you do desire to be read
like a book you do
as you are what man
is, romantic fool
or a minute volitante

would you could you
sift through my waste
in order to sanely pick
a speck of me worth keeping
and prove that i am real
even if hard to see

shake my jaws apart
mirror-face
and lay wasted
in a hole
on a sunday
only i can fly
in my dreams

lost as a man but not an object
or lost as an object but not a man
or not quite lost at all yet
a beacon to be pointed to

unlike the tiny eye floater

it’s friday night
as the last flight leaves from houston
as i look out the window
it seems that all the lights are on
but it is actually a great
burning trash pile
attracting something much bigger than a bear

the engines on the plane churn
like mule-less mills but from
whence do they find their motion?

from the parasites eating away at you
from your unasleep mind racing
fretting about your disorganized soul

and you cannot make out
what comes around the horizon
nor have you the strength
to blow the smoke away

i hate tuning the guitar
i am only happy when i can just pick it up and play
and however it sounds is how i am feeling

but songs like that don’t get played on the radio

---

All the money towers are unique
All in the same way and
Just money towers, after all
Let their ephemeral and illusory grandeur
Wash over you and into the sewer
And be amazed at not just the pieces and parts
But that a person would put them together
In this particular order
To make a big impressive money tower
For fools to feel small below
Or fools to feel big atop
And to carry the money up and down
Because that’s what money towers are for

---

The city is drowning in bad dreams
That any man so inclined
and with enough effort
could wipe away
Albeit the sounds of the highway are deafening
But that’s a cross we’re all born to carry
Whether or not to go outside
You can’t stop them all from dreaming or even fill their heads with butterflies
But that’s a cross we’re all born to carry
Which is the truth you’ve no choice but to face one day
Which we are all fated for
Dust in our mouth, whip to our back, the whole town gawks and jeers like in a feature film
How we carry that cross is up to us but
To be honest
It won’t matter either way
Because no one can go back in time
So you can waste your last moments debating on whether or not you like the taste of your own sweat or not
As long as it was worth something

---

I open the window and let the cold air rush in
that among many things is at least okay
i high off the smell of fall long to be intoxicated
and as the birds fly i hear all the things that are free
calling me to come out and play in the piles of
freshly fallen electric bills as the sirens wail and
the shore inches towards my toes but i am so very afraid
so i close the window
the stale air makes me sad
i wonder why i am so very afraid
and pull the blankets over my face
like i am flipping numbers around in a math equation
that will always end the same way
like a fork in the road, window open or blankets warm
matter will live each way but which will more to me
or which of me is bigger are all thoughts i have
before i go back to which is always the same
work

nobody wants to hear your
spoken word piece
nobody thinks your
life is interesting
you just want so badly
to say it out loud
that there’s an entire
industry designed to let you

nobody wants to read your book
or your poetry
nobody relates to or
feels excited by your words
but it’s free to
write them down
or post them or
throw them away

if you make it big
it’s not because your
stuff is good it’s
because it’s useful

yeah it’s unique…
uniquely unoriginal
and perfectly fit for the
modern narrative

your self importance
is a ringworm eating
and getting ever bigger when
ever you do and you eat
eat eat until it’s all over

and mommy will congratulate
the big baby who did nothing
but finally stop crying

you keep being right
and knowing things

you’re never wrong
or finding that out

and go about brandishing
the accomplishments
of the authors of the
books you have so
dutifully read
every word
come dripping
out of their mouths

and unless someone
says it to you
i guess you’ll never really know
anything

it’s a big wanting
without purpose and
without reason

but it’s not about you
that’s for sure
on august 9th, 2021
whatever that means

it is both highly personal
and entirely universal
like tasting loss for
the first time or
rushing back to sleep
to catch the end of a dream

and it’s about lying

because it’s a quest for self actualization
at the cost of all things

it’s a big wanting
without purpose and
without reason

but it’s not about you
that’s for sure
and all the things you should or
should not have done or wish that
never happened

it’s about the friends you made along the way
clutching their chest in a parking lot
and the diseased oak leaves drying out in the baking sun
and the consequences, of it all

you lose everyting
you love
being over-conscious
because your brain
is a million little germs
that make up a disease
that slowly eat away
at your life
a disease, being
something like your self
something in the mirror
something like acid
in your stomach
eating away
with no cure

in some ways we still live in the garden
asked to make decisions on things we don’t know about
and to accept the repercussions
then banished for following foreign thoughts and feelings

i think, as i round the corner to your house
suddenly lost and talking to myself in languages i don’t understand
i decide to stop looking for anyone and sleep on the curb
fever dreams of drug filled mansions and the ability to fly

since god won’t love me and i can’t read street signs
i decide to recoil into myself

in many ways we live in a purgatory of sorts
where happiness sits at the end of a tractor pull
and we feel different on the inside every morning
but look like day-walking zombies

i eat and shit and laugh and cry alone
even moreso when others are around me watching
thoughts of suicide-by-apathy filling my
mind and following me around in my dream-

when something is lodged in your airways
you can’t breath even if you try

dax the cat wants to go outside
although maybe she doesn’t know what
awaits for her there

so i make the decision for her, that it
is safer for her to stay with me

but i don’t know if she really knows
and i don’t know if she would agree with
my decision even if she did know

but the language we speak to eachother doesn’t cover much
and she’s a very smart cat, so sometimes i wonder

i wish i could tell her that if i let her out
i can’t be held responsible for what happens
and i can’t be timely when letting her back inside

she’d not be able to come and go as she pleased
and the city has laws against this kind of arrangement

but when i look at her eyes
i know
she knows
and i know
she wants to
go anyway

to be honest, i know it for certain

a cat wants to roll in the grass
and eat bugs and small game
and bathe in the sun all day

“tis better to have loved and
lost than never to have loved
at all”

and maybe it’s selfish to keep her locked inside
with wooden floors, and air conditioning
and a strict regimen of nutritionally viable chow
and even my love is not enough

it’s chess against myself but i don’t even want to play
and it’s bringing me to tears
win or lose, i don’t understand what i am saying
and i can stop talking or stop listening
and i can take bong rips until my eyes water
for a different reason
and take solace in the fact that

i decide to get up
because i’m hungry

and i move my feet
to get to the kitchen

and get a bag of chips
to make the hunger stop

but i have not yet understood a thing about it
and it’s not their fault that they can’t understand
i don’t even speak my own language

parched and dope sick in kansas
cutting through the bramble
haven’t i been here before?
i mean, everything looks the same
guess i aint goin nowhere

another zombified mother’s son
no clouds in the sky
just eagles flying round
or maybe they are vultures
or military jets

a consistent abundance of nothing
a prison of your own decisions
where other places are just stories
you think about as you drift off
into sleep

king bug makes no decree
his royalty remains unseen
and only challenger, gluttony
his tiny army always flees
but if alive and well he be
a constant state of victory

One day you’ll have nothing to say
Or no one to say it to

it is good to feel you
are treated as a child
when you are one

but wouldn’t you
rather just die,
than be one forever?

i imagine

you crawl out into the forest
under the grey clouds, not so bad
but it gets blacker, colder
hostile like the vacuum of space

whether to make peace and die
or turn back to the crib
it’s always been up to you.

the ouroboros represents
money which is a lie
that feeds itself but
the depiction should be of
a white snake,
with a conquistador
hat

it’s late and the sound of things you could have done pitter patter across the hood of your car and you’re a little under the weather but nothing you can’t handle and you wish yet again that time could travel backwards but that’s the one thing it just won’t do and even though you saw the red light as far back as your twenties you just couldn’t stop in time although you knew precisely how slick your tears would make the road you pressed the brakes too late and at first you think this is fine, you’ve made peace with the whole thing, but then suddenly you’re not at peace and then in the last seconds time really does go backwards and you wrote a check that your ass couldn’t cash this time but you had saved a joint just for a situation like this just for a final drag i guess that’s how it ends and i guess that’s all it ever was the familiar smell of forbidden happiness out in the garage on a summer day before you struck your head and everything started blinking and then it stopped.

you’ll be killed by a dumb man
who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or why
and he will rule the world

it won’t be good, because good
is smart and smart is an
aberration to god

the king of man must be lied to
for at seeing the truth would
tear out his own eyes

even love, as beautiful as it is,
lives in the moat of the
stupidest castle in the land

it must live there else it
be devoured by all the retarded
senselessness of each passing minute

a stubborn boy, i thought i’d live
to eat each fruit but now i
wretch loudly throughout the jungle

it’s too sweet, i don’t know
maybe poison in the last one
feeling very drowsy now

i guess i don’t know how you hunger
and it may be that i never really will

when i said you’d eat the eiffel tower
from a place where that idea
seemed dumb, i’d not known i, too
one day would want to, in a way,
consume things as well, of a similar substance

too similar to obviously
discern the difference

i mean,
i want to say it’s different
but i don’t know that it is

because i woke up with you
in my head today feeling like
i selfishly wanted every thing that i could
see all for myself and no one else

and i don’t care why

so maybe i should have
listened differently or
you should have
explained yourself better

or i should have explained
you better to myself

oh well, either way
as pain builds strength
so too does
being wrong build wisdom

i am used to missing the
mark, after all

but it’s not about me

the mountain is not a metaphor
but a mountain made of rocks
as you are made of rocks as
rocks are states of energy
seemingly stagnant but a
story an infinite number of
pages long with letters too
tall for you to read.

the mountain is a letter too
tall for you to read in an
infinite story and appears
to be made of rocks as
you are made of rocks are
not a metaphor but just
differing states of energy.

give them no quarter
in your mind and run them
out. remain at a distance
of at least 6 feet, for to
prevent the virus from
passing. take on the mountain
alone, or with trusted few.

this is all there is.

run them out, and give them
no quarter in your mind.
keep at a safe distance
of 6 feet for to prevent
the virus from passing.
climb the moutain alone,
or with trusted few.

there is no more than this.

the devil
lives in my mind

and you can bet on that, as sure
as the tide stays at bay

and you can even set your clock to it

and I won’t die, no
that’s too good for me

i will see the virus wear me as a mask

so sad that i am afflicted
by this virus of the mind
and i don’t know how it
will end
but i know how it began

the truth
makes an uncomfortable chair