War In The Distant Skies 665p24

WAR IN THE DISTANT SKIES

R.M. Kamm

Copyright © 2021 by R.M. Kamm.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914819 ISBN: Hardcover Softcover eBook

978-1-6641-8622-4 978-1-6641-8626-2 978-1-6641-8621-7

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Rev. date: 07/23/2021

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For my kin,

My comrades,

My canines,

And for those who hold this penniless,

May your scattered thoughts someday afford you a meal.

When we think, on days that are dreary,

That all love is gone,

We’ve done naught but to prove,

That we and the universe are one.

CONTENTS

Prolegomenon

Excerpt from the Aforementioned

Beast

Short of the Long-List

Break Path Perigee

The Theory of Red vs. Blue

English Eater

Hominidium

In the Alcove

Symptoms

Fresh Cut Gardenias

Eyes

A Life a Letting

The Tension

As We Crawl

Bedlam Enamored

Conkle Rodent

My Favorite Killer

Edging

A New Something for an Old Nothing

Traveler

Spare Me

Esprit de l’escalier

The White Devil

Lo and Behold

Cashmere

Luminous Top floor Victorian

Wires’ Breath

Malady

Ode to the End of the World

Earth, Asphalt and Rubber

That’s Enough

A-Voyaging

Dusting Clusters

Please in Another Language

Sea Shanty

History in Inches

Green Bicycles

A Series of Things

Red Alert

Chased a Hare

It Crashes

When Shared

No Sudden Movements

Cadre

It is Now Forever

Tired Till Tome

Chocolate

1-Twenty-5

Anthropologically Speaking

Zooma

Existing Gaga Pit

Liquidating

Purple Haze

Sensory

Deciduous

Smile, Zi

Tide the Moon

Ripped Apart by Horses

Images Just Enough Unseen

Stem Theory

Nebula Gum 29.

Bearded Logic

Dweller at the Sign of the Falcon

Desk and Chain

The World’s First Anti-Inflammatory

The Light Takes Away

A Match in Space

Fantastic

The Male Named Bird Sparrow

Junk Deposition

War in the Distant Skies

~ PROLEGOMENON ~

Hello Reader,

If you can’t already tell by the parenthetical, the informality, and the conjunctions, just to name a few of the many things I’ve used to toggle the English language, this is something that I’m installing to knowingly—as if it can ever so be done unknown—break the 3rd wall in an attempt to prepare you for what’s here to come in form, in fiction, and at times in unpredictably uncontrollable fashion. I think it worth noting that this poetry anthology that you’ve somehow stumbled upon or been forced upon—a loud thank you due to those slight few who’ve actually actively sought this out—was in its initial form, fiction, and fashion, a story about the absence of time, or rather the active dismissal of it. Though those some hundred or so pages still survive somewhere, I say as if I do not know exactly as to where, I decided that many tiny little lines inside tons of slightly less tiny factions would serve best to describe my tiny self, and my little life of comprising lines to undo the damage done by compromising what I genuinely love. I tried here to think of what I think of things and to express it as honestly as I know how to at this station in life. I spent a lot of time writing this thinking of Adeline Virginia Woolf (Stephen), of my family, of my future Adeline, of theology, of mental illness, of ecology, of ethics, and of the standards we grind ourselves against. I don’t think that I wanted this to be anything further reaching than notes on an observation of a semi-conscious mammal struggling to exist. This may not be my masterpiece yet, but what it is is something that was done in time for a few key lifetimes to take hold of it and indorse that this was in fact done and that what it may be lacking in mind it makes up for in matter. I’d like to think of this work as the first emotions related to the concept of moving, the acknowledgment that something is bad for you and the continued use of it anyway, and the idea that through the collection of enough things, we can somehow feel less alone. But you don’t need to take those things from it; therein lies the beauty of poetry, and it is beauty alone that persists a dying art.

~ EXCERPT FROM THE AFOREMENTIONED ~

There’s a sludge factory pumping grime through silly straws in my chest. All I’ve managed to learn from the gathering of these books around me is that I’ve made an exceptionally flammable room. My regulatory ambitions have degenerated through time. Since I’ve come here, I’ve observed all that remains to be not but thick, mangled forms. It’s scientifically more than before since before was just that, but it’s not recovery as they’d have you believe. Recovery results from excessive days, moreover nights, antebellum. It’s always some kind of nice. You feel like you’re constantly breathing out fire some old dragon owned that’s been smoldering inside of you with his legacy eating away at your organs and your youth. You take unnecessarily large breaths just to see if you still can, with staggering ease, nonetheless. I swear everything is made uglier in this place just to tempt me. My ears ring all the time now. They hate when I sleep with the echo box on, but I have a problem. Its solution is a superb model 900 Tinnitus Terminal Defense Tyrant, more commonly referred to as a hearing aid. They prefer I use the fan, but the echo box dulls my ringing, so I fight for it, but it keeps them up, so they shut it off and put the fan back on. And do you know what the fan triggers? The ringinggggggggggggggggggggggg in mine ears. One version of me goes, “Hey, you should take yourself out of this…

out of this civility, go north, go to the woods, choked s, mere silence by comparison.”

“Ay, what a great idea,” I say to no one. Just those other living things and the simple human beings. Those who brought me inspiration. Maybe I can channel them into some heteronym’s false and insignificant minute, yeah, that’ll be... That’ll be nothing because those thoughts never came to me. Those beams of prophetic union never even made it within an inch of my ear hole because my roommate has a desk fan and also may not exist. I go to her to determine if I can count myself as one of those with which I wish to count myself…

a writer, a novelist, a poet, a columnist, an examiner, a surveyor, an Earth soldier, a slough, a sloth, a cretin, a snake, a dog, a wolf. (I’m keen on wolves, for they have a feral potency.)

But that’s just it! I’ve foiled their plan. In the sweet silence of the echo box, I have foiled their plan to render me utterly defenseless, worn in their grasp. I accept what they put down just to be rid of the ringing in that room, the smokelessness, the helplessness. Everything finds a way to become impossible no longer. But I’m Queen Rat! I do no such thing! This is stupendously outrageous. Why waste all that time taking worthless notations on my life when my life already consists of worthless notations? “It’s therapeutic,” they say. It’s shag carpeting is what it is. Demanding of me to perform said tasks that in turn produce therapeutic reactions from my own person seems awfully contrived. I don’t understand the external relationship there. It’s frightening and offsetting. Was our wiring done, so lack of supervision as its inefficiency suggests? You mean to tell me that this, the most important piece of human hardware required, brain chemical stability, has had its installation process overlooked?! The new guy skimped on the logistics, did he? Didn’t read the manual? FORGOT a step or two? Preposterous. Or… Or maybe my hardware just has an abnormally short shelf life. No, no, no. I demand that I have the ability to tell me how it is I should be helping me. Simple as that. Why is the what that I don’t understand. I’ve been told to jot this all down for “simply therapeutic reasons,” but I told myself to turn it into something less ephemeral, so that’s what I intend to do. So, really, in the end, it will boil down to these remaining elements: they will watch me to see how I teach myself to unlock the abilities to then learn how I should have been helping myself all along. And just maybe they can take from it to help others too. Just apply that simple formula, and you’re on your way as clear as thunder. No, no thunder round here. The walls would break, and we’d escape.

~ BEAST ~

I happened to be a small child of three and sitting amongst a big rock a beast. I thought I’d wandered, wandered free, but loneliness, hunger, and void struck deep. I wandered through a dark of trees and found I was a feral-ling against a furry scuff of Beast. I asked the Beast, “Beast, what see if I see thee?” Beast said, “Naught but a child of three.” “Naught but a child of thee but Beast,” I said with sorrow and angst. My plea, “Beast, don’t walk, don’t walk from me! I’ve traveled so far and deep beneath the surface of earth and rocks and streams. I want to watch as watchmen see, From tops of mountains and towers and trees. Don’t walk, Beast, don’t walk from me. If not you that’s left, then what’s in me?” “In me,” Beast said, “are bones and leaves. Bones to break and leaves to breeze. Breeze past the face of hate and glee, Glee to hunt and burn my leaves.

To take my bones for all to see in homes and books and minds of men. Men meant to slash and break and bend my flesh, and wrap their silly little children in my skin, my skin, my skin, my skin. But child so small at the age of three, you ask if I may be of thee? I say walk not in the shadows of beast, For trembling men will look to see if beasts may live within your soul. Then take and break and burn you whole.” “But beast, I need your strength divine.” “No strength can measure to man’s cruel eye.” “Can not we break their serpent minds?” “My child, my child, we’ve not the time.” “In centuries of battles fought, we’ve driven only the afterthought, Into the rueful minds of men who slash and burn and break and bend, Till sun and moon and ocean tides cease to keep these men alive. We walk, small child, walk not for none, for every broken, bleeding Beast, Every wondering child of three, Every woman who’s dawned regret, Is with us in our every step.”

~ SHORT OF THE LONG-LIST ~

To be unhuman… In all of its forms and stages, Is perhaps the most beautiful thing.

Oh, may my Ana come to me? Unhumans make no lists, Let alone shortlists. Their leaders are of the most proficient anteaters, Or as ants the strongest, fittest leaf-lifters. My leaders drink the blood of conventional literary techniques. And pick the bones of the divisive elements out their teeth. But may my Ana still come to speak?

I cannot stand unless the ground may seep, Through the Earth and past old space debris. For if I must compete, so disgustingly categorically, Against, “Mother, here look a poem for thee!” Where combs sound like waves,

And the beach is the place for you and your old noises to play, Then I will gage and grate the very soul off of this life, And down it to the wolves and rabid hounds, And to all the dogs I’ve seen be put down, And wrapt in old blankets and buried in muddy ground, With rain heavier than you or your dead mother could ever weigh. Or your tight-knit stanzas could’ve ever have thought to be. But I am not on the defense, Margret. I am the defense. The defense against holding fourteen hundred years in your thieving pocket, Just to pull out a slick note at a shifty dinner party, And to have not but one word first heard, When you read your borrowed, putrid old soup from a can.

Ana, sweet Ana, Murdered by her old soupy words.

But I? Ana and I once drove a camel up a burnt orange sandhill, With a windchime of dried bones and threads, Woven from peeled sticks, we found slain in Oases.

Listen, we hoofed the summit, arms akimbo, And dancing on dehydration, We finger-capped the horizon’s suspired fire. We didn’t see a single damn thing. Not even relentless you. No Ides of Marg. Nothing.

Oh, to be unhuman… In all of its forms and stages, Is perhaps the most beautiful thing.

Thank you, Ana, For setting us free.

~ BREAK PATH PERIGEE ~

The altruism of my Cinderella’s Scordatura Voice, Makes my days ever so less dolorous. Chocolate-box definiendums’, Soniferous détente ferries a fettle emancipated, Since when first rang that cherished meadowlark. Erstwhile you transliterate Old English, Into even Older English benevolence, Vis-à-vis the greats with unbellicose muzz. Echelon desuetude, Where your Sparrows carry succinct writ, For commensurate the scroll’s length, their beaks, As ethereal your lyrical quorums. To my most memorable meteoric mythologizer, May your perennial polyrhythms, Catalyze for all eternity, And eternities more.

I, a deathless habitué to your certitude.

~ THE THEORY OF RED VS. BLUE ~

What is your retention in sand vs. clouds? What is your scope of derision in kin vs. bending your scourge? What makes you leave with an oar to cane a native, While your fellow sea-bearer’s teeth greet rocks? A child takes his goldfish for a walk. The dog brings you a half-dead opossum round the fire. A man gives his baron wife a white carnation.

Just because we care does not mean we know how to. Earthlings are no experts on the minding of others.

Survival by blending in vs. survival by rock and anvil. Increases in operational time and distance vs. white-hot hyper fuel. Dragging, slinking, and lasting vs. bright, fiery, and quick. Talking about shadows in forests in cars at night on near-deathbeds. “Strength is merely the measure from your head to your feet.” But space has a funny way of spinning us round. Directions unintended; often left upside down.

A giant steeps down to a mythomane, To sulfur the silvery tongue and become giant again, In eyes only giantized by fear, confusion, and threat of death by dialect.

Linguistic phenomena’s hermetically sealed lexicons, Float in hyperbolic Oceania. Morphemes cough, sodden and sink, Through the depths of etymological seas. Quick-tempered fish bull-rush hammerhead sharks till Childhood’s End, As eels and anemones live peacefully in silky twisting painted reefs. O praise what lives at the bottom of the sea. O praise be the deep.

Mythologizing, rectifying, mythologizing, rectifying. Oscillations on repetitive variations, In measurements predictable in interminable time. ed, hipped, surgically serrated to draw blood effortlessly. Struggle we are so struggle we. No fever runs low with medicinal fog in heaps of avoidance. No structure stands still atop bogs and swamps.

Evolution has dulled our teeth, May it sand your smite and be done with it.

Snow as romantic watery marks on dirty, dolorous human huts. Time as a sick kid, aged 5-20, Stuck in the medicine man’s tent. Left lone to dance to the great redeemer. Though no voodoo king ever comes.

Human development is a predictable process. In significant periods of relief, we still find struggle. One day my voice may be muffled, comprised of borrowed shells. Find words that will remain, sent to burn things alive. As we knead the brain, Red the meat that let sit I drink the blood of, Blue the waters that run over my lifeless conclusions.

Four years I’ve kept my mind in cold storage. Easy, safe place used to to forget. Laughing day by day. When ropes become stretched at a glacial pace,

No one mourns their splinter. I’ve gone days without a light, Knowing that only lite may I remain if in silence I achingly sustain all thoughts, Meant once to have loved to serve to save. The crow is cooked, and it tastes great.

I still strive for no one voice coherent, but for many little scroungy muffled men, With pick and axe in hand sent to choose which life to end, Through a slowly spiraling flurry of we-don’t-know-what-could’ve-been.

Red and blue are black, and black is white is white is white. To’ve seen five years set adrift, two broken waterlogged crafts from a mothership, So primed for sail is a march atop the sea and a slap across the whale. I didn’t hear your steps, nor feel your cold cunning, To use agitation to carve old sticks to poke the bear. To see the water dry and to kick the pale. To watch the world muddy, into a purple dream, Into a purple dream, Into a purple dream.

No flesh here could feed his breath when depths he sought, yet to seek repair, Were truth at heart if so, the heart may dare. But I came to watch the white whale bend backward to save the tiger. When systems anguish and knockdown, black doors whiten. We cry and beg for new life, new life, new life. Though when given, we break bone to stay erect and re-risen. Oh, how we break bones to stay re-risen. O hosanna, O high river marcher, Give me the strength to eat the meat of the sea-beast, The courage to stab the bear, And mine own mind to never mock the frail. Pray it be thee who saves though kin sits next in throne. Actuality brings shaper a stick, served to loosen the fur from the snare, Crawl out over violent Earth, and bleed to know what of all that’s there.

Early Earth was purple, and all humans blind. For sights as green as we think we’ve seen were meant to bring despair, To the eyes once lost by kin who sought to shout and shake and glare. To’ve hindered what was of once to sing.

“Care not,” said I, with one lost eye, to the flames over bloodied sticks. Carry away the future I see, one-eyed sunken and grey. The whale dries up, and the tiger then flees, But the bear makes way with the meat. As Earth melts backward, From our not-so-bright green, To an earlier compounded shade, I still and I learn to first let my mind breathe, And of all else to desaturate. I want to leave having known of this place just what to say when we grieve. I want to leave having known of this place just what to say. I want to leave having known of this life.

~ ENGLISH EATER ~

A fly on the temple of the fragile stated mind, To live to not impact the world to impact the world, To have many one words and not the power to array, No lack of silence, no red pen, “Should we go outside?”

Oh, a dream woke me to be understood, As to not be understood, The pressure-lock is compromised, Hit the big red button, I cannot continue to be as if all can stare, And I here sit sinking and greying their impressions, So flat-pancaked the walls have known no higher a degree of compression, Form forgotten not, only by what’s never learned being not forgotten, Longer and further, we go with the same large rocks in our pockets, One day to ire, one day to down us in the river. Down us with no greater pressure than this gigantic spectacle for what’s worth one world,

One world, maybe less.

~ HOMINIDIUM ~

Nothing is the answer. We are not one. Born of divinity, scoff. Depravity and blood. Atlas smashed the sins of the world. David built them up. Shown no crime to taper off. Just walk and waddle till forever set. All hominids breed contempt. All hominids breathe the scent, That forefathers wore, When cutting off the heads of deer.

Duct-taped to a dolorous host. For years groomed to brave and boast, This coveted Neo-Saxon ring. Born of the parasite’s waxy inability, To ensure itself some sustenance,

When detached became its orifice, That so long had sipped the sinful soup. But upon that which shrivel that shaped its way, Came long a sparrow and with it lay, The script on which the para’s eyes beheld, The answer to escaping this impossible hell.

~ IN THE ALCOVE ~

I hang on to so little, But I do it so tightly. A loose-leaf, a matchstick, some black tea. I used to use spoons to measure things, Now I use mildew. Miss, use me misused muse, And drift towards the alcove. Bright, not so bright, but bold, We speak, yes we speak, in the alcove. Speak of men-women, young, so old, Dull and shivering, Simultaneously hot and cold. The tiny, wilted preacher man, That was once my desert plant, Lasts at stand in the alcove. Goodbye, new day’s news, days never told. Come to me in prisms capsizing old deities. Come to me in the drips to the unconquering.

Come to me, sweet misery. 7 years—load save. I’m new again.

~ SYMPTOMS ~

I plagiarized a giraffe. It was long overdue. Son, there are things you don’t understand. Son, there are things you’ve yet done. Son, Son, Son. The dreams, dreams sought to seek self to seem, Steadfast to what lasts a family. Bring not the perils of independence. A snake wraps only in leathers of sinew. I once grew seven times you and more. You’ve faked a happening. Not a word I use for fear of ridicule. Neither or nor neither not. You claim - I abash - you rot. Festering. Holding to. My Father, my Father, What a great man of symptoms are you.

~ FRESH CUT GARDENIAS ~

A hand-poured Human, And a hand-poured Human, Roughly one thousand four hundred and sixty Earth days apart, One has airplane metal with bullet holes, One has feral powers, Such as breathing in the dark.

I moved an entire field of something symbolic, Just to see the trails of her development. I found the tracks of an old fox, Who knows very well where the hen sleeps, But I found not a foxhole.

A few attempts, though, Almost as if it were a bird, Gross piles of vile, mud, and sticks, A cocoon or two, But nothing that fits a fox.

So, I regrew the field with something symbolic. I placed my bullet-holed airplane metal in the shape of a teepee. Came back in six years, To find inside an alcoholic fox, With six illegitimate fox-foxies. He’d forgotten the exact quadrants of the hen house, And the warmth of the sun. But the warmth of the sun forgot not him, Not foxy. And the warmth of the sun against my airplane metal, Caused him to lose his fur.

I harvested the field again of something symbolic. All that was left was a naked fox, In an all too conspicuous metal teepee, With six illegitimate furless fox-foxies.

The next day the farmer spotted the metal teepee, From his farmhouse bedroom window. He shot and killed the fat, alcoholic furless fox,

Right through the bullet holes in my old metal airplane teepee. The six furry fox babies tried to run, But never learned how. They were stomped out with the butt of a gun.

Airplane huts fit not a fox, Nor open fields a poet. Do as the farmhand does, Stay fit and furry for all of us.

~ EYES ~

Our eyes are getting worse. Our eyes are constantly getting worse. Large screens, tiny things. Emotions gone berserk. Call the royal guard. Hark the Harold angle sing. Wash our thoughts on rocks HD. Stitch our clothes of old scenes beach. To block the sun with mushroomed shelter. To burn blue the eyes that waning wither. Into the skull of once found fire. To burn down the line and chords that slaughter.

~ A LIFE A LETTING ~

I forgot the last word I said, Forgot the last thought I had, Forgot my dog; I did. Forgot you in all ink. It’s all ink, brother. Ink and skin. I’ve never loved, nor will I again. I’ve never woken up to life, In the form of a collapsed tent and a bear on edge. I saw a dead body. He saw what was once fish. Not abstract enough. Not yet plain. Hate it. And again, I another. Another life ready for the nail on the scaling board. It does not matter. It does not matter.

I need no editing. I decide. Fish needs no scaling. Me? Scaling. I’m still a child, I forgot. A life a letting. No love, No work. No heart. At this point, it’s muscular. I am a child. I’ve known and forgot, I know. I garden, but I weed. I kill. Fish swim.

~ THE TENSION ~

I have no country. I have no warmth. No love, no roaming rendered accessible.

I have had 10 years a catastrophe. And I will die from kidney disease. I withdrew a couple times. No one may enter here. That line needed to be italicized. How many times can one use the word no, Before we start saying yes out of spite? I’ve tried to make it work. I’ve tried and untried, And rolled around on the floor till 3 AM. And I’ve learned nothing, but I do not understand. It is less a mystery more than it is sheer pain. Torturous deep-down dungeon pain. There will be no key.

That line didn’t need be. No rope. No staircase to separate melting and being, Melting and being. I feel that all of the greatest moments of my life, Are valueless in the eyes. Just used to burn a smile. A grimace. A flicker.

I deserve it? Asked for it? Aye. To be deserving is to pity more than to hate.

Shaking, the shaking. The indecisions. The insecurities. The predictions. The assumptions. The madness. The anger. The confusion. The loss. The life of tension.

~ AS WE CRAWL ~

Enthralled in absence. Shaded by the big tree. Enveloping the sun, With choice and behind manor. It awaits for Aquarian delight.

To tender for greenery. It seems to grow continuously, Sharp-named blades for reason. A heavy meaning. Dry and unrelenting. Taste the dust.

An end as fantasized as closed eyes. Tremble with much activity. Lids shake as skin chokes its former relation. It’s humble, mate. Alive eternalized.

In death, he was stripped by a pair of sun and hot cement, Before a shadow’s chance.

~ BEDLAM ENAMORED ~

Bedlam is enamoring the fifth consequence. The soft-shell catastrophe.

We watch.

Microscopically named by the ounce. Paid for the hours spent noting eloquence. As fresh as the arm thoroughly washed of the Devil’s scent. Graciously crushed by your unaccompanied marveling. Face me and wrap your life out of the first cut string, From what was so viciously whole. Tampered, I turn the last time. Clocked with an untimely gaze. Its eyes forcibly desired. Equally as un-fortuitous. Evidentially uneventful, As every click rings on deaf ears. If as if but only if, if is.

Marry, marry. Sing twice for a more rendering effect.

~ CONKLE RODENT ~

A man, a disease no more, Than in the rarest shadow of a giant. He can be hidden by a glare at high noon, To once over trick the light of day.

A man of irably brilliant follies, And treasures that he locks so far from shore, That the ocean could not even find them, Unless he lets you in.

Who? No. You answer to him. Never him to you.

He is my king, his own king, and a rat all the same. It is in both the day and within the day the hour, That birthing there will fall.

Miss Ellox is summoned to the birthing station, And simply asked one question, “To what with once severed shall we stamp the child?”

The mother sunk in contemplation, And of a dapper creation replied, “The boy will be marked an honest man, No more, no less.”

The doctor, stunned, informs the mother, That this is a stamp of an occupational matter. The mother sits on her words.

City: Mather. Occupation: 2 Million. Environmental state: Under haste deterioration. Year: Unknown.

The records tell of just one man: Conkle Rodent. Born in a hue of some otherworldly light, he arose. Confident and unwilling seems an odd combination,

But rather, it was a representation of the moral that is he.

Time has a debt to pay to him, At once, he realized the horrors that he has manned, The hours will beg for his forgiveness.

Born Conkle Ellox, But forged, nay formed, Rodent by distasteful acts. Once reached the age of suitable manor, And in manner the prowess that is the latter he, A devilish series struck.

Struck at an hour for him to prove parole, And to make aware of whatever light behind rodents may leave.

~ MY FAVORITE KILLER ~

Call me martyred. My time as a glitch. Witness I’ve become. Been made for these hours. Short-- tail. The dapper boy lies through his teeth.

The rain outweighs the windowpane, But only when I look at you. As the moth meets the face of a train. Distinguished and burrowing. Doubt straight through the front door. My prized invited guest.

We dine for hours. As if we have forgotten how. Relearning for the very first time. Silver chattering.

Sex slave mistresses with shared secrets. Only for herself. A flock stunned by a jet stream. Sloppy and recovering.

Born now is the broken V.

~ EDGING ~

Stop, stand still, stare and let it all destroy you. Waking into a life with fluctuating volume. The mouths match not the lips; the mouths match not the tongue. I half-heard a twitch. I’d twitch till I’d break my neck, A brain a-bouncing. A coup contrecoup. I am now coughing blood. May I out this old thief, before my time has come.

~ A NEW SOMETHING FOR AN OLD NOTHING ~

The world is a cruel and terrible place, You may just not have enough time to really look at it. Busied to complacencies comradery, I just thought there was someone standing next to me. Don’t sit there and argue, About what it means to be, With bleached hair and three degrees.

Building, building, buildings breaking gnawing burning. Buildings being built for no real reason, For absolutely no real human reason. For what am I? What am I meant to invent, And how am I supposed to relate, To any of it, To any of you, To the spit that roasts the few,

Actual sensible thoughts, Left to disparage and rot?

My hair today. More coffee – less coffee today. Eight great barrels of whiskey, monkey cymbals, Constantly healing nothing, Creating nothing, Connecting no two things, And driving further and further away, From the icy surface of the face of the steadfast world.

~ TRAVELER ~

The simple things that bring me joy. The simple things that bring me peace. The simple things. Think how the simple things think, Of only the simple things.

Thanks, I may add another verse and then not get it published. So heavy. It’s all so heavy. The heavy. She’s heavy. Take them all and place them atop one another, and then light them all on fire for no reason whatsoever.

See. It’s so easy to ruin the world. It’s so easy to waste a life,

To never have had a life, To watch it just flow along the same streets, That we were too dumb not to sling our feces down.

Down, barreling down to the sewer, that is all that is. That is all that is. That is all we are. Show me purpose. Show me how that becomes that, and we then become this. Because we all know it’s not just from looking in another direction. No. The only good that’s come of that, Is the even tan our bodies get sitting and burning in the very light, That takes our little lives little by little each day, And the next entirely.

Why does it have to seem so dark? Why cannot it just seem to start and to end? And to travel six light-years to get here? Where really are we? No,

Sit down and tell me where we really are. Spinning, And inside that spinning, And inside that, more spinning. But we never get so sick of it we hurl, On ourselves or straight off the face of the Earth. Until forced, we are so too, By the dividing and the ending of time unconquerable.

~ SPARE ME ~

I don’t want prognostications of future terraforming benefits and complications. I don’t want advancements in sea warfare and anti-submarine missiles. I don’t want better and faster ways to lose weight. I don’t want discount codes or a free this with a free that. I don’t want chicken that takes like cow that tastes like grass that tastes like human. I just want to take a god damn nap.

~ ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER ~

Never have I lived a meaningful life. Never have I been so broke alive. Never have I before been so poor inside. Never have I found forever long-lasting. Never have I seen abashing love-the-lie. Though, ever have I lost mine own mind. Yet ever not loved more me than I.

Great big love—Earth’s soil. It’s dirt, and always dirt. Mounds and heaps and piles of muddied Earth. But buried—buried, I love the soil. But buried love, the days I’ve lived. But buried moved the rocks and stones. But buried, my mind erodes. My mind mined for thought’s under-soil. But buried them then again. To upheave—to zombify in exile.

Said buried, To crawl and drown and kick alive. Said buried, Something in the dirt. Said buried, Something of some worth. Deep buried, An exercise in flora births the word. And never have I ever soiled the muddied Earth.

~ THE WHITE DEVIL ~

So says the little bird, “Comb one’s hair before the funeral.” So impales that canine’s canine, Into that sweet, sweet meat!

Humans be gone! We sing so tenderly, in pack and fleet, But we’ll be undone. Cannot be undone. For they’ve sweaters to stitch and dogs to kill and eat!

Big Dogs’ Big Dead Eyes. Half alive, half alive! She left yellowed, sodden. The white devil arise! To eat your puppy, puppy sweet! Make no mention of her before the fall. Stuff of only legend.

But I’ve seen the primitive teeth. I’ve looked into the Big Red Eyes. And heard sounds that’d scare any sane man alive. First hunt, “Pummel the beast!” No sir, please take mine gold and mine meat! Second hunt, “Shackle the beast!” No ma’am, please take mine axe and mine traps! Third hunt, “Murder the beast!” No please, take mine shelter and mine mind!

Lo, the Beast, and I escaped side by side. As day one as day nine hundred and ninety-nine, we pace. The Beast and I will forever escape. Escape until the day we die. Not by big strong hand blind. But by grace and finally at peace of mind.

~ LO AND BEHOLD ~

Existing in another century. Where willows grab invasive species to guide them home gently. Life’s become undone by a massively intelligent quill. And o’er all our dowers inked. Juxtaposing airy contractions to intend on meaning contagiously. Where barrels of ageless ale become our life’s brine, Lives entwined enwreathe all we could ever become. Together as we dare two one, Around flora and family, As history collectively willingly forgets a division, We scribe ages timeless to ever-seas, Sent adrift. Imponderabilia swims with the Mythomaniac. To breathe in the oceanic air, Till made eternal. Creatures of the barreling sea.

~ CASHMERE ~

Wooden lights, wooden lights, How natural the window is narrowing. Lions clinging to lines fall writhing. A split claw now walks the edge, Of if I love or if I lack. A much larger influence on a thing, really, Than can be two things twice walking the hill, Of a cliff only sung.

Wash it off, let it become, Open it, then set it to dry in the life-threatening sun. Just let watching take you and with you what we all don’t see.

~ LUMINOUS TOP FLOOR VICTORIAN ~

Rogue little cheeky, cheeky Earthling Takers! Where have you gone? I you from when I was young. Your terribly bright light and your humming fascination. Driven deeper the sheets, deeper the fear and exaltation. You’ve shown little face this vicennial, you Tricksters!

Have I offended thee? Have I not done right, done not, or not have seen? More than likely, as clouded the years they be, By funny little suds and leaves. I think I we had a rather peculiar thing. Which upon I upheld, and you seemed reprieved. To add of some service to this place and these Beings.

But what power have you begiving me? To sit and to think and to write poetry is silly, As no one has ever known of me.

Save for family and for Sam and Steve. I wish to fulfill your creed no more. Please relinquish me Otherworldly Beings. And take with you the loads of sentences that strung me, Left me to dry, suspended above company’s approval, Below substantial’s acceptance, And smack in the middle of alienation’s numb fingers, Left brain, cold brain acidity.

~ WIRES’ BREATH ~

The mind is a wild and wondrous thing. Listen to it as it pulsates. Listen to it as it breathes. As the anxious tend to be, The well-rested never dream.

~ MALADY ~

Awake before a forest. Images unbuttoned; half slouched. Falling off of youth, they see moments. God save the almighty Queen’s rind, For she hollers and she coos till we’re wrapped up, Of any semblance of self, shelter, or time.

I want not. Small silly child blanket small silly child thought. Goodbye, home, hello green, green moss. It’s the same formula, And in the same mixture. Hope all that is lost, M’lady. Oh, to be something we are not.

~ ODE TO THE END OF THE WORLD ~

If the world is going to end, then what, When left hanging on by rosehip, Do we want with the very villain that cost us lives, And slipped us down a stream so hyperbolical, We recognized not walls, nor the face of a woman, Who left us in crib and in dying favor?

If what is longer is now what is shorter, Then perhaps we can collapse all time, And flatten it to a line that points directly to the guilty dinosaur.

Trial him and ask him why. Why he made a mistake and ate that little insect, At that particular swamp, At that particular period in time. What business that fly had with such a protozoan inside it, Is beyond intention.

So back to the big old lizard and answer, To all of humanity and to my mom, Why I sit here in sweat and fear balancing 28 years of thoughts, Inside a dying bowling ball, Atop a wilted bag of wet laundry, And you were left to live bereft of all chaos theory and its’ self-similarity, Just as the only true survivors will rise, Marching to the beat of their inevitable singularity.

Roll over and spit and look inside of me and tell me what you see, Doc? Diagnose a tiny drop of this and a sheet of what to watch for. Oh, I’ll be back, Doc; it always gets worse. In case you haven’t heard the world is dying, And so am I, Patient 6742171.

Catastrophe strikes with no sestina,

Watch the world end without a rhyme.

~ EARTH, ASPHALT AND RUBBER ~

In an hour as pinned down underneath thousands of pounds of steel, As this, How does one exist? In the wake of what was something so ed to the beginning, That the end seemed forever unreachable, How can what’s always been ignited extinguish?

Eternal is a tale. Told from the snowy cold pine-swept embrace, Of another life and another mile. Take this place once owned, And light it once again. Let the walls be warmed with our collective spirits, And let the tales never cease.

Run Alfa. Run and beat down the tarmac roses, Toward home.

~ THAT’S ENOUGH ~

Back at it. You button-hooked bastard. I recall I left breathing. The message is this:

Alone you wake. Alone you waltz. Alone you wrought. Far from blonde hair, Blurred eyes, busted cost.

I didn’t walk miles, Barefoot and barren, Just to whale a slow pine. To pin it down. Every bit of writ thoughts. My hair has excellent permafrost.

From skinny, Skinnier, Turquoise bedheaded Candle Wizards.

~ A-VOYAGING ~

No sweat. No sweet, sweet sweat. No, ground me up some earth elements you salty have not yet. I found fossil. Bones fossil. You brave part of the forest.

I hate it. I travel to be traveling. Rid of it, but it combs me. It combs to such a hive of all eloquent excrement. I want to walk. Walk and wash and tell my family I’m rid of it. But, “Hello, (name)!” “Yes, hello. I’ve found three coins, one silver, one silver, one silver-ish….” “Okay, good love, much love!” “Love… shit.”

Slow crawl through random basement particles. And I require a new knee. Sorry, big catch. I’ve looked at a cat. And watched it bleed so, It’s dead end. We don’t need it anymore. We don’t, Anymore.

~ DUSTING CLUSTERS ~

Sprawled all over your face, you shifty zombie. Why you were left to try and bereft anything/one makes me cringe. Bombs or found things as bullets of “faith”. I puke confidence. And I regurgitate self-awareness. Boom, poetry.

Po’ meh from sled dog to cute graves. Watch the shoulders of said sled dogs, Or the friction from which all will burn to form, A scant irritant itch just behind your left knee. That will drive you slowly insane. You’ll call a number and ask, “Friend! Befriend the paroles that have come of me, Fit long dog skins in short dog legs.” It looks rather…

I will call this my own little piece of poochie hell. Don’t drown me, don’t kick me, don’t call me.

I have to go green, man. I have to go make sure. When they pull the curtains, I won’t find an old version of myself dead, Because green used to be for fun and life used to be a given.

Non-sorry. Now I grab at broken shelves and make sure they don’t wake. Or else… It’s just an old rainy 90’s radio. It’s just else, but I love you. I sincerely, leaky-ford-tempo-car-window love you. And forever I will work your station. You, finite familiar.

-Your finite familiar.

~ PLEASE IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE ~

Well, Here we are, Old Chap. Bludgeoned, Bedridden, And barely alive.

Forget not, The veiled symmetry, Of the bridled Cavern-ess, And her promiseless accoutrement.

She stitches together a stride, Drunkenly down fickle avenues, To berate and to chew, On every last humble root’s dissevered nerve.

I’ve seen the rolling eyes, Of the smokey Cavern-ess,

Torture and steal will, From many once laureled.

I will travel nine lifetimes, To parry the helm, Of your hellishly guided misfortunes.

I will inhale shadow, To bust through your tongue, With frigid whisp.

I will nightly stamp out, Suckling detractors, To edge dead stead severed blocks.

Earthly by vault of rocky minerals and substrates. Galactically by flighted mirrored monoliths. Universally what shall we call this light?

~ SEA SHANTY ~

I walk a desert before I wash my face, Yet, several-hundred-million-minutes too late.

Seven, eight, nine billion overweight. Six lightyears lost in hyperspace. Five seconds to of the world escape. Four shuttles to cram in a bunch of ugly apes, Three times less likely to delegate, Two worthy minds left to then, One new happy world create.

~ HISTORY IN INCHES ~

Inching with my baleful winch, Taut past the point of intact limb, Cross gully on through hazardous galley went.

Spun dry of the sea-ice parka. Home of slender frames and notched leather. Two men, only one man willing. To ride seaside the whale’s might. And bough out a shilling more than red hands can offer.

Fated and abated by what one ought not to do. Lo, I feel the firm four walls and stove ablaze, Of five years been burnt away, Of neurotic circles and sodden days. All set aback new old wonders. Old heavens and vertex plots. Where if man lives but a little, Oh, my dear son, man lives but a lot.

Though still much rather I’d listen than hound, Than the vox bane of the withered kin. When a tree fell, that wasn’t supposed to. Or an ancient animal liked not, The anti-ancient animal clasp, That within it its’ paw doth rot. And left it to the cold dark haze. Where a sparrow once had found its warmth, To smolder in the minds of giants at play, Drawing away from immobile death, It challenged the very life it ferried.

Spearing through centuries still. What keeps the same fate aloft, Jettisoned chattels became apparatus to the lost. And a quasi-omniscient leader of the drunk, Droll-eyed to the likes of the new world stumbles off.

~ GREEN BICYCLES ~

Wait, the words did not work? Hertz, his pulse must be okay? Plummeting…

O, I am now going to stop everyone from ever thinking that I (we) cannot do this, Sort of a long, weak pulse subject to ice cream and salty, sugary soda pops, Yeah, I can. Oh, I can do a fake scented accent of your friend, your love, your hox, Walk a little damper, you sad, carp, there’s really nothing for you.

High rhyme! Lord, why can’t we strangle a little lyric out of this sick pupa? I want to walk apace to your sad eyebrow just to make you question life itself. Longer is less breath, less hand to hand, hand to skull of intruder. I intrude; it is I you want. If it will draw bone, then I will draw weird blood.

Do you have a sanctum suited for millions of weak neurons? For I surely do not. I’m sorry, but I too much.

Like when! Like when! Like when green bicycles rode themselves away…

~ A SERIES OF THINGS ~

17 more channels when you’re dead, I hear. A Lil bit more fed, I hear. A good bit more change in your dirt pocket. A walk to rejection, I hear.

I woke up with a questionable way to don my shoes. And on donned them. that window is oh-so-narrow, Oh, so narrow, dear fellow.

Keen on kale makes a good new sun. Bears clawing the waves and the pines make an old one. I want not to be forgotten inland.

Circumambient the land, The urchins in will flow. I just wanted to see the orange sky swallow doubt.

Doubt and pain, my fellows. I wake with six claw marks upon my back, And I smash charcoal and whatever I find, Into really, really weird derivations, From what is usually a whole verb.

Right! Wasting, wilting, burning, Faces pulled toward the Earth. I have seen some things.

No, safari-cart, I have, But in not the torrid un-natural sense, That makes moldy log home to thousands, Of whatever will rent.

Stop. Listen. It’s over! It’s over, old bear.

We’ve cooked the pair and waxed the days over. I don’t have the cap, over. To rent out a pleasure for flight, over.

But recall, friend! You aren’t so long, As you are so ahead.

You awake. “Exclamation!” No, she’s lost an ear. It’s ok to use wild grease to t, Two lives that look like left temple nerve pain. That looks like a favor. That looks like a cyan crayon. I shoved off a cliff, With four lifeforms within it.

~ RED ALERT ~

Do you… Expect me to dance? Jump, skip, hooray? Well, watch it, little lady, as I just might, And in so doing say forever my goodnight.

Lives in gorges, Usurping the surge, Dirges for languorous cantankerousness, Yet, in the valley of peace, I watch horrid giants become the sulfur of a matchhead light.

Charge of the temperamental brigade, Floating in sudsy space, Whipping dead horse’s drawn mistakes, Towards the beacon of longing, Diaphanous traits sculpted by the god-queen exclusive.

Steady the sins and paroles, Welcome the dawning of the new high moon, And the half-cut face, of her preeminence, Esse.

~ CHASED A HARE ~

What objects can physically be thrown in my immediate vicinity, and at what velocity, Debilitatingly quickly? By Earth. By Metal. By a bunch of scattered-ozone-hole-lung-punching leaves.

Watch it all turn asunder. Becoming something that will minutely less smolder. Less lung cripplingly leaves leave lungs lacking luster.

You then recognize it as a whole new dried-out piece of brain. Sketched. Evacuated. The last mineral that spilled over was chased down the glass. By a not-so-friendly patron that’d live half his life, Half his life in substitute, For the thing he’s yet done.

Half an enzyme short of coming to .

Is it suffer the end, To come towards the greyest? We’ll make a mold from this asphyxiation, And tiny new monsters tomorrow, For the skulking awaits.

Grabbing at roots, To see what holds. None of it. None of it is sanctum. What’s been, Has been severed with such haste, The words that ate his time, Ate the images’ insignificant face.

I want to roll in dirt, To make several faces my faces. To make someone who just met me try and escape, But I catch myself,

And then cover my body in sin. Sin for spiritual satisfaction? No sin for sin. To know that I’ve either not died, Or not yet died again.

I think thoughts as such drag us home, To a place where we grab old playthings from the attics, And define them piece-by-piece.

An arm goes up here, A leg here, a leg there, But don’t you forget, When things are molded, melted, and smashed to fit, Whatever life they say is the only life to live, Whatever man says “couch,” says “babes,” says “let’s give,” You rigorously scruple, If his hair doesn’t fit this hour, Then place ten blocks across his chest, And make him sing, “I am happy,

Lo, I am dowery.” “I am heaven, Lo, I am down deep.”

~ IT CRASHES ~

It’s cringing, It’s cringed. It broke (broke real bad) like fork-toaster bad. I want to scrape electricity off of me; it burns. I want to take two hemispheres and pull, Until “No, probably not.” Means, “No, if not.” But go home and find a couch-of-mine.

~ WHEN SHARED ~

It’s the wake of the dematerialization simulation. I. Mark. I. Mark disgusting radio waves, bringing nothing back toward the beachhead, Save for plastic algae, lower case styrofoam, old needles, and the occasional hymn.

Have you ever tried to burn down the pillars of a cement bridge at a submerged base? You’ll find an old catfish boot, some al-u-minium, and a waste of your adulthood. As a child, I’d tow through the muck. I’d feel river weed, crawfish shells, driftwood splinters, clam husks, and the tips of old slick rocks.

I am become joy.

Cross sands I’d march,

To make news of new cartography. No silly seeds, No advanced under-river photography, only what’s recordable by tiny human feet. For old human feet can’t breathe. The leather. The awful leather. The real leather. The fake leather. The faux leather. The leather-tramped stench.

“I’ve worked for these calluses!” “Well, I’m Alexander Supertramp.”

~ NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS ~

the slow clicks of the tongue! , no one wants you, and no one wants your dogs! you spelled “rember” until you were 21! , the ashes left on silk-screen lashes make noise!

, you’re wrong. the dreams you had only once. , the promises are as biographical as the psalms. drowning and losing all limbs at dawn.

despair. , your friends who are no longer there will read this. you are generally “okay,” In literally any sense of the limited word. you aren’t “ok.” , you’re okay; you’re not ok. You’re okay, alright?

~ CADRE ~

H.P. fear crafts death. K, mollusk? Arthropods, my personal hell. Oof, there’s such a chill in the air H.P.! Shall we use our excess fat to warm thee?

Coloring in faces scares me! I in art class, I’d mix a few and have myself a good ole heart attack! But where would art get me other than the ditches, Banging on street signs for attention from the police so I could sleep, Then spending all night playing the J.H.B. shuffle on my cell walls?

At least cells are less cavernous! To think I could be looking for stalactites inside a big ole scary dream! Or worse, locked in cellars ‘neath an old man’s kitchenette! No, H.P. I’ve not lost myself amidst the great expanse of time. I’ve found sculptures across the world fit to cascade my fears.

Oh, the axioms! Oh, the axioms!

Please elucidate me! But do not whip nor garnish nor sweeten thee. Ole blue shall do that for us all! For indeed her waves may align true, and her tides may taste so, so sweet!

Save for the rodents and feral dogs, The New Cities and Countrysides look rather oblique. But watch the dead rats don’t mold the pasture’s hills, Or we’ll have to drink of bleach. As a test, of course, just to see, just to see.

But H.P., we can rebuild your fragile waters! We can encase them in jelly to ensure we LOSE – NO – PARTICLES! Do not be slant nor dull, For horticulture will rue thine soul!

when… Um, the smells of old pages, ain’t it sweet? Mildew! I’ve smelt it with mine father’s nose I did! If only the morning grass weren’t as slick, I’d have a fair knee.

Lo, I’m thankful the monoxide has yet to poison me softly. Humming a tune to a tender grave, I muttered in big death’s ear, You do, in fact, frighten me, Big Sir. You all, in fact, frighten me.

But it is fear that keeps you alive. It is fear that keeps you alive.

~ IT IS NOW FOREVER ~

Don’t you put it in front of me, little Jimmy. Two things, You’re loud and annoying. Sorry kid, it’s really this easy to place words together. Guess why I stopped?

I want to wake up, and I want to take my face and peel it off, Stick it to a hot radiator, Watch it melt, And play with my second skin as oils drip.

Hand in mannequin’s unloving hand. Sick, rotten plastic. The candor has gone badly, and we’re all now a forced reality. I hope I die before I ever see myself become nothing. I’ll wipe a baby’s face or three, but I’ll never, I’ll never write a word without a signature, Not even a letter.

For in all love, I still find Mother Untethered.

Yea, I want to snake the rope till I’m promised a chance. A chance to love local cuisine, To walk Wednesday home, And to see Anna through to another atmosphere.

All devoid of my flavor of oxygen, Almost as if… designed. Realize there is nothing going on here save for sampling. Sampling Ourselves.

Dropper by dropper, till we flop and become hymns. I just want one. One human. For majority, I’ve killed or found the vacuum of value in. A simple sip of, “Howdy do?” Some time sures the fact that I’m entirely alone. I think if I skip more lines, I can avoid questioning.

~ TIRED TILL TOME ~

Crawling through this life in an instant, Cassiopeia becoming unincorporated. Spirals became decades, and woe gave way to organ rot. To face two things and to go blindly with eyes crossed. Meeting true parallax while your heartbeat wanders lost.

Murmuring in ink is but all I’ve got. Capillaries stretched twice round the Earth, Strangle my ability to think and to speak. Sugary days and sugary nights, Warm altitudes and the almighty inability to see colors.

If we are, but a line plunked when taught, That vibrates in triplicates and absorbs other’s heavy, heavy thoughts, Then why must we go so down complex systems of caverns, That at such depths stings frost and twang, When we try to show our friends just how we’ve come to weld our wounded knees?

Sleep, the seafoam equivalent to polishing a busted combustion engine. Perhaps a junkyard is not a bad place to rebuild. Reconstruction can be a swift deduction in challenges lost, And swinging bridges crossed can lead to a concurring of heir vertigo. Oh, the problems we wouldn’t face if we didn’t emaciate ourselves, With self-depreciation.

Perhaps the working mind is the wounded mind? The hogtied side of less crazy looks off in the midst of the red cape. “Shoot from the hip” seems like increasingly bad advice if we are sea-driven. And the good lord knows we are always sea-driven. Even after the sea didn’t want us back, And the land grew to die at our feet. We still clung and clawed for the escape of s stapled to our chest.

But again, perhaps it is not the wicked who get no rest, Who’s to say I can’t use est without hive-minded participation? To release the tension in all twenty-six muscles in the neck. And to use a burn barrel to make then the sky less red. Though there be some truth behind pollutions’ enchantments,

I still wish to crawl inside of it and to sit and to fish and to sleep and to wake another day.

~ CHOCOLATE ~

I think it fated I grew far a ways from the nearest mountain, For seen at any distance and at any given time, I’d have walked till I could’ve climbed, And I’d have starved if starving be the way I’d find, The nearest mountain to peak the errant mind.

~ 1-TWENTY-5 ~

Life and its lemons, Me and my dizzy duality. Silvery lid glass jars with morphing folding gooey space flecks, Sparkling the tumbling doughy taffy tar, All inside a watery bed, Pirouette of the living.

The world is weird. Eat yourself and be rid of us already.

Well, hello there, you shimmering little leaf of otherworldly symmetry. Has there ever been made an easier decision, As the ice melts through the rising sun’s course of the day? Many unwritten decades turn to win your warmth. Merrily, we see two vastly separate ends part. Merrily, I see your eyes, your face, your bloody heart.

Does it?

Does it matter at all? All dead, does it matter? Expired, does it matter? Wasted does it choke and never dawning claw and grasp?

Shall we? Brain wiring infected as imagined as my sanity. Slipping down thankless streets solemnly, Waltzing to the asylum.

1-2-3 1-2-3

My arm is numb, my fingers bleed.

1-2-3 1-2-3

My eyes are blurred, and my heart has seized.

1-2-3

1-2-3

I feel the beat of arrhythmic lunacy. There’s fire in the snow and plowmen at the ready. Nothing makes sense to me.

Sleep-fell-drown-break-wobble-choke-tingle-crazed. Hollow-howl-whimpered-wither. Hide beneath, coughing beneath, slipping under beneath. Delirium beneath, no peace beneath, bloody beneath.

Much more unsound, unstable, hysterical balance for an approach, TOWARD CONSCIOUS RECOGNITION.

~ ANTHROPOLOGICALLY SPEAKING ~

No one has ever, Just, Died lying in bed reading.

~ ZOOMA ~

I have crawled through, coughing, and seeing stars. I have watched the Earth move all its shadows, Fractions of inches in eloquent couplets. And have now become one post-synapses.

Whether it is moral to push the script, Or fold it back up and be rid of it. These things tend to fit to form to serve you. And of no other purpose seem to be.

I will quill my quelling ink in old glass, Mask my brute fangs and spilt blood with white dust, If so be it I can then scribe my sur, Next to ancient dull arrowheads and furs.

Walk me up the ladder with trodden hands, Kicking and feet greeting the heavens mad.

~ EXISTING GAGA PIT ~

To want to… want to watch the subtle gloaming finish on the matte grey skyline. Imagine emergence infantile yet aged where all surroundings scream, “Everything!” And they scream that very everything now, right now. No matter your ineptitude, aptitude, or inability to an “r” an “a” or an “an.” How to soak up a dripping brain, how to not care what goes where and where what went. A simple loading error, a simple life-threatening, sleep-depriving, terrorinflicting affair. Did I ever know how to spell? What’s the best way to eat radishes?

You can’t tell me when to go, and you cannot take me with you. I’ve seen the hours, and I’ve seen the undying sadness, and I’ve watched it go. Symphonies on the inside with a tenderized soul à la mode. Keep your wish to cast away toward where senses fail, and I will march atop it all, To fight for new prose with one perfect seashell to end all .jpeg’s sad attempts at a soul.

Come christening down the orchard rows with blissfully splintered strings to

tins. All in first person, All edible, and all real.

~ LIQUIDATING ~

Today was unbearable, and look; I bore it. I now lie, and I scribe that I am a man, and a man more alive. The venerable vengeance of the raining vice, Can serve only to burn the 99.9 From mine fingers. I need but a breath, But air, But mind, But time, But space,

To of all else erase.

~ PURPLE HAZE ~

To bring outer when inner bites to a race. To write a new fate. To bury an old friend, With all intent to commend a life, So well lived a quadruped. We hold true, And on through the misty Haze, we ride. ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky.’

~ SENSORY ~

I am mad, you see. I’m mad I woke up and said I would be stretchy, Or stretchy-er, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t. I cleaned the air vent, and I dusted, and I dusted, And must’ve dusted up something rugged as I wiggled down the step stool, (Once called ‘bench’ by buffoon). I started to um, started to get this… this… Sense. A sense that something wasn’t quite… right. Something was ah, Much louder than it should’ve been. Far brighter than it should’ve been. Way wetter than it should’ve been, Considerably more prominent than it should’ve been, Significantly newer than it should’ve been, Greatly greener than it should’ve been, A whole lot hotter, then I thought of it, This is several leagues more painful than it should ever, ever be.

But what little bird sings beaklessly…?

“If it can all be this way, it can all be un-this way.” “If it can all be this way, it can all be un-this way.”

But we must first break it, to next collect it, to finally, remove it. To in place of it emplace harder fought peace stakes, That will stay driven to keep the herd from crushing what’s within, With its stampede of incredulous force, Known only to care less about what we’ve suffered through, Than its own drive to a path less hoofed.

We can make fine words from carrots and strings, But can we hold them far enough away from our organs to remain unseen? Whilst meat surely tastes little like root, Is it safe to assume that the shoe stomps what the shoe stomps? And if so, the root that has grown so has lost its former dirty home. Surely we can of all else it, That the carriage was never drawn because the carriage had never fit. And the beakless bird knows only beakless wit.

~ DECIDUOUS ~

Everything sunk with the fish bones, And the scraps of the things that I’ve broken my teeth on.

All patrons have died from carbon monoxide poisoning, And the ringleader has no fit fingers left. Just nubs and regrets.

Pony up, showman. ‘It’s all your circus now.’

Spun round in circles until the lines blurred. You collapse and find what it’s like to live attached to the bottom of the sea. You watch the jellies dance in synchrony, To your failed aversions.

Flat and filled with billions of units of saltwater. Your purpose is to beautify the depths. To lay alone till you harden and wash into a world that you cannot exist in.

You become a child’s prize. To be honored for a day. To lose one of your arms. To be placed in a box on a shelf. Then under a bed. Then in a closet. Then sold away with the house and the memories. And one day found by a child who has grown to hate the sea, And all its creepy-sea-like beings.

~ SMILE, ZI ~

To find caption in the grace of the human spirit. To scream so loudly that no one can hear it. What helps but to be here and to think, Of anywhere else but here to be?

To use a wounded mind to climb back to a time, When Zitkala-Sa would so gracefully not smile upon me. I prefer it when she doesn’t smile. I’d also prefer not to die. Those two things are separate and unrelated.

My lips are pins; my hands are needles; my feet ice, My insides are ripe for rectification. My promises too steep to of my present state contemplate, A descent toward the volcanic marshy tar, That lives beneath the pillars of my forefathers.

The caribou has heralded the tundra willow,

And I have spent the last hour fighting off something that isn’t real. Or is it? No, no, it isn’t. So, clean your glasses, dust off your life, and how to write. Take a step closer to the ample bright light, You tertiary luminary. You big scary tertiary ill-luminary.

~ TIDE THE MOON ~

I will find in the brackish of seas just what this life has meant for me. I will find in the murkiest of waters just what my stardust has formed to offer. There will be no strings left in me that have not found will in harmony. There will be no pennant free of my life’s crest and my shield being. I will find a moon that I like, and I will stack rocks to claim my right. You can keep my poems and my strife, and I will entomb, And on new moon breathe new moon life.

~ RIPPED APART BY HORSES ~

Sometimes the things we intend to be shorter, Break order and turn our lives into little shiny green mile marker signs. To illustrate our day to day, We tick our ings with the things we think bring merriment. Voracity becomes tenement, Taphonomy awaits us. But how a pleasant spring breeze can make for a masterful neurologic symphony. The ties back to early childhood histories. The chance to be a new version. Rewound to be renewed. The opportunity to become an entire atmosphere. To see the air and to feel the aromatic master score of the pleasure bloom. We’ve seen nothing if we’ve not seen such sensory vibrancy. There’s little to life left, Then to relive powerfully enough to restore the present moment.

Our capacity to experience existence must continue to grow, Multiplying by the length of an exploratory young scout’s, Scavenge for the paragon beetle. Each he finds the quintessence of its former. Mapping the internal dialog to Aristotle’s descendants. The world has now become encapsulated inside a small drawstring bag. For some reason, its navy and bright yellow strings remind him of 7:30 PM, In mid-spring. Apparitions ignite nostalgia’s old-smokey wool blanket haze. Right as you drive over the bridge over rivers once dammed, You feel safely 20 years older. You see little ones clinging to last light’s defense while you char something good. Drink something, hum something. Welcome. You’ve made it. Reacquainted with the transition hour. Akin to the life so longed yet lived. One stretches to disruption to remain in

the cozy heated pipeline of a time, As vivacious as this. Then there are vehicles that come to take us away. All of the undesirable hours comprise the frame that compromises bliss. There are no negotiations with welded steel and dead dinosaurs. It either isn’t your time to live here, or here really isn’t a time at all. It’s an amalgamation of all the things you’ve never had. It’s the fever running down your neck when you were 4 years old. Waking to a sweat blanket cocoon that never really opened. Can you drive in reverse as quickly as you can run into a tree? Perhaps if you never left, you could decide how best to cook your sides, How finest to garnish your discord. It becomes irrelevant if we are to agree these hours pose no real threat, if they pose no real purpose. After all, It is just elements and timing.

~ IMAGES JUST ENOUGH UNSEEN ~

Twelve tiny shiny little boxes and a beam hammer. No , no needle stammer, no bright white effigy. We’ve begun again, and by god, if we need be strung up like marionettes, And forced to unwittingly hobble along, Then let it be done. For I’ve no longer the patience for Jesus hair, Jesus beard, Or the thirty seconds it takes to fold hands and to forfeit a prayer. There’s a lot of grain in this salt, isn’t there? A lot of hair in this blood. We no longer live there, but we no longer live there. I’m sorry for the fights in between the fights. I’m sorry for the rich flair. I’m all armored, and I’m still agaze the treetops and the everglades. I just have dishes to do first. And oh yeah, Limbs to regrow. But what color is it this time? It matters not for the sequence will overflow with the repetition.

For as long as the fear overflows with the fear, And the thoughts, the thoughts, The many, many misguided, unguided, god-why-did-I-do-what-I-said-I-did-not thoughts, The fuse trips daily. Stemming the stammer of the unsteadied needle hammer, The needle clamors.

~ STEM THEORY ~

Rip it apparat and ground it down to fine-toothed powder, Shove it down the pipe and see if it’ll light. What have we to do but extrapolate our peaceful demonstrations of luridminded, Do-alrighted-ness and make cakes to serve new masters? Do you those old bastards? “This always equals this!” Get the picking fruit out of it with this moldy sludge. Go find a rake to eradicate this wildly hexane emulsifier. The dog would sooner realize it’s not water, Than I would take to grave the words of your forefathers.

~ NEBULA GUM 29. ~

My magnetic teeth grind the stellar grates of Nebula Gum 29. At its center lies a cluster of knots whose floating fibers aflame, With a molten quinacridone crimson. Splice the water to not shock the roots and pour yourself through, The translucent cannula traversing through the multicolored multiverse, Chartering charged spirit particles as the rainbow hexahedrons disperse.

Cool, blue and liquified in artificial veins, Rolling, spinning, twisting, and stimulating the cilium. The tracers are stalking the outer layer to empty the antechamber. It’s nice when words make sense like “antechamber.” Something you should’ve thought of before you’d gone on aimlessly, And so rudely died out in space.

~ BEARDED LOGIC ~

The honey shelf is aplomb with sticky enrichment. Don’t leave me—don’t waste me—don’t just let me watch, While white hot water twirls its god fingers round all my wasted thoughts, I swirl with its whirlpool palindrome as we together, Ever stronger, Attack the unknown.

Deep breaths and esthetician’s fates, Doing different things in different places to ease bad-mouth-washed associations. Today is a day built for writing, Lo, I must tend to the hounds.

We travel through time coned but doubly annoyed. We must that other machines are driven by other encephala, As Claude by Tchaikovsky, As Occam’s Razor by fuzzy-fuzzy logic, As the absence by the presence,

And as time by peacefully unwilling unconsciousness.

Sit down and study the patterns of human communication. Do not use your lack of things to attend to to expand the minutes. Count your breaths and mind your texts. Left *buzzer* right *buzzer* Stay in your lane, fake the river flow. Bestride the esplanade, Though we all know it’s a circus wheel. Steam that damn frozen Chicago topsoil.

We want nothing more than predictable breathing patterns, Hematomas for our enemies, Peace, And a yellow room with white trim that does not elicit anxiety. A space where you can use whatever word you choose, Without fear of ridicule. It’s always accompanied by the most pleasant of aromas, And never creaks or hums in any way other than exactly how we want it to.

But who s us in this yellow-y room with white trim?

As history would suggest, we have some choice mares, And as always, the hounds, But when will one choose us? Tea and honey, peppermint, and heartache, Actual ache, actual scolding. Be it the mother withholding that tears the teddy from the crib, Be it the old Bukowski-man who cradles and rocks, Spits up prose so poetic and lost, That he crawls around empty and solemn in slosh just to mock, The many simple triumphs of the many simple-minded millions who’ve flocked, With steady wings as he on cradle rocked, And was given such a gift in the amber and the grain, To die alone, But to be ed by name.

~ DWELLER AT THE SIGN OF THE FALCON ~

Measure me against me against me against me. Do not mock the honor of the child-ling. He seeks what he thinks to be and is what he has since learned forgot. The technology to time plate tectonic anomalies, Can be traced and outlined to identify and subdivide a series of beings. For one, A being seeking meaning in dead past things and heirloom rings, Can be taught to of himself invent an herbary, To nurse his newfound furbished armory. And to place parts of bones next to scrapes of rocks and leaves.

~ DESK AND CHAIN ~

Will I ever choose a wife? In this dull cantankerous life-a-letting, Why I just might! I’ve grown less comprehensive, But have I really gotten any smaller?

I can see the veins in my hands drawing maps, To uninhabited animate sandy red beaches. But does this increase in protrusions make me superfluous, Of mind, of observation, And of too in pence?

I’ll never my birth, My death, Or any intermittent parlance breathe. When so checked I am by fear, By noise, By serpents-a-fellow,

Ne’er do-gooders.

Here’s where the poem changes. Here’s where I catch my breath. Look me in the eye after this, And say I asked for less.

No, I asked for this, Exactly this, And for screams throughout my vents, And for an amiable wife, And for a lovely lowly desk, And to of madness write.

~ THE WORLD’S FIRST ANTI-INFLAMMATORY ~

The first poet to write a grocery list. Who gives a shit. Period. Believe in something. Love and/or beauty. Peace and/or grace and/or solitude. I present you with the present moment. The construction has stopped, For an hour. The reduction in inorganic polyphenols is vast. Press now your sleep cymbals. Rest now your overcharged, Undercharged, Global cannabinoid system. Peace, gentle Beast, Peace. My teeth hurt today,

As the Earth dances and sways, I think I ought to go back to fluoride toothpaste.

~ THE LIGHT TAKES AWAY ~

Lunchtime again. Silence so loud you can hear every little morsel smooshed.

You are not without sun, And you are almost not without love.

Your digestive tract gurgles. A courtesy you’ve done it so not to starve, And to whittle away.

Your face has been twitching more recently. Perhaps it’s just stress. Perhaps it’s a stroke. Perhaps it’s nothing.

Plan out the rest of your day now, friend, Before it runs its course straight over your head, And you’ve done naught but to poison yourself again.

Is balance the seed that, when buried, Begs for new soil, Or the seed that grows swiftly regarding not, The asphalt beneath which it’s toiled?

Perhaps the more, The more you read, Read from your teal book of poetry, Lent to you by the girl, Who’s soon to be the world to thee, Though not but weeks earlier, she was but a mystery.

Wouldn’t Love love how empty the world’s meant to be?

~ A MATCH IN SPACE ~

Unlike a match in space, I once tried to use a Hafiz book to snuff out a candle. Didn’t work out so great.

~ FANTASTIC ~

You can see it in their eyes. The foggy faces of general publica. The origin is dusty in the corner. I, only, I. The man, the moon. Walks with scars and bricks immutable. I’ve dug too deeply, Not only am I trapped, But sliced into a pocket of fumes got me dusting off.

We were landed on the same line. Tasty and viciously bitten-smitten. You were a keeper, but I had to fatten up. Intellectually. How many more times can we drain the spares, Till my clock beats out? Hard to beg for a noun sedimentary, When what your last page was meant to read lies a mystery.

~ THE MALE NAMED BIRD SPARROW ~

It’s as if planetary derivations sucked Quasimodo liver juices, From the ice-cold hellish coolers of lukewarm Mother Earth.

Simply sayeth me, The surgeon alliterator stacking f-a-i-l-u-r-e.

Come crashing down the left vein, Toward a wrecked chess piece Stromboli. Rolling tired old car tires down swiss-cheese alleys, For I fear no rat, nor any human being.

The side thing is the end thing if the main thing, Comes crashing through touchy-touchy windows, Splintering and inventing new galaxies on the daily dash, Before the tire grates and the teeth greet glass.

The plural of many births unhinge the operator’s fiendish mirth, To use thirty-odd years of echoes to quench our thirst,

And tilt-a-whirl the universe.

Sending offspring radar to paleontological days, A far beat from sovereignty to St. Odilo’s street, Waxing the warning signs to become capsized, By the anonymous neighboring fleet.

The window is narrowing, Keen— the male named Bird Sparrow King.

~ JUNK DEPOSITION ~

Relative. Ooh, baby! Past-time therapy. The effect, the mood-swigging, brain trimming demonstrative display. Waiting for a co-human pilot. Bath we in weirdly misidentified energies. I’ve been here for centuries. And I can claw my way back indefinably indelicately. I’ll fly on the L-Y’s, baby, And I’ll write twenty more pages, ya dig? One wears a cone Elizabethan. One walks a line undefeated. Black and white plaid. Stitch it tight.

~ WAR IN THE DISTANT SKIES ~

There’s war in the distant skies, But finally, I’ve found peace. How are these all my pages? Years but if not decades lost.

Mounting moonbeams on my walls, In place of ten sevens. Better to stoke old embers, Than to frame dead words aligned.

There’s war behind his red eyes, But finally, he’s released.