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.
marked his years with ink lines on left forearm. no. it doesn’t scan.
gave more of himself up than he kept. [it was a flawed campaign for a recalled product.] first woke up
wondered what the end destination for a course charted across freckles would be; was satiated on a southern path, and his tongue remembers. they do leave texture: he preferred that alternate smooth.
you don’t need to know. you don’t need
wrote poems of war in his own blood, vomit and shit. such holographic wills are legally-binding if properly witnessed; i call you to bear witness.
burned all the steak-ums and days later dreamt the gutter was filled with the war dead.
to walk across that desert to you…
convinced himself that he could pinpoint the exact moments they’d erase him from memory: 11:11, 11:42pm, 7:41am. he’d sometimes wake for no reason with an urgent sense of nothing. resigned to the same status as the dead, intangible.
wanted to write her into a book, chose words for actions, phrases for breathing the way she smelled at night.
hid the explosions of the midnight city behind headphones, sirens bleeding through, once watched them hose the blood from the street and gasoline after two vans danced around the corner, tangled, the very spot the crazy man had shouted in dozens: “Mayor Matt Driscoll is an asshole.” until sun rose, traffic drove over glass.
sat on the roof sometimes because he loved the smell of sun on tar. reminded him of his lung.
a spiraled coil, a field of red: he carried within him delicious genetics for heart disease, Alzheimer’s, a predisposition for children with inexplicable holes in their chests. vowed that his line would end with him, since his siblings did a good job of breeding.
reserved core terrors for plural pronouns and the fear of substituting new names into well-worn phrasal constructs. felt disingenuous and watched ceilings because he was so afraid everyone would see through his skin.
underreported the number of cartons overreported the frequency of meals never told anyone of the hours he’d spend lying on the floor.
once rocked forth, back, forth after lighting a candle now long melted into the rock fabric of a birthday gift, a monkey sculpture veiled with dozens of dollar-store candles [once wrote a poem] prayed the first and only time. [these penance years
never restarted his computer when prompted. allowed frost to build to ice in the freezer compartment until he hacked the tip off his one good knife and breathed freon enough to make him sit down. the landlord paid because he lied about the affair. not once used his toaster oven.
wondered if cats saw ghosts when they looked past him at nothing, attentively intent. wondered if cats talked to his dead.
fatigued by himself but just wanted to try something different for once in a life filled with static days.
the downstairs neighbor ran out to the street to help what was left of the white van driver: he stood at the window and counted the pieces of her as he drank milk straight from the carton: some conveniences come solely from a life without partners.
the end result of the total mathematical extrapolation of the designed ignition of infinity: collapse entire, cessation, wanted to beat that compression of all possible heavens by a record of twenty, thirty billion years.
the next time, that would be it because there’s only so much a person can give before recognizing such giftings deplete the essential desires to remain.
had the mis/fortune of being an artist born with a brain hardwired for logics and maths; some chapters augmented his internal mathematics of desire, her curves and planes and volumes.
slept nightmares drawn from futures forged of the gutted nickel cores of rock seas, unbreathing. woke too many nights to the recurring image: the staccato tattoo of a war without the possibility of surrender.