My Exhaustion

Today my exhaustion is a noose upon which hangs my prognostication, the oracle’s augury that restricts in bondage the arms I gave to hold you down. I’ve foreseen the spiritual death of love on a hillside patch of Queen Anne’s Lace, this knoll outside the atmosphere of caustic indecision, intramuscular plunger pulling out a dead man’s sickness.

I see that grassy sea of dirt like soldiers at attention. I suffer the weight of ecstasy in chains you drape across my resurrection. Still I rise to no occasion, sometimes falling where I made my bed for us to beat each other bloody. Sometimes vomit forth the breath I live and die to be reborn some lesser form no farther from extinction, every night in flames I burn a lust to be created.

I REJECT SPIRITUAL APATHY

I REJECT SPIRITUAL APATHY

I REJECT SPIRITUAL APATHY

I REJECT SPIRITUAL APATHY

I REJECT SPIRITUAL APATHY

The smell of my skin makes me sick to my stomach. Get to it, Drop the bags in the trash can and rifle through the waste, I need a hit of some special moment, outside of the decay.

I am tearing out the hair of intuition from the camel, Succumbing to the heat with every glass I break upon her back. I strip away her beauty, I violate this holy form with ease, for I was not beaten into violence nor inoculated with perversion, I seek it like I seethe beneath the chemicals. I’ve studied all the tricks of abscondence from moral reckoning. I relieved myself of the duty I inherited from a righteous man and exchanged it for a weapon. See me now, as I spit upon your fire.

Head back to the garbage. I siphon off the junk and administer a fresh tourniquet, tossing bloody blankets for the pigeons and the rats I grind into a paste beneath my boot. I flail across their entrails, I lap up marrow like a dog: This is sex, this is love.

They catch me on sidewalk and I catch one to the ribs, I vomit. This is sex. Thirty six slices through my sternum. This is love and I have never been so joyous.

Back to the garbage. There is one more bag of pills at the bottom, best for last I figure. I descend beyond the bottom rung of my final length of ladder. I try to strike a match in silence but light is not permitted here.

I see my trophy on a bed of bones, this is it. This is everything. I take it, I score, the game is in my hands. My friends pour forth from the shadows brandishing a golden crucifix. I won, it’s over. I won but the smell remains. The awful rotting stench, the air of a bad break, the organs of the birds that I am bleeding. I kneel before my lovers, take one more heel to my chest and my flesh falls away like ash. One last prayer before the broken camel, One last little death before the lights come on, one last fuck in the sewer as I shake and smoke all covered in hands. Covered in love, I vomit.

2C-B

It’s something like a small bush, a stone in my stomach, slow release coating like a wrapper. My eyes are vibrating and I’m losing my mind, I look like a junky, I look like the silence I bring into every room

My fingers are writing without my will, I have no will at the moment I am far too high, I am far above the body that belts these foolish similes, childish metaphors. But what have I left if not the magicians cloth. I live as a misdirection for those who seek something honest.

I’m sweating bullets and my pupils are nickels now. I’m shaking and I’m freezing and I’m burning and I’m going to cry. I make myself sick with confusion when the words pouring off my tongue are those of someone better, someone void of image and fashion. I deceive myself to believe I am good man. I’m so high and all I want is to a hit. All I want is to know. Everything would be different if I knew. Everything’s gonna be different when I paint my masterpiece.

For now I am the smartest fool in every room, it’s the gift bestowed upon me by the Lord who I forsake with every narcissistic swath of bile I spit at those so unlucky as to meet my gaze.

Recording “Gagged” last year

Lift weights

Go outside

The butcher’s daughter breaks fast with junkies. Why should I lend her my hand?

You can see that I’ve grown quiet, grown seeds of compassion towards the floor.

My bones become lead on the carpet I sweep with my brother’s fingers. I should serve you better in silence, once the dust is gone. Pillars of ash towards the ceiling. Bottles and bottles and bottles. You can see that I am begging for some kindness. I’m desperate for hands to hold me. Why should I get up off the ground when you will always be above me. Why should I seek salvation when the violence fills my lungs. You all see me from your thrones up on the roof. You watch me writhe like a snake and you hear me ask if there’s anything you’d like to do. Why do you keep me here beneath you? All I want is some kindness. I’m begging for hands to hold me. You ask if I’m going. Why should I?

Blanket me sweet nurse

To keep me from burning

The glass that rides the sea is full of loathing for the soft winds allowed by your indifference

The copper inside the burnt black rubber is missing, stripped like the dancers down the block, spitting poison lead, noxious fumes from the cavities in their chests where an organ should be pulsing, you forsake them for your apathy

Simple things, still quite confused

Pennsylvania Steel shows up, cold air on the loading dock, cold March

Quiet in the morning, boisterous on a Friday night

I give it all away every time

Favoring a strong high over the scrap yard romantic, piecing together wonder and truth like an idiot, so you can go fuck yourself you’re losing your shit man, you’ve got maybe one chance, maybe, and you waste every minute of your hour in her eyes

You don’t know what love feels like to a real person

You give it all away like an idiot

You write poems like an idiot

You relax like a dead dog, like you’ve given up

But aren’t you happy this year? You’re better this week, you’re drunk every night and you’re high on the phone with your doctor who lies about your condition, she says you’re on the right track, I’m on the train tracks smoking dope with Marcos and glass bottles of rocks so filthy they might commit suicide

But you’re happy tonight

You’ve got it all in the street

You’re open to the tongue in your ear when you explode all across the room

You give it up like an idiot

You’ve got maybe one chance, I haven’t got shit but a nice job and a nice car and a nice family and a nice place to live and food to eat and some friends who love me

What do you say to that?

Sucker

Benny

The stones in your sleep and dreams dying and deserted upon the beach it all must be so important it all must be the symbols it all must be,

You put your pen to the brow of nothingness and believe you have God’s gift in your fingers, yet your hands tremble with the weight of emptiness in your soul inside which you pour these images, these representations of something you’ll never understand like the sand in your sweater that will never stay too long, morning air fills the hallway and you’re alone again, they never want to be with you when light comes through the window and your body knows the truth, so the rising sun fills you with cool despondency,

Folding into your bed sheets soaked with water and blood you lie back, reclined before the priest you pray and practice patience, still every time he leaves you weep, still every morning you wonder and every night you beg for dawn’s solitude, you don’t want anything you can have, you don’t need anyone but him to speak your name,