Pan up from the ocean
Pushed like icewhite hands in winter water
Stasis chasing hiscores in a forgotten arcade
Skipping pale before a blue screen of death
And short breath and marshlands old to pave and push live freeways
Carry my air wherever i sleep on a spit in a fatsuit
A set of split quotes fleeing cold from my back in a hot mute panic
Pinned selfconscious as a naked turtle
There is no doing left
Bloodhounds inert in electrified cages, asymmetrical warfare
Sidescrolling through an abandoned city’s sprawl
Crossing clouds when they can see your breath and tracks
Bowed heads and thinning thumbs piled up at a dead end
Snow from a tired brown sky, an hourglass with no neck
On the dogleg consulting a heineken for marriage advice
Where there be dragons, elves against mice
Are taglines disguised as songs
Why ask what year it is?
Bright beige food, footage of accidents in video loops
When they began using their lifetime passes, dancing with the coals
Confined to grids, limited to perfection
Trackback to fill in the tendons
I am a white male in my late twenties, so it has already been said
It will not end, it will not come back, like a dog in the city
Like the first time you drove through a place you’ll be moving to
Not many are fortunate enough to sleep without dreaming
Most have to live with themselves their entire life
Walk out on the ice floe
The distance dark with black snow
Sailor bailing out the boat with wood salvaged from the hole
Frogger stuck with dead controls, out of time without setting foot on the road
Soldier in a cave alone telegraphing codes into an empty ocean
Shredded hands pulling the rope, it wouldn’t hurt so much
If you would only let go
Breath is boiled bodily steam hissing from a sealed stovepipe
Sprouting from iron lungs fired by the corpse of grizzled grey bird coal
Each sunset a railway tie, each rail a thin strip sliced from sinew and skeleton
Given crescendo, all conspiracy and no resolution, a forever storm
Told the circle of the earth would roll endlessly without edges to fall from
So i busied myself painting a mural of the sunset to hang behind our graduation
And devised my parting precocious words
From all the borrowed humble grandiosity i could scrape together
While feathers were plucked from the hollow earth
Burnt quills’ circling smoke sucked into its byzantine mechanical heart
Howling whirls of special promising ash tracing the contours of crushed snails
Down the entertainment dream inhale floured in possibility’s machinations
Lineart sunrises and daily affirmations
Eagerly biting shiny nickels rendered from the priceless soot exhaled
From a cagesheltered chorus of blackthroated children calling for another
Against the growl of their collective stomach’s engine
Threshing entropy to progress and powerlines, sustained by treats
Hope as a veneer of young learned sarcasm
A molasses desert slowscaling permanent torsos
Taped together my former split jaw (though not literally of course)
Like i’ve been engraving on winter night for weeks
Blueinking sleeves i cannot wear on days that don’t exist
A peeled jar bleached and filled with soil, sprout planted and growing
Thumb on the scale and the same wait as i could reach back through the fog
Stolen north, tracks laid and mortgaged to a clear pinched forcedperspective
Painted on a wall in a bathroom stall
Trying to scratch a reply to myself on the wall
But i don’t have fingernails, and one by one the lightbulbs are burning out
The settling ether, old men eating breakfast
The fog of summer mornings rubbing along blue streets
Finally scattering against the burning disc of the sun
A long drape shuddering its last wide sigh for the warmth of its final petals unfolding
Kids drink grape juice, grownups drink wine
One who knows only sweetness remains a child
