egress from a brightly lit land (part 1)

we take small steps out from what
many like to say is a dark
nightland
a dim graphite-hued landscape
where everything is dead and faded

the truth is
it's very bright
too bright
bright enough to delineate the most
strangling detail in hyperfocus
both lies and truths
illuminated with equal shading
spoken crisply and eloquently and
the faces of the past aren't as
some sloppy distressed watercolor
but really a professionally animated decoupage
individualized and bordered and
sharply recalled
ready to bleed the vomit of your own
magnificent fuckups directly into your
mouth
twisting your own language
torturing you
slicing off your cock
digging beautiful dragon's teeth of glass
into your starving arms wet and pliant and welcoming as
egg custard
laughing delicately then
heartily til you find
yourself horrifically laughing back

we drag our way through the technicolor
trying to understand it at first

well
trying to understand it for a
really
long                               long
while
we ponder it
we arm ourselves intellectually against it
then with it
helping it for a while
then we combat it again in
a kind of schizophrenic musical trench warfare
catching ourselves by our own thrown projectiles
it could be months lived like this
elongated and tallied by the measures of
sleepless eternal evenings
clutching our cold brains
fraught with dreams of justice and reconciliation
dramatic gestures devised
celebrations of delicate grandeur
deadeyed
zombified by what we lack

to pursue a jagged path through we
generate the loveliest distractions:
other people
the centers of our bodies
intoxications and pharmaceutical delights
flickering entertainments
twitch dopamine carousels
riding the hypothalamus bareback and hitting
every obvious obstacle right at the fucking knees
progress is pitilessly slow and mired
sometimes we turn around and are being chased
sometimes we are chasing the stoic end of the day
sometimes we are chasing the fragile morning
sometimes we find we are simply running for some time

you would think that when we hit the gate we
crash heroically through it with
all this stored kinetic energy and
the fury of the chase but
this land never moves and though everything in
this land is moving nothing is moving and
we get there right at the edge of it and
this is probably where we stay the longest
and this
is probably
where many others
still
live
and we think
about that
and we are
no longer
moving

hielo / one hundred and four degrees

maybe it's nothing
cigarette smoke cascading cancer over
old blankets
suffusing particulate suffering as
murmured words
absorbing errors and freewheeling
mental imagery and crushed romantic
dirges into this weathered fabric
rescuing images from the past like a
cloudy sky

she's kind of weird
like that
maybe
it's nothing that she wakes up
early to chuckle over something she's
reading
or make perfect coffee and
hypothesize the day before
bothering me but

it always
seems
to
be 155 in the morning now it
angles into the room like
shafts of ambivalent sunlight
awoken with the ghosts of her and
the hateful architecture of the day
positioned before me
i gather my diseased moorings close and
angle towards it

and
maybe
enlightened by nothing
to nothing
i procrastinate in the softer unseen
edges of her
and designate abandoned boundaries where her
gentle breath breathed tunnels into
mine and
submerge into the discordant ink where her
prose met
mine and find my
enemies in what remains maybe

it's nothing but
the mythic refrains circumnavigating these
streets and rooms which are forever
our moments
a frozen garden
where
nothing grows
or
dies

you may have just won ten million dollars

he will never
hurt himself
he will absorb and
conjure and perjure and
suture and culture but
not injure or
enfeeble or dart
across the surface of
an eye or meet
soft redemption in
hands that run through
hair or asleep in
chemical tendrils be
destroyed
he will
stay
forever
trapped in some kind
of a creased permanent
stance like a specious
bookmark
made of magazine clippings
and fucking stupid taunting
habits and immature
somnambulist ideas and
sincere loathsome
molecular destruction in
a
dream
yesterday
my
left arm and hand sliced
and shredded and scarred
over a mix of
old wounds and new and
the pinky torn off
below the knuckle and the
scars like braille or dna
held down by the throat
unable to speak
or wake until
woken
i was
able to be
silent and dreaming

i remember waking up to calm
adjacent nightmares
i remember a soft breeze at night
blown over and around our
furniture and mixed in
with our breath
the sounds of partying neighbors
and backyard dogs baying and
our selves redacted to
an atomic whole
i remember rhythmic iloveyous
and passion and complacency and disinterest and
verve and thrill and pleasant boredom and
ravenous bloodthirsty boredom and elegant
sated boredom and the boredom of
knowing how not to be bored and avoidance and
the lack of faith and the loss of it and
my old dying frame a hideous
portrait and my face something to be
idly destroyed like junk mail

this is what it looks like
when i'm just walking around:

a king bullshitter
self lacerated
drunk & drugged
staring at pedestrians who
cope like master craftsmen
going through the motions of
emotions breaking up the
composite motions of
smiling hello or buying a granola bar or
taking a shit or two-stepping the subway
stairs or feeling for the right grapefruit

near the end of a given day i
expend the limit of my energies paying
for groceries with a debit
card exactly like a normal
person

what a life looked like

in 1980 a piece of shit was sprang onto the earth fatherless or fatherful or motherless or  mothered or somehow described into being in 1982 he fell on the stairs and split his head open and maybe some dirt and shit from the blackened floor seeped into the folds of flesh  and bone under his thick young hair in 1982 he left or was taken (always feel funny telling this part like additional explanation must be made. it makes for a shitty story) thousands of miles away to a strangely angled house under an oddly angled sun that felt like a new sun until he was older many peculiar and discordant things occurred which don't really make any  sense still now weird loves and obsessions and a lot of hornyness that was too young but felt old and a very strange overly large portion of shame like the meal he was always pushed to complete like the mockery of his weight and many other confusing body syndromes that seemed too intimate and sharply known for a small frame several bloody accidents many confusing dreams every sexual bit of data compelled from texts and cued from film all significant answers drawn from within the well of his own funny and disrupting brain (the attentive reader will note it as the same brain exposed to the elements of a dirty argentine staircase) until at some point by roughly the age of 8 it was very clear to him that he was a bad person somewhat deranged yet able to function a kind of stricken automaton that enjoyed to bleed but was very distressed when causing harm to others even small objects and toys though this didn't really prevent much violent expression in classrooms though it was peculiar how in his synagogue he felt warm and asleep even when he was awake and singing how when those large doors opened and shut silently cushioned behind him and he stepped in front of the wall of names of dead community members who had donated here and felt the warm orange hued light where prayers sprung and echoed he found a seat next to a man who would continually point out where in the siddur he should be praying and singing from these were all decent things to him until he started to fight with the other older boys who would hang in the stairwell and fuck with him though they didn't often physically confront him he learned how to use his tongue as a crooked taped blade these were all key lessons and he still remembers when he was in his house and started to sing the kaddish and his mother told him to never sing that prayer as it was an awful thing which was confusing because singing it made him feel whole and fulfilled but he never sang it for pleasure again not once though it pleased her when he memorized the shema and then two other things happened to him when he was still jewish one day a girl in yeshiva said it made her feel good to kick someone in the shins and she was pretty and he said okay do it and she did very hard with clicky dancer shoes and it was the most searing vibrant hallucinatory pain and it still hurts today if not worse and somehow sweetly and the other thing was he was sliding on the floor in the library with friends and smashed head first into a bookshelf but when he did he kind of bent up at a weird angle and he couldn't stand up straight and so he limped outside where rabbi pearl was standing on an elevated platform and he saw how he was walking and he came up to him and he placed one hand on each side of his body and snapped him straight like he was closing a book after afternoon prayers and then he could walk again

uzumaki / kiss in the parking lot

the murmur of
crooked wildlife
a mirror of ice of
arms of
glass of drifted
animal darkness chasing
through cruel grateful
dreaming sleepless counterfeit
bloodless architecture soaked and
hollow
when removed

a hand disturbs when awake
like a stranger breaking
my concentration
then
refocusing carefully
temporarily
for the most miniature
moment to try to
find in them the most
rudimentary trust

cold blood in
a voice in a very
small machine on
a street in the
sun recorded by
a security camera

bookmark

not
really
sure

maybe it's the supernova
of incongruous loneliness
spread upon a sunlit day of footsteps

or it's xanadu
in ten breaths that separate
the thought of her
from ten different
inhalations
that occupy a mesmerized
valley of disjointed
anarchic
resilient
jealous
dreamily indistinct and
tortured daggereyed
rooms

where every object
is a talisman
wrought with grave and
disgusting memory

where
possessed with simmering
self
hatred
that disturbs any
shaky attempt to nourish
or push forward or
comply

not really sure

maybe it's the
bubbling liquid
surface of
the real
maybe
muscle memory
replete with soft
goosebumped arms
hands roughened by
life and motherhood
always causing a weird
distraught gesture i've
tried to hide
like a pill
under the tongue

not
really
sure about
what lies under the tongue
an honesty that presupposes
fear
a
dark urge
punishing whoever
would place stupid faith or
gamble their crumbling joy to
this deft ghost

he haunts our old roads our
words and narratives
he kisses the empty space
he mumbles
not really sure
he picks up our books
he doesn't know
what they
are for

camera #4 / Bedford Park to Fordham Road

junkie in bad sneakers on a long stumblish walk
past the ubiquitous subway sandwich shop sandwich board
bored and fretting
the bus is close but legs feel free
taking me past quinceanera bakeries
and fake toys at family dollar
little farther
i'm wading through auto chop shops and
pitbull collars
shoptalking around the homeless
lined up at P.O.T.S.
holler for spare cigarettes and scratching lotto cards
lot of closed up storefronts
battered faces eye me warily
carwash kitty dashes past the morning daring me
to chase him through the metro north fencework
too late for the second bus intense
doesn't even stop for a splitsecond
the school is filled with recess yard dramas
i fastwalk past the stop sign persistently ignored
or be gored by an impala
or the SUV with the smiling family
new bodega opened up 6 months ago
never needed in this neighborhood
yet they never leave this neighborhood
cross the street
fordham trumpeting its million shopper march
neverending trinket tables
shell games and WE BUY
GOLD AND DIAMONDS fables and
the storm sounds
of the train
avoid the rain under the best buy shelter on the corner
i disappear behind a door
wearing karma's
garments as
armor