Unnerved

My eye keeps twitching
the left one,
from my perspective,
whenever my mind turns
to taxing thoughts.
It began a few days ago,
seemingly at random,
and I found the sensation
to be kind of pleasant.
Now,
mostly,
I just hope that people notice my twitching eye
and become unnerved while conversing with me
because I like to affect people.

Travel Diary

How the ground below trembles -
insular, cyclic, static -
so gentle in its gyrations
generating only
familiar sorts of consequences.

The scars and faults over-familiar; understood,
but safe -
dare I trade to trod far-afield
to walk upon unknown ground,
towards alien fauna and foreign flora
where I know not what it would mean to stumble?

But oh, that these boots had never journeyed
not towards horizons shimmering
nor towards where great Sol slumbers,
that they'd never stumbled to stopping here
where to see singly is to know
and to stay is to die - slowly.

Pits

So close to the edge I stand
as remain stationary I must,
for what else is man to do
when all but standing is lost?

A wiser man once told me
to 'ware gazing too deeply' before we
And they have come, however, and taken from me
all else that I might have cared to see.

The gaping chasm beckons, calls,
begs that I cease standing,
and I wonder,
what light to the below might I bring?

A mystery as black as that black pit
as none've ever gone so deep
to where her siren song calls to me
when I'm deep within sleep.

Just one step forward, now,
to call myself the very first
because many men have wandered
yet none dare slake their thirst.

One ahead then
with none left behind
falling, falling, falling I fall
until all that I have and hold left

is the little I carry inside.

The President

Deep beneath a rocky and scarred shelf
I have slumbered,
lain still for what seems now
to have been a very long time.
But I,
who know only of the static subsurface,
I know nothing of time.
Yet lie here I have and shall
as tremors from above
have begun.

Glass Chains

With a mouth that could not open,
I masticated
grinding the red and green
to shreds
that I might shit them out
atop
your silent, waiting form.

Stairwell

Half-glance in a rushed white-lit stairwell
the two of us passed unaware,
or maybe just unprepared between us,
that there might be such proximity.

Half heart-beats inside constricted chest
these two eyes but fail in knowing
or maybe just failed to see
that, for a moment, you were so close to me.

Half-known inside a confused mind
mine two hands did tremble -
or maybe just fell-to-sides unhinged -
as I reconstructed your face atop hers to see.

Half-gone thoughts inside a suspicious soul
my more than two visions failed to agree -
or maybe just failed to concede
that never again might such nearness be.

Knives

There's that line again
two steps ahead
marching ever-onward.
Its loss,
met with melancholy,
lifts the globe -
but closes the gate.

Chained, I follow
two steps behind
ever-vigilant
just in case
a flawed link
should appear in the phalanx.

And that is why I carry a knife.

Pissgrid

Weird smell in the bathroom.

I'm pretty sure it's coming
from behind the toilet.

It expands up past tile floors
ignores the grid of labyrinthine plumbing
to drift
around long-past-cast-porcelain
wall-panels asynchronous by decades
ignoring the mirror more murky than coherent
and into my sensory network
as I add to the problem.

Failing in Love

She's got that peasant stink stuck to her
radiating failed dreams and passed-over advice
speaking to the untold quantities
of filthy, illegitimate children
birthed through pale and quivering thighs.

Tattered, low denims
faded, high-cut blouse
full head of ratty, unclean hair
propped up in a high-rise hair-spray style
that hasn't been popular in the trailer parks
for more than a decade.

She always worked real hard
yet always put failing-foot forward
and though I asked,
she could never tell me why -
she never, I think, knew herself.

It doesn't matter though
she'll just fall again
fall to her knees before another he again
fall into the welfare lines due to another newborn again
fall back down into what she knows again.

She saves her non-handout-cash
for the spending on endless streams of hash,
bottles of paint for nail and eye-lash
-because she believes, as she's told,
that she's worth it -
even though it's real clear that she's not
and that
it's real clear that she's one for looking-on
and never acting upon and yet,
I cannot help myself
anymore than she can -

I have fallen
completely and pointlessly
in love with her.

III: Almost as if Alive

Curled around her tale as if asleep.
Only a certain, solid stillness showing
that she rather something more than slumbered -
the now-forever-open, gelatined-eyes
removed all doubt.
I placed my hand, ever so delicately,
overtop the elongated, tapered face
and pushed down
hoping to restore some lost dignity
by closing her eyes -
the way they do in movies.
Almost as if alive,
her eyes, thick with death and slime,
opened.
They never show that in the movies.

II - Elevation Level

Even though the woman in the white coat told us
as she left the room
to leave the dead dog on the ground
- the remains, she called it -
we did not.
Placing her instead on the examination table
because
somehow
the cold steel of the unadorned table
seemed more dignified
than the hard, bleached tile
of the floor.

I - Held

I held the girl
as she held her dog
who, had she been able,
could have looked
eye-level
at the woman in the white coat
who held a plastic syringe
which held the soft, pink poison.

III Restart Button

Ghost manifest in binary:
escaped from memory and into corridor,
denying recollection of exorcism as falsehood,
spirits have returned again to central processing.

II Northbridge

I.
So frustrating that
after the integrity of the bridge was assured,
it has been learned
that the river changed course.

II.
But the thing with that
is that fortunately
the thing was never intended
for the crossing of water.

I: Datashock

I felt the ground tremble in revelation.
Vision-blurred and steps-faltered,
faced with horizons understood, previously,
as mirages, and yet -
they've taken substance, a solidity foreign to
illusion
and yet,the ghosts are as real only
as the medium which assembled them
for what I pray
are benign purposes.

Funny, how?

Funny how
that whole thing about
appealing me to her ideal as mine
is that very same command
to lay the fuck down
and die.

Shielded

Guarded from having to set hammer to stone
or even draw the laylines (in grey), I instead
Drink it down quick
fast-paced ingestion to match the quick-burn
of the cigarette burning too low
too fast
and filling the air
with coils
wrapped about the leavings of the evening
as so many snakes in the stable of the grey mare.

The Frontier draft

It's like we conquered the whole world,
the frontiers remaining only those forged by man
and left the rest of us without homestead
destination and, instead, gave us only home.
Not that the splendor of silicon isn't grand,
not that the charted and developed territories
aren't worth of thanks-on-high,
and not that Mars being dragged within
the grasp of man
was maligned,
yet somehow -
Something seems to be missing,
some survival element of the equation subtract,
some mystery gone vacant.
It's like the only thing
that could ever kill me
is myself.

Phobos Fire draft

Starry skies and saffron haze,
tranquility shrouds the bloodied dead
and cloaks the wail of vultures circling overhead.

Phobos rising,
the glaring red emanating a living glow
from lifeless eyeballs and dried tongues.
Deimos accolades,
the hard violet corroding Sol's hold,
shadowing the glaring glow of long-past dawn.
A grim monument,
An Ares-herald piled-high,
the children of earth beseech their patron:
"Shower us in purifying fire,
lift us aloft with alighting flame,
smite out bode with a conflagration
such that Hades might rage with envy.
Pull at our true selves,
severing us from this mortal coil
with a holocaust of heat."

The killing long-since complete,
enacted with such grim precision and efficacy
to make Sol flee and weep.
Under baleful eye of Demos
and burning glare of Phobos
the husks of the martyred dead
piled high and blood,
gathered as the massacre was lead,
came to designate the omnipresent
flesh-mound a bright and shining red.

The red-ritual complete,
with wall of bone
and pillar of tooth replete,
the sacred eye of Ares turns
and, across the inky black expanse of ether,
opens the ancient portal awide
as volumes immeasurable of death-crimson flame
do spring toward Terra in fever:

A journey of a thousand lifetimes expanse,
bridged in the life and death of a breath,
the flare of the father of Phobos reaches
infant Terra and, noble, green and blue Terra,
is annihilated by the flames' all-encompassing breadth.
The broad expanse of biology destroyed
as the last glowing embers of holy prayer deployed,
and yet, alas, hope for followers of fields and dreams remain, as,
somehow, supplicants of devil-father and demon sons
were, for but a miniscule moment, decoyed:

A babe remained,
swaddled in shrouds of Terra's veridian,
protected until the last of the scouring flames
of the life of the faith drained and, despite their prayer,
a hope, a miniature fragment of life was yet sustained:
Somehow, the flames of Phobos' father
were contained.

Mental Marketplace - A

I got plants and grapes and ghosts,
but what I ain't got is what I need:
stones, dense and solid:
assured.
Though these stones exist not, it's pretty easy
to imagine solidarity in such states of ephermia:
Tangible, real and solid:
unimagined.
Times coming, then, to trade the chemical reactions
for sought/hoped social interactions:
Random, chaotic and anything but solid;
but real.

Spare Some Change, Man? draft

You get used to it.
Telling the same guy
with the same story
with the same problem
the same excuse that you've got nothing to spare,
that what you've got amounts to little and less,
and although this one has a different face,
the guilt feels the same,
and both reactions are the same:
the forced gratitude of charitable attention,
the fake smile but earnest wish for luck,
but you get used to it.

Grocery Shopping draft

Wine by the gallon
bread by the cent
with fevered, raving eye-knives
at the drones following pedestrian procedure.
Disembodied ghost-voices
hawking glowing, hovering sales,
forced forward through
the labyrinth of food, and escape:
please insert bill face up,
conform, know that the command is compulsory,
but:
Please wait for an attendant
so that our silicon might verify your carbon,
but please to not engage her, as
we cannot be held responsible for her attitude.
You brought your cellular, right?
Flee, then, solace in the cool mist
of a late, light May rain,
and home made by way of
beloved, hovering and shining icons
just in case we forget what we're working for.

What Might (She Sleeps) draft

She slept something spiritual;
little and less could be described as
little holistic, less tangible states as
surely naught else might aspire to attain
such a state of grace.
Surreal, unreal, yet -
tangibly, omnipresently, impossibly,
as indicated by breaths deep
and the back-and-forward of eyes' sweet,
it -
is little wonder that I've come to christen
her as Sleep.
That this coordinate of space-time might be
written, repetion unto tomorrow,
that our hour here might be made stone,
that into my retinas forever might be burned
with thsi furiously burning halo;
What that changes-only might be made
exclusively eternal,
and you, and I, might be shielded
by veils of shadow,
while although the world revolves-in-perpetuum,
we might change from this moment naught -

The Other

She left as the snows came,
draining with her footfalls the
silhouette of the skyline,
damning the sunrise to the banish of winter.
Unto the tomorrow deserved
was the logic of yesterday,
unmindful of the toll and vaguely-minded
of the benefits-potential,
aware only that mere steps beyond the horizon
lay that made-sacred destinatory-goal:
the other.

Daylight draft

The great flaming sphere of the burning sun
crested the horizon of catastrophe daybreak,
bringing with it the dawning of blood
and the thousand anguished wails of survivors.
They came at the height of midnight,
heralds of long-axe and pike
putting the believers to the hairline of the blade.
Orange flame of daylight danced atop the
fixtures of ornamentation of the knights of ever-late,
the awful visage of amss-murder below playing out as
mirrors on the visors of the newcomers-at-arms.
They said little and stayed less, the quarry eternal
having slipped beyond reach of their bola-nets and manacles,
and left behind those husks, unburied and burned,
as tokens of a repeated failure.

Never Was a Gambling Man

Another reworked piece. I like this one much better.

Heavy-handed-slit-lidded, I’m casting those bones
- didn’t play my game as close-chested as I should have, though –
And now I’m throwing with higher stakes than I’d known prior,
starting to regret the forced nonchalance of trying to “keep cool.”
Cast and weighted as I could,
but don’t watch: I’m blind to the hustling pit and
eyes-dimmed of hope-glimmer, I’m resigned against
double-sevens and sacred fourteens, anticipating instead
the triple-ones and maybe solo-fours of feigned failure
- they’re the usual roll, anyway, but I’m standing, moving, gone –
I can’t watch this.
Black/whites give rise to new metrics of haste,
the cubes bouncing and dancing on damnation,
and as the headsman’s axe falls, the die settle:

Broken Leaves - April version

Someday, I will be content with this piece. Not yet though.

Pulled by a black magic so
ephermal it’s more mist than mass,
I conjure.
I conjure and summon the thunder the clouds, spinning
celestial hammers that make ruin of the land –
Sent forward to hew the stone,
to destroy to butcher to carve apart the image of
the hand that came before,
and make anew a likeness never before seen:
But my vision is hollow, empty, a fraction of yesterday,
missing a critical support mechanism
that remains as intangible as the lightning
that carved these lines known prior,
and the hand that ordained this world.

The struggle sometimes is not one of definition,
no, but rather syntax; but the cracks, holes, gaps
I failed to foresee, could not have seen,
they mar and line this landscape -
They define it, they claim themselves as
antagonia-in-opposition.
They embolden the horizon with a faultline that
I knew not these iron hands capable:
An awareness of futility so pervasive so as
to destroy in an eternity of decay.
But not the stone
- never the stone -
As even barring I or he who came before I,
These stones live of their own:
Grow and fall and form, and I – we –
elements of impermanence, and yet as strongly
as these molecules bind themselves my image,
as absolutely as they assume correct form,
they are to be only as dust, as laughably marred as crippled,
their pre-programmed entropy a display that I – we – have neither
those iron-shod hands nor power over stone, no, but rather -
The shattered leaf, the burned branch,
The wilted, scorched and dying grass, yes
- these things,
these things dead and fleeting and soon gone, yes –
These are the ways in which we carve.

The Lance of Longinus, I

Mother, would you believe
what it is that I am to do?
Of mine charge,
a Christ.
Of mine command,
a lance.
Of mine soul,
a damnation.

Mother, would you believe
what it is that I have done?
Of mine hands,
a murderer.
Of mine eyes,
a scapegoat.
Of mine soul,
an apostate.

Mother, would you believe
what they have done to me?
Of my spear,
a relic.
Of my armor,
an icon.
Of my soul,
a saint.

The Lance of Longinus, II

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Gone from mine eyes is the radiance
of your puissant Pantheon, escaped
from mine soul as the blood-aery
poured from the vacated void of the blade:
Baptized, as it happens, on Sacred Calvary.

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Mine spear borne away by bewinged babes,
and mine armour broken in devout decay as
dawn approached while the sun setting, unfurled:
The man thrice-pierced and twice crowned
had died, and as I to this world.

Blessed mother, sacred father:
your son has forsaken your way.
Lifted aloft and b’wreathed by angels,
promised the thousand glories of mortal deliverance
as my men bore him away and gone:
He is dead, gone and rotting in a cave,
but what can be of day if lacking in Son?

Blessed mother, sacred dather,
your son has forsaken your way:
Light not a pyre for him, nor
sing sorrows to thine furies –
strike thy son Longinus from the lists,
take all that we Romans know of this world
and cast it forth into the abyss.

The Lance of Longinus, III

Lance of Longinus III

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
“Truly, this man was the Son of God,”
I spoke aloud as I thrust the lance,
and knew a dawn of peace within me
as the sun set upon our ancient empire.

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
I have forsaken only the shadow that
has become our world, and beg a thousand times:
forgiveness, blessed father, but no longer am I astray –
“Truly, this man was the Son of God.”

Father, and fathers before he,
know that I fall from you without fear:
what that I could share with you this
blood, this salvation, that you might say,
“Truly, this man was the Son of God,” –
and what that only you didn’t fear to fall.

More in Dreaming [sonnet]

O, craftfully carved soapstone and
alabaster visage, what that you knew
of all of the gentle dreams I'd plan'td;
a green garden in which our love might grow.

O, that only I could demonstrate to
you how wondrous together we could be,
spirits entwined and bound as thread on screw,
if only I could charm you to love me.

Such things are correctly known to be dreams -
for circumstances - and great many fears -
Forever, I'm trapped in gardens' green,
stuck to merely casting you longing leers.

Yet ultimately, I'm sure that I would
love you more dreaming than in waking would.

The Bog-Witch [sonnet]

Quarter-tooth angled archingly reverse,
her snaggles enrapture me; hither,
come, my fairest, grant me those perverse
acts – lest I, like you, become withere’d!

This, I cannot, allow to come to pass!
Whether by charms, wit, big brains or huge cocks,
Whatever cost you pay, I’ll have that ass!
For my be-warted, I’ll indulge no stops.

You can cry, resist and plead, extolling
Unto me the injustice of m’love,
But it shall avail you all of nothing,
As my sights are on that filthy trove.

Flee, run, wail and never cease in weeping
In a steel cage our love I’m keeping.

Christmas Lights

Water white like ghosts falls
into glass. Upended,
sickly-thick liquid encircles –
a new, easy-access-brand elixir
for an old kind of contamination.
Burning more than should,
corroding boils and poxes
as it slides, falls, digs deep –
scoring chasms and lines
while falling – unanticipated –
a novel redress for an ancient affliction.
Internal temperature rising as fast as
awareness falling, composure sedate
but sentient, growing distantly fearful -
even though the snake oil accompanied
guarantee: “Whatever ails you.”
Wonder, I, if said whatever is said oil,
mentally transfixing that fast-falling cure
into a clever-cruel kind of contagion –
thoughts worsen as poison of aporia slips deep,
and hands-to-throat, digits dig deep –
archaic antidote; a brutal purge, and
mangled boils and liquefied pox
Explode
in a burning sea rising, aflame and
charring as experience-dictates-should,
while sickly-thick water-white ghosts escape,
screaming in exile –
face-to-floor, thoughts rod-grounded,
awareness – gone, snake oil - purged,
malady - sustained.

Swordsong

Swordsong: Freeform

Peering up from the precipice, a cyclops! – a
Many-fanged and mono-eyed beast,
Flesh a sickly sea-shell and putrid yellow as a
Series of pustules pulse rivulets of green-black blood,
Staining scarred surfaces and shadowing engorged strength.

Reaffirmed grip on haft,
I plunge the sticked-spike a shade-shy of horizontal,
Missing the mark obvious but finding purchase,
Shattering clavicle and spraying sinew in a perverse sort
Of macabre rainbow arc, yet met with instant,
Abject terror: spear now not merely stuck but gripped
By mine beholden nemesis, and he shifts, twists the
Leverage and I, trained in the art of never-surrender-never,
Have not his primitive power to resist and thus fall,
Giving way to laws of momentum – and the world shudders.

Eyes-wide as fist-eclipses-sun, a quick scramble,
Desperate-probing-reflexive grab for the half-arm length stabber,
Unsheathe, roll, aim and thrust:
A scoring glance, slicing more pox and pus than
Bone or gristle, but desired effect achieved:
Nemesis rails, howling, orb clenched and pointing skyward,
Arms guarding reflexive at bloodied torso, leaving precious,
Glorious goal unguarded:
A backwards roll, leaning into the earth like Atlas,
I push, spring, and the world gleams in high-contrast
Blood-red and silvered-steel-sword as I’m propelled skyward –
Blade-and-hand acting in concert, a conductor in a symphony
Of prospective gore seeking to punish the cyclopean’s dissonance,
I plunge deep, scoring a bassonic rumble from
His jugular and cacophonic crackings as his cerebral
Column gives way to the superior song.

His shuttered eye now open as he slumps, falling to the
Ground ilke a dead god, it develops a strange sort of calm,
As if he’s hearing his own song of slaying – but that
Sizzling, that pig-eating-slop sound, that wasn’t my song –
That must be his, and awareness dawns as adrenal sets –
Blinded by blood and battle, I’d neglected to heed
The refuse of the beast’s bilious eruptions,
Blown back from the force of my blade, and now, immersed
By the nauseating, liquid-green mass, I am devoured from
Without.

I lay now, eyes alternating skies, and weep that I
Am sapped entirely of strength enough for noble suicide:
I shall die here, propped astern like a failed Atlas, a
Boneless, gibbering mash of grit, guts, and warm, soupy glory,
muted and deafened to the howlsong from above of vultures.

The Maiden as Demiurge

Lewis-Carrol Carrol. Or something. Word limits and form rules are for chumps.

Maiden, maiden, maiden, a depilidate mobious minaret –
Holical, Eris begs an atlatl defection, the
Genuis-from-Mars technique – an erathicus lecanopteris.
Suffretex, past-perfection in pastel gloxinia,
Glowingly acidic and shiftingly glossidic, it’s cosmaltry mariala;
Ungual outmoded, holonym singing Aquilar rapax as demiurge.
Demos and Phobos weep, coruscating terrathos, killing riva.

Swell quickly, optic ophidia, lest the ira florena rise –
Rise, maiden, rise optic ophidia, ignore Irredelphine!
Strut the hematacolpa and pace-willow, but fail flow:
Deciduous telechir beckons, demanding autobogotic-hajra.
Piss-venom and picea hovea, eche verri naught echo –
Beta-decay and COBOL error, fandango with teeth
And sing praise for Eucladanic soignè solaris

Sprint quick, maiden-solidago gesparisè, to Misra pourum!
Majerns and hapax, death-knell aloud and encelia,
Enfloranè, haste! Enatic haste tichodrome, flee, anise!
Apios, harken: tryst-sans-thermobic sweeping of thresher-thrown,
Little-low else yet achroma, de-jubilance:
Fall fairly, ayah! So to be so, blanking systemic,
A thousand steps for one death.

Bad Habits

Form: list poem.

Stoned again,
Post-hasted doubting and raving,
Confused why I torture myself so –
Truer words never spoken as lies,
The dull, pumpkin-glow of the broken lamp casting ghosts,
Filling my visions with demons I’d thought excised.
Stoned again,
Alone in its tendrils again,
I travel –
Travel through ideas shattered and plexiglass melting,
Singing and burning as it covers my senses like a myelin sheath,
Conducting protons-only,
But my brain is slow and the receptors dull,
And the raw input manifests only as trails of spirits.
Stoned again,
The madness thick as bog sludge,
Stinking of scorched sulfur,
It kicks corroded and dead gears into spin,
Generating false ideas and wild delusions
That I know aren’t real but –
Nothing else here is, either, especially not you,
Disembodied you, listener.
Stoned again,
But not alone this time no,
Her idea ghosting simulacra,
Taunting me with her shortcomings and spitting like venom
Those thousands of details I’d always hated while
Refusing acknowledgment, but
Like a brick golem she’s got a core,
A conduit of last-year’s hopes, and I flee, panicked –
Stoned again,
The clouds high above the ruined October grass,
Laughing like spaceships, and returning me to boyhood fancy:
I’ll never be an astronaut.

In Hoc Signe Vinces [In This Sign They Shall Conquer]

Title was commonly used in reference to Roman conquests. Wiki it, asshole. Form is Sestina.

From the corroded portal of his mouth erupted sunlight,
Spilling forth and poisoning the land; the mad god
Had spoken, and from his words issued only collapse,
Driving into frenzy his legions, and among those followers
He counted scores of angels and seraphim,
And not a figure illuminated in creation avoided the light as it had fallen.

Poised on a shrouded throne, the mad god set his chosen
Legions forward, those grim harbingers of dawn and sunlight.
At their head he appointed Lucifer, Champion of the Seraphim,
To press forward ahead of the voice of the mad god,
To secure for he and his entire coterie of followers
A new kingdom, ripe and wonting for conquest and collapse.

Thousands were smashed under the iron-shod boot of illumination, and the collapse
Of worlds and nations imminent: the forebears of man had fallen.
Reaping the glories of the coming dawn, Lucifer and his followers
Became drunk on the power and succumbed further to the grasp of sunlight,
And lifted high their praise of the almighty Yahweh, the mad god –
Thus it was that the taste of dominion developed in the seraphim.

At the very height of their favor to the mad god, that Champion of Seraphim,
Lucifer, had come to know those broken sons of man post-collapse,
And had come also to understand their mutual worship of the mad god;
That is to say, he had come to know that both he and they were fallen,
But he knew not where from – were they not the progeny of sunlight,
The very pinnacle of creation, he and all of his followers?

Some immortal truth was exposed to he as lie; that those followers,
Supplicants to the mad god, counting among them man, angel and seraphim,
Had been cheated by that enthroned and shrouded speaker of sunshine,
Cruelly coerced into exacting upon man an all-encompassing collapse,
And he, called now by Gabriel as Satan, dwelt on how far man had fallen:
Man must have a new dawn, he decided, and man himself should be god.

By even mere thought of this, Lucifer had maligned himself with god
And the challenge lay now in bringing the light of truth to his followers;
Over time, a full third of all the mad god’s kingdom had fallen
From his poisoned grace, but many enemies had he made among the seraphim.
They lusted now for little else than bringing the rebel sect the full circle of collapse,
And though the cost would be great, always high was the cost of true sunlight.

But justice is seldom conducted in sunlight, and anathema to the mad god –
For in delivering man’s collapse, he had forever damned his followers,
And Lucifer alone among the seraphim understood how far they all had fallen.

Circle of Ash (Black and Grey Scarves version 2) - elegy

A circle of ash cascades down the column of cold air next to the stone-plaster ashtray,

each dead and grey particle entwining and encircling the other, forming and outfalling from double-helix sequences that nobody notices,

providing half-seen distractions for the one standing idly smoking a Camel – a Turkish Royal –, and he’s looking like he’s working something out:

Why bother waiting? He’s paused, waiting until the cigarette burns low, the addiction sated, ceased in action until the decision of the nicotine forces departure, and finally decides to reject life – but to slowly wither here in the frozen snows and devouring winds?

Standing, paused still, wondering at the ashtray now, and as the embers cool to ashes, questions of scarves and stones arise: why choose the half-finished, woolen-scratchy black-and-grey scarf?

For fashion and heat, possibly, although the nature of an unfinished scarf and colors contradictory to fashion sense dictate otherwise, suggesting another motive –

The same, then, as why he carries the wolf-stone from Minnesota, a reminder of failings long-past and futures impossible, and as my mind turns to wonder at such things, the burning sun of the Camel finally dies,

And he steps away from the plaster-stone ashtray, leaving behind wool, stone, and a broken double-helix of ash.

Discs and Tigers

I got a pocketful of pennies and a mind full of lies,
ever-mindful that neither form of currency will avail -
I see there lying just beneath the surface a sort of beast
I've never yet slain, yet I fear the chase:
always the hunter, KI've lost my spear,
left it lying next to my shame,
and I assume flight -
Scattering pennies in my wake in desperate distraction,
they fail to attract it's attention, the copper approximations
slipping, falling, revolving about fruitlessly,
yet there, caught in the reflection lies still the beast,
snarling and ravin - but stationary.
Turning, ready to die with a thousand unruths,
I face the beast -
I face the befanged and hideously-mouthed monster, finding -
the lie projected before me and,
finding the thing now in flight, panicked at it's discovery,
the adrenaline engages, sending it and I into a fury
as the last of the discs cease revolving.

22 hours

Click. Scroll, scroll. Enter search query:
1983.
Click. Scroll, scroll. Add to query:
blonde hair, blue eyes. Fair complexion -
No results found. Click here to pay $25
to be told again,
no records were found - you're a ghost
in our system.
Please wait thirty seconds between queries,
it says, - what are moments to decades?
Nothing, nothing:
Modify query: April 5,
Nothing, nothing: no relevant data found.
So must it be with we bastard sons of man; surely,
the result of some flesh union whose results
can be further yet called ghosts, immaterial
on this most organic of planes, slipping through
the pixels, emerging lost to the system that was claimed to
see all -
like most, however, deeply corrupt and flawed,
incapable -
although that's not fair, as for
a machine to effectively function, all parts
must operate effectively but
that most critical of components,
blood that begat further blood,
sower and reaper of bastard seed,
builder of false cities, that thing -
that cog and wheel and chain -
Those components critical gone, leaving not wont
but cruel, terrible want,
unable to even be characterized as need -
and yet I saw,
was witness to a system fully-functional and
well-maintained to such a wondrous degree that
it was a marvel -
a marvel that threatened to glamour mine eyes to blindness,
atrophying my good-intentions, shatter my self-delusion,
to realize that the machine-other has /extensions/
hunting and probing, searching out and connected -
but not my system, no -
Maybe it's my data-entry punch card, poorly translated from
early binary, maybe, but I don't believe so - no -
"You just can't express these things in yes or no sequences"
and these questions just can't be asked without feeding into the queries.

Syllable nonsense 2

Fourteen
days this time I
waited, secure in my
hope that not merely might your eyes
alight onto mine, but
that there you might
find life.

Sd

Although
seven days may
pass from now and when our
eyes might meet again, I will not
pass a single moment
without thinking
of you.

Pair of haikus

Dogs

Today, my dog died
mostly because I shot him
.. he had it coming

Cheap Decorations

Falling from above,
splattering on the sidewalk,
bluejay - no longer.

4:01am

Behind the window and through the blinds lies a man, who
stands and perches, naught but a silhouette outlined by the
brown, nicotine-stained glow of the sheets-called-curtains.
Anyway, there's a man there, peering into my window as
measures necessary to enable sleep are taken, but he's
not doing anything, I mean - I'm not sure he's even watch-
ing me, but the hour grows late and try as I might, the mind
runs
wild -
drawing demons from crevices and hands of memory
from the bizarre December thunderstorm winds, and
it's always hard but right now becoming impossible
not to draw lines between nonexistent floating points and
shadow the underside of spinning geometrics. I
don't know how people do it, although I imagine
this fucking guy that will not stop looking at me - ab-
solutely, undoubtedly, has some notiong of how to ..
Hey!
Listen!
I shout, but I'm starting to wonder if he's really there at all
or if maybe he's not a pseudo-fucking floating dot-point
construct, designed and developed and implemented by
some crazed group of people to -----------------------------no!
that is unlikely, and probably impossible - really,
I believe that I'm better now and see ent8irely that said
lying-yet-standing isn't a man, no, but that he is
an
illusion!
Looking around at the soft yellow glow from the low-
yield/high-power bulbs as it leaps from sad chair to
stained and scarred electronics and into my
cerebral cortex, the lack of and maybe .. I can
see now a palpable, blood-like desperat-
ion for wont of any sort of human contact - it is
wretching, but ever-present - because, currently, that
cannot
be.
And really is there ever anything nearly as damaging
and damning and, I think I'd argue, driving as the desperate
drive that comes from knowing that what you know is impossible to
rationalize? The terrible tragedy is the way that vile
data manifests itself, corrupting and poisoning pure s
streams, but becoming aware of this wasn't half so bad as
realizing that man you just spent hours learning to hate was
never
there.