.

We have lost direction,
But we haven’t lost purpose —
.
The overall organism has taken on a shape
Not indicative of the individual cogs,
A fact, of course,
In no way provable,
But by a new, outside organism

There it is —
At 10:49 pm —
That little two-note jingle
From the ESPN app on my phone,
The very mark of lame guy virility,
The thing that never loads,
Never posts full sentences,
.
Only pesters me
As I make my ninth step
Toward bed, when sports
Might as well be
Distended sloth fingernails
For all I care,
.
The sounds knock against
A back nook of my
Mind I
Never even knew existed and
As I haplessly attempt to achieve my bedroom
On this rainy night,
No orchestra was ever so sweet
As that two-note jingle
On the ESPN app on my phone.

15. I hate that number. I rub noses with her. I see what she’s feeling, all across her face. She is my cherub, in bed with me on a rainy night and contouring to my body and then 15 seconds later, I think of it being over, which is just as bad as it actually being over. I want to be a professional crawler across of deserts.

I look around for the RIGHT thing to do and
That proposition itself melds
Heat to people’s patiences
Like raining giraffes kicking
Furiously through the night,
The legions of all hell on an
Arc like shrapnel

How did you know
What to do
Humanity
With the construction of your body
With your ribcages like art and your
Giant,
Cancer-ridden breasts
Given space, space where toothless clods
Would try to penetrate but you
Degraded the sky,
Monitored people’s gender of motions and
Celebrated nothing.

Immediately when I gain happiness, I always get the impulsive fear that it will go away. I tried thinking of what exactly to call this — it’s fear, obviously, but it’s the fear of an unknown thing, and seeing as it exists within a realm of happiness, it can’t technically be classified as anxiety.
Anyway, I think that this fear, whatever it is, is the most common malady prevalent in our society — it bespeaks the very malaise which pervades any public place from the bus station, the motor vehicle branch (whereas restaurants are typically more positive), even universities. It’s an entirely ubiquitous flaw, but a flaw nonetheless.

* Seeing as how corrupt college basketball is now, I’m hoping that this bowl game betting system will take off and replace those filthy, diseased, Calipari-infested “brackets” we used to know and love. This betting game is based on points, the object being to accumulate as many points, out of 110, as possible. There are three ways you can gain points — choose the right game winner, choose the right point spread winner, or call the correct over or under on the particular game’s over/under.
– Game 1 is the #1 team vs. the #4 team. The total possible point drop-off for game 1 is 25. The same goes for game 2, which pits the #2 team against the #3 team. Game 3 is the championship, on which 50 points possible can be lost. The “wild pick” is a non-playoff bowl game of the participant’s selection, to which the same criteria apply, with point values totaling 10 instead of 25 or 50.
..
Point values for wild pick:
Game winner (6)
Winner against spread (2)
Over or under (2)

Point values for game 1:
Game winner (13)
Winner against spread (6)
Over or under (6)

Point values for game 2:
Game winner (13)
Winner against spread (6)
Over or under (6)

Point values for game 3:
Game winner (26)
Winner against spread (12)
Over or under (12)
..
Beal’s picks:
Wild Pick
TCU (game winner) (6)
TCU (against spread/-3) (0) [6]
Over (49) (2) [8]

Game 1
Clemson (game winner) (0) [8]
Clemson (against spread/+3) (0) [8]
Under (47) (6) [14]

Game 2
Oklahoma (game winner) (0) [14]
Oklahoma (against spread/+2.5) (0) [14]
Under (60) (0) [14]

Game 3
Georgia (game winner) (0) [14]

Georgia (against spread/+4.5) (12) [26]

Over (45) (12) [38]

Total: 38

Amidst this stifling CAVE
Of self-esteem and
“Solid upbringing”
Sometimes
It’s better
To just lash the whole thing to the ground
And realize, Christ,
You probably freakin’ want the same
Thing as the next guy.

One man’s part of another man is a slim vertex.
An angled edge of a hair feather
Where on he meets an agreement
In passing graces or delusions

I used to live by the mountains, in Boulder, Colorado, with my mom. I remember how I’d felt before we moved out there — I thought, well, I’ll take acid and run up and down the mountain all the time. When we got there, when I actually sized it up, I was scared to do that. In hindsight, I guess it was a little bit of a ridiculous thing to say you’d do, but for how clear in my head the vision of doing this was, I taken with the sort of marked fear that I can’t help but acknowledge and relive, to an extent, even after all these years.
When I moved back to the Midwest, there was this dude I wanted to fight, but I was too scared to do it. What I’m getting at is that I think this extreme instance of fear, at least in me, was from a lack of understanding of reality, rather than an excessive or overly intense understanding of it. Both of these things happened when I was fresh off of another part of the country. Their entities in my mind were foreign and novelty, not the framework of anything truly my own.
But then, as this is the case, the scholastic realms become problematic, because the way our society is set up, with school as a sort of hands-off preparation for the “real world,” the dichotomy of school and the workforce is composed of mutually exclusive elements to where it’s more of a complete TRANSFORMATION than it is a gradual transition, much less ably considered a bona fide PROGRESSION.