Speak then Think

I think before I speak I can't surprise myself. I speak before I think, it may make you hate me but at least that way my speech is even freer than my mind, which is tainted by... shit I can't think of how to put it. Some really eloquent, profound, visceral, overly detailed, decorative to the point of redundancy, tautological repetition, bells and whistles, this description of... shit like a mind-cage-thing where you have to be careful how you put shit or else people will hate you forever. There's 7 billion people, no one has time to give second chances so think before you speak, think enough to paralyze you, that way you won't fuck up and do something you regret. That's the best lesson I've never learned.

Stuck

I get stuck on things. Hypnotized. Captivated by change when I can notice it happening. Rippling fires take my attention and pin it on the shift from a log to a coal to a pile of ash. I get stuck on that, I get stuck on river currents, tumbling tension pockets weaving in and out as obstacles force the water to adapt this meandering wiggle-walk to most effectively reach each drop's destination and yeah, the molecule will meet the ocean and then evaporate and come back and it may take the same downhill slide next time, or pick a different path, and it will participate in that wiggling dance for eternity, trapped by its own nature, but it will never dance the same way twice because originality is as important to the water molecule as the poet. It gets bored doing the same thing all the time, and it's just as ashamed as I am to paraphrase Alan Watts rather than concoct its own wisdom but we both avoided plagiarism and that's what counts. You find a rhyme scheme, you stick to a rhythm, then break it for a tangent and remember that not every word has to rhyme at the end of the sphelecum.

I get stuck on this. I get stuck on the way the ocean waves keep track of the world's pulse. Earth's heart monitor is the captured attention spans of a hundred million beach bums listening to a slow rock rhythm. Somehow we all know what's going to happen next even though we missed the ocean's beginning and the first season isn't even streaming on netflix. We fill in the missing pieces. It probably went something like “Ghhhhhrrrrrrrrr..... Ghhhhrrrrrrrrr”

 I get stuck on that. I get stuck on songs I've never heard before that sound so familiar I swear my parents must have played them in my crib, shit that came out in 2010. I get stuck wishing I already knew the words and simultaneously finding out I've been singing them wrong. It's not like anybody making that music knew what they were doing, it's not like the lyrics they wrote are more correct than the ones I made up. Every pair of ears is a remix. I'm sorry if I didn't understand your message, dead artist. But if it helps, no one understands me either, and I feel like I understand a part of you that you didn't even acknowledge. A part of you I likely projected to delude myself into thinking a stranger shared my experience because it just so happens to make life easier, just like it makes life easier for me to tell myself I'm a good person. What even is that? It's so abstract but god dammit my cognition glued to the concept.

I get stuck on that. I get stuck on the way your face looked that night when I told you how I felt about you. I get stuck knowing it doesn't matter if we get married and grow to hate each other or merely stalk one another on Facebook and secretly wonder what might have been, nothing can bring back the particular shade of moonlight that danced upon your skin. It's not the way your body ages and accumulates wrinkle, or how our feelings went from butterflies in our bellies to cocoon shields and caterpillar poison, it's just the way I can never tell you how I feel for the first time again. You can never hear one of my poems again yet the last time I tried it was ruined, I made a mistake.

I get stuck on that. I get stuck on novelty. I get stuck on tasting the moment and finding the flavor that fools me best into thinking I'm really alive. Turns out you can't get it from a cup, through a straw, you have to stick your mouth straight under the slurpee machine and pull the lever. Turns out feeling alive is fucking messy and against company policy and you'll piss of the people that work here because they secretly wish they could do the same. And then they get mad at themselves but because we're all one, they confuse who they're pissed at and take it out on the "crazy person." Well fuck your cardboard cup full of lies, I'm sick of tasting plastic every time I drink from the chalice of life. You'll have to grab me by the feet and drag me away from the authenticity excreting from life's teet, I'm here to feel alive. I will not be stuck, hypnotized. I will not make all my words harmonize. Rivers would be boring if they were all straight lines. People would be boring if they accomplished all their dreams. I want to see that coal ignite. I want to see how it glows. The weather's cold tonight and I don't draw an ounce of warmth or comfort from either untouched logs, or their perfect finished products. To me, perfection is an ash-clump. Give me process. Give me practice. This time I promise not to give up halfway through under the weight of my mistakes.

Rejection

Rejection is hard, but do you know what really sucks? To be haunted by flashes of a life you could have had with someone you never even made a move on. I'd rather be a mistake maker than a doubt prisoner. Give me the kind of burn that hurts but stops when its over, I've spent too long dealing with the other; the kind that makes you numb, digs under your skin and goes after your lymphatic system. Gangrene vaining its way up your psyche, parasites made out of "what if," the virus proliferating as you continue to ignore the problem. You're fine. Everything is fine. It's just regular, old, existential dread. Everybody gets it, we all just ignore it. No one got to be the perfect version they imagined when they were kids. It's okay if you're not enough.

Fuck that, drop the china, make it shatter. Flood the aisles, craft disaster. At least if you're the one making the chaos then they can't take it from you.

Fake

You're all fake. Everything you say and do is fake. Everything you think is fake, especially everything you think about me. Someday you'll leave me or if not, it's probably best I leave you. Someday you'll die and no one will even remember you and nothing you ever said or thought will be relevant at all you fucking pretend not-real, total-fake, fake, stupid not thing. You mass of instability, you pattern of curling time bundled together around a cause of resistance like ripples caught curving around a shoot of grass poking up from a river. You towel. You compost in waiting. You secret meeting between 9-billion-year-old atoms using fake names in the parking lot of a deserted swampland truck stop. You abstraction. You flip flexible, drift decibels by the second into less than this, you blip blip, half-bit would-be a bitch if you could have kids. If you were a book, you wouldn't be the cover, you wouldn't be the story, you wouldn't be its letters, you are not the binding or the author or the characters. You're not even the only one that gets a peak at it, you barely even get to read half of it, no one gives a shit what you thought about it--you're fucking fake. You're just noise.

And that's the best news I've ever heard. Because what's real is so fucking real it's not even worth sacrificing a second for fake, fake-ass, ass-fake, flake-noodle-soup, red-number-six, drip, drop take a shit, say good bye to your relative you poop, pop sugar clot—fake! Half-baked clay scales draped turn-tables, 9-volt battery operated, at a Walmart flash bargain, n-word friday, super sale, semen weeping from the smiley face; fake. Old, cold, stand-off-smells-stagnant, stale, stalwart Stuart stew steam sterilized, bleached and alkalized; after-math hipster trash, hairy fashion nut-sack, hashtag garbage man, graveyard seance zombie friends, bebop space cadet, clown cowboy castaway, tells you which celebrities they like before they're dead. No need to tip the waiter, already bought their coffee fair trade. Fake.

Click-clack hacky sack Cadillac snap-chat; dread-lock head-lice private stash, stones for trade to suck your chakras out, knick-knack needle creeper, second-hand squealer, here-to-help-you-find-shit-you-didn't-know-was-stolen-yet tweaker. Tic-Tac make-out, nice-treat-turned-cheap-trick-turned-chapped-dick-turned-taxidermy-tax-exempted-preaching-penis-puppet-tap-dancer-cured-cancer-but-only-in-the-brochure, turned Alabama-bastard-alabaster, DC-TV-superhero-sidekick-turned-something-that-makes-even-less-sense-than-this fake! Found God in a pair of tube-socks and smoked Him right from the eucharist like a true fake christian, Zip Zap holy crack phantom. Fake-ass cross crawlers smoking crack-rocks out their ass-crack rock faith as fake as their fake-ass ass-faces. Poking nails through their palms, and putting masks on like Freddy Krueger so they can chase women down and staple their vaginas to save their disabled rape baby with one hand and shave away their healthcare, fair wages, educations, freedom from violence--I apologize I did not mean to talk politics my point is you're fucking fake. Everything you believe is fake. Your electrons refreshed a million times since reading this sentence. You are made of nothing real. You are limited by no such boundary. Nothing you do will ever be original, or matter for more than 6800 centuries. So do whatever the fuck you want to. Or don't, I don't give a shit. It doesn't matter, I'm just ending this poem because I have to.