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.