,
that we're not damned to the meaningless and the always dull,
that all of our punctuations aren't just exhaustions and disgust,
that it's not all Liquormen and excruciations like it is, ass-banditry and existential infirmity,
that there's still a breath of air left somewhere around here, somewhere, unslept and wine-maddened at 3:13 in the morning, in the dark.
"ceci tuera cela"
lobotomy-eyes and a withered lecture, yes, those with the ceaseless and sharp gaze of their deathadder countenances
just nothing and rotting, that's the sum of us and our brazen pilferings, nothing and rotting!
the intraversible futility of this idiot ghost that i am, all uncalculated and clumsy indifference to all the carefully crazy
(and too much of everything is carefully crazy)
i am the brief promise of a smile among all the delirious and seething cabbages,
a corseted existence,
so as not to spill into the sunset or into the freeway or into anyone or anything else.
and yet,
this unconditional ally i know as separateness leaves me always, always, so strangely, nakedly, vulnerably bored..
i've a lot of time to mull it all over.
the passage of time like a phantom, idle bleeding, only
the blood never clocks in and shows face,
it's as though a wound that by all rights ought to be able to be seen
for how obvious it seems
and still, nothing:
just the margin-feeling of decay, a tertiary uncomfortability you cannot shake, with all the perturbing beauty of the bad dream.
but it's not in terms so certain, nothing is,
the world at large blanketed in a viscous ridiculousness,
giving all its content the irreal and tentative sheen of the floating bubble and her precarious and miraculous surface tension,
a transient and precious luster unique to the things that just barely are..
we are like torn paper on galvanized iron sheets, both things just as preposterous as as the other,
two bizarre uglinesses refracting each other's light,
but then again, all my attempted abstractions of things seem to throw the fight,
"smithereens, smithereens,
it all comes down."
my mother had spoken drunkenly, beautifully to me as a boy
when the Columbia exploded,
i don't think i've ever heard anything that made quite as much sense before or since,
it was one of those phrasings that escaped her mouth almost involuntarily,
and scared her, and me, too,
because it seemed like something it wasn't possible for a human being to say so succinctly and perfectly at exactly the time it needed to be said.
i don't think i've ever understood poetry the way that she could speak sometimes,
hell, i don't think i've ever understood how to be a drunk like she could sometimes, either
sometimes people like that, while being seemingly without talent in anything in particular,
are so very, very gifted at the art of being themselves, hermetic and brilliant and without any effort in the world.
some people are made of things like that, and are all the better for it. some people like me seem to be haphazard plasterings of cornered fury, and cornrowed mischief, and timeclocks and televisions, and all the other bullshit that seems to litter both streets and lives,
and i cannot help but be left to wonder what in the hell it all means, while the woman trots victoriously to the restroom, the awful light of an unshaded lightbulb claws its way into your eyes, an unmuffled engine popping like the fourth of july;
what in hell is this place that i reside in? what exactly is it that i'm always in the middle of?
and some nights it feels like i'm on the edge of grasping something big, a memory, maybe, of something else or somewhere else, the vague outline of a justification finally for this constant and pervasive feeling of my own eternal misplacement here,
almost there,
almost there and
then, when my mind finally arrives
the memory is just gone, the memory and the words someone
took them
when i needed them the most.
condemned to incandescent hell-holes or an early grave,
because some of us are too precious and delicate and beautiful for the rest of them
forsaken to solitudine, because some of us believe with absolute conviction that possession of any amount of pride for the self is an unpardonable and egregious sin against existence itself,
because some of us believe life is about playing the piano,
or about being yourself in spite of the weight of the whole world bearing down on your shoulders,
because some of us value life over feeding a machine built to propagate its own existence perpetually,
because some of us are poets and criminals, or at least try to be,
because some of us know it's wrong to be injected with neuroleptics just for crying,
because some of us know something is terribly, horrifyingly wrong with the world today,
we've only those two places to go,
a plastic mass-produced hospital bed without sheets or a coffin
because if we don't keep our machine-civilization turning and destroying and murdering,
then we're not even considered human anymore.
「永遠にね?」
「ああ、永遠に。」
ｰｰｰ或日の欠片
生きるって何なんだろう?どうして生まれてくるんだ？ここは一体何だ？
人がなんで生きなくてはならないのか。
人間は生き続ける本能が慥かにあるんだが、どうしてその本能に從わないとダメなのだろう？
別の本能なら從わないことが多すぎる．．仕事の時は眠くなれば眠ることは絶対不可能って誰でも分かる常識だ。セックスしたい時はしないことも多くて、食べたい時は食べないことも．．
そうならば何故生きないことだけが別なんだろう？生きないと選ぶのはどこの国でも罪として思われる。どうしてそうなるんだ？矛盾すぎるじゃないか。どんなに辛くても世間に本能に從わなくさせて、けれども生きないことだけが悪い、生きる本能にだけ從わなくては絶対ならないことだ。どうして？
こういう考えが最近十分あります。頭がおかしくなりそうだけれど、なんか思いついた気がするんだ。
この存在っては何かの試しだとしたら、生き続けるか命を捨てるか、どちらが正解なのだろう。
もう生き続けるエネルギーがなくなったみたいで、俺の人生のくだらなさ、悔い、哀れ、痛み．．前週から家のない生活に戻って、父親が死にそうで、もう沢山すぎ、俺自身の限界を遥かに超えた辛さに勝つわけがあるまい。
希望売る人に出会って鉄道自殺とかしないといいな。そんな人無論いないけど、その上鉄道がどこでもある．．
the sky at noon was so beautiful i almost felt ashamed to be alive: it was more beautiful than my life, than all of our lives.
my endless search for anywhere at all only brings me to crooked places where love goes to die, newly tarred parking lots adorned with discarded insulin syringes, check-out lines waiting behind someone with only frozen shrimp and a 4-pack of modelo...
i am so unhappy.
there's no point to any of this.
there never was.
you can speak to dogs or cats or even houseflies more candidly than any human being nowadays
why that's so is beyond me; my conjecture is that it's some inexplicable mixture of programming and imbecelic obeisance
at the coffeeshop today was a bunch of those crooked cops
some decrepit looking yellow-haired woman was bitching about one of the homeless guys begging for change outside
i know the guy
he's a solid chess player
now, it's just par for the course for police to pick on homeless, that's just how life is in this shithole of a quote on quote "country"
my beef lies with the audacity of this
insipid toiling gremlin
with her new shiny 202X Suburban
who has no other way of exhibiting power in her impotent and unmeaningful existence
than to pick on a good chess player
down on his luck
reduced to groveling for nigh-worthless silver and copper coins stamped with even more worthless men
i hope she lives until one-hundred and twenty-three
so ancient and rotted that she can't even shovel triple-processed shitporridge
down her
worthless, gaping shitpipe
of a mouth
on her own.
昨夜夢を見た。
元彼女が出、
「ごめん、キラごめんな、俺が悪かった」
泣き潰していた私は何度も言い、
そうしてキラは
私を強く抱いているまま、
小さい声で美しく
風のように薄く
「大丈夫だよ」と。
そんなに美しい彼女の声を聞いたことが
生涯初めてだ。
夢のキラの腕の中に
そのままに
永久にいたい。
目が覚めた時から自殺しか考えられない。
もういっぺん彼女に会うよりも
何も欲しいものなんて
ない。ないんだ。
もう生きていられないのだろう。
ダメだ。
幼い頃から死に向かっているのが気づき、
やっと死に辿り着くのはすぐかなと思う。
そりゃそうだとしたら、
居場所のない私が
愛されるわけのない私が
死んだ方のいいくそったれの私が
泣けない私が
何も出来ない私が
やっとの自決に
死の完全なる優しさに
感謝致します。
芥川先生は昔
「人生は一行のボオドレエルにも若かない」と書きました。私は賛成します。その上言い残したいのは、
人生は一行の芥川にも若かない
と。
i wish i had the courage to ask someone
to ask anyone
to save me from these beautifully miserable nights,
to bring me back to those hideously pleasant days,
because my vision of the present is deeply stained into the fabric with the guilty-conscience of memories of her i don't feel i deserve,
and through the lens of self-loathing i can't help but to project upon myself
everything is warped and so frustratingly sad,
and so damned bitterly cold,
and so familiarly fucking dark,
i wish someone would just pluck me out of this
torturous sentence
where i feel bound by some undefinable force
to chase after every starburst of poetic thought,
and turn it into something honest and pretty,
i wish someone would rescue me,
from the same old dark and same old cold,
i wish so dearly you would rescue me,
but we both know
there's no-one behind that knock at the door,
is there?
two tickets to Icarie,
where every day is August 32nd
and home to Valle de L'eau
where no-one is playing with the clocks.
nightbirds curiously gorging themselves on the stuff that grows around peach-pits,
and you standing with your gorgeously chapped lips and eyes like decadent daylight full of dreams and disaster both,
and me not knowing what to say i, let forth a steady tone with my voice so as not to offend you with my bludgeoning silence,
wanton streams of the controlled chaos called 'beauty' radiating from your skin wholly perceptible to eyes naked and not,
you just watched me for the longest while i'll ever know,
until the nightbirds flew off to become daybirds leaving behind the orgiastic massacre of fruitflesh and seed in their stead,
until the sun dove below the sudden horizon,
and moonlight cooked us younger with her tender rays,
until i realized in abrupt perfection that nothing would be nicer than to die in the snowglobe of this very moment with you,
until i woke up.
i fell in love with a girl who ended up becoming my favorite poet.
she died -- i still can't believe it -- in november, in her college dorm.
i still listen to our recordings, practicing poesy and dramatizing historical figures both lovely and not-so, plastered on the wonder of mutual affection and the blissful forlorness of a lovers' snowglobe reality.
now it seems all there's left is waiting;
just waiting for that sweet, still night,
waiting to become a pillar of salt.
drank myself into and out-of and back in-to a stupor
seditiously drunken and excoriatingly stupid i
melted gracefully into the cynic and cistern-like twilight and
found myself by the railway tracks, far away from landing territory; i ended up at a sheet of plywood with graffiti on the wall behind: THE LIGHT WAY, it read
i knew i was where i was ought to be, maybe all-along, too;
i thought i was dying from the heat for a few hours, then, i became inexplicably serene; trainspotted until morning light.
in the night searching for my lost phone i
realized
how profound fire is in the darkness
when you most need it
ten-hundred-thousand pounds of steel rushed by at disastrous expedience,
our nation's continental veins bellowed in abject cacophony
bedlam of machinery rupturing my ear-drums on iron rail,
the hot night air became so very cold for a brief minute as it tore past me,
vanquishing my makeshift torch's fire,
leaving me in the darkness the train left behind for me,
the moonlight was bright enough to read, so i had a date to keep with Céline
perhaps my only friend.
wishing you goodluck and Kindness in all of our ever-evolving worst semi-mental breakdowns ever.
emaciated and now quiet once-cacophonies give birth to the defeaning silence of today; all we have is the methodical hum of factories fashioning infatuation out of polyvinyl-chloride to drown out the maddening vaccuum of m(eaningless)uted sound that spills from the pores of every city street and every rattling radiator in some grandmother's basement and every deteriorated news-paper stand with a creaky door.
my love goes out to you, o clandestine cartographer, your platonic and sun-bathed heart held so gently out of sight from the watchful eyes of above and below and of the man you sleep next to at night, for fear (and rightfully so) that they should tear away your soulful flesh-core from your very breast and dine in egregious bouts of hate and hedonism upon the love that dwells therein, their endless ritual-toil in search of miserable fixes for their chronically unsparkling humility;
o, you silentmost of cartographers, tear into my skin with the satin of your nails: won't you carve unto me the path to myself?
are you not my mirror, dear cartographer? not the reflection of your eyes but the very flesh of your body, gorgeously seeping with the plumpness of self-love?
am i not your mirror, basking in your painfully unaffectionate gaze, a look one can only truly rend upon oneself?
tell me cartographer! was it that i trusted in myself too much? or have i never trusted im myself enough?
was self-desecration the means to my salvation? or have i merely expedited my damnation?
why do i value the lives of others but loathe to live my own?
i am lost, my lovely cartographer; it is as though every landmark that should by rights exist standing about has vanished into the depths of my vision compromised by torment
the ground bears no distinction and no tracks,
please tell me cartographer,
how do you draw a map of a place with no-where to go?
it's as if the act of living has transposed into nothing more than mere waitings, as it were: ceaseless and serial anticipations for something, for what.. the expiration of time alone? but as time passes by it doesn't appear to pass through; the accumulation of expired time seems as though it weighs on body and mind with significant encumbrance, and every movement thereafter becomes inexorably slower and duller and more slightly unbearably uncomfortable,
Christ it's as if all i am is apprehension and tobacco smoke masquerading as a fucking person; maybe that's all i ever was?
fish formula and bio-rings, but they die anyway
in the midnight howl of basement tenement halls adorned with 50 watt bulbs and the smell of sweet ammonia
and homeless people afraid of hospital stays for fear of disulfiram and needles and force-fed Scotch,
smoking their last cigarette butts to stay out of the rain
drinking surgical spirit,
somehow smarter than the college-kids, dry-humping the professor's ego until they find themselves in their assigned cubicle
obsequiously slouching and lobotomized
bisected tongues and unconscious conscientiousness
more fucking flags than convictions
more opinions than pets
unlearned until they can't learn anything from anybody
when you can learn anything from anybody,
the push or scrape argument again
when there might as well be no crack for 700 miles,
or however far until dawn is,
and the kid alseep behind the parking lot dumpster
sheltered under garbage-lid roof
16% battery and no mobile data
but enough heroin in his pocket to get through tomorrow without begging
sleeps soundly through the rain.
life and her
semi-infinite come-me-bys
is sometimes not enough
for what i want and need.
schizophrenia makes it hard
to pursue my ambitions
sometimes, all there is is the poetry
to keep my ship steady and adroit
to keep the over-resting from consuming what's left
of my half-buried ambition
from plunging into madness
i would love
a hug
more often
sometimes.
頬の先真っ赤っか
頭傾け笑って
いつものような夜、いつものような笑顔
もう2度と見ない笑顔だったことさえ知ってば
笑わないことはしなかっただろうと私は思う。
どこ行っちまってんのかな
そうしてまだ笑っているんだろうな。
詩を書いた
言葉の垢抜けした詩ではない
テーマの深い詩でもない
いい詩でもない。
短く醜く
下手くそな詩なんだ
でもさ、俺の詩だ。
書き続けましょぅ？
凶暴の意味を分かって
やっとの殴り合い
女ってこういうものか。
俯き癖坊ちゃん
いつも髪に顔を隠して身
寂々と家に帰り
眠りの泥棒に命を半切されちまう。
uncommonly ugly
steeped in gratuitous violence
because death is cheap.
rain shines,
and the moon pours.
雀が鳴いていない
郷愁、哀愁
安い酒で世を破壊。
窓硝子崩れ出してきた夢
またも白眼、白眼、白眼．．．
救いは人を騙すこと？
救いは人を無くしてくれること？
救いは隣人への挨拶だってこと？
解らない。
going to pieces
singing sweet lullabies for my ex-teeth
glowing vermillion dots in the distance
are they watching?
nobody knows
the dance i never danced
and glares of white light throughout my childhood.
dreams fallen asleep
hum of a laundry machine
bottle of codeine in a jacket pocket
production lines unstopping
smell of a city bus
color of the sky on prozac
i fell asleep under the christmas tree.
ちっぽけな街の星空の下
雲が来たり
雨が降る。
家のない私の本が
濡れて淋しい。
we wrote all over the bathroom mirror in blue lipstick
plastered the walls with our fingerpaintings
covered a guitar in cigarette packaging
god, what didn't we do?
we even watched foster's home high on dope.
よっぽど4年前、買えばよかったという本を買わなかったんだ。
田辺聖子の「あかん男」という本だった
読みたい
the world has become such a dark place
a cute giggle, a pretty face,
keep it all away from me!
i can't afford to lose anymore of my world's light!
everything is intolerably dark, everywhere is egregiously filthy
don't ask me to take a chance on you!
there never has, nor could ever be another chance!
keep away from me!
i'm sharp and you are soft,
allow me to stay in this razor-wire cage,
so you don't cut yourself on me.
ゑこ、
あなたとの退屈、最高だった。
真夜中の電車に起こされた。
完全に悪夢から離れてないままの半醒の恐怖。
何処だ．．あぁ、電車だったか．．そっかな．．この部屋だね．．
意識がやっと戻った。狹くて汚い部屋だった。彼女の部屋．．いや、僕たちの部屋だった。
停電っか。蠟燭一本の火だけの明るさで壁が視える。紙何十枚が壁に貼り付いた。
希蘭がぐっすりと寝ている。蠟燭の光で視える裸の体．．その背中の輪郭ってやつか何か．．美々しい。
彼女の息のリズムで少しでも落ち着いた。
「愛してる」と囁いた自分は
もう一回寝ようとした。
土砂降りの雨だった。言いたいことが声にならないほどの哀しさだった。
みんなに裏切られる妄想だった。お酒だった。泪だった。白だった。
捨てられることも、裏をかこうかなという考えも、心を込めることも、踊りまわることも、せがむことも。
解りづらい。
the stark honesty of months prior gives way to endless anxiety
as it always does.
顔の美しさ、と言えば特別に（世間の意見で）魅力的ではないけれど私にとってはどことなく好きになっちまったんだ。なぜだろうかって、見れば見るほど気に入るようになる顔だ。
社会の人間には、美しさということは合意で成立されて、大体同じようなこと。美人とは、「テレビで見るような形」という意味となった。
そういう基準で、この人は特に美しくあるまい。
でもそれこそは本物の美しさではなく、それはただの欲だと思うのだ。本物の美しさは、欲という概念を遥かに超え、地球的な理性とか語彙とかで定義できないほどの、先天的な意義と無意味を持つことだろう。
顔の完璧でなさはなぜか完璧になり、いや、完璧よりも眩しく、正しく、自然でなぜか知らずその理解されない何かへ引かれて、瞬く間にその本質の虜となっちまう。
これこそは美そのもの。
all around is buildings appalling in their ugliness
salvage titles on dead lots
well broken-in convenience store floors
i think the cities are alive and they are dying
much like us
mayors like quack doctors prescribing repaved highways when the whole damn organ is shutting down
no amount of in-construction lanes can stop the drugs from flowing
in
slaughtering mothers and daughters alike in chicanerous frenzy
all the killing killing us in turn
our hearts in acute necrosis,
our minds burning out from the lethal annals of absurdity
micron by micron
it's all so tragically, stupidly,
fucked
lurid temptress, and in the corner, the scarlet-yellow lamplight cascaded through the tree leaves...
("me and my three dots...")
the ferris wheel was there and so were joe and juliana
i was there too of course
and my coat was too large, and so were my thoughts of love
of its diffusion into the air
but cupid's quiver held not
one
arrow for me.
how close you were to them
how far you will be
all performance interspersed with the
"hush-hush"
of your usual sour
temperament
your clumsy ramblings failed this time
because you brought up Demeter
like usual
slow motions until it all fades away
and the sleep that does not come
comes
how many times you've walked that road or this
always the orange hue of childhood
always a ghost
always, you.
sometimes in my world there is an
insidious
plasma
that infects the brain stem and all of the muscle tissue and the texture
everything—
call it "love"
call it whatever the hell you want all i know
is that when it really gets you
when it really seeps into your pores and really
fucks you up
verbally and semantically and
whatever
you're done for.
i was young once like that and now i am old
(accept loss forever!)
i really believed the jane and tarzan shit
(accept loss forever!!)
i really cried
hard
not for a while, now
but i always hope it is soon
and i always hope it makes sense
when i am asleep i accept and when i am awake i struggle against
just the disposition of an idiot, usually
speaking my peace in quiet terms and reserved glances
until i have no energy any longer
i love you
but i am so alone at times it
makes a kind of unsmiling and real sense
why is he smiling?
you tell me anything—
"she's fucking another dude behind your back!"
Oh, I believe it!
"your uncle joey got crushed at the factory yesterday"
Oh, I believe it!
"she overdosed and died the other day"
Oh, I believe it!
"it's not your fault sho"
Oh, I believe it!
"i'm a witch!"
Oh, I believe it!
"i had that bitch sniffing shards of finely pulverized glass!"
Oh, I believe it!
"he caught a blood infection, had to have his feet amputated"
Oh, I believe it!
(If not immediately it seeps in when the dope hits,
hospital bathroom)
"jesus christ loves you"
Oh, I believe it!
"a snarling wife on the balustrade is more than a man can stand"
Oh, I believe it!
"...the capybara that taught me how to make methamphetamine and a nuclear bomb..."
Oh, I believe it!
"oh i had your mother, she wasn't that good, she was in the 'dry' goods section"
Oh, I believe it!
"a flightless drowning bird requires wings of water"
Of course I believe you...
"the monkeys choose to be alone with cocaine"
I cannot believe it is too close
to me
tang of lithium still fresh on his breath
smothered by the all-too-saccharine sweetness of the coffee he needs
to put the restless night of bad dreams
to sleep
the cigarette perched on his lips says he will be okay in five.
running through the same beaten tracks of 26 years in his head
(27 is knocking on the door)
the same daydreams and baddreams
the same imagined conversations
the same people
the same hope if you'd done one thing differently
well, no,
too many times down that avenue of thought
i'm still here
not exactly the me i want to be
"oh well and what the hell"
more trudging through the bog of people
all the cardboard, all of their and my own servility
reflected in everything in TV static
and thin veneers of good-will to all men
and women
and women neither
the cigarette between his fingers says he'll be okay in five.
wasting time on immaculate and inopportune unrealities
straddling the balcony pretending the drop is one thousand feet instead of ten
and walking the beach
hoping to chance
to make
to meet
tears more deadly and salty than all the ocean's worth
the cigarette
that he just finished says he will be okay in five.
i wonder that myself sometimes
how i must appear to some people
the shade of a man pulling the shade of a vodka bottle out from the shade of a backpack
at dawn
drinking myself into belligerencies all the deeper
the strangeness of my blip of a shape against the horizons of countless days' beginnings and countless days' ends
sometimes they say
"what is wrong with him!"
and sometimes they say
"there he goes,"
how inescapably garish and stupid i can be
silly, sleepy-always
how my fears will never be
paroled
for the fear that comes with dopamine-antagonist induced apoplexies
these foreordained captivities slaying me like scythes of bile and night
callous marauders riding about on all sides
reflections of myself
tossing me into the oubliette of my death once and for-all
like a dog who shits on the carpet
my nose upon my filth
reminds me of who i am
i like it here
i'm afraid of feeling myself
come back to myself
i like it when things don't make sense
in the way i make sense
of them.
i remember sitting outside of hotel rooms
carpeted ugly floors
waiting for things to return to normal
and normal they never ever became
again
is life therefore not for me?
is this the wrong stage?
not an extra some interloper
for all of my days?
under the pale darkness of a moon
who too never
needed
me?
floodlight beams had turned themselves into fog somehow
on the night of which day i can no longer ascertain
how long had you been awake?
how much longer would you?
(the answers too are lost to time that slipped so fast i could not keep track)
i had thrown some papers out onto the lawn
days, or weeks, ago?
perhaps some of my best work
if i did not dream it
of course when i stumbled
ugly body and painted countenance
and gripped grass-roots
and pulled up
looking for traces
nothing was there
the rain had eaten it, all of it
that's when i realized that words
will never be enough
here is how it will go
so we know between the two of us
what became of what we
once
were
one day, on which nothing in particular happens
i will be
overridden by an acute, insinuatory madness
despite all evidence to the contrary,
despite every honeyed reassurance otherwise,
one day i will simply
believe, and do so truly
that you do not love me any longer
and perhaps never did at-all.
and yes, i will still adore you with all of my heart
that will ruin me too.
where indeed do the ducks go?
rather, where would i, a duck. go?
in the winter slumber frigid,
and all my kin flock to some warmer America
i will go north
until the tickling of white pine and spruce and firs
touch me no longer—
land's end
lavish winds tracing their trajectories against my beaten wings
the sting of a dead white land in my vision
white is the absence of color...
the pallid scalp of a continent soon to be as colorless as the corpse
i must go north
because something in me needed to see
what no-one else wanted to see
the futile vista of a terminating tundra
acquiesced into the icy beckoning of tumbledown icefloats
meandering tenderly upon the undulating breaths of an old, cold sea
i had to go north
because nothing waited for me in life
but death, always, always
and now that my gelid form breathes its last
in time to timeless waves
that dance underneath this speck of glacier
that houses my end
so lovely
and lulls me into my last eyes-closing
at last
you can ask me
what it is like
to have lived.
the angel passed you by
you broke free from her embrace
and when this happens people they say
that her arms were thorned like a rose despite her gentleness
or that her gaze was enough to to instill a guilty sense of being so totally and unjudgementally pitied
and that these things are what threw them from her arms.
i will not say such things.
or if i am at gunpoint forced to say i will whisper passively that
her wings seemed tired and i thought myself able to walk more than bear the sight.
let us not say things that are not for us to say
dust yourself off, the road ahead is long
barkeep, another round.
have you ever woken up to a 7 A.M chime that wasn’t for work but for
the other thing?
shaking
have you ever
driven down a very unpaved street on some tin-sickle bicycle
shit on wheels
and seen a dawn that was more befitting of a twilight?
in it’s cloudy sunpour,
and imagined your death many times at the wheels of vehicles heavier than yours
imagined under or over?
imagined if you’d even realize what was happpening?
when it very truly and surely was?
thoughts hanging over a field that you’re not sure when they’d cut down
since you now noticed?
have you ever
had insane withdrawal-conversations with the circle k lady
(always not the usual one)
as if from a second-story window
until you could fumble out the bills and nickel
for your life?
and battle with your own bikelock
wondering were the cops to show soon?
seen blood veseels in your closed eyes?
walked along grass and felt a burning that was not sun
and an aching that was not muscle
and glanced over your shoulder religiously?
wondered if the half-fog was there to begin with?
and crashed coming into the driveway
and tried to unlatch a gate that did not want to be unlatched
and got it all inside
and still couldn’t breathe
a sigh of relief?
it becomes agony to realize that you've
not enough energy to face the night and
not enough peace to sleep
i watch the moon in its flight
and in that pale darkness i am at once reminded of and bedazzled by
the memory of your eyes that surpass the end of the night
and the bedazzlement gives way to a sense of complete loss
and i am profoundly moved to inaction
and i watch those clouds in the night going somewhere i can never be
and it becomes evident to me that it is not nor was it ever me i wanted to be
so i go inside searching for a substance-high i know has absolutely no substance
i cannot fathom why you wished to save this world
it killed you with such solipsistic whimsey that it'd give a stoic a hard-on
you were probably the finest mind of our generation
i was supposed to be the back-up
now i'm front-runner in the first heat
what's more is that these people don't want to be saved
no-one searches for heroes any longer
they just want martyrs
statues
more imbecilic idolatry
take a look at their libraries:
full of dull books thick with words that say almost nothing at-all
walk around any city block one time:
homelessness, poverty, crime, egregious filthiness, discarded hypodermic syringes every 20 meters
this is the product of all human history and knowledge
we lost something essential when you left
and my sorrow since then
engendered by the complex flame of my embittered emotions
continues in its acuity with no apparent end in sight
plasted with just a sip of my bottled self-deception
and until i am covered in it and i am become one with it and i am it in itself
because i could not
and seemingly could never
construct myself an escape into the fantasy of daily life
there it all is!
the shock-and-awe of it, of loving so madly and being so madly loved
and the unfortunate proof of how tremendously love burdens the soul
juxtaposed with the contradiction of the poison of loneliness and desolate nights at the end of a bottle
the vulnerability of the darkness of hurt we all bear like the cross
the impossibility of a single true embrace
and words that i never knew i meant that slipped out
in haste
and anger
like everything
steeped in self-contempt and irking fucking misery
which only served to amplify how abrasive and raw the words that followed:
"you can't fucking save the world!"
were.
and now i stand looking at the world as though it were through a foggy and shattered ashtray
and everyone is gone or going.
idiot dreams of idiot ghosts
(full of themselves, like myself)
that stalked the icy streets
of my childhood Pennsylvania
where i onced dreamed,
now dream no longer
the cartilage of my soul
bare and broken
smelling of exposed sinew,
reeking of dry blood
something flays me daily
that i cannot name
i've looked in all the
dictionaries
but if there's a word for it
it isn't in them
life is unusual to me
and i'm told it oughtn't be
the closed-circuit of my
being here
strangles me beautifully
until my horrid face
turns to horrid dust
dust that were you to ask it
would tell you without saying
could have been a smile
the unfastidious night was crawling across my desk like a wounded spider
some common terror-babbling was shitting its way into my ears from next door,
dry, dry shit really, my mouth was dry
and the beer said super dry
the woman was like an ulcer to my being, then
it wasn't her fault
we just weren't good together anymore
but neither of us wanted to admit that
because it was just too much damn work
for both of us to go hobnobbing among the freaks
for a replacement.
we were both waiting for the day we'd wake up
and the other would be gone.
it was like some kind of shit-vaudeville, except it wasn't funny.
we just sat there in the dark
working at our beers
occasionally cooking up a shot
listening to the inane garbage gurgling in from the television next-door
eventually she threw a glass
against the wall
and became very quiet.
she was gone
the next morning.
something awaits for me on the other side of the concrete
besides all of this plain anxiety and all the things i've done wrong
and can never make up for
no more tall packs of strong beer and no-more no-more no-more
dreams that beam in contrast of how wrong your life has gone
in the uncomely kingdom of waking men
you have lived a long time without love especially towards yourself―
maybe you are willing to live a little longer?
see where the thread you have followed so adamantly leads:
in the end you will be either right or wrong but at least you will know
i gilded her with the heart of my sensibilites
with my history, and with the men who carried me far through the night
when no-one else could or would
now my booksheleves are lined with viscera, waste
things that can be mine no longer
the sky is real blue out there but i don't go out
except before dawn
to run myself ragged down a stretch of bare ancient crackling road
sharpening my body and my appeal for some vacant future puppet i'll have settled for
because my capacity for loneliness is taken
because my kingdom is laden with darkness unremittent
my cities tumble
because a memory, just a memory
is something i never wanted her to be.
i'm a real bastard, and i suppose i always have been
so it is an astounding thing that i of all people
should have become a poet
normally i keep my voice tinny and obsequious
with beercan highs and lows
but the real bitch is that when i'm sober
all bets are off the table
even i do not know what i am going to
think
feel
say
write
sing
or do next
and it scares the living shit out of me.
it has taken me so far out of the realm of people
that when someone breaks through my usual recalcitrance
they will always
always
regret it.
this is not a plea for pity or understanding
nor is it justification for the kind of human refuse i am
in fact i would rather everyone assume i am incapable of guilt or shame or regret
because the truth there is something even i don't want to fucking face
no, this is a personal reminder
to never
allow myself to fall in love again.
you've finally succeeded in making me hate you
and i suppose i hope i've done the same
now that there's blood in my eyes from crying
(not a metaphor, there's a small sea of red in my sclera)
and all's said and done.
how fitting too that it should be this day
on which we chanced upon one-another nearly half a year ago now,
on that christmas eve when you sang to my choiceless soul from the cantos of savior-love
(which i now know must have been borrowed from the madness of stars long dead)
that catapulted me long from the foregone conclusion to something with the glow of having a future.
it was of course foolish and i ought to have known better by now
so the joke is indeed on me
and there's no point faulting you for anything.
this is not to say that it wasn't ever any good, but that i wish that good could last―not a miscalculation i am likely to make again.
we were just not suited to each other, thus we've made our last mistakes
and we part only knowing of the future that the paths we will each tread will be strange and entirely separate
and let it be known that these are the last goddamned lines i will write of you.
6:30 am suicide wake-up calls must be getting to me. empty bed, scratching of diseased palms on the tin roof of a shed. out there is night, but not for long.
bad time all around. how will i resurrect myself for another to-morrow?
there's nothing outside the window but nightladen field and a radio tower winking at me in deepred chapstick signals. it means something, but damned if i can figure it out. this life is dead. this whereabout is dead.
no more abduction dreams. it'd be welcomed to finally disappear somewhere; a preferable alternative to punching a clock until what's left of me worthy of the name is gone. uncover the window, let them in so they will never come.
27 in less than two weeks and you're still not enough for anyone, old-timer. your shortcoming of soul might as well be tattooed on your forehead between the other ones.
you'll always be dancing in the palm of convenient lies.
just wait for the blow to land
it'll be your fault too
even though they'll save themselves the trouble of appearing like a bad person
and avoid doing you the courtesy
you have waited a lifetime for
a reason
that they will always leave
you feel the window
and it isn't cold, back to warm
shortcoming of soul
how drunk are you?
exceedingly.
Drinkers are like that.
day-again-style
despite obvious evidence to the contrary
a few beers to prime the pump
palooka
a little gin to clear the vision
oh cripes
i was licked
how do i explain this
the alcoholic has no tolerance for the limelight
always keep it simple
full disclosure
same dried corned bullshit
shambolic
vaguely drunk and coming down hard
morning terror upon me
perturbingly drunk
pain is there to keep you alive. or kill you. i haven't figured it out yet.
i reached for the heavens, and this is what i found
plagued with nightmares
hearse-followers
like ant defecation
scenes in the life of an alcoholic
watching through the crack of a door
the wojaczekian man
where it was not supposed to, where no-one thought it would
blisterous pustules
like a diseased saliva
head-in-lap
forfeiture
came out like a raspy cigarette
kid-shit
courage and death
do you know what that means
pleasing and freezing
get away
they don't get far
between the lines of cocaine
permanently
too drunk to start the set
when someone has died of overdose they have really died of loneliness
month-ruining, year-ruining
the only truthmorer
little did i know, id rather have the goddamn bruise
sometimes
serious personal condemnations
aggravated drinking bouts
i don't respond to my feelings in appropriate ways, in fact i always choose what will make me the most miserable, the most listless and morose and i think about everything constantly
when you focus on pain it's like everything else evaporates away
evinces a design