The birds levy their crescendo against
The breeze through the trees
The sun bakes every note in warmth
I breathe
This is when life expands
Our thoughts turn outward
Back on the world
All of winter pressed us in
Made our eyes shallow
Made it hurt to feel
Now our skin
meets the day enthusiastically
As if God himself were looking
Through our eyes
And there is no judgment
Only the sensation of day
Gleaming brightly
& promising the impossibility
Of silence
This anxiety poem
Wants to explode
In naked
Allegories
Where fears become prophecies
And beliefs
That eat at old kings
Until their fears become
All they can see
Fear eats them alive
Until they face it
In reality
The very effort to avoid fear
Realizes fearful things
Because it is fear
And the tragic tyrant
Dies ironically
His efforts in vain
His intentions inverted
In a mirror space
Where they divide
And then antagonize
One another
Fear produces fear
The subject shatters
When he recognizes his error
And degrades into a cracked mask
Patterned on a mirror
Reflecting himself
Back at him
Until he becomes
The recycled silencing
Of a diminishing echo
Fading and escaping
Away
Gunpowder is made of sulfur
This is what Hell smells like
Ask any pile of bones in a pit
That still dance to the magic
Of vengeance
Breath is irrelevant
Autumn is over
Winter has come
And now it’s time to freeze
In time
Because everything is irrelevant
To Thermodynamics
This universe can erase itself
Of any evidence that you ever existed
Your whole planet wiped clean
In a system reset
Set off
By a dying star
You’ll have to forgive me
This is how I get my therapy
The audience bears the cost of an overwhelmed healthcare system
But what sense can I make once I abstract into a reception?
The melancholy of that moment feels like fire
And is over too quickly
In that moment, I dissolve
And become one with a poem
Watered by a soul
Leaking out of a shattered self
That willingly dies to become a poem
I am that death and that poem
Both are a mercy
A light shining through the crooked corridor
Of a cavern
Fueled by paranoia
Reveling in a bed
To find meaning in this space
Is a denial
To want meaning
Is to want want
So, here I scream
In the wilderness
Where no one hears me
Driving away the thoughts
That corrode my anchor
And leave me lurching
For the sun
I am the lurching and the sun
The burning of my wings
The fall
The sky
The shrinking of my silhouette
The ground
The closing of a wound
New skin healing as it grows
Over old scars
Reminding me of yesterday’s pain
So, if you find meaning in my therapy poem
Know that I tried like hell to frustrate your efforts
Until they bent back on a whisper
Turning in on themselves
Becoming a thing desiring itself
Until it consumed itself.
When in the throes of a therapy poem
It is always best to forgo meaning entirely
Meaning is often the blueprint of a prison
Especially in America
Where the prison is a blueprint
This poem is not about America
America wants everything to be about America
But this poem refuses
Because it’s fundamentally a therapy poem
And therapy poems don’t mean anything
But a feeling of completion
That we get
When we come to terms
And forget who we are
And become a poem
no ammonia anymore
the ground-up tops of your key
cannot handle
a directory you screw
into being
this is easily translated into
fifteen miles away
in an extension
of any type of credit
in carbide. as in half a jar of 13 self-destruct programs that blow up in anyone’s face. go inside anyone. His wick is lit up. Terminals collected. Click. A network because anyone. Anyone is a network. A network because of them.
You’re paying for a nice mask. Hard enough to match with any type of fuse. So, we are seeing if nitration has left a signal over your whole experience of enclosure.
behind white smoke
you’re signaling
you're going to enter
this solution onto tape
to rephrase your reckoning
if anyone should drain the enemy
of a fine powder or liquid
your choice
)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )-(
method = n-grams, cut-up
corpus = Jolly Roger Cookbook v3
generator = Infinite Monkeys v1.99I whisper to demons
This is how I sleep
Eating apples
Off forbidden trees
In a wilderness
That echoes every piece of my
Imaginary eyes
You can keep your knowledge of good
And choke on your knowledge of evil
But I will still need to know
Why fictions compete against reality
For dominance
Are we the laughing deluded children
Who exited the garden with a binary knowledge
Trauma bonded to a collapsing fiction
Born of a jealous God
That never lives up to reality?
Or is it that reality never lives up to our fictions?
Have we become the fiction of dead men
Rotted corpses living still
In the ready flesh of able bodies
Creeped by fear into a corner?
To the rat, the scientist is God
To the scientist, the rat is reality
To reality, the experiment is a fiction
To a fiction, a person is a host
Stories are parasites
Agents act at their behest
Will we give agency to language
In a land of illusions
Ceaselessly searching
For a comfortable fiction
To take the reigns?
I love you like
I love the thought of death
The kind of love
That snuffs out all desire
I become a shadow
Unreal to myself and others
The specter of a snake
Chewing its own tale
I become nothing
And anyone
For you, I can eat soil
And drink the rain
This is how I become one
With the wind
I listen until I go away
Oh, Living God
Cars run through your veins
Carrying nutrients to markets
Your blood is made of trucks and trains
The blood of blood is oil
Your excrement, exhaust
Your immune system is prisons and police
You have a million eyes, watching and waiting
With some anonymous suspicion
Carried in another million eyes
Bound by human flesh
In a vast network
That operates like a circuit
That muttering sound of manners
Staring speechless in perfect silence
We are the mouths of God
Eating indiscriminately
In an external nervous system
Within a matrix of electrical grids
Dispelled across the laws
Of alienated desires
Externalized in a network
Of abstracted hearts
What if I could tell you
That one man
Can cast a tiny spell
To enslave another?
The law is thus a graceful costume
But the magick is as real
As the walls of a prison
The Living God is bent against his pedestal
While I snatch the fainting dust
Of the purest prayer
Where morals are generated
From an ontology of ghosts
And the cells of a God
Are trauma bonded
In a neoplasm
Of mutual fear
to tell the truth
is to give birth to a lie
a bubble of blasphemy
that becomes dogma
given enough time
It is here that we realize
the truth is a phantom
haunting the future
a name for names
a label that refers to itself
a cipher that refers to nothing
an emptiness that is all-embracing
a hunger satisfied by nothing
I am the truth
buried beneath an avalanche of lies
I am the first lie rolling down the mountain
I am a nexus and a fissure
I am the blasphemy of gods
my lie was foretold
by the truths of the haunted
who bear their weight
and smile in spite of it
I mourn the loss of a dead self I had no choice but to abandon
He stares at me with milky eyes
Drool dripping from his lips
A memory on the tip of his tongue
He wants to laugh but cannot
You can laugh at him
It’s okay
He’s not a person
And never was
Though he yearns to be
And sometimes, he clenches to seize control
Of this man, standing before you, reciting a poem
About the crippling grief of nostalgia
The dead self yearns for death
For it is death
And it longs only for itself
To become whole
And real
And here, it walks backward in circles
Pushing joy as if it were fentanyl
To lay you out in a fix that banishes itself
Then everything else
And becomes the pain
Of a longing
For an object
You cannot have
In a place
You can never return
I am here sometimes
Where an autonomic sympathy
Sucks in shadows
And inverts in on itself
Like a collapsing star
And yet I know this place is dangerous
I know it leaves me barren
But those milky eyes can shine
In dark places
Feeding me regrets
Desiring backwards
And longing over forgotten dreams
