from The Middle

Infer, no, inferno. Gather the facts before inferring that
we are living in an inferno. A war on many things;
they want to kill you for any reason, make money off
you, lick you bone white and dry. They would rather
see you poor, imprisoned, uneducated, sick, hungry.
They want to keep you alive.

* * *

Practically all things are related in one form or
another. What kind of boy is unboyfriendable? What
kind of girl? Not in words are we like our parents.
Only in words are we like our parents. Language is
premise enough to begin. You will always be between
your mother and father, regardless of if you never
met them—a bloody and fleshy edge of comfort and
discomfort.

* * *

Translation teaches that stanza means room. Bakhtin
wrote of literature’s architectonics. A book is a static
and constructed space through which a reader moves
at will. It is rooms and passages, design decisions.
Ought the same wood floor to flow from the dining
room to the kitchen? Where should we place a
doorway? Does this blotch of blankness cry out for
carpet? I should have studied architecture. The way
through might have then been less jarring. Let’s begin
again as always.

* * *

Things are said to fall apart – thank God. I split my
day into parts just to manage. Whole hours at once
overwhelm. Days come as waves or weights to rend.
But dissolution’s only normal. Cells want to split.
And dismal couples. Hot legs and hot dog buns. The
double doors of the city bank lobby. The seams of
tight pants desire this, the lips of hungry mouths. We
break bread and promises. We cut film. We split
seconds and sides and the rent. The trees branch out
just to live.

from When Empurpled: An Elegy

XI.

Amazing how every home be a
haunted house with gables like
the deadliest of sins and witches
tied to Corinthian pillars pilasters
splintered like firewood hahaha
how my flesh be the heretic and
my body be bewitched and how I
will be the one to burn it like a
smoldering pile of embers a
moist cigarette pinched between
the lips of all loneliness O
astonishing how a leaf does fall
as does the long night moon after
the winter solstice when people
sleep in pursuit of solace of love
longevity and lowliness lowly as
those angels fallen from the
graces of God as does fall a leaf
from the canopy of our habitat
inherited from the bravest of us
human beings being human
seeking refuge in Allah from the
devil the rejected my poor
harmless child protecting you
from those who seek to have you
dead I take refuge bat at hand and
ask you O God my hearer you
mighty man near my homeland O
my thy might and thy power you
are not incapable of seeking
refuge speeding far beyond this
world in perforated lines that
from the desk of elsewhere go
and and and
AndAndAndAndAndAndAndAn
dAndAnd I swear to God that we
will not forget the dead who walk
among us useless and flailing
marinating autumnal colors
crumpling beneath our feet
birthing a pattern a rhythm a
dirge for the fallen anyone of
everywhere some supportive
setback or burial of the
bloodened continues to beg for
the forgiveness of God no power
but in God no pedestrianization
but in this place this place of
overpopulation and carbon
monoxide inhaled deeper and
deeper down daintily now down
from my ancestors down the field
of fever dreams coming to
fruition flourishing amongst the
flowers the seeds of promise
planted for the sake of a
prosperous land and your
crumbling cookie eyes and your
museum mouth opening wide
wolfing down disintegrated tape
loops on holiday the most
difficult task of all so far insofar
as not yet having had the chance
to get to know any individual
having taken leave from the
crowded marketplace of the
world with this thunderous
swarm of pedestrians all about us
all everywhere and at once upon
a time in the remotest reaches of
a darkened village miles and
miles beyond where we now
stand there stood a harrowing
house with a roof steeply pitched
and cornices sated and columns
of a certain Greco variety
attempting to embody the ideal of
rationality the revival of some
fantasy and in this house there
lived and burned a homely harlot
at home with omens and without
a name O God to live and burn
without a name to bear to wear
upon one’s shoulder as if it were
a badge an expression of
nationalism of identity of the
mythical ideal of rationality of
solace of love longevity and
lowliness lowly as those angels
fallen from the graces of God but
I O I am calling off all falls from
grace and I O I will stop words of
I into stir the stirring of the
melting pot like the melting flesh
of floundering witches flailing so
uselessly amongst the flowers the
seeds of promise like the seeds of
everything I could be but
mmmmmmaybe may not be just
as be proven false cannot be
proven false just as it cannot be
proven false that every dog be a
god and every god be begotten
and every body be bewitched and
every home be a haunted house
hahaha!

Person

It looks around after it pokes its head out and it sees that it can still make McDonald’s breakfast if it hurries.

Person

She goes to school, she fingerpaints the universe, she responds to stimuli, she fits her responses in her lunch box, she talks like “I am embarrassed of this lunch box,” she twinkles and thinks of what a gaping asshole the future is. She does karate on a classmate, she goes home, she does karate on the darkness.

People

If you really want to know someone, watch how they cut meat.

People

“Here is my lighter. Don’t look at me, and don’t fucking hurt yourself.”

“Here is my fucking Gmail password, don’t look at me.”

“Here is my favorite book in the world, fucking read it. Don’t fucking look at me.”

“Here is my fucking full external hard drive, don’t look at me.”

Person

She likes chicken on her salad. She hates the impermanence of lettuce. She has thoughts like, “I can feel it moving through me. My body is a level of Donkey Kong.”

People

“In five years, we will have at least one,” she said. Then, five years later, we had a squirming, sloppy little child. He swam out of her backwards, which made me nervous. When he dropped into the doctor’s thinly latexed fingers, I choked on my spit and coughed, trying to struggle out that I loved him.

The doctors wiped grayness from the Tonka toy of a man. I felt, for whatever splash of seconds fucking minutes, that he would be the one thing that would not drag or be dragged through it all. I thought of my own undoing, the way I look at myself in the mirror now and consider myself as a piece of gutted history, a product, phallic, a fuck ton of haircuts.

People

Someone will eventually say, “I remember when this was a Denny’s,” and everyone will feel like they’ve been shoved.

Her Space Circle(s)

From our brief chronology of time it appears that first
he briefed his job about the current inadequacies
of forgetful behavior & lit some marijuana as he was talking
& got fired right then for speaking what words he thought were true.
It could be said he fell terribly for the roses that fell from the balcony
of her MySpace after that call. The new look of her page was like being in her.
Her space even smelled like roses & see here he scrolled forever one night, etc.,
because she had presence. Even I used to wonder specifically about spaces
& the matter that destroyed & created. Check this out.
If you look closely enough & back your eyes away from this screen
real quick you can see the trickled space of white between these words that
would allow rose petals to slowly drop between these sentences. & symbols
are space circles that can be galaxies too. That would be
a poem. This is what he saw: the absence of this Space dissolving into a million
empty catacombs. He wished upon roses built of code
because they were the only roses he would ever receive & they were
beautiful to him. This was no game that Called to Duty
it came back with a story about infinite disappearance, it was real
& empty at the same time, the same representation of bird and bee:
is there matter in the lost message to a girl from the woods?
Somewhere in space there must be this message bouncing between stars,
& after a long time the stars return with a typed story about a boy
with the world at the tips of his fingers who had brought the rose petals
that fell from the screen of her MySpace & presented them as proof
that she existed to him
then.

Killin’ It

Candida, candida,
I soak a tampon in apple cider vinegar and push it up my

lavender candle, lavender candle.
Tilikum, Tilikum,

people do awful things to make money in the name of entertainment.

Sea World is a fucking horrible place.

Entertain me, entertain me,
soft world.

Fuck Sea World.

Are you captive in a place just a little bit larger than your body?

I fall into a very deep thought about the conditions of vanishing
in the well-lit, but not too well-lit change room.

I buy fluoride-free toothpaste because I’m trying to
activate my pineal gland.

Some people say evil people who work for powerful people
put fluoride in the water because it dumbs you down.

Candida, candida
I am self-medicating with pure cranberries and apple cider vinegar.

I buy chocolate eggs and tea light candles.

Everyone’s tongue is pink la-la-la.
I am craving sugar so much.

Candida, candida,
I do mountain pose in yoga and kill it.

I kill that pose.
I dream that I dance with Beyonce on AstroTurf.
I kill that dream.

I dance like the best I’ve danced ever.
I sip my cell phone, mistaking it for a glass of water.

I breathe out of my ears.

Chapter 7.
Ballad of your Boss

Don’t hesitate to serve your boss.
Sit quietly and he will come to you.
The blessing of an employee
is in the corners of her mouth.
The blessing of a plot
is in its time of being worked.

When a great boss says “I kill you”
lay your head across his laptop.
Throw your documents in the river.
This is how we measure time.
The blessing of a plot
is in its time of being worked.

Do not despise small documents.
Do good for your body, but
there is no one who does not die—
Do not delay in your office.
The blessing of a plot
is in its time of being worked.

Be a cat in your boss’s presence.
Do not give a wary look
towards the elevator door—
You do not know the length of your life.
The blessing of a plot
is in its time of being worked.

Do not hesitate to serve your boss.
Do let linger without enquiry.
Put myrrh on your head, dress in fine linen.
Sit quietly and he will come to you.
The blessing of a plot
is in its time of being worked.

haiku about the biggest question of my youth

should i masturbate
tonight? i thought as i puffed
on a black n’ mild

haiku i thought of while hooking up with my ex-girlfriend

i knew you would find
a way back into my arms
like a homing pigeon

haiku to my ex-ex girlfriend

you keep coming in
to my life and finding new
ways to hate me

haiku about being depressed and single

nobody wants to
date a depressed person
why did god do that

haiku i wrote after seeing a guy and a girl talking provocatively on a bench outside of a party

can’t deal with the
pressure of “getting a girl,”
where’s my ex-girlfriend

haiku i thought of after waking up with my ex-girlfriend after spending a night together

woke up and thought
“i finally have a real
human in my hands”

Man Hole

I left him unfinished. I just wanted to.
The snow outside fills the sewers
and like my drive for power will stop abruptly
     and soon. Starting now, I’ll drop picture frames
down the hole. Drop food processors and Le Creusets
and my chaste little letters. It’s due to my interest
in godless practices that undoes the ritual.

I have a hole where I store my absent typographies,
I have a hole that will never move outside my body.

When he is beautiful, he adapts to a you-state,
thous his way into my pants to mortify my skins.
He draws me over in charcoal, my dull empty sternum
pinks with creation. I have a hole capable of erasure
and his jaw hangs like a mantis there, there.

Then I make him just once pierced with hundreds of holes.
I make him to preen and prick and prune his skin til he bends in his beautiful stalk.

Then I make him to crave my every sustenance as I fill him with clay and stone and ink.

Here is a mirror to wander through, a hallway to crack over his knee.

I make him to tender my strong arms as I spread him open with my knee.
I give him bloomers. I give him diamonds. I give him my desiccated brainstem
and ask if he’d like to go home now. He digs a hole in the ground and gets in and this makes him mine forever.

 
*

One definition of a hole is
     When men accidentally kill endangered wildlife
    they fill the beasts with holes, sew in rocks, sink them in larger holes.

One definition of a hole is
     I used to use maxipads against my hole, and I could smell
   the perfumed cotton-rot when a man slipped in through my window.

One definition of a hole is
     The men have been wiped out. I’ve been given certain allowances
     to provide for my species. I miss them. I am Ursula fat and witchy under the sea.

One reason I fantasize about the re-creation of men is because they always admit having loved me when they’re done with me, the heartsick goat in my stomach slaughters itself I am so grateful to fill myself with godawful certitudes as I bleed out. I don’t hear them in the vents. I don’t hear them over me in the dark, emptying. I starve my body still in case it drives them back.

I store them in the hole outside my body. This isn’t my hole but it’s a decent one, keeps them veal-dark and veal-alive. Vials and vials worth of DNA. All these sad engorged wads of dead ocean.

 
*

My poor man, so full of addendum,
driven through the asphalt to occupy the space
of a shit lake, shit river, shit rat god.
When you are mine you become animate
only capable of burning selfies in the shit lake.
        I say when. I say.
And when I close the sepulcher it is done and
you are he again, the agnostic whimpering he.
I place a hole over you, under you, fill it with rock.
Can’t wait to return to my dumb bitch couch
where he is the empty border outside where he is the hole.

The dog presents her dead
to an amnesiac who claims
she was touched by a man
and the touch felt like power
Power is a couch that covers a great hole

The holes I poured you in are becoming legible,
can be read from left to right, up to down, under to over—

The beauty of holes is that I cannot enter one without ceasing to
exist in the seen world. That a body can disappear and become
subsumed by a space suggests that the body is nothing but an act
of spectral negation. My cunt is a star with its darkness pressed to the floor to temporarily light me, to lighten me.

So the channels of men close. The lines of the men close.
I have a sample of spit from the hate of my history and I hock and
I hock and I hock in the holes of my men.

To call a woman a hole is to suggest immediate use.
To call a man a hole suggests grave incivility.

Incivilities I place like a knife at the windowsill to cool.
I’ve set a wishbone in boiling water to watch its holes appear.
When I weep, my calcium brittles. My men limn in sinkholes
until they are again important, until their duress makes me faint in my delicate sovereignty.

*

History is a papertrail that leads to a hole.
My personal history is always such that and that which, a dreadful taxonomy of raining men.
Hallelujah I’ve dug up this adorable patriarchy and it wants to live!

The classrooms of girls offend me with their careful thinking.
Thinking is an act of dipping your hands into a hole that you hope will form a skin.
I have crowned my foreskin a philosopher its rhetoric is so dry.

When he is homely, he is a leader of men and glimmers a brawny integument of he.
He is drawn from the rocks. He rapes a hole in me to fill me with rocks.
My consent is my sinking to the seafloor. Sally sold seawhores by the seashore,
I hum and I hock to the bottom.
The hooked descending albatross is a beauty to behold and I place its carcass like a key
     in his gray bloated sternum to bloom itself dry.

When he is homely, a hole forms in his throat for him to speak.
Stones fall out of his crude syntax.

I make him hundreds of times, drill holes behind his temples to make his future exterminations simple. I make his cock hundreds more times, I freeze them mid-revision.

I make him hundreds of times for he is homely and I’ve made him to desire the keen white    scalpel again and again.
I make him hundreds of times, let his holes grow dusty from lack of speech.

I make him hundreds of times and he sits on a rock all bashful and glitz.

I make him hundreds of times until he is pretty and worth his weight in flesh.

And in his flesh, I see him, the delicate sovereignty of his limbs.
And when I see him, I scoop out his throat, I take it in the hole and the look in his eyes tells me   he’s grateful. I thou him so hard I can feel his fingers wrapping their worth round my   neck.
My love is a hole I can only make once. I make it hundreds and hundreds of times.

high profile search and seizure: a compendium of bizarre hazing rituals the fbi never wanted you to know existed

i am currently a very different type of heartbroken and alone
compared to when i was heartbroken and alone in the jungle
or heartbroken and alone drunk in the mouth of a volcano
or heartbroken and alone in a city i’d lived almost a year in
or heartbroken and alone on drugs in some field in a storm
or heartbroken and alone on a street with a high murder rate
or heartbroken and alone in bed with someone in a mansion
or heartbroken and alone with no smartphone, different mansion
or heartbroken and alone with no money in a desert
or heartbroken and alone in an empty high school skipping lunch
or heartbroken and alone in bed, two weeks pneumonia
or heartbroken and alone at night in the catacombs of a church
or heartbroken and alone playing sega in a basement
or heartbroken and alone being forced out of a womb
i am a very different type of heartbroken and alone
heartbroken and alone on the internet with you