.

Expensive things are likely to be what they claim to be, and cheap things are likely to actually embody unwanted scraps and byproducts of what is unfeelingly thrown away, then regathered as a false assemblage. In this way, “identity” and “quality” are really one and the same, and the only things that are “bad” are those which claim to be something other than what they are.

As I am writing this, things are crashing toward me, events are crashing toward me, evidenced if only from the fact that we’re hurling through space on this ice ball. This would seem to render us all small, but just as they say that our greatest fear is that we’re powerful, rather than powerless, I’ve just now come to the illumination that my worst mishaps in life have spawned from thinking myself without power — from “not knowing my own strength,” in other words. I made more of an impression than I thought I would, perhaps, just by talking to a stranger, or something, and maybe I communicate, convey, things by virtue of the very look in my eyes. Is this then the essence of life — emotion, or is it space, or is it time passing, all these things relative and fleeting. I was just acting arbitrarily, once, with you in me, pot of ravaged alfalfa.

I remember this from the only time I ever did acid —
I wrote a paper for English and I completely lost the ability to organize thoughts
To where my priority became relaying the intense feeling of joy I had
From listening to music like the Grateful Dead’s “Fire on the Mountain”
And Soul Coughing’s “Soundtrack to Mary”
And watching sun glisten off of
The melting snow on the ground
Or
Listening
To the millions
Of individual
Specks of dust
Falling on our basement furnace conduit
An experience at 17
That made me hide,
And never show anybody the intensity of this joy,
This
Falseness
That
I would
Not trade
For 15 moons

Haha wow… I just woke up from the spookiest dream about the essence of creation. Deep stuff, and yet so simple, in a way. Did you know that thought and physical form are exactly correlative to each other, in terms of phases of formation? It might have taken a couple swatches (maybe three, as long as we’re talking about biblical matters) for the first living being to take form—it started as random, senseless patterns of static electricity braced against an endless night. Then, when the first thing formed, it was just like you and me. Space travel is another matter. That was not encompassed within the dream.

I have seen perfection,
And it looked not like these structures we build,
In fact it was simple,
And fleeing
A woman’s eyes that
Were memorably wistful,
A presence,
A smile
That betokened breeze

I pop my fist up at the thought of “government”…
In wanting to sing a song,
I am having a song sung to me.
And it is a song that knows it’s bad,
Like the derelict given voice
In a cancerous era.
.
And now as a moth
Climbing along walls
All I ever wanted was progress,
And more of it,
So as the infinitesimal achievements of man
Emerge before me,
I will separate all 74 people in this crowded room
And not step on any heads,
Wondering, then,
If progress like math songs
Is truly equality,
Or just this bended knee.

Animal mission
When malls lay silent for Christmas
And ices matte the bridges and skyscrapers
Laughing at urgency
She says things in a mocking,
A receptive cockatoo ensigned in
Missions of reductions,
To look past,
Always past,
Around the backs of the naked pine trees
Which keep turning
As if to hide their plainness and
Who would be the new slow transfer,
To fumigate pride down an
Anthemic exit through the fingernails and
Turn off
The machine

Your kindness,
Like a disease,
Makes tinny flatulation
With swatches
Then
.
To nestle
Themselves
Amidst the floor boards
And we wonder
Will the apocalypse be beautiful
Or is this it already

I think of it all,
Like the still,
Endless
Days in Colorado,
Partly cloudy
Days
Back in Indiana
Walking around the
County City Building
With a fat Mexican
Practically
Screaming at me,
There’s nothing here for you,
Your very existence, and slightest manifestation of strife,
Is predicated on intricate paradigms of transgression
Constructed by the most beautiful country in the world
Where my computer couldn’t seem to hum loud enough…
I think of all the torture,
All the paintings,
Wanting to gore out
Every corpuscle in my pancreas
And examine for one single cell meiosis
Which might have enjoyed Nickelback or Korn,
I think of the next petulant homeless person
I’ll see on the street,
Unavoidably, and I think of
Their expedited certainty.

We were walking down that one random street, again. We didn’t even know what was on the street. It was just sort of the walking down it that appealed to us. And this was what we knew deep down, in our inner souls. It was like what God would do if he were fastened down to earth, but in a pedestrian (underwhelming, that is), guy-who-just-got-out-of-church-and-had-been-bored-in-there sort of way.
There it came again, pretty much always — another person piping mad like a steam engine making ramshackle your reality. Behind us, we could almost still sense the buzzing of all those neon lights, as if even they were in flight, remaining on the forgotten block of toys and mice. Deeper, and deeper, we sunk into the homeless man’s eyes who passed us, being seared by his need, basic and humanitarian, and then his animalism, wild, mischievous, uncouth and true.
We looked at each other, and we suddenly both seemed too big for our bodies, or like an avenue in our hearts had become obstructed by fathoms of goo and mire, like something impenetrable and that you’ll never get to see over — it was like the feeling that the sun could never burn bright enough, in 1,000 years, to erase all the hate, spite and disuse populated in our own town. And then we got to wonder, even if some photosynthesis were to take place, like some constant beacon harvesting peace and prosperity, would that even be enough.
To our left, and down the road, we looked, leaving it for the gun blasts. Night fell upon the town, with storekeepers sweeping in fronts, with television sets turned on in gusts of envy, and with an anger so deep in our fingernails and toes that language would never be the same again. Then, within the eminent eyes of one young girl twirling bubbles, or one welfare mom glaring African sun from a porch stoop, we would again see the immateriality of things, knowing accomplishment only in the impossible, in oblivion.