when there's nothing left to distract you
you are alone
and closer to death

a note you should keep in your pocket
to remind yourself
to get swallowed up in the complaints of each day
clicking away like a gear
this notch the same as the last

did you do enough
did you feel enough
to save yourself from the realization
that you're careening forward into nothing

was this day enough
to tie you down
to really connect you

what happens when you're finally alone
and you recognize your fear
what's the value of love
when it's just another distraction

rolling around in the back of a motorhome
bouncing and heaving down a highway
waiting to cross a state line and see some change out the back window
always invisible
but perceptible in my 8 year old flesh
certain of adventure and progress

later, driving on hot days
strapped into a car, irreverent
with irreverent boys
windows down, my breath caught by a freeway breeze of no discernable temperature
smooth lips like my own
and clean sweat
adventure but no progress
just stasis in the heat
miserable and comforting

later still, nighttime in a passenger seat
lights glancing across the window
even patterns, neons flashing at a club
confined in a clean car with a clean man
ready to take me home
to deposit me back into the real life I didn't manage to escape
despite the smiles and drinks and smoke filling the space between my atoms
no new adventures, just repetition compulsion
and backpedaling to that fork where I took the wrong road

feelings are fickle
happiness and destruction are one in the same

i could tell the exact moment it set in
a perceptible dip in the atmosphere
the first scent of rain before a storm

i felt the wobble inside me as i backed my car out of its spot,
windows fogged, mirrors obscured
in the silence of a parking lot at midnight

too much coffee lately
too many nights left to drift into mornings
too many preventable mistakes

and now the feeling in my chest of a breath exhaled twice
the loneliness and disastrous longings
a lifetime of sad songs and self-pity

give me back that blood burning in my veins
that tightness in my fists
that sudden, stupid awe

later

i'm already getting comfortable

Someday, with or without your help,
I'll overcome the acid, the oil in my blood
The tendency of every atom in my body
To pull towards a nonpolar covalent bond
With everyone who is lonely and sad and cursed with this rotting blood
Like attracts like

But forgive me until I work it out
Until I balance my pH with the right chemicals
Until I sanitize my blood
The things inside me are working against me
And they are pulling me

too excited
amped up on sugar and caffeine
and getting a hunchback
an old lady hump
i want to go out and claw at the ground
dig until i feel the dirt under my fingernails
have a healing spa layer of mud over my skin

dig until the earthworms find me
and i hit bone
and i can bury myself in nature
and the past
and damp darkness

god i want to be out of this room
away from this machine
i want to be chewing weeds
and spitting words
so my fingers, so clearly made for digging,
won't be mangling words on a keypad

i have no more patience for typing errors
no more patience for typing

deep in the night
i feel its waves washing over me
cool like some outdoor breeze
sheets billowing on a line
moonless
all tactility

i feel you like a ghost over me
appearing for this moment
what do you want to give me?

i'll accept it
i'll be your new car
your midnight stream
your comfort
and your desire

what can you give me?

in some private world
ancient
i let myself slip
into that background
communal instinct
out of this personage
i am only body
and lunar understanding

every molecule is impossibly light
transcendent
and vibrating with fire
and you bring all that exists
into me
and we are as dense as everything
surrounding us

you are a stranger
off the spectrum of good and bad
in a series of moments
no time passes
i want you
god

i am a ghost
faceless
nameless
washed out by camera flash
in the night

i am wooden
a hollow tree
carved out
solid
but not sturdy

clandestine

well
I guess I'm alone again

I guess this was always meant to be
my true state
that I can't handle anyone
or no one can handle me
or I just don't deserve to have someone
suffer with me on my haphazard journey through life

and this is why I can't feel religion
because singing at church
can't possibly cleanse the sin in my body
the poison in my blood
can't possibly cure me
and I fight
and I take more
because that poison's all that's keeping me alive

so now, what direction will I have?
no friends who know me
no family to outlive me
no partner to accompany me
through life's million trials

but maybe this is what I should have been looking for all along
this natural state
this proper state
this righteous state

v'always been alone
l'always be alone

and someday, after smelling the same cologne every morning for 20 years, will you feel stuck? will you want a way out but be unable to find one? or will that smell bring you comfort? will it give you your place in the world?

please let me know.

heard a car coming up the road
thought it was you,
coming to make it up to me
then remembered you couldn't drive

in my heart i am nighttime

hematite and rhinestone glittering in blackness

a string of tiny bulb lights over some dark alley

tiny, distant twinkles from cities or stars

in my soul i am something else

sunbleached, open, expanded to the horizon

black hills, salt flats, desert

deep breaths of pure oxygen

for 26 years
I've gathered information
built my brain
noticed everything

it's been my goal
to see
to understand
to absorb it all inside of me
until it is me

once you know jesus
you're ready
forgiven
you can die safely

but all that knowledge
all that building
becomes nothing
becomes vacant ether
the day jesus takes your soul
the day it's safe to die

black road plateau,
winding across the highlands
down through colorado
and eventually,
arizona or new mexico
I forget which

behind the trucks,
making slow time,
no time
ripening in the open sun
crawling down the road,
weeks at a time

a man said i'd find it there,
coasting across the dirt,
the moonlike plains of the desert
less gravity,
too much elevation,
a thinness in my blood

in a wide gorge,
the plants pricked me,
the bugs coated my eyes,
the lizards picked away at my skin
I went deeper until there was shade
and mud
and I stayed there a year

the first man I met
I gave my heart
since there was no one else around
and despite the sun, his skin was pale
and I thought he could use the blood
one day he turned to wax
and around three,
the hottest point in the afternoon,
he melted away

the second man to come along,
I gave my body
since I thought I would die anyway
his hair was long
and wound into the sides of the gorge
and one night while I slept,
I assume he blew away

the third man,
at this point a tedious phantom,
I gave my soul,
since I guessed I was dead by then
and what this man looked like
was burnt diamonds,
sooty and sparkling,
and one night there was a rain
and a sudden river carried me
to las cruces
and mocked me in my haste,
my lack of faith

if you knew me before
you'll know the ghost i've become
the lives I've consumed
the bodies I've buried

I crack apart,
too long in the heat and wild
borrowing time,
with none of my own left
wandering old roads,
barren fields,
looking for the meanest of the thieves i've known,
looking for my soul

fog in the roads

making driving harder than the rain

and some burnt candle smell

outside the windows

as if this were all a holiday facade

a miniature world on someone's mantle

lit by flame

i am drunk

in warmth and christmas carols

and my coat feels like something i should sleep in

and i wish i could be out with the people i love

in blinking lights and layers of frost

mist rises from the road

and water washes toward the car,

spraying the under-carriage as the tires spin

and there is a greened tint to the air

recycling bins zombies emerging from driveways

deep nights and deep feelings and i wish i could stay out and embrace them

instead of returning home

a defeated conqueror

lost in the fog of my own mind

lamenting the distance of once-a-year weather

likely already gone

traded for skirts and plunging necklines

and someday i will feel the fog rising from my grave

and lament the days lost to life

and the blindness of spirit

and i will search for those i've lost

and i fear that i will only find them on nights like this

once-a-year nights

back when i spent hours with rocks and caterpillars and ideas

there were such things as secrets

things too big to share

things which had lives of their own

stored up in my chest

monsters that i didn't know how to release

without them tearing me up on their violent escape

and these were not things told to friends

because friendship was so fragile and fickle and tenuous

and could so easily dissolve,

and because i wasn't these secrets

and i didn't deserve to be associated with them,

further weight against my forming personality

and i still keep secrets

because that is the thing to do

when something is so horrible that its escape

would maul those in its path

would massacre or mangle all souls within range

but no one else keeps my secrets

they spill out in a torrent

and people talk

and soon everyone knows

and my childhood instincts were correct

that someone cannot know a fact relating to you

without attributing it to you as a person

and i always knew not to let anyone too close

not to give anyone too much

but a sting of indiscretions

during a long-abandoned attempt to connect

plagues me still

and i wish i could go back to those days

when those monsters only lived inside me

and were not me

every morning i wake up with the taste of blood in my mouth

and an unsettled feeling in my stomach

and i wonder what i was doing while i was asleep

who i was eating

we went somewhere and someone told me they got a job at a beer bottling plant

this could also have been a dream, but bear with me and let's say it happened

it might seem hazy because i was drunk

which is ironic because in this memory

i was warning our friend

about someone who went into AA

after being a canner for Coors

and being paid in alcohol

everyone's always getting too far into something

and getting lost

i have another friend who was just found in Tennessee, homeless, dazed,

having burned through something like $10,000,

which had been left to him in a will

and my own brother, my own family

the stories i could tell you about them

and myself

now i just sleep and wake and there is no shock between the two like there used to be

and i can hardly tell

one day from the last

i just keep pumping away,

hoping you'll find the answers to your problems,

hoping i can help you find some relief

so i can believe it exists, somewhere in the world

relief, i mean

weeks like years

days like weeks

marked only by nights of full sleep

and empty mornings

sleepwalking naked through my room

and laying face-down on the carpet as respite

i awake with aches and stiffness

into the hazy blackness of 5 a.m.

to conquer another day

while my mind is still a few years back,

stunned into to stupidity

at the passage of time

rhythms rise and fall, trancelike

lulling me past hours and minutes and seconds

and i "live"

following some invisible piper

leading me on

and on

and on

october death

i push my shopping cart out into the mid-evening

of the parking lot

the air has a comfortable briskness i haven't noticed in months

and on the edge of each breath i take,

there is the faint scent of smoke,

that seems always coupled with a slight cool breeze

i think briefly back to firestorms

and the weight of that ash, inescapable

now, my eyes glance across the sky, out of habit

but the only clouds are remnants of a two-week storm,

monolithic and back-lit by the first pinks of sunset

as i cross the parking lot toward my car

a monster of a vehicle lurches toward me in reverse

the tinted window or the desperation of life obscuring the driver's view

i angle away without incident

but the thought stays with me

that at that moment, i would not have minded dying

and when my life is terminated,

i hope it is on a day like today

artichoke

super-empath

that's what they'll call me when they tear me open

and dig down into the deepest place behind my breastbone

out will come all the emotion that had lain blue and glowing and dormant,

gravity forcing it down to something small and densely packed

and totally out-of-commission

the feeling part of me that lies frozen under the ice that flecks my blood,

the coldness that is so strong within me,

will be out and exposed and beautiful

but for now, my fortress of ice and stone and emptiness,

all things unliving, unfeeling,

is who i am,

controls my actions

and there is so little of anything within me

that i have built up my outer shell to hide it

to mask that absence

but i haven't done it very well

and the glaring void still shows through

when i get tired of making the expressions,

pushing up that energy behind my eyes

to look like

i'm there

and here's the terrifying truth:

i smile and react

but i can't feel it

it's just an act

to look normal

to hide the fact

that the world

has taught me

how dangerous

it is to care

empathy is vulnerability

so much more to me than the outside
but we judge by what we see - i do and i know
it can't be avoided

years i've wished i could let my hair tangle
grow out a beard (a hormonal impossibility)
and sit in the trees

better to be friends with the wilderness
the earth itself
than to hold faith
in the fleeting whims of humans


i don't need much
and i'm never lonely
(or, rather, always lonely)
and i think slowly
enough to savor those days

instead, money lies on my mind
like an unloving god
ubiquitous but unattainable
and grinds away my days
into blurred, detached memories
into dust