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Say Goodbye

The weather has turned cooler and gray hangs over us, dome shaped. I sing as I pack my bags to get out of town. Riders on the Storm. Jim Morrison is my newest obsession because of his poetry. And his face. God that fucking perfect beautiful tragic tortured face.

I am troubled / Immeasurably / By your eyes, he writes in The American Night.

Couldn’t you just die.

I need the ocean. I need it all over me and crashing on the sand. My love gets out of bed and walks past me naked, sandy blond bed head hair in every direction. Black coffee and warm kisses. That crumpled space between sleeping and wake.

It’s just us and it’s quiet as a faded linen afternoon. I sip my coffee and watch out the window as the sun begins to break through the mist which whispers along the trees.

I don’t know if I will write while I am away. It is a strange thing. Sometimes I never quite can settle in when I borrow someone else’s house. All the coordinates are off somehow and my senses get mixed up.

My body and mind need a break from whatever bullshit they call reality. Lately it’s all just too much. It’s too much rush to get back to the things we used to do that didn’t make sense even then.

The birds are chirping but I have not heard a single cicada despite all the hype. People keep warning about the deafening sound. They complain it’s constant, the maddening buzzing which surrounds them from all sides.

I want to tell them it’s not the cicadas.

But they probably wouldn’t hear.

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If It Pleases You

I watch his eyes for the things he may not know how to tell me but I need to know are there.

Bubbling up in his blood. Prickling all over his body like pebbles of hard rain on a stone gray ocean. I wear a tiny bit of lace, light the candles by the mirror like maybe I’ll be saved, anointed, forgiven.

I want to be soft and him to be savage tonight.

Fuck poetry. Poetry is murderous. Poetry tears you into shreds, makes you beg. If it’s worth anything, it kills. Makes you watch. Makes you a witness. Makes you a voyeur and a spy. Poetry is utter devastation. A haunted kind of life.

It has been a long time since I formed my mouth around a word like a vengeful god binds his wrath into a fist. Since I kissed you like a burning bruise.

Let you drown in the searing ache of wet rose madness for a while.

Now all your thoughts of me are swollen, ripe, and red.

All the color has drained from the head.

I like the way your jaw juts out from your thick neck. I like the way you force the taste onto my tongue.

My love is a brutally beautiful thing. Lavish with a suffocating kind of attention.

I watch his eyes as he does it. I watch like a snow white lamb for the glistening of teeth.

Watch him fuck all the pain out of me.

Take it. Cut the lights and skin my knees. Poetry is reckless. Poets are nothing but bottomless pits of need.

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Sing for Me

In darkness there swells the truth about you. The murky depths of the truth you wish you did not want so badly to see up close. The Devil is in your blood is black like rain is watering the dead. You seem to have built a temple you can no longer manage to maintain and so the crumbling comes naturally, almost as a relief. Destruction as the sweet jolt of violation, the art of pain as surprise. He steps in close to you and you disappear against yourself into the void. You watch for the signs. You count the numbers, you lay out the cards, you mark the corners, face each: north, east, south, west. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Drink from the cup. Never break the circle. You bite a stranger on the mouth and take him home to find out if you hate yourself and if you do, how deep does that go inside. As long as you can hardly feel it as long as it doesn’t hurt as long as you never have to fight back. In a small room which is buried in your chest, a candle burns, melts its molten syrup down along the hard surface of the many orbiting moons. In another world beyond this hell you exist outside the binds of good and bad, as a midnight flower which opens silently into the fragile air. As an idea of what freedom has forever tasted like, eyeless, needless, breathless. Little shell, little bone. Make a wish. Take me home.

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Junk Yard

The thing is it’s all slipping away even as you peer into the hollow soul of it. If only they would feel the claws of it, too, then maybe they could understand what this feels like. Maybe a conversation or at least the quiet passing of a cigarette back and forth when the desperation really swells like a motherfucker.

Remember when we used to glow like wet sand beneath the moonlight. How you would cover every inch of my body with your burning mouth. You and I, a deserted beach awash in escape, paradise like promises kept in the beating of the heart against the skin. At the center of the blood red rose, into the folded petals swirling softly inward, you follow me. You will follow me, won’t you? Even if we understand each other so well it scares the shit out of both of us. Even in spite of the way my eyes play tricks on me, you in the mirror, you always falling apart.

They make all these bizarre predictions. A soul mate, a twin flame. A balancing act as if there were a point and a counterpoint to a love which claims to encompass everything. The buttercream light of morning melts along the rooftops and the trees. A day awaits, her slick pink tongue out against the blade like a threat, like a nervous breakdown. It’s too much coffee and not a lot to say. It’s a thick book of love poems tossed out in the rain and left for trash.

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Slit

Evening birdsong sifts inside the open window as I watch the light’s eyes turn down against the hands of an antique clock. What cuts my heart deepest is these little slivers of moment, soft sweet flickers of an invisible beauty made just barely visible. A fragment of a second’s split in the veil which drapes the eternal body of time.

A boundary not crossed but extinguished, collapsed entirely into itself: into nothing.

Light sliced along the edge of a sloping petal; consummation without intrusion. So thin a movement of air against skin. Even as you collect yourself beneath it, it has disappeared.

What else could this dead world possibly offer you faith in but melancholy. People are hysterical. People are maniacs. Cruelty abounds as does deceit. In the mind of the killer. In the mind of the rich man. In the back of the throat of the hungry and abandoned child. God and the Devil and the Son and the Blood. And you pass my whiskey and you want to get high and you want to talk about this fucking life as you know it but so do I – so do I – and it isn’t this.

It is not this. It cannot be this. Anything but this.

Everything else is layered on top of what is true and what is true is the thing that aches the most. I pull out a notebook to write a message to no one. Notes on my phone. Lipstick on the wall. Make a world out of nothing and hold it in my hands like a sacrifice. Like a pistol. Like a looking glass I attempt to gaze into. Fall into. We are only ourselves and only unto ourselves can we return.

A tangerine sun, like one strung out eye, sinks into a white glass sea.

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The Dark Part of Truth

You are an outcast. Always have been, even among the included. Even among the chosen, you were the few and never the many. Singular. Disaffected. Dissociated. Frightening.

Moving your face and body the wrong way, they clipped your wandering steps and pasted them upon the tightrope horizon line. It is the one thing about you you cannot bed. It lives inside you and does not rest. It is the only thing about you. It is the hardest part about you.

It is the only thing you love because you want to, not because you must.

I light up a cigarette and sit on the wrought iron chair on the patio beneath the maple trees. The ominous sky heaving with electricity. Solitude is prayer. Is the only universal expression of gratitude. To be left alone to pick up the paper cut-out footprints they peeled off your feet. Nailed the wrong way around. I busted up my foot over the weekend – something stupid.

What if you couldn’t walk. What if you couldn’t run away even as they chased you.

The chain-link fence around the building has two feet of curled barbed wire around the top I never noticed before. They tell you it’s so nobody gets in. All kinds of running are the wrong kind of protection. They can say a lot of things but I am no longer listening. I can picture some of us, shirts torn, skin bloody. Trying to get out.

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Love You So Hard

We slept in later than usual. My body and mind are both still sweetly tingling with the whispered press of our love making which we rode out from dusk til dawn like we used to do when we first met. We have been through so much, traced our way through the darkness of a time we thought would break us, and still you can make me blush, make me open, make me cry for the sheer depth of the beauty of it.

Out the bedroom window the rain is pouring down, a steady thorough rain, and there is a cool wind moving through the blood red maple leaves on the trees across the street. The birds sing wild little songs as I run my fingers through your soft blond hair.

I know I don’t say love because it sounds like nothing to me when I do. But I love you as if that meant more than any word could ever mean or contain or imply. I love you hard like the wet pavement takes the lashes of the rain without relent or protest. I love you until that cruel ridiculous word finally takes root in my limbs, an expansion bright as the sun which exhausts itself sliding through miles and miles of my thin bending veins.

At the beginning we didn’t believe it could happen. And when it wouldn’t let us go we didn’t want to trust in any of it, in anything that could ever hurt like hell again. But here you are kissing me and here I am tangled all over you and here we go clutching again and again and again like the world could end and the walls could crumble and the sky could burn and we would not stop. I could say love and you could say love but I think it just means that we will not stop. Not for anything.

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New Podcast Episode! Why Would Anyone: Wear Mom Jeans? Go Back to the Office? Use Whatever the Hell Bitcoin Is? Turn Off ‘Likes’ on Instagram?

I host a podcast called Spacetrash with my very dear cousin Mark who makes me laugh so much and chills me out more than most other humans ever possibly can. A new episode drops every other Friday morning and we riff about the things on our minds as fellow writers and creatives living in a world that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to either of us but we roll with it anyway because: life.

Today’s episode covers a lot of cultural ground in just 36 minutes! We get into such topics as Mark starting his next big creative thing and he reveals what computer coding is really like (writers and poets, you will be surprised). Also, not worn jeans since before quarantine? Listen in to hear what’s hot with denim – and what’s not anymore – and what is again – because the nineties were everything. We’re told. And among a slew of other things, we discuss the critical pros and cons of using the new Instagram feature which hides likes on your posts, or the posts in your feed. Why would anyone do this? Why on earth does IG even offer this when nonsense popularity is the name of their whole game? Grab a Friday beverage and let’s get into it. You can listen on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Deviant Behavior

Hunger is tricky to think beyond and she is hungry each and everyday, like running a low grade fever, it is always there pressed against the underside of the skin. Planes have come out of the sky. The thinness of the atmosphere, the weakness of the arms of the air. In early morning, the blood of the sun watered against the moon as it hangs in orbit.

Visions come and go inside of the huger, but I have mentioned this already. I could have been afraid you would forget. It is a numbness in the back of the rib cage, chest and neck. You forget that starvation is deprivation and deprivation is not limited to, not housed within, the body.

Wings of birds are quiet against the branches as the throats of the creatures fill with screams. It is too early for cigarettes, too early for infatuation. Reading the lives of poets. We are studied. We are test tubes, we are lab coats, bleached whiter than snow and cold as ice inside the soiled earth.

Lack of empathy. Lack of reliable direction. Denial of the passions within, and all becomes dark. ‘My heart wants to mate with the dark,’ Forugh Farrokhzad confesses, her words in books which contain her voice from the great beyond. Cars have come out of the sky and have been run off the side of the road. Winter has come to slumber against the crush of her young chest.

Pareidolia: the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous visual stimulus (so that one sees an object, pattern or meaning where in fact there is none).

And then there is you, and you do not belong in time. Not in this time or any other, past or future or present. You are a suspension and an immersion without limit. Yet the more they look at you – the more they study, the more they probe – the deeper you split in half. The body and mind attempt to accommodate the emptiness, the distortion, the division which rages inside of the whole.

The more your eyes detect a pattern which they keep telling you does not exist. You have seen the way the connections are made, hand over hand, hand over mouth, eye over eye.

The trouble is you have to make it fit. And they give you starvation and you give them poetry and your tongue is so dry you can’t even spit. You are trying to recognize the patterns even as they shift.

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Eventually You Break

The trouble is even if you write something good you still have to write something else. You still have to write again. And again after that. The itch doesn’t stop. The need does not subside. It is not erased just because you gave a thing a chance.

In the nest of my dark mind, I imagine a world where there is much less noise, so as to allow for a kind of internal peace not known to most people in these crippling times. There is no reality underneath the lies which swirl and encircle us no matter which way we turn. Each step you take punches a hole through the continuum, each breath is an intrusion.

It is painful to move about within a web of ignorance. One feels as if she is a protrusion, a distortion of some robust and obscene kind. One does not belong, even as one is.

Blood cut eyes. Trembling hands and thighs.

Even the ones who want to save you don’t. By that I mean they cannot save you and they do not want to anyway, no matter what they tell you. No matter what they tell themselves. You have to save yourself and by that I mean no one is coming behind the dogs, behind the search there is no search.

Alone in a cool wood by a stream, I sit and listen for the wind in the leaves. I touch crystal water to my soft wet mouth. I take my coffee black these days. I sip it in the mist which sifts high above the treetops, before the dawn which comes to overtake all worthy forms of thought. Like a black cloud. A thunderous daily apocalypse. Eventually it will kill you.

As will anything. As could anything, really.

Marching against a cruel hard ground, the same day keeps happening on all the days. You make a stab upon the page and it exhausts your lungs. Slinking off into the shadow of evening, looking for the answer to the riddle of a life no one else can see.