from ABANDON GAME
Loss Leader
If it bleeds, it leads. Cake in the shape of a real heart. Pretty little shape of an afterthought.
See something. Walk all over it. Pushing your small self into smaller corners. Little ignorant bitch fist. Same old shame fold. Choke on the bird already. Happy drums.
So full of spiders as to be void of ants. Clutter is a never ending potential for change and a better life. This one. Let go once and you’re fucked forever. So out of breath just trying to stand still. If you keep starting over, you won’t get anywhere. That’s kind of the point.
I am instead picturing your partly open mouth.
More juice. Just jest. It’s my party guest.
Twined into submersion—daring down—double-up do-good over-done god-gone thunk-blossom clean-shot spit-monger.
To dither. To dabble. To dredge. Foot upon the ledge. Jumper-cabled into pre-animation.Watched and weighted down with patience unto the next short-sheeted go round. Anticipassion-pation. Debtor nation. Jackson Withers Frost.
Cop out ulate tic ernicus. Con cussion job tainer sequences fabulate vex cave cern trary vene voluted way. Way. Because she is a special case of some kind of awesome. You know that kind of woman, the ones you fall for. All girl. All golly. Sold the house, fence and all. All wall.
Waiting for you to open the emergency exit first. Waiting for you to be waiting for her. On the corner on the sidewalk by a window in the rain. Lack-you-wanna hold up like a billboard just about to crash mast first into the BQE.
A whole new chance for the world to not end. For us to all still be here, stewing in the makings of some other generation’s destruction. Consciousness uploaded before that other less obvious deformity is revealed at autopsy. If you were under the table with me, we could call it a fort. The stitched together bits of clothes worn to all the midnight balls of congress. So many nights of glory gone just ever so slightly wrong. Forcing history to finally institute instant replay. Score.
Teach me what you know about gravity, which is to say spin, which is to say: How do you work that work again?
Big labor makes little trees. Just ’cause just cause.
Just barreled into it and found out it was the finish line.
Year of the posthumous Nobel.
Upshot better never than now. Being held in the station by the station master of himself. Tambourines. Something for the girls to play with. Late joy. Our ache to point B. Gargoyle sin watching over every pint poured into the misery void.
Prostrate before the edicts of, well, those who issue edicts. Ergo ego. Ergo id. Some qua non come early. Clap, clap. Thank you for threatening to rain money down on them what have it already. Get ready to drown in your own spit. Fair use for foul bits of rusted screw.
Do we remember to recognize that the system is rigged? I see your amazing. I see your error. I see the inherent evil of your capitalist ways, which I can help you master. Which I can help you, Master.
Self-restraint as sexual fetish.
All jump. No joy. No tattoo take-back.
Urge mess everywhere. Cross falls on subway floor. Pick it up. Give it back.
“Already naked.” Nothing to lose but loss itself.
§
Echo and Spray
If your soul were for sale, I would buy it. If you were on fire, I would piss on you. For as long as it took to put you out. As into a tiny forest full of tiny endangered owls. Growing sideways into the light. Strapped to a chair. And posted on the Internet. And in love. But not really.
Gonna go home and work on digesting that canary.
“Tell me now how does it feel.”
We who are about to have erred on the side of reckless excess and saw it coming into out-of-focus fuck.
It’s either about preventing death or having fun.
I think you are lighter and I am happier.
I like comparing things.
This is about pleasure.
It does not prevent death.
Slower sucker surer hand-holder cold lucky faucet-turner-onner roomer-leaver lover later never better sweller fodder cannon bawler holler holder tilter weeper loser over finder keeper. Dish of spit.
Just one long acronym to encompass the entire universe.
Probably Cyrillic.
I know the chart. That is not the same as seeing it.
One brick much like another. One pigeon like the next. Until you throw a brick at it. Look, ma, it moves. It moves like the earth turns, not so as you’d notice—like creamer, like bass line—like a breeze just as warm as the stillness it moves through. The heady, beautiful stink of youth.
Smoke more. Live pretty. Die never.
No one likes to witness the seepage of need. Dirty flecks of want gooing up the works. When it works, it will stop working. Ah, the ism in jism. Just be fucking thankful that you can spin in circles, that you can spell, that you can see in color.
To thine own other self be true. That all-id girl in the headphones who just glitters with unattainable light. Go cry in your soup. Oh, you humans, sometimes I wish to join you. Mostly, I just want to stand in the kitchen, out of range.
Look me in the eye when you don’t talk to me like that.
The perfect shade of pigeon gray.
“I dreamed I was the president …”
In a basement in Ohio.
I had something to say.
And then I didn’t.
Mouth open in the rain.
Losing something in a sea of other things. A clutter of spiders. A cacophony of wants. No whiskey Tuesdays.
Beholden to the play of molecules in one’s own chipped brain. The most tolerable balance of terror, boredom, and pain. And music. Words are not music. But maybe money is. Shove the twenty up your nose and sing.
To pretend we remember or care. For those who died in a cluster of mud and indelicate thoughts. Break it first. Buy it later. Don’t bother to take it home. No one wants what’s free. Unless it’s open bar.
Saving up to pay off the texting implant. Six jobs and a shack in the woods.
Enough galleries in Bushwick to make it the model of a major—fret-ful and tetched. But clean enough to leave the house.
Hungry hands through the convent gate. Go ahead and try to touch that hoped-up soul. Slipshod. Ramrod. Cut sod. Lie in it. Better. Lie to it. Say it is green and lush and everything you have ever wanted to bury your face in. Grass of home. If home were a target to be taken out from a great distance on a weakly fluttering screen. You sunk my battleship. You’re welcome. Welcome. Welcome to your home among the distant stars of Alpha Centauri. Come again. Next time, bring better gifts.
Please hold my hand while I cross the Delaware, trip on the stairs, get bagged and stitched and strung along. Bug-less hum. Flawless mum. Shut it. Say it. Choose. This is time travel. Reravelling a favorite sweater. You are what you wore. The future will never, ever come. Promise. Pick a color ending in “ah.”
First-world thirst.
Everyone seems to want the only girl not in the room. Every year is another opportunity to ride the subway in your underwear.
Echo and spray.
That ingénue from rural Michigan, that maybe famous artist’s hostess daughter, each sweet young thing better than the next. Had I but only known you when the dollar was cheap, when art mattered, when the sun set in the West and the world was full of water. We all weep. We all get walked home. We all get forgiven. Get given and given away. Surrounded by beauty every waking moment of every goddamned day.