fermi

i have lived in the shadow of

my own self-awareness

brittle teeth and smiling bones and an open chest

with every letter

from every language carved

in agonising ways just to make me

understand

i don’t understand

black eyes in the shape of

blackout jealousy

seeing resentment and divination

in numbers that don’t matter

anxiety folding over seven times

in the pit of my stomach,

universes within the creases

perpetually expanding

tearing wormholes of worry and

negative space to fill in my interstellar veins

to purge the burning blood

burning me out

maybe there’s truly no one out there

or maybe i’m just

too tired still

tired of being omniscient in a worshippers’ world

that doesn’t give a damn

going quiet

why did you swear to me

and let my numb feel odd

i understand the sympathy

of disparaging your own love

.

why did you swear to me

and let my numb feel good

if i don’t pass your humanity

i’ll let you be the first to intrude.

Sign Of My Love

I weaponise my own overthinking

Pretend it’s a martyr’s stealthy stifled game

Don’t react fast and stay unblinking

I’ll cherish the love but not the foreign name

.

Devoting that single line of pain

Only one more bad confession would suffice

Immune to the pieties of disdain

Find another distraction to reveil the disguise

.

I love it, I stress, swallowing spatial headaches

Oh god, what a mess, a pretty pulsed mess to unmake

Am I stupid for supposing you’re not the wolf?

For lying for you to see more than just their said truth?

.

What had she done to you with those shriveled-up veins?

Entrancing away younger venom with untold ancient remains

Why do I wish to wake your worth, oh why should I descry

Persist to save the saveless soul—as if I’ve crawled still to try?

.

For it’s done, no, there isn’t much more to be done

A lost historian cannot weep for their bloody discoveries

I dream on and on with the stain of our loaded gun

Finding softer murder in between all our golden mysteries

.

I’ll weaponise their mass overthinking

Understand that maybe seventeen is a bad place to be

Don’t listen don’t pray don’t let it sink in

I cherish the leisure but not the most twisted analogy.

Last To Come Down With Cabin Fever Wins A Funeral Bill

Now, you hear it? You hear the torture
I’m on my knees begging your body to wither
Don’t you ignite me, this is not your time
It takes hold, this image
Of rapture infecting you whole
Stripped, stripped to the bone
Devoured for solace, a place we both know…

~*~

Just a bunch of clattering jaws

With nothing special or new to say

One armed with a dull penknife

The other a clamouring pity parade

.

“So come rain on mine!”

The unhinged taunts don’t cease to breathe

Until the air is so stuffy, it has to be swallowed

And some poor victim chokes on empty grief

.

Just a bunch of castigating tongues

Hoping to flagellate some thicker skin

Sharpened vowels fly out in all directions

But the bloody shrapnel digs deeper within

.

“Get it through your thick skull!”

There’s only one way to truly understand

And you can’t pull the trigger or pray for your life

With a dead man’s fucking hand

.

Just a bunch of claustrophobic brains

With nothing else to feel but primal thrill

One squashed down to pure pretention

The other stretched out to senseless shrill

.

“I’m sick of being sick of you!”

And everyone comes down with the disease

There’s no way to get it right but to scream for your life

Until the symptoms drag the audience to their knees

.

Just a bunch of cacophonic gullets

Desperate to talk away the underlying necrosis

So let the bodies drop, let mouths clank open and shut

And soon the surviving blowflies will do as they please.

~*~

I could not see past fury
Maintained the true beast
My instincts rupture and
The motive has no theme
Now look into these eyes
And see the end of time…

ipecac milkshake

& i wish there was a soft metaphor / to lower you into this grief.

–Donte Collins; anger

have you found your next darling spithole yet?

not meaning to come off rude but

i just don’t have photo albums in my home anymore

of all those weathered stacks

of glossy tourist postcards and airbrushed polaroids and half-arsed private promises which led to

quick pity fucks and more simpleminded conversations (weather? news? one plus one?)

when you ran out of coffee grounds

and breakfast was cold

and the fingernail scars being shamefully picked on were still quite scarlet

like vampire tongues

fresh off a feast, a binge, a hellfest

of a hot-lipped hunger pang

how many towns did you ravage and terrorise and theatrically swoop over with your velvet raiments

how many people fainted

at the mere sight of your anaemic cadaver-sheet skin and anabolic empty marble glare

how many thrust pitchforks punctured your abdomen and how many furious torches

burned the inside of your pelvis and how many corroded teeth did you lose chewing on

leftover bones the next night

sitting all alone in your grandiose dining hall that smells of decaying rats and halitosis

spitting out the occasional tough marrow or stray spider leg (you never really got used to that odd brackish flavour),

how much of it was

worth it to you?

you were acting on impulse

instinct

some other impressive, egregious “i” word you have yet to figure out;

i can’t blame you.

blame is too weak a word for anyone with half your brain to ever understand

i can’t blame myself

except sometimes in the middle of the night when my juddering teeth refuse to unclench (pissoffpissoffpissOFF)

i understand

you’re the same as everyone else (nothing wrong with that i’m wrong i’m wrong so wRoNg) but

sometimes understanding doesn’t mean forgiving

[just nod] yes i understand

okay fine, you crave makeup kisses

caked-up made-up fake love fake blood

painting broken boundaries all over brocade bedsheets screaming

slipping almost begging

WARNING don’t cross this line and carefully step over the crude chalk drawings

where many unfortunate deaths have occured

splintered spines and shredded vascular systems and cannibal sick sighs

you barely even toed it and you lost an entire fucking arm

past that finish line

where they unhinged their jaws like singing serpents and gorged mercilessly

until their overbloated stomachs

ballooned up and burst into confetti just in time

for the next baby shower birthday party funeral eulogy

and you might be the next

victim

will you fall for that

a g a i n ?

never bloody mind that—

because we’re all about acceptance here.

we’re all about holy terrors cavorting with holey beggars

we’re all about your tremulous callused hands on the inside of someone’s delicate insides

coil up their wrenched guts again musicman

spill your unraveling lullaby all the softly shrieking butterflies have desperately searched for a way out

and you crushed them all

just to feel iridescent powder sparkling in your stained palms at 3 a.m.

reflecting the gentle throb of the glow-in-the-dark stars and the grating television static and the godless blue in your undilated pupils

when she’s lying next to you fitfully asleep

dreaming of an infinite field where the weeping azaleas never bloom (she still wonders what it meant)

ribcage left ajar just a peep

cascading umber hair and stick-insect limbs splayed all over your worn pillows

sometimes unconsciously feeling your freezing nape

and you feel nothing

at all

i hope you’re happy (satisfied?)

or i hope at least, that she rinses off your fraying toothbrush after she uses it to secretly purge in your newly-cleaned toilet

if that’s not too much to ask for

and you also left some day-old lemonade and reheated battery acid by the fridge door

just in case

but you missed out on buying coffee grounds again

even though there’s an unhealthy smattering of pinned yellow-note reminders

right next to her faded number

and you’ll be moving out next week

oh well. oh well. unwell.

my obscene picture collection is still incomplete even though it’s set to display on a national gallery next week [this is your cue to clap]

but you never called back so

i hope you’re happy (shit—sorry—satisfied)

she’s not

and please, don’t forget to gargle.

undertownes

another hopeless mantra

of odes beyond understanding,

beyond sloppy replacement,

beyond our neverending

lost cause of a losing moonchild

towed away by triptych tides

gazing in the southern hemisphere

no space left for goodbye

only mornings of infused silence

a depth so shallow, bones

will fracture and eyes shall turn to

undefinable stone, uncarving

the furious migraine feels almost

well-deserved, now. yet this

insomnia is only a punishment

if i accidentally blink and start to

sink below, now—there is no

current left for me; your calm, your

call, your cast penumbra over

my ignored ventures to seek out

every wasted drop of the lifeless pulse

you label as a counterpart,

but this i know if then—this much i

know, your bleeding mantra only

speaks to the clemency of my unworthy.

A Spoonful of Stagnancy (The Fix)

I woke up sideways trying to find clarity at the edge of my bed

‘Cause I thought I would meet a liar, but I met you there instead

With the knife stuck in one eye and a strange leer in the other

Before I could start to understand, you held our heads underwater

.

And let contrition flood my nostrils, let your heartbeat send the tides

Where old treasure chests and pirate bones can only dream to hide

My veins phosphorescent, a sickly glow, the predators won’t let me go

Sand in your lips like a velvet bliss, send me beyond cyclones and snow

.

A traitor in my midst, our ribcages interlocked beyond befallen stars

Fine silver melts at the very whim of your ire, spin a mysterious nebular

For where the mind shall go and where you let it roam is an open road

And you dragged me by the skin and teeth, jammed inside the folds

.

Beyond lost libraries and cathedral halls and the closets of your home

Our somewhere that we both could share just to leave ourselves alone

When your iris takes on some colour and the rusty blade begins to recede

Far away from angels and enemies and god, farther away from you and me

.

As I woke up sideways trying to find an elegy at the edge of my unmade bed

I just wanted to meet another dying sinner, but you left me one instead

With the knife out of my spine and your bloodstain roschach on my shoulders

Before we could start to understand, we were ending before it was all over.

M a n i f e s t

i will never understand how you leave me like this.

this sorry state of mine, wretchedly piteous. i feel as though all of the pivotal sockets in my body are being violently wrenched away from their joints; every part of me is so stretched out to its very limits that if you were to do so much as to gently touch me, your hand would simply rip right through my gossamer skin.

yet this pain…it’s rather so elegant, so otherworldly, so magnanimously efficacious, that i simply can’t help but agonisingly writhe my way back to it again, despite knowing the inevitable torture that lies ahead. the sight of you. the sound of you. the merest infinitesimal sense of you—so frustratingly palpable that your conjured afterimage begins to bleed into the monochrome universe around me, until i could no longer see anyone nor anything anymore, but you.

you. you. you. you’re clinging onto me like confused kerosene to an open flame, ideas scheming ideations, screaming ideologies, spilling idle love.

you leave me like this, and yet you l e a v e .

Persecution Circus

Is it because I understand you, dear,

That our tongues refuse to speak?

Between faux light and serpentine

I dwell in which you peruse to seek

Whilst you accost my sideshow heart

Only five cents for an ungallant peep

Let strange faces gawk and sneer away

And if I’m unlucky, I might feel a pinch

.

Is it because I understand you, dear,

That we both lie to save our graces?

We befall into patterns labyrinthine

And spend centuries in mirrored mazes

Whilst every breath accused our throats

Of being crude vaudeville traitors

But the carousel shall spin and spin

As we destroy our own creators.

down by the fairy ring

oh, this wayward glow

i catch sleepy lightning bugs

and send them off to space

with one last quiet hug

they’ll light up the horizons

for you, when i failed to

do the very same, only you

melt me down like the

plastic jewelry you wear

the crude good luck charms

tarnished promise rings

and the ancient silver locket

with our very first picture inside

the one i always hated

because my hair stuck up

in such strange places, but you

thought it was funny and i

found myself laughing along

recklessly, almost afraid to

let my contracting insides show

pushing down the declaration

building castles in my head

though there’s no one in distress

inside to swoop in and rescue

only my monstrous self

just another forgotten tale

in a dead language no one speaks

but for a moment, i wondered

if you understood it—if you

understood me; the way your

delicate dimples danced to your

own melodies, a half-wit grin

dripping with sonatas and sonnets

and sweet sarcasm, somehow

endearing me like a lantern mystery

buy the paper sun is never mine

to keep, and so away it floats

up to that sky with its purple moon

and flaxen lightning bugs, and

you will nestle perfectly within the

crook of andromeda’s final embrace

for you belong in a place i lost

you belong in a place i don’t.