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I'm standing motionless on the doorstep of the death
Of everything that's wild; every market crashed into the sea,
Every ambition devoured by a white whale --
I'm mixed into the detritus, meal for the sour mushrooms
That'll come after and remake our world into naivety.

This life is calculated; it's not only my illness that's sacrosanct
But the geometry of the whole plane,
Unit circles projected onto unit circles
That silently spell out our allotments.
No one will ever hang the usurer;
No one will account for the misbegotten,
Hush the unfair and bring down the weight of the
Jabberwocky roaming on the hard edges
Of the certain world. We'll cry misery,
Sue for judgment and lecture the hungry
From the throne of the hungering
Without ever being delivered dues;

We'll quake defined, grind at the borders and tear
At the seams that won't ever change.
I'm standing motionless on the doorstep of the death
Of everything conjured, wishes sent over
The horizon in an era the New World
Still held promise of eclipsing the old;
The Pacific will fade into the Atlantic,
We'll remember it's only one world ocean
That will swallow us at the last
We foresaw in the beginning:

I'm never going to get better,
I'll never know the life I wasn't destined to lead,
And the world will burn to ashes before any leaden hand
Remakes it

Into what the pretentious and arrogant legislature
Deemed would be better.
I'll still vote, though -- dream and riot
Hand-in-hand, elbow-to-elbow with you
And the rest of our sorry, condemned lot;
Orbit an uncaring, fading star
While we succumb to the pale surety
Of our short and unimportant lives,

Buckled at the waist
By the weight of the hopes
We so unwisely hung around our necks
When it still seemed possible
Fates could change for the better.

[Spoiler]

let us weep into our kool aid. we wallow in baleful lamentations on this auspicious night, the eve of our final victory

Spoiler for "do not click":

Spoiler for "no one is to know about this!":

Spoiler for "its a secret to everyone":

Spoiler for "hold your horses!":

Spoiler for "not so faaaaast":

Spoiler for "youll spoil your appetite for change!":

Spoiler for "do NOT open until the final crisis!!":

withershins

Wink out with me, then —
Put out the fires cruelly dotting
The end of every waking man’s tunnel,
Come to bed -- go cold —
Sing one last slow, sad song.
Let the lingering promises go ungainsaid,
Recompense and comeuppance
Withered and forfeit
With a wreath on every altar;
We fought well, but landscapes remain
Consistently spiteful in the face
Of landscapers. Go quietly --
I won’t forget you —
But the time for sleep is now.

I'm the onion hearted pilgrim,
Sulfur blood orphan
On the altar pleading

Mommy,
Mommy,

Come take me home

Away from the beestings and the dungarees,
The loud-mouth block knockers and
Sandpit queens with wormy teeth

That terrorized and peeled away my flaking layers
To reveal beneath

The vibrant wort I can't stand to let the world see --
I'm so fragile underneath the skin,
King of effigies running at a snail's pace --

Come take me home, mom, before these
Sun-splotched scars sprout; I won't take root,
Grow up, weather the weather
Whether you want me to or not:
Just wilt short-handed, crinkle-wrapped
Could-have-beens dignified by mercy murder
Driven through the chest of the child
Who choked to dream and sputter

Mommy,
Mommy,
Come take me home again

This moment is antecedent to more of itself,
What's to come the unsatisfying rejoinder
To what's happened already --

The slope of my line has evened out,
Plateau at a young age. What aches
Won't change, and I'm hopeless as a
Savior; these fingers are worked to
Worthlessness, grimaced projections
At the tip of a failed body. I knew,
From the get-go, I was a doomed
Creature -- worth my weight in
Carbon and nothing more, greasy
Hardened fuel for the ongoing fire

While the people around me emerge
From cocoons as firefighters or starters,
Agents of change in a world
They seem capable of contorting in a way
The world has only ever contorted me

Boiling this out,
My life goal is to piss out of a vulva
When prior
I was content to squat,
And pee piss out of a penis.

The entire establishment is selfish.
Everything I do to achieve what I describe as a goal is
Self-absorption; I'm guilty of everything,

Nothing ever washes out and

I'm only a simulacrum --
Haughty and demanding,
A representation "thereof"
The barricade will perceive as churlishness and
Affront towards perfect woman woman,
God's bookend casting long twilight shadows
I'll retreat into in imitation, pawing at the heel
Of mother, mother I saw emblazoned
Onto the small, soft spots of your back.

My time comes and I'll burn myself to
Better melt myself, to inject myself,
Into this charade:

I'm wearing the woman suit now and
Mother never touched it. Motherless,
I stepped into this world wearing a new body and
Strode all the great rivers,

Which we assembled in a line

To demonstrate the
Potential
Of
Synchrony
Of
Water beyond borders.

Afterwards I'm rushing forward,
The engine driving the froth that collides

With you

And when I press my fake breasts against you, I want you to think
In terms of Pacific and Atlantic and decide the following:

From whence it came,
Does it really even matter?

I want the sandsea queen to sing me to sleep,
Laid down in the wadi beside

All the other things waiting for this bastard rain

That will come on high and wash away the unkempt edges --
Turn the desert to glass
Then tumble, turn the glass over and shoot it again.
Refill the tumbler with a spirit of your choice and blow it into the wind,

Let loose your new age bullshit that will resonate with,
If nothing else,
Your quaking ownership and paternity;

Let loose the line from the wall,
Skedaddle like pop fizz and crack,
Brick serpent tongue twister
Mister listener for the wide-eye, wide-eye
Injunction into hope.

Pray not the needle! Beseech the queen and lay sacrifice,
Burn meats,
Stack high these olives!
Tonight we will all be wicker people
And weave our lives together, in the fashion we already have
But now literally:

Physically, I implore you to

Thread through the needle
And disseminate this gift to the naked ministry, inglorious
Though they be they are yet your brothers and sisters,
Fathers and daughters,
And must receive the windstorm communion
If the desert's to survive.

it needs a conclusion but I can't see the conclusion through the veil maybe when I am more lucid I will revisit that one

I want to bring the art of the sword to myelin,
Resurrect limbs with the providence
We're indoctrinated to

Put faith into

And quell every autoimmune illness
With something soothing,
A song you'd sing me,

But on my worst days the blood boils,
Congeals and those same spiteful snakes
That stole away divinity
Fill my veins and arteries with their whispers:

On my worst days the blood boils,
I dream of killing and dismemberment in a way
That's not forgivable, that's no more right
Than what wrong was levied,

The lien we pay,
Tall prices exacted
Whether we sinned
Or sinned against;

Oh Jeremy, on my worst days I dream
I could crush your genitals into jam

Recursively,

That I could cast you into a whorl
Like the one you thrust me into
From which I just can't make my way out --

Sing a song of unattachment,
Lord, make me a molecule
With a skeleton key and free reign
To put people back together
And on my worst days take them apart.

Lord, make me a molecule
With a skeleton key and free reign
To coax proteins, unfold the dying
And give second lease
To everyone from whom you shorted it:

 I'll be your avatar,
I'll put away the dreams in which you apologize to me
And do so much more than
What that temporary solace ever could;

Lord, grant me the free will you promised
And not its simulacrum,
Lord grant me the Earth I inherited and I'll

Punish the wicked,
Punish the worthy,
Punish myself,
Punish you;

Sing a song of unattachment and
Tear me from this body,
Lord make me a molecule
Everlasting

And leave me to my lonely work,
One caring atom vs. the world

The fire won't take down the whole house;
The black and the ashen, and later the bracken
Remain resident, spent carbon residing lonely
Until the city deigns to reinvest --

Thermodynamic remediation,
Cued to a timeline that inevitably leads
To the same heat death

Whether flaming or icy,
Abrupt or at the human pace
We set for one and another anon;

Embers on the hearth and the fiery
Dissolution of DNA we dubbed senescence,
The cooling of every passion
Brief or long-lived dead at the last,

With nothing more to show for it
Than growing distances
In a growing universe,
The gravity with which we come together
So handily outpaced by the rate we fall apart;

No deed worth doing in the world
Alzheimer's was reclassified as only an
Early-onset dementia
We all barrel towards anyway,
Nothing worth building in the world
It will only, eventually,
Idly fall to pieces

Before or after the end --

Allotted and spent carbon
We can't even muse on
Ever-after, because even the elephant in the room forgets

My experience with heroin took me to a dreamworld,
Paralyzed and in excruciating pain for the brief moments
I could wrest myself to consciousness;
There was a white ship, and familiar Grey Havens,
And a voice telling me it wasn't yet my time; turn back,
Wake up,
Go home.

Drenched in sweat I was alone with myself again,
Where I least and most wanted to be;
There's something inside of me that breathes
Despite my best or worst intentions,
Something that I spent a solid year attempting
To cut out at knifepoint
Because killing it somehow seemed to be the
Prerogative in ending pain forever.

I'm drawn in two different directions,
And vessel to as many lives besides.
This smallest thing,
Flickering and thriving amongst
The stem cells' persisting genesis
Drives me both this way and that --

This mote of life,
My smallest component,
Powering the countless engines of homeostasis
Has come to embody both every reason
To live and every reason to die.

More than I'm haunted by my chameleon past,
Turning black blue and yellow under your
Applied pressure

I'm haunted by this thing inside of me
That forces me to ride it out,
That whispers, "we'll grow a new skin,"
"We'll refill your veins,"
"We'll rebuild your body,"

And I'll cry, and I'm crying, not out of fear
That the new body will be subject to the same
Tortures, will bleed and ache just the same,

But because of the hope of a better body,
One to satisfy aforementioned other lives --

This smallest component,
This mote of life,
This thriving forward motion burns
Just as painfully with the notion things
Might get better,
That my long-delayed wants may be met,

And this terrifies me. I'm crying,
And I'll cry, because alone with myself
This piece of God-borne engineering
Keeps me awake at night
As surely as the night terrors and
Flashbacks do themselves;
These opposing directions have turned
Non-Euclidean,
Have become intertwined --

I'm compelled chemically to continue.
Nothing can tear this first,
And what will be the last,
Piece of my body from me --

Nothing can penetrate the marrow;
No amount of alcohol has yet to poison it,
No drug I've ever taken has passed through the heart,
No force of person or personality has ever
Won argument with the steady-state
Function, the ongoing act of coping
Through visualization:

I am the mote of life,
I am passing down my throat and
Into the stomach;
I am walking on the surface of my heart;
I am surveying all of the parts of me that have hitherto
Refused to die and
Will refuse to die tomorrow,

When the sun rises again
And I'm left alone, with myself,
One stubborn soul paired to one
Very fallible human
Who just needs to stop,
Breathe deep
And listen:

"We can get there,"
"But only once you agree to cooperate"

No rest for the wicked,
Can't sleep but dreaming big plans:
Tomorrow I'm going to call for help,
Tomorrow I'm going back to rehab,
Tomorrow I'm going to talk to someone,

But for the sleepless tomorrow never comes,
And today drags on interminably --
One day fluidly through the dark into
The same cavernous kind of living,

One kid at a computer who chose not to grow up
Listening to Taylor Swift and remembering

High school,
Something purposeful,
A time of my life when tomorrows sprouted
And branched out like willows
Riverside, back home in New Jersey where

I'm thinking back to every skipped lunch
And the dollar fifty going hungry earned me,
Shopping with Amanda for the first time,
Back to an era where I could and did make a list
Of every feminine article of clothing
I ever owned or borrowed ...

Sitting across from the superintendent and his cabinet
Holding hands with Brooke under the table
While we discussed the pragmatic steps
Before I knew they would peter out to nothing:

A key to the staff bathroom,
A transfer from P.E. to an essay-based health class
Consisting solely of me,
Built from the ground up for me

The same way I was churning tomorrows into
What was going to be the life I'd lead forevermore;

I owned everything, or thought I did,
Saw the placard for Jessica Heba at my prom table
And through it into everything I'd ever wanted

But there's no rest for the wicked,
Can't sleep, only big dreams,
Awake at 4AM making lists of people to call
When tomorrow comes,
When tomorrow comes,
When tomorrow comes

Things will be better. This is what I tell her,
While the walls melt
Just the same as my eyes into the back of my skull
From the time spent idle,
Wasted staring into a screen where
I'm trying to communicate to anyone who will listen

The elation when I first came out at Montclair,
Rushing back into my room to write on the wall
"October 13, 2:17PM"
To commit to memory the moment it was all
Supposed to change for the better

And the juxtaposition of this elation
With several years' accumulated self-loathing:
How rape enables prostitution,
Prostitution enables drugging,
And drugging drives dishonesty;

I'm not lonely, anymore, I regret to say --
Memories of high school finally faded.
I stopped trying to get in touch with my former friends.
I stopped trying to make new ones.
Today I've resigned myself to this lonesomeness,
And today has me held firmly in its clutches.

I used to dance.
I used to go out,
Change clothes in the backseat of my car
Because it wasn't permissible at home,
Meet people and ask them out on dates
No one ever agreed to.

This is all fading too, though --
The willow's gone grey,
Every feathery whisker pale yellow
And falling singly to the ground.

There's no rest for the wicked:
No sleep allotted prostitutes
And drug addicts,
Misdemeanants with pending court dates
That blot out the future
And flounder in the deep water,
Beyond the breakers and the buoys,

Hovering cold and alone over
Nothing
Other than the black,
Nothing to do
But superimpose memory,

But all the happy ones have faded.
I remember them only as events,
Indifferent description pale in comparison
To the intensity with which
Flashbacks and night terrors rock me,
Roil the ocean entire

Throwing up walls of water,
Impassable, cutting off any rescue
Anyone might have attempted --
I'm a conch's discarded shell, now,
Hiding away a once-was
That for all anyone's efforts,
If they even managed a peek inside

Would find cold,
Empty,
Bereft of the occupant that once dwelled within.

Going over all the right things to do,
There's no rest for the wicked:
Can't sleep, big dreams,

No follow-through,

And tomorrow never comes

These breakaways are discontinuous,
Parenthetical because I'm denied
Brackets plotting the function of my illness --

I can hear you calling, mom,
See the ghosts rally round my bedside
While the fear and then the paralysis
Take away my ability to breathe

Naturally, naturally I'm at odds
But they're pulling the blankets off me,
Pulling me out of the bed,
My elbows are sore where they
Trudge the carpet
And I keep my eyes closed
Preferring the phosphorescence
To the adult, brazen shadows
Who've come here just to take me away;

But I open my eyes,
I'm still in bed,
No time has elapsed,
The fear slowly subsides,
I breathe easy and remember what Tim Theory said:

Don't focus on the inability to move,
Don't try to move,
Don't try to fight any of it,

More salient than any advice or pill
The psychiatrists have ever given me.
I can't walk straight on sidewalks --
The nystagmus of my eyes
Pushes through to every muscle
And the waking moment is a

Living moment, the world I'm seeing is
Different than yours,
Imbued with a character and life
You would have to artistically render
To experience yourself:

I am the benefactor,
Receptor of the God-given gift to see
The spirit inside every leaf and tree,
Motives of every insect I come across
At home in the wild or

At home in my bedroom,
The glass spiders that scurry across my blanket
Or the million ants dotting my sheetrock ceiling,
Milling,
Always on a slow approach towards me
Like everything is once the wall breaks apart;
Oppressed from every side,
Seeing the dark designs of everything and
Everyone

While the nature of my prowess commands me
To command them, transforms my biological
Inequity into something weaponized
I need to wield with care because I'm so sorry

About 9/11, so sorry about that time
I caught you in the rain without an umbrella, dad.
The commandments come uninterruptibly,
Demand chastisement and self-flagellating
That I hover around at the behest of
Taught reality testing

That just feels rote, plain,
Starkly dull in contrast to the richer life I could live
If I drew blood every time
The generals commanded me to,

Put into action their demands to ward off
The oncoming falling-out, fallout,
Missile strikes and coups that were placed
Between my able fingertips
In the world where only I can stop these

Conclusions,
Ward off the end of all things,
Consumption of the Earth by the would-be-natural
Events set in motion prior to my birth
I was born to keep in check:

For long times I wondered whether I would emerge as the son of God,
What reagent test could prove it,
How apotheosis will feel when I finally achieve it;

But it's all at arm's length, now,
Myself safely sequestered into mind-poisoning
Video games that burn away my time
That would otherwise be spent revitalizing

The Long Winter Watch,
Buying another typewriter and glossy paper
To invite more people via

Carbon,

Only carbon is safe from their watching,
The eyes on this page same as yours
That would intervene if they knew I was
Intervening myself;

Self-styled hero,
My brain compels me in equal parts
Towards megalomania and punishment
For not having already achieved those goals.

You might find a letter slipped under your door --
An elegant header,
Gold foil embossing,
An invitation to something greater
Visible only to me because it was implanted at birth
On a day when my planets aligned,

And yours didn't.
Don't read what I write,
But don't send me away;

I'm already tranquilized,
Harmless and pacified by this goddamn stupefying laptop
That more than once I've wished
I had the wherewithal to just smash into a hundred pieces.

You have nothing to fear. America quelled me,
Long before I set into motion
My plans to quell America.

Don't think, just refer to the
Heart of the matter,
First responses first;

In theory it should be so easy not to remember,
Halt ruminations,
But these words reflect tautology:
We're held by the past so long as we
Consider it,
Cut off at the head so long as we honor it;
Licking wounds long after they've healed,
Caught up in visions of a hard world
So long as we treat with that iron taste
Of blood long-spent, replaced but

Remembered because we stew and sue for
Retribution, restitution, the imposition
Of orderly ends to loose threads
We let entangle the present --

But the heart knows better on the
If and whens we tune in;
No beating heart turned black
Except in the most trite prose,
Never abandoned its charge
Of keeping rhythm as steady-as-can-be
No matter what happens,
What we apply to it,
Our self-correcting people engines --

Walking in the cold today it's a chilly forty-odd degrees,
But doing the right thing calls to heart
The heart's wishes and gift-giving ensues:

Today, I exude warmth
And am no worse in the winter weather
For lacking coat gloves or sleeves
Than anyone who has bundled up against

Something,
Cold or otherwise --

It doesn't flashback, today,
To the same scenario when I was just a boy
Walking the streets of New Jersey
With nowhere to go;

Today I am warm,
Firestarter uninterrupted
Let loose to play on the edge of the world
Where being clocked or laughed at doesn't matter anymore,

Because you are cold
While I am comfortably warm

Firestarter pt 2: Cruciform

At the end of any given day I'm left wondering
Why certain things ever came to be, or are:

It's amazing that we ever salted fields,
Invented the sword that never

Outmoded the hatchet, never bothered learning
Lessons from delta-dwelling peoples about

The accretion of salts in silts, poisonous inundation
Predating what we straight-facedly call "slash-and-burn"

While withholding the option of interventionism
Because first-world-ism doesn't judge the pastoralists,

At best force-feeds secrets of crop rotation with one hand
While the other collects royalties on trademarked seed;

Ratifying responses too late to save anyone
And codifying it every single time brazenly "non-binding,"

Only too eager to hold ourselves back:

A younger me would ask you pledge in brazen equanimity
Raise swords besides me, but my faith has bottomed out:

We'll all die together, not by force of senescence or
One another
But at the hands of just one judge,
A position for which I nominate only myself.

I want to kill the harassers,
Rebuild our atomic investment to a point where
Everyone's DNA falls apart,

Forgets itself,
All identity erased
At the point of origin,
All life ended via cancer or
Erroneous apoptosis
And at the last we can come together
Communally mad
With every cross discarded

And burden shared equally,
Dead on the ground cruciform from outstretched
Hand to toe:
I'll scrape together the trace elements
We pushed to the fringe or
Let slip through the cracks
Building my critical mass,
Lead a riot ever-lasting
Until I've killed everyone,

Removed every obstacle by means
Of preemptive contraception,
Taking away the human
Because you proved to me
We won't ever take away the suffering

And it's only fair for the sufferers
That they can join in with the able-
Minded and bodied, oppressors and despots
If only for one burning moment:

I'm sick of this, the cross hung round my neck
Already overburdened by the one at my back;
You burned me,
I'll burn you back,
And with no remorse I'll bite harder,

Watch you bleed out,
And enjoy all the while.

Stop killing my friends,
Stop killing me,
Or prepare for my apotheosis --
My will be done,
Mine kingdom come,

Every man will die