Prey.

7/20/14

"If it wasn't one thing, it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you'd been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless. Feel? Be." - The Lost Weekend, C. Jackson, p. 84

Too terrified to cross the street

To all those I've let down,
be brave in my admonishment.
To all those I've showered with scorn,
be proud that I so fear you.
Each day upon our earth
is harder than our last,
Remember.

I will never trust a woman who doesn't like to kiss during sex.

[cthonic]

O how that blow would smart if my axe were to be swung sober.

My dry eyes click like billiard balls, a membrane of dust between the sphere and the lens. Each blink is a guillotine shutter, capturing all I take in in the basket of blood below.

7/21/14

Today, I feel like prey, stalked about my house by anxieties unseen, I creep past my windows while eyes slither through blinds, I remain silent afraid that I might wake what lies in wait.

Pout in the mirror, then,
you knot-headed fool,
if even from light you must hide.
The reflection reflects tension
so smooth and cool,
and besides, there's people outside.

Shudder at each crack, then,
appliance and porch,
the sounds of the house as it settles.
Your nerves are ropes of flies
now buzzing in hordes,
your blood shrieks in a curdling kettle.

---------------------------------------------------

My little lover
wakes as an animal,
blue eyes wide
as wide as only blue eyes
can know to be,
staring not through the air,
but at the air
and the dreams of dreams
yet painted there
upon the canvas
of motes in sun.

Weird marijuana nostalgia; Cocteau Twins. Sewing patches onto my shorts: Spoke Pants of the Flowering Skillet. Still can't draw a pot leaf.

Can't leave my house unless I'm leaving the county. Sirens, alarming.

7/22/14

"My love confused confused with after loves
not even over time did I outgrow." - from "Images of Elspeth", J, Berryman, Love & Fame

If each word writ
is a shell being loaded.
or if each word wrought
be a shell fired,
should I let heart
or brain
choose the target?

"'The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted + posed in form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.'
I was never altogether the same man after that." - from "Olympus", J. Berryman, Love & Fame

DREAM:
Game of Thrones' Jon Snow-as-cowboy, with a murderous dog, hiding in limestone outcrops of Arkansas. "Hold... hold... hold... get 'em!" Dog kills four bounty hunters, also GoT actors.

Dog kills two boys, one turns out to be brother (?) or boyfriend (?) of Jon's old fiancee. [ink running from spilt sweat, words unintelligible]

Jon sighs, says, "He's killed a lot of my friends over the years." Then he gives her a small plastic ring.

DREAM:
I start a fire in the basement of a house during a house show. Fire is put out, but damage is done. None suspect me, assuming accident, except for Kyle K., who will not tell. He understands.

DREAM:
Brian Cummings handing out matzo at a Pantera concert. Jon Snow has replaced Dimebag. Pantera covers "May the Circle Be Unbroken".

-----------------------------------------------------

One week in, I'm still blowing bloody snot and picking bloody boogers out of my nose. I wonder if maybe I broke it.

Downtown, I look at a trail of broken glass on the ground with sentimental detachment. How many times was this spoor my own, with nary rhyme nor reason, but me hyena cackling and enraged and erotically charged that my blood should spill, hallowed and hollow, with none to see and grant action the witness which raises violence and sacrifice from the profane to the legendary, worthy of mindless devotion?

"a mat of flesh a bed of down where I'd bed down and roll you over once again with your corona round your head and who's the one that fitted you with that when all should know to deify is to betray in a failure of love in some sort of transaction with myself." - L. Ferlinghetti, Her, p. 147

[here there is a second Ferlinghetti quote in re: God/galaxies, unfortunately likewise rendered hereforthwith inert by the power of buttsweat]

7/23/14

coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee

$3.67

I want to stop everyone I walk past and tell them everything I know, and all that I've seen. This is my new art, their faces my canvas.

7/25/14

It is 1:25 am. Somewhere, someone is still able to buy liquor, and goddamn them. Fuck your sympathy. I feel like shit.

[unintelligible] can relating your past [unintelligible. . . . ] deep in my iron [unintelligible. . . . ] needles, staggering anxiety [unintelligible. . . . ] leaking tears and so tightly wound I feel entirely made of screaming horn is now the goddamn fucking time to tell me that, as if it in some way equates us as brother and sister in our pain, and besides who doesn't dream of a sex addiction every now and then, me of course considering how many wasted years I spent not being promiscuous, but hell shit I know every motherfucker in this town and now can only picture them inside of you, and christ I'd like to write more but this bastard cunt of a right hand of mine is cramping and I have to fucking stop whether I want to or not.

-------------------------

And while each girl makes sounds her own during sex, I expect in Heaven they will all sound alike, and Heaven will be a bore.

When first she held me,
but then my head,
but then my hair
in her hand,
when first we touched
and spoke our hello,
'round fire
and ashen october fell,
she loosed a gnat
and I swallowed it
and carried it
for two years hence.

*******************

"I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that."
- R. Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 11

*********************************

DREAM:
He came to the bathroom and reached to the light switch, then started as he realized she was on the floor, laying on a hurried pile of blankets between the toilet and the sink. She began to sheepishly rise, sheepish in her solitude and facing only herself with guilt, as she had yet to notice his presence.

"Christ," he said finally, her seeming the barest surprised at his voice. [ed. note - "Swan Lake" screams sexceptionally triumphant here] "Are you alright?"

Hardly raising her eyes, then, she spoke, the words tumbling freely. "Friends come home, and are so helpful, he took me to eat and listened, he hadn't listened like that before. And back here, you gone for so long, we drank and I felt him grow, he in me and holding me, we both fucking in my bed until I came, arching, then he came, inside me, as friendly as they who are where they are needed when they are needed, and I was stupid to think only you would make me come from now on."

He stood, silent, anger warming his cheeks. His vision blurred, doubled, cleared, then blurred again as he bent and put his hand beneath her chin, pulling her face upwards to the relative light of the still-dark bathroom.

"Gone? So long? It was only three days! And I saw how much you drank..." His anger now gained proportions which seemed immediately to betray the early comfort of his self-righteous rage.

"And nothing happened, those three days?" she asked. "You lay with no one?"

He was silent again, still holding her chin, and his vision blurred once more. He remembered the girl's shoes, tangled beside his own in the salted sun-bleached morning, and the pillowcase he had drug home still damp with her sweat and still blossoming with the smell of perfume.

DREAM:
He wandered about in front of the museum, wary of the officers stroking their mustaches, who though speaking in code ("the wolf...", "the egg laid...") he knew to be discussing the break-in and murder the night before.

"There's no reason for them to suspect me," he reassured himself, "Save perhaps my guilty constitution, some thing I don't realize I wear upon my face."

---------------------------------------------------------------

Words,
gouts of blood,
drowning in dreams,
I lift them
and spin
a rearrangement,
jerrymander-upon-juxtapose
Strafford-upon-Ava.

What then the knocking when finally sleep may come?

I jerk off ferociously to foreign porn stars whose names I never learn to pronounce.

My house is ghostlight
blue ghostlight

Will I ignore my phone?
Will I get anything done?
No, yes,
say it and let it lie true!

8/5/14

Men have been trimming trees in my neighborhood since sometime this morning (it being about half-past 6 pm now). I cannot bear to watch; they are idiots, and I fear I will be witness to one losing a limb. Even without watching, though, they intensify my anxiety, the frantic cicada of their two-stroke saws only letting up long enough for them to gripe and shout at each other in the wearily angry, thickly impatient grey tone of fools.

Such anxiety today! Tony being put on "96 hour hold" at Cox South was only a tipping domino to some sort of walking-catatonia, handymen showing up not helping, too much coffee. Drinking a beer now, bad boy, but it was screaming and I don't know how else to shut them up.

**********************

Find myself with plastic bottle clenched tight in hand, find myself no fault of mine. Here we, weary. Here we only I and I, such miserable company, such dust-mote poetry and private fancy. Ah goddammit my sister now what twenty-eight this weekend? And I miserable coward shuffle-shuffle, little crab-man too afraid to touch his phone, and the terror of auditory hallucinations, I hear knocking at night, and now I swear someone is screaming every name I own across my alley-drive, surely real? and surely in jest? not knowing my state has but utter terror, here! Do you see? This is why I draw my shades and want only drinks and a clean house and my guns, all to scare the rest of 'em. Locking all my doors. No one's allowed.

Lackadaisical charisma has obscured the fact that I constantly consider myself at war with everything and everyone around me. I deserve none of the gratitude I am shown.