ventral tegmental area

all day long the words of petty,
compulsive liars and the elaborately 
lazy 
strangle my ears, hurt my eyes 
pinch me like scared children 
riding busses & trains 
to places they can't identify. 

demimonde immigrants with Corona/
Modello-breath, occupying billboarding 
gossiping in the convenience-store 
parking lot 
like too many boys outside of 
a school dance... 

since I'm in my 40s I think I have 
some right to be disappointed, 
whether I am a dis-
appointment 
or not or how subjective my success is. 

I take a couple vitamins (with coffee) like 
band-aids for whatever's left 
of my immune system and 
the clarity of memories 
significant & trivial 
like rocks in the ocean of 
ten thousand million words 
or sounds or variations of 
words and sounds 
at a plummet none have the breath 
to witness and 
emerging from a request 
even less understood. 

the choice to look for 
some balance of discipline & want, 
the choice to let the day keep you 
instead of 
trying to keep the day. 




**** 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Appointments (to be completed, soonish)

ONE  At night, he'd lay a plastic tarp in a wooded area near the edge of the city he relied upon, a certain modicum of gratitude in the ritual. He'd remove the comforter from the large leaf-bag, unroll it, shake it, lay it upon the tarp. He'd take some default note of the temperature--typically cold--and provoke a small memory of endurance, push against the unkindness of his situation. It was all but permanently bad, hardly more than an accumulation of rudeness and inhospitability that consumed the energy and good will that wagered against it. He'd lay a backpack with a few books and like supplies and everyday needs such as a toothbrush at the head of the blanket and remove his coat and sweater and fold them into a pillow and set the bundle atop the backpack. The hard air running slow and steady through everything. And on nights when he was sober enough to, he'd remove his shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and set these somewhere dry enough, close enough, for the morning....
Read more

the respiratory habits of fish

if there's some habit, vitamin, pharmaceutical that corrects short attention spans I haven't seen it.  all day long my eyes drown in the hapless, abject conformity of turdsuckers overpiling with words and not a flare of meaning or  whit discernible,  their voices trapped in some world before language: immigrants of this unwanted country this timeline all futures would beg to be spared from-- the leaves and the rocks and the wind and what else move in the space of the expanding universe and I try  to meditate on the respiratory habits of fish: those whose ancestors navigated, bred  endured trials century and millennia old, hungry, thinking creatures with a perception older than dinosaurs, citizens of a world no name has been provided.  **** 
Read more

glass [and] razorblades

 glass ~ even the routinely-poor are afforded  some small mercies and graces --  earlier, today, for instance  a discreet 3-panel  animation of a woman  smoking in close-up  of narrowing proximity  rolled into my periphery of  a sudden at the weedstore  and, tonight, outside the church  where my eyes close to some rest:  the fierce stone of the architecture  spraying indismissibly into  the moment...  ...when counselors,  nurses,  clerks, interviewers,  doctors, various staff  ask me why I consume  alcohol to the degree I do,  this is what I can't remember  or manage  to tell them, this  perpetual, permanent  withering, something abundant yet  feeble in its abundance, the glass  before something else  that always  was.  ****  razorblades  ~ stuff this into your brain:  there's this overflowing pile  of billions and more...
Read more