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.