Everyone else is drunk

Nail-file air conditioners drill their way into my ears with the steady tap-tapping of the drip from the uncleaned overfilled overflowing gutters ten feet straight down onto beige aluminum as sirens wail in the distance, on their way to something they or someone believes to be urgent enough to merit flashing lights and an alarming cry. A train whistle resonates in my bones as it rumbles heavily through my backyard. Timid crickets tacitly attempt a two-note lullaby to lull me into a two-toned dream world where everyone lives in an enormous canteloupe and all their shoes are verdantly neon. The wind rustles the leaves insistently: 'no, don't sleep, don't sleep, you don't want to go there. Trust me on this one. You'll only have dreams that you won't want to remember, waking disoriented, disconcerted, anxious and angry and feeling like you've gotten no sleep at all. Better to just lie awake and listen to machines rolling obliviously by until exhaustion consumes your brain and you fall into true unconsciousness. Trust me.' Your mind snakes its way insidiously, amphibiously up my leg, across my sun-baked cacti thighs, your scent intoxicating, seductive, corrosive and compelling. There's a void between us as you bask exotic in the sun and I erode in the tired familiarity of the absolutely ordinary. I can feel you, I can feel you, and everything is velveteen, the softest dove grey into the burgundy stretches of late next week as our paper-crane wishes and basketweave lives overlap and maybe, maybe intertwine for a nectarine moment of tasting ambrosia in your hair, and everything will cool to an igneous black, if we can keep ourselves from bleaching out to alabaster as I desperately trade you a pocketful of buttons for your needle and thread.

Which way is north?

The rising moon, enormous
With a manic tangerine grin
Chases us across a barren field
Of coal dust and copper pebbles.
Ghost deer flit at the edge of vision
As ragged scars open under our feet
And a clockwork wolf howls.
Around us, the trees shimmer
My eyes burn.
An insistent tugging at my scalp
Pulls the salt from my eyes
To coat the concrete pillars below
As I stagger across iron rails
Over seductive chasms
Deceptively wide and treacherously deep.
Shadowed eyes peer suspiciously upward
As he crouches beneath my dusty toes
In the shadows of the glaring mercury floodlights
That create dizzying patterns of sharp contrast
Deepest ebony against the sheen of tempered steel.
The moon rises, cackling
Footsteps quicken and breaths catch.
A nervous laugh
And a hurried backward glance.

Squinting, nearsighted thoughts in the dead hours of the night

Sometimes when I'm talking to people on the phone I forget that they have substance and that they actually exist at a concrete point in space-- they have an environment that they must interact with. I just think of them as disassembled, disembodied voices suspended in a fuzzy black void at the other end of the wire-- which itself is becoming ever more and more imaginary.

You have a way of picking me up so that I am floating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, laughing and gazing down at the birds like ants below the vaporous clouds, but also of plunging me down to the very depths of the sea so that I lie, swaying gently, in the murky sands, nibbled by unseen creatures and watching the eerie lights of bizarre and grotesque fish drift by before they disappear into the gloom.

On the edge of sleep, my bedsheets are made of barbed wire and eider down.

Glaze my skin with selflessness

A seraphim's self-induced chemical haze
The backbone of the drumbeat
As the spinal c(h)ord beats a soft tattoo
The rhythm chronic, neurotic
Burrowing insistently into her dazed head.
A catch in the throat
And a cold, resisting lump
Deep in the center of the chest.
A heavy, intoxicating weariness settles over the skin
In a sticky, noxious film
Sinking and crawling its way into the marrow.
Each heartbeat lasts longer and longer
As the blood cools
And every limb is slowly transmuted
Into hardening clay.
Tiny veins of ink spiderweb the whites of the eyes
As her brain begins to sublime.
Infiltration, yes
The insidious invaders have inserted themselves
Into every fiber
Every vessel
Every microscopic pore.
Infection, yes.
But don't call it a disease.
She has become a stony effigy
To those who cannot
Will not
Should not resist
Letting go
Giving up
Giving in.
A one-shot chance at attaining nirvana.
And if you miss...
What, really, have you lost?

Weather

We fly straight as green arrows into the heart of the storm. The sulfurous wind whips our sodden feathers around us as we labor determinately onward, our focus as sharp and deadly as the spears of lightning flickering in the distance. We fly out of the warm vernal sun, into a forbidding shade with a purple hue and a sickly yellow underbelly. We leave the light behind us, and we never once look back. Icy drops of rain assault us, pounding our backs and our heads and our weary wings, maliciously trying to chase us from the sky; we surge upward, out of the torrential downpour and into the choking clouds. The wind gusts in dizzying eddies, and I struggle to keep your sable form in sight as you begin to fade away into the haze. I struggle on blindly, desperately hoping that I have not gotten twisted into a spiral, perpetually circling the eye of the great storm. Fear drives me on as I cling tightly to the belief that I still follow you.
The fog at last begins to weaken, and I push my screaming, leaden body on with a new rush of hope. Shafts of light pierce the enveloping shroud, glittering with defiance. I burst through the final wall, and when my vision clears I see you gliding ahead of me. Exhausted and aching, but flooded with triumph, we fly on through pale azure skies, as thunder rumbles on the horizon.

Spectral moths flash outside my window

The leeching roots swell and crawl beneath my skin
Pale white forms grisly against my tense, anxious body.
They suck the moisture from me
And I become the brittle paper of a wasp's nest.
I fray and curl at the edges.
The tips of the roots burst forth
Grotesque worms greedily seeking daylight.
Shreds of paper drift away from my hollow form
The inside blackened, slick and molding
The outside dry, sun-bleached, and cracking.
I await my end patiently
Turning my withering face to the unforgiving light
Seeing nothing
Only waiting
To resist would be a waste of precious time.

Remaining

I lie motionless in the hard mo(u)rning light.
Threads run out of my ribs
Across the sheets and into the woodwork.
I am dissolving
I am crumbling
I've been torn wide open and I am unraveling.
I stare coldly at the great rend in my body
And I try to reconcile you and me
Who I thought you were
What I've seen, heard, felt
How I feel about us
And about you and me.
I am boneless and I am sinking down into the clay
Its cold, emotionless embrace shields me
From the void growing from the pit of my stomach
As my insides crawl away
Into the bright summer sky.
Yesterday I was a paper bird
Today, I am crumpled and sodden
Waiting to dissolve.

May 30

My brain is dying. It is running out of my ears and my eyes and my fingers and toes. It is leaking out with ever-increasing speed, constantly becoming more and more fluid; it is pouring out of me and it won't come back.
We are too amazing for words, we are too cool for shadows. Fuck this, we don't need faces, what are they but lies we turn to the morning light, begging selfishly for all that there is, on our knees in the cold air, the warm red mud. We supplicate shamelessly for things we should never even hope to hold.
Fight me, fight me, I hate everything you are. I want everything you are. Kick me down into the clay, grind my bones to dirt and ash. You might as well take everything I am-- division is senseless.

Cognac and Fireworks

I want to be a supernova
As bagpipes float through the darkness
Let me expand into the night.
I want to stargaze with you
We'll fly there together
Forget the world.
Racing through the night
We'll leave the earth behind
Speed past Venus
Past Mercury
Straight to the heart of the sun.
You and me, hand in hand
We'll pass beyond
Out of orbit
Faster and faster
Spinning through galaxies like fountains of dust
Laughing with the ecstasy and the thrill of it all
We'll go beyond the point of safe return
Go until we burn out
Keep racing on and on
Reckless and giddy
Drunk on adrenaline
Overwhelmed by the mind-bending blackness.
Fly to the planets with me.
Race until we explode in a chrysanthemum of flame
Laughing into oblivion.
Accelerate until out material bodies
Can no longer contain our exhilaration and joy
Keep gaining speed until we can hold ourselves together no longer
Until we are overcome by our happiness
And the white-hot emotion
Bursts forth
An explosion bigger than you could ever know
Leaving a vapor trail of dazzling sparks
In the ebony sea of stars
We fizzle out and become the night.
We'll light the universe
As we fall
Out of time
And out of existence.

April 25

Take my energy
Pull out my life
I don't need it.
Let it flow through your veins
Your limbs
Breathe it out into the air around you.
Give me to the birds
Let them nest in my hair.
Lay me down and let me dissolve
Diffuse into everything
Eternity brings omnipresence.
Leech the vitality from me
I'll shrivel up and die happy
Fade away
As you burst forth.
Breathe me in, breath me out
I want to be a part of everything.
Swim through the tiny rivulets
That the spring rains flood through the world
Soak me up
Drink me in
I rejoice in oblivion
In nourishing you with my being.
I have no need for substance anymore
It will suit you so much better.
I don't want it
Just take me
Destroy me
Scatter me
Oblivion is omnipotence.
Don't make me an ubiquity
Make me everything
Make me real.

April 21

Panorama of a war in the back of my skull
A matrix of burgundy smoke
Grenades, sparks
Crumbling stone palisades.
All sound is muted
As if through thick glass.
Sulfuric lights flash sickeningly.
Pebbles, powdered cement burst
Fall slowly
Outward and down
In lazy, terrifying arcs.
No guns
No soldiers
No sides.
A city in the distance.
No sky, only endless boiling clouds.
No you
I am nothing
I am diffuse throughout what little air remains.
There is only the scorched earth
Strewn with crumbled stone
Lonely stretches of defiant, unmoving, martyred stone walls
Watching their comrades evaporate around them.
Everything is the color of wine.

November 2

Balance on the edge of the seductive abyss
The ecstasy of illusory flight
Freefall.
Rocks and waves and sand and
Black, black agony
Numb.
Aching stone.
Hanging in the air
Looking down
Spinning
Whirling
Dancing
Screaming and laughing and crying and
Loving and hating
Down and up
Into the dark, into the light
Won't hit the rocks 'til tomorrow
It's ok.
Emptiness and black
Ecstasy.
Dragging out
All the way up
Out, out, out
Walked away from sweet temptation
Of simulation
Stimulation
Consideration...
Disturbingly cloying.

October 13

Hope, longing, apathy
Every bit of it's a lie.

Sanity is leaking
Flowing, pouring out
Diffusing all of me
To all of you
All of everything
The world is me and you
And nothing is real but thought
Is aether
And you are so far away.
Float away, it's ok
I'm sorry
Who is this?
One more push
You make me sick.
No, no, not that easily, you won't
Not on your life.

September 16

Day-to-day urges
always suppressed
they compress
they get ugly.

Going to Hell in a lavender hand-basket
Paved with good intentions
But the deeds are by the wayside
With everything I ever meant to tell you.
Goodbye, my mind
Why are you floating over there?
I am minuscule
A giant
I am in your blood, your bones
Bones, bones, bones.
"Three is the number of the day", the blackbird said.
Birds cover the sky
Huge and foreboding
Tiny dove, shot down
Cannon
Fwoosh
Smoke
Flash
Rewind
Replay
Sob, sob, sob
Shiver, shake, hyperventilate.
I'm sorry I collapsed on your sweatshirt
Who are you?
Are you me?
Or her?
Or someone else entirely?
Are you paper?
Flesh?
Aether?
I fall apart
Out of sight
Out of mind
Almost-but-never-quite out of reach.
Who to trust, who to tell?
Who shall keep my secrets well?
Your hair, your hair
It's wet
Soft
Unnatural.
You worry me, I worry you
Don't laugh, just understand.
Why haven't you changed?
Don't you feel the least bit strange?
You, you, you.
So many people, so many words
They'll never know
Oh no, no, no
They stay here
Between my head and the world
Caught safely, never to be let free
Oh no, no, no
Freedom is such an illusion.
I dare you
Wrap your self-important mind around this
Around me.
Go ahead, fuck with my mind some more.
Maybe this time I'll fuck you up, too.
But no
I'm too meek and docile and stupidly virtuous
Damnit, I want to get even
But it's all in my head.
If I'm a balloon, what are you?
Need to forget, forgive, belong.
Don't drift away again
Come closer
Get away from me
I can't stand the distance and the crowd.