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 

but 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.