I am alive. You are gone.

You can't understand.
I don't understand.
I want you to understand.
But you'll never understand.

I am steadfast.
You are fleeting.

The myth of One stained my blood.
Over and over it coursed.
Through the same path, unobstructed,
A structure changeless and reinforced.

I am reproduction.
You are fertility.

Save me from insanity.
Let it, in rapture, be smothered.
I think you are a psychopath.
Even though you love another.

I am carnal.
You are cruel.

I don't smell quite right, right?
But sufficient for a fuck.
Staccato kisses produced static.
They were awkward promises struck.

I am graceless.
You are callous.

Acceptance, keep out.
I cannot say,
I love you I love you.
Yet do not let me stray.

I am immovable.
You are unfixed.

But you let me just one time.
I cried and cried and cried.
Connection is a simple fact
that died, it's dead, it died.

I am alive.
You are gone.

"A busy mouth is a happy human"

Mm.
Imbibing,
smoking, toking,
yapping, smacking,
giving advice, making nice,
making out, singing out, SHOUT!,
giving head, remembering the dead,
masticating, contemplating... out loud,
screaming Marco Polo in a crowd to find
your lover blanketed in train station lighting,
finding sureness in alerting your kin to "take cover!"
in a tornado and truly believe you'll all be ok if you do,
licking anxious sweat dew off of your upper lip,
accepting that very first sip of
beer,
water,
vodka,
bloody mary,
crying out in pure elation,
praying with a congregation,
discussing the origin of our creation,
Sunday brunch mimosa after church,
baring your wretched soul to your mother,
reminding your father you're a better man,
teaching your sister's children how to speak up...

But there is nothing
my mouth can do
that would do justice to
that look I gave you.

Nuns take a vow of silence
Sages speak only truth

People get in more trouble
because of the slippery tongue
than any other member.

But I use it now
to give thanks
for having it.

Pigeon Vision

I am suspicious of pigeons.

The irridescence on their breast
feathers look like a projection of
bubbly blue and pink light from
one particular front-porch fountain
on the night of a party.
That light also danced on a boy's face.
Otherwise dull and quite possibly diseased,
he glowed beautiful with luster-markings.
He let me go on about my usual verbal ramble,
before he flapped his hands onto my face,
captured my cheeks between his haughty knuckles
and kissed me.
I should have been paying attention.

Pigeons make me anxious.

Where we held our feet in place
was on a rocky front porch patio.
(Well, except for my left foot, since my legs were crossed,
as it fidgeted in the tension-thick air,
bobbing nervously back and forth
like a pidgeon's chicken head, to and fro
reminding me of the rhythm of fellatio.)
The cobblestone flooring
resembled the exit of the church
in which my mother and step-father married,
pigeons flocking and feasting
on rice thrown heartily towards them
in celebration of what just
so predictibly became the stuff
of interpersonal corruption and decay.

Pigeons petrify me in fear

until I am called to "fight or flight"
by the promise,
or paranoid assumption,
that they will come too close,
infect me with their contemptible ability
to thrive in human-manipulated conditions,
in dumpsters, train stations,
parking lots and graveyards,
reminding me how we rely on
the economist, proctologist,
city planner and political scammer,
but can not trust them near our lives.

So, to be fair,
it's not that I fear pigeons.

It's those red eyes,
the color of love, lust, blood and the Devil.
the color of hot infection and scorn.
It's the wings they hardly ever use.
It's the way I wish my mother would use her wings to fly the fuck out of her marriage.
It's the way a man's face entrances with luminescence,
yet I know the light reflects off of him
just as it does off of the pigeon's breast,
and I know that must say something about
tricks of perseption versus something's true nature.

So...
Could that mean I am wrong?

Once a fuck, always a fuck you

So this is dream number...
I've stopped counting
though it wouldn't be fair to say
that I ever counted in the first place.

I wouldn't want to impair your trust
in my viability as a truth talker so soon
and with nary a trace of knowledge of
my true character.

Excuse me, I'm in rare form,
how about another merlot?
oh...
Sure, sure, let's take this slow.

So about my dream,
well, you were in it.
You were symbolized by a...
This isn't agonizing, is it?

I just figured I'd cut the bullshit,
but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Here, take my napkin,
you're tearing a little.
Do you have something in your eye?
You never cry...

except from laughter.
My my, I shouldn't have called you here
so soon after...

Wait, ok, here, let me concentrate.
Don't allow the furrow in my brow
to fool you.
I'm perfectly fine
and it's not like I committed a crime!
Ok, at least not this time.
Remember? You said "what's yours is mine."
or shit, maybe it was the other way around.
Ugh, I sound like a dog's whine at the impound,
but still, it applies.

Damn it, cut me some slack here,
we've stammered through this before.
It wasn't ME who stabbed you in the back.
Why do you seem confused?
I didn't USE you,
not to bring it up again.

That wasn't the plan.
Man, alright, so last night...

HEY!

Where are you going?
I know you don't owe me anything,
but at least let me say...

FUCK YOU, TOO.

Constellation

Our minds are a constellation
of thoughts, assigned arbitration.
Why do we insist there's connection?

We make this pattern from
where we're standing.
We made our own
intelligent design
of conversation, contemplation,
elation, and station.

We only made this pattern
from where we stood.
Vantage point, position
is our truth.

I like what it looks like from here.
I see you and me
and especially everything.

But you're looking for a change,
a shift. Well.
Shift yourself, and you shift everything.

Without me, you think you'd be a star.
You're right.
You'd be a star.
But you're not the only one.

We are all a common
constellation imagination,
shaping and shifting.
You'll never be alone
and neither will I.

No matter the pattern,
neither shape nor distance die.
We're all intertwined.
So you're not the only one.
...
You'll never be the only one.

Get UP

Get UP
Maybe it's easier.
Lonesome, but easier
to drift alone
along the cesspool of needles
you accept as so-called
simple-celled self-loathing.
Easier than to aspire to rewire
your brain to re-register
your experience as painful.

You know that annoyance is all
I outwardly feel towards you.
If I showed empathy instead,
we'd bed together
and you'd think I accept you
but I do not.
I'll accept you when you do,
but until then you'll confide in me,
go on about your inadequacies,
but your vulnerable face
isn't what I want to see.
In its place,
I'd prefer the god in you,
and that's what's wrong with me.

Get up
Get out
and I'll pat you on the back
for showing your spine.
Really, it's time to get out
of the bathtub.
Carpeted in fungus,
practically an ecosystem
but with no sense of harmony,
the spider on the showerhead
doesn't love you,
I do.

Sekhmet is fooled and drunk

The gods trembled for humanity.
For themselves, it would be a tragedy.
Their humans' sacrifices, suffice it to say,
allowed them to exist in every way.
That was their immortal secret sworn,
until the fearsome feline goddess was born.

Her apparition, a lioness.
Her will is to destroy, this capable huntress.
Human blood she drinks to nourish.
Her innate, unstoppable focus will flourish
with every soul stalked and eaten.
All the Egyptian gods in submission, beaten.

The people caught wind of her plan
to rule the heavens by beginning on land.
Retaliation hatched with a spider translator
for it knew the scarab would be no protector.
Since the gods told it no information of waste,
it revealed this plan to the people post-haste:

(Time ticked, the lioness' claws rapped on petrified wood
waiting to annihilate humanity like nothing else could.)

Beer was brewed in batches of thousands,
using the yeast in bread kneaded by woman's hands.
Moment by moment, excitement and dread
motivated men to dye the beer red.
This liquid would be used in a mischievous ploy
to quench the goddess' thirst with a tempting decoy.

The feline goddess' offering seeped
into many fields of crops, sinking deep.
She lapped up every last drop in Cairo's heat.
The gods' plan carried out by man, complete!

The goddess was intoxicated and sleepy
causing the people to cheer til they became weepy
because she needed a thousand lifetimes' rest
failing to pass humanity's clever test.

And so, everyone would be safe
from revered pharaoh to rejected waif
because we are the ultimate tricksters
using knowledge passed from our ancestors.
Maybe it is we who are so easily fooled...
but always that hot fear is easily cooled
when we keep our foes, real or imagined, at bay
by sacrificing everything to save our way.