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. 

Grotesque

 Just give me the salacious details. Show me the explosion. The campy sluts that ply their craft to the anonymous masses. My soul is rotten and nothing is fair.

Just give me the seeds. To place and yearn for. Like waiting for the pollution of self to subside. In twisted metal and fleeced goods. Gunfire cries to the shriek of trains. And this too, was someone's dream.

There, in the trash that litters the streets, rolling in the wind, caught in nets of chain link. Trawling itself like some pulsating metastasized ouroboros, fueled by drugs and money.

Just give me the desert. Where things make sense without expectation. Just the equity of the brutal sun and the stillness of vacant thought. Where I don't mind eating scraps; and don't get looked upon while doing it.

龍魂 (Dragonsoul)

 Like a siren, calling out against some mirrored shore 

The song, a pheromone i cannot resist  

Calling me to some abstracted place  

To some frontline, a pugilist to the battleground  

to slip into the green once more and become the Fayth  

 

How it calls me, as if, one day a guarantee  

one day i will fall 

One day i will not be here  

 One day, i  will slip back into the forest. 

And I feel it pull at my soul. Gripping it like the tendrils of some great liana  

Gently Encompassing  

and I let it take me,  

 

destined to become the fabric upon which this reality is built 

just in its way  

as if superimposing two realities simultaneously  

Merging them within myself 

 

And it calls me, jarring me awake 

 

as if I have been a general on the frontlines  

to the fractures of our world  

to a point where, it is all i know.  

 

it is all i will know. 

 

& to make peace with that  

feels like fading violence  

 

As if spread feathers reaching for the sky  

Bristling scales in the summer sun  

 

as a breathing dragon  

rising over the dominion of itself. 

Consolidating power as the emergence of spring 

cannot be ignored  

in the service of some greater horizon  

As a hymn to ephemerality  

as a song to the visceral  

Superimposing itself over the wreckage of all of my failures 

 

I hear it over and over in my mind:  

The forest spirit, is a god of life and death. 

The forest spirit is a god, of life and death  

The forest spirit is a god of life, and death.  

our last walk

 Unremittingly, the heaviest thing I have ever held.  

not the heaviest thing I can lift.  

no amount of strength covers for this 

But the reality  

Una pesadilla  

  

The nightmare is, in fact, over.  

and now the anguish sets in.  

 

the is nothing to fill the holes.  

But the reality of the state of things 

And it occupies me in strange, awful ways.  

Is such that we need to live in a world of action  

And I am consumed in a warpath that makes no room for anything  

At all  

 

In these moments it weighs on me, like all that I have ever lost  

Generals that served before the flag; 

That I cannot repay 

 

As the suffering of an emperor is painfully unique  

But it’s not about me, as justice is achieved through honor 

And I aim, with all of this, to bring honor; the small spaces these beings bring  

That stay with us forever  

alt+0151

 When thinking on the absurdity 

the idea of guard bees watching nurse bees 

inside the hive like some totalitarian regency  

 it makes no sense. There’s a reason they don’t do this.  

no hive would ever-fucking-function like that 

 

at work, the disruption of an otherwise mild day absolved into the pinging of the bullets as they zip past and connect into the scene.  

when we realized they were not fireworks, or just gunshots in the distance, but rater gunshots aimed at us, destroying everything around us.  

And yet, when asked, I am consumed in the thought of the hawk in the trees like a harbinger that took my thoughts away, for just the right amount of time, in a way that registers as extradimensional  

splintering into the tailgate, each fragment of the hollow-point, lodged into the metal like some threatening flower. When assessed, I imagine it would have gone right through my back, had it not blossomed on the plate steel of my lift-gate. Had Teddy; my truck, not lived up to his reputation: “Teddy’s got my back.” in a way that’s never been said with so much weight until now.  

The truth is: I never saw them.    

But heard them loudly; as if speaking a language I’m familiar with, full of frustration and carnage,  

But never connecting in any real way 

As Some frenetic outburst from a crackhead, shrieking some obscure detail over and over again fading off into the night. Psychotic in every way.  

And how I see myself in these moments, perhaps just as deranged, telling the same story like it is there to garner sympathy. In this sphere full of the needy, and their needy needs. Beggy beggars begging. pining for the monetary attention at every-single corner; strung-out on every single intersection, coming down, desperate in their need. And I hate them. I hate them to say — 

 

in dire places where I have seen literal horrors of the human body, desecrations of soul, so foul. And in an awful and revolting twist: self-subjected.  

 

...Self-inflicted.  

 

As they put the sutures into my leg, and the bloodshed seems all but over, until I understand hemophilia intimately, for the next two weeks 

And somewhere in their slumped-over forms, somewhere in the rafters of my soul there is this insatiable ache 

 

something within me that is broken. As though there is something I am supposed to feel  

some silhouette meant to take tangible form. Ascending from two dimensions into this 4-d hellscape of housing crisis, healthcare nightmare, corrupt government, climate catastrophe  

And the fucking circumstance of it— 

The fucking unfairness of it all— 

The universes of rage that pass through me, for everything. For every branch broken, for every slight a seed, for every trespass; a theft.  

And the world is so burdened with so much worse.  

The limitations of the deer god are that they can do nothing for the humans. 

Only the avoidance of loosing their head  

   

And the shit part is; I fucking... live for it.  

 

I am not some bystander, I’m not sure if this is a curse. 

 

I’m not sure if this is a gift. But I saw it once, and felt it pass through my form: and it has never been the same since.   

 

the effect I have on plants after all these years, I don’t know how to categorize it. And the act of saying that seems to diminish the power. 

 

so much of this seems to diminish the power.  As if I will only ever have it by letting go.  

 

And I think of the other day when they all, quite suddenly, realized I was a witch.  

And unabashedly I’m a powerful fucking witch. It is spooky in its way. 

Its also inspiring, I realize. And I’m not ashamed of that either.  

 

I’m not ashamed of my own name either— 

As if that matters.  

 

where that’s the trade off, isn't it? 

 And even within: how is any of this relevant?  

 

How is this not another outcry in a world so full of shrieking?  

as I pass them on the river estranged from themselves, stripping wire in teams like a vocation committed to methamphetamine, and heroin, and blues. That dictates every dead end in their lives. Creating and filling.  as if their entire lives are dictated by the substance that owns them.  

As addiction, so completely does.  

And the truth is: this I know well. 

Hatefully so.  

 

And so, this is the crossroads: after so much, after so many battles, after so many people and experiences, and whatever-things 

 

to pick up and move forth has become so heavy that I have forgotten my own strength  

As though the yoke is an afterthought  

As though all of it is an after-thought. 

And I ruminate, in the spaces where the bugs crawl through the cracks of my soul: like an ancient cathedral that has lost all of its luster to the sand; as a monument to the desert  

as if I am the desert, like an endlessness where derogatory realities go to die.  

Exhausting themselves to the elements  

 

in ways, so beyond experience, they must be felt.  

 

dangerous thoughts

 the phrase that comes to mind is: 

 

“Strong before the mast.” 

In the various swarms and swarms of things.  

Some Painful, where the familiarity of a thousand daughters has shifted  

like so many allegiances that dissolve with time 

Some familiar, as if piloting my soul is some comfortable extrasensory power closer than all the atoms that comprise me 

& Some downright confusing: watching uncountable spiderlings fiddle through the gills of an enormous mushroom that I put back exactly as I found it. Utterly unclear of its meaning.  

 

And it is there in the sensitivity, to this endless bower I am constructing, as a monument to some sort of obsession, 

it rises like a moon that I feel in my bones, and aches like the blood of exertion  

Where the truth seems to be so simple and clear: 

 

“It’s all just gardening.” 

From the humans on the side of the freeway, to the surface of mars, it’s all gardening.  

 

proliferate the solution. Manage the land and water and people in the best conceivable way.   

 

Layering fixations as if I know that they will coalesce.  

As if polishing ideas into a particular kind of psychosis 

 

That I warp into fruition, every single day. 

It is not the destination, but the process.  

 

As we render the marrow of ourselves  

To our mind’s eye  

As the endeavor of becoming some greater,

  

whole— 

esperarse

  No se estaba que recuerda  

La carnalidad que siempre comiendo  

Como un gusano del árbol, devorando mi mente  

Debía ser, mejor. Por mi propio, por mi gente. 

Y sentiste como una olla gigante  

Cayendo despacito en un coro de destrucción 

Cantando y todavía ahogando con cada palabra  

 

En las lloras de la machina, Oí las mentiras  

Susurró en deuda y cadena  

Como lo único cosa que se  

 Yermo, violencia, y la confundida divido  

la falla que separarse mi tierra   

Como algo siempre sabia  

Como los manos solía atrapar  

Necesito ser, finito. Con la abrasión de arena  

al mover cielo y tierra.