7/23

we always knew this day would come, didn't we, old man?
though i made believe otherwise and you let me pretend.
coffinside, i couldn't help but smile admiring for the last time
that favored arrangement of features,
thinking of all the times i faked sleep for
countless minutes while you stood motionless in my doorway
admiring the same
believing yourself alone
a shadow in a half lit hallway silently defining love.

out of gas and lost in space

ruminating on your big
blood burst and how to tie
you back together or to here
our king
adorned in paper towels
crowned with air
aseptic anointed
window corners matted with stale
sleep struggle obscuring the flowering
season outside
blue venous fallout threatening
to take your feet while you slumber
tight hands hold heart beep
dim and claw at nothing
i'm choking on a
mouthful of salt begging you to
bring me your skull full of sun
shrug the pain that leaves you
purple, chewing at the sky.

Dead air

Criss-crossed wires. Ghost messages received 11 minutes to the witching hour on an old dead phone belonging to a number not even in service. 5 letters and a question mark. The saddest part is knowing I can't respond on this line, even if I could put the answer into words. 

fury and control

goya's paintings remind me of my first tastes of fear when i was a kid. the unnamed nothings that kept me from sleep after learning of possession and evil spirits in church. the day that i opened the book i was reading to the part about legion, and how my mom had to carry me out of the building screaming, with the open book left on the pew and the churchgoers staring after us.  they remind me of the places my imagination used to run away to after the veil was pushed back and i realized that the world was not all good, and i knew with my child's mind that i couldn't possibly understand. things were bigger then because they were all in the dark, and i had no idea their size.

oh, goya.

"goya was no more mad than shakespeare was when he wrote the mad scenes for ophelia or king lear. furious and inspired, yes, but infused with an icy control. and it's the combination of the fury and the control that announces the genius."

"i tell you, i admire him so much but he also frightens me so much sometimes, because the thing about goya is his absolute authenticity. you feel that the demons that inhabit his work come absolutely out of the center of his being. they're completely familiar to him. it's like he has breakfast with them... they are what we are, and he shows this with complete lack of any sort of embarrassment or pretense. you know when you look at the black paintings that 

there

go 

i."

-- goya: crazy like a genius

hey.

pssst...i'm wearing these headphones for a reason.

if i don't look interested in what you're saying i'm probably not, and you should stop talking. besides, i can't even hear what you're saying.

i nod at what i guess are the appropriate times, and my "yeahs" get funny looks because they're in all the wrong places.

without sound, it's easy to imagine you as a skeleton, as framework. i can visualize your skull inside your head, jaw opening and closing, and the mechanics of it all are like a tiny miracle. your mandibles are flapping and i'm thinking your skull and i would have a better rapport than you and i do.

that means your bones are more interesting than you are.

mixed wavelengths

i bore the antichrist. i named him something modern, but it turned out that in some archaic tongue, his name literally meant affliction.

i birthed him and he destroyed me.

what a waste of my body.

but, i said, this is all wrong. my belly was supposed to explode in blinding prisms of white light.

what a waste of my time.