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.  

 

But 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 

Replete

 When my brother spoke of coming down... 

From heroin  

He said that “it, it just feels like I'm dying” 

 

I remember, dismissively  

Feeling like I'd head this before 

You're not dying, your just— body’s going through withdrawal 

 

I think of him; one hand on the wheel of his truck 

the other flicking a cigarette out the window  

Talking some nonsense about paying underground artists 

 

 

I think of him: on days like today, where the dog’s water is frozen into one big cube 

About to liquidate my whole collection, because I don’t believe in it anymore 

As I wake up to another summary execution on the streets of Minneapolis. 

 

I too, feel like I'm dying.  

Tired in a way that becomes disassociative  

In this mælstrom that subsumes everything into itself  

 

 

It feels as though we are transgressing an event horizon; perhaps we already have. 

Are we dead already?  Am I lensing a guaranteed future?  

Or am I going through withdrawal?   

 

 

As if yearning for a thing that no longer exists 

I just need another hit of that, that conceptualized value  

Just t’get me by for another month. 

 

And I think of you on these days,  Eeyore-ass, mountain of a man 

Devoid of belief in any of it anymore,  

beyond the reach of this vulgarity, absolved of all that nonsense.