was known to pick targets when boxed in by tractor trailers when the median gave chance for a head-on collision. drove like he didn’t care to survive.
bumper stickers warned innocents.
an army seven-million strong by the time he was ready would be nice if once just once or twice we could stop hating each other so much to honor that time and maybe it’s not really hate but a succession of days spent wondering through desert life at stars at breath my decision of each inhalation tempered now with the surrenders inherent to each departure: i must hate you. i must unlove you unseat you from this tangent, exponentially tangential, scattershot into futures apart.
was unknown in brevity, famous in obsession and little else.
multitasked his path to mediocrity: books, pages, digitally-versatile stubbornness borne on [did you know he was actually allergic to donkeys?]
i don’t know who i am anymore.
never tried a drug he didn’t fear, never didn’t fear You, that base addiction concreted, secreted in a night that he put his hand over your mouth so the neighbors wouldn’t bitch. knew then that your flicking tongue tasted yourself on his palm from cupped foreplay: [this isn’t cheating; this is friendship: beneficently extended.]
synesthetic in that he could hear your smile, taste your release. synesthetic in that he could live the shadows of you and die each time he felt for your heart-beats.
ate aspirin like breath mints.
hostaged himself to yesterdays. to three-times-nine, to fourteen-seven: to morning, afternoon, evening and night smoke.
once considered working on a bison farm because “artists” need real “jobs” to pay for cable.
[your dark exterior masks a caffeine-driven activism/] [you’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it/]
thought that maybe if he smiled hard enough, long enough, his face would stick that way [such childhood threats only work for negatives] [and no one would know].
realized long after they’d left that they were gone
long before they’d left.
stole poetry from his inbox:
Under the cheese, reconciles a breezy stain. Dresses by drugs, transmutates the acorn to guy. Ruined by chariots, wipes the light to guest. Transmutating, saying, transmutating, writing, stepping. Counter had a spill, which was not at all a gut. Tells cowardly, wordlessly, like keys yelling, allegedly. Seasons like rocks go slyly but angrily.
lonely man: suspensory particularist falconine boil lonely euangiotic
lonely man: wondered exactly when the future became a time when scambots used “euangiotic” to market cum-guzzling tranny vids and bigger dick pills [ripper cun7 open 2nite] and the. lowest. mortgage. rates. ever.
was never particularly falconine.
synesthetic in that the point is, i forgive you.
synesthetic in that he never wanted an acknowledgement, just silences
the suicide watch was long over, the july phone call of an angry father and halfhearted attempts to convince him he wouldn’t walk off the roof.
sometimes swerved into traffic. sometimes ran into snowbanks on purpose. sometimes pretended he wasn’t home.
the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, palm to breast, wondering which geography hearts learn first.
his madness taught him that tinnitus ringing through from first memories sang a perfect constant note, an S note, inextricable from musics that dredged and driver units, fifty millimeters spanning twenty- five thousand hertz were the most convincing evidence that he wasn’t in fact indistinguishable from god.
wrote such worlds into existence with maths learned in base one four seven fifty three forty seven fourteen made no sense to anyone beyond the periphery of his madness: for all we know, benton really existed somewhere dying at quantum light x and ghosts are nothing more than unrealized lovers.
let’s disappear.
wondered if the three seconds of static from two minutes, twenty-two seconds to two minutes, twenty-five seconds was intentional.
have you remembered me as he fucks you?
long ago forgot the ingredients of love if ever he’d purchased them in the first place. substituted distance for proximity and water for milk. burned the mess.
learned the result of making love is often a screaming, dying pile of flesh more self-inscribed suffering than infant.
the morbid lock with which he fantasized an elegant entrance to their funeral cars and the questions whispered by strangers, of strangers: was he? the one? who?
such daymares unseat the hesitant security of decades.
revised his histories to include suspicions. revised his memories to include evidences. revised his life to the end result of conscious constructions of begged pities and reassurances: we are here for you [based on truths we can never believe].
wondered what you were doing these days with your hairs or if maybe every reimagining of self was nothing more than a surface attempt to become present while underneath you knew the same battles used the same metaphors for us and plagiarized my hate.
surrendered more than once.
never had anyone travel so far away and come back to him. [these things happen in threes.]
surrender capitulation without white flags.
put down payments on too many others’ emotional dowries; invested too much of himself in the gentrification of exiled landscapes: he was the art kid they took home before they met the safe one.
argued the non-pre-raphaelitism of a proud antique-shop purchase and probably ruined all chances of getting in good with mom. [sure, it’s impressionist. sure.]
waited for the other shoe to drop. spent most days barefoot so he’d never break a heart. was accused of ruining lives twice. took heart in knowing that he’d not once made that accusation, hated himself more for self- ascribing all responsibility often broke plates and stood on them by accident.
knew that once he began to associate music to specific humans, they’d either die or cross the world to escape him. never again wanted an our song, but he did enjoy plural pronouns.
agreed with blair about ginsberg, but still wrote this.
editor recommended the expurgation of two shitty teenage poems from his first book, so he wrote a poem chapter in the third of seven entries, all math internal.
[the lessons of the second are that i can survive, and no matter how much you were to me, i will use the us we were to pay the rent if i can’t use you as a pillow.]
drove in circles.
light bulbs lasted for durations of residence because he preferred his work in the dark and found that he couldn’t proofread when the songs had words.
rusted through most recollections and lived as dust, wiped away more than once but always returning, an exquisite layer only visible under heartbeat scrutinies, mostly shed flesh.
reserved a large percentage of his willpower for a time when he’d not likely need it longer.
divided and hid his past [the electron flicker, stippled] into convenient sub-folders that only turned bold when someone actually needed him.
he hated bold folders.
preferred acoustic versions.
counted three grammatical errors in his deepest inspirations.
marked his days in the number of times he emptied the desktop ashtray; most days, three. what a war mask such ash could inscribe.
marked his months in the number of cartons, the handful dozen career aspirations and the nights they went to tully’s; had a specific memory of each booth.
