dreams

you beautiful neurotics
what has happened to you?
I love you and I miss you

today is a sated ghost
wandering because
all is not lost

the sun feels awkwardly
like heaven
as I drive down eroded

former factory town roads
mist and sunbeams
lingering unlit lightposts

I don't wanna stir you
but you look gorgeous when you're sleeping
and I can say that even if I'm creeping

and it won't stop being true

you are all my loves
bundled in tarmac and paint lines
I remember you as tongue

twisters and half-rhymes
expensive taste and free verse
dancing around in a unitard

looking awfully silly
or maybe you read a book of poetry
as blades of grass swayed

as effortlessly as they do

marry me to the open road
where I spent my life with you
in my head, where everything's perfect

and your love is right there
I think I know it
I've been writing about it forever

centralize

somewhere between court jester and his majesty
lies unmistakable brutal truth and honesty

sometimes in order to put out a fire
people set themselves on fire

thrones submerged under seas of gasoline
fashioned themselves from polyethylene

other times in chaos worlds writhe and wretch
their peoples empty and outstretch

there is no romance in decaying love
painless pristine hearts incinerate their gloves

would that it all conformed to one worldview
but weakness and desire keep it fresh and new

I had all the answers wrapped up in a sleeve
but those elusive lovers always leave

machina ex deus

meaning asserts itself
drink as much as you can from a rock
don't ask questions
until you have none left

some people tie brain stems
like cherry stems
with their snake tongues

let them flap

meanwhile, in Ohio
without rhyme or reason
flames lick themselves out
while no longer leaping from the eyes
of a demiurge

stem cell

cradle in a corner
rocks in place
door swings open
door slams shut

no doors
no windows
just enough room
never entered
never left

not a room
not a ghost
not alive
not a concept
not a poem
not a word

a baby marveling at the noises coming from its mouth
drooling all over himself
deflated
folded over a coathanger
hung in a closet

what choice do you have

the rubicon is flushed

the wind has blown
the tree has fallen from beneath the cradle
the roots have climbed out of the earth

a child is borne
down a river
of tangled wood

not a concept
not alive
not a ghost

pit of hope

recurring fugue state
recursive fugue, static
noise, life and memory
fixed in the brain
broken away and fictionalized
bad luck carved down wrists
holding shards
blemished by anguish
a poorly rhymed face
ill-remembered
remembered ill
a rhyme poorly faced
anguished by blemish
shards holding
wrists down, luck carved bad
broke, in a way; fickleness
lost in the mind
silence, death, and memory
recursive fugue: statics
this recurring fugue state

Limerick for My Kitty:

I now have a cat named Billy.

He hunts wild game and he's silly.

I can not take a crap

Without him in my lap
Which could end with me screaming shrilly.

absent ease

"enveloped in an absence of light"

doesn't ring true, a loveless phrase described

vacantly, in all meaningful terms

absent of pith, itself defined by absence

Darkness is absolute and palpable

receding only to validate love

just as this treatise systematically

evades poesy, it does so respectfully

in order that it may flourish elsewhere

you can, if you try hard enough

separate what is legal and what is right

it is not so easy to tell the virgin

darkness from adulterated light

leisurely seizure

words written in blood aren't good
enough papering over cracks
riddle the intellect

it's flooding sluices
damned well pored
over the diseased poetry of #GOD

meanwhile, beautiful words
kill several people each day
buried under mountains of data

orgasmic, murderers, neighborhood
covering up blood-pooling tracks
in hash tags and genuflects

covered in bodily juices
healthlessly poured
from chalices made of clod

effortlessly sterile, deferred
meaning just gets in the way
so upend, transcend strata

falafel waffle and a lawful novel grovel

casks empty, hearts floating towards betrothal
bled out in a cider cellar converted to a brothel
compassion and despair make for fine offal
even if the brittle bones of love smell something awful

psychiatric evacuation

"mothballs in a closet

food grime in a sink drain

spiders on your crawling face

death sentence fragments

disrupting the brain's tendency

to build webs, so I read your mind

only I don't exist, I'm merely hypothetical

surrounded by the composite sketch

of a hive mind

collectively unconscious

the worst thought, that eternity

is strictly hypothetical as well

and I, no you, no

this is all so misleading

and Molly Died Missing Anything

familiar

damp. disgusting. as much as she

wished also to forget"

sometimes I am appreciated

and it is at those times I am most suspicious

paranoid, insecure, loved

loved

sometimes I am loved and I am most skeptical

standing on babies to save myself from flames

begging for your giblets

generally not giving a fuck

but asking for one

life without music

precious reality
beauty and cruelty
grapes and leaves
it's all behind
sweet avenues of stardust
cling to smoke
before my eyes
undulate in unblinking chorus
no loneliness
precocious
real-
politik

lunatic fringe
benefits

inferior interior

find myself
staring into hammer
lost in mirror
cracked
open
spilling dead
art over
dead art
crusty and peeling
breaks off at touch
dry again
on my tongue
hands
and brain
bits of my body
draped in tatters
on escritoire
or escape-
hatched in shards
wond'ring
if I were a blizzard
would snow also bleed

disembodied couplet

imploding, slowed, as buzzards circumnavigate my skull, spitting out black boxes and flames

gnarled aluminum, gnarled alumni, and a looming solid wall of spectral names

buzzworthy

I am not alone
because we are all alone
love was never in the cards for me
because we've turned our eyes to bumble
bees

and our hearts into diamonds
beaten them with clubs and spades
lying prostrate in fields with jokers
and jacks of all trades

the king is dead, long live the king
regal and merciless
full of bile and wine

turning everything we touch
into honey covered
gore

the queen is throbbing
holding all the aces
in stasis

what have you done for me lately?

post-title

cement soul, wheel-like
if perceived by some other
quicksand fears, reality veers
carried away reinvention
by UFOs in sterling silver
tense shifts
gutted

yard cordoned, trees wave
tires screech
blood on linoleum, blood on lapel
blood trickles up dry wall
blood chokes on asbestos
too close to the camera, blurred
dreadful and absurd

mired in minds'
eyes in bobbing heads
music too loud
in the stereo of an other
every thing's just
patterns in dull elongated rivulets
pour from dumb
mouths, delta waves
crackle like a perverse
jury-rigged love
is not enough

uh where

as I escape tongues in venom
spitting image of a god the whirlpool
of god the tremor and flame
quiet as bath salts and I said I'm going
to eat your face but you didn't
believe me

lamb lambaste the asp
life is trying to bite through its paradigms

as I fly, on the wall

I see it all meld, the synthesis
of selves, worlds poor
trembling, in pain

I see what's left of the light for a moment
after it goes out

I suck out the poison in the dark

hoof it back to Noah's Ark
I'll brave the flood

alone

psyche of a golden ass

if there is a being
eyes break it down
eyes know it exists and in that moment
it is senile and wobbly
poetry is never young
it is a self-destructing eye
in a mirror maze
and my love for you
pure poetry
stumbling
failing
the purest being
slammed shut now that it
is finally free
rapidly moving
with the ebb of the dream
somewhere in the cosmos
cycling through a different noise
emotions extra-dimensional
a voice trying to speak
without resorting to words

Greek to you

The cynic, sure of his stature as cynosure
Barks and chases his tail through acid
Rain pelted Lyceum halls; miles of stone
Statues, faceless and stained, irrelevant
To the ultimate burial of bone

entropical paradise/coughin nail

outside of my body and the universe
is something I can relate to

drifting uncomfortable demigods
through rhyme-less subconscious

here is the abstract
a blue body, rolled up like a cigarette

lapped by radio waves ebbing
on shores of distant islands

islands of authentic passion
in an ocean planet

petals in a poppy field
blanket the soil

every body dragging itself through
a smoke that wept and growled

a raspy voice instead of a clear one
inflects through humming
disembodied speakers

you, yeah you
you have cancer
everyone you know is cancer

but I didn't listen any further
I put poppy seeds in my mouth
and spit out flowers

weighing in on the scale of everything

prove
love
happiness
truth
enlightenment

deny
our
genesis
from
chaos

the anti-ideal
the proof
subliming
beggars
who chose life

eternities
encapsulated
infinitesimally
in subatomic
particles

quantum
foam
majestic
prison
in extremis

no-etry

thrown-on intellect throws off feng shui
in splattered chunks of information
non-sequitur clicking of the teeth
formerly gnashed below a thought-full tumor
spilling black bile like it was hopeless romanticism
receding into the inner circle
where everyone is god and everything
is neatly segregated
and you feel good about yourself
as the hangman begs for his leg
so he can feel the full dead weight of his body
as he drops into the rope you threw him

pro creator

erect
a god
or a cock

ride that trojan horse
into a burning bush

the perfect world
where the fucking
protects and preserves

you

from high atop my gilded ego
you look like the cock-
roaches you are

my tail end lifted
a banana plant of babies

ready to tell you
how ugly your mind is
how perverted, your very nature

while they age and fuck
find a way to survive

courting jesters

gavels floating in the open
like cataleptic astronauts freer
in the space between deaf ears
not one of them will fall on

judges throng the killing fields
presided over by wraiths
of blank-faced youths
that put the doll in dollar bills

an orgy or a jury
dislodged, they smolder-and-reflect
upon the un-scene, in which their necks
as if to speak, show rope burns

give birth to someone
who didn't know they wanted it

teach how to fuck
how to fight
and maybe
how to tell the difference

expiration

commited suicide
because they wanted to live
unable to shake the paranoia
of endless pins and needles
suffocation and pain
dull and sharp
dreamless
sightless
soundless
numb
driven by a ravenous
purposelessness
ripping at their bodies
rotting alive
screaming "I love you"
and
"I don't wanna die"
as they made love
and died
filling up their lives
like mass graves
for all they could never be
the universe, infinite and growing
they, statistically nonexistent
clamoring for breath
in the sucking void
"I love you!"
"I want to live again!"
gone forever
as if they had never been
and God wept
over his own
head-
stone

body is relative

body without mirror wanders
through a mess of wandering bodies
mirror, mirror
don't look now, or you'll miss it
body is relative
amidst bloodless relatives
separated by perception
clinging to gift-wrapped
genius

body without candor strides
through a convulsing mass
on the wall
you can look now, they've all gone
body is relative
to each unraveling mind
compressed and long confined
singing songs of fading
dreams