Hessian

In my mind there are the hooves of horses

Thundering against the ground

The flinch of predatory eyes

Criticizing some familiar landscape

As a hailstorm

On some freezing night

pelting down against the earth

in hateful ribbons

I fell them in our ancient ways

warhammer in hand, claymore coming down  

we drive them to the slaughter

patiently

in a conquest where the blade of my mind

is filed against the stone of my soul

there is something magnificent yet empty

in the inertia of our agency

in the wood-grain texture

as hard ripples of development through time

Why are we like this?

Why are we such hungry birds?

juxtaposibly Insatiable

As chicks in a nest, as raptors on the horizon.

ravens to the aftermath

of that which we were born to create

44/100

I’m trying to catch it

In words.

Like some buzzing prey item

Wafting through my doorway

Its little turret of eyes averting  

repelling down the frame once it realized I was on to it

I thought of catching it on my hand and putting it in the living room

Then, I thought, how the doorway is probably already a decent spot

There’s probably a reason it’s here

This little jumping hunter

Equipped with all the repelling cable it could ever need

Chose to guard my doorway

And I felt so humbled as I looked to the dog on my bed and the cat in the reflection behind me.

This is a pretty good crew.

Gigantic jumping spider and all.

As I throw myself around my place

Grateful to have a place at all.

But I mean that—

Somewhere in all of this there is a place that is mine.

Unique.

As I float backwards in the hot springs of the desert

Looking up at a star crested sky

whipped to sharp peaks

somewhere, my shemagh sits at the bottom of that oasis

returned to the flow of the underground river

that somehow connects the desert in fractures.

Spellbreaker

Shaken from a torpor

I awaken upon touchdown

From some other landscape

Where a moment of passion

Like a spell being undone.

a curse broken upon impact.

Connecting by tearing away

The little tokens that have haunted me

And wish to be done with them

In thought and practice,

psychological and physical

visceral and ethereal

in a hunger for the coming hours

excitement trickling through the dam

constructed

from so many inexperienced mishandlings

as if putting a depth-charge

the wreckage of the past

as an unnatural tsunami

rising up from the cenotes of self.   

Agency

Like a dynamo

It charges and charges

Forward

Faster

Everything, all at once

Build, create, make,

Sit, write

,

(comma)

Like a kiln

Hardening objects of utility

In a hellish flame

That takes weeks to subside.

As if plotting for the future is a kind of internally contained firestorm

Forged in utility

I am beginning to feel its drawbacks acutely

As the machinery seems to wear out

From the brattle of repetition

Gears slip in fatigue

Muscles fail from exhaustion

Time grinds in slow and measured pieces

As if evaporating

To the forest

Lost in the steel and machines

Windborne hallucinations

And it subsides as suddenly as it happens

Though those around me can see I have lensed

Elsewhere.

Elsewhere.

It comes like sizzling static

The whisper of writhing chains

scraping leaves in the wind

elsewhere.

I hear them

 Purring of a friends voice.

Clear,

with a certain rawness I appreciate

in a wholeness that seems familiar

I look to the stars in yearning

I am bigger than my body

Familiar to more than myself

With an agency over this and other realms

As if being all and nothing

Whole and fractured

the nuances of restlessness grow like weeds

blocking out paths

That used to lead me

home.

She.

 

There is a gravity to the negativity

As she is caught in the pull

A victim to the energy of others

That I know like the bitter taste of manipulation.

There is a relentlessness to it

As she tears them apart in the gravity of herself

And they fall like trees before a pyroclastic flow

She is caught in her own dimension

A victim to herself that preys upon others.

There is a quaintness to it,

He listens to misogynistic music on repeat

Where other young men spit their limited understanding like gospel

And without having seen the beast unleashed

He cannot fathom a life beyond the moment-to-moment

There is an idleness to it

As if waiting for a train on some distant platform

And I know this train, as I see its lights down the tunnel

It will take me to some kind of home

But it doesn’t ever seem to arrive.

And somehow I know that it can.   

There is a hatefulness to it

As pound after pound of flesh surrenders under my knife

My fingers coated in hot grease

As the sinews peel and snap

In the furnace of central market downtown

There is a soul in it—

Somewhere, in all the metal and glass

She breathes in

life and death, debauchery and order

in a persistence beyond the veil.

divergence

No longer meaning what it once meant

There is a restless emptiness

Where divergence consumes every moment

We are the great trees of this forest

I am but the fabric of this system

A mere extension of the network

A kind of delusion takes hold

A kind of delusion relinquishes

Like the various tides of thought

That come to mind

As the present slips into memory  

As reality unfolds in a way beyond language

A familiar solitude grows

Like so many weeds on the side of the highway

Flying past in forgettable succession

On a road divided by so many forks

stretching on into some unforeseen horizon.

43/100

Of cactus and orchids and everything in between

In a rawness I can never seem to place in the moment

Where I persist in a way beyond commiseration

There lives so much blasé hatred

As they sit potted in quart containers

That I stole from work.

Meanwhile at Pershing square

The Datura pulls over agave in aligned rows

Behind fencing

On a walkway where everything always smells like piss.

Like a crowdsurfer through thorns

Throwing up white flags

unstoppably insurgent

with a smell that has the power to recall memories
of distant places, vastly unlike here.   

They sit in square boxes

Atop a Beverly Hills apartment

Awaiting my return

The one; never stops flowering.

The other; never gives up.

The rest, a hodgepodge

Emaciated when I found them

Entrenched in their fallen

Persistent to the last

and on this seething day

when the soft and distracted cannot muster the strength

my bag with quart containers of avocado stones

my skin soaks up all the water of my peeling tattoos

in a feeling not so unlike shedding weakness

with a cold rush to the head,

not so unlike awakening

to the reality that we seem to have no control over.  

with a kind of connection that seems to have no bearing.

delicately caught in the distant closeness of the green