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

you want to
eat the eiffel tower

you want to eat
notre dame, the grand canyon
so you can fill your
brain with images

“go outside and breathe in the crisp air
and smell the city”

but for what?

for myself to keep?

you think you live to eat
i think you live to kill
and shit

the colors are already
inverted for me
and i just have to
live like this

so that i won’t one day
find myself

in someone else’s brain
trying to tell them
what to do

at least i’m in wichita
and one of
maryann’s cousins can’t just
towe my car

at least i’m wichita
making over 50 thousand a year
and my mom can’t
yell at me

i’m not back home
smoking mids
behind a gas station
with some kids i went to
school with

rob’s dead
a lot of shitty things have happened
(and continue to)
but it’s fine
it’s fine

what takes me out better be
something
not like falling in the
shower
i’m too self important
for that

i want to say thanks
for the cold air
and thanks for the
moon

you are but a fruit fly
born into a garbage can
it’s so hard to understand
there’s nothing to understand
every night you go to sleep
in order to wake up again
tell your family tell your friends
make your little stupid plans
get all fucking stressed out
eat and breathe and play pretend
there’s nothing to understand
it’s so hard to understand

i dare not speak on
lake skaneateles
the silence
is for me

and the clean water
and
the birds chirping
are for me

i don’t want to
think about
the muscle men
of wichita

or the land lords
or the
hit-men

but i do make noise
and i do think of them

and i vomit and
vomit bile
the entire time

all over the
eagle’s nest

muddying the
blue water

all over ed and marie’s
pretty little cabin

as i become the soul of skinny atlas himself

straightening my spine
and readying
to shoulder this
globe forevermore

for those who toil
and think to build
onward, to the foot of niagara
where one shouldn’t go (but wants to)
a billion pounds of water crushing down
be it for the sharing of ideas
and these planks of wood
i am baptized by the gods of america
uncertain and raw, in my natural
state

i kept those letters you wrote to me
for twelve years in order to
read them today
when i finally cared to wonder
what you had to say
and i’m not sure why

i try not to cry as i hold
love letters written from my
fever dream-girl as i begin
to wake and wipe my eyes to
realize that you were real
all along

i bury disgust in my queasy stomach
my selfish, selfish queasy stomach
that i was born with such hunger
for the tender loving words
of a girl of maybe fifteen

i devoured you in waking dreams
but you were as real as me
and wrote love letters that shake
now in the hands of a man
and i’m not sure why

it is not enough, i know
there are lessons to learn, i know
in between the lines
of the young girls
who once loved me
and i will learn them