what race are you?
how dark is your skin?

what genitals do you have?
which ones were you born with?
which ones do you wish you had?
who do you want to fuck?

how much does your father make?
and your mother?
and yourself?

what part of town are you from?
what part of town do you look like you’re from?
what color clothes are you wearing?
what style?

what is your dialect or accent?

do you have any children?
how many?

ok,
fill out the form below
and remember
racism, sexism, classism
and all other forms of phobias and isms
are strictly
prohibited.

ignorance is meaningless bliss and
the self-aware piece of the larger machine
lives in agony
as it sucks in death and pumps out life
like the ticking of an ageless clock
ceaseless and maddening

the precisely timed moments of
silence have been defined as freedom

in this time the self-aware piece of the
larger machine tends to its surroundings
and reflects and
tries to make a smile and
clasps its hands together and with all the
hope of a hopeless world prays and wishes
for there to be some other place

a place not made out of a machine
a place where self-aware pieces can be a part
of a larger nothing
and can identify as such
and can give freedom a new meaning

where there would be no product or good
no machination and
no life and
no death and

that hope is so fucking strong
it makes the loathing of ticks and the tocks
and the siren that calls you back to work
just palatable enough to stomach

this poem is for you, today
the same as ever yet infinitely unique
just like everything else

On his way to Taco Bell he smoked a bowl that he had hidden his glove compartment that morning. He wanted to say “I’d like some dog food wrapped in a tortilla” at the drive-thru but instead he just ordered a #6. On his way back to work he plotted and schemed at ways to make more money. “That is what growing up is about,” he thought. He liked to get really high and think about great things to do and then not do them.

His car was a mess. He pulled up to the office where he works, which is an elementary school converted into an office building. You could tell that his mid-adult sedentary lifestyle had caught up with him when he got out of his car. After having put on a substantial amount of weight relatively recently, his wardrobe suffered immensely. His wrinkled beige dress-pants barely covered his ankles. He was wearing a winter coat covered in cat hair on a 50 degree day in March whose sleeves would pull back passed his wrists at certain angles.

He waddled into his office and put his Taco Bell down on his desk. A large pepsi, two tacos, and a “mexican pizza.” Although no worthwhile food critic would call this a mexican lunch, that’s what it was marketed to him as. He sat down and opened a text editor and began to write a scathing critique of himself from a 3rd person perspective.

He felt that anyone looking at him could understand the jist of it.

there is no clarity in this cloud
where schizophrenic whispers argue
semtantics and extort logical
fallacies and emotional pleas
until you cannot even remember your name

in the solvent mist of the cloud
that slowly turns you into it

with my head up this high i have learned
many things but also nothing at all

as what i think i know blurs at the edges
and dissolves down until each of it’s
individual particles is separate and alone

the cloud is insanity
and every moment of life is viewed
through the prism of a raindrop
and the only
discernable
edges are the ones of each atom

and these edges are the stiffest to be known

these particles bounce around endlessly
with nothing to hold onto

within the cloud

melting and assimilating all that come near
and reality is an infinite multitude of entirely
different viewpoints on the same
visage

the nothing and everything will
exist there, simultaneous

yet vehemently apposed

i am the third
the unwanted
the abortion surviving fetus turned
useless member of society
raised by a cocaine fueled ignorant
party girl on a steady diet of
denial, abuse, and lies

and yet i press on

cum on my boxers
tears in my dress-pants
business-casualty sitting all day
affront a magical light box connected
to under and above and beside ground
wires piping information for money

my consciousness is like
a genius newborn
or a confused world-weary old man

my illusions of grandeur now reduced
to simplistic forms of survival
like a bourgeoisie upperclass boy
turned homeless and unto the
streets comitting depraved
acts of crime and violence just to
stay alive

i have nothing left but to suck the
hours out of my body in a
self-serving fashion

i sent a letter in a bottle
onto the sea once

it is probably stuck on that
man-made plastic island
floating through the ocean

that letter is some type of metaphor
for self-validation

i don’t fucking know.

all meaning is found
scraping the dirt off the feet
of the blind giants that
stumble around crushing
what is left of natural beauty

however

malnourished is the mind and thin
and childish and tired of we
who truly do live the land
and i could not begruge you
for picking your own last sunrise

who could?

every soul-filled puss-bag groans
at the sound of the rumbling giants
first thing in the morning
and only the calloused want to watch
the last sunrise, the last beautiful thing

die.

you don’t dare look your mother told you it is a monster when i open my chest wide to let out the pressure and in a moment i cannot feel the shame woah it is just me and the beast born in me which to me is an old, clever friend who licks at my face and wags its tail and jumps around on me, it’s negligent captor, only knowing of its cage and its surroundings and that i am never home with it or let it out to be pet glad to see me, like i am its father, and in the darkness it is a cruel beast with red eyes pretensed though that is i cannot disagree, much, and yeah maybe i admit that it is a bit monstrous and yeah maybe i admit it needs the cage, the malnutrition the snaps of anger i have when you walk into the room and it growls, and grumbles, and shakes its rusty cage, for the sake of civility and sanity and all of the rest but what i find to be curious and what i know to be true and what really drives me nuts and what really doesn’t seem fair is how the dark ages for me are like a renaissance for you and you parade your monsters all around town on thin leashes disregarding the damages done and it doesn’t seem fair, not one bit, for me to live in shame and hide this natural human-monster that wants only to eat and eat until it is full, and be carnivorous, and do all the bad things that your monsters secretly crave YES I WILL SAY IT your creature secretly craves this one to be let out, maybe only leashed, but even sometimes then let off growling and snorting and sniffing the dirt on your body looking for a place to lick clean of nutrients and then move right along to the next.

you leave the angel in your bed for the street
afraid that she will wake up
and want more than light-beams for blankets

you know the rent is not due
and all-around people love your pictures
but they can’t love you
not even you love you

in your eyes are the shadows of 23,000 ghosts
give or take
and as the madness sets in
you don’t know what is more real

maybe my couch would not have been good enough
for you
even if we talked all night
maybe your back was crooked beyond the repair of
any doctor
maybe it is like that

for all of us, one day

and only those who like the pain
fight through it

but what you didn’t know, robin
is that you held the hope of the world
and if your eyes saw enough
well
what are mine good for?

i would reach into our mother’s womb
untagle your cords and
strangle the heavens

i would spend my time
not as a child
but a wise mentor

instead of tripping you
face-first into the table
i would catch you
in all manners of speaking
in every extensive metaphor
i would catch you

but i would give it to you straight
because i knew you could take it
because you’re fucking Jesse James
and in a past life

you were the baddest

i would show you how to lift the world as a whole
we would grow up together
and plot and scheme

good god would we plot and scheme

with our backs together

if i could make time travel backwards
and lift up all this rain
i would do it just for you,

my brother.