leaning with intent to fall
“light the sanguine lamp brother, it’s time to finish what we started.”
the skeletons of bark and sinew show themselves against the dirty pink opaque. the days of the meager fallen rattle themselves against the spoiled winter night. I look up into razor-glass air and attempt to swallow my apprehension.
the causeways of listless grief are open for business once again. and, the disciples of complaint offer their patronage in due course.
the light of this sudden day wanes, as I try to curry favor with gluttonous ghosts. I am a poor host, as alcohol is within reach. the throttling of skin and soul threatens to shatter the false serenity of our underground. so I call to my brother for his stained cellophane scrutiny. and, we arrive disinclined @ the citadel of unkempt finance. we pivot upon our path and walk down empty wood avenues. ours is not to believe, but to accept. full tilt shirk; our dance of the evening.
“hold tight your propriety brother, now is not the time.”
the broken snake pavement gives up its treachery. the city squats in envy. the skeletons sway creaky protests. but , our paper has no weight.
the citadel is lit with charring dreams. the kind that twitch & slouch, mostly in ghostly predawn haze. when the air is dressed in a dusty white-blue shear. chill as gravestone salutations. and the firmament swoons its small-hours soliloquy. my pride shifts in this post-consumptive temperature. something in the furthest ignored corner of my eye vies for notice, but I’m pressed to childlike immediacy.
“tho I feel weakened, you can see my shine for miles & miles.”
she says, as I put on my haze-tint glasses and breathe in the tendrils of her orchid confidence. the scent is so erudite, but the effect remains vaguely vacuous. I’ve unwittingly fallen into another trap of my gender. another pitfall of loin-sought consumption. yet these bars, like morgues, hold no warmth I’d like to touch. no such meat in which my teeth are willing to sink. so I come off like some fucking Gulliver in a land of incredible belonging, and I’m bereft of a password. o but how they shine! that emptycold shine of white tiles and sterilization. that void-like luminescence of cheap fluorescent tombs… (the gleam of open solitude.)
everybody thinks that they are at the dog end of a day gone by, but it’s merely the sound of another blind year shuffling past. singing a soft song of quiet madness. beloved lunacy. a form of piracy never adequately recorded. and four years in the desert is a long fucking time. regardless of whatever specter speaks otherwise.
“BEING READY TO DIE IS SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT FROM KNOWING HOW IT WILL HAPPEN.”
a numbing hum comes into my consciousness like an uninvited crowd. I want, more than peace, to find my path back. I do want to live in the fucking past. but, dining on impossibilities is harder to swallow than broken glass. these avenues only seem like unwanted regurgitation. and, it’s as if I’m dragging barbwire stories across my brain. written in some language of unbearable cold. (the brutality of temperature, once again.)
the hungry chill of ghosts
thousands of hours have made their way to this. they take what they can take, and leave me on the dangle. all a-tilt in dark stretches. the flies bait their breath with false platitudes. I am their king, and I accept their gifts in the spirit with which they were given. smeared sullen by ashen complexity.
“this temperature is made for measuring blood.”
he says, clutching his heart and swallowing his final ounce of certainty.
bound by tithes and tears, we flail about his vapor in mad-sightless fever. seemingly drunk on our own fermented confusion. sifting. silt sifting. “it’s not our time anymore, is it?” I question the dead moths, collected like so much desiccated treasure. and, not to forsake the obvious, I receive no reply.
there is no form of memory known to me that would explain why I can’t seem to function in this slave-driving temperature. it doesn’t matter how many times I scream fuck into the void. yet, I always have my ghosts to scream back. tho’ I avoid them, I still clutch at them childlike. infantile in their wake. I’ve found a sort of serenity in their hunger. their hungry chill. they shadow me in my lonesome walks of cliché. this nail-biting solemnity all too familiar to my kind.
so, what do these stolen avenues hold for us anyway? one last gaze into the abyss, before our eyes crust over with complacence? a final shrugging charge into a breach that still confounds us with sex & saccharine? or perhaps it’s all just an inebriated illusion, conjured by apparitions in tailored suits? (I can merely pray to the whitenoise deity for an answer.) this cold front confronts, our search is cut throat-length. the slip is granted much too painlessly. howl like freezing dogs, but it’s only the recognition of unabsolvement. merely the smell of burning time. and I lack the throat to scream…
crowds gather; an unwanted swarm.
ill-orange lit streets claw at my already threadbare sanity. I cannot join. ‘cause the fucking bell tolls for me in too-few hours. I’ll expire like a promise not worth keeping. transparent blockades mire this track of trial that we cannot avoid. jagged stones in such damaged invitations.
(or was it more like a bruise-black void flanging through my brain like feedback? this sheet ice emotion so ancient and esurient. I the throes of my flailing, could I have unwittingly fucking stumbled over the source of all my life’s disconcertedness? my question ricochets off the clock’s toothy grin of malice, and returns answerless. my belief in love has me firmly by the throat. it takes the breath from my lungs and offers a poison fume. it falters my step and tosses me into the snow to dig for sustenance. head-steam curling like cordite…I am no further than fucked.)
the deceptive silk of night lures us in once again. it calls its sycophant to steal all logic, then replaces it with weakness. “maybe I like the taste of bourbon too much?” I hear myself ask through the static. throttled, we run to the ashtray and dig for our remaining sense of relevance. yeah, some artifact of former madness. this crawl craves, but there is nothing but cigarettes & blank stares. in invisible catalogue of fevered middle-fingered triumphs. we remain fanatical in our irony. and, tiny deaths we die whenever we think of shining glories bereft. lacking forgotten of true continuity.
“where does this jagged path lead?”
comes the hang from my left ear. I scratch hidden claws across my arm to form the nature of my reply. it comes sounding of squeezed lungs and plaintive shrugging. o, how I love what I do to myself.
I call for the serpent in order to fashion my crown of venom. my inauguration forthcoming, I have ill-preparations in my mirror. to say the word ‘distraught’ at such frail times is the vilest of heresies.
of late I’m tied to the sunset like an animal. naked, cold and feeding off my own substance. with every freezing-violet dawn, I understand less and less. (and the ghosts never let me forget it.)
often I seek answers by studying the jagged ruins of my fingertips. remembering the acid smell of saliva as it evaporates off the skin of an exhausted lover. while I gnaw at my arm in order to free myself of my perpetual ensnarement. “sometimes it’s all to comfortable…living among the maggots.” says the leper as he skulks past, unflinched by the carnage. and I hate myself for the anger I feel towards his nonchalance.
a sudden bloody punchline
somehow, this recitation of bonedust slips into cyclical. I never seem to forget the pain it inflicts as it passes. that blinding grin of chrome. so edged and so criminally there.
the sun always finds ways to leave my sky without me. leaving me sightless, confused and utterly resentful. so I take to writing rhapsodies with my shivers, as the cold becomes something tangible and belligerent. (and I liver-waltz into an early grave.) my red night sings like a detuned Wurlitzer. the air stings with insects made of ice. my withered blood whispers a reminder that only drink could allow me to ignore. I lost my way along this fluorescent corridor a century ago, and the temperature won’t let me regain my equilibrium.
“but…this is all just a fucking joke, isn’t it?” I suddenly hear myself ask the liquor in my glass.
no arguments can pass down the curt symmetry of my stairs. this house is a mausoleum dedicated to beauty. so scarred and so hard to cradle in such chapped hands. and now, all the years of solitude have grown teeth so sharp my skin practically sways to the bloody embrace. I submit.
the second hand bares a middle finger tonight. I’m dead and past caring. even the ghosts can’t quell my grief… tonight I want to weep, but the desert is a cruel master.
“lovers forever.”
I barely mask my doubt.
a mixtape for a siren
“I was too busy mapping the stars, when Eve took my fruit.”
indiscretion forthcoming
states of disbelief; constantly in flux. a thousand hours have passed, and the fluctuations still gain steep. blood and saliva still continue to lubricate the workings. I found myself slumbering on a pithy little shelf of entropy. counting the dust strata blanketing my meager geography. some land of promises ill-kept. I move unceremoniously among the charred remains of my security. tripping through the dirty ruins of my solidarity. one day these shards will insurrect the blood from my veins.
the service of solitude is a shoddy business. swallowed in pink slips and obfuscation. you’ll get your pound of flesh when we accept our mound of shit. scurrying straight past the trap, and cozying up to Armageddon.
yet, at the foot of these stairs, the strange does not seem so much like fear, but simple elevation. the creak & swell - a symphony of passage. a fray so slow, its agonies are like bittersweet elixirs. I taste them in moonlit stretches. passing through beautiful barrios of my own invention. yes, this black dog has its hold.
object permanence
the fickle membrane of snow outside whispers its salaciousness into my bones tonight. I’ve been a fucking coward far too long, it says. “unwind the wire from your skull.” it says. my answers shrieks from the cigarette burn in the palm of my left hand. was this the touch of my conscience? or was I cradled too long in the tardiness of my excess?
I fought hard to reach this river. I put it to my lips and let its ice melt my nerves. I fought hard to be numb. indifference is my prize. and now, in these maladied watches, I dream… I dream of lovers locked in the quicksand of their own hunger. I dream of genius bedding lunacy, and feebleness fucking the status quo. goddamnit, I dream of loss being razed by animal desire.
I’m smoking again now, because I now how much the ghosts love savor my self defilement. in ten years, I’ve learned their addictions like my own. I know their ambitions like some twisted lullaby. I’ve scrawled countless maps of their tongues, in the smallest of hours, with the gnawed ruins at the end of my hands. yet, it’s only so long before the winds carry themselves back to the fucking wastes from which they came.
like a child whispering obscenities into an oscillating fan, I find myself (again) vomiting my confessions into the chasm. calling for a respite that has a price tag far beyond my means. the stars are too crooked to allow debate. “I’m tired of doing al of the chasing,” I tell my solitude, annoyed, “for once could I be the chased?”
such visions are reserved only for the monochrome. flipping through photos… the sensation of surrender is palpable enough to leave a bruise. where to turn? and who to turn to? my uncertainty has reached critical mass. and, contrary to my former dispositions, I await the rising with arms outstretched.
“turn your own tide.” my solitude says, with a gleam in her eye that perfectly matches the one sheening off my bourbon. with a sutured soul and a swooning skull, I bend myself into air so thick with questions it intoxicates me even further. my mouth is so saturated that speech has become a cruel and comical afterthought.
these streets are so conducive to running away. so we run from repugnant dispatches. unwanted messages heralded by the blinking green light on the cordless receiver. the CALLER ID now shows its potential to be a digital curse of knowledge. hurried shivering past haunted store fronts and church doorways like quantum singularities. avoiding anything that could transform our passions into pillars of salt. no looking, under pain of nothingness. void collected in misstepped finance and half-hour formats. sluicing through gutters of pure promise. of further horizons. of sweet unknown nectars.
too many days we stand feigning stoic like mourners in an icy rain, waiting for our sorrow to evaporate. waiting for the sun to climb and end this horrid hollow chill. clutching our nostalgia like a moth seeks to clutch light. and so this dance continues. this uncareful choreography of loss & longing. steam-starved; mechanical and completely transparent. dedications of love shrink-wrapped in cellophane. fucking prepackaged and made useless by its own advertisement. “my life is perfect now”, feigns the liar whose completeness is skinned by so much vinyl treachery. undevout; uncaring. I’ve lived tens of lives, each one more emotionally esurient. each life more complex and complicated and fucked-up… yes I’ve lived many lives, but only if you count the ones lived within the cholesterol-slicked walls inside my skull.
what are these vapors, if but the rarified pressure let loose from a prison of self-delusion? a sudden, almost sexual elation materializes, but is as fleeting as its arrival. as brevitous as such things, in their design, are meant to be. and, comically, we bare the burdens of this design.
my fears are delinquent tenants holding court in my gut. shaking the walls of my being with their dissident noise. the more I try to drown them with liquor, the fucking louder they become. and, in the throes of a sickness all-too-familiar to me, I come closer in proximity to the nature of my charge. its pungent presence climbing the cracked walls of my hovel like an army of grey spiders. its scent mingling with, and ultimately overtaking the incense first burned to choke it out. however, choking is the order of the day. had I the artifice, it would be tattooed across my chest. burned into my green eyes. yet I lack. and in lacking, I forfeit.
“what the fuck do you wish to ignite?” asks the object of my permanence.
“you,” I reply, “only you.”
it’s not death, but inattention that I fear. the mark of a man so stretched by pervasive banality that his blood becomes a fetid pool, breeding only emotional parasites. creatures fecund with inertia. a faction of oblivion whose only demand is adherence to a soulless status quo. barely, I hold these apparitions at bay. my sway, little more than the fever dreams of a holy fool addicted to an elixir called ‘whimsicality’. my understanding of this edict palls and shrinks with every swell of the tide. with every throb of my rapid displacement. or, I ask myself, was it my disconnection?
o, how I rage at these conceits. fully obliged to rail against them. however, my guileless flailing gives way, almost scripted, to toxic maturity. a certain blind glimmer seen, too far off into the giddy-lit forest, by eyes too glossed over by bright stars. too sheened by the moon for any fucking acknowledgement. and, once again, sick lights become my coat.
untoward insurances
wanderlust in a scrap yard… esurience on the killing floor… cynicism in the sanctuary…
from a certain point of view, all equations have undesirable conclusions.
fading sunlight holds no cowl over my head. I’ve drunk too many napalm sunsets, so I ready myself for the downcasting of the gauntlet. off into the woods, we will make the sacrifice. we will watch the celebrations collapse. and, in feeding this oily soil, you’ll feel the fucking Raze.
“someone started this?” I bend myself into my punctuation. “will these trifles begin anew?” question answers question. “in light of the finding?”
to assume that the world outside your window is shrink-wrapped in understanding is a sin of inconceivable depth. a man of a thousand faces could but merely flake this surface. the cardboard din of this melds with the far-off sounds of the lost misbegotten. spinning on their heels in oblivious gravel, and two-stepping toward another fucking snake-oil oasis. careening toward another shimmering false horizon of psychic self-medication. shaded guarantees dress the beds of all those blind-stupid and fatally naïve. and, my understanding remakes me as grist for the quixotic mill.
parasitic prayer
so, I kill the sanguine lamp in willful resignation; surrender to the cockroach of cruel unredemption. grey is now the language of my blood.
