Cartwheels and Swings

I feel like sometimes this is the hardest thing for me to do. Release. Relieve myself from every single day’s torment of dementing me.

From here I fall up.
Into the sky.
Into the mouth of God -
my wet cave of sound(less)
heat, breathing,
revision.

“Until creation becomes
revelation,”
I said to her,
wishing, waiting for my own
message to transfer,
mouthing words in
no real vocalic symbol

when teeth close down -

“Safe-keeping,”
she said, looking up to
greet the tongue above.

“As long as you bring me,”
smiling all the while we jump
out of rubber seats.

     Loss coming from deep-chested gasps, whether it oxygen or soul reached for, the feeling grips my heart all the same. I wear these marks of permanent shame as a rebuttal to life’s approach toward keeping me happy, or maybe just my heart beating, irresponsibly, irreversibly, substantially aching over the detriment of my unknown love for something yet to reveal itself to me. Makes me wonder was I enough before it became a game? So satisfactory that my repercussions to this demented representation I call ‘living’ hovering to be seen, striven for? Withered for? Sacrificial terms of spiritual standards. Fiend.

     Prisoners of our own body if we don’t use it properly. I highly doubt some therapeutic separation will justify reality created while in this stress-producing, coma-inducing mind diluted so the prominent figures, mathematical measures appear only for the provisions my appetite has for lying. A ‘you’ relating ‘me’.

     Maybe this is where my thesis on survival of the dispersed is revived by singularity - movements of motionless wind. Gulp after gulp. Morphine, water, and waiting. interchangeably reliable for sleep. Sometimes all three unconsciously show. Each blow producing a euphoric, man-made embrace. ‘Photograph-worthy’ or is it only because of submission? Succession of depressed images withdrawing themselves from your darkroom’s liquid clarity.

     Art equals sufferings. Or, countenance is beautiful enough to download a spiral drag of all the emotions conjured around the wall of a bottomless well? Red dressings where feathers used to be. Construction of relevant raptures pulling my wings.

     This is all that’s found inside ‘we’? Simple things like drafting out dreams where you’ve killed Jesus in his sleep, or is the death of humble intelligence a calling for human strife to overcome separation from God’s omniscience? Lunar lives evolving into children of the sun. The children of God augment to holding captive their own God. I feel my cells divided by secular sorting where my brain’s occupancy empties into a loose-leaf sheet. My electrical impulse to indulge myself, my hand, my metaphorical head, deeper in the sand.

     Mobility gives me no exact idea of where I should place my body when done. The ’shock’ should not converge with ‘awe’ as my electrical programming turns innards of the hour to glass. Lightning bugs in a jar or maybe a jar there to catch thoughts? Hot air rising from ‘wisdom within’ suffocates the lungs. Here is your bodily disunion, mind releasing the highest prized possession any person owns. Deceased and relenting against what confines the cosmic approach of only loving the competitive force brought to us via skin.

     God comes to the psyche before this false striving without humility you’ve ‘earned’. Thus God becomes your over-baring parent instead of inspiration found in ‘advocate’. The light under fluttering wings was born before the flapping sound’s emergence. Before the glass transformed. Before we could think such constraint of time into existence without the wind blowing. This maker is waiting for us to regain what we’ve decided to leave. Chased the ghosts out of the breathing.

     A relief of celestial seams cutting and fraying the physical form. Teasing our cognitive seal of approving our model human doll. Sewing in plasticity instead of love, the disease is coughing from inside our cleavage, hoping for placated rungs to point out to the world, “We’re so much better than this. Better than you.”

   Remnants of our creator, except misguided and wrong. remnants of our saviour, but with additional drones to support you. The one-sixth backing of a revolver subtly telling the sky where we’re from. Denial and trials of being a refugee without a home during the storm. Taking stance without thinking it out. A spiritual walk down into a dimly lit basement, a couple cells with lightbulbs dangling, blinking. A question of faith in living. Whether your hand can give these pointless hangings a point in destination. Man has captured the full potential of straining ‘captivation’, a naked curiosity fighting itself, shackles and chains. Some egotistical mind caught in a web God watches but pretends it forgotten until revelation exceeds past the haunted house atop shoulders.

Winter Park Memorial Hospital

“I have birds that whistle, I had birds that sing.”

Drowned in meds and stupidity rolling off doctoral tongues. Don’t know whether to pretend this is the best blues song a man could bring to the table or if I’ve just wasted a complete week of my life. Still walking around in pain but the cloud of opium is hard to dust off the sheets. Concentrated sleep where dreams squabble in one ear and then farther into my brain. The electric fire burning through my chest reminds me that every man is only as connected as his needled vanity scrutinizing trust. I found myself shaking the bed in hopes to rid the rest left in me.

“You shook me, baby, all night long.” – L. Zepplin.

Classroom Notes

 

Thin lines holding up the shoulders,
snapping, disappearing,
like idle thoughts lost, shivering
in the cold, in mindless speaking,
rambling, huddles
of letters falling
in some random numerical order
but far from technical, secular sorts,
the uppercase being a national hero
for all the apostrophes
making them stand with motionless singularity
like an apostle,
because God can’t live alone.

The History of Drinking

 

Calm, collected,
infatuated with quietness
whispering to me,
like dust rumbling over book casing,
padding along the top
of parched pages disintegrating under
artificial, alien lights -
sand paper in limestone
quarries.

Tiny wings clapping
in translucence, vindictive
fluttering, taps
against the bulb -
every man’s flight
towards God.

Fissures scratching
inside man-made glass,
florescent vines
cutting outlines -
a kinder garden of
time-outs and mind
envisioning the arboretum
to come from
Benjamin Franklin thinking
while drinking under what
watered both.

Mechanical Human

Bruised bags under my eyes
beaten by flicking hands, fist
drilling minutes, seconds,
splitting eyelids – a flutter
similar to an immobile,
perched set of robotic
moth wings twinged by light wind,
trying to keep awake.

Each tick of the line
slicing silence in two’s,
then thirds, sixtieths, then
into those unheard minutes
before noon, or was it
midnight the night before,
this is where my knees feel restless
and my ears begin to deafen.

I will lose to this mechanical drip
of the past spitting at the future
only hitting me before it gets there,
laughing and knowing I’ve trapped myself
within.

But if I shut down systems
rebooting may call for a restart,
erasing any memory of what this
entire dream meant.

Midday Drift

Insatiable critics never play games,
developing love to
unfold the cage of my ribs,
like a piano player might
an organ, collapsing, folding,
bending the crease -
live oxygen to a field
of poppy plants.

Hospital Visits

It felt like a small village
held idle
like a hand would
the needle over vinyl.

I can hear the static
dripping into my ears -
drums.

The silence of sound.
Patients turning over,
rustling linen,
coughing the air of sleep;
disease, pleads,
medicated dream.

Dripping down
into my inner ear
beating like rain
on bat-winged
umbrellas. I watch.

A pattering of God’s tears
overhead, my umbrella
a dying neighbor’s denial of Him.

Who am I
to heed you from your decadent,
opium-covered seizure?

Inside your room I drape
my thoughts over
the back of the worn leather chair
and sit only an arm’s distance of air
away, unlike your tethered wings
clamped down to dampen sweaty
beats of chested gasps.

I keep a steady tapping of feet,
much like the static from the record player,
watching over your dressings reddening,
your unrest between songs.

Hospitals seem to be
the only places in the world
where death and birth resemble
a scientific anomaly.

I don’t want to grasp the rest. I
feel distant and collected
like a train station in the early morning,
empty from epidemic,
or like the patches of blood
subject to clotting,
where feathers used to be,
replaced by pillows and frail bone
indenting sheets.

Conversations About Death

Words are water,
tumbling from the mouth
of a shallow pitcher,
hoarse, sly like the match
God dropped in Hell,
coarse, dry like dryer lint
under the branches
keeping my eyes under
level seizures of thought
shaking into the mouth of
another.

Flame in throat
hoping to choke down
the glass.

Waking the Dead

With a few drowsy steps I shuffled my feet with stiffened legs and with an uncaring yank out plopped my carry-on bag. I wasn’t in the mood to wake up. My life felt black and white like the color had been beaten out of it from nightmares and unfinished dreams. They say you’re supposed to have at least eight hours of sleep when you take sleeping pills. I only had six due to my lack of experience with overseas flight. And to make matters worse I had took two instead of half to hopefully avoid the jet lag, or maybe make a friend carry me all the way to the hotel (at least if I pretended to never wake and just snore). Because I flew alone the latter was not an option. Instead I kicked and dragged my bag off the plane like a five year old in a stubborn fit. I remember it whacking everyone in the knees and I not batting a lash (if my eyes were even open). Whatever got me to the coffee faster. Whatever transported me out of the cramped aisles found  in the back of the plane, you know the place cleverly located next to the latrine and wing’s engine, smelling like urine, sex, and some French bitch’s body odor.

Anyway, after shuffling through the giant Dutch airport I found the nearest place serving coffee. It was a quaint shop that looked as if it was sagging with age from tourists and visitors, myself likewise, so tired each stiff-legged zombie put an unstable set of elbows down to lean on the counter and cram their eyes with the palm of their hands, almost as if they were about to cry. I remember the line being longer than desired because I, too, wanted to put in my two cents of an elbow lean. Hell, maybe even cry. An image of angels could do no justice to what tears would do to that dust. I promised the vendor silently that I wouldn’t make it collapse if he would just hurry. By the time I got to him the elder man behind me, maybe in his late 60’s, realized I had bitched so long that I actually forgot to decide on what I wanted. And with this I got a small shove and grunt. Not wanting to awaken an attack of the zombies trailing behind me I, like the saddened sinners before me, put my elbows down and leaned into my eyes as if pushing on them was going to instantaneously give me an answer.