Homecoming

 Of two invisible bailees  

Framed in opposition 

Frozen in the impossibility of progress 

 

And the dogs, barking, incessantly   

the sound of gaslight annealing  

Eroding the affluent in the battering storm surge  

 

How pained it all feels, forlorn and foregone  

In the shapes of an ache that needs empathy  

But, swallows with a unique, selfish hunger  

 

How endless this all feels 

Where the deletion of future 

Engenders a restless emptiness in the contemporary  

 

There, in the gravel that slows the process  

The subtle dagger of them, endlessly twisting  

degradation in an endless number deft little remises  

 

How exhausting the labor, tangled in frustration and ignorance  

Aiming to be, something? Anything, at all?  

But I am caught, in the net of myself, hateful and rotten  

 

Overwhelmed in shame and disgrace 

Burning alive, in the wrath of my own dynamo  

Where I get to be a god of nature and sound and movement   

In fleeting instants of sublime grace  

I danced with the trees, that remembered me from last time  

Tearing into that beat with claws that could shred a tesseract  

 

And the indulgence, and the beauty  

mired in a bitter reality— 

the ever-present omniscient suffering of humanity 

 

Punctuated in the earsplitting hiss of nitrous oxide   

Dissolving into some San Bernadino-ass tweaker shit  

as an empty alley behind a tire shop, scoured by meth 

 

It has been a long, long time since I was that afraid  

Overwhelmed in number and psychosis  

A fractal of depravity, upon depravity; decades of abuse  

 

Blustering forth to build up the inertia  

Posturing those two dilated black pits  

superimposing them in the privilege of my own self-righteousness  

 

It is beyond comprehension what i saw in that man’s eyes  

Crossed in confusion as they struggled to center 

as an observable violent past, traumatic brain injury 

 

A slightly mis-centered retina, chipped;  

one of these pools of ichor had a little notch missing— 

fomenting the sorrow of owning nothing but the shirt on his back and that canister  

 

terrifying in such a mournful way 

in those eyes I saw a completely broken child, posing as a man   

Abused so profoundly that could never go home 

 

sounding like an echo that feels familiar 

With the agonizing Californian underhandedness  

As if to welcome me home in this Derogatory Baptism  

 

and later, after the pressure, the tears and tears of emotion  

I was brave. I was cool. I was there for everyone in the moment when it mattered.  

Bitter in the realization that nobody’s there for me 

 

My Son; welcome home, we have not forgotten you 

let us remind you of our pain 

So that you may awaken from the dream of elsewhere 

 

Drink deeply, in the hatred of the desert, as you know it— 

As the sand of your soul is an endless storm 

The love of your bravery is an endless thirst 

 

As if overwhelming æons would relinquish their gift 

Such a crass elegance of a raptor so defined 

We have not forgotten of the catharsis you so clearly deserve  

 

And I pretended that if  

I got something big and greasy

It could break the sitomania 

 

realizations of such precarious vulnerability  

Meaningless to my excited pit bull, thrilled in the homecoming  

stuffing an endless amount of french-fries into the maw of his big happy face   

  

 

 

 

 

Anemoia—

 Over the drone of the television 

The spikes of their constant bickering  

Punctuate everything in obnoxious trailer-people language 

 

interstate trucker-dad is home 

complaining vacantly about everything 

too fat and stupid to act, it takes on a performative characteristic  

 

the depend-a-potamous, her long, trashy, acrylic nails  

drawing even more attention to how obese she is 

Making me wonder how she got all those Johns these past weeks 

 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with teeth so gnarly; 

There in the unlicensed, unregistered, uninsured car  

to the unlicensed, unregistered, unvaccinated dog 

 

Some yarn about, ...some bullshit 

carnie trying to drum up sympathy after the circus 

To the disinterested regulars looking elsewhere 

 

And the child; so well-adjusted 

Respite to the derogatory reality, in such a way as to parallel  

This city’s bass culture; tentpole-ing its value amid garbage  

 

But the glimmer of the future is not the reality at hand— 

Where missed opportunity dematerializes into nothingness 

As a cast shadow is not the reality of man 

How then, this interpretation has unraveled  

the scream of machines, the burning of tires 

As a rain that never lasts, the meaning evaporates 

 

As if ignorance is a weather pattern  

Disrespect is a kind of tide, in a perpetual culture 

forged from the scraps of cut-rate cop-outs   

Punctuate

 In delusions, within delusions 

There is this space of engagement  

When the pantomime of performance has waned  

Where the sobering bite of reality gains purchase  

 

this place, Vile and dirty and petulant— 

And I sense I will miss it  

As reiteration welcomes clarity:  

I am not leaving from something, but to 

 

As if putting a rest to seasons of dormancy  

Awakening from the dreams of peaceful intolerance  

A violent kindness that dares implication  

Stimulating a hypersensitivity into hibernation 

 

A distant thunder rises 

In anticipation of the coming deluge  

Sanctify this putrid earth  

In the blessings of greater upheaval  

to awaken upon an empirical honesty

and shed the misanthropy of this terroir 

the paradox of progression is made complete 

in the bitter kiss of  some kind of catharsis 

Thirst

 Here, 

spent her entire life,  

to find her in the state that I did:  

and buried her for no other reason than the economy of it 

as I don’t particularly like them  

but will put no effort into bringing them low either  

as i have come to know all five of them,

a whole little squirrel family 

 

that has eaten all my irrigation into a total write-off  

as thirst is something, I too, understand 

as I fear parts of me have fallen necrotic 

in the bittersweetness that death offers 

as grace, in the brutality of it  

 

her skull cleaned under a stretched canvass of face 

a vulgar cheapness; silent beyond a whisper 

I recall of her smallness on the roof years ago 

an abundant life of distraction and urgency  

framed in the effervescence of termination 

in the severity of simplicity  

 

and somewhere, there is a disassociation of me 

curious to where my soul has run off to  

distracted in the flames of violence and lies   

consumed compulsively on my fone  

 

I need to come to terms with all my various fragments 

somewhere I know, in the wells of myself  

that the realness of thirst never subsides 

even as it abolishes the vanity of mortal schemes 

As we sought for this day, our daily bread— 

forgive us of our trespasses,  

as we forgive those who trespass against us— 

& lead us not into temptation, 

but deliver us from evil. 

  

As if reaching for the sun

seeking to experience every piece of ourselves  

tasting in the fragile nectar of existence, 

to be worthy of earning our rest among the roots 

In the shadows of the forest that echo, forever and ever. 

Episodic

 The sensation to harpies tearing into mentality  

Rending thought with beak and claw— 

in sensing a totality that churns like a dynamo  

as a tesseract in myriad dimensions  

extradimmensional wheels of contemplation  

the slow self-destructive walk into the sea 

where things feel foreign and familiar,  

internal and extrapolated  

& I don’t feel good about anything.  

but I get the message— 

I sense it as it happens,  

as if seeing gravity— 

some natural force coming into focus  

drawing this emergent reality into myself  

beckoning me to meet it  

with the claws of my own demons 

The Disrespect.

 The lingering smell of garlic  

As I pull my five-seven to my face 

 

They’re out there shrieking again 

Screaming about something 

This place is always reverberating 

Sirens, and backup alarms, and the scream of machines 

I don’t even chamber a round.  

 

 I can imagine the disdain.  

Always speaking in a language I'm familiar with   

The petulant disrespect of these chunti neighbors  

Always just shy of conflict 

Just below board 

of getting their ass-beaten  

 

and I know what I did — 

To that data center.  

As an awoken dragon, it deserves to burn 

As a Roman decadence. The empire stops here 

To me— 

My empire. 

Borne of my own imagination  

Casually violent and open to aggression 

as everything here seems designed  

To grind away at achievement 

Through some kind of deliberate misanthropy  

That strangles communities 

With the bullshit that is our money  

 

And it feels like— 

Being the skin of society; 

As if we are to be shed to feed the selfish needs of another: thoughtlessly 

And the smell of asphalt lingers,  

in the super-fund site that my whole community grew around.  

Like a mushroom spawned of toxic filth  

 

And I have come to hate this place,  

where my arums grow.  

Where my dog likes the mailman 

That sit like glimmering moments 

Where disrespect is the tip of a cracked chain  

As inherent as the weather 

 

Where carbon monoxide fills the whole house because the neighbor cannot get his shit-box to pass smog and just leaves it running outside my open door while I am inside sleeping.  As if I am laboring into some Rube-Goldberg machine of killing myself. Surrounded by people that are too stupid to grasp anything of merit. 

 

I can accept being poor, but I can't accept being surrounded by morons. How shallow my hopes have become. Meaningless in a wash of political theater and curated controversy.  

How resentful I have become; mired in rancor 

For all of these realms, I crave they be cleansed in fire.  

 

as if the heart of a man could ever subside, cursed as it is.  

 

and this is mine—  

I have done this to myself. Blanketed myself with the stupidity of others, mired in proximity to homeliness and it is dragging me under.  

It is a language I know well.  

 

practiced;  

as the abrasiveness of my personality has made me quite polished.  

I hate all of these things so deeply. As if I am a tesseract of disappointment 

a churning wheel   

that internalizes and externalizes  

every iteration of failure. 

The Nautical Mile

 Trawling emails,  

Checking back in,  

As the anxiety fills like a ship taking on water 

As the disownership sets in in   

The blasphemy,  

The treachery  

Like I've stolen some shitty boat  

and cannot escape with it 

 

Defeat upon defeat 

over some war-torn place that bears no semblance  

To the reason ;  

there is an amnesia to this storm battered harbor,  

A hurricane of forget that eats and hungers 

And can never be satiated 

 

As we awaken to the same headache day after day  

Stuck in this rut where everything seems like a waste of time 

Like a clot in one’s skull, wholistically absolving the concerns of the future  

Made manifest as exhaustion;  tired of the failure, tired of the struggle  

tired of the lies and the bullshit and the lack of advancement  

Tired of this existence where nothing seems to develop favorably 

 

tired of money reigning over everything, and always, religiously coming up short 

 

I dreamt of a child presenting yesterday’s meagre catch to the oracle, as if by virtue of desperation, a favorable fortune could be won 

As if the bones of something that wasn’t good to begin with become better with time 

 

as a coagulated mass of cells in a biohazard bin outside of the clinic should have suffered more  

 

Where the horrors of all that could have been, and what in fact became 

 collapse the probability of another day looking into a phone  

 

Wishing, I had done more with my life than this. 

Adrift in myriad waves, as if drowning is all I know.   

 

And i find myself craving crimson romance, utterly antithetical to this 

 as it is alive and thriving somewhere  

Like some ignorant fantasy that propels this broken cathedral forward  

into the waves of time and circumstance  

Of flesh and profit  

Crassly, writhing in filth and fluids, gasping for air 

Aboard a ship that has already decided our fate 

Adrift in an ocean 

utterly indifferent to our suffering 

Replete

 When my brother spoke of coming down... 

From heroin  

He said that “it, it just feels like I'm dying” 

 

I remember, dismissively  

Feeling like I'd head this before 

You're not dying, your just— body’s going through withdrawal 

 

I think of him; one hand on the wheel of his truck 

the other flicking a cigarette out the window  

Talking some nonsense about paying underground artists 

 

 

I think of him: on days like today, where the dog’s water is frozen into one big cube 

About to liquidate my whole collection, because I don’t believe in it anymore 

As I wake up to another summary execution on the streets of Minneapolis. 

 

I too, feel like I'm dying.  

Tired in a way that becomes disassociative  

In this mælstrom that subsumes everything into itself  

 

 

It feels as though we are transgressing an event horizon; perhaps we already have. 

Are we dead already?  Am I lensing a guaranteed future?  

Or am I going through withdrawal?   

 

 

As if yearning for a thing that no longer exists 

I just need another hit of that, that conceptualized value  

Just t’get me by for another month. 

 

And I think of you on these days,  Eeyore-ass, mountain of a man 

Devoid of belief in any of it anymore,  

beyond the reach of this vulgarity, absolved of all that nonsense.  

Intraposition

 There, in the thought-terminating-cliche 

all of it— 

The lay of the universe,  

seems so clear and convoluted,  

in all of its majestic filth  

Pixelated into the hard edge,  

and still observably invisible 

As the brothers of the wind each had different names  

are these not the Anemoi of extradimensional currents?  

I envision the atmosphere as layered scales superimposed across the blithe unhappiness i feel toward myself 

Unnamed and invisible,  

Awash in the absolving tides of winter   

As everything has equitable importance in the apathy of man 

The gurgle of machines, every morning, and night and weekend; 

a refresh in the vulgarity of it all  

As if there is any meaning  

where shelter from the cold bears more prevalence than the forethought to not be exposed 

  

It plays out so predictably,  

as if the end is already determined 

 forgetting that I am the narrator of this vignette  

as automaton devoid of voice, correcting speech  

played along to such ends that this skin can shed.  

 

Awakening some new form in the face of upheaval  

Where circumstance and obedience have resolved into nothing 

(And how could it?) 

As pouring concrete for a fading world,  

promises of future dissolved into a dead mall 

And I feel like such a husk, as if I have shed everything  

over and over, so many times 

As if the anthem of my soul is distant droning sirens  

The symphony of train horns 

 

it starts like a distant whisper,  

as a dust storm evolving into a synthesized zenith   

Irresistible in a way beyond words.  

the slow peel of bark in ribbons 

The cold sting of a scab coming loose 

As hunger gives clarity,  

pain is an equitable teacher 

To a future that remembers nothing.

The Hunger of Birds (Video)

Darrell Watson's Breakfast Jamboree

The privilege to die alone 

where the trains and the refineries poisoned everything 

I want to be alone. At one with nothing 

Curling into a ball like a little cancerous little dormouse  

Sleep it all off. forever 

in the name of some new atrocities, that I no longer find the will to fight. 

And there this lingering feeling, like, I was supposed to do something  

in some other reality I surely missed a stop on the train  

I don't know where I am anymore, and I also don’t care 

my body feels like a haunted house 

there’s nothing to offer beyond the labor of my meat or the wrath of my mind. 

And I can’t stop looking at the shitstorm  

In its insurmountable endlessness  

Where the beast never tires 

the storm that never stops 

And I’m exhausted.  

My soul hurts.   

Or is this the onset of some blood-borne cancer? 

These tendons and joints and spine are all expressing their existence to me 

and I won’t become anything of relevance  

so this all seems so scripted.  

as a predictable, fragile anger. 

And the truth is; I'm bored. 

While ‘exciting’ is a neutral term,  

the excitement of chaotic redundancy wanes 

There, in the recycler.  

As a hive of fencing semi-precious metals 

Shopping carts buzzing in and out, as disgusting as cockroaches 

Scurrying in and out of the shadowy places  

In the service of the drug.  

Beneath a sign that proudly says: “Praise the Lord.” 

As if salvation is stolen metal in exchange for dope. 

As a cathedral to depravity   

The atrocities of this faith have become vulgar  

Begging an awoken reality in the face of this 

Is this how I'm going to spend my time? My life? 

I think not.  

we must shake this intransient, financially impossible state 

And I don’t know how. 

As some migratory bird shanghaied in the mountains 

The shifting trade winds, have been favorable 

until now

Unsent Calls

 I should call someone. 

... but then all the inertia of all that 

 

flickering shadows, that kind of sparkle as they pass 

And sometimes figures,  

and sometimes the never-fucking-ending alien-puzzle dreams. 

 

i should call someone,  

go to the doctor so they can give me pills 

 

but the only person I feel comfortable enough to call, 

 I'd rather have sex with,  

do drugs,  

dance in a sweaty warehouse with 

hangout with people that come off as aliens.  

Or gods on a good one,  

or any iteration of the inbetween 

 

I should call someone— 

but when they pick up I'll want to hear about *their* day  

I'll want to know what *they’re* doing 

and I wouldn't get to bringing any of this up 

and I'll miss them 

and wish they were here 

to fawn over my lilies 

 

as the alarming harmlessness  

of skittering domestic insects 

 

and I wonder, if this is how my brother felt from the seizures 

where he like, gnawed his tongue into meat  

and ran his car off the road 

 

or are they gathering to make contact, again. 

Which is always, insightful.  

But curiously, never helpful.  

 

or is it just my mind unraveling— 

after years of this unachievable narrative 

 

of time, substance and leaded water 

have run their course 

 

and all of it in the face of the child rapist, 

which seems more pressing  

as the quality of our life unravels 

in a way that makes bloodshed and gunfire seem, reasonable   

I should call someone,  

because I have been in solitude for a long-time  

living alone in crowds 

Alone with plants 

alone with this, mind. 

 

and there is one less call to be made,  

and i feel it acutely, when wrapping my tools to fit my hands 

i feel it in the hopeful fun of buying dog-toys,  

as if being kind to nature is its own fulfillment 

I hope you sleep well, where nearby firearms can’t awaken you in the night  

where the scarred and filthy, shirtless urchins 

shuffle along the road 

their metal-filled shopping carts laden with all manner of import 

in the ritualized escape attempt

for which drugs (allegedly) hold the key  

How derogatory this all seems 

the howl of the passing trains 

when gazing upon the sloppy balter of lilies 

resting in voluptuous sexuality 

their bodies observably abused from the hail 

and yearning in the summer heat.  

 I should call someone. But there is no one to call. 

as if everything culminates into disassociation 

interdependence and substance and desire  

meld into a currency beyond apprehension  

in a pursuit hopeful to numb the incessant feeling 

of petals being shredded in the rain    

Epiphyllum oxypetalum 47/100

 I think of your queen-of-the-night Its petals so delicately slender because you never watered it I always imagined it was somehow more inherently graceful than others As if each occurrence smells better and better in every memory Once, when I was a child and my grandmother woke me up to appreciate the heap of dust-covered leaf-straps that lived unnoticed in the doorway of the old farm. Like an alien in plain sight. I think of those nights, in the subtle awe and wonder of beautiful secrets, ever-present in the mundanity. in the gentle surprises that echo within, I think of you fondly, of the softness of your petals and the rigidness of your character, and the endless cunningness of your graceful shape, illuminated in moonlight. And I yearn as if the desert, for kind surprises on balmy nights. In such a way that if I sit really still, I could somehow become the night itself; wrapped around you, wherever you are.

46/100

 There, in the collapsing bones as they touch sheets  

day on day, they are spent 

Sun up, to down. at the mast of self 

a dynamo churning to the ikigai  

 

as I bifurcate yucca without being countered, 

as I devastate and install landscapes in singular and innumerable passes,  

 

There, in the endlessness of labor—  

made sharp and crisp and... invisible. 

How practiced the hand,  

how exhaustive the experience 

 

as the intersection of miraculous and breakthrough and... banality  

come to fruition, as if ripening fruit 

remaining ambiguous, as if assessing gender 

proliferating, as if spawning-life  

 

and I am at its imperfect hand,  

shaping futures, given the reality   

as the practice of generating the future  

is contingent on transcending the marring vulgarity of the past— 

 

As if there is some great anvil to the formation of grace 

forged; in fire and focus and... violence. 

holding us from death and away from transcendence  

in a duality that struggles to grasp a fifth dimension 

 

there, in the bindweed gyred around chain-link 

cleverly extracting them from the earth with a trained grip 

when just out of reach,  

the fence can stretch just enough to utterly cripple their year 

as if seemingly concrete structures aren’t impermeable to my will—  

some being beyond comprehension impartially debilitating the very nature of you 

because the plant you’re maliciously touching has sex in a more pleasing way.  

 

There, in the fragments of children’s bodies splattered against collapsed buildings 

in the endless bluster of lies 

genocide takes place in our kitchens— 

as I wrestle with how their oppressors must see them 

when humans are so dissimilar to plants, and bugs 

 

How brutal this has all become, how powerless I feel for the realities of others  

as if all I can do is draw their suffering into myself, weakly. pathetically weakly. 

 

There, in the infinite singularity of our black mirrors 

the demons of time amuse and destroy us— 

In the way that age wears us down and hones our metal 

the ache of irresolution seems... eternal.    

   

Where the Trillium Grow

 In the shadow of your loud philodendrons, jabbering away like excited children  

your old garden, made of railroad ties and twine, flecks of sharp rust that sparked off your old fence whenever we touched it, and the stylish sculptures beneath big bracts of mulberries that tasted—  

like stale warm water. 

 

a place for brothers to drink cold whiskey and burn dank weed 

and the higher one got, the clearer they could hear those big, spoiled plants. Chattering away distractedly, like the squeaks of the niece you’ll never know. At your funeral, so inappropriate for the occasion, and simultaneously the high point of the day.  

And it falls to us, the other witches of the coven, to carry the banner, to lift the heavy sheet into the future, to embrace the storm of inevitability.  

And confessionally, I feel it acutely—     

It all feels so precognitive, so planned and rehearsed, so familiar and practiced, so...known. 

And I feel you brother, in the emergence of the trilliums, in the doggedness of the Lophostemon, where graffiti populates over broken concrete, in the depths of the forests we used to hike consumed in the tasks of juvenile desires.  

 and I must pick up these broken things; these broken feelings, the hurt and the violence, and form them into something greater—  

And I feel it there— your power unto me, fractured against our other members, your craft belongs to the coven. as we are all greater than the sum of ourselves

Given unwillingly. Though I feel it, in the tips of my fingers, when buying firearms for the coming revolution, electric and considerate, cool and brave. To the bitter, exhausted end. How I would absolutely exchange this for your enormous presence. As if the volta of your soul surges between us, involuntarily.  

I am gathering the fragments. As shredded fabric, beyond the possibility of repair. I understand, as only your closest friends could. I understand. The future will not accept the same of myself— And I cannot either. 

& I will fight, I will fight them until my soul is in ruins; I will fight them until there is nothing left. 

As An iguana in the curtains. I will not make it easy, and I promise to honor you by never giving up. I know the heaviness of this reality, and the strength of our hands. As the existence of freewill must be proven to be valid. Come away from this place and its banality.   

Brother, retreat to the redwoods, to the mountains where we hiked as children, beyond the manzanita and the shitty ants, where the trillium grow. Rest your soul in the depths of the forest, 

& we will be with you, 

in time.  

45/100

 Like juicing citrus, my consciousnesses, being wrought   

Firmly being ground into pulp and desirability  

The violence of extraction, so pertinent. 

 

i dream of this: the puzzles, the clairvoyantly prescient 

like, I hear you: but I don’t speak that language 

and I am tryin, tryin to get it... 

 

but it is so many sounds, so many whispers against this backdrop  

so gossamer and articulated like, like fabric 

 

and its somewhere just out of sight,  

like your missing tweezers... 

when you need to pick an infected, ingrown hair out of the side of your face. 

 

Like when your boss comes back from his first battery of 20 (probably needless) rabies shots 

after you told him the week prior... 

That creating unfair situations in the workplace is “How you get attacked by dogs.”  

 

as if, creating a space for ghosts, gives them somewhere to live.  

and I can’t stress over or understand enough— 

 

I can never really tell if I'm doing it at all.  

 

Where the feeling of the forest in its magnificent entirety 

Is harnessed in the muse of hunting roaches by sensing them 

And the ire of hearing your garden devoured, one bug-sized ‘crunch’ at a time 

Thos same infinitesimally small stakes that leave an ache equally eternal  

but the addiction of it —hits the spot 

In the pursuit, some sort of realized beinghood 

Where practice and execution merge     

In the thrill of sharpening the liquid of the soul  

Juiced daily from the grind of overlooked opportunity  

arson

 My soul is a storm beset in myriad ways 

Torrential and volatile from uncountable days  

As the swell of the sea rising past the shore 

Where the anger of æons always beckons for more   

 

there is a demon within me I cannot express  

the powers it gives me are framed in duress 

As if a pulsation, of some frenzied swarm 

Like a face so familiar that I often preform 

 

a comforting gesture, as gift in the haze  

It rises within as an unforgivable blaze 

Caustic and vile like holding a flame 

These gifts I have shaped have no spoken name  

 

& I cannot relinquish, nor ever forego 

The whispers of influence these talents can show 

To have without holding, I keep as a blade 

Blinded by light, to be made whole in the shade  

Myre

  In this place of petty edgelord shock value This vacant branding-centric bullshit Where the goals slip away, like diamonds burning in pure oxygen winking right out of existence As if— as if, they never existed at all. Subsumed into the atmosphere like a dream, abolished after waking How everything seems to be the slow annihilation chunks of self. washing away into the sea Granite cliffs battered by myriad waves ...The way her eyes flinched across my body as I emerged from the water Actively trying not to stare at my scars In the way that discipline by segregation is all that have taken away from here A season of self-consolidation rising within a silent chaos, as the snow begins to fall outside irresistibly quiet and immeasurably dangerous As some future imitation of picking up my ball and going home portends as an inevitability Awakening from supernatural dreams & met with the cold, indifferent isolation of reality There, in the daring, shadowy mechanisms of myself a churning ichor pulsates Defiant to the last and emergent as a kind of angel rising to meet the sky Frustrated in the mire of self and otherness Wrought to face this dissolution over and again as some fractalated nightmare that has awoken with me And will not leave my side

revenant to the end as a kind of demon beyond empathy or forgiveness Borne of these theaters it is their lies that flow through me; this same underhanded scaffolding that I am built of—

...in the way that they put their heads down when my voice cracks through the injustice of it, as if shouting is a kind of practiced dissent

As the trauma has become replaced in otherness, I cannot distinguish what feels worse; the hurt of injury or the emptiness that supersedes where sensation should have been Broken to the wheel of solitude and simultaneously comforted from knowing nothing else just failure and failure, again and again Until a massive question mark forms from the pieces of broken attempts at craft Without the possibility of retreat nor the dream of greater it rings as an echo both past and future— conquered in the endless belligerence of the moment.

Pale Shades

 There is this gray place  

That cannot shape in my mind.  

That I cannot reconcile.  

Otherworldly and liminal  

In some refracted prison yard.  

 

Contained in a place dissimilar to myself  

The echoes of some alternative that never come to pass  

 

in the march of ineffable progress  

that feels like watching a tank burst into a million flaming pieces 

 Over and over and over again.  

 

there—  

in the audacity of it— 

The snarl of machinery, the cries of men, the distant chatter of gunfire 

 

another school, party, shopping trip, street faire— dissolve into chaotic bloodshed. 

 

the gears of war churn like tracks into what feels beyond inevitability  

And resolves like a raptor descending upon a meal 

 

as if destiny denies possibility; like it ever had a chance.  

 

It feels gyroscopic, the inertia unto oneself 

That man feels immortal in his hubris  

 

until the bones are fractured and the blood hemorrhages  

When the cold and the silence grip down  

In the nuanced mercilessness of winter  

 

And I cannot make right of it— 

the vacant complacence beyond forgiveness  

there is a kind of empathy. Emergent like a weed, that never relents: what I feel towards you, a kind of inexorable sympathy that yearns for righteousness  

 

But I am not right. I am shadowy and duplicitous. Honorable like an artillery piece.  

Brave like a warhorse. Devoid of decision.  Forward without conscience. 

 

II 

There is this visage I imagined,  

a good-natured ribbing, and things would be whole again.  

United in our shared humanity; and through its struggles where we persevere as a whole.  

But this is not to be— 

That cult lingers like a squawking electronic box fixed to one station, that says anything to generate a peculiar narrative and is never silenced. 

...though, aren’t we all bound to screens these days?  

Consumed in the minutia, unable to face the reality that bears down oppression and call it love  

What empty times these are. Pivotal and worthless in the same stroke. In the way that the last flare sinks into the darkness for adrift refugees upon a sea of their own design.  

How I have railed against the storm, as it has washed my family out to sea. And while i thought they would be saved in the calm it was merely the eye—  

my connection to them cannot last another deluge, not one brought upon by their selfishness  

Framed pettily, like some dissatisfied sheep fumbling away from a fresh shearing. 

 

III 

& it fucking sits there— 

Like this inconquerable black bird. Like this demon that I cannot exorcise 

These belligerent echoes of failure 

in spaces that seem both familiar and foreign  

  

I suppose I was the fool  

For thinking that the laziness of prejudice  

Would subside to better judgement  

 

Sitting like a phantom in the corner of my room  

Disquieted and persistent  

Resolved to an endless voyeurism that cannot be satiated 

Haunting, like impeding violence 

Yearning for release  

in supernatural tongues 

Agonizing over the inherent imperfection of all things

The Dogfood Factory

 I think of the desert horses 

The ones that got fat when corralled  

Because they were so accustomed to foraging for every last calorie.  

Utterly Ignorant to the reality of things   

 vicious and impossible to train. 

 

I think of the space behind the McDonalds on Washington.  

where they strip wire 

these sub-human revenants of shit drugs 

Encapsulated in the struggle of everyday  

 

and it weighs in places  

So immense and immovable that i sometimes wish i couldn’t see it  

It weighs in its endlessness, that smells exactly like unregulated refineries  

The stink of these fucking trains 

the reek of airborne carcinogens at all times  

Framing  everything in futility  

 As we inhale our ephemerality, ad nauseum.    

 

somewhere there’s always a tire burning 

There is always a shrieking homeless person 

There’s always some hick-ass Janet throwing trash everywhere  

 

And for what? 

Meth isn’t that good.  

 

But neither is this poem.  

neither is anything. From homeownership, to marriage, to becoming a doctorate. The long life that’s filled with joy and prosperity— It’s always a struggle. This endless fight within oneself.  

The jihad.  

 

Sloppy and irreverent. Foolish and irrelevant. Empty and reviling.  

Like so many cockroaches I crush every single morning in my empty sink, in the futile attempt to reduce their endless numbers that well up from my downstairs neighbors.  

Like a plague I shall never be rid of.  

In the way that money never loosens its grip. No matter how hard I work, no matter how much I make, it seems, I will always be poor. The inflation will adjust to subsume whatever earnings I have, the situational effects of my economic class will always mire me in this. I’m just some bastard from San Bernadino. All of my intelligence and sapience and experience are just dressing from the reality of a life I cannot escape.  

 

our generation is meaningless. Overburdened by the overbearing. We cannot make the changes necessary to salvage our future within the parameters of the time we have.  

And I think deeply on this.  

 I’m literally writing this. I’ve got good drugs and alcohol. Why the fuck would I be doing this instead, it’s not profitable.  

But nothing really is anymore. It all just feels like so much subsistence: money and time and energy and resources emulsified together into this loud, ranky, poverty-stricken shitshow. 

And it’s like, “What’s the fucking point?” because the gathering of other people’s trash is an endless prospect. Coupled with a world filled with their braindead progeny. And all the affiliated pollution in tow.  

What is another day in this perpetually fighting country? Another school shooting, another slur-worthy politician, slaughtering innocence with class disparity. Another gate-keeping member of upper management appointing their cronies at every opportunity because the corruption of this city is complete.  

There seems to be no escape.  

Trapped on this planet with people that are actively ruining everything.  

Getting fatter by the day, because I was never meant to experience this level of comfort. 

It makes no sense. None of this makes any sense.  

But the hunger, that makes sense to me.  In the way that those horses would bite and kick and rear up. But you just keep your wits about you. And i never got hurt, though others did. And keeping eyes on them, chest out. Like, they never gave me a hard time at all. But that didn’t change their fate either. And those motherfuckers all ended up at the dogfood factory.  

So what does it really matter? 

 

these people blacked out in their own squalor. These horses too hardened to save their own skin. This virtuoso too mired in the shortcomings of the present reality. As we are all broken upon a wheel of our own measure. As even this is not significant.  

None of this:

you can smell it, and it smells exactly like warm kibble 

saturating the backed up freeway in a snowstorm.