broken burlesque [written 2002-2003?]

ask the mantis

NO BROCHURE FOR A BROKEN AMERICA.

beaten burlesque of a life I still don’t know how to live. bruised breath for my greatest excuses. hung on the line, such a familiar cue. culled in the clinch, such a derivative queue.
nameless endgames look on toothy. the altar grows choked with unalloyed offerings of exit strategies.
but, I prefer my ruin on the rocks…just ask the mantis standing watch outside my door. I name him Tecate, and collapse upon the pavement. nesting like a stupefied libertine among the detritus.
“oh god, is this the rapture? or am I simply that submissive?”
salvation is a chameleon. a demon with a face of unimaginable elasticity. it is privy to your secrets, like the walls of a glass house awaiting the wrecking ball.

favored culdesacs

if I’m trying to convince anyone of my brilliance,

then maybe the cramps in my style will do the talking?

for me, it has become a question of endurance.

“I’ll drink to that!”

but don’t get too excited,

‘cause I’ll drink to just about anything.

encyclopedic knowledge

of torrid endeavor notwithstanding.

I know the name of static now. 

(the finest philosophers suffered the most.)

hardy-fucking-har.

sexual détente

I’d like to think of myself as a brown recluse of the intellect. I’d like to, but the truth is no less toxic. it shrivels me up into a boozy ball of tangled fantasies and I’m given over to an ostentatious, arm’s-length sort of social poise. a shit-sunny rubber mask of platitudes. everything is wide-eyed smiles, when all I really want to do is scream mindless obscenities and kick people to death. especially when I’m flashed special smiles from proverbial GIRL. a vision that I could whittle a quaint little life out of, but then her idiot reason for my romantic vacillation ambles up and jaws something inane, worthy of a pistol-whipping. so, I hump on in my state of sexual détente. 

born bibulous  

my inebriated preoccupation will surely become the compost of legend when I finally fuck-off this mortal coil. surely, some poor hateful soul out there will read me like gleaming graffiti.

Dylan Thomas, I got your fuckin’ number homey.

I could allow these words of mine to fade away into intellectual rubbish, like prehistoric fecal matter. knowing that some bottomline asshole will mine it like gold. but, what does it fucking matter, when the one thing equals the other, and the other equals the next cigarette?

the supplicant, all specious

…like whalesong on a cheap flange, I’m throttled astir by the discordant prose of the lowest common denominator. amidst this peculiar autumn apocalypse of the current calendar, all mangy with decrepit contrition. emotionally psoriatic and given over to a mute asphalt grey juggernaut of lethargy…

deep tissue disenchantment

I woke up with a crooked neck and a doubt the size of God. unsightly build-up of years&years looking over my shoulder. I went to the kitchen to scratch up a morsel or two; something to palliate this hollowed-outness. all I could find was the mockery of mouse poison, and a package of hot sauce.

so I took it all in stride, and washed it down with warm shower water, then pulling on my clothes like they were pathological rags. I listened to music that reminded me of dusty-bright asylum corridors. a fucking fitting soundtrack to the bone-white day, stretched out ahead of me like a desert artery. the promise of sugared poison to be my only companion.

sometimes it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or to cry, in response to this human burlesque daily scraping. just don’t ask me the answer now. I’m much too busy daring the clock to stop, so I can keep on punishing myself with liquor-slicked words of miasmatic mental rape. 

and by the way, where are my cigarettes?

id est…

still no further toward renascence.

some sandbag form of acquiescence.

conclusions drawn and quartered. 

an itch; refused to be squandered.