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