Row

I have ten fingers, ten toes

Two eyes – all standard fixings

A healthy number of chromosomes

No known chemical imbalances

But I was created full of lack

In the imperfect image

of an imperfect creator

Spiting the harmony of the cosmos

with an absurd lump of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen

Propped up on average feet

I commit to normalcy

and achieve nothing laudably

going nowhere brilliantly

I succeed in my limit situation

I was created for a single station

and I guard my position with bemusement

Puzzling over implicit simplicities

I crouch near the warm spring of elation

Take gulps in manifold and shrug

Back to work

War of attrition

Bridge the grim chasm

with bath salts and crème liqueur;

Are you happy now?

e-z cheeze

We sit in webs of vicarious inaction.
It's an opportune time: to be unique
you only have to vary slightly.
you only have to shut your jaw
and wipe the spit from your bib
To be apart from the core.
Then, flexing your bony limbs,
you emerge for the longest haul -
the trudge of solitude

Heathen bar

Names- those sickening reminders
that you carry your parents' choices to the grave
abreast the altar of shame, the record of past misgivings
Negotiating between rotting shelves and the scepter of illumination
You're being blinded by the choices you stumbled through, passing
damp tears matted with linen redolent of chamomile tea
Clinging to a sliver of metal overlooking plains of despair
Sloping with the caress of the father's sacrament
and the indomitable burdens of the weeping mother
Skin flayed in raw, rippling sheets of congealed flame
You shriek for hours, pausing only for caught breath
Passing gallstones and nuggets of truth
From the same orifice - that with which you were blessed
To speak honestly, to speak trippingly
You make the grandest speech, gesticulating wildly
Toward an audience with pinholes for ears
And great gobs of running jelly for eyes
Horror spawns of rushing eras
Rebels pining for the final chemical surge
Plug yourself into an EEG machine
a white labyrinth of sterile curses
and whittled demonic phrasing
Sip gingerly on the elixir of life
Put prominence in your poultice
In your peacetime potions
In your perversions of what prevails
Pause only for the shrill of a rudder
Pause only for sanity's sake

An Accompaniment of Nilla Wafers

-I'm submitting a protest to have all recreational drugs legalized.
-Why?
-To escape whatever [this] is.
-What is it that you're so afraid of?
-I'm afraid of death.
-Why is it that you seem to be afraid of everything?
-Everything reminds me of death.
-Dwelling on your fears - that can't be healthy.
-Living generally isn't 'healthy.'
-Neither is neglecting life out of a fear that it'll end.
-I know too much not to fear and know too little to be satisfied.

5-HTP

Beautiful days fraught with dread silence
Rays of sun beat down on chilled limbs
I lay quivering hands on gooseflesh - stroking madly
Seeking the babe's comfort in senseless times
The warmth of a freshly pressed sheet
The inviting aura of a deeply pitted cot
A bed-frame that creaks with endearing signs of age
Contrasted sharply against the sores and aches of adulthood
Huddling near the shower-head in throes of bitter frost
Juggling goals, dreams, and ambitions with the constant
impressment of a life lived in perpetual purposelessness
Wading through meadows of deceit and odious bickering
That is what awaits youth, the expiring wick
Giving way to anathema, cynicism, and wary outlooks
Sun-kissed, wrinkling grins melt through to impure scowls
Baring fangs and widening shock-white eyes
Your animal urge to claw back to the cradle of humanity
Rendered futile in a pentecostal paean of disturbing rage
A yawp so barbarous it hangs on the trestles of night
in an infinitude of disturbed calm

I keep falling asleep while reading

Here comes the thrilling immediacy - the trudging awareness
That curious ease that accompanies foggy stillness
Wreaths of glacial obscurity passing by unaware
Of me, that fool on the corner, or the eyes sidling left to right
Bungled impulses demurring flatly on the slick pavement
absorbing wet detritus from atop cemented leaves
Plotting perfidy and pernicious orations while
the stretch of worldly canvas runs backward unraveling
I huddle with bruised shoulders and bluish lips
Near the towering impasse which divides all knowing
And nursing inches of decayed tobacco leaves
I tacitly dash out ten stanzas in complicit agreement
with the written shade demanding tableau upon tableau
Tugging at heart strings and focus
Retooling the mechanics of my dreams
and drawing a dim, languid curtain
over the brilliant star-stuff of youthful pupils

Speaking unto nations

When an animal faces hardship, it is called survival. When a man faces hardship, it is called absurdity.

Eighteen Years

Presumably unplanned conception, fetal development, birth, intense stimulation, vague amusement, socialization, recognition of constructs, self-consciousness, loss of self-esteem, development of character, adoption of personality traits, intermittent schooling, dread of schooling, further character development, further dread (extended to all stations in life), intermittent schooling, refinement of "talents," external recognition of "skill," feign having life goals, put feigned life goals on applications, intermittent schooling, acceptance into another form of schooling, subsided dread, graduation, dread, dread, dread, stimulant use, novel reading, dread, dread, dread, enter dorm room, slight feeling of hunger, sit on chair, pull up pointless webpage from a catalog of one hundred million equally useless webpages, click "new post," reflect.

Dread, dread, dread - ad infinitum.

Twenty minutes until Rhetoric.

I have twenty minutes until I stumble over to Rhetoric. It's two buildings away -a brisk walk will do. It starts in thirty minutes; I leave in twenty minutes.

In twenty minutes, I'll toss a wax-paper cup in the bin, plug my laptop back in, put my phone in my pocket, get twin sneakers on my feet, zip a jacket up, stuff my backpack with a journal and A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf.

In a little over thirty minutes, I'll talk with a class of semi-harassed honors students about the prudence of women and their relationship to fiction. No soluble sentences said: most of the three chapters will fly over their heads.

In twenty minutes time, I could learn something new, doodle, dawdle, dangle threads, hold my breath until I'm blue. I'll settle for getting ready for class instead.

In high-school, there are no breaks, excepting minute intermissions that rumble and shock over your mind. Twelve minutes of time to do nothing but whine.

In college, it's reversed - nothing's punctual, nothing's terse. Discourse drags when it's not interesting - flows beautifully when it is.

In the grand scheme of things, prepositions reign supreme. Of, for, until, in, and after form my sentences' life blood. Well, syntax can be forgiven, otherwise it'd be endless adverbs and brisk descriptions. Prepositions let you wallow in the meadow of verbal hollow. Prepositions let you thrust through the commonest sentences with laudable prescience.

Ack, I'm late.

I'm posting this from a toilet; Will it still be poignant?

A wise man once said
That there were no positive values
or negative values.
A mob fell on him with rakes,
skewers, and makeshift bludgeons.
A trial-by-law acquitted them all
before the mob took the stand
they pleaded the fifth in unison.
An ethical man rose his hand
Mustache quivering in a fit
of indignation - no one listened.
A dust settled on eyes atrophied
Unused tools set down in pangs of rest
When we see not, we feel not.
An interview was given to
the family of the wise man
They said it was better this way.
One less mouth to feed, one less mouth to hear
An ear - shorn before the casket lowered
was left bloodied on the steps of the courthouse.
A bawdy judge in curls and reeking of wine
Snatched it up for his collection
Of truths unbidden, unsaid - irrespective.

3:1

Basking in the cool, electronic vibrations
his feet dangle inches above wormwood flooring
eyes twitching in intervals of set speed
Flickers to the rhythm of the atonal, haunting
ambiance cascading from burst-twine speakers
He recounts ratios, ineluctable numerals
Gloss-rimmed arabesques glide across the theater box
of his inner eyelids; He gathers enough fortitude
for a wheezing leap into a tight-fitted right pocket
Cracks a zippo; inhales omnipresent convalescence
Off-white billows of bitterness kiss the hollowness
silently building in his living space
An army of what-could-be's and what-should-be's
construct strategies in sightless tents of impotence
Launching biological warfare at the rosy fingered slip of dawn
His eyes cease twitching in a reverse playback of synaptic tension
He tugs at some final glimpse - passes with a sneer on chapped lips
All was full of love

Dream-quote Haiku

Insincerity
The most severe form of sin
You aren't what you say

Ruinous nuisance (amethyst)

I set aflame the brittle, peeling self
Ego-death; I am no longer am
I am no longer was and will be
I am the memory of shivering
The recollection of flesh pooling
In hideous masses, of orgiastic flashes
I am pure locution - legs thrust forward
Looming farther and farther
Pounding the midnight soil
in the unconscious search for kinetic death
Thermodynamic self erasure
Chemical blinders from the sanity shredding
Banality of this mundane realm
This chunk of rock, this seat of pride
This eternal civil war, this hitchhike into
our stolid, ethereal, cinematic mausoleum
Twinkling pupils hovering in the weight of pitch
That blanket of nothing from which we derive
all somethings; we set off on our journey
wailing, vomiting the potent verbiage of life
And knowing only this tremble in terror
at the thought: inhaling clouds of not
and exhaling our beings as mere nutritional value
I take disassociated comfort in the knowledge
That my singular, so far ineffective self
Will breed legions of selves
each armed with an an arsenal
of idiosyncrasies and pleasures earthly
I'll take the black eye
for their kaleidoscopic lives