.

How you go through life,

There,
I should say,
I see like the jackrabbits
Elemental in the forest
.
Where to exalt you would be to stop the world,
To appease you would make maladaptive indentations
In the grooves of wind,
As you maneuver through zen poets,
Their eyes braced in drastic explosions,
.
I see how a life of safety
Would be neither what you want
Nor possible,
Too much a song,
As it is,
In itself.

We will look back into the wars

For images of beauty
Because it is there that we cast off all vanity
Under Zeus’s scope,
.
And for our bones and cartilage
Know no value in this life,
Only rotting into theory,
Into still life,
.
Within this conjecture
Of “splendor.”

I started wearing a black t shirt every day. I thought it might be fun to see what happened if I lost all feeling in me. Just mockery. Mockery of the self, mockery of the world. An albatross in flight. The only feeling that would penetrate my psyche with any significance was of conquest, of desecration. I tasted the light dust furrowing under the rainbow, and it was my own fate, seeing these scissors of the world shearing one and all, the big, wide faces crouched, faces hollowed out and bleeding with eyes that cannot see, but still snapshot in Nikon dens. The greenhouse has plants, kept, and here we are, kept, animals that cannot act like animals, responsibilities, attached to identities, attached to faces, thinking, this cannot be happening, I cannot be sitting here eating at Subway, doing the exact same thing I did last week, being the exact same thing, while also dying. That kid’s Subway uniform belying her understanding of the whole thing. She sees me, being kept in this cage of society. My song has been sung, and now it is the world’s song of mockery, of me, a baroque polka dance so infinitesimal you can barely hear it, its drolleries dancing solely in the ears of dogs, golden retrievers who lie thirsty on summer lawns, in their days.

To be exact, and to explicate, one pompous aspect in the propagation of this thing called “soul” is its ignorance of the fact that people affect each other to eventual commonness. So in pursuing the fulfillment of the “soul,” a person rejects coexistence, in a sense. This is, of course, a decision made alone, the personal matter of the self making it.
Bukowski said, “Only two things matter in life: don’t get caught drunk anywhere, and don’t get caught without money.” Bukowski’s writing tends to be a lot of things, among which are humorous, fast-paced and urban. It’s for his very ability not to care too much about himself that his works have value. They’re among the most illustrative of our times. A given of his stories is likely to unleash a bevy of authentic, cutting dialogue, rapacious cognition and of course his twisted overall drunk perspective, which must have value too, or his books wouldn’t balloon on shelves, and his muse wouldn’t surface in rock songs. But it’s nice to not have this “spiritual” stasis anywhere in there.

Old, ancient trees

Like sistine chapels
Speak the loudest, to me —
.
They speak of another time
In their hotbeds, now in summer
And they drape the canvas of the moment
With boundless pride and exuberance,
Although the message become’s that of one’s own temporary spot
In restless consciousness,
Forever shirking harmony
In all its contraband decadence.

Sure,

All you wanted was to get to a glorious plateau
Where you could reproduce,
Where you could perceive beauty
In the tonal, morphing green sky
And shirk the molestations of freedom so aural,
.
But we’re piled heaps upon heaps,
Here,
And nobody will ever show you a difference…

All of the formulations we produce in our minds
Are in some way delusions,
Because in them is woven pride and ideal,
And a love that’s so categorized by society,
Flanked with damnation for incompatible vision,
Stripped of kinetic foray
Under documents and séance faith.

Elegant shine of plenty,

Even if I have nothing left to give you,
I will give you the last wets of my eyes,
The last basin of bone marrow
That they granted me on this earth
For too short of a time.

There,

Which heaven is,
I see the little sands of furry animals
Nestling around the student building
And the bell tower,
.
Just doing what they can.

The veterans are ready,

Here, again,
Making graves
On the county face.
.
These are our heroes,
Who go on shooting sprees
On their weekends off,
Coiled springs outside the library
In the hot sun,
.
They just saw that sun
Going round yesterday,
Too,
But still can’t seem to think of what to do about it.