Bubble

You trembling sphere, you quivering world:
You rise toward the waves.
You are anxious, submarine beauty,
As the scene you ascend sleeps in aquatic silence,
Laden with gravity and fear.
But still you rise.
When you arrive, you will not retain
Your form, like a retired bullfighter
Wearing his cape to breakfast.
You will dissolve, fearlessly,
Into the pure fullness of your being.
You will be sky, wind, breath
As I breathe you in, tortured by the mysteries
Of land and sea—and suddenly,
As I sit scratching my cheek, my heart rises
In defiance of my anchored emotions.

Blink

Your eyelashes flash, fluttering
As pages stutter blindly in a thumb’s
Slow release.
Syllables quibble off of my paralyzed lips
As I take you in.
Your gaze breaks
From its jealous object as you turn
Your attention toward me.
I lie,
Framing jokes and acting sane,
As your little laugh shatters my world.
I’m quiet,
And you are beautiful.
When you are again distracted from
My thin attempts to see you smile,
I turn again to my pen and paper,
And sing your praise between blue lines.

On Being Loved

I’m glad I had a shitty home life. I can’t imagine hearing myself whine as much as some of these polished porcelain children who can’t seem to get over the realization that nobody’s going to be there when they break.
Of course, I’ve got nothing to complain about, myself. I grew up with enough to eat, enough to read, gnawing nipples and fingering knives with a sly smile that would make Freud reach for his pen. Yea verily, I went resentfully to a federally subsidized school, that pride of the middle-class taxpayer, that torturer of tapping feet and wandering minds. I spun sinister plots on that playground, bending fresh fantasies daily like a baker smelling yesterday’s bread as he turns on the lights. My parents hated each other, of course, but they were fairly quiet about it for a while. The grain of guilt festering in the filter of their stressed-out heads kept them roped together and only silently contemptuous. I fought with my sisters like any good boy, pinched the dog when Sunday’s backyard was sleeping, and cried in silence at the static on the TV screen when I woke up for cartoons and didn’t know what to do.
Sure, I was a fine child. But never really loved. My father never called me by my real name, preferring to hide impersonality behind a nursery wallpaper of postnatal christenings and a funny falsetto, pinching and tickling incessantly but never really wanting to grasp our innocent giggles, ruffle our sun-touched hair. My mother would have liked to love me. The heavy boot of her work-ravished world repeatedly stomped the shards of the bright daydreams I sometimes imagine her fondling through college. She had a strong mind—imprisoned now—and I imagine her youth, that muscular mind plowing through the soils of her education, breaking with a smile to chase faceless children to the house where she would someday live with a handsome husband. The reality—that she was not permitted to love me as she was so obviously dying to—that, at times, makes me question my faith.
And now, these people appear before me, rising from the crystalline lakes of a golden childhood, guarded from the evil sneezes of a sick world by all the medicine money and love could buy—and they waste it. I look into their eyes and see frail frames that have never had to fight for anything. They, the ornately programmed and musical machines, well-oiled, well-kept, that run well for a dime—that have never learned anything on their own. They who are spoiled on love, those merely affectionate beings: I look sternly, steadily at this portrait, cough into a clenched fist, and continue quietly down the hall.

Ode to Women

Poets, rush the last lines
Of your odes to women:
There are strangers on the street
Who won’t rip you apart.
Leaves kiss whispered dewdrops
Unrealized in the wilderness,
And dogs whine waiting to be loved.
Women arrive to introduce diseases
And then dangle the cure—
Those missing pages,
Those beautiful vultures.
There have been men, honest,
Who looked at that door
And refused to enter, preferring
To protest the mad instinct,
To burn like Buddhist monks
In the fire of the unwanted desire,
Laughing in the flames.
So christen this crisis the last;
Bells toll the tide’s approach,
And your clocks are out on the sand.

Alone

Door by door, you're passing me by, laughing and crying into ears that aren't listening; and I'm sitting inside, all alone.
Because you could open me up. Yes, it takes depth of character and years' experience to get it down right; we're all drunk on our own insecurities, howling in pain underneath pristine exteriors, crawling around amid the shambles of our feelings searching for something to sell to a consumer economy. But just stop a minute, and listen carefully: I'm here to meet you, as torn-up by the world as the world is by itself; I'm standing just on the other side, waiting for the slightest insinuation, a faint falter from the heights of your indifference—a slip of the censor, a prick of the hidden tenderness. Knock, friend, ever so quietly; place your palm on the knob, and I'll let you in.
God, how it hurts to see the world place you back on the rack. Society’s education is to learn to see oneself through the eyes of others, who have been taught the same thing. And the murderous insight of the unschooled is the realization of the system’s insistence on mandating who you are and then condemning you for it.
Where does all this come from? Hurt feelings, naturally. I don’t know if I’ve ever been slightly understood by anyone (I really don’t), but today the person who I had imagined as catching a scent of my simmering essence, who caught a glimmer of my movement in his periphery, and for whom I had crumpled up so many lonely hopes—today that person refused to see me as I actually am. Some stranger said something that alerted him to a coincidence, a condemned eccentricity in my character—and I watched from the ground as he went flying around the corner, having tripped over my wasted faith as he ran. Held his breath, afraid of the quarantine. I watched the curtain fall over his eyes.
The world is a vampire, ain’t that the damned truth. And I sigh as I hear the heckling of those who love me unconditionally, enraged at the use of a dirty word.

Note

Here’s the deal: when I tap my foot on the ash-stained cement, you be the butterfly mounting invisible treble clefs to the conduction of city sirens. That’s it, and that’s all. The people passing in cars being beaten apart by over-amplified basses can watch as we re-create musical theory; I don’t want anything but the simplicity of this streetlamp’s warm territory.
Forget the tangled knots you stuffed into your pockets to deal with later; let’s not gift existence to these trivialities by holding solemn conferences over them. Let them rot on the agenda.
Conversely, let the future die in the fictional distance. I’m sick of committing. Horizons lie, anyway. We’re orbiting reality, love; let’s slow down to the terrestrial tug.
So here we go: the street expects, the finger finds, and the interrupted transitive implies impatience. The decrepit conductor turns, straightening his coattail and running a cool hand over his pallid pate; lips are licked and pressed to polished mouthpieces in romantic preparation; and eyes straining under the weight of disdainful brows search out the source as my whispered joke reaches the punch line, and your hand flutters up to contain a muffled chuckle.

Apology

The cosmos paused before the storm awoke,
And the sneeze teased, and the water waited.
The doorway’s torpid tension never broke
Between out and in. The music faded.
My home’s moment of respiratory
Crisis, the pendulum’s pause at the rhyme
Of its smile, a gray hour’s purgatory
Implying the absolute. On ticked time,
Her fretful fingers swinging make-believe
Rings around the hole where I watched the lights
Fade on and off. Then the air coughed, the sieve
Strained, and fingers danced on keys in the night.

Your image clouds with my trembling exhale—
In the storm’s static I raise my shirt-tail.

Glass-Topped Table and an Underline

A prophetic mug cramps the diffused profusion
That slowly reaches self-realization on my
Coffee table, its parched cavity telling vestigial truths
Of future reuses.
Several bygone sepulchral celebrities
Drown in their undesired glory as they hang on these walls—
Preoccupied antitheses of those nonentities that swim
Through the profits of their prostituted beauty
As they slouch on wire racks in-between
Cheap chocolate and the real deal.
Mountainous academia seems self-suspended
Over my extended legs, as my toes huddle
For shod consolation between four sundry sentries
Guarding the ancient inexplicable eclipses made by
My stifling textbooks. Other objects of interest include
A gas heater reminding me of thermal pockets of paradise
In-between the dually depressing horrors of
My pulled-back covers and a teacher’s icy exhales—
And a quaint collection of poetry that slyly reminds me of
Happiness, and suddenly the sheets are slipping.

Here's One From the Lazy Days of Summer

My goodness. It seems like the day starts right before it starts to end. Where does it all go? Down a hole? Is there a reserve somewhere, and a stringent distributor? I always lie in bed at night, having pushed as far into the morning’s hours as my body allowed, with the taste in my mouth of not having enough drink to wash down a dry bite. Turn up the glass to get the last drop, concentrate the flow, swallow with steady force—and it’s still not enough. A cruel proximity to satiation. And then I drift off to sleep still dry-mouthed, I awake in the morning, sit down to a long wooden breakfast table at the other end of which is seated a man silently snickering behind the blind of a quivering newspaper, and the maid who refills my unwashed glass with the exact same amount of liquid as the day before seems only a little better at hiding her hilarity. I try bargaining, sometimes pleading with her for more, but she scurries off quickly, somehow embarrassed before my confused inquiries, her seams about to burst from the tension of her restraint. I swallow slowly, satisfaction escapes around the bend of an imperfect angle, and then—off to bed. That’s it. Nobody looks me in the eye. And I never get anything done.
Wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast (an illogical order recognized here), book, store, home, lunch, phone a friend, regular exercise, lethargic languor, hazy words on the printed page, pitiful attempt at creativity, and then off to bed…still thirsty. And feeling like my day consisted merely of carrying out those dull daily prerequisites for experiencing life’s true substance. I’m perpetually preparing to live. A sigh is all that comes out when I pose for prayer, and my words haven’t had time to simmer to moist divinity. I spend a moment hoping that God knows what I mean, and then somnolence sneaks up from underneath and kicks me into the reflective waters. That was another day—and here I am, with two sad paragraphs and eight to ten fingers’ worth of alphabetical buttons.
And every night I’m revisited by the recurring dream of being blessed with insomnia.

Please

The arduous melody flees through the wind-tickled trees and the band players tremble in blushed intimidation at the well-fed notes being born of their horns. My steps transpire on the sidewalk’s surface as if on a coarse independent plane (a squarely sectionalized pathway to the absurd), my mind absorbs the tones and colors of my own psychological projections, dressed and deemed worthy of a fine play on words, and my eyes roam over this town which I’ve seen a thousand times, which I’ve never seen before.
And all of this in my mind. In reality I sit in a church office thinking about her, trying to decide how to die and with what style and which pants. The old people—old couples, sad men, quiet widows, all smelling like embalming fluid—that have been floating across the span of my open doorway for the past three days, here to have their pictures taken for a collage of everyone who hasn’t realized that someday they will die, talk always about their hair and ailments. Ironic, that they perpetually complain of illness and never really die. My God, is it impossible to have a purpose at that age?
My thoughts return to her, her as she stands there blinking into the silence, sits here laughing with that silly friend, her as, eyes gravity-stricken, she whispers to my confidant that she can’t tell who I am. I—I try to justify my jerkiness with cynical syllogisms and existential angst; I try to cry, but I only sneeze.
And every night I pray for hours. Isn’t that funny? I pray for hours and never talk to God. I wake up and spit sloppy insults, write contemptuous words about the sweet, if virtuously mediocre, old people sitting quietly in the folding chairs in the hallway, I refuse to let her into my mind (it’s so messy—I’ve just seen off a raucous band of criminals that ate my food and ignored me when I tried to entertain them at the breakfast table), and I don’t know how to respond when someone actually cares. Funny, right?
Yes, quite funny. I laugh it up in my dark psychotic basements or out in the streets as I burn down the edifices of innocence, drunk as hell.

Prayer

Let me forge these days as my weapon
And not let them merely fly by, raw material.

The earth spins over the years, you know—
Millions or billions, trend dependent—

But our work is to mold it.

Eight Lines at the Beach

The crustaceous arachnids crudely crawling
A slow scamper sideways across the rocks,
The beer-laden duo covered in sandy tattoos
With their illusory masculinity poorly mooring
Weak wills and weird fears,
The tide rises over the bobbing bodies
Of an anxious cluster necessitated by the raging waves,
And the naked girls’ blind butts outshine the seashells.

Sadness

And the strangest thing
Is that you let them.

Yes, you—you sitting there smiling
As they make their ridiculous demands
On your peace and quiet,
That band of political pirates.
And you walk away,
You walk away somehow proud—
Like a teenage girl who let him
Go too far.
They’re raping you,
Little girl.

Spiritually ravaging you.
How could you let them?
Because, you know, this is
Very avoidable: God only waits
For you to say the word…
Silence.
And I sit, dissolved into a corner,
Letting them laugh on in the thunder
Of their excrement,
Watching as they take everything from you.
Your ancestor’s heirlooms,
Your kid’s candy.
Sometime down the road they’ll
Beat you up and take your clothes.

How? Or why does it take place?
This conformation to foreign fashion,
This imitation of their inattentive conception,
Their desecrating cartoons of your
Holy confession?
(The neighbor’s muddy dogs running
Rampant across your poor mother’s kitchen floor.)
Why do you act like they want you to?
Why do the girls give up like that?

I’ve yelled these questions into
Mirrors and madhouses.
I always end up insane.

And the craziest thing
Is that you let them.

I Laugh Sometimes A Lot

On the porch, reading and whatnot. A glance at an impatient cell phone screen tells me its 1:15 a.m. This is my favorite part of the day, as scheduled. A dark bark from an unseen dog, the undulating roll of the crickets' exchange (somehow never monotonous or annoying), me snickering and hearing myself--a self-repeating cycle ensues. The night's appropriation is saved for those who can look back on a day of satisfying self-assertion. Me from the morning is a long way off, far enough now for me to wave at without this mocking expression being perceived by the distant figure. The orange haze from the streetlamp filtering through the leaves, the thick impersonal darkness closing my perception into a manageable space, contrasting my consciousness in a way the sunshine never could. This nocturnal weight presses the juices from these long-standing impressions, and I miss her, that quiet girl. Then I laugh. The coincidence of multiple instances of me drinking wine and loving life just a little more than usual is humorously and forebodingly scaring me. But it's funny.
I have a doctor's appointment at 10:15 in the morning. I need to leave time for an only slightly laborious waking-up and those purely necessary hygienic routines. This would be a suitable time for me to go to sleep--but I don't much like suits anyway.

Death of a Bicycle

The midnight fight of pale headlights,
Like a raging cancer patient falling out of bed,
The backward burn of that secret red
That shows the frightened dust
Falling from these vague leaves
As the vacuous cat purrs with me inside—
I’m leaning out of its side window.
The small house where we picked him up,
Him and his bicycle, where we came to get it—
The house opens its eyelid and
Sees his mother waking up within.
The detained light is a danger to our whispers.
And me the seated beast’s last voluntary victim,
Her stomach plays horrible music
As I watch these floundering friends
Take him apart, the bicycle.
A sudden blow to his bisected head and
He is on the ground, his veins twitching still.
They are upon him all at once,
Dealing out the suffering blows
In the crawling crimson vapors
Of our secret sadism.
I turn away, I turn away as I hear
His gurgled cry for help.
A firefly perforates the night air
And I pretend to connect the segments;
A lone lamp stranded in the country field
Melts a pool of orange butter below—
But I still see them tearing him up.
They deal him their gasping frustrations,
Unnecessary now, and take him apart
Piece by piece.
He must fit in the back, you know,
And I am chosen to squeeze in there,
This mechanical corpse all unbolted
And disfigured.
So I stare straight ahead, and giggle quietly
As I imagine that vacant tire’s
Dead gaze, haunting my periphery.
These friends laugh loudly, and we drive.

Spiritually Speaking

If you're looking, you're going to find it. And if you're not--well, maybe you'll get lucky.

C

The ugly thing about beauty
Is that you’re not here with me.
You pretty girl,
You unknown force,
You swirl of subtle movements that
Compose some profound silence.
You devastation.
The vibrant vibration
That has made it’s home in
A room behind my stomach,
The dizzy winds that spin
Scintillating around my head
Serve only to awaken me
To a very small hole that
Runs right through the middle—
The circumference of the finger that I
Once felt so faintly in my palm.

(You opaque presence in this room
Of half-human transparency.)

Yet everything is divine.
I awake into infinity
And act ecstatically.
The day is everything, but
Nothing more than a composition
Of a million open moments.

(But in weak minutes and quarter-hours
The days are merely parenthetical asides
In a story of me awaiting the entrance
Of the compelling absent protagonist.)

Just like that,
The movement suddenly turns tragic—
A sudden disorientation with no explanation,
A subterranean shift,
A rare scent on the wind,
Amnesia in the courtroom,
That feeling of waking up lost
Or forgetting why you walked in
Or anticipatory anxiety
Or maybe just
Fear.

Fear
Of unveiling something empty
That’s wrapped up like a present
Or opening your mouth and finding
Nothing.
Fear of
That woman with the scissors and the
Ghostly eyes
Or maybe some mother who
Drinks in the back room.
Fear me, because I fear you
Showing up out of nowhere and
Finding me like this.

(Open me up and inside you will find
A muttering old man neurotically combing his hair.)

I’m afraid that
Somewhere between the clouded frames
Of my magnified self-conceptions
The handsome proprietors of
My unsanitary solitude are
Slowly murdering you in my mind,
Quietly and behind my back
The thieves of my timetable are
Defiling the collage I had formed
From the things you said when
You thought I wasn’t listening.

Perhaps the next time we pass on the street
Or greet in my dreams
You won’t fit the description.

Or
Perhaps,
Like a bright bell twinkling
Through this voluptuously
Volatile night,
Like the small touch of a child
Descending your dreams of destruction,
Perhaps this is not so bad, after all.

I’m struggling in your arms
Like a child in a nightmare.
Hold on
Tighter
Love,
Look at me
And smile.

Nietzsche Could Have Said

Nostalgia is felt by those who dream longingly of times when they were not fully awake.
No one who seizes and swallows every harbinger of life ever looks back with anything but fondness and approval--and that for but a moment before they keep on.

Night Drive

When all I ever had was right before me then:
A faint flourescent line and a monotonous warning refraction
A weight was contained in a pale beam's divorce
And lifetimes passed by as I waited to die.

An Atheist Manifesto

[In fond and loving memory of Bertrand Russell, a man who was heavy with the weight of a reasonable life.]
We, who commune together in recognition of godless ground, who do not create but accept reality, who do not judge but are so easily judged, who strain under the burden of a scientific objectivity, we who are, in short, the scum of the earth, the meek and mild -- we are Atheists. We, by definition and linguistic analysis, are: against the concept of God. Our very identity is found in antithesis. We are the anti-Christ.
And, therefore, we manifest ourselves in contrast to the ignorant of the world.
Christianity is characterized by its blind bigotry, arbitrary and manipulative dogma, concealed hatred, and an ever unerring exclusivist descrimination of infinitesimal particularities. Christians -- these who require blind leaps of faith from a nonsensical platform of emotional manipulation, these who take up violent ambitions against the peaceful people of a godless world, these whose words bite so unwittily from mouths envious of freedom -- these must be fought back. The veiling ambiguity of their cloud of unknowing has advanced too far upon our purely physical earth -- now, their hate must be hated, their bigotry must be likewise countered; we, the moral-less, we must utilize our freedom from ethical ties. We must strive to attract their envy in tearing down the structure of their conformist imperatives. I implore you: act out their presumed evil and feel no grief; run all the faster as guilt chases you! Never, brothers -- never let them catch you in despair! We must preserve our image.
I ask you all, murderers of god, to briefly put your trust in me. Unite in this goal with me and the conscienceless devils of all nations -- we must destroy this pseudo-angelic ideology.
We do not attack out of hate -- no, that would be too much like them; we do not strike down out of envy -- no, that is their pill; and we are not seething in this pool of burning impatience and frustration out of guilt or despair -- that is so obviously preposterous as to transcend logical negation.
No, we the pure of purpose, the guiltless hearts, the bloodless hands -- we the killers of god seek only the unadultered truth. Ah, it is our holy plight, but it must be endured! We must endure the holy fools and the holier-than-thous, the heavy depression of an unveiled reality, the listlessness of the abyss -- but we must do more than persevere: we must act, and decisively! We must strive to destroy the crystal balls of fantastic imagination that float, suspended in nothingness, beside us, unaware of the airless space encompassing them. We must strike the fragile, homogenous microcosms of illusioned madness -- for the sake of those poor, blind souls within! Brothers, sons of equation and daughters of chance, natives of Actuality: we are the righteous, the noble, the holy. We seek only that all may come to see clearly in the light of the presumptionless vividity of reason. These who are happier than we are truly objects of pity. We must burst the proverbial bubble and release into the unorganized abyss those noxious gases which drug those within into the scintillatingly false belief that they are happy.
But, amidst such unrestrained pity for the mystically imaginative who cannot see clearly the facts of life through our own scientific scope -- amidst our sympathies, there is room enough -- yes, room enough, even in our vacuum-sealed abyss -- room enough for anger at such obtuseness. Take courage, brethren; such anger in righteous.
These who are holy, superior, drugged; these who are happy, blessed, illusioned; these who see glory, hear promises, feel underneath a blazing irrationality; these whose explanations and arguments display such despicable and cowardly faith and lack of logic -- these are the hell-bound. Be wary, ye Christians -- here ye hell bound have opportunity to accept the most paradoxical of rewards: despair. If you deny the Spirit of the Circle, ye crazy Christians, you will be doomed to a lake of childlike joy forevermore.
These are the hypocrites.......
[We.]
Johannes Antichrist

These Premature Nights (Ode to Friendship)

These premature nights are a drink
Spilled at a well-lit dinner party:
Unexpected, unrequested
And dissolving formlessly in my lap.

Seems something's been lost
Which I cannot put my finger on
Or I'm waiting to regret
An accidental deviation.
The unaltered clouds, white paint
That translucently reveals
The grey-purple cheekbone
Of a divinely silent yet
Somehow spooky entity
Of the all-around -- those clouds
Are more like the daunting chant
Of a confusing savage religion
Or a nihilistic smoke signal
From no one.

On nights like this I can't do anything.
The compounded sounds of my chair's mechanics
And the consistent tapping of my half-crazed obligations
Are a suspended sand castle of an optimistic child --
Secretly crushed by the wind as it pours
Horizontally through a million sleeping leaves.

And, even now, when the world is my brother
Who didn't think out his practical scare
And in fact has caused me to cry --
Even now I want to retreat to you like my mother.
Even now, when the warmth of my pocket
Is my soul's last recluse;
When metaphysical notions are a bright day's deceit
And humanity's movements are mapped mechanics;
When you and the world and everything else
Are all just a reflection in the galactic eye of a puzzling God --
Yes, even now my heart's yearning traverses
This infinite distance which eternally separates
Two specks of soul, distance existing even
When our hallowed bodies collide in holy reunion --
After repetitive dips into melodramatic death
That we act out like my little sister's costume party,
With imagined tea
And everything.

When mistaken nights like these fall into my lap,
The subterranean love reveals to my misty eyes
The distance of necessity.

[The Firstfruits of a Poem]

Hastily erased remains of their silhouetted lesson plan --
The chalky ghosts of their ancestral conceptions
Make me content to attend the formulated funeral
Of a dead education.