Poetic Discontent

in this undecided age, an affectionate anxiety in universal sympathy with falling in line, sequences of trauma and overcoming (like moths pouring from shirt sleeves) arrangements for rearranging, estrangements of dragged feet, collections of demolitions, and questions yielding to deletion.

the final reciprocation of the eye, the liquid tissue unglued; agglomerations of astonishment at our permanent carnage and drug-induced breakthroughs.

this suddenly cutthroat ephemeral hurt is used as an occasion for early resignations and premature assassinations, hostile depravations, fierce felling of the exceptional.

the gelastic vigilantes of the loosened tongue like rain, antimicrobial flame upon this mortal thrush, redeemed like Prometheus into tomes and werewolves. the loop of conversation, its reliance on liminal measurements of attempted consensus and partially solved puzzles; eye contact a woman strayned too far from the well, the evacuated space like an unread book: the Complete Works of a Sad Sack with no dust jacket.

and there are still so many ways to not matter; the repeated soul-baring throughout history, petitions from temporary mountains under the infertile curdle of the repetitive moon; the scraps of nightmares like euplastic plankton that nourish the midnight adulterers cheating on noon.

the doomy clouds wayward scroll, couriering the light pollution of gelded dreams and compromised bedtimes; the penal hormones of cold youth and adrift distractions of a stranded mind; the existential sprawl of a lover on call and an always-on deadline.

the relic of eternity is discarded like a long lost frivolity, a divulging shade in the shadow of a different moon; the omens of the gas station signage marking the ways gone wrong, an unprecedented pandemic of regret still onshoring; ruminating like a 24hr laundromat, vacillations of coin and sweat; dry cleaning for nudes.

unrest is the underground crest of the bashed in heart circulating back to this square empire cashing in what it can't have. alcohol can only do so much lubricating and the universe is not big enough to apologize. so many departures sent too soon... to await the impossible and its reclamation but for the empty parking spaces.

scrounged up in the richness of the waylaid dreamlands, neglected by the dead, cutthroat innocence of lapdog scavenging will carry off-balance sins as an accusation's debtor; lawlessness down to the letter.

the unsituated exhibition of the overcast glimpses at a barroom serenity; the day is an unbroken whisper, a false god's confession; to be and to not be blindsided by the past's latest pivot; spoiled grain of the imprisoned mind, the thirst takes its toll on survival; the unfortunately affordable desperation of the entitled.

to inherit the parsimonious discredit of the prodigal remission of this undercooked scripture; an out-of-sync accounting, a confluence too inflated to burst; the eleventh of the decimated squaring up with the reckoning of a lost coin.

sun drowning in blue. the prelapsarian day's inevitable lack of follow through; smoke building up to nothing as if it needs something. who knows the terror that the throne bearers felt when they heard the first jet engine melt into the immaculate waste of a paradise spent in haste?

the gluttonous trauma of full-bellied empire; the butterfly in each massacred awakening; gunfire pullulating like denials amidst the disorientation of ordinary martyrs in file. the sunbaked fading from outrage and all the mercies of age into a climate of manic desolations that rejoice in the aftermath of tomorrow giving way to the ancient.

We emerge from last call stalled and bitter engines; brokedown passengers discarded and vandalized, cynical yet surprised at our continued disregard for novels.

The fragile veneer of transaction out of the haze of the midnight commute. The gas stations are shrines, the strip club a willing, auspicious meeting of like-minds, nights of humble coronation, flashing red: beer, wine, and candle to ward off a modern plague. Hot baths like glown, feminine sachets that keep the raccoons up past daybreak with their sway.

Of convenience's vehement crusades: onion rings and red-eye flights and charging stations. Gorging shots of blood, the wrist diminishes and rusts from its instrument. Glass puzzle of bottle and trough, the open wound of the mouth; a smashed tail light, itchy cornea. This strained cargo, the graveyard shift-worker’s Marlboros, hot boxes that take the wheel and idle; the totality of grudge matches in the essential company of asphaltic blight; an entanglement of dogs chewing at the floorboards of the night.

The mouth's delay raised from these quondam diversions as a storm relieved of disturbance, teeth like fingertips sucked into the sorrowful organs, drained through a bloodletted confessional; the initiation of hurt not stirring until sang to.

Consider beneath the streetlamps a yearning, the stoplight channeling fateful issue, the tissue of the night clutching and imprinting the hour’s aloofness that might teach these snuffed out streets hobbled and vomited upon, doubters, star-inquiring of god, to breach.

There is no humanity here only a human euphemism. Sunset to window shade it's all struggle and ignoble beauty and moments of searing recovery. The lunarcloud breaks away and days of fat and compromise are left in the open discernment of the moon’s torpor, revealing the vanity in our horror.

a truth too sad to leave the false confessions into a cold breeze.

the city's silent audience is the first request of grief the massacred heart sending out feelers for a restorative bleed.

the pitfall of waking in the shallow depths the sun a day late with the eternal reverberating of a silenced doubt.

the naked crowd helps the dead to understand lifetimes exist to terrorize the right direction.

with heart pounding like a brain trying to escape its skull we are victims of opportunity and flag waving.

I am every flaw in your masterpiece; too much to drink and the earth losing its green; half of an extreme.

How far the hereafter is from the rafters, the seasons from accepting change; you hold on to an ache like it's a photograph; ferris wheel of memory halted at the blueprint stage.

You matter more than the rules of war. In your incredibly indistinct mirroring the accident of truth is seen; the high life of tired miracles, a saint gone rogue curing anything that bleeds. Your heart is like a racing mind with too much practice at dying; a honeycomb with crimson walls and sweet rectifying.

The rind of your shyness is pierced by the kindness of having nothing to say; your pulped innards like a strong cocktail of exhaustion and industry; lunch with you a sacrificial divinity.

Strength is the most effective form of loss; the soreness of a handshake goodbye in retaliation for raiding the scenery for poetry. Let me with your gums recede as you gnaw like a naught waiting on a number.

The highlight of your pathetic eyes like headlamps in the caves of today's pessimisms. The nearest reckoning with your beckoning lips: sash windows in a storm.

The town is cold as laughter with dogs only barking after you've begun dreaming. Yet isn't it elegant how eloquent your disappointment is ablated as the butterscotch morning is regurgitated.

every mistake of affection is annotated like a butterfly of indifference catalogued and framed. the order making it harder to not be where it was.

fall while you may. cry and be merry. there is no polite way to cross the confluence of skybridges linking hotels to convention centers where mortality is stricture and obsession is agenda

the city a discombobulated appeal to God a heaven without a pension with the State and safety of an intake form.

the stampede of the pavement boots like defibrillators obeying like no tomorrow the voluntary commitment to a tommy gun restraint newspapers numb documents propaganda an aria.

alcohol took young Charity in her prime and gray Grace from her golden times the police motorcycles like stygian guides abetting us to the crime of exceeding the animal like the sun free radical its light becoming food for swine

a dorito bag in the gutter, the treadmill that shames you and the emptiness that weighs on you sprite-and-clear-liquor-ology open air stadiums of bacchanal violence and the justification of historic inequality called political science

the fate of something else where light is indecision and darkness is the fear of missing out this all or nothing appetite cellphone scroll like unpaid labor and a heart button for manna

the maintenance of this dedication like the escaping heat from a failed invention the centurial grind of time and god's silence what an explosion feels like in the recorded pages of the unconscionable

maybe the crow's caw can acquaint us with catastrophe without the ecstasy of genuflection friday night bruises that heal by monday where the world for a warm meal is fair trade

at the great abandonment of the sky you appear like an era on its last life where fugitives can reside awhile we miss your name in lights and when music could change life hope such a disoriented quest such a brittle place to rest

-Unknown

time's plundering revisions each day a delay of the return home the sun relapses and again we follow the exacting hours into dreamstate where we slave away as if awake and rest only comes with waking.

risking everything only for the reward of risking again finding significances disparaged unresolved compromise between lung and air the next backwards attempt at pausing the freefall, a temporary Intransience the only thing stopping existence splattering into predicament are your tender palms.

if only the spring of the hills was an everlasting pill and memory was a medicine if only the compulsion to wonder was reciprocated by the unresponsive thunder.

mountain, my mountain why don't you stand tall anymore? is your gloom seasonable? rumination reasonable? open the century to thy stairs let the legacy of your atrophy not be in error.

mosaic of unanswered prayer orphan with a black cat bloodline; profane dawn and its cursed enlightenment this miserable galaxy and its succor of late warnings and panicked bargaining impotence of our dalliances with determination and oil paints; mere air dissolving into what isn't there.

who are we to interrupt the rats and their expansion of empire the cherry groves dusty and picked over the dirt is anesthesia in the acreages of violence minefields, black sites for eyes.

the lone suffering of the bones of your temperament the bipodal brain lunging for two different directions.

no one knows you like the songbird's despair your garden, ignorant of its fidelity to self-repair grasps at transfigurement lashes out in prayer

doping is the angel's coping close kindling for brinkmanship the music of the leaf's smoldering heard only in your fingertips.

memory lets go of its reversal fault lines crack and reform shelters become obstacles, ruins, sanctums reborn.

knowing, however improbable like fruit budding from volcanic ash, is unremarkable. belief nothing more than open air.

a land become scratch resistant, disasters machine washable. we find purchase in equipment to be reenvisioned like april seeds acropetal.

how disposable the lives of dreamers put through the lemon reamer of mutations, warring nations, space debris, and health transfers.

let me be the first to love the landfills, my service alley brethren! the aggregations of radioactive swill, and the unwashed madmen. let the deep sea de-plastic. let the animal inhale deeply.

poet as wasteworker, or more like wasteworker as holyman. it's you there, in hot, polluted air, mouth filled with trash like a pelican; possibility like a hallucination in this oasis of maculate lavation, surfing the thermal refraction.

imagination is merely a fever. and this parade of hyperfocused deviations from nature's leisures, its groves of immortal fluctuations, for these millennial mementos of grayscale capitulations.

the heart like a rescue worker holding a dead child nails in shambles hammering at the expected collapse of crucial lifelines autumnal scenarios of streetcat vendettas and lethal medicine.