There are names we cannot bear to hear.

Tell me what you see, you who have eyes to see and ears to hear--do you click your tongue and think of the gray offices where I could recline and eschew the jagged assemblages of my thought? Do you wander in trembling troughs of worry, thinking Oh when will he smile? And will he not come again?

What gives you the patience to wait? What monstrous charm availed itself that you would suffer until I emerge, wet with rebirth, and hand you my newfound grins? Will they not become regret and bitterness and wretched anger again? This is the sweet rancor of my company.

I blame you for things you have not done. I am driven away from you by sins you have not committed, by imagined wrongs that I know well enough are fiction, but whose power I cannot refute.

There are names I cannot bear to hear. To Hell with you, you bastards I have never met. I can hate the faceless, and I can hate the faces I know better than my own. I resent your candor, I resent your doing the things that I would have done. I resent that I would not have been strong enough to do that which you have not done, that which I condemn you for. I will remember next time.

In the sorry meantime, fuck it.

I feel like a lie.




All this fragile air breaks me. Is it not strange, that I should be broken more easily than fragile air? Is it not love--no, it is not love. It is such a just injustice that I cannot shake its inarguable judgment.

READ ME, why do you not TELL ME who I SHOULD BE, what stricken clause in your muddled skull does not let you--...................ah, God a key. A key.

I sleep with the rust of ire flaking into the cracks of my brain, like the drifting shifting agony of a grief observed. Tusk, but I have grown so tired tired. Every moment I spend with me is hate, a lonely hotel room of echoes jimmering around asking -do you hear me echo? Here is the bloody socket of my sweetness, can you taste me in blue shadow garages, thrusting shallowly into red evening with fingers in my eyes -do you hear me echo?

Only guitars with crimson strings--your songs are your own. Here is what I ate, and here is what I gave, and here is what I have when the crickets have impaled themselves upon their own white violins--why do you never speak speak? You do not speak speak, thus when I resent, there is only the spattering flicker of bored-out lights and nerveless mouths.




I feel like a lie.

You can't go back.

The shattered muses of who I was recline in their grand lack of minutes and laugh oh they cackle at me in crackle-glass titters, throwing their heads back and grating
-Oh but you feel so good, so good.

You cannot go forward, my inner friend. They cannot go back.
But here is a massacre, the interrupted riff that splits up my ribs and bleeds out the heart of me. Do you recall the sweet blade, the merciful swell of blood BLOOD on your cheeks. Is it not words, is it not expression, the spindly branches of red slipping and slurring across my face
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.

I laugh at stainéd memory,
For I cannot cannot go back, must not will of course go back. I do not hope to turn again, but I am sure that while my veins scream and pine and die and force the sap from their yellowing tubes. Come to me, keen catharsis, give me a cylinder for my thoughts, a brassy one like a band or a false voice that rocks out tittering memory that squeals, like rats and women
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.

You can't go back.
You cannot come back.

There is no song between blood and death, only an ungentle silence that cracks grins into
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.
You can't come back.

Hurry and slide against the ragged lip of mourning;

Observe the crow-flecked field, snowed palely under with bodies, bodies--
Tell me that I should not withdraw, that I should not pull up my bloody stakes and crumble back and away, a clay martyr with no mettle only
straw, only rain pocking my shambly corpse.

There's a fleshy newness that they want to stretch on you,
Hold your face still and let the furious reek slump into your wrinkles,
Can you feel it flow and fill it is slumming between my teeth so
Kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss my ragged lip of mourning.

"All my spheres of logic cannot prevail against you." - Frankie

My eyes are like orbs of red-lashed pain. I suppose it works for me.

If I may be "desolate," might I not also be "isolate"? I cannot be "desolated."

Thus sit we, isolate and surrounded in the sick refracted burn of bony daylight. Only the dead sing for the dead; the living pay them no mind.

If I order, I'll order the same as her, who ordered the same as her precedents, juggling on toward the inevitable beginning--doesn't that feel good?

Hello, do I know your name? I think not, and you know not mine. It grows late, and I suspect that you will tumble into my ink before I can remember your face.

Even small dreams die. I suppose it was a small dream, an improbable ache made impossible by the glacial press of time, frozen and suffocated.

Louder, louder, cry me down from the mountaintop.

A strange and unusual update from your neighborhood downer, who says unequivocally: "Screw depression!"

There is immense satisfaction to be had in good music. There is a hard rock band named Dead Poetic that I discovered more than a year ago, and I thought they could be far better than they were. I longed to give this band a chance because of their name, but they screamed far too much.

Well, their second album came out earlier this month. I decided to test it out, since I liked the single. I have an uncompromising report to give: they rock. I am going to buy this album at the earliest opportunity.

In matters of other interest, I have begun writing a play. To be perfectly honest, poetry doesn't always cut it. I find myself breaking into new forms of storytelling, now that I have more resources on hand: my films are becoming bigger, more ambitious projects; I have written a novel; I am forced into either complete innovation or dire repetition with my current poetry. The way to keep your art alive is to avoid the same patterns, the same expressions--you will notice I do not say anything regarding style. Style and flavor is an excellent thing to have, a signature. However, having a style does not entail repeating one's works over and over.

Thus, I am writing a play. I wrote the first scene yesterday night, and was impressed with the characters. Naturally, they are not fully fleshed out yet, but two of them have already taken on their own lives in my head, which means that the writing begins to do the work itself, and skates along more effortlessly.

Isn't it grand?

Awake.

Awake. This is the herald, and there is the summons, the streak of blood scarring dawn and conjoining like the crucifix of a song, the jab and spar of searing notes. Immolate me.

Here is the confluence of consciousness, the one you cannot see, the vague vain apprehensions of that for which you have no care. It's just a song, you see. Immolate me.

The frantic ferocious flailings of our flamboyant failings that we bray on about like banners are mere mitigations, justifications--I can't feel yours and you can't feel mine. Immolate me: perhaps we'll see.

One more repetition for God's sake, or for mine. This is the jade glass that imprisons my impressions, the caged microscope of my weeping harem with sirens lithe that writhe and have themselves a fine time. Awake, and immolate me.

Awake--you are the heralds.

You'll notice the time at the bottom on a Saturday morning, and I feel quietly absorbed. Dead Poetic's "The Dream Club Murders" is on my headphones, and I think it's buzzing me with sonic madness. It feels good. Is that hard to understand?

Do you see that? Or have I for so long hammered out this flat image of morose despair, of wordy grabs in the dark for company, for solace, that you cannot imagine it? When you see me thus, do you see it only as a lame projection, an illusion that will last until I step from the cab and swing like a gallows through my door?

I hope you don't. I hope that is not what I have given you.

"How do I get back to where I want? You were smiling." - Dead Poetic

Smile again, eh?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you to take "a long hard look" at reality. Now, what would you regard as rational behavior: an individual who chooses to speak to a friend, particularly when that friend initiated the conversation in question, or the inexplicable pejorative of a desperate, lonely individual who had been left to themselves for less than two minutes?

Ladies and gentlemen, my client, the defendant, has been accused of self-destructive behavior and of disregarding his most intimate relations in favor of a romantic relationship. Examine, however, the evidence which is at hand. We have proved that the prosecution itself displays a long and violent history of self-destruction, and is prone to extreme emotional instability, particularly during high-stress periods such as that of the night of April 14th.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I say to you that this is no case at all. The prosecution has none! It is merely the scrabbling, jealous attempt of a solitary individual hoping to drag my client into the same lonely madness from which they suffer. My client has committed no offense except in the haunted imagination of his accuser who, in self-righteous satisfaction, has attempted to shunt the blame from where it truly belongs.

I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to search your hearts and your consciences. I also wish to implore the prosection to examine their motives and their concurrent pain, and ask themselves whether they know what they think they know, whether their sight is really so clear through the red haze of slashes and abandonment.

At this time, I wish to reaffirm our upright plea: Not Guilty.

I am done.

Don't ask again.

Ticker-tacker, clitter-clatter, crow to Death's moping matron, the spewing, crying, soaking, dying dress bundled about her ruddy shoulders and slumming to her ankles. Down, down to the tired old spindle of my throat, chalked up in a dry lack of lips; swallow me down, a draught of salty scars. Pour me down.

Here's to all our brilliant conversations.

Move that beat along, miser--don't hog it all to yourself.

Here's to our closely woven myopic brows. Here's to our narcotic masterpiece of desire, a jumbled and classical monument, an enumeration of all that speaks to us of humanity, of foolery and of loss.

Here's to our grief, to our singular sight and the voices that cry in ecstatic choruses of Handel and God knows what else, shaded youngly in the rearward pews of our skulls.

Here's to hope and here's to death: we swallow them, and I know we'll choke on them in the end, but both of them taste so tender, tender as blush in her, in me, in you.

You. Yes, you--you don't know how it makes you feel. Does it bother you, does it make you sag into yourself, or do you brandish the sweet whip and grind your jaws--will you strike me when I come to you again, or will you let it fold you. Suppose I cannot be what I wish to be, so as I lie in gentle time cry I, let me be, let me see what I will be when I be without your being at my elbow.

Here's to our magnificent end.

I wish only for my pain to fade.

Yet, do not worry about it. For once, I fight it; it has not taken control. I will not let despair ruin me again. We have seen what it does, what I do. Even from the sunless center of it, I tell you that there will be light.

BizANG. With emphasis. With mac-daddyin', foo. Sitchass down.

BizANG.

The silence is horrid, unbearable.

Now must not be a time for words.

I feel that I owe it to the whole of you to spread out something of a less self-destructive nature than what has been displayed of late. I want you to know that as I sit here at five twenty-four a.m., bopping to the melodic strains of "Have You Seen Her?", I am content. It may not last, but I am content.

Now, sleep on, my beauties. I go forth to test these young muscles of mine. Sleep on.