100816A
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No point ever,
in any intention
to make an impression.
You get to know
every impression only ends
pushed face down
into the same common dirt.
Rub your face around in it,
get used to how it tastes,
know that it never washes off,
no matter how hard you scrub.
A kind of soil
that no one would defend
from eroded breaking away.
The dust storm rises up
and gets in the eyes,
blurring reality with tears
until it all looks like mud,
where nothing moves forward
from sinking down
ever deeper into it.
The only hands you know
are tugging downward
at the ankles
in a vast sea of quicksand,
where you start choking
before you ever go under,
and unable to kick loose.
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100816B
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There is always the option
of becoming buried
in various fantasies
that do not need anyone.
Let go of the world,
knowing it never went your way,
and that it never would
go any way that you wanted.
Get off the teeter totter
that always urges you up,
then lets you down again,
getting you nowhere.
They revoked your membership
before they ever granted it.
It simply took you a long time
to catch up with the news.
They give you the illusion
that you know what is going on,
forcing you to sift through lies
for exhausted bits of information.
A new sort of starvation
that weighs down your thoughts,
in a head feeling ever more emptied
from being kicked around.
The feeling of paralyzed with fear
of being steadily consumed,
while forced to observe the process
as though from a vantage point.
You attempt to provide
a dispassionate commentary
to sequences of events and feelings,
as a spider drains a juicy fly.
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100816C
-----------
Pruning away,
all those dead limbs of relation,
as feign their affections
and taunt with impossibilities
giving illicit responses
and ever more distant promises.
Ill mannered pests
having penetrated
under the apparent surface
of various interpersonal events.
Little to be done
as could ever save the moment.
Taking one’s pain to solitude,
having found no comfort,
and only forced to cut down,
to make barren new ground
by uprooting and turning over,
where nothing good ever chanced.
Such a derelict feeling,
as if having become an abandonment,
discarded by highwaymen
along some country road,
perhaps as if left for dead,
to be picked over and scavenged.
Too much to clear away
that one did not want any of,
and nothing more than the barrenness
of so much of that intense absence,
as once made love seem possible,
but offered no such chance.
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100816D
------------
Whatever one desired to know
did not really want to know one.
The sort of thing that is frequent
and regular as billboard advertisements
offering vague solace of convenience.
Only exhaustion given to the pursuit,
turned to falling away and back,
left to nothing but stopping in
for what can be readily bought,
as various types of painkillers.
There are predictable punishments
meted out for other types of attraction,
and other punishments for failing to choose
what is offered up to total disinterest,
with a horrified scream in between the two.
One can always remain with ghosts,
having dared to imagine nearer
anything that is entirely unobtainable.
There is always that choice
the way a mouse can choose a mousetrap.
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100816E
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I thought she might be my lover,
but she had other thoughts
and I became only a stenciled indication
on a rapidly moving time line.
Something that is hardly noticeable
as events continue to pass
and the moment recedes entirely away.
Intercessions instilling disinterest
are so constant and common,
that what conspires to anything else
would seem peculiarly traumatic,
as if the shock wave might not be survivable
in any such alternate universe
of overturned endings and beginnings.
I never wanted to know
only beautiful ghosts and ugly presences,
while longing for a parallel realm
where it all goes otherwise,
everything turning out differently
as to what is close and what is far away,
from having near and being free from.
Battle lines in wars that cannot be fought,
as to stray partisans, and illusionary kisses,
in the bombed out, ruined, underground.
I was defeated before I ever began,
to put up those barricades, trying to stop
the brutality of the past
where it advances against my mutiny.
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