ideal wreckage

 As if conversations coming in through the walls  

Muffled and unclear 

Imperfect, in the way that the marvel cinematic universe has bastardized expectations 

Still, like a mouse in a maze  

The echoes of implication  

Shift like tectonic plates  

 

If only I could fucking understand it. 

If only I could lower my head, and hands, and quit with the constant aggression and anger. 

And its just this low simmer, all the time. Utterly in control, but always present.   

 

Like a dream where I was expecting to have something beautiful, and instead got the truth. 

And the honesty stings in a way that makes me feel small and stupid.  

 

Where I've worked so hard, for so little.  

 The fetishization of self: a consumptive vortex 

Where I dream of sun-dried blood staining forgettable soil.  

  

 

I am the harbinger of the desert to come.  

The sand that wears the banner 

Swarming locusts overcome with hunger  

The hands before the hammer.  

 

As if the storm ever subsides 

In the minds of all that grieves  

What intricate forms this victory takes 

In this hamlet held by thieves.  

 

And it’s there in all the chaos  

Framed in all that lies  

As a warlord on the conquest  

For that which never dies  

 

They'll speak of derogation 

As if beyond the veil  

Where the ghosts of all that haunt me  

Are anything but pale. 

 

 As if the wolves are closing  

Like the demons and their sin 

Open offers in sensation 

Where there’s nothing left to win  

 

Moving forward in the shadows  

As a fugitive of the light  

surely I'll find something 

Surely I can make this right  

 

And I feel you in the wind,  

and I smell you in concrete. 

And I hear you like a siren  

Like some fate I've yet to meet.  

March of Progress

   It’s there in the empty plans Where somehow I know they won't come through Where the vibey, jivey, lip service Amounts to nothing Over and again, like I am in a hall of mirrors Pretending that I see anything other than my own vanity reflected back Wondering how the terror that is wrought could have any other meaning Like a whisper in the night that consumes all thoughts The hum of an inherent illness that we have brought Where the fading dreams retire

to a world that dies a little more each day in the beat of some unknowable rhythm It’s there in the hatred that has framed all This tireless storm that gets older, and older And old. As if the stake of the world rests in the will to rise and rise again keep fighting, keep pushing to recover from the damage with some kind of grace Like the filth is not corrupting. like the scars don't remain forever Mutating into otherness, a familiar thinness settles like a dissatisfying mist Asphyxiating the will to heal. just let me bleed out here, just leave me to die

And the numbers, and the systems, and the confusion seem to climb onward into infinitum Beyond the reach of anything sustainable And its there in the itch

the bugs that feed on you day and night eroding confidence with the lackluster effort

a stolen droplet of lifeblood at a time

As everything is so egregiously overpriced To the effect that: its meaningless And it all seems to dissolve into some form of capital Some echo between ‘seen’ and ‘read’ Where I am waiting for something of reverence to take place.

Circumstance

Like music I’m not sure if I am hallucinating

As delicate sounds, like air trickling into a room from a cracked window 

I feel them, when they talk about me, sometimes  

 

And I’ll know the conversation before I close the office door 

I heard it all last night, already  

And I want to share this and be helpful 

But I hate them. I fucking hate them so much. I want to watch them burned alive— 

their flesh peeling from their bodies in shrieks of agony 

As existence razed from the surface of this reality  

 

 

Each day this bastardization unfolding 

The intensity so vast, as if I am reading some unspoken texture to nature 

And it is such that the volume is always dialed to eleven  

As my mind sounds off every one of their species names in Latin,  

reads every tag in the neighborhood, overhears conversations, vocal or otherwise 

Into these affixing horizons  

Where I feel so powerful and weak  

And immense and small 

Where the connection and disassociation fuse into the singularity  

Of a massive bird eclipsing the sun

Sometimes

 Sometimes it calls out to me  

Like a siren, only I can hear, across space and terrain 

as an endless ocean 

Echoing against the cosmos 

 

Sometimes their pitiful moans haunt me  

Crying out in agony, like bodies slumped over the wreckage 

That I have caused them  

From their extraction and vivisection 

 

Sometimes I have these dreams, right before I wake 

Where things seem familiar in a way that I know isn’t real.  

And it echoes against the cold logic of reality  

All day, perplexingly  

 

Sometimes I forget to keep my weapons sharp 

I feel it in the bones of my hands, old gears that I wish I could grease  

In the practiced places that always feel like picking myself back up.  

From the earth that never fails to catch me.   

Phantom Limb

 The flickering dog star 

Outside my window  

For what seems like eras  

 

Looking upon this space  

As a diorama  

As so much has come and gone  

 

a sensation of absence  

As a phantom limb 

Ringing through me  

Like a nuance I will not experience again.  

 

Where the laughter, and the jokes, and the joy 

Evaporate; as they claim this space is a desert  

As idiots claim expertise 

 

As the lesson that you must protect your face 

As they begin to kick you  

With the intent of fatality  

 

I make a better friend than a partner 

In every facet,  

Because a friend can tell you the truth.  

When the weakness of a romantic interest will perpetually have ulterior motives 

 

And there is no justification 

For the ancientness that we become  

No excuse 

No patience  

No forgiveness  

 

As if a familiar smell  

 

Like the last epithet that connects 

Heroism to treason.