“Not today.”
standing outside
when streetlights
turn on, it was
beautiful all
along outside,
where i could
have had a day –
maybe died –
and yet if fate
is a real thing,
there are moments
where you are
invincible where-
ever you breathe
Standing –
Actually
Looking around – inside
Of some withering memory
Can prove
Scary:
Parts and wholes all mixed and mangled,
Branches where limbs once swung,
Boiling solids,
Tattered
Liquids
(Were furniture)
Dim in the living room;
Red as blood because it is blood
((Not real
Brain blood))
Close friends and strange people twining,
Combining, but all wrong.
And finally
It’s gone
cats’ eyes
blood succulents
rain from a cloudless night
a dead fountain full of pennies
cave mouths
old malls
some dead man’s last annotations
rousing to a grey day
wet plastic bags
snakes’ tongues
the treachery of an edge
that had never opened
skin before it did
feels like being cardboard
boxes being broken down
behind the steakhouse in
the rain and feels like being
someone’s last cigarette ever
(before all the saudade)
there’s a pitiful epiphany
that feels like the treachery
of her promise’s fine print
or like watching a family pray
together (and the dad’s peeking)
their table almost levitating
out of the restaurant and
out into the real world
where we’re all waiting
for our skin to push the splinter out
“The mind is not a sandbox:
Its contents bear consequence
In the material world
(Time must be measured
in the mind for
dunes change
underneath
a brilliant map of suns)
“The life is the creation
Of the contents of one mind –
Thoughts are things in the real world
(Deep in the orange
distance: a string
of tiny camels
inching across
the grand dunes)
“One does not build sand castles
In the mind then not build them
Again on the ancient beach
(At the edge
of this alamogordo
your chain-link
fence made out
of mithril)
no longer
beautiful to
me infinity
disgusts me
(some abundances
wax rude)
how about
come back
down and
die like
the rest
of us
you know?
snap out of it
when i am thinking
i think to myself –
self thinks to self
till one wakes
up and is the one
self again and
again thinking and
selfing multitudes
and unto infinity
selfs till one wakes
alone and is the one
self unto death…]
little
contemptible
undead child-people
said the misanthrope to herself
like me
fall asleep
with two papercut
hands in bags
of rock salt only
to dream the ancient
elf city of el
dorado smoldered
golden-red like the tip
of the pilot light
under your only oven
.
live awake
with two eyes inside
holes in my facebone
only to see
the present tense
moldering around
me like snow like
so many gel caps
tossed in the volcano
fingers through my hair
skin chills ripple up my spine
getting a haircut
⨀ 