the fall

a single tree falls on deaf ears
dead in the ground
it is the sound of thin veneers
crashing violently down
like a muffled moan
or a cancerous bone
what organ feels love
when the rest crumple to the bed of leaves
and the sleeps come to burn
when the brain ceases thinking
and the mind refuses to learn
screams are white noise
colors are blurry toys
drifting through ego death like seasons of blinking
it is in this world no one grieves

poop

invisible, insane, frantically grasp
for air, pull it inside, no lungs
love is a burrowing worm
inside out and back again
like a tesseract or a strange loop
somewhere in the wings clasped
freefall like a rope high hung
wrapped round the neck of a germ
no hook to catch a lip when
smiles wrinkle and droop

just floating thru space, all this useless beauty in my skull
like a flower trying to bloom
roots dancing in an aching vacuum

losing my place, rereading the stars as my senses dull
somehow comforted by the sound of my own breathing

planets small enough to crush in my palm
why would I ever trust these eyes?

music plays across my lips like balm
singing songs I never quite believed

no one to serenade, no one to save
me
is that really good enough

I'll never know
I'll never come home again

understand

I (don't) want you
all my loves in a pile
charred, caramelized

death

(don't) want you
just the experience of you
taste wash over my tongue

river

(don't) want
ashbed, littered with sweet teeth
and (you) in my arms

(love me)

I don't

fucked

I'm hopelessly evil
sweating red after a fall from grace
I fell flat on my face
I'm just good people

every day I relearn how to breathe
how to swim, how to dream
floating through this liquid
low pressure planetoid

I'm smoothing out all the waves
from inside this blind moon
painted on walls of caves
I wish my weight could push them out of the room

but the walls are bare
they were never there
and I'm lying on a stretcher
a white knight in the body of a lecher

cast my unwieldy heart into the deep
sink into brine
fade in time
when sharks have need
sharks will feed

here in my diving bell
weight of the ocean's floor
won't crush me
I'm already a dream
bubbling out of the mouth
of a bad swimmer

cold blood

love a forked fractal snake twitching like its tongue
wrapped around itself, eating itself
well I'm the one shedding skin
I'm the one who lets you in
I don't love my love
whispered like venom across
my nebulous paranoia
I know you
don't
it's exhaled scales and death rattle

we bury each other like hidden treasure
we didn't even try to discover
pay our respects to the pearly gates
etched deep in our shadow face
I've loved you forever and I will
even learning to breathe through gills
I cut into my neck
where noose kisses used to peck
this blood ocean I cried on loan
pacemaker of the tastemaker
I've felt the earth's mantle moan
magma maniacal and miraculous
conceived of a cold conservative calculus
the floor of your heart
I'm parachuting down
it is written in stardust
coded in our DNA
"I have raped your memory
and left nothing but the day"

mantle peace

discovery
where I've been headed all this time
perverted love
of war
cosmic harmony
at the convergence of our bones
and cold cold stone
architects of our escape
hiding in each others arms
prosthetic and limp
making our tools with tools
endless digression
of manipulative means
fashioned blood out of primordial mud
gods in reverse
lords of the perverse
I own you now
I have your head on my mantle
forever and ever and ever

directions to love

there's nothing more cliche than the human heart
she said knowingly

wishing I could show her my true heart
I let her perform my autopsy

there's nothing special in here, just blood and vessels
she said, knowing me

atriums and valves, the machines of betrayal,
myocardial

infarction; oh, but disregard this young old heart
it's full of dead arrowheads

shot from stupid's bow

I have nothing new to report
but whatever direction, way leads to way
and finds itself here again

the arrow points and I'll follow
looking for any pill to swallow
my soul frail and hollow

sucking all the poetry out of her kiss
and her tempered coos of bliss
spelled out on my grave in piss

anything

The infinitude of nothingness and time: an abyss before me, an abyss after me, an abyss not unlike me, surrounding me - not only me, but you and me, from the stars birthed, and laid to rest in the earth. This is our silence. This is our fight. Heaven or hell in a bedroom, with no bed, no windows, no one else in it. Or the unknowable purgatory of an heirloom with no heirs who shall wear. Rationalizing life as a side effect of the existence of ancient molecules, we live and wonder why.

The structure permeating or once permeating this emptiness was absolute. Sovereign. It gave birth to the means to categorize it. Measure it. Expound upon it. It is done. Evolution is a nuclear bomb, walking aloof amongst the souls of newborn gods aware of their own death.

Disciples hear me, they screamed at each other. Blasphemy. In the same breath, curses, loves, lusts, and threats. Indistinguishable agonies want each other. We don't. It was never different. There is no line, no expanse, only hope and fear. They, too, shall overlap.

Everything at my fingertips, I want it less. Life, I want to hide. Death, I want to hide. Love, I want to hide. Yet I will perish wishing I knew you at all.

want

i.

there is the thing itself
there is the failure to describe it
and there is the beauty involved
in crafting that failure

into a graceful dance
in a graceless chaos of space
enveloping the thing
the words, the sublimation

of suppressed desires
they coalesce into a whole
which becomes the new thing
and so on

the story goes
useful only in its newness
bleeding through the page
into the gauze I thought I'd escaped


ii.
I will bury you
a fountain of youth
and fragment into all of us
searching to find it

I have forgotten how to sense
I have need for your observations
beliefs and worship, blindly
mirroring down my sterling

forgetfulness, sinners baptized
in ink, flushed of preconceptions
dreaming a foreign love
extricated from the lotus blossom

bathing in death
we don't want to leave
I have room for you
in my cage

I'm Locke's socks
in a lock box
so lifelike
patched together

never the same boy twice

I wish I knew what love was
like I did when I loved you

let me out
no

tonight we dine inside each other

bandwagons are the planet
is hot lava
my soul is
your soul is
heaven is
hell

bandwagons burn down
this armageddon
trail of tears
trail of fears
trail of careers
is what's keepin us in business

wheels keep turning
fire keeps burning
souls keep yearning
fools keep learning
nothing keeps earning
nothing's keep
counting sheep
losing sleep
dreaming deep
thinking cheap
giant leap
empty creep
silent weep
guts churning
society spurning
society's gurney

whirligig

swimming against the current
generation of new waves
foam as they lap the coast
filthy feet follow us

my eyes breathe for me
a sky full of diseased blood

and I adjourn

raw sadness is a joke
I can't take anything seriously
I've never felt empty
I've only dreamt about getting lost

while we idle beneath symbols embossed

I'm dying the slowest death imaginable
said every smiling face pressed up against my skull


hopes and dreams are each other's
failed hopes and dreams

grapevine

moral high ground on an inverted planet

impales me at gravity's will

the brain wanders

there is no breadcrumb trail

for the sitting ducks

to inhale

pigeons' wings slither against air

erupting beak volcanoes

full of erudite illocution

empty themselves! you warn

but we missed each other

the only point we ever intersected

we just were not very interested

he said gnawing at the bone
he said, gnawing at the bone,
he said "gnawing at the bone,
he said." gnawing at the bone,
he said "gnawing" at the bone.

he broke all his teeth gnawing at the bone.

I just wanted to erase all the questions he said.

Now he is an earthworm, crying in clods of sky.

Cut himself in half.

Rebel without a corpse.