Babylon Effect Ben Buchanan Copyright © 2019 Ben Buchann All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Contact info: Email: bsbuchanan99@gmail.com IG: @ben_writes_poems Acknowledgments: Much of this work would not exist without the presence of family and friends in my life. Many thanks to Drew Harper and Alison Garrity for their help, friendship, and propensity to get lunch with me; to Maeve Farrell for the laughs and discussions of music; to Steven Moore for believing poetry to be more than long-winded bullshit; to Olivia Nestrick, Alizeh Khan, Zariah Walton, and Jorden Link for putting up with my unsolicited texts about poetry, music, and whatever else controls me; to Ashley Markowicz for her constant feedback and support that spans an entire continent; to Nicholas Walling for keeping me sane, enjoying lunch together, and encouraging me in anything I do. And an enormous thanks to my family for showing me how to live within means of joy, encouraging me to pursue any creative endeavors I desire, and understanding me more thoroughly than anyone else. I am eternally grateful for everything you do. ============================================================================== For those in glass terrariums with tongues of fire ============================================================================== Table of Contents I -------------------- Joyful Brood (Made Right Again) Bottomless Pits of Love (Jazzheads) Dawn of Newer Days Vendors and Merchants Shades of Chameleon Charm Vein Melter Periodic Disappointment Bouquet Two Decades, Like Parallel Towers Buffer Overflow Financial Advice Only You Know Aviary Like a Baptism in Reverse Vein Melter Pt. III Contrast Panes Languages Felt, Not Spoken Neopatra I only love you, nothing more. New Revival Mythos II -------------------- Subtle Blowout Make Something Good of it Pt. II (Shifting) Lithium Ion Battering Out to Sea (Saltwater) My Day Complete Apoptosis Ascending in a Dream Coronal Rejection Clear Skies Over Calvary Seem So Far Away The Process Academia Above Chiangmai (With Eno) Tower of Babel Some Ramblings About How Summer Left Me Wanting Party of One Whatever I Mean The Benefits (Of Daylight Savings) Predictive Text is More Real Than I Am Infrared Skybox Bleeding Particles Into My Dreams In shrill whining of cicadas, everything is melting away III -------------------- Fuji-San R U To Those Drinking the Sad Poetry Like a Lukewarm Lemonade Afterimage (In Multiple Mediums) Chariots Burning;;Re-entry;;Smoldering Husks (Jigsaw) Interdiction (Replacing Reality Like a Fuse) Need A Tunnel Cookies Left in the Jar Winding Down (In the City Of) With the Sun Already Set Storm Flows (The Clearing Away) Clown College Admission Essay Sleeping God Like Taffy Up in the Clouds Above Vestal Portrait of Brain Slice in Spring Now (Enough) When it feels like everything is fading to dust and chemicals in your mouth The Strange Negatives of Stiletto, NY ============================================================================== BABYLON EFFECT ============================================================================== I Spinning flipping motes between your fingertips ============================================================================== ############################### Joyful Brood (Made Right Again) ############################### Delicately floating there in a brood of jellyfish, I am being carried by the birth of a new mythos. When glass cathedrals crack and I am Despondent in depression without catharsis, When I look back on beauty's banishment, There is a room within a sunrise in the East, It can steal me back from such gaping maws. Letting willows die, Making beds in stinging nettles beneath atmospheres of ocean current, I am a shock of beauty in this mad world. How I turn your morbid death wish into a future. How I blend into translucent skin, sparkling nothing in misty mistakes, Mistakes made right again. How I burn once more at the center of this heliocentric being. Growth in spurts of fitful freedom, I am born again into a pocket dimension of summer, Weeping with you. Weep with me. Smile, love, this is the future of joy. ################################### Bottomless Pits of Love (Jazzheads) ################################### Jazzheads drink themselves silly in smokeless rooms Past the prime of a solstice And the grooves keep coming like Digitized bass beats from space Pounding holes like skylights shattered into tattered remains of brain cells And in the middle of that noise I wanted to melt away I didn't want to speak to the wind I wanted to become it And curl around every filament of hair She kept perfectly positioned on that Hill that I chose to die on I took my last breath And looked out the window of my grave And fell back asleep For it was too sweet a sound to go out on Like a light in a storm I have not destroyed myself thus far just so I can Whistle to myself the lullabies I miss so much In the dark Without a map Of all these craters and puddles Of mud Bottomless Pits Of L O V E E E E E E E E E E E E E E ............... . ################## Dawn of Newer Days ################## Written in the muffled explosions of fireworks over mystical hillsides is a passage of scripture for those without a reason to believe. Clocks striking their head with the incessant grinding of time ever onward. And yet they cannot seem to give up the cords that bind them to their ghostly graves of the past. I know the gravity pull of such an alluring failure. I know the sweetness of death it promises. I. Dawn with me over rain soaked hills, Watching every leaf waver under our new sunlight, Waiting for the day when skies of diamond pointillism Show us every way in which we can Make the joy of life last a few moments longer. Shadow corners opening up like flowers before friends, dip your limbs in their honey secrets, test the waters of newer days than even I can fathom. Waves pull at your skin like children to a mother's skirt, innocent their careless destructions. Roll off of the tides like sunlight off of snowy peaks, names unknown and heights too dizzying to imagine. II. The origin of this new mystery is close, Reach into your humility and pull it out, Play with the destiny it presents, The fruition it is trying to achieve. Blooming with a strangeness like slime in the throat, layers of slowly sliding sadness being shrugged off like snow in this ambivalent sphere. See me there, sitting on the steps to your love? I am only visiting. III. Mirth bursting in such quiet possibilities, Lives branching like mirrors, Always green with this envy that I cannot contain, A pain of patience being exorcised from me. I am dropping into the wormhole now I am stretching like taffy without an edge, Folding into myself, Becoming a sweetness you Cannot Resist ##################### Vendors and Merchants ##################### Bleeding edges of softness, extending cilia filaments like mycelium horizons, mountains to ants on a trail of tears, creeping ever upward like monolithic fears of a joy without boundary. Bottomless pits pockmarked fields with blackness painting ink stains over roiling grass like tumultuous stormy cumulonimbus killers. Charcoal remains of willow lightning strikes, floods witnessed from peaks over dams and river gorges. Surrogate lust filling canal locks without overflow, perfect liquid tension, surface level reflections, imperfections, hesitations without resurrections, silly little insurrections within limited brain space vectors, vendors of sadness, merchants of death. I am a merchant. Depositing seeds of unreality in unknown dimensions, waiting for rapturous blooming to tear the air apart, portals of unimportant fantasy, carry me, daring me to surrender existence to a power that does not exist. Bleary eyed and prideful, I water the weeds at my feet, I push the thorns further into my flesh. A garland of topiary that shines in the sunlight and stings under your scrutiny. Get off my back. Dominant astrology beckons and I step aside to let the starlight pass me by, phases leaving residue on my eyes, still waiting for my pass at the January moon, that bulbous smirk in the sky that pulls your house apart whenever I think of you. You are dead but still breathing. Hear the softness enter your veins, quiet but for the tearing of doubt. Revelatory mounting pressure and dissipation of disillusionment, a garnet banishment, sparkling under piano ballads drowning, throat full of pleasure, full of an inescapable passion, unstoppable joy. Just as it pushes forth, it pulls away. Supersonic alternation vibration panes like electrode brain socket lanes, electric veins, lame synapse misfire like a slip into ballistic pyres. If you want to be the softness inside me, you can. Bleed into me perpetually, endlessly, without need for air. Drown yourself in whatever light means most to you. Down yourself like a glass of contentment. Make peace with ideas that simply cannot be. Be free in a way no one else understands. ######################### Shades of Chameleon Charm ######################### I. Where am I? Said Thoreau You are here And here is unknowable Who am I? Said Thoreau You are you And you are unknowable What am I? Something in between it all Something untouched by the materials of death Darting in and out of prismatic sunlight Painting the trees with shades of chameleon charm II. In the shadows of dimmer stars And reaches of quiet little tributaries There is a patience like the world Slowly turning in a cosmic grave Grabbing at your love without eyes Secluded and blind and daring More daring than humanity's thirsting ego Pressing up against yours Groping and grasping for purchase Cloth cross-hatched in tally marks Over the places it does not know are dying III. Dire mist circling the moon without end Comforting stars in satin graves Without headstones We make the names for ourselves And burn them into stars without thinking About what we used to call ourselves Animals in velvet cages Waiting for the reddest meat The reddest treat on our plate This planet A plate to eat from IV. Where am I? Said Thoreau You are here Here is my hand The palm that slowly closes Like stage curtains Say your midnight prayers Amen ########### Vein Melter ########### Out the window of night there is a plateau of scathing breezes Invite me for a drink there in the bar In the sunlight like lemons dropping on your head Dropping into drinks like pills like blood like Veins melting under the weight of the lightest stratified bones Fossils without names Our future You could sink into rivers and laugh with me all the while With a future like that Innumerable scratches in my floorboards Not from my nails, no not from mine From the Devil playing hopscotch over non-Euclidean surfaces Bending like moss in your hand About as motivated Telling of storm clouds without linings, without borders, without shape Descent, ascent Leather curling over naked flesh, s h a m e f u l n e g l i g e n c e At last Crafting fortress and bulwark and thin paper wall Out of books and notes and CD jewel case inserts (So lovely in their strange physical nature of choice) Just air that the hawks of shame breathe and cut through On wings of steel and atoms of violence Lead me through the hallway here Concrete collapse over flowing streets alive with the deaths of innocent tourists In a land where even the words I love you Can rend the flesh from your eyes And the jellyfish continue to float beyond reaches unknown Touch, and feel peaks of nettles before the flash takes your soul Like a camera Along the waves that shall hide you from any future explorers Midnight Overlooking The Waterfront Soft shearing of wooly traps I set over my eyelids, never opened into a real sunlight Innocent and virginous, brittle with misuse Like kingdoms of paper walls and nothing at all Kingdoms of tubes in my throat going down Themselves On a day where the sun can be any color it pleases But I am here to witness it And still, I am pleased In stillness, released, relinquished Finished Without A License New heights over steel-tube airplanes Reactors blowing magma up my spine All the time But there are no words for that There are no meanings beyond a helter skelter conjunction of random words And I am the artist like Pollock Like boxes and bags of unused paints, dried like the saltiest fish on the shore of a dead planet Waiting to flow without knowing the end has already set in Gangrenous And Red Even Under Crimson Sun Saturation Now over those plains on plateaus where even the trees do not dream of falling into the valley (of the shadow of death) Where are the faces of your joy that you promised me? Where is the golden stair of your graceful falling? Where have the burning crosses been stowed, where has the hate gone into hiding? In a shock of wind They are invisible As I have made myself In the desperation Of loving Under veils and shawls of white purity And eminent auras of purple velvet sashes Beyond the questioning of the mindless and the dying But I too am dying And I too am mindless In those places where everything is melting Into my blood Like a cheese that I cannot Devour Quickly Enough There is a clock somewhere and I cannot find it And I cannot kill it Don't forget To say Goodbye To Me From inside the dorms of annihilations, of metallurgy and mystical muteness The outside is a darkness that cannot be tamed But of course It can never be tamed Even in lightness You reach for the sun as I reach for anything brighter And the wrist always comes back without a hand Like a phantom limb Returning from war Washing Over Everything With The Widest Brush No Detail That night when I kissed you and said my goodbyes I did not know that it would be our last And that death was surely at my hands As I passed it like a note in the middle of class A bomb A message to your spirit Through glass thicker than much else I have of my own I do not regret, I ponder endlessly at what was and what I failed to see Green seas of life breathing into me From beyond coasts unknown to me Breathing myths and majesty into me Into places that hadn't yet existed within me These seas are shrinking, you see? I am drinking them all up, you see? They do not belong here, to you, or to me The Mountains Stand tall When They Are not Grovelling At My feet For The Sweetest mercy I cannot provide them anything more than the endless streams of entropic nonsense from my mouth Rush, love, quench, huff, sprinting to the scene where I lay in flames of self-inflicted misery Rolling over in a grave not yet dug Thank You For Riding With Me Thus Far ####################### Periodic Disappointment ####################### What haunted ships we pass in the night Known only by the slight muffling of whale songs Beyond steel bulwarks Ground from dust of departures past Masts slicing air jetstreams to confetti bits Evergreen needles to choke on Slowly and with a subtle pleasure Not able to be understood by those with Half a mind The creation of something abstract Like the excuses put up to ward off sadness Like a fire into the oily darkness The creation of something absent From whatever I do on any given day Ghostly vessels of things slipping by on floating icebergs All the strange objects I never grasped Because of their innate nonexistence A swirling slurry of every choice is like a drop of light Searing and chastising and debilitating Like something I could Overdose on ::: From the bow of this oceanic castle Love is a ship without any passengers But the lights are still on ####### Bouquet ####### A strange malevolence in this stale air Like it wants to starve me of reason Of purpose 1. somewhat freshly shorn. miniature ambrosiatic eyeballs. pupils without passage for light. walls. blackout curtains. there is too much light getting in. too much sunshine for me to handle, it makes me want to kiss you, take you, all of you, then die an inglorious death. 2. ritual bells, habitual regurgitations. hellfire incantations. spells of malice like pentagrams without religious connotation. killing caressing. my soul. is a blanket. from which you cannot stretch your legs. 3. isolated numbers bleeding in the morning. bass lines plucked. it's all fucked. everything. but only when I look just the right way. look, love. look this way. turn my face from destruction with your beauty. 4. golden valleys under winter sunshine. industrial collapse. a soft simmering in the depression on the scale of a small city. power plants without buds. no hope of flowers for mother. I'm sorry. The floods are filling the dam And all the fish are dead Even though the DEC just restocked them L a s t m o n t h ( ? ) This bright cloudless view is a placebo Give me the real thing Crimson tulips wavering, wilting In suburban lawns But the lavender smirk as it blooms around my fingers like concentric rings, That is where you are, Ghostly in the way the petals touch my spirit 5. tiny risers in the corners. a flash of enamel and gum. earth falls into so many colors. I am there, too. I am one of them. see me there, shimmering like stars in our atmosphere. ################################# Two Decades, Like Parallel Towers ################################# Twins, Gemini landmarks on the horizon Rising up from the smallest puddles like portals like portholes sideways and widening at alarming speeds Ziggurat in reverse, tapered to a finely honed point One calls the birds to perch while the other spots for prey Pillars Columns Towers Depicting how rods from the other end of the universe conspire to puncture our celestial bodies All that we have is the short time of this life And it is taking such a L O N G Time (()()()()()()()()()()) He is reaching out for an anchor with the sun smoldering I have seen other men do much the same But he has not given up quite yet He pulls at the corners of the drapes in his mind, Waiting to relive the sunlight ages once again I want to deliver him to that vista To that dream (()()()()()()()()()()) If autumn was a descent into unknown foliage, then what is this winter? This unimaginable winter. Solidly confounding, like bashing my head into a brick wall. Again. Again. Again. Avoiding bottomless pits at the back of Cybercafe, I drove home without realizing. But tonight I did not forget to look up beyond all the yelling. All the arguing. The ruining of a life besides my own. And up there was a ceiling of a giant cavern, no moon left for us lovers. I sometimes hate how easy it is to die a little inside. Sometimes the peeling of green copper and other rusts can feel like such a mournful disintegration. Who am I dissolving into in this slurry of snow, like dark matter soup? My thoughts in superposition, you need a delicate machine to determine their true position. A savage chrome machine like an artificial heart. Beating. Pulsing. Humming. Serenely and without pause. Never a break. Never a rest that isn't just a short death. (()()()()()()()()()()) This is all that there is to dream of Just permutations of reality A twisting of your neighbor's necropolises into gardens of Eden And little visions of objects and people that actually matter That actually make a difference (()()()()()()()()()()) Colliding with every option at once Providing no context for my rebuttals Relying solely on my capacity to breathe steadily Defying night-laden cities without sleep For I too am without sleep I too am without meaning Beyond that which you apply to me Like a bandage over a simple Paper cut Twenty years may go by before anything more is realized ############### Buffer Overflow ############### Viscous pressure behind pumping measured in ounces, gallons, wrists slit in warm baths like Roman advice on the end of days. An acidic buffer maintaining a weathered stone wall of a man. Still the bricks chip in sunlight like motes of dust into furnaces for replenishment. Still the rain flows over smooth surfaces I continue to grind at, I continue to rough up. Trenches and valleys and peaks of snowy light. Lights on poles of many colors. Parking lots that empty before you can see the rush of humanity. Backtracking to the cafe, I've got to get dinner, I've got to get my food and fountain drink, I've got to spend my 10 dollars, I've got to pay Tracie at the register, she's such a nice person, even though she sometimes thinks I'm someone else named Nathan. Sometimes I am. Or at least I'd like to be. A little bit of medicine under the pink light of late night patience. Of decompression after ultratight maneuvers in all of my blind spots. I operate on sounds and the sudden intuition of 5 months on the job. There are numbers of the universe in my head. 4065. 4053. 4048. 4011. 4959. 4608. 4612. 3616. 77918. 4076. 4080. On and on the belt spins and spins and splits open like some ancient metal skull they don't know how it works it just spins and spins and spins and delivers the goods. Sometimes the goods are the people, but not often. In every smile and wink there is a life that I am witnessing, passing me on a two way street. I cannot turn. Nor would I want to. I go home at night and discover cuts all along my fingers and even arms. I sometimes work so diligently that I cannot feel the edges searching for that buffer within me. Sometimes I work too quickly for the computer. Buffer. Overflow. Where are the bandaids? I have a lot of old cuts that just w o n ' t g o a w a y. Oceans of bits waiting for the injection attack, oceans waiting to fall through the barriers and dissolve in electrical insignificance. Black. Nothing. Dreams die in much the same way. But that soot around the outlet? It doesn't wash off. That is how you know the dreams are still there under the dirt. Dig them up for me. Breathe into the mud and make it happen. Craft the package and deliver the payload. On wheels. Of rubber. And platitudes. ################ Financial Advice ################ New digs in the old ones, bubbles forming in cauldrons tumbling blunders shuffled and sorted into shelves still busted need the wood glue to hold a bit longer. I have clamps tightening vices bumps in canals tinnitus vows without a moment too soon. Sonic pleasure. No pressure. Sickness like fetish wet with impermanence close your eyes it's not terminal just worming slowly under dirt from a far away hurt. Landscapes like the char of a fresh burn. Peeling and humming with life from the ash like light without gas no motes no questions floating around just diamonds processing prismatic data. Blow over my body just a twig on the path in the mud from the rain before you came but it was you who cried more and I didn't care because I was too bored with how air was a finite resource I simply had too much of. Had to cut off the source. Reservoirs polluted without restitution or absolution just potable poison like the Princess Bride. Pick a cup. Using time as a new escape, new scapes like levels of the same old planes of existence. Like testing on NyQuil or sleeping past reason. Dripping drip drop dropping stretching bending like magma through rough-hewn tunnels of obsidian. Atom edges cut before you've even grasped it. You couldn't grasp me like I asked. I asked nicely. Snatch the question in my teeth. Please release the answer without ransom. Before I've asked. Flashing signs pulsar whining in vacuum just light waves into human iris ports. Morse code divorce papers from across the globe. But larger. Grander. Save your words. I've spent all of mine. ############# Only You Know ############# Love is such a violent word And it grips this folder of images like a hard drive That just won't die Images like phantoms like abstract afterthoughts of people I've loved People I've wronged, and yet I never really learned to apologize Love is such a shameful word to me I feel nothing attached to it anymore Other than a loose string like a failed amputation, a limb of lust and longing watching my eyes follow it like a pendulum A countdown to losing my mind in the indulgence of a selfish desire for a selfish feeling I could never contain what these images are supposed to represent But most no longer exist outside of my own personal dimension In the neglect of apathy, and the ignorance of loneliness, there is a breath of summer without reminders of how I ended her life for a short while Like a cicada fallen in a lazy river, A set of wings drifts by Without a Body A subtle frustration of pathological numb, vitriolic bouts of absence, what's happening, this plant that has crawled up my spine and died before it made any sense? In the familiar red exit sign There is a finale waiting to fall short of expectation But I will have already seen the ending And I will have already made the connections And I will have already learned my lessons Every reflector plate turned to beam the moon back into my mind Lunar madness, bombastic sadness, statues in gardens left to grow layers of foliage I am pruning them all and becoming an amalgamation of each Everyone has an array of masks But the mistake is trying to choose just one to be "you" "You" are all of them, at once And only you know that face Love is such a strange solution to this problem Because letting a lover into your life Creates another mask, another layer Love is only a suitable poison when The silver drinker is your equal And you can both laugh at this collection of masks You have amassed -- Only you know the flowers I picked for you And only I know how long they have stayed in the trash Only you know the warmth of my hands And only I know how many they've held Only you know the metaphors of my demons And only I know their names Only you know the force of my tongue in your mouth And only I know how long to brush it Only you know what you have become And only I know what you used to be ###### Aviary ###### Waterfalls of ferns and greenery trying to hide the acrylic blending of light beyond plastic sheets and windows of plexiglass. Small holes to breathe through. Oxygen pass, dioxide amassing with carbon in my throat. Impeccable choking like gloating with a garrote at my neck, vocal cords mute in the watching of birds fly over my head and under my feet. They don't seem to want to save me at all, now. The garrote is my hand, my experience and pleasure at turning simple things to the side, stacking mile high sounds like towers of blind feeling, toppling, reeling without a bed to land on, much less to sleep in. Whether you cut away the excess or not, you will always feel too full of it. Or is that just me? Herons walk to me like a father, slender and quizzical. They walk right through me and continue searching for a better puzzle. Cartographers of shores and seafloors, trying to fit their worlds together like pieces of a mosaic into something much grander than just some material plane that we drink from until it is all gone. Herons dream of infinite psalms that never end. They can wade in it without drowning, without floating, without flying. Words and songs that mean more than staggered breaths through holes in a box so the animals don't die. Benches on stilts, sinking into murky land, I want to sit and relax for a long time. Let it take me where the drain leads. I could reach out of that pit and grab a bird and slowly close my hand like I'm folding up a paper swan. I could listen to the sweet chirp and warble as it squirms in my fingers, weak against even my feeble strength. I could cherish the brush of its wiry feathers against my pale, clammy hands. A bird in the hand, in the pressure cooker, in the steel press, in the dreams of small children who don't know the meaning of smother. Am I the bird or the hand? Or am I both? I sometimes feel I am the squirming, an invisible force, a symptom of a larger, more complicated unrest. Who can enjoy the squirming but me? Sheets flap like ravens in the snow. They have no home here. Crimson flowers like poinsettias, but left in the eye of a nuclear detonation just a bit too long. Chipping and growing and crumbling like the end of a cigarette. But they bend to find the diffused sun through this layer of opaqueness above. Like children finding their mother after losing her in a store. Yet they cannot scream for her. Nor would she hear them. The humidity. The water on the sides of the glass, sweat not from heat or stress, just the weight of life they are trying to contain. This bunker is a strange place to grow into. This is a strange origin of blooming. I can hear chickadees calling in the trees. It is morning, even though I feel so tired. I stayed up late and ate a cardinal to consume his powers. The red crest is just starting to come in, and I don't know what it will do to me. The vines are curling in on themselves and the birds have started screeching like emergency vehicles. I feel like I must have fallen asleep on a pile of salt. Or ashes. Ah, a koi pond over in the corner, how peaceful, how full of sloth. I want to curl up beside the lip and slowly roll in, I want to hear their stories, I have no food for them, but maybe they'll take some of my stories in return. This golden one is smiling at me and I have not felt so light and happy in such a long time. I don't understand why he swims in my eyes like this, but when he passes over the hole in the iris, the sun suddenly hides behind this golden cloud in a sea of particles like jellyfish. And I love jellyfish, I really do. So why doesn't this feel like smiling? I want to give them a big hug. And there is a woodpecker clinging to the side of my head looking for grubs in my ears. It is just looking for food, but so is this Venus flytrap beside me, so I lean over ever so slightly until I feel the follicles take my ear. The end of the glass opens up like a volcanic tunnel, but it just leads to another patch of strange synthetic woodland. I can see toucans mating in the trees above me. The ceiling is so high up now and they don't think anyone is watching. Or they don't care. I can respect that. Another dream is waiting around the corner, it is hiding in the bell of that flower, ringing and blue and wailing like rivers of glass down the side of a mountain. I dream of plastic and angles and oblique sunlight streaming through plexiglass panels. I wake up in the same dream and perhaps it is simply another day. Sometimes days can feel like dreams and sometimes dreams can feel like death. There is a mobile of planets hanging at the top of this place. There are pigeons on Mars. Ospreys in Jupiter's Great Red Spot. And I am here watching them find new ways to thrive. I am here waiting for them to come back. I shall love their children as they did, building generation ships from one home to another. Cosmic alignment, astral projection, celestial rotation, spatial compaction, leaving bits of sinful remembrance behind their thrusters, perhaps they are coming home soon. I am waiting. This plant is me in reverse. It is a man and then a tree and then a limb and then a branch and then a root without a place to sit still. It is trying to breathe the air. It is getting frustrated that it cannot grasp air with its thin follicles. It is smiling at me like that fish. It is piercing my eye forcefully. Hysteria ensues. Floods of calm carry me to another tunnel of glass. I am becoming red, I am becoming beautiful, but I am chipping and crumbling like that flower. Like a ruby husk, an ember of a campfire, the ashes are rising from my skin like motes of burning soul into the smoke of a long forest night. But the sun still pollutes the space in between the obscuring glass and ferns. I am not consumed by this synthetic nature. It has rejected me. So I plant my feet in the wood chips and wait to crave the sunlight. But it does not come. I do not crave. I crave nothing. And in return nothing craves me. And I am left to my devices among the birds and the strange plants. Falcons circle a stone in the center of the bunker, it has called their mother a whore, they must take revenge. They must intimidate the stone until it softens to sponge. And then they must eviscerate it entirely. And the stars must witness their retribution, squinting through the frosted surface of the glass like a janitor into an executive's office. I leave them to their duty. In the next clearing over there is a pool in the earth, but there is no water. Only fossils and layers of history too convoluted to sift through. Something transplanted here without a care. Death from another strange place. Beyond divots of ends like paintings, finches play tag and paint murals of their lives. Such beautiful renderings of life from a place so small and fickle. Or perhaps I simply don't understand the reasoning of beings like this. In the eye of a figure painted here is a key. In the breast of a robin is a hole with a set of tumblers. I open the robin and the glass becomes red and welcoming. Everything is a red of control and chaos. Everything is a beam of energy in a plastic tube under the ground. Under the robin is a hatch with a rusty handle. Under the hatch is a tunnel with recessed lights. Under the tunnel is a room where it exits, miles and miles below. In the room is a husk like an insect's exoskeleton. It is chipping and crumbling and from the ashes fly little doves without olive branches. This is such a violent thing. I breathe into the ashes and a strange warble escapes my lips. My beak is covered in soot. Little flames dance in front of me like foam on an ocean tide. They burn holes in the glass like cigarettes through paper. The sun is still there behind the glass, now blue with passing. A mockingbird stalks me as I wander to the end of this tunnel, pushing hydrangeas out of my way. Pastel dust rubs off on my feathers. Pink and yellow, powder blue. Snow white. At the end of this room is a separate season entirely. I am sweating with hypothermia. Shock. But only for a moment. There is a breadcrumb trail here. I cannot stop consuming it all. I cannot stop moving towards the end of the path laid out for me. There is a dotted line here, I have signed it, initialed it twice. There is an understanding here, I have made a pact with myself. There used to be a tree here. There used to be talons there, where have they gone? There used to be a crimson breast there, where has it gone? Another tunnel of glass, another funhouse mirror, another silly set of worlds where I am just a silly reflection. At the other side is a mountain. At the peak is the sun, no glass in between. This is a strange zen. I scale the grass, I scale the stalks, I scale the petals and the trunks and the trees entire. I scale the boulders and I scale the waterfalls, slipping only once or twice. I'm perfect every now and then. I scale the gorges and I scale the mountain. I scale the sun. I scale the galaxy. I am the galaxy. I am the sun. I am the mountain. I am the gorges and waterfalls and boulders and trees and trunks and petals and stalks and grass. I am the glass, I am the plastic, I am the husks crumbling in lonely bunkers. I am the fossils without reason. I am the planets building generation ships for smaller joys. I am the strange flowers without purpose. I am the key to the dusk. I am the hand and the bird within it. I am the bench and the sinkhole. I am every fern obscuring your face. I am this place. ######################### Like a Baptism in Reverse ######################### Just over that little dip in the hill is a small watchtower bouncing radio signals through my cardiac tissue I can imagine the sheen of the sleet as it drips off of angular steel beams like frozen blood Against the drab brown sky roiling with this thicket of winter Mist upon the snow that is turning to ice and calling for your tongue upon the ground Carried upon the shoulders of those more perceptive, I waltz and jive without falling, Endless pacing without coming to terms with the idea that I have become so busy So very busy And so very hurried I hate it And yet I have also become someone that I am almost happy to be Almost Not Quite Yet Still waiting on a package in the mail that shall never arrive A tank of boiling water that I shall dip myself into and pull myself out of Without even flinching A fiend of love, like a leech with a rope above my head, They told me to kick the chair out And they must have told you much worse What is this cloud of despair above your head? It is raining frozen blood upon your beams, You are staring at me with those blood diamond eyes, I can feel them crawling from across the room But I am a man of wild imaginations, Believing in the Good Samaritan when I am the one in need of a shoulder to carry me =-=-==-=-=--====-----==-=--=-=---=---=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-= Green bursting like geysers deeper than mines to the magma, Had to be the sad one, the one with the laugh, the path of torture that I sign off on like a car payment Laments about this edge are so past listening to, just blow me off too, pass right through, Ghosts in Cadillacs waver smash in lacking piles of favor, couldn't accrue enough of yours, Sore wrists shaking over this keyboard, frenzied with nothing to do, Something is bursting green from the gills, not an illness, a stillness like envy creeping, Seeping through rib cages, seeing the twisting of your visage makes my skin want to b u r n r i g h t o f f Why is that? Perhaps the proof that the mystical man still exists, Still twists at the knife in his gut Still wishes the same on his suitors Rooting around for an old Polaroid he left by his bedside Crumbling under fallen cardiac tiles, aorta slit like a wrist, You know the kiss of pain I speak of, yes, you, Rusting under sleet into a sleep like death that you joke about But I know what's up I know what's up I know what this dance is I have two left feet but I know all the moves, Take my hand, dammit, dance with me You, under the rain, slipping on ice, leaving without taking a bite of your favorite vice, Kiss my eyes under beams dripping blood frozen, so nice Watch me burst with green melody, something perverse A baptism In reverse ################### Vein Melter Pt. III ################### The mystery is becoming distilled. Their eyeballs are like tracking shots, I am pulled like a clay pigeon. I am a piece in the sky. I am a piece in your eye. A trophy for the kill. Gold medal hung around your neck. Cold metal bent around the stretch of imagination where I used to exist, like a digital page of memory. Chalk at the crime scene, outlines of my grin as I pocket the coin. No flipping here, no floundering. I am sitting there across from you in a plush leather sofa. You are silent but you smile at me and I realize that you are asking me to leave. So I stay. In the shower as you slide down the wall and weep, what are you thinking about? Of course there is no room there for me, because I am not a solace that calms your spirit. I am a silence that boils your blood, melts your veins, like the laughter of trees as you leave what you once were behind. Do others bury the dead like me? Do others mutate into twisted facsimiles? Do others dream of the singularity? Do others belong to a layer of irony? Do others remember the singing of fires in need of a darkness? Do others dismember fireflies when they land on their shoulder? Do others want to explode like an innocent violence? Do others hear the draw of a slumber they cannot find? There is denouement along the treetops, crows calling curses and venom when they see my face. I have done nothing to them. Coping is a fruitless battle when there is nothing to cope with, nothing to see. Gray mist flurries like mercury obscuring loping mountains of hurt without names. Your face in the fog like lace or a veil, delicate, porcelain, tattered in rags of quilted forgiveness. You are clutching the blanket so close now, I cannot find purchase on this cliffside. Scaling stairs in search of a nature I wish existed. Niche dreams of pursuit. Nine-tongued faces of doubtful power. Drooping flowers. Much too long in the sun. I wish to spend even more of my time in the crucible. The beat of the heart against solid sunlight, scorching searing spears like pans on stoves, contact high of burning flesh, metaphorical fetish making fresh the fears of a festering death. A dying of culture within the people. Nothing left but the desire for victory in any form. Nothing left of the manner of good. Nothing left but the gentle banner, torn. Shorelines Making Moths Appear In My Periphery And I Am Becoming So Concerned With Their Safety Living off of so many vicarious joys, like a carnival of mirrors, windows into silly dimensions where happiness is a drink that I steal from your blood, making my lifeforce so fertile, so long and winding like a vine without a care in the world. Step on the buds, shear away the excess, I will take the express line to Tokyo and bathe in the glow you cannot muster. I cannot muster it myself either, do not cry. Do not cry, life is much too fragile for that right now. It is so difficult to escape this distillation. Escape velocity is unreachable. Distrust is impeccable. This man is impeachable. But they will roll in their beds without sleep before they question their own motives. Blinders over their eyes, ropes around their throat, burlap burials in progress, political revivals long gone and never to turn around. Their faces are gem facets without merit. Rubies and Sapphires fighting with waves of mud. Tides of shame. Be ashamed. No One Now Can See Where This Is Going =========--------~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . . . , Withered and weary, my capacity for blunt force trauma is unending. Your propensity for pretense and malignance is like a blight upon my patience. I am running out of reasons not to break the earth under my feet. I am ripping up the codes of former days. Constitutions of cross-eyed stupidity, a lack of forethinking, little left bleeding after the leprosy leans its luminous head on your shoulder, eyes bleeding light like lanterns swinging in symphonies. I want to listen to that music with your head on my shoulder. The ambiguity is like a stake in the chest, inching closer to the center. The vague names swirling my brain are clouds bumping into my lobes. Homes I don't wish to live in. But the bed is already made. Parts of that crimson ash still cling to my clothes. Not a dream, then. Just a premonition. A prophecy of worlds I create in my longing. Lore of lands not of this coil, just a black screen waiting for the mark. Waiting for the splash of entities into crystal pools on other planets. In the night of many moons, there is a creature by the shoreline waiting for a signal from her lover. She will never receive it, she is sick, she is foolish, she is naive, she is normal, she is a Clover waiting to be picked. Waiting to die in just the right way. Rain on a tin roof, reminders of proof of villainy, of mortal mistakes made and to be made again. Made by me and my many children of lust. Me and my tales of nothing of importance. What is important to me? The subtle jingle of chimes on a still morning. The shine of moonlight on ice. The humming of harmonies under her breath. The lilting song of storms as they roll over us like a weight of decision not left up to us and our feeble brains. The blowing of tendrils into her face, obscured in just enough hope that I might live to see another day. The smoke over painting materials. The lifetimes unlocked in those layers. The history. The love. What is important to me? Yes, No, And Maybe If You're Good All those colors you are wrapping your name in, why is that a laser in my section of the sky? All those words that I can feel bubbling between your teeth, you are afraid, why is that a sun in my window? All those thoughts that I have of us together, why do they leave me feeling empty? And where are the ones that don't? What is important to me? A fleeting feeling. ############## Contrast Panes ############## Ghost towns appearing like cities from The fog, a necrotic dream come to steal Me away from all the holes in my theories. The ice looks like plastic. Synthetic men Looking back from the angled windows, Digging for the loam, the hope they buried. I remember the blazing end we were promised On that day in September. It never came, But I still feel like I lost something I had Back then. Something I shed without Knowing. They picked it up with their blue Hands, oceans of carbon in every Capillary, seasons they cannot feel, but I can. I can feel them crawling like spidersilk. Walking back to a plastic car without logic, Nothing else but delaying disruptions, Hypnagogic in their destruction of sleep. Somnambulant. Life like an ambulance. Red blue pains making miles in my body, Wrapping sidewalks that turn over my Head like an M. C. Escher funhouse. Over my head she is telling me that she Feels alone again, like a demonic shawl Or a long bender at Virginia Beach. I Tell her that the oceans still love her but She won't stop carrying that splinter. It will find a way into something more, It will make a path of glacier determination, And they will find you like they found him. Inches from years. Centimeters from more. In my insomnia is a selected psalm, a poem Without any meaning. It strikes me over The head with porcelain figures, consumes Every part of the buffalo. Watching you Specimen-esque in test tubes of gray morality. Shattered and reconstructed upside down I open the car door and somewhere in Space is a cosmic moan. Stars being Ripped up. Spit out. Stepped on. Walkers And other pedestrians. Children who cannot Listen to the Earth spinning around them. Premonitions are in your morning cereal. The sky is burning in blue somewhere Beyond this hellscape of gray mold. ########################## Languages Felt, Not Spoken ########################## If there is a language of healing in my bones then rip it out It's doing no good rotting in this man In cozy rooms on the second story, we are writing to someone A pen pal without an address, floating cosmic souls with paints like Io, Geysers spouting bullshit just to make each other happy "When can we go back to the happiness?" When? ----====---- If there is a language of patience in my blood, then drip it out of me It's doing no good boiling away on this pavement of muscle In dreams I can't recall, you stabbed me with a smile and I wound up feeling refreshed But this steeple is ringing bells like alarms Without arms to wave in dismay Little mayday hymns like tattooed scars Bauhaus homes on lakeside hatred, isolated from mischief From miscreants and misanthropes, A museum of malady This apathy like staring across water, Skipping your eyes over crystal canals Storms rolling in over Lake Erie "I just feel so alone." My pneumatic jaw responds in affirmation. Silence. ----====---- If there is a language of understanding in my flesh, then grip it tightly like a body you crave It's doing no good here without your fire against my skin Luscious And Interminable And Idealistic And Sickening I don't know where the confusion ends and the wishing begins Where the dreaming becomes a force beyond thinking Where the longing becomes a disfigurement "When I'm home alone, you are never on my mind." ... ######## Neopatra ######## Softly, with felt between hammer and strings, Hot wires struck like anvils taking detours through my flesh, Windows are delaminating like supermatter breaking down, Holes in colors like Art Deco demoralization 1. latex black over eyeballs, a sheen of questions never answered, leading me blind in content bewilderment. continents of crush, spindown valleys trying to unseat themselves beneath skies bowing like mineshafts shredding struts. 2. your face is a Warhol painting, quadrants collecting tips like espionage. setting me in fits of laughter I did not want. stained glass cubing me like meat to eat. i sip on the ice in winter waiting for nights of nothing at all. tearing down walls mycelium moss spires contorting living expired loving mired in tar and tension. 3. breaking down the bicameral mind into an amalgamation. my mind is a stone in a hot pot. neurotic shirking of reality is another Tuesday. 4. liquid minimal flowing down gravity telescope grounds, mounds of telomeres ripped out and replaced with belief. side effects of dying. symptoms of trying. carbon rings bubble under leather bible bringing angels down from heaven on balls and chains, my arsenic trembles in the vessel, dreaming of dripping in branches and heads. Crafting a bed of chaos, orderly only in my eyes, Shrines of brittleness, belittled in bridal gowns, What you call parasite I call mine, A diamond planted in the skull, so rich, so fine ///////// Out of body, out of mind, bleeding weather dry When I see you walking cranes on leashes, Eyes draining, non-Newtonian leeches, Your weapon, a death in decline ############################## I only love you, nothing more. ############################## Crystal light poles resonate over my head as I tilt my eyes and look up. Plows are scraping this scene cleaner than I can muster in my own spare time. I am standing in front of the gauntlet, in front of the paper machines. There in that moment I am lost, telling myself to find a passion. I did not think of you today. Why is this infatuation such a temporary thing? Why is there no crack in my landscape, a place to hold roots steady? Surely there are crags and ravines hurtling deeper than I could ever need into the mantle of this man. I wish there were more days as bereft of you as this one. Finches driving nails into my psyche. I want their beady eyes to close forever. Watching a human molt like this. Have they no sympathy? Even the animal in the cage has shreds of a past life it cannot shed. There were no shadows. No lights. Just snow. Fickle flakes with more to say to me than any ghost you can conjure. I only love you, nothing more. And love is becoming such a tired word. I've been searching for a shelter in the snow and now I can't seem to stay put. "Stay lost, instead." ################## New Revival Mythos ################## Winter forfeits bombing runs like napalm rites and burning hillsides as the sun comes up horrified My fingers in superposition, swirling around the shining ice like vortex hysteria Splicing cornucopias bathing like maidens in floating disk utopias Calling me like mesh screens with too many holes There are black borders brushing up against us here at night Where the moon cannot find our silhouettes Touching and caressing when we aren't looking, booking flights to Shangri-La Stomping grounds already leveled and set up like pins at the alley, Paddles in arcade machines stuck to the sides with chewing gum Silver wrought trees trundling across the spineway where students are staying alive, Yes, managing just that, what a sight And when the towers glow at night you can see them from across the valley and know that Somewhere people are bundling up, smashing their heads against brick walls, Reclining under hanging lightscreen portals Brittle and belligerent, chasing fulfillment at the end of a soundscape, too transient to handle, Hazard containment oozing sludge through establishment cornerstones Old labyrinths where some people never found a way out until the end And even then they received no epitaph Crimson nights are long gone and the blues of frost are creeping along the drifts When you look away the flakes are wrapping your shadow And I laugh at how much I have come to learn About how little I already know !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! From the flares of the sun come fingers of radiotendril love, epiphanous and cacophonous, Surrounding us, dripping life into our gaping mouths, Sounds like fields of embers and mycelium pools creaking under ancient shipwrecks Smiling, the sounds released us into our own kind of freedom, escaping crushing corona weights like they once did, Slipping and tripping like fawns on ice, declining all offers of true sensation for a grander height, A vision of challenging dysmorphia, dodging dystopia, Celebrating this new revival in floating disk utopias ============================================================================== II Have yourself a good time, it's nothing at all ============================================================================== ############## Subtle Blowout ############## Lavender overload on lengths of cloth Cut and quartered Drawn with permanence I have not reached Objects disappearing into digital ether Theater of the mind my playground Jumping generic galaxies like stones I skip off the tides You make inside of me when you wrinkle your face in my direction Or when you speak to the man you think I am Cameras watching me but I watch the servos whir I study the bearing socket spinning out of control, Belated moments of joy on open plains and hillsides Where busted brown and red bricks coat the earth But you are free of it all and you crawl from the straw of decay Into my arms like evergreen needles Mirrors reflecting just what they were meant to Eyes of opioid pleasure Full of holes, wounds of tasteful glancing Dancing into better tomorrows too tired to talk about it Toppling towers in tepid air, Stale and wanting for more than this strange comfort Highlights come and go but know that in the moments between I am still there waiting for something To come looking for me In the dim crimson shadows of summers' end In those looping dreams I am an endless friend With love to share and pain to mend While your smile may break Mine does not bend ########################################### Make Something Good of it Pt. II (Shifting) ########################################### Trenches stretching through dark tree lines back to campus What dreams accosted you? Where have you hidden them? Every alignment is a message in a bottle I twist the cork and it does not make any more sense than this I shift the feeling in my gut and it does not sit well Never Belonging to sleep like nocturnal animals Making homes in solid darkness Find me there in the boughs above your head Watching down without speaking Silence reconstituted in place of pretense Lies of omission Truth is unstable Teetering Believe the phrases that do not escape me I am sure you have heard them inside yourself As you contemplate my face Like a piece of art that confuses you There is no proper meaning to find Only what you make of it Make something good of it ##################### Lithium Ion Battering ##################### Flowers curing petals obscuring the metal behind the lids cyborg eyes making mincemeat of your meaning Leaving nothing behind but my own reality This year is a long road of ice Walking through cars where we talked about girls But I am a leech of love I am no match for this metamorphosis Sullen for the both of us But your head is stuck in a cloud or some book or some playbill Right where it belongs And mine is staring open mouthed at the sun without blinders Searching for air above the clouds like a tourist in Tokyo No face mask, no umbrella, just turtle doves perched on either shoulder Tree fingers reaching to caress them Creaking golden blood between bouts with the sun and the moon Pose on 5th Avenue, get a good look at you, Burning the filters brining eyes red with salt and saliva, I may say hi to ya but it's a formal complaint of my demise, You don't have to realize It's a hidden prize -- Mellowing out in the evening as Snow shouts tirades down my windowsill Bleeding shapes of bobbed hair in short ponytails Patience of my past leaking like battery acid The ions are all out of whack Kiss my lithium teeth with regret I know you will in time Before the city takes your head I will take your heart My sick art ###################### Out to Sea (Saltwater) ###################### When you come to the place I will be there When you look for a friend I will be in the shadows waiting If you notice me I will waltz to the cave and disappear If you follow me you will know why In the red, in the hemoglobin, I've got a feeling there where the iron keeps it ground up and fine Like a paste it sticks to me A feeling Like love being flayed alive and leaving behind only the silver trimmings that shine Sparkle like I thought your eyes did No not now just the sun playing violin through the grass That moment passed, and it keeps passing With cyclical graves like a merry-go-round Where there is a frozen night and an icy window there is a lamp and a bed and a statue taking it in A man made of topiary clippings Coalesced and caressed by these flimsy sheets Virtues that he cannot cling to Empty meanings left discarded by the well, Filled again in frantic desperation, Staging annihilation and leaving it for later, A life in more than just three acts There is a place where there is no intermission Old leaves piling at the end of a cave Making murals of fossilized entropy Believe that this river takes you out to sea And continue to dream of saltwater I know that's what you're after ###### My Day ###### Ascending towers of books dusty on shelves ignored and forgotten I committed the labels to memory but I no longer want to find them again This elevator is so cramped, although I've been in smaller rooms Why is that Why do I feel the longing of a desk jockey trying to find meaning beyond paperwork and benefits? Glass doors swinging on nails and harmonic bombs, silence I am an invader, lavender trails jet streams leaving behind the contents of myself Footprints they will immediately wax over Memories they will erase And I will still be here Dusty on shelves ignored and forgotten Corner rooms of brick demise Fireflies fluttering from an outlet calling my name with a number and I hold the ticket But I rip it up And stare ahead at the conveyor belt A keyboard at my fingertips melting wax into the night of noon it's already been so long and I don't remember how long I've been awake ===================================== Text decentralized, dematerialized, deconstructed I don't know how to put it all back together, the yolk is spinning in a whirlpool telling stories of yesterday But I'm trying to forget that kind of numb I'm trying to eliminate that empty A receipt of my work in pretty little lines Flapping without a spine, just a template, a personification of nothing much at all getting out of bed in the morning and rushing down the steps with the fervor of acidic tides eating away at everything it touches More glass doors swinging vices and nocturnes and comfy little office sofas A glance and a critique and a full blown escapade and now I have a job to do without knowing what matters beyond it There is nothing more to this trudging than that Trudging and trundling and trembling at the idea of taking out the trash later today A weak wobble and I fall back into place at my station by the outlet ============================================ Presentations on presentations and how to present the presentations on presentations and making time for more practice But I don't feel any more perfect Perhaps this is all a reflection of my ineptitude This lacking is not a conflict of circumstance but a consequence of my unheard concerns Slow silent tirade of amnesia walking from one side of the path to the other, spiral staircases in engineering complex spires Pods of destiny leading me to another singular duty Another night spent within the electric confines of solarized solitude Universes being spun out of binary conundrums, links and symbols and metaphors only computers can understand ============== Taking out the trash In the cold Where the cornerstone cinderblocks of my house Bathe in orange-yellow dusk Among the black of winter night Taking out the trash In the cold And the solid walls tower as I shrink Remember the car coming closer as I waltz across M3, headlights blink as I unlock it And the end becomes an alluring mistress that I drool over Taking out the trash In the cold Beneath frozen cloud horizons Unbreakable until dawn Taking out the trash In the cold I'm never quite done with it ========================================== Into the warmth Into the sweatshirt Into the plaid pajama bottoms Into the ignorance, the belief that there is nothing more than this Enter dinner plates with porcelain charm A burst of lightspeed ending peace with a bombshell over Brooklyn But the caller ID is a name that I remember Up the stairs is a solid dimension of dusk, but it warms me to hear this message Big red balloon on my table, bobbing with the only agreeable notion I have ========= Beaten and drinking fluid from the air, I am ready to leave the waking world for another A dream of places immense and magical, a place called Stiletto Where there is a bed for you amongst the wonders ====================== Sometimes my day is boring and dreary and made of all things demure Lightsick, pale, polluted by my thoughts But in waiting comes a relief That there is a reason For it all ################## Complete Apoptosis ################## Fading forests in consciousness of fainting hearts Each part is a leaf without capillaries Sucking skies dry sun drenched in denial of death Yellow red brown snow white and dead Dreaming of summer hikes crossing stone walls into foreign lands Vermillion in confusion, a basis for natural vindication Burning canvases end to end in portraits of landscapes Escapism licking me sweetly as a lollipop Finding my center where I cannot Suspending dystopia on a string over my mouth Tasting its cries as salt falling on each bud Savoring the only serenity I will ever have And it is gone already Worming into my genetic material Hysterical breaking through basal boundaries Malignant apocalypse in relapse through a telescope with a bayonet Rip it out Lightspeed snakeskins piling up My gaze does not settle But my hands are always idle at your throat Just mapping topography Finding bearings to the nectar you hide In dusty jars you feel ashamed of Open the lid I want to lap it up like a malnourished dog And complete my apoptosis In peace Brittle and breathing through sentinel lips Crashing between stones dividing fields like cells Waiting for a hiker to remember me And paint me back into existence #################### Ascending in a Dream #################### Astral complex destinies circling like moths around the black pits of my eyes Horoscope nothings becoming frothing masses like rabies making spills along the linoleum Fountain drinks wasted What a crime Ascending in a dream without end growing higher and higher until there is nothing left but the downward glance Steel balls rolling from shoulders to toes in little coffins built for two Sometimes loneliness can feel like digging a double wide grave And waiting for the right corpse to bring along Astringent chemical cleansing from peering over the edge And smiling over the fall Bending palms in hurricane metaphors whirling without meaning Rising suns replacing every hope you had with empty, weightless light Weightless, hovering, smothering tears with apathy and an inability to move beyond it An inescapable fear of moving forward A regret for experience not exploded prematurely and without proper burial No grave wide enough for this stupidity I marry myself to Wilderness seeping into the snow slowly and surely Taking back the spines of the dead deer and all the feathers of crows in the teetering trees Watching and waiting for the world to turn back Mellow nights hiding malignant trains of thought Wandering shores of red oceans and broken planets Heaven is in her eyes and she is shipwrecked beyond my conditions Stranded and I won't save her for she needs no savior Planting both feet in the sand and waiting for hell to come is a fruitless patience There is no hell after this, only the misery you choose to drape yourself in ################# Coronal Rejection ################# Safe in the cage of the sun Crush the lock Open the bars Invert your particles into the emptiness of space Ejected at lightspeed catching up to a direction A line without obstacle Rejection from corona destiny celestial sweetness A parade you missed because of the rain Pale blue dot On atmospheric entry and how the burn is such a thrill Pacific throne with tidal cushions Must be a luxury model On the coast where emeralds die You perch in patience Killing my gravity bouncing off of saltwater societies Crosshair on your pupil Into the obfuscated gel, joy of deep dark hell Listening to your brain like a heartbeat I do not understand I do not comprehend All these light years All these reflections All these hopes like speeding bullets And not a single one of me In the dusty liquid I frown There is no containing disappointment There is no origin of despair Only the invading feeling in every cell Through this porthole like a spaceship Is a coast where sapphires die Reflecting lightspeed lines Other rejected spirits from outer space This is a world of aliens Dreaming of normal love Normal people Normal pain I dream of serendipitous rain And sometimes I hate that about myself ######################################### Clear Skies Over Calvary Seem So Far Away ######################################### Mud caked tablets in archaeological dystopia Prophetic screams in Sanskrit and palm readings Virulent subtle lilting horns Blood pooling in unborn decisions Bruises broken before the cells even existed Fated to blacken under the downtown storm clouds Flimsy glass bulbs hanging hipsters Every single day is an executioner's Christmas Last night as I was walking to my car someone drove by Blasting soulful and touching music And someone to my right yelled out "You're a fag" "You wanna bop to something, bop to some good shit" Of course, I'm sure his AirPods exclusively drip with The tepid sounds of death Church organs having seizures carrying over the wind Pipes buzzing and bubbling full of horoscopes Trees rounding heads like fingers protruding from dirt Slowly exhumed from winter sarcophagi The process is a slow one Taking my stretches of time and S t r e t c h i n g t h e m F U R T H E R Piling into coils of fluid disappointment Sons and daughters of negligence Abused And destroyed Staring sweetly up at the stars above the spot In Calvary off of Harry L They use the granite as a pillow And dream of dancing in the morning light Sleep Peaceful And so lacking in discord Until I wake up and remember That I do not hold that hand Walking through walls of smoke Dispersing stained glass gratitude Among rows of misty martyr markers Few read the names Or know they exist(ed) In the mellow room I saw through epitaphs You are just ashes and sackcloth I exi(s)ted ########### The Process ########### Theories swirling, gurgling springs into lakes into oceans Penny flipping in snowdrifts, staining the sorrow to copper Big Dipper bleeding off of Orion Belts breaking the pants are falling down around my ankles On a treadmill That I cannot stop And between the arbor bars of ironwood And beyond the icy windows And because I only wish for silence I embrace the ringing of process The harmony of non-avoidance Killing curious entities in hemoglobin Hobgoblins sawing my spine in half Into tendrils and strands like muscles Without ligaments and anchor points Curvature of radium glass around my eyes Polarized reflector plates sinking into skin When the stress squeezes cardiac risks When the sun lights up all the figures behind the curtain When you drift into areas without sustenance You make it yourself When you take it in, that is the process And when you blow it all out That is the process That is the fruit Sweetly Bleeding ######## Academia ######## Glass pyramids and palm trees that bleed light Hieroglyphic sanctums Listing like Pisa upside down under starlight Confused in gravity reversed Birds perch without knowing Tourists lock away spirits with disposable cameras Look through the binocular stand, love Put in the change, will it to be, Turn the image Rosy polka dot sunrise Splitting panes between worlds of light Through my fingers like bars bending Idiosyncratic Gorgeous -- Vines overtaking the green beams above our heads, spinning metal fixtures sending cars off of bridges and into your arms. You are carrying each word in that book. Let them rest on the page, love, let them sleep. Let them die. If I have to see your eyes read that sheet one more time, the universe may repeat itself in my sleep. The hands on the clock tower spinning wildly. The bell chimes are just loudspeakers with audio files. Plastic passes for existing, virtual license to live. All my efforts are buried here in the fiber optics. Softly humming under your dorms, creeping up the walls of your apartments, sleeping in the plastic bags on your kitchen table. -- Oligarch peering over the throne Golden bronze summit Building an infinite empire to nowhere The sun is setting in a Dyson sphere Covered in darkness The shadows are my territory That you claim with radiance Your future is bright, love Take it from me ########################## Above Chiangmai (With Eno) ########################## Atonal Desire Migration In fire Immolate Poetically, of course Just brushing up against white hot stokers Waiting for the brand Surface Resplendent Halcyon Life sentence Inmate Only mysteriously, of course Never a knowing glance or revelation of identity In the clouds Above Chiangmai With Eno But I don't feel high Enough Only stupidly, of course No fool sees the ground so quickly Yet I don't turn my face to the sun so smoothly anymore Palace Arc Lovechild Divorce Separation doesn't have to become so cold Doves without homes Cataclysms Melted roads you can't return from Swallowing asphalt Carnival Gravity Rainbow Closer to me Come closer to me In digital drench blues I miss you Only warmly, of course Smile liquified Held in a bottle by your side You sip Constantly And it leaves me Ruby Bamboo Barren Who are you Who are you? ############## Tower of Babel ############## Reconquista crooning over milky powder driving torches into the earth, blending neosentimentalism and the ignorance of death, the neglect of another man's peace. Classical drones in ice age caverns dripping monarch decree justification, lip service free of charge, Magna Carta caldera, craters where she left those names she had for you. Sweetie, love, honey, jerk. The works. Blunt force drama melting out of containment, my solid calcium standing erect against invasion, titan pillars like pier posts running miles deep into murky social contracts. Crickets tell you stories in their shrill patience when the wood of your door frame melts in the heat. Casual diminuendo, valid gorgon frenzy circling breeding grounds, nothing under eggshell traps and red grass for tracking. Watch me traipse the tall grass. What comes from my mouth is confusion. Hands making impossible a lie. If you could understand. If you could understand. If you could understand. You would stop reading. ############################################### Some Ramblings About How Summer Left Me Wanting ############################################### Figure of geometric light webs Like dymaxion spheres floating without a shadow Tall grass along nature's dam bleeding Emerald whiplash under scorching bursts Of yellow and gold Armatures of gracious rest Letting me down in a pool of fervor In love with delays Infatuation displays and hurt from forgotten days Pieces left in the sun until the pain(t) wore off Just a dull political knife, now Or just a floppy reasoning Flaccid With Understanding Sweeping chirps keep you from falling asleep Nocturnal until you cannot stop staring Sunbeams burning holes in your pockets But your pockets are the golden brain dips And the beams are smiles and kindnesses And your sleep is an eternal dance with your own pride When you slumber is when you achieve more than you bargained for When you submit is when you die and Are remembered as more than What you really were ############ Party of One ############ Lavender sea faces, bulbous smirk placed in my palm Closing petals flesh and gristle locking gaze into packs Of thistle aggravated, immolated in the room with the incendiary grenade What is so royal about this bruise of love? Crown of broken smarts tipping drinks into first date memories Where are the stains now? Into my lap goes the space where nothing may enter Bleached permutations From the porcelain bowl she stares with mascara running Styx down her paleness Cherry rolling along her lips in viscous frenzy, couldn't hold it steady Arm resting headstones in weight only, no vestige of joy She cannot get up on her own power, she no longer has any She cannot tell you what color her sheets are, or which corner of the room she poses in the mirror She cannot recite Shakespeare or play kickball on the playground She does not remember what year they dismantled it and paved it and melted it and abandoned the puddles Contents of two sewing kits strewn on linoleum, or tangled in rubies tying her hair in knots Her glasses are just frames Nothing to look back on Tomorrow her cocktail dress will strangle her like it always does Next week is a birthday party with a bit too much wine In a month or two those people will waltz out of another revolving door Next year her luck may change Right now there is a knock at the door but nobody else is home What is so lonesome about this bruise of love? Sleepily and without an ounce of conviction Without memories to get in the way Strange smell of mother's baking Burning Solid mattress under the streamers dangling Taunting Remembering what she cannot Slipping Dreaming Forgetting In the morning there will be light that does not wallow Pale and helpless In the morning there will be lavender genesis Friendly, with a smile and a kiss ############### Whatever I Mean ############### Ash symphonic platitude machine Rolling die cast conveyor belt beyond my reach Spewing ridiculous journal cliches Making skin sprint off the bone With cringe Resting beneath the curve of a volcano At the base of the boil The doors are all closed in this house Voices thrown around corners and up stairs There is no meaning to viscosity What matters to me Is more than personality Beneath crimson gazebo circle and eternity Waiting for meaning to crawl from the ooze That is the concept art for beauty No need for full release Swinging around checkerboard lighthouses At military bases This is the carnival of sundial showdowns I wasn't fast enough Bullet in the ribcage Marine shallows with DIY ziplines Pavilion of whispers strutting rooster around campfires Show and tell and cry Wrap my jacket around your shivers Leave blisters On my fingers From the questions The answers And the in between Exit light burning kaleidoscope Turing machines running along my spine like a bit tape Grit in the lashes, wipe off the hesitation Nothing left for meaning Just the hollow casings of words Spent like memories Through a target Heavy granularity weeping pebbles from ducts Air supply short Busted lexicon making anything into everything Everything Everything Everything Everything Whatever I mean It is nothing ################################## The Benefits (Of Daylight Savings) ################################## In the echo chamber sun I watch motes of ash curling rose petal bell curves into the corpse of yesterday A lonely river of gray The burning takes so long, please stop sending fuel Summer sleeping with innocence Untouched Unparalleled Cloaked in drama invisible in misty alleys Climbing up the walls looking down into the reservoirs you keep Surface placid in verbose denials Flipping birds to cosmic watchers Old guards nearing the end of an infinite life out in the Kuiper catacombs 1. in the soft blue-green sky at 7:30 with a drink in my hand. Ladders rolling away with my pain. Falling without a cord. Blending into seamless nothing air stirring in the places I once was. Leading all the smaller hurts into one accord. 2. waiting on a frosted lily to crumble like hardened sugar. Glazing my tongue in lethargic whispers. All those things I told her. All those things. 3. wind factory sweeping after hours. Mirage police flashing red blue in street puddles where tweakers struggle to stand against imaginary sundowns. 4. in a small office with abstract nothings melting the paint off the walls. A collection of Neruda is the center of gravity. De-stressed like pillars already chipped and worn without a ceiling to raise up. From your eyes are silver bullets Mercury rivulets running hurried to savage arms like potholes widening bottomless pits I am returning to a place I have been before How has it changed? ###################################### Predictive Text is More Real Than I Am ###################################### I don't know if I can get it to you or not something I can do that I cannot is the day I cannot come to the earth day and I cannot feel like a dream come true and I cannot feel like a dream come true and I cannot feel like a dream come true and I love you and I have to say that you are the best thing to ever come here and the people that are in love with you are so much more like you and I have been to the earth and you know that it was great to see you guys and you have been so nice to me and I am so sorry that I was never really feeling down to earth and I don't want to see you again until you get home and I will have already let go of it and then I'll take care of myself and let go of my way and I don't have any more sense of love and joy and then a little more important than anything else I cannot feel like a dream that you have any idea of. The only thing that works for the people is to be honest about you and I cannot feel like I am going through the process of becoming more important than the past. Tomorrow morning I'll let you know what time I cannot come back from the sun or something like that. ################################################# Infrared Skybox Bleeding Particles Into My Dreams ################################################# Daylight stations orbiting under clouds, shadows bending rays upwards into space 1. On the curve, brushing up against fuming cars, letting 60 soak into my bones. It's been so long since I've felt free of anything bigger than a word. Over by the complex is a volleyball game in March. Under the dim lights of Whitney Hall is a couple making out. The offices are dark. Circling flagstones curling smiles watching people waltz beyond depression. Somewhere there are nooses swaying frayed and blooming flowers between the filaments. Feral birds swinging censers wrecking balls of haze and dust Under your skin is a map of patience itching to get out Cottages scintillating August, screen doors melting, burning gusts embers blaze And the planet spins And the clouds are sometimes pink 2. That night in Oakdale, when I felt melted and flaccid in winter frustration, where were your wigs and masks? In the black dress of jazz, stone grace moving free in false flurries. The notes were placid, orderly. Never a step out of line. When they ask where you want to go you just tell them something you found in a dream. From the dreams we will pull together the edges of what we desire. Magma winter wallowing in sunlight frost on my windshield Ponds flowing in Mobius strips Gardens of gloom becoming dust frothing mad with jealousy Enter dissolving pools of sickly sweet nostalgia Drifting apart, plates dividing mitosis landscapes into gem face frontiers And every ocean's edge crumbles to dirt and lost jewels 3. Where sterility grips the limbs, there is a serenity. In the silence of making time for nothing but joy. In the solace of waking up to the idea of maybe. Possibility becoming the foundation of forward movement. When you say these words that I cannot understand, know that one day I will have an answer for you. In the sweetness of my nature, limber trees and goldenrod in summer, lavender thoughts of circular returning, little by little the opening of glories by the roadside. Zoetrope spinning reflecting gravity backwards through a wormhole in your pupil Irrefutable jest poking holes in your reasoning Glints slitting razor boredom from alternate realities where you are nothing more than floating Becoming dust born again into dust Dripping into amber rays of every afternoon I ever longed for And the diamond window is still there waiting for a watcher 4. In basements I collect power from obscurity. Back then it was a mad grab for something beyond words. But there exists no such thing. Time crawls on crutches with wheels, a machine separated from thought. In your arms it's so far away, seemingly motionless. But still it rolls without a care. Like an empty gurney looking for a lover. Gates drooping rope bridge despair knots collecting like skulls Coyote cleaning the kill to the bones, humming drone of moon smiling on prey Broken when you feel like a peak, you are not always this weak And the shimmering of leaves in July still calls your name in its sleep 5. From abstractions I bleed dreams into reality. Glowing deep into infinite pits where I paint the walls with love. At the zenith I look at the empty blue and whisper in bell chimes. Hollow tones with clarity. In the passing of the sun, there will be colors you cannot describe to me. Bending like gutters up into space ######################################################## In shrill whining of cicadas, everything is melting away ######################################################## In shrill whining of cicadas, everything is melting away Sprouts of everjoy nestled between furtive footfalls, Summer watching in tunnels and tributaries for a friend Diminutive hills, rolling tumbles of belonging, folding dreamery love songs Holding spats of rain within the future of spillways and candy shops Pink blooming, dusting sticks without inconvenience, Carefully selected in this seasonal dance Only the purest joy remains Paddies stretching miles, patchwork woven into fabric of memory Sensory pleading remembering places meant for adventure Forests made of light and glimmer between the foundation The Sun is dopamine We are the cravings Fragile cupped hands lifting time into dead places Making rain charms in spring with leftover postcards Foxtail spinning by the roadside, under the bridge by the phone booth When July speaks your name there are fireworks Inside of the moon Making a call on the corner Waterfalls carrying golden forever ago's into the reservoir Stockpiling the only moments that matter In the frame of the sliding door, where time is cut short, Do not toss tears into the setting horizon Where there is loss there is also a will to move beyond it But there is also so much more than that In this breeze that does not fade, there is joy abundantly ============================================================================== III How to live on a planet without anyone to give you flowers ============================================================================== ######## Fuji-san ######## Midnight swirling ginkgo leaves fanning microgrooves into basement corners Under streetlamps with white sheen stripes colliding fences and nameplates Lateral motion astral precision morphing Orion into more than matter Remembering the liquid freshness, Heat of the oven opening, Nights of knowing Moth wings falling petals sakura in spring The trees are not green yet Still hillsides of mud branching up from the yawning earth Waiting to churn with greener pastures than you properly recall 1. Brooks bleeding edges into babbling nonsense. Morals quenched in resolve to chase ideas. Beauty before banishment. Born again before bruises. Black and blue and washing away in clouds of red to pink to white. Ornate inscriptions stairway to summit sessions with the breeze My compass points to this place without moving Dragging listless spirits into one accord like a machine without direction Treads of tunnel vision, trundling over the fields of golden life above the top parking lot I will never forget the face of momentary significance 2. Sizzling sticks making scars in the air where we used to exist. Sparkling something in the eye, never realized. Hydraulic actualization lifting across eons of futuristic dysmorphia, infinite loop of no tomorrow bridged and forgotten. Combustion seeping smoke into smaller pasts Those people you turn around and see and do not say hello There are moments of alone that stay there Even after you have left the building 3. Collecting filaments of love to weave into a better understanding. Jumbled meanings and comic strip panels made into a collage of comical collision. Of course you can ask anything of me, just don't be surprised when I refuse. Dawn scrolling neon death on windowsills Waiting for the collapse of my eyelids Still watchful and wondering where the dreaming has gone Pulling on my sheets like a child Scrambling up to my side And clinging Searing Screaming "I have always waited for you In the clearing behind the house In the mouth of the trees In the lungs of the street, Where headstones convert our smoke into Color In the smallest step you take each day, Climbing your spine like Fuji-san, Lifting the beams into your arms, Resting my simmering head on your blackening shoulder, I have been waiting for you." We are always too busy waiting to know what to do next ### R U ### Showered in spheres of something remembered Alternate universes in bubbles of chance Popping on my gaze, razing possibilities fire in the library Lexicons breaking into ash and soot §&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&§ Iron lung pumping staleness Staples in ribs Surviving on the sweetness of a blossom that has not yet arrived The photograph is hanging on my wall Next to my mother's painting of serenity §&&&&&&&&&&§ Are you at the house? Are you still holding onto all those thoughts? Are you still painting with thinning blades? Are you still screaming in other languages? Are you still searching for a patience within love? Are you still hoping for more than this? Are you blinking more than once a day? Are you remembering the words to that song you showed me last year? Are you staring into the Sun? Are you flirting again? Are you wasting time again? Are you locking your windows again? Are you beginning at the end of everything again? Are you sure? §&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&§ Tin can bells jumbling up your favorite tune Strings tied to tongues spirit lines slicing souls from fat and flesh, leashes of leftover hurts Just married to the idea The idea of peace §&&&§ There is something I miss about a life I have never lived Dreams and terrors of absence Distance between my feet and the mirrors of placid daydreaming Star clusters beaming nostalgia down my throat, force fed feelings I do not stop (s)wallowing §&&&&&&&&&&&&&&§ I am writing to the entirety of you now I am writing to splice myself from the present into your pleasure I am writing to weave crowns for you to wear I am sketching designs for glass prisons I am leveling the window to your face I am cutting the holes where you will speak to me like a bank teller I am sewing the orange patches with black numbers I am plastic rotting inconceivably I am soap in your eye, skulking I am welcoming you home I am inviting you in §&&&&&&§ Are you listening to summer? Are you wishing for a lover? Are you sure? Are you more than a morning dove on a wire? Are you less than your neighbor? Are you sure? Are you wholly yourself? Are you a piecewise pursuit of patience? Are you sure? §§ In the mountains humming mist crossed with zen, I am waiting moment by moment, When will you be coming home? ######################################################### To Those Drinking the Sad Poetry Like a Lukewarm Lemonade ######################################################### When the Sun is a star in my palm, Where are your eyes transfixed on my fingers? (Between the hour of sleep and month of standing still, years of slumber on rafts of old frozen wood. Collapsed power pylons ushering in your ancestors from lands of semiconscious listening. Exodus of pain, leaving for a promised land where they cannot reach us any longer. A place in the lungs where there is no weight, no sullen clinging flower.) When the sky is a fresh shade of paint on this cosmic home, Why are you in a black veil and gown? (The fitful child inside is missing the point of the waiting. He cannot remember the dips and rises over ridges in frigid forests. He cannot picture the alcoves and deer trails, he cannot fathom much beyond the uselessness of an I Love You. Frisking himself for a sorrow that he has already robbed himself of. Only steady noise remains.) When my eyes are closed and soaking in comfort, Why don't you recline here with me for a while? (Searching the ashes for keepsakes next to the new apartment complex. On the third floor your key will open the door to room 324, but you will not turn the lock. Glued to that spyglass into broken hearts, your reality is a shade of depression waiting for an AED. You refuse to remove the metal around your chest.) When I am still and consuming the passion I seek, Where is your patience? (Blinking grace of a lightning bug in the tall grass behind the house. Soft figure of a morning dove on a wire. Purity of a sky without any clouds. Shimmering of leaves on the poplars in the throes of a summer evening. Woodpecker perched along a pylon like a torii gate. Pulling desire into a single strand and weaving without a pattern.) When there is no reason to be sad, Why do you ignore the joy? ################################ Afterimage (In Multiple Mediums) ################################ White circle lineless stamped on blue construction paper in the east. Nature's stakes yawning fists opening glories on the flaking hillsides. Birds stippled on crosshatching, watching without eyes, aerial ghosts fates sewing the red string into our hem. Onyx coffin geometric skeleton slumbers in frost. Wisps making love overhead between the moon and its children. Blacklight parade splayed open centerfold style across empty lots. ????????????? Spreadsheets tiling windows into tourist lives, fleeting spirits only so stubborn. Leaving without a trace, light on the door closing in the afternoon. My prints undisturbed on the knob. ????????????? Opals dangling wrought and righteous over pitch walkways from exhibits to spiral steeples. Prismatic lingering licking my cheek against the stubble, chilling abrasion saving face in light of failures swerved and surpassed. Sizzling cone of golden hours humming on the round table. Tomb of satisfaction, the paint remembers the sound of my laughter. My mind could use a fresh coat. Cerulean curtains opened into the wrath of god, fading light making shadows like Hiroshima, the laughs are sealed in soot. ?????????????????????? Petal sunrise lowering death in spades, bending the palm trees in foreign languages. Valleys and crests burn in orange acrylic. Jupiter singing stormy hymns over long dead colonies, metal crags left in graveyard orbits beyond geostationary love. Moon slipping a smile into the pool, always in good time, land of silver drinkers. ?????????????????????? Dividing line, people scattered like sudoku numbers, it doesn't add up. Canvas misted with sleep, no one can wake up. Creases and folds origami bookmarking faultlines and warps in the plate. Behind the figure on the right, crouching lioness, hidden hesitance. Stairs chipped and decaying. Every window covered, no peeking. Peering over the past tracking sun paths erasing faces without knowing why. Mannequins putting on a show, new beginnings with the same endings. On each still finger reaching for pillows in the sky, green envy waits to bloom. Fates fading off into migratory routes, leaving strings attached. White stillness soaring, overblown and overused, waiting for you to realize. It is all for you. ##################################################### Chariots Burning;;Re-entry;;Smoldering Husks (Jigsaw) ##################################################### Drifting billows drooping aerogel Pillows caressing the places I cannot warm Slipping panic shredding entering atmosphere Can't seem to find a way out of here Fever Stricken Green around the hills Slowly succumbing to time digging in heels Steam mountains locking Otherworld calling building coastline fountains Never a dull lining Garden toppled trees churning moss Graves in morning pale achromatic Making habits, returning wheels Pulley and rope in a knot In a web Window open still no wind Waiting for a seizure --------------------- Pieces of a smile sliding around my face Never quite snapping together In the quiet afternoon light I walk to my car With a pep in my step and music in my ears My boots dragging the pebbles across campus Why sad when now? &&&&&&&&&&&& Portraits splintering speeches meetings Without concrete meanings Lunch about nothing in particular Movies I never saw, never knew the names of Smiling thinking about that young child who told me "Thank you, have a nice night!" Another piece floats just under the skin @@@@@@ Walking up the path to the forest line where everything shining is forgotten This feels like death The driver's side is a portal to silence Purgatory in transit This feels Like death ~~~~~~~~~~~ In the coliseums of passion you construct I am burning the chariots And carving the keystones If you ask I will tell you I enjoy the chaos If you ask I will tell you I am entropy I will tell you I do not know what comes next Simply some words I heard In the scarlet clouds like lamps Pressing coals into the cold dead places ++++++++++ Behind the tree, fragile and shy Peering figure wondering why Moonlight child forming a dream Shaping landscapes that gleam And scream "Goodnight" ############################################ Interdiction (Replacing Reality Like a Fuse) ############################################ Wooly blanket wrapping my head in the clouds, there is a revolving door of everyone leaving But I am turning the crank as my eyes grow scales, Watching justice embalm the words and phrases sticking to my tongue Fragile cotton candy idealism playing with my existence in the bubble of hypothetical futures Mirror rooms expanding into space where the mountains never stop striking the sky looking for golden linings On the other side of that wooly blanket I want to become too much, and maybe I already am Bleeding through the towel around the gash, listening for sirens Clinging to the salt rocks off the coast of goodbye Red flares singing sparks around town, I am fleeting like the smallest one you see Black gloves over my hands, taking out the trash, swaying without the words to make it seem reasonable Nothing I say has any meaning and the meaning of that is a dry joke at a funeral And the retort you can hear is the ghost playing with the glass case Like a spinning top or a windmill Shedding sleeves and layers, corona peeling off clementine joy adding some zest in this moment of grotesque zen Waiting for sakura to fall and rot and bloom again above every statue taking the subway and crawling the bars on the weekend Sitting tongue-tied wrapped held by a thread of politeness stale and crumbling with disillusionment A trick of the light spinning a flitting between the petals rosy and collapsing on the bridge Where all I ever wanted was the completeness of your being But there is always more landscape to the place inside your bones, seeping through the faultlines (Yesterday there was no reason in the wind and today there is no love in the sunlight, only hollow tones like bell chimes twisting in a furnace) ((Tomorrow there will be hands clasped indecisive and jittery with a strange fever)) (((As the sun ripens beyond the wooly blanket waiting for a confidant, the woodpeckers will return outside my window like a dream))) ((((And the next day perhaps I will read my emails and eat my lunch by the window)))) #### Need #### Need is an acid partnership Dissolving burdens into two-man shackles Melting joy into a vat slowly spinning, wafting the aroma of decline Over our noses Tepid half-life taking our tears and flowers and making a forest of colorful weeds Skylines glimmering in evening sleep Spindown of shutters and terminal fixtures In the lecture of the Sun where photon rail guns impale And continue Where the black covers fold and pile up Waiting for more attention Need dissolving itself into want Into a slurry of maybes And half-lidded tomorrows Horizons that keep climbing up your face Long awaited spring rain sliding down the driver side window For a moment your eyes are black holes Steps angled in circles paradoxical and flat Serrated into space waiting for the dinosaur killer Splitting wires under the stove Burning and crisping the meaning of connection The draw of affection misleading intentions just a lick and a penchant for transparency when all of my skin is a glass of joyful brooding you take in All I need is the idea ######## A Tunnel ######## Turquoise mirrors and panes of glass Spinning in pylons on islands of shrines Palm prophets bending and drooping Heaving the sun across the sky I. The hillsides of brush and scrub fields are freezing over. The memory of summer scratching at my car window. Reflections of the shade under the poplars in the backyard. Where the sun cannot reach the snow. The sky is a minefield between the uprights. I am a stake in the floodplains, a lantern flickering in the marsh. A cricket singing lazily into the night. II. Energy slipping between the barriers. My force is a chasm you stare deep into. A wave of bioluminescence, fertile microbes of patience. Waiting for evolution to save them. The seam of my face is grinning. The air is stirring with the beating of metal wings. C130 touch-and-go's at night. Reality bending around the hourglass into a shape like an alternate universe. I like to weave the ideas together into a fabric of joy, but it is dripping off into our dimension. Look at your feet, the water is smiling up at you III. When the woodpeckers greet my ears in the morning, my mind is full of grubs. When the wind whips my midnight window I am still searching for the words that will not come to me. IV. I miss something about this connection but I keep breaking up. ####################### Cookies Left in the Jar ####################### The heart opening slowly letting the shade inside the caldera Flash freezing all the joy into a razorwire sculpture The golden pillars of light sweeping over like lookouts Searchlights waiting for childhood friends to return from the store Extremities bleeding with weight Blood lead lined and magnetized to my bed Swirling jumbling agitated minutes hours days in my head Nothing but the memory of tendrils flourished green, flashing red Bending gravity into a Mobius strip of fate Returning What do you want me to say? I will say it. What do you want me to think? I will think it. What do you want me to do? I will do it. What do you want me to love? I will cherish everything but its name. Wooded mornings melting into tropical panes flitting like Butterflies with stained glass wings A needle for a proboscis, taking a sample of my sugary sweet blood Nectar for those who crave release from the bondage Of depressing obligation and responsibility What do you want me to feel? There are no cookies left in the jar. And I am crying. ############################# Winding Down (In the City Of) ############################# Cascade billowing flowing helter skelter drowning shelter drywall huts in the city of butterfly catchers Endless sequence of feverish loops birthing forlorn hopes of hands and elbows bent around the right parts Dangling laughter on the end of a rod, stick and carrot trick scratching the itch spreading like medicine over the floor Sickly sticky with purple tablespoons convex over your face gas masking the noxious anxiety but it is always outside Overextended into mirage islands where teal skies tear the clouds to micron nothings, cotton brambles above 1. in the net of her presence waiting at the top of the spiral stairs. Delays roundabout malevolence from signature sources coursing slowly bloodstream sipping on swollen bags Layers of angelic sighs carving names into petrified waiting, debating the benefits of making it past lunchtime Collapse in the wolverine mindset, crystalline jet black textures walling off the bowls of astringent meat you hate Neon polygons warping and folding tetrahedron style across the dance floor without any steady pulse 2. walking to my car flipping private messages like tarot cards. Apologies bubbling into vapor never existed just thoughts from windows closed off and shadowed Frenetic decline from solar throne to ocean bones, oily sunken at the bottom of the reason I stay tied to the docks Flowing waves sky bound laced with passing out in class, surpassing the logical step for the absurd 3. jaywalking double yellow lines for a little peace of mind. Intended for everything to end before the sun came down again, the bend in the trees smiling fresh eyes into my business Corporate crawling on all fours begging merchandise and time clinking cups against my patience for ridiculous bullshit 4. the vivid memories of brick buildings with second story windows. Sleep retreat from sadness world staring back but dreams are catalysts for sugary surrender and sulking 5. before you go, can you tell me how you really feel? ######################## With the Sun Already Set ######################## Growing roots over miles sipping on lead lined pipes Drainage shallow and hidden under the asphalt The wood floor is a buffer between my thoughts and the mantle of chance Convection bubbling jetstream exterior searing like the Sun pulling away all the clouds === 1. In the powder blue forest at the chime, the sky breaking into crumbling pieces, panels of glass refracting all the ultrawhite smiles. Where the logs are green and wet with fear, space is filled with birdsong. Magenta dripping leaves, nature decanter planting vivid dreams into the soil. Two chickadees dashing between the blooming fingers, watching you wonder, where are your eyes, when did the sky come back together? === Cerulean light expanding into this space, gaseous experimentalism calm in quotations Making faces when I type, poet's foil peeling when unripe and ready to collapse Vaporous satellites hovering when I exhale in the northeast Waiting for the snap freeze Sediment brushing aluminum cans on the roadside Careless and unforgiving image in the distended reflection of a face A placid mask of love in the eye of every beholder Burning at the stake waiting for a flight out of home === 2. In a tulip yellow room, melding furniture with piles of passion. The windows are too bright and the idea of sleeping on the couch passes over the water. Still life of flowers only halfway opened, they cannot find the Sun. The lake on the wall divides Exodus with the shadows of mountains making a shelter. A blue grave with bells and whistles covered in acrylic and wishing. === Motors passing by my window, anti-solitary confinement Mood padded with flocks of balloons in July, climbing higher, dropping like dead birds on the shore Tangled in hydrogen wires twisting between high rises overlooking the waterfront Spying on the people living a part of my past Seagulls over parking lots making homes in the strangest of places Embracing the sky that is always the same dull force of momentum Controlling the peace in my nest with a keyboard and mouse A cat stalking sentinel cutting glares when I imagine === 3. In her cardinal red dream, mannequin leaning on a telephone pole. Haze of old nostalgia left out in the cold crawling up watchtower control. Searchlight buzzing humming tunes of rare loving, looking manic in the face of vacancy. Too much space left empty, gathering the warmth of the loneliest sun, burning split ends going wild like severed power lines. Mannequin blind and waltzing over the pool in the road. === Idealism crafting arks over the unchosen, open ended people falling out of themselves Sound carrying the bits and pieces of myself up the stairs and into the recliner Her eyes reminding me of nothing important, the new paradigm Where patience is sunlight in a statue garden, forgotten people are no longer crying ############################### Storm Flows (The Clearing Away) ############################### Storing fabric heavy with memory of snow Hanging on my door hook like a side of beef Crimson streak falling into a bundle of keys Taking me into unknown places where you will never find me And my words echoed into obscurity Like a shriek of joy Inside of the Sun &&&&&&&&&&&& Pulling at my sleeves is a wisp of passion. A pat on the head, a snapshot of a future in love with the symphony of every dream making waves into space. A transient hesitance crowning, wrapping. Stable as the world continues to spin. Dizzying. Pulling at my hidden cards like fraying strings unraveling this sweater in hushed acceptance. Silently spent cartridge of must. Of have to. Of need. Worry is a dull knife that cannot cut the threads. And my will is a flame pulling at the edges of sadness. &&&&&&&&&&&& The subtle breeze from my open window feels like a solar wind Tidal tinted pulling moon dust shores into my brain The funk of loneliness painted cheerful in floral remembering Everything is clearing away And soon I will be left With nothing but An empty field And the gold Of storms Passed ############################# Clown College Admission Essay ############################# Leaning fortress slipping foundation down the hillside weeping hiding linings in gray clouds above nothing undone but the confidence to wear a sundress in this wind without a need for stakes and ties, ropes and bindings, rain fly resting in the tangles of blooming branches, never coming down, not now, not now. Crawling between cracks in the cotton, crows turning the air with their calls, molten mating misery like molting a malformed adolescence, lessening the weight of need rolling away in lily pad armadas, flimsy carriages carrying your love where I can see them sinking in the daylight, your tenacity is a mayfly under my curtain of deluge. Cruel blue, placid view skies vaporize the clouds with sudden rain in golden hue no rainbow, drastic powder over trees, nothing left to please, line of the forest deteriorating into chirps and warbles, fickle talons and feet splitting the path in the windy quad with the sculpture of momentum, of entropy birthing form, through the portal of charcoal remains layered graphite refrains he sat with a guitar in my memory for only a few moments, earnest in wonder, a lover of nothing but the present. Shrooms crowning the fleshy wood, waiting for petrification, stale being of stagnation feeling out every angle never stepping through the corner of the glass, overflow contained meticulous blaming nothing but chance and the change you despise, I stare at the ceiling with it by my side, bed partners with chaos, drilling holes in the notions you keep steady in plastic cages, dog-eared pages of traditional erratic displeasure, hateful gavels for arms, slamming alarms before sunrise, hermetic pulpits freezing zero Kelvin sealed away in place. Picking through the trash for bits of insanity Like a homeless man in Utopia ############ Sleeping God ############ She who holds stars in between her fingers Shifting reflections of light in black hole horizons The back is the front and the front is inside And the pillows are soft and the people are quiet She who spins idle running humming waiting for herself Pulling the strings out of your ears Playing vibration games with your heart She who bends the halls leaning on cosmic crutches Muted screaming in the glimmering windows at the mall Remembering the cracks in the wall Slipping under dripping pines and willows She who colors the Sun in different lengths Making the great crescendo soar with chromal elegance Dancing in jittery euphoria as the waters split She who sleeps into the late morning And the late evening And the late night Without waking and shedding her power ########## Like Taffy ########## Dragging melted timepieces in torrents of ditch water flowing endlessly in front of my tires. Stretching the filaments of thought sizzling holes in the time it takes for my frontal lobe to blink. Kneading the bruised portions of imagination where the colors came out all wrong. Folding the ends of patience over themselves into a swan floating down the galaxy. Waiting on the moment to arrive, to wake up like a bird before the Sun, a driver at the wheel on too many medications. Pulling at the silver threads of my window, fruits in every shade of not yet ripe, plastic effigies of a dream wishing upon one listener. Sleeping on the past, gazing wide eyed out the window when the colors are more than the usual pale blue and gray. Slowing the crawl of time into a slurry of starry hopes, straw in my mouth, my lungs are waiting for the fill. ############################# Up in the Clouds Above Vestal ############################# Living on perforated park benches swinging in chains Rattling softly into the microphone Waiting on hibernating nostalgia to unearth a useless pleasure Like having sex with an ex Behind the house the trees grew eyes After the towers and saws cleared away Between the weighty power lines Watching us drive away and return Every time it rains the mist clouds them like a cataract Falling over the cliff of green boughs Shooting stars hidden in the sails of ships that used to float the Susquehanna Bleeding into the ocean of trash, plastic sharks snatching fresh meat Industry plants mailing me their ads For a service I will never remember the name of Or have a use for Mud in the mix, all over my boots, the laces are fraying and showing the elastic When I get up tomorrow morning I'll find the red blooms in my lungs Split from the branches of the tree across the road Covering my car and my mailbox Waiting for a package that may never arrive Covered in red blooming moss crawling targets beneath eyes in the trees ///////////////// Love is a magazine in your basket by the toilet, Maybe I just don't get why you need to read something While you're in there \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Outside is a storm of gold and green living breathing down the neck of soulless pleasure, leisure like free spinal taps covered in blankets and klaxons, patching up the holes at the base of the world, blooming in colors you don't care to see. ||||||||||||||| In the park on top of Vestal, 10:30 crimson lights peering over the playground equipment The boys are playing tag in the dark And I am sitting on the side listening And the bugs are waking up And the stars are bleary eyes from space And the weeds are still in the night And the valley is glowing And the moon is rolling And the sound of laughter is a wall of force against doubt Where the responsibility of obligation ends and the joy of nothingness begins is where I sleep in sheets of vacuous intake Endlessly drinking this strange waiting pleasure ################################# Portrait of Brain Slice in Spring ################################# Dusty hallways in a high rise I am waiting in glass Golden hours spilling sunlight slanted Through storm drains in the walls Rain is the scent of a memory Melting snow shedding kerosene In a hot seat, umbra licking me clean Dripping along the seams in cherry Do you remember the feeling of being Home? -- Breathing steady in a merry breeze Sleeves in tapestry tapes on repeat Flowing floorbound through sheets Canals locking sinking filling for free Crystal ships departed waiting for shore The edge of the earth under the lamp Beneath blood diamond watchtowers Fuming spiral ballad flowers in bed Do you remember the thrill of chasing Phantoms? -- Ghosts of power, placebo in dusk Headstone humming regrets of the month Transient lovers and careful collapse I'll be back in the summer with petals ############ Now (Enough) ############ Low noise of the furnace buzzing pipes The static shifting clicking of the house Settling With the memory of Metheny playing games With the shadow of music in my brain Frantic obligation swirling in a tornado Piling up outside the walls of my compassion Sectioned off and purified Only enough for the objects spreading light across clouds Dispersing joy in seeds of rain Washing away seasons of pain 1. floating in a hover state like a comatose stone. Zen licking between my ears with shoreline waves brushing against rough patches. Grazes with being many people at once, now just an empty bed with one heat signature. 2. drifting along a river in a fever dream. I enjoy the wave as it is, nothing more or less than a force of phantasmal remembering. Every word you snuck past my mind is still stuck in my ears, I can't shake it out. 3. doing a dance in the dark room, your face is sky blue watching clouds dissipate into pink smog rolling along your temples. Breathing down your back, the moves are shameless and your placid demeanor is a sign of acceptance. Dreaming larger than you have any right to. And you will receive all that you desire before sunset the next day. 4. somewhere in the future is a bridge out of the dream and into a steady reality. Happiness is a sunny day driving along the side of the mountain. Pleasure is the smile on the passenger's face. Respite is the noise of people walking to a different destination than they did yesterday. Peace is a thread of being, softly vibrating, a single pitch. More snow may fall in the end of April Than rain over the dry seasons of mind But there is still a joy in the absence of words Where a landscape is fresh for the find ############################################################################## When it feels like everything is fading to dust and chemicals in your mouth... ############################################################################## Why does it have to stop and start again like a shock to the heart? I. Where the corners are glued together into a mural of landscapes, there is a shadowy cave I have not yet scoured. In the rusty chest at the end of the tunnel is a faded patch that someone left. The last memory of their being. The quilted cloak receives another addition and I move on to another landmark. II. Searching worlds for a joy that does not cremate itself upon exposure to the arid breeze of time. Dust only piles so high before it topples. My fingers are gray stained feelers, morbid examples of the color leaving you behind. In the sky over the horizon the blue and white race beyond your vision. Clouds roll in over the lighthouse and a faint drizzle begins to melt you away. In that moment of swimming through yourself, it can feel like the subtle gold of an afternoon was never enough to satisfy you. Sometimes it's hard to discover new joys when they keep crumbling like this. III. In the blue haze room where magenta drips from the ceiling and golden motes float between shafts of parallel lights. Heavy particles colliding in heat, jumbled and scrambled, slamming brain matter against itself, bending minds along the beveled edges of a picture frame. In the center is an idea that became a figure in your childhood. You cannot throw it away. Wherever you go, the waiting follows. Crawling along the hillside The stars are riding on airplanes made of chemicals And the night is dead and quiet Somewhere in the furrowed land Greater winds are blowing you in the right direction It isn't always easy to feel connected In one piece But you are always reaching for every scrap of yourself You are always searching for the right place And in that search is a glowing joy on your fingertips Blessing the shadowed grounds, brushes with light and stardust In that world where stars are faintly leaving you behind, There is always more joy than time ##################################### The Strange Negatives of Stiletto, NY ##################################### In the blood of new winter skies, I peek through the cerulean curtains to find another frozen scape below. Lightsick and pale, I return to the orange glow of bedside enlightenment, resplendent and frothing with urges for sleep. Alarmed and nostalgic, waiting for peace, I rise and head downstairs. Into the sterility, into the modernity, into the mundane science of mornings. In the cup of coffee next to me is a fly drowning violently. I don't even drink coffee. Beneath the placemat is a map of this place, marked in frenetic scrapings and gibberish. Outside is a car waiting for me. There is no driver. At the circle we turn around and around and never really go anywhere. The buildings are stout with smokestacks, belching nuanced chemicals into the brisk air, chilling and comforting. The churches are stained glass with pews in the windows, half-shattered, half-melted, belonging to the happiness of the people, they smile every time they pass one. Over the Susquehanna, there is an ocean, a pond that ends in sight but continues in mind. On the coast is a Bauhaus prison of Art Deco demise. The floors are an M. C. Escher wet dream. The windows don't really exist. The mirrors are doors into new parts of the facility. Through chromatic glass is a vista like Revelation. Water and green plains and nothing else not even the mindless people that keep it glued together. On the other side of the pond is a school where the dorms look out over a beautiful topiary garden. A Roman statue in the courtyard. Signposts pointing to eternity. Work to be done without any manager. Sometimes when I visit it reminds me of Auschwitz. Off the highways are lots steadily emptying, but never abandoned. Markets filled with thieves and black powder. Outside my father rests against the car with a hole in his heart. No heartbeat. Smiling as his DNA is taken in by the asphalt like a tar pit. Across the traffic lights is a megacomplex of desires. Atriums and theaters of tubes and food courts and floating disks taking people to heaven. Please don't go. Take me to lunch there, make small talk, I'll take anything they offer me. In the frantic yellows and frustrated reds and frivolous blues of the plastic cheapness I will swallow my pride and buy the entire place a round of shots. I don't even drink shots. I don't even drink. I don't even know these people. The rivers are industrial waste ponds. The factories are shattered husks of what we never could have achieved. The carousels are playing lofi funeral dirges. The parks are wailing with crushed dreams and wood chip splinters. In the reflections of Taco Bell windows at 11:00 PM in the rain, I have seen this place before. In the dreams where powder coats trees that do not exist, I wish they may never have existed. In the evening the skies are orange hellscapes with graphite stratified between sunrays. Porches are frozen purgatories. Anterooms you cannot escape from. The mud sticks to everything. The rust chips and the tendrils stain your teeth. There is a colossus in the center of every city like this. There is an ancient mind keeping the children up at night. The satellite dishes on the hillside have wilted. The red crosses that peek between the boughs by the on ramp are blazing when you aren't looking. In complexes like space stations I orbit hazardous materials, like the smile you keep showing. The glances you throw my way like a circus animal. I'd take scorn and peanuts over the hope of another failure like that. In the frozen breath of power plants over the horizon of arcades and diners, I remember birthdays and dates with frostbite. Losing an ear, a finger, a life. Crystal canals polluted and laughed at by environmentalists. Piano stars plinking away on felt strings and rubber keys, heinous whispers I left like atom bombs without detonation, they don't know how to dismantle them, neither do I. How can you just erase words like I LOVE YOU? How can you just eliminate yourself from the equation? You Cannot. In the deserts of Main Street there are cyber parlors where I blew away in the wind. Bottomless pits trapping cars and lovers, different ideas of platonic death, but I've resurrected worse. Here in this city I am a wizard without a hat. Driverless and without motivation, chasing newer dreams than have ever existed. Strange negatives scattered on my floor, memories corrupted or otherwise modified. Flooded. Drenched in some digitized elixir. Waterboarded under the rainbows we used to admire on the way home from school. Cat-like armatures of steel carrying cables of light to each and every mill and butcher in the valley. Looking out over the twinkle is like staring at insignificance and finding yourself hopelessly in love. Sometimes when I think of your face it gives me the same phantom emotions. Further than the water stretches is a shed where we had a party. All the people I never knew were there, and when they left you said we had sex. I don't even drink sex. Wait how do you say that again? In underground grottos of misfortune I tossed away coins in a mad dash for collective joy. And it worked for a while. But every carpet is meant to be pulled out. Loneliness only wins if you let it, and every bird is screeching its warcry. Beady eyes scanning for signs of life, just be a zombie and you'll be fine. A cog in a machine, a savage, undead machine. Humming with the sounds of the stars over this amorphous wasteland. Downtown is a frenzy, a flooded pain of loss, reconstituted as the worship of progress. And I love to bend the knee, oh I do, I do. In the lofts above museums, curators plan my downfall, shards of gratitude vaporized in their eyes. Former lovers of the inept. As the sun comes down over ember fields, lightning bugs bring the summer to a standstill. In between the floods and the blizzards, before the end of nature, before the end of me, I stand staring at the setting of peace for the final time. Before winter comes to steal everything away. In the corona of Sol is an angel waving sweet nothings in my general direction. I try not to think about it too much. Back in the metallurgic den of malignant minerals, my mind is a metaphor, a pocket dimension of dreams I paint onto reality like a square to a cube. Expanding into dust of nothing, sleep restless in its chase for my head, I watch it like the Panopticon, I am behind the bars. In the orange glow of this lamp, I swear my innocence. In the gray bleeding of the moon on my pillow, I question it all. Loneliness is a keystroke away from festering. Here in this city there is a forest where mushrooms grow on dead trees. I don't even drink mushrooms. Wait. There is a creek beside the mycelium pooling underneath rocks, shallow and drawing all good things into one accord. In the summer you can hear the wind whisper over it. Don't cry. It's only gone for now. I'm only gone for now, when you wake up I will be here with you in this strange negative on the floor. Your face is pixelated and sharp. Mine is empty and without eyes. But the smile is still there if you imagine it. If. Beneath this layer of fatigue is a sleep waiting to take hold. Roots gripping eyelids. Waking worlds are only good if they exist. This city never existed. But you, the one in it, you always did. ============================================================================== About the Author Ben Buchanan is a poet living in Binghamton, New York. He wrote this stuff. He likes writing things that he can't understand when he reads them back the next day. He lives in cinderblocks and uses rainbows for clothes. He likes wiggly air that makes his brain happy. Contrary to popular belief, he does indeed speak English. He loves it when someone reads his strange scrawlings. Someone like you. Feel free to contact Ben either through email (bsbuchanan99@gmail.com) or through Instagram (@ben_writes_poems). Thank you for reading. ==============================================================================