onward

and now i've finally untangled myself from the
lingering notions of admiration and loyalty that
had once shaped my earlier ideas on love, or anything that
brought people happily together in my mind:
i've laid my eyes upon a new american landscape of
slavish adherence and lost transaction, dredging up
false memories reinforcing simple rationalizations,
and all loss of value and worth dressed up in
a newly stitched suit of excuses and bullshit.
all i see is a carousel of fools chasing birds with exploding lights--
a race of sick men carved raw with hungry words,
running barefoot on moonless nights
towards the dream of a horizon sinking
slowly with the world
to the bottom of its glass foundations

i only think the new winter nights
remind me of the older ones
when my
eyes would shut thinking about
a walk around empty shoreside towns
suggesting
gaping hollowed faces with their crumbling remains,
wind strewing sand
through teeth slowly disengaging
to make with some old memory or unraveling rant
on the depth of human misery and
its correlation with violence and exploitation;
or how you could never really trust a person
to know what they should want, which was reason enough
to never trust any of 'em:
maybe he's put his car keys into too many baskets
to even know what to forgive and what to forget.

i feel like i could sit sun baked and staring
at crackling brown hands fingering the stoic non-faces of
black and white chessmen, listening to
them argue about
where we should have gone or go, or the
various merits of the
girls they fucked and
girls they've known;
how little it means to whisper something
always told to someone else;
and just how well they've done for themselves
despite the odds they're stacked against

gone

new(,) old i found you stuttered
unshuttered and from you couldn't tear the everything
golden, broken, and unspoken that you held dear;
at times like these, i tell myself
that aren't we all just constantly running away
and don't we all just
intertwine and drown us out
and overtake us while we
scream and claw
something horrible again?