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, was chipped;
These pools of ichor had a little notch missing—
owning nothing but the shirt on his back and that can
terrifying in such a mournful way
in those eyes I saw a broken child.
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
