18 Jan

Turmoil Go Ahead  

This isn’t the first time 

I open up the drawer 

and an octagonal passage 

too small to descend 

falls like a paradise  

balsawood 

flowerladder  

onto a cobalt-blue floor.  

Mystery fumes from the opening. 

I hear pleasing sounds. 

Laughter and distant celebration.  

Strong perfume. Garlic onions and deep chocolate.  


↑ Is that what I think it is?

You may be enlightened or poisoned. 

Who can say what waits beyond the roses?  

Is it Cleopatra’s asp? 

The bird who fell from her nest? 

A troll who insults and violates you? 

A spirit watching from a distant tree 

laughing five ways-wrong-you-stumble?  

One foot follows another. Maybe  

that should end with us.  

On a scarecrow, ravens laugh. 

Nothing scary anymore 

and the dense corn keeps me living.  

My questions are answered by a soft body 

 with coffee first morning. 

Time slowed to punish me.  


Is that the music of Rameau?  

Am I a part of Masterpiece Theater 

or the fight for my own life 

and how it should go?  


The forehead of the fantasy, in which his childhood is argued as ok because he lived It and thinks of your family though kitsch Is a sign of fascism 

My directors have mandated this 

surely knowing they are pushing too far X 

when someone else is asking Y. 

But what can I do? 

Jealousy and boredom. 

Oxygen and hydrogen.  


Rain clouds are not the only omen.  


Soon you’ll be shouting 

Ok, I get it  

waiting for the angel sun to rise  

but all there is  

is more rain. 

More crows landing. 

Maybe a woodpecker now. 

(I don't know much about my own opinions.)  


The countryside becomes a maze of thorns 

a necropolis I walk with frozen yogurt 

waking up to say no time has passed.  


But years into your green curves  

the autumn full of dewdazzled webs 

and winter glare stripping hillside snow 

the grossness of spring as Scott Walker sang 

the explosions of last summer 

I realize the quickness of life  

outlasts all its other qualities   


sometimes so quickly I believe 

a rainbow is illusion 

the gold and the sea do not mix 

and the lizard appraising the sunset 

dehydrating in the vortex between the color and the indigo 

is invisible as shadow 

or the humpback whale 

or you.  


Lost my train 

free in a sense which  

whether repeated or not 

speaks a language  

we are relieved to outgasp  

by the time of the Nightly Murders.   


 ←he lives in the condition of others he once whatever criticized 

This labyrinth eventually you find 

has no end. The outside is inside. 

The inside is outside. 

Time is :01 but I know you meant well. 

Time is :01 but we can break that down well.

Tomorrow is always part of the test 

and tomorrow is a million days away. 

Therefore, if you are not in it-- 

I mean you can’t 

not be in it.  


And the harder you deny 

the harder it hurts 

and the patterns find no end 

and you say This at least was my choice-- 

to fail on my own with great drama 

and not some doctor you are offering 

I shouldn't have to pay for. But I can’t.  

So these are my terms. And this is my house. 

And all I have left is this gun 

and a Super Mario  

who drives just like I do. 

And all ya can do is pray.  


It has patterns but no end 

(this is contended) 

and some walls made of mist 

and some walls graffitied in blood 

and some walls endlessly long 

take a bend 

and some halls with a fallen man 

scorpion attached to his breast 

sucking out the meaning 

and all manner of marrow  

worth as much as you invest 

in the feel of meaningful moonlight. 

Or the tragedy you currently experience. 

Or the trail you leave, forever long  

which once was the best way we had found 

to keep ourselves  from ending  

exactly like this.  


Random symbol string 

A trapdoor opens. Foam emerges. 

In a chess match with Sobek-Ra 

or a breathy phone booth  

interlude-by-fishing-pier 

unsuspecting as a fly 

drawn in by the swamp's great aroma 

perhaps the garden closes leaves 

triggered like a school of impulse 

by the craving for nitrogen 

or the gentle trending  

toward an epicurean coma.  


Four entrances for every room of the dream 

and a tedium so extreme  

it would be called inhumane 

if inhumane were not code for subhuman 

and if truth could present itself 

in a brand new way 

that does not kill us 

or we were not as impassive  

at the whole view without barbecue.  


Type2→azeros. That ship has long since sailed. 

Good luck 

or a piece of dilapidated pizza  

and a can of Pepsi Zero. 

Don’t mind the kinky twists. 

Many options are less sanguine.   


In one antechamber of nightshade 

there's a safe place to sleep 

with gumbo and lamb loin 

and lobsters at Christmas. 

Big-honking-mansion-thing. 

The best cookware.  

Three convection ovens. I don't really like to cook. 

A finished basement and a cocktail of remedies  

delivered by the finest pharmacists  

to make it all ok.  


Wine, finance, despair-- fatty age and ailments  

to keep in tune  

with the time of the world. 

Soma. Soma. Soma.  


Why shouldn't I walk through and smile? 

How deeply do I need to feel the suffering?  


Go. Bac 

Are you one of the millions of Americans who experience bloating?  


Sleep. Alarm. Obstacle. Forward. Setback. 

You change yer mind so much, yer like a damn woman!  


My mind stirs like a troubled sea. 

New hellos clear space  

for old fellows 

and the night it keeps on thinking 

how my friend is at the hospital 

asking for admittance 

because he's cracked, lost it 

and just wants relief.  


Elsewhere, someone close to me 

asks why I think of the grave so often. Am I ok? 

And I see  her life in disarray  

and I'm like, I'm fucking great. How are you?  

And she gets all pissed off  

and I'm like what's wrong with you. 

And I remember not everyone 

dwells on Nietzsche's question.  


My mind is therefore a shuffle deck. 

My mind is a memory bank. My mind is electric. 

My mind is a carbon emission. 

My mind considers 

no longer being able to function.  

My mind is in love. 

My mind has led me to think  

it is thinking too much 

of how badly it does not want to end.  

And how strong I must be  

to alter mortality.  


My mind is imagining 

things that never happened. 

It illuminates my limits 

as it punishes me with judgment 

and reminders I need self-compassion.  


I ended up in a parking lot near my house 

in a ditch that was now a mound of sand 

full of skulls and spiders.  


It was a strange night at the palace-- 

I entered through the millipede storage area  

into a golden library silence 

and hanging from the ceiling  

an octagonal balsawood flowerladder 

was leading upward like a periscope 

into a scalloped room of existence 

a scalloped room of existence 

scalloped room of existence 

room of existence 

of existence 

existence.  


I could see an eye clearly tearing. 

I saw its man look at me and said 

Man, have I got questions for you.  


↔Subhighway 

In this way 

(and a psychic ceiling 

manifest in a lack of survival skills) 

I griefed out  

ultimately accepting  

I could not secede to Nunavut 

so cut the snarky tweets about the failing country.  


For me the roses look pretty at twilight. 

Memories seem endless as the walls 

the walls that turn  

and wind within the colosseum 

the stomach of time 

the time that feeds us  

into the continuum.  


Consider this the ultimatum: 

let go 

or go mad 

in its duodenum.  

------------------------------------------- 

A nymph I love 

cries into the pool  

like a model in a fetish magazine.  

Her eyes once asked me fancy questions.  

Now I miss her like an evil fool. 

She was right to leave 

because no one free  

will choose to be otherwise. 

Otherwise, the wind would calm 

and everyone would be 

happy already!


The raven laughs at me. Where 

does his tree really grow? 

Can he see where I am  

from there?  

Because it seems I'm going nowhere 

and all I have is disorienting music 

and an obnoxious crew.  


→Anticlimactic Kombucha

You may be knifed in a parking lot  

outside a Wendy’s. 

You may be quietly given polonium. 

You may just not know what the hell is going 

on and doin great, whatever man.  

My stock is doin great.  


Who knows. 

Who knows? 

Who knows what lies beyond the roses?  


2018-2021


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