18.2.015 17th and Western (a mess of a work in progress)

Beneath the cracking concrete flats,
The Earth is (still) there.
In the low hum of winter:
Grass, upspringing (still) from ruptured capillaries, spidery little things
Tracing pathways and outlining
Something dead, and lifeless
Chalk-white, really
Bone-like, even
A monochromatic overpaving
Of wild and unruly life.
Wellspring whence we all came.
And to which we are wont to return
Denying, (still) denying
That we, too, are our-selves the natural world
(Still) unending and changing;
All overpavings illusory, milk-white
And just as useless
Harmful, even
Detrimental, it is said
To a system which has no use for the lactose therein.
Useless.
Yet
(still)
:
That promise.
We like to be lied to, we have a need
For concrete promises breaking, and yet
Don't understand;
Why.
Pave over the grass.
I (still) do not understand.

In the low hum of winter:
The Earth is still there

Beneath the salted concrete flats.

Bone-white, really.





Under the summer sun:
Radiant heat (useless)
Might burn through my feet
Soles a conductor, (longing to walk upon the bare earth)
Heat rising quickly through the bones in my leg, white-hot pain in my sacrum
(I fear I might vomit)
The heat rising from the spidered concrete flat
Burning the air from my lungs,
Cracking my throat
(Chalk-white, a promise)
Blistering the skin from my hands, my head
Capillaries rupturing in my nose
(Cool blood dribbling down)

29.3.015 RE: Michael Oaktree

And I sit here, asking myself--

What must it be like, to come from money?

Who might I be

if not for my struggles, my grief?

What might I have become if becoming wasn't do-or-die,

if everything I had was handed to me

or just as easily within my reach?

Where lies the line bifurcating pride

(for my work, my deeds, my livelihood hard-won)

and a cynical judgment 

of those who had no say in the matter

regarding the spoon with which they were fetally fed,

born-and-bred?

Why must I feel resentment?

I cannot fault a soul. 

I do not want what they have. 

They are humans, as I am. 

So why the disconnect?

07.4.015 Auxiliary; Insularity

Every deletion,

each small, cold-controlled

backwards push:

a minute death, 

a sinking further inwards.

I have done it again;

I could wear these partings

as accomplishments--

a frozen star, each

an adornment upon

a void of cold Hell, each

event a singularity, a lifeless jewel.

The ache hasn't come unburied yet. 

Always there-- slumbering or awake, self-aware--

I know it is about to start. 

I know where it will leave me--

I have known where I was going all along. 

31.3.015

It is Now that I pontificate upon the totality of Forever--

its clutches settling slowly into the corded nape of my neck, seeping
into the synapses therein,
to rest there like listeria:
a slow paralysis.

Drugged and dosed:
some wayward child facing
a child-hood feverdream
(serial surgeries, scalpels removing
and giving new order;
sterile barbs and firepokers,
[so cold and unkind, themselves]
prodding without relent:
carefully reshaping, though they do not care)
with the perennial ticking
of the ole ticker's bloodflow:
reminding without relent.

The weight of passing days, undifferentiated,
sinks
ever-further
in;
with a digitalis-sweetness,
lacing the nape of the neck

(toxins):

a glaze of pyritic myelin
(sticky acid in wax's stead)
permitting the dissemination of the electricity therein,
the ions' communications tissue-dissipated
(a shame).

What once may have been
a message of storms, a din
of forked lightning
racing to the brain:
it comes unbundled as heat
in the nape of the neck;
from heat, to dread at the base of the skull;
and from dread to dead-silence,
no-feeling,
stillness.

It is Now that I ponder the reality of Forever--
with the absence of bygone moments
boring into the nape of my neck,
and a lulling hum-- the buzz of thoughts
without escape-- to fill the space

above the base of my skull.

Go West (work in progress)

Seventy-five, stoned,
on the Sunday-night highway.
Bright Eyes and Quasi-sentimental taillights, trailing...

Go west, go west.
You have seen and lain upon
the shores of the East:

warmed internally by their sands' radiant heat
(and yet chilled, still,
by the alienating memoryscape

of waves overfrozen, making for a moon-landing
of an afternoon stroll
[craggy and barren are these imagined hills:

floes, which-- through no
internal will of their own--
may soon

calve and fall away, crumbling into the unforgiving
waves, though ever do they remain
alien, and still]),

and warmed as well by the burgeoning swells
and spumes of effervescent joy:
roiling, carumbling, brought

about by the countless encounters--
moments of singular love, supreme--
themselves, so like the

unaccountable grains of sand
adorning the shore of
one of the Greats.

Go west. Go west.

Regain what was lost,
push farther, go
past that very-middle, that

cumbersome ballast
(deadweight of non-committal, treasonous
wafflings: middle-ground,

middle-of-the-road,
mismanaged feelings-- onto the back burner,
hastily pushed) which ties the heart

to an early, watery rest.
Push past, go further,
go West.

Find again that hard-won solitude,
"sun-age" as the Spaniards
and their descendants might profess;

again, find that loneliness.

Onward, to (perhaps)
wander the high desert, to
find that heart-center

(newness with each pump, each
depletion of blood),
to find again your breath...

God, perhaps, or nature more likely.
The self, mayhaps.
Truth, definitely.

That hard-won solitude.
Communion with everything.
Keep going.

Go West.
Go West.

For your love was lain low in the East.

Dark Window xx.xx.011

Death stares out from inside of me.
My eyes are black beams;
heat- and life-seeking missiles.
I am the grim reaper.

And the Dark Window is watching me again.
It peers into me, now-- and I am powerless to resist.
It stalks me in my dreams.

I see only myself and the candle by my side.
Not a bit else reflects.
The Window will not let me leave.

Everywhere else:
I see a face.

Tree Limb xx.xx.011

I cut the tree, limb from limb and I think about the line (is there a line?) between life and death. I strip one of the large limbs of its bark, admiring the eerie glow-- pale white, like bone. The limb is heavy; naked; bare. Its length is coated in slippery sap, and I am reminded of blood. I have just killed, yet the line between death and life could not be more unclear. Beneath my fingertips, living cells are rushing towards some end (sentient, or no?) . . .