Broken: A Plague Journal (32 page)

bumper stickers warned innocents.

an army seven-million strong by the time he was ready
 
would be nice if once
just once
or twice
we could stop hating each other so much
to honor that time
and maybe it’s not really hate
but a succession of days spent wondering
through desert life
at stars
at breath
my decision of each inhalation tempered now
with the surrenders inherent to each departure:
i must hate you.
i must unlove you
unseat you from this tangent,
exponentially tangential,
scattershot into futures apart.

was unknown in brevity,
famous in obsession and little else.

multitasked his path to mediocrity:
books, pages, digitally-versatile
stubbornness borne on
[did you know he was actually allergic to donkeys?]

i don’t know who i am anymore.

never tried a drug he didn’t fear,
never didn’t fear You, that base addiction
concreted, secreted in a night that he put his
hand over your mouth so the neighbors wouldn’t bitch.
knew then that your flicking tongue tasted yourself on his palm
from cupped foreplay: [this isn’t cheating; this is friendship: beneficently extended.]

synesthetic in that he could hear your smile,
taste your release.
synesthetic in that he could live
the shadows of you and die each time he felt for your
heart-beats.

ate aspirin like breath mints.

hostaged himself to yesterdays.
to three-times-nine,
to fourteen-seven:
to morning, afternoon, evening and night smoke.

once considered working on a bison farm
because “artists” need real “jobs” to pay for cable.

[your dark exterior masks a caffeine-driven activism/]
[you’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it/]

thought that maybe if he smiled hard enough, long enough,
his face would stick that way
[such childhood threats only work for negatives]
[and no one would know].

realized long after they’d left that they were gone

long before they’d left.

stole poetry from his inbox:

Under the cheese, reconciles a breezy stain.
Dresses by drugs, transmutates the acorn to guy.
Ruined by chariots, wipes the light to guest.
Transmutating, saying, transmutating, writing, stepping.
Counter had a spill, which was not at all a gut.
Tells cowardly, wordlessly, like keys yelling, allegedly.
Seasons like rocks go slyly but angrily.

lonely man: suspensory particularist falconine boil lonely euangiotic

lonely man: wondered exactly when the future became a time
when scambots used “euangiotic” to market
cum-guzzling tranny vids and
bigger dick pills [ripper cun7 open 2nite] and
the. lowest. mortgage. rates. ever.

was never particularly falconine.
 

synesthetic in that
the point is, i forgive you.

synesthetic in that
he never wanted an acknowledgement,
just silences

the suicide watch was long over,
the july phone call of an angry father
and halfhearted attempts to convince him
he wouldn’t walk off the roof.

sometimes swerved into traffic.
sometimes ran into snowbanks on purpose.
sometimes pretended he wasn’t home.

the catalytic reaction of palm to palm,
palm to breast,
wondering which geography hearts learn first.

his madness taught him that tinnitus
ringing through from first memories sang
a perfect constant note, an S note,
inextricable from musics that dredged and
driver units, fifty millimeters spanning twenty-
five thousand hertz were the most convincing evidence
that he wasn’t in fact indistinguishable from god.

wrote such worlds into existence
with maths learned in base one
four seven fifty three forty seven fourteen
made no sense to anyone beyond the periphery of
his madness: for all we know,
benton really existed somewhere dying at
quantum light x and ghosts are nothing more than
unrealized lovers.

let’s disappear.

wondered if the three seconds of static from
two minutes, twenty-two seconds to
two minutes, twenty-five seconds was
intentional.

have you remembered me as
he
fucks
you?

long ago forgot the ingredients of love if ever
he’d purchased them in the first place.
substituted distance for proximity and
water for milk.
burned the mess.

learned the result of making love is often
a screaming, dying pile of flesh
more self-inscribed suffering than infant.

the morbid lock with which he fantasized
an elegant entrance to their funeral cars
and the questions whispered by strangers, of strangers:
was he?
the one?
who?

such daymares unseat the hesitant security of decades.

revised his histories to include suspicions.
revised his memories to include evidences.
revised his life to the end result of conscious constructions
of begged pities and reassurances:
we are here for you
[based on truths we can never believe].

wondered what you were doing these days
with your hairs or if maybe every reimagining of self was
nothing more than a surface attempt to become present while
underneath you knew the same battles
used the same metaphors for us
and plagiarized my hate.

surrendered more than once.

never had anyone travel so far away and come back to him.
[these things happen in threes.]

surrender
capitulation
without white flags.
 

put down payments on
too many others’ emotional dowries;
invested too much of himself
in the gentrification of exiled landscapes:
he was the art kid they took home before
they met the safe one.

argued the non-pre-raphaelitism
of a proud antique-shop purchase and probably ruined all
chances of getting in good with mom.
[sure, it’s impressionist. sure.]

waited for the other shoe to drop.
spent most days barefoot so he’d never break a heart.
was accused of ruining lives twice.
took heart in knowing that he’d not once made that accusation,
hated himself more for self-ascribing all responsibility
often broke plates and
stood on them by accident.

knew that once he began to associate music to specific humans,
they’d either die or cross the world to escape him.
never again wanted an our song,
but he did enjoy plural pronouns.

agreed with blair about ginsberg,
but still wrote this.

editor recommended the expurgation of
two shitty teenage poems from
his first book,
so he wrote a poem chapter in the third
of seven entries, all math internal.

[the lessons of the second are that i can survive,
and no matter how much you were to me,
i will use the us we were to pay the rent
if i can’t use you as a pillow.]

drove in circles.

light bulbs lasted for durations of residence
because he preferred his work in the dark
and found that he couldn’t proofread
when the songs had words.

rusted through most recollections
and lived as dust, wiped away more than once
but always returning, an exquisite layer
only visible under heartbeat scrutinies,
mostly shed flesh.

reserved a large percentage
of his willpower for a time when
he’d not likely need it longer.

divided and hid his past
[the electron flicker, stippled]
into convenient sub-folders
that only turned bold when someone actually needed him.

he hated bold folders.

preferred acoustic versions.

counted three grammatical errors
in his deepest inspirations.

marked his days
in the number of times
he emptied the desktop ashtray;
most days, three.
what a war mask such ash could inscribe.

marked his months
in the number of cartons, the handful
dozen career aspirations
and the nights they went to tully’s;
had a specific memory of each booth.

marked his years
with ink lines on left forearm.
no. it doesn’t scan.

gave more of himself up than he kept.
[it was a flawed campaign for a recalled product.]
first woke up

wondered what the end destination
for a course charted across freckles would be;
was satiated on a southern path,
and his tongue remembers.
they do leave texture:
he preferred that alternate smooth.

you don’t need to know.
you don’t need

wrote poems of war
in his own blood, vomit and shit.
such holographic wills are legally-binding
if properly witnessed;
i call you to bear witness.

burned all the steak-ums
and days later dreamt the gutter was filled with the war dead.

to walk across that desert to you...

convinced himself that he could pinpoint the
exact moments they’d erase him from memory:
11:11, 11:42pm, 7:41am.
he’d sometimes wake for no reason with an urgent sense of nothing.
resigned to the same status as the dead,
intangible.

wanted to write her into a book,
chose words for actions, phrases for breathing
the way she smelled at night.

hid the explosions of the midnight city
behind headphones, sirens bleeding through,
once watched them hose the blood from the street
and gasoline
after two vans danced around the corner, tangled,
the very spot the crazy man had shouted in dozens:
“Mayor Matt Driscoll is an asshole.”
until sun rose, traffic drove over glass.