Your Dreams

 

You Dream at night

And those Dreams are like sitcom television

you have a predictable pattern and a laugh track

A loop of Dreams

Driving/Lost Wanderings

Airports/A lost passport

The alternate paths of life/Lonely ministrations to the soul

Deep fear/pure suspense

The wailing/Siren song of misery of a life not lived well

Spreading its warmth through your vocal chords with a luxurious disdain

a longing to be removed from 

flame and pitchforks and the general screeching sounds of metal/

Meeting the axe with hands in supplication

seeing which one will be the first to give in to the demands of the other.

Scope of it

Some lament 

Warbling out of me in bird song

As the wind starts to settle itself

and the Sun is shifting its angle-

Contorting in slow, diagonal positions-

A gentle descent.

My Notes held at length,

Letting the sound do the lord’s work.

My grief in the pleasant murmurings of the later afternoon.

Throwing passing swipes at the still branches of the trees

Swirling around the crowns of long shadows

Trillings stir from my crumpled frame’s rasping song box,

Pushing notes 

Into existence

Becoming a melody

Pitched into the air and echoing back from the other mournful aviaries,

Sobbed into music,

clipping the stillness

as the sun says it’s goodbye

and the song becomes a symphony 

in the darkness.

Ecosystem of a Grievance

 

I nourish the malcontent by eating a spoonful of rotten prunes each morning

while the television yells in my living room’s general direction. 

I’ve been hiding all of the ill will in a dank, clammy basement with a mud floor. 

Letting it outside on overcast evenings where the moon is a faint ring that whirrs, fading, aged fluorescent crescent. An aura around a darkened circle. Sterile road leading into town, lined with streetlights hinting at their own fuzz of light.

Before the crisp air can wake up its senses, I cram it back into the dark corner. Kick it. Use coarse words.

I turn on my car’s AM radio and feel it between the voices, crawling out of a far away canyon mixed with an auditory haze. Played through a mute. Buzzing with rage a size too small. A little deeper, into the well I threw a rock into last week but I’m still waiting for it to hit the water. For the satisfying rush of the surface tension breaking.

I am starting to worry.

If the well has gone dry, where will we end our thirst?

The prunes writhe inside me.

Stretching their clenched fists and slamming into my vital organs.

The television and the radio swell their chests up. 

Make their voices blend in the sound of appliances left to run on the highest setting. Wail for relief.

I am waiting for the well-maintained shoe to drop.

Waiting to hear the sound to tell me what to do next.

So much of me is ready to finally Let loose.

Own it.

Now.

Zen Ruination Pt 1

 

let the rest

Take care of itself,

the circle meet its end

of it’s own volition,

the age old questions

passed from our scholar fathers and their scholar fathers remain unanswered-untouched and unblemished by the ravages of brainwork,

a rock falling down a chute forged in the shape of the rock,

smooth,

made for the moment and her indeterminate visitation,

despite the distance traveled,

coming and going,

unchanged.

Young Liars (not featuring TV on the Radio)

 

If silence were golden

You’d be chipping your tooth on fool’s gold

then spitting your fillings into the collection plate again.

Caught doing it for the fourth time

this fiscal quarter.

A real blunder, this one.

The improprieties pile up on one another-leaning precarious, struggling to see over the edge, locked in a mothball-ridden closet.

Molding with the passage of time-

Still vintage.

If vintage were the wheels, catching fire from heated, seized calipers, the entire contraption falling off and rolling into the glamorous lake, the pride of our little slice of heaven.

And I’ll sit by and let the torn rubber and the chemical smell of spurned brakes choke out the fish in the water, seep into the drinking supply.

revenge-a measure of it-

Finally.

Gravity Rides Everything (not featuring Modest Mouse)

 

From a distant star

The flashbulb burning itself 

into the collective’s

knowing oblivion.

A blip and blop and click and sputter.

Morse in uneven distribution

of light’s focus.

Slipping into an inkwell.

Returning unblemished

Dipping again

Into an unknown.

Slept well

and

Shaken awake

At the whims of

Some unseen

dark-hearted puppeteer.

Boy in the Bubble (not featuring Paul Simon)

 

I’m a show pony

Rambling with incoherence and sweat and a directionless

chattering of my lips and teeth

slapping together

with the delirium of wisdom in a tighter space than

really should be allowed right about now

they’ll strap on my feedbag 

and send me out to the pasture

to put a pistol square on my forehead

and fire this bullet of confetti back into my brain

where I’ll dream of the range

before I was taken to be paraded

in front of the masses

shuffling and showing my gums

to check my value

against the barcode and the blue book

page

the one with the picture of me

smiling with a dead man’s grin

hugging the fence for dear life

and being so much more than they bargained for when they put the down payment on me slapped a harness on my back and corralled me with a whip and a chair to usher me out to the dusty trail

Late Registration (not featuring Known Anti-Semite Kanye West)

 All of the day

All day

Each

Moment

I am absorbed

In the clinking sound of the glass

Touching against my face

As I scream against the window

Full tilt. Belly on fire.

Even the water

Only fuels the 

Flames

In their search

For whatever remains

inside me.

Garden Song (not featuring Phoebe Bridgers)

Shake off the dew, vibrations hanging on the edges of the row of flowers. Sharp thorns running up the stem, something brittle-wooden. Uncanny in the ability to draw blood from incidental contact. Transgressions of passing.

Thorns squall around me. A Stretching color game from hell. Leaving my limbs with little purchase in their airspace. They wail in acknowledgement, unaccustomed to being denied this entitlement. 

Dug straight in from inside a well-hidden space, obscured by worn rock wall. My sullen form jitters-anticipation left to spoil.

The thorns collapse down, smelling the thrill of the hunt. I do my merit best to compress and contort away from their fall pattern. The edge of the raised, sharp-thornteeth.

New scratches and nominal droppings of blood smeared around my own edges, blots forming from my core outward. Constellations to color my form. A snarl denoting a victory across my face. I am made something uncommon. A new sense of whole. Known, smoothed out in the rush of emotion. A survivor, sipping the last few drops from the flowers. Thirst, trying to be quenched. 

Again

Time Placement

All my time

Spent

In fragments.

I could write it a love letter and throw it, without a bottle, into the ocean.

For all it is worth.

Churned by the white froth.

Wetted and torn by the elements.

Ink running deeper into the sea

In gobs

Distorted blots to poison the sea life.

Better to fold it up,

Into the perfect,

Well-manicured paper airplane

to toss from a great height.

Let the wind allow it to travel where it wishes.

Borne across the currents to a place where

Birds will tear the sentiments apart with beaks and beady black eyes.

Shit out my words on unsuspecting windshields

To be blasted away by bargain wiper fluid.

and to slip into the road.

Deep into our streams

and make the least of us

Vomit into the cold, night air.

In surprise, grasping our chests for relief.

What it amounts to in the end-

Always a poisoner,

and those who are poisoned.

Remote

We lost the remote again.

As a result, life has been stuck on the same infomercial.

-3 easy payments of 19.99

-No CODs

-Buy now get 3 free.

-Wait, there’s more…

How have we lived without it?

Whatever it is.

The world would never know,

Except we will always know

Because the confounded remote

has disappeared

into the vortex that is the couch,

Or the basement,

Or another dimension that is inaccessible to this mortal coil.

Meanwhile, here we are,

Ready to buy,

But waiting for the number 

to flash across the frozen screen.