Wake up with the salt in a streak A residual cave painting The minerals dripped down your cheek Must have been crying in your sleep Dreamt of the sadder things Or let the realities creep in Spin the wheel and see where it lands Eyes as mirrors within mirrors Bouncing smaller and more distant drafts of me As our cells divide, we mutate sometimes Mistakes in our code imbed structurally Did you try to read The background of the scene? The junk words on the prop signs? The padding chatter between, Backdrop recurring extras, And the stranger NPCs? That spawn off-stage from nowhere, And are never seen to leave? Noticed cryptic nods to subplot, Eerie clues to deeper themes? The hidden messages designed to be ignored But meaning can’t help seeping into all Did you do something wrong? They’re talking about you behind your brain Which busted duct did the whispers creep in from And what is it they say?
Glue
This only cooks under intense pressure Mixing raw desire with fermented exile Diced visions of some reaching future That you're a weary fool to compile Don't go alone Don't go at all Don't lose the way Don't feel appalled You're a mixture of yous Trying to surface from this glue You should reach out But I know you won't It's ok to doubt That you can navigate this on your own How can you ask for help in a search to be alone?
Liquid Shading
Make mine a tall one The liquid shading of piss Dehydrated as shit Fizzy burnt antithesis Of something stronger They can jimmy the lock Air out the closet Where the stale feelings rot.
Feel The Physics
What is compulsion? A comfort unchecked? Sucked down and into when you fall through the cracks of your motivations. The taste you like, but you wonder if you really like this much? Enough for how little it takes. A semi-automatic hair-trigger spitting round after merry-go-round. The next is always immediately ready. A kind of absorbing satisfaction that distracts from the bartering trade off of time. An overriding warmth comes into focus, but in the back of the blurred frame a dark figure hangs just visible, watching you sink. And although your focus is drawn away, it’s peripheral imprint reminds you to feel the physics of your distracted descension.
Lead
And they asked, are we losing our membership? To sensible decisions that weigh on each of us like lead. And solder panes of life together, into a stained glass vision. Soft enough to bend, hard enough in our blood to warp our heads.
Cool Of The Shade
Branches wave at me through the depths of a cloud-domed darkened dawn. Wear my worn out trainers for a casual day again, Or harsh splitting boots if there’ll be ice on the floor. I can’t slip into the road again and spill my confidence. I don’t want to go, I just want to live in your warm quiet arms again. The valley where shattered sun fragments fold and puddle into a day. Breeze into my brain, Like a street curb in summer, As sweat dotted handlebars slip, From a loose untroubled grip, Feel the cool of the shade and I welcome it.
Let Go Of Me
Who is me in a different twist of time? When the time ran out. Someone smaller as a wilting half, or stronger as a complete solid whole? This life is all I know, and I sometimes like to pretend I have seen more edges than this plane has. Who is the person that continued through the winds of the track that never merged? I made a decision when I was young. I made a deal I didn’t understand the magnitude of. The lock turned silent without me noticing and I couldn’t tell what I was really doing. I had not lived through it yet. Would I have made the same choice if I had seen visions of where it led?
I cannot know. All I can do is wrestle, now as I sit here in the future wondering which directions were right, and which were right in the wrong light. I am baked into the last decade, a person at the end of a path with a specialist’s experience in a subject I can’t bear to examine anymore. Is this misfortune? Has the richness rotted me? Am I being pulled through this pale existence by fear, or by a regret so stubborn it only pushes deeper into itself, until I am forever lost? How can I miss myself so much? Where did I go and why did I leave? What words could I untangle in a letter that might reach myself and convince them to come home?
The more life becomes motions, the more meaningless it shows itself to be. The more I am disappointed in myself, the more I despise this cubicle I have painted myself into. And worse is the dread at the sheer swallowing upkeep hours it takes to keep the paint looking fresh, as if it was what I wanted. And truly the worst is that I sweat hard for a finish I can only ever get to look half-hearted, because really it was more one-tenth hearted and four-tenths faked at my own strain for someone else who will never be happy with what I gave them, even if it is five times more than I really have. But they will still never let me go, even if they don’t like it. Not everyone is as disappointing as me. Not everyone would ask so much more of me than I have. Let me go. Let go of me.
Every Crack In A Crumbling Voice
Snowed today but it’s all gone now. Slow danced in a box room between stilted conversation, With people I’ve always loved but who have never existed. The G string is me, and the thinner B string is a thin veil of them. We exchange wonderfully tense in each other’s breath space. Sentiments drag in the air and fall through it, Casting shadows in the shifting shapes of meanings, Into the pockets where the lung’s soft projections are obscured. Feel every crack in a crumbling voice, Searching for the words at such fragile close range. Cannot help. Cannot know. It would be beautiful to know. But it is also beautiful not to. To swim in the lush tension, And float on the bottomless tolerance of the unsaid, For another lifetime of calm quiet suspense. We are two rings of a Venn diagram, Heavy with swallowed feelings we aren’t sure will fit into our overlap. Pulled closer with each response. So aware, and so lost as every second after incendiary, anchorless second scrapes past.
Shrinking Mirror
Motors you can’t turn until you try To flex your iris, to curve the candle light The world gets no cleaner bathed in night Such tiny muscles slip the grip of nerve endings in low eyes Fumbling with a gloved hand Sieving in the hot sand For memories carved in rocks That you lost, that you dropped From waves left as they sank must have been important Dig after them And every grain under your desperate knees Is another eroded speck of distant memory Enacting their passive revenge Smoothing the masses that don’t remember them Revelations hatched Set into stone Grasping for meaning From the nest they have flown But a rock doesn’t fly A rock only falls Quietly snatched from a world It can’t understand at all Your lost thoughts tumble Until they shine Until they reflect that dumbfounded look Back into your lost eyes And you shrink In a shrinking mirror
Lumbar
When did he grow so old? When did he admit there are places he’ll never go? Burnt holes in the paper maps Cratered space saving weight Every gram helps his craning back Woke up today As playdough caked in shapes Best he can remember From the kinder kind of mirrors They don’t make anymore The totems shift with each night The vertebrate spin in the wind as they clang and chime Singing the day’s refrain Whispering all kinds of shit In the ancient language Of lumbar pain My spine’s a fishing pole My line is caught On some sunken piece of brickwork Not that swimming silver sword That I was born for Maybe I wasn’t born for anything at all And as the current drifts Softly links my arm and pulls me with it Gently like a friend in turmoil Panicking in the street Guiding me from phantoms that only I can see But they have me.
Quit Vision 