There is something vulnerable about the human animal in the morning. Grass-haired and askance from rhythm; not yet fed, groomed, or conversed; the creature has not yet put on its skin or climbed successfully to its first challenge of the day's labors. It is almost sick, like a crumpled flower, it is automated in the lack of a program like those early toy robots that flail in sluggish mechanisms appointed to being by lack of clear meaning: bathroom, newspaper, coffee, breakfast, teeth brushing, etc. If any man wishes to learn humility, he need only observe his activities as they bumble through the veil of the morning.

bar talk

"My parents concieved me in a flash of literal lightning beneath a wry old oak."
"This is what you tell people you're being introduced to, normally?"
"Well, no, but I felt some kind of energy between us."
"You thought you felt some kind of energy between us, no doubt, thinking of the kind of energy your parents must have felt when they concieved you. Why bring up something so weird anyway? Did you think I'd be impressed?"
"Um, just an interesting fact about myself. I could tell you about the time that the forest wolf stole my favorite blanket when it flew in a hunger fit through my parent's farm cabin."
"Look, you're way to self-conceited for my tastes. Cheap talk, cheap laughs, that's all I'm after."
"Don't you want a genuine experience?"
"Yeah...but not listening to you tell me perverse stories about yourself. You don't seem that interesting, to be honest."
"But I've had a lot of interesting things happen to me."
"That doesn't make you interesting. In fact, it can make people pretty boring because they end up resting the entirety of their personality upon anecdotes that are of little consequence to the actual conversation at hand. Like, I was going to tell you that you should buy me a drink, and now I am insisting that you buy me a drink and walk the other way."
"But, I just..."
"Ok, no dice, I see. Have a nice life imagining scenes of your conception and thinking about how your parents made love."

demarcation

the answers
to my pretty window
are inscribed in notebooks
that sunk to the ocean's bottom
on a lost trip through the dark

the questions
to my darling doorframe
are coveted with the fringes
of hinges made from rust

so dance drunk with merriment
upon this marble rainment that
lasts like a grave that speaks
in silence like a slave that
devours our play as fast as
we can win; the soul's forfeiture
upon Buddhist sin, the lines
that don't matter and infringe,
laughlines, tired lines, waiting
for fines, and at last a love
within this sepulchre marked
unknown, marked blown by leaves,
settled in crumbled earth's relief
like security, like life set free,
like sequence delivering all
the roses to the living as they
wait behind frontdoors for the
heat to pour for the sun to reveal
the shore, for the dance we promised
after life had burst like a raspberry
upon the skein of linen framed by
fate, by desire, by destiny, by
laughter at it all again...

discursive esoterica

It arrived with a delicate speaking voice that sounded south of New York, this person dressed to the nines and even the tens in blue suede coat and tan trousers, splattering words at a meter a second though the group sat in doldrums, leaning heads on palms and sighing wistfully. “All you have to do to avoid mind readers is think of a single word and you throw them off track, it is like me, I am only Korean Su and there are only two others of my race, so I don’t get caught up in the doomsday forecasts and the dark desires of my fellow man. I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus saves and God forgives.”

The moderator felt adulterated by all the religious talk and motioned to the door for Mr. Korean Su, while the others picked up on his train of thought as if they had been riding in the passenger car their whole lives as observers to the mystical esoterica of the subjective blue coated figure. “I read letters from the clouds, great big ones.” “My sister had a seal put on her so her gifts couldn’t be used against her.” “I am not spiritual, but rather spirited.” The moderator twirled the curliques of her hair into tighter ringlets, chewing on a pen. “Ok,” she began only to falter in the storm of private confessions.

“Listen, I’m angry,” a Pacific Islander began, “I’m not angry, I’m angry,”

“Sometimes I imagine a rainbow protecting me from the broken glass of other people when I’m at the supermarket, and it is healing to both me and them.”

“Vines flood my apartment when I go to sleep. They confuse the dream-tigers.”

Soon the doctor himself was in the room, interrupting the free form jazz speech singing like a flat piano note in an otherwise brilliant orchaestra. “You have to realize that the fundamental cause of mental illness is a belief in magical or delusional thinking, you all must obtain some kind of control over your individual realities to the extent that you can go shopping for milk at the gas station without digressing into rainbows and dolphins.”

“Hey, what are your beliefs, doc?”

“They are private matters that I keep to myself.”

“So you believe that you’re better than everyone here, is that it?”

“Well, I went to school for eight years to train in pharmapsychiatry.”

“That don’t make you an inch better than anyone!”

The doctor left, beet-faced and opening his hands in a gesture of relinquishment, considerably consternating the young moderator, who had an even more rambunctious set of patients on her hands than before.

“He’s like cancer, when you get it they open you up and once the air hits it it dies.”

Korean Su mumbled some casual comments touching upon the legality of cigarette smoking, how good it feels to suck brown smoke through a fiberglass filter into the delicate pulpa of the pinkened lungs, and how glorious the sound of an opening cigarette pack sounds. The others in the group agreed with knowing nods that seemed to know about nodding beyond the simple act of an affirmation particular to a single thread of conversation; their affirmation included all that transpired; the doctor’s immolation, the humble embarrassment of the moderator, the magical techniques of other patients, life-status, the vans moaning on the street outside the facility with cylinder chortles, the trees shushing over the manicured grass like the ghosts of old lovers, and the idle banter echoing from the hallway between receptionist and customer. They even affirmed the inaudible sea, rising now within their breasts, drowning out matters of unimportance and filling their swimming heads with the delicate watercolors of dreams.

Stale chalk slab walls molded by auspicious smell,
when they took me away the sirens called down in echoes
across the steel doors bolted with key's ceremony of
in and out, like candles snuffed on and off, the binary
of the catacomb hospital all rust and Catch 22 with
drunken drugs and sober dreams cognizant of spice plants
and muslin shrouded women working their way down concrete
embankment alleyways with short term memory malfunctions
past sarcophogi laquered with blue linolium, nurse, nurse
feed me please and don't call my hunger a false disease.

Taser threat first then manacled wrists, plastic backseat
pressing into the column of the spine, Orwellian paperwork
and changing memories, hot tar burn on police plexiglas.

Intake, voluntary, ITU, clinical psuedo medical names
for disastrous loose slavery mechanized behind burnt
out florescents and cruel hammered faces staring away
the simple supple truth. I ask for a shower, I ask
for a piece of paper, I ask for some food that cant be
bought in stores, not even refusals reach me just
pale pained apathy slipping through the dark hospital
on special socks silk screened with anti slip and
sometimes back up is a long way off and sometimes laughter
is all but forgot.

help is manipulation and honor a stuffed animal bursting
over with pride...so they say, so we act, so the miserable
obeys the miserable, jargon walking with brain soup settling
into false social niches, lexicon unraveled like a torn
parachute across the sky of lost enlightenment,
when will they learn to learn, that is my only question
and it sticks in my rib like a gaffing hook
so tell me delicate that i will never go there again
tell me in preterite that my bad luck is at an end
tell me some saturnine story about the moon's eclipse
over the dried sea of tyrannical sin
and I will lead you to my favorite door where commands
dissasemble and fey misery breaks apart at its end
met by the bodys euphony signed with relief that
we dont break but only bend.

The artless hospital devolves artisans into minimalists
the loveless corridors entomb catacombs of cleaning solution
into the hallowed architechture of the self,
the nondenominational angels took off their masks
and were ridiculed for their beauty,
the engines are churning in the glowering light of the heart
but there is some poverty between me and you
when I called you after the names of children's books
kept on cobweb shelves between the mind and its ear.

prophetic dreams buried within this skin
false prophets tunneling to sleep within
like miners crushed by timber beams in the
coal day's exhaust strewn about the street's arenas

all these sleek sins were fashioned by misers
in the history of love, all those crude lies
became our enemies tools that conspired through
the dark millenia to seat us here behind pale windows
where we hunted another's disgrace; this precision
built with consideration of the ancient lake,
call me without a phone upon the airwaves,
let your languish become a replacement for pride.

Revisited

Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
your friends all wear knife smiles and your
family thinks you're crazy for singing when
the cage has wound its tight mesh about your
life. Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
the television stays the same and the movies
are all violent, they put you at odds with humanity
in order to steal your source.

Yes, living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
they put truth on sale in the form of lies,
there is poison in your food and they put
poison in your milk, they make it look like
a utopia if only so that the beauty kills you,
and the police are on to someone in the declared
silence of acts, and the police are onto you and have
been onto me, in the silence of acts. They
are waiting for you to fuck up, they are waiting
for you to act out, they are waiting patiently
but they know they can't win, which is how the
story goes, they know they can't win because
they are deeply paranoid about every person
because the thing about living in a fascist
dictatorship is that it has no power, that is
the truth, that it is all internalized by the masses
in the form of media, movies, magazines, and
the internet, that is the truth and don't you
dare call me a liar.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you get away from your family, it is easy living
when you get away from false friends, it is easy
living and breathing and singing and making
collect calls when they try to find you to tell them
how much you hate them for what they have
done to you, and it is easy to leave, just don't
forget that.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you have forces of nature on your side, it is
easy living in a fascist dicatorship when you
knew how to escape a mental hospital, and it
is easy, way easy when you know secrets kept
veiled behind false temple doors.

It is a false fascist dictatorship, this, what we call
home, this is a fascist brothel, there is a fascist
supermarket, and there is a fascist bar where
all the drunks try to cut you down, and there
is fascism in love, there is even fascism in love.