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. 

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 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.