untitled song

Well last year I learned love's what you got to do,it's not what you get it's what you give to get 
through
love's not a trade no it's here for you
When we close our hearts we're the ones who lose

This year I learned to love without limits,
my heart has opened and it's just the beginning,
I don't know if it's too late or too early,
I don't know if it's breaking or blooming,
so im choosing to love every single person
whether or not they proved they deserve it
because my love is not for them, love is for all

Love them even if they never let you in,
love them as you press that block button,
love them if you'll never talk it through,
love them if you're stuck together like glue
because love's not for them it's for you,
your love is there to carry you through

Love them with your whole heart
I promise you won't get lost
Love is never gone
Love is here for all

Love your mother who complains about the clutter,
love your father who never got sober,
love your enemies while you gouge out their eyeballs.

And tom hanks' wife had a new man
by the time he left that island
Poor old Viktor Frankl survived a death camp
because he wanted so bad to have his wife back
but she had died already in that first smoke stack
pouring from the chimney
Love will break your heart it's a certainty
and you gotta let it.
Love will break your heart don't try to fight it

If you let it love can be your companion
Send you soaring up above that canyon
Whatever you do just watch your landing
Don't be weighed down by expectation
The future in your head is a dead already
Inly your heart knows the way through this journey

So let it go
Send your soaring up above that canyon
Whatever you do just watch your landing
Don't be weighed down by expectation
The future in your head is a dead already
Inly your heart knows the way through this journey
So let it go

Love them with your whole heart
I promise you won't get lost
Love is never gone
Love is here for all

What if Cain had been aborted?

 

The question is not whether life begins at conception like pro-lifers profess, or at first breath like the bible says. Life began billions of years in the past and hasn’t stopped since. Or maybe just six thousand years back when Eve got her man tripping on drugs, he snacked on an apple, but it screamed out loud, “I am a living being. You’ve hurt me, you’ve sinned.” His girl wasn’t happy, she had a bad trip, so Adam came up with a plan to handle this. He told the apple “you might be alive but you’re no human being, I can draw that line wherever I want it to be.”

He came down from the drugs but his mind was made up. Adam began changing things into whatever he named them. The garden was gone, but now he had a kingdom. The plants became crops, the beasts were livestock. And they didn’t scream anymore, they just squealed. They weren’t friends anymore, they were meals. It’s not a sin anymore, but necessary evil. How else could his girl feast on some baby back ribs?

Before long it dawned on Adam that even people with different skin were not as human as him, so he started to draw lines on them and by the tenth day of genesis, Eve vomited from morning sickness. She was having a baby back then even though she didn’t want kids. Not this one. It might be alive but it’s not human, she cried, not yet. Adam wouldn’t listen. The next line was not drawn where she asked him. He said, “If anyone here isn’t human it’s you, bitch. That’s my son.” So he saved baby Cain but the cost still came from the life Abel lost.

Later, God sent her one begotten, transgender son to correct this original sin by reminding men that what you do to the least, you do to Him. He’s the food you eat, the slave you beat, He’s the life striving to enter this world through any possible portal. He’s even the man with the rifle aimed at your temple to remind you who’s really immortal. A human being is still meat, and she’ll eat you. Sometimes they win and sometimes, it’s your turn to sin. Those are the options. Shoot your shot, cast your stone if you have no victim. It’s not your fault your mom’s twat tore to pieces on your way out but she still had to forgive you. God’s job assignment isn’t innocence. God gave you power over one thing, your actions. Nobody controls their own results. All you have is your best. Haters only mean to ignore themselves. So wear a condom if you're anti-abortion. And yes, let the lepers back in, but only after you've cured them.

His followers listened, then when their savior’s speech finished, they stapled him to a cross, paid for popcorn and watched him rot. He wasn’t human either, just a failed god. They weren’t looking for justice, just somebody to judge and they caught Him sitting on their throne.

Unconditional

Full disclosure, this is not some rain-soaked love poem penned by the frozen fingers of some civil war veteran in 1867, letter carried by postman on horseback seven hundred miles in the snow so his lover would read it and know just how much the photo of her sun-soaked smile folded in his wallet propels him forward one foot in front of the other through every mud-covered mile of this blood-soaked death patrol. How she sparks hope like fire from a gas leak in a rainstorm. 

This is not that poem, I've already told you exactly how high I built your pedestal, how rosy red you turn the lens I see the world through, but you were allergic to that flowery bullshit so we put on our garden gloves and pulled those weeds out. We worked through it. Our friendship is a big slab of concrete that snaps every pickaxe I slap against it. I wanted to crack it open and find the gold they wrote about in those old love poems. But I found something better, the most valuable matter ever whispered about in the haunted taverns' gossip circles of long dead treasure hunters. I would trade no other brand of union for this slab of concrete friendship, I am so thankful for what we have. 

But it's like this blanket of moss keeps growing on top of it. Not much, I can always scrape it off later, it's just a thin little layer. I stapled on it a reminder not to water it with overthinking or expectations. It doesn't change what we are, it just adds some flavor. I love you as a friend, and also more than that. 

And maybe that's just a challenge to the way society attempts to make us limit and compartmentalize the types of affection we can have for each other so that we can only feel one type of love for our friends, and another for our family, for lovers, for teachers, for monarchs. But you are so many things to me all at once. You're a role model and a fairy god-mother and my queen. Serving you is my favorite thing, my greatest pleasure, it illuminates every node on the spectrum of my emotions and compels every kernel of my being. And still, you're more.

You're a healing light, helping me pull from the shadows of my psyche every wounded piece and hold it tight. You don't just make me feel safe, my love for you is a place where my soul can take refuge. You heal the pain from every bad thing that ever happened to me by the simple fact that it all led me to you. And still, you're more.

You teach me nothing short of unconditional love, not just for you, but for myself, because if I can love you despite the fact that you don't feel exactly the way I wish you did, then I can also love myself despite not being exactly what I wish I were. And as I learn to accept our relationship for what it is, rather than comparing it, I also learn to accept myself as I am. 

I don't think you're my soulmate, I think you're just so spectacular that I don't need one. I get everything I want just from wanting. I don't love you for what you mean to me, what you could give me, what you represent, no. I love you because you are so undeniably lovable. I used to think it was a bad thing I couldn't turn off these feelings. Try as I might, the pining of my heart will never stop. But I'm starting to see the benefit of feeling such solid consistency. It's not a place where I hold out for hope that one day you'll realize you love me just as much. I'm not that kind of masochist. By contrast, I love myself so much that I don't need to dole out my love only in places where it will be neatly reciprocated in exactly the same flavor and shape. Any pain I feel is a reminder to weed out those expectations.  My self-worth does not depend on you, rather I love you because I'm worth too much and I worked too hard not to enjoy happiness in whatever form it chooses to arrive. It is not hope for more that keeps my next foot in front of the other on this brief, exhausting, chaotic journey. It's not a journey at all when I think of you. There's no where else I need to go. My love is a dance floor.

To climb

Your walls, so tall
Stretched high above the fog
My eyes squint tight
I hold my knots
My nose leaks snot
Still I can't spot the top
I know it not
If this gold I want
This goal I sought
Is real
Still it's worth it just to fail
Even if each pull and tug and heave
Each cold breath of air I wheeze
is futile
A voyage to a door that's closed and locked
Still it's worth it just to knock
To climb, to try
To test my self against that open sky
To grasp for love, to close my eyes
And dream of reaching your last block
To crack your walls
And vanquish them
Replace them as your safe haven
And maybe such a dream could never happen
Still it's worth it just to fall
And let my body decorate the bottom
A tribute to my passion
So others could see something great awaits
On the other side

Like television

The first time I found Jesus he was strung up on a fence post, his arms stretched out and stapled to the rails, belly stuffed full of straw, a scare crow god there to scare off death, monsters, outlaws and the unknown, my rubber turkey deity on a cross to comfort me with the promise that I could take that casket doorway to his place with the other zombies, I just have to be a good person, which is simple because right and wrong is simple. Just do what it says in the book besides this part. Don't overthink it. Just watch television. It'll teach you how the world works, there may be some growing pains when you actually experience it. But I have no regrets.

I promise you mother. I'm so sorry I ran away. I just couldn't live without reminders that you love me. I thought about what mothers did on television, the way they loved their kids, I saw my friends with mothers who would talk to them, and suddenly I wish I knew about my grandparents. All I remember about them is that I grew up going to funerals. On my birthday I always wore the same exact Peter Pan outfit and then lay awake at night wondering if it was really true that one day we all grew old and died.

The second time I found Jesus, she was staring back at me through my captive reflection painted on the iridescent gasoline sheen from a glossy silver 30-gram brick of cannabis hash oil bought from a man in a tinfoil hat to wax the bored look off my face. Lubed up to ride forty days and nights on a desert highway performing the gas-jug asphalt American ceremony of anointed gutter-punk garbage messiah kings raging for a different kind of machine. And as I peaked I noticed not one set of blotter prints behind me but two.

I knew I was different. I can't sit still. I must discover, create, explore, make an impact on this world not to find meaning but to hide myself from the lack of it. I keep trying to hide from mortality by making my life as rich and full of love as possible but it all goes to the same place. Behind me. Each breath in and out of my lungs is its own last one but knowing that fact doesn't help me repeat them. I can't even remember my dreams, how am I supposed to remember this life, this place, all of you, when it's over? I try to keep moving forward but I'm still just out-stretched and holding on to the rails. I still wish things were different. I still need to forgive someone. I still need to apologize for failing to save the world, I could have done something, I was different. I still need to apologize to my mother.

I'm so sorry I forgot my temper. Nerves dripped discomfort, my skin went goosebumps and burnt hot by embers, mouth scowling warning growls. I can't sit still. I bit and snapped until control came back but by then I was bitten and leaking puddles of regret and wondering how could I say that to my mother? I didn't mean to. But the fact is every interaction orbits the weather, or what somebody said the other day. I talk about my dreams and you talk about acting classes. And I realize then that we are from far-away planets. I never feel connected. It's like you're never present, and there's always this tension. I can't go without reminders that I'm held and loved, so I'll settle for forgiveness. I'll set to prove you love me one way or another. I'll force you to choose from the worst side of me and nothing.

The third time I found Jesus, he was strung-out on a cross-fade of drugs, arms stretched out to embrace his dog as he delivered his sermon to the condemned office building giving him shelter while the rain poured buckets. Wrapped in a coincidence blanket, magic crystals hanging from his neck, gnostic symbols tattooed to his face. In his mouth, a cigarette he had pulled off the ground, and he offered me a drag. He called it sacred tobacco to exorcise my demons.

He said the secret was to smile. People like smiles. He said I had two lions, their names good and evil, problem and opportunity, complaint and compliment. Their names are shame and gratefulness, faith and fearfulness, Scar and Mufasa, stories and memories about me that live on in others after I die, and I chose which. But he wasn't finished. He told me the worst side of you is not that evil-looking scar you hide from the world in shame and fear, it's the coward that hides it. Forget dying, that's how you are annihilated. I'm so sorry, my mother, that I never listened. Please tell me about my grandparents. It doesn't have to be like television.

Cage

I have to love you through a cage. You are my great white shark. You're beautiful. You're powerful and brave and hard, so hard to love, my shark, so full of teeth and I believed I could dive beneath that water and swim but I'm losing my limbs. My excuses vamoosing to be this stupid. I have to choose different. I have to love you through a cage. My great black bear, your teeth gleam through a glare. They are teeth that could tear off my skin but I see you wearing a grin. I see it shine like the curve of the moon.. And your laugh and your hugs. I love it so much when your arms wrap round my gut. So soft I forgot that those arms come with claws primed to pounce and to maul me if I move too suddenly, and I don't want to run but I'm maxed out on regret for the time I spent playing dead to avoid that claw's edge. Cutting off pieces of me and feeding you them so you would not starve and now I'm something less than I was at the start but even if I'm limping, at least I'm walking. Whatever I have to sacrifice, no matter how hard, I’ll begin a new act in my life, whether written in ink or in spit, I made a promise that I would survive this. And you growl at me, you cry and you plead, asking why all these boundaries through tears in your eyes and I have to hide all the blood that I leak and trick you to think that my heart's not broken so that I can start over. I show you a cold front so maybe you'll give up. I can't be weak to a lion, I must scream. I have to love you through my rage. I have to curl my lips up, my pearl white fangs flexed out. My cactus arms stretched out as if to beckon a hug, but covered in needles and you held me despite them. And you left blood on my quills to write with. And you claim to have wasted the time spent but it’s our life and our time can never be worthless and now I need you to survive this. Love me like a page in your life and turn it.

A story for Jay Hulme

Dusk turned to twilight as the city burned. Nothing could be done. Despite my best efforts, every dark word of the old woman's prophecy had come to pass. The blue star had fallen. The rain had turned to fire. The day had turned to night. The white king had risen, and created his army. Every marker had come to pass. Every riddle she spoke was answered, the knots of fate relentless. Fate could not be escaped. And fate said very clearly that no man could defeat him.

No man could defeat him, she said. The line echoed back and forth in my mind as I lay beneath the remains of my gollum to shelter myself from the falling embers and flaming arrows that rained overhead. Was there another line? Maybe a key to what could defeat him, if not a man? These thoughts were all I could do to numb myself from the sounds of the common folk being slaughtered, and the wound bleeding from my chest. My eyes ran over the corpse of the chimera I hired, her expression still caught in the surprise she felt when the White King cut her in half. I was surprised, too. My entire unit was destroyed in seconds. It was like nothing at all, and then so much death all at once. And the worst part, he fucking spared me. I took a wound to the chest in the scuffle, but when it came to landing the finishing blow, he hesitated, looked closer, and then let out a thundering, victorious laugh. For he knew the prophecy, too. He knew there was no one else left to stop him now. It was just me, and I was just a man. He left me to bleed out and went on to claim victory and sit the throne.

And I tried to do just that, give up, bleed out. I almost did, too. But I could see the palace doors in the distance. They were opened, taunting me, and the arrogant bastard didn't even place a guard in front. I could just walk in and show him who can't be defeated by any man. But I shuttered at the thought. What could I do? The prophecy was prophecy. Charging him alone would just be a suicide mission. Still, I couldn't get that laugh out of my head. I felt so humiliated. And it's not like I had any where to retreat to. If everything was futile, I may as well stare doom in the face, right? The more I thought about it, and the longer I listened to the screams of the city folk, the more clearly I knew what I had to do. The prophecy may have been written, but the songs had not, and I wanted them to say I tried. So I rose to my feet, now flooded with newfound bravery, powered by conviction, desperation, and humiliation. Steps began to come, one in front of another, as something in me moved. Not deliberately, not like I desired to be there. But like I was compelled by some unseen current. Compelled by the lack of other options, by a conviction greater than self-preservation. I passed through the door. 

"Hey!" turns out there was a guard, maybe several. It was all a haze at that point. I don't even remember reaching for my blade, but by the time I reached the royal chamber, it was dripping blood.

"You," the white king breathed a sigh of relief when I entered the chamber, as if he thought something else was killing his guards. "You should have run for the hills," he chuckled. "You should have hidden in caves and waited and eon or two, for my reign to end."

"Your reign ends today," I stepped closer. He lashed out, launching me back with the pulse he emitted from the swipe of his palm. I slammed against the stone walls of the palace and felt my hair-tie come undone, my long black hair unfurling on either side like raven's wings as I kicked myself from the wall and stormed forward with a twirling slash. He buckled with the blow but when I came for another strike, he grabbed my sword with a bare hand and squeezed, indenting his grip into the blade and bending the edge. He attempted to pull me in but I let go of my sword. As I leapt back, he reached for my arm, ripping at my bracelet and sending the beads flying. I pulled out my long knife, then tore back into him with one slash and another. He took a cut to the arm from the first, but on my second swing, he blocked my arm and grabbed me. This time, I couldn't get away. He proceeded to slam me against his throne with a grunt. I noticed a trickle of blood from his arm. Did I just make him bleed? He cocked his arm back for a punch, but I kicked him back, then I jumped over the throne and began looking for a weapon. Blood bubbled up my throat pooled around my lips, mixing with my lipstick.

"Don't you get it?!" He snapped my sword in half out of frustration and chucked the pieces at me. "No man can defeat me! Give up and die already!"

"That's the funny thing," I answered. "I always wondered about who I was, why I always wanted to be more than just a man." I picked up my broken sword and began to circle him.

"Oh please," he laughed menacingly. "You think you're not still just a man because you don't dress like them? Don't kid yourself. Deep down you know the truth."

"You're right," I responded, circling closer with every strafe. "I've always known the truth, deep down. I just let people like you convince me otherwise."

The white king growled, unleashing a pulse of energy that crumbled the wall behind me. My hair flailed, but this time I took it in stride. I looked at the demolished wall behind me with perplexity as the palace began to creak and cave. His eyes widened. I stepped closer.

"No!" He shrieked. "It can't be! You're a man!" I took another step closer, and his anger turned to fear. He began to plea. "Please. Half my kingdom, please. I will give you half, please. Sir, be reasonable. Sir.”

“It's ma'am,” I corrected, sinking the blade into his heart.

Don't Call Me Brave

Don't call me brave, I wish I were but I wasn't. I didn't charge this field to the crack of a trumpet with faith in the divine truth of my cause, I flunked life, I sunk this ship. I lived out my death wish until I had jack shit to lose and then I transitioned. I flipped out and ripped down this round world my thumb out to peel back the curtains and unseal my sunlight but I was still encased glass. I was see-through and hollow; a monotone robot unable to emote all of these feelings stuck underneath me and nobody was me. I couldn't express me. Not a hat, not a goatee, not a travelling poet fucking with locals and living off magic tricks. I still felt broken. Like a door in my house sits inviting me to my own unexplored territory. The one thing I had left was everything I wasn't allowed to be in this binary world. So I became her.

I'm not brave. I wasn't prepared. I didn't strut out the closet with fat hips from practicing dancing in front of the mirror. I jumped out a burning building thinking only that falling beat boiling alive. And somehow that trampoline found my feet and I landed free from that agony. I found her there waiting, ribbons in her hair hanging like pieces of forgotten dreams, recalled like songs played in the perfect key to unlock me.

Is a bird brave for flying? A squid for deep diving? I'm not brave I'm just born this way and no bigot alive can take it. Go on, tell me I'm ugly, I find it affirming to my womanhood when you try to tie inherent worthiness to my appearances. Tell me to repent, you see the Bible like fences on a racetrack, I see it like sign posts and landmarks to pull us out of the wilderness. I saw through the old me and didn't know who remained until God told me to be the person they made me, and I couldn't give that to the bigots if I wanted to.

Menstrual Cunnilingus (Blasphemy Remix)

Call me a Vampire but I see nothing wrong with a bloody vagina. All that gleefully nutritious, succulent sweetness goes to waste if you're unwilling to assault the main gates and plaster your snout against the coppery wetness leaking from those happy drapes. Sometimes if they're bleeding I'll go down simply because I'm out of granola bars and don't feel like ramen. I can survive off their pussy for weeks and if I'm careful enough they won't even stain the sheets.

Don't you dare look disgusted. Have you ever tried it? Do you even know what it tastes like? Sure it's pungent and stings the throat and leaves a bloody mess on your chin but there's a rich and sugary undercoat like raspberry mucus over Worcester olives or a syrup of honey and copper and bubbly soda pop--oh you'll love it I swear! It's like salmon brunch or a nice tuna melt. Except covered in vagina blood.

I can't even describe the taste with words and I apologize, but how do you put language to the essence of creation? It's not just the taste, my friends, how can you waste pure, distilled miracle smoothie? Somewhere in that natal ooze there swims a baby cherubic angel still waiting for her knight in shining semen to ride the currents with their mighty tail and cross the bridge between heaven and Earth.

But they ain't coming. Her best chance now is if I gobble the whole thing down and step two find a cum bucket to spit it into. Oh who am I kidding? We don't need step two. I can just swallow the whole thing myself and grow a baby in my tummy like Mother Mary, and they'll have red hair and green eyes, and I'll name them after the stars. Maybe Delphini, or HD 149026. Okay I'm fucking with you, the only miracle my genesis slurpy's bearing is a colossal shit. It's really about the taste.

So come friends and join me! Let us dance all night in vagina blood and play and splash about and wrestle, holding each others faces down in menstrual puddles until somebody calls uncle. And when we're done we'll shower in it and scrub each other thoroughly dirty until we fall asleep and when we awake it will have crusted over night and we'll find little snacks caught in our hair and behind our ears, tasty treats too delicious not to eat. You can snort it off the floor but if you do make sure to mop, you don't want germs in your menstrual snot. You can hoard it in all in jars, you can leave them in a drawer then sneak it into soup and serve it to the poor.

How dare you tell me I'm being improper? I say let them eat caviar! Come friends, won't you have some with your toast? You've heard of a Southwest Omelette, but have tried the Cannibal Coast? I like to add it to my coffee. You can even have it on your sushi if your soy sauce lacks in flavor, or throw it on a hotdog because you're already eating a fucking a hotdog so--Look, don't take my word for it, try it for yourself but heed my warning, you may come to love it. I'm just kidding. You'll probably get sick and throw up.

Silence is a Weapon

Silence is a weapon

Violence can hurt someone once but silence makes a lineup of future victims. Violence will scrape off the skin but silence will pick off the scab and prick you within. Indifference hinges our suffering open with no one to notice so no one can close it and traumatized people never feel safe again. A missile can hit a target one time but silence coats it in depleted uranium. Silence passes birth defects to the next generation. Silence goes after the children.

Silence is a weapon

Violence can steal your dignity but silence will resign you to misery, silence will deny you recovery. Violence can shanghai you to slavery but silence put more slaves here today then any point in human history.

Silence by law enforcement majority shields the handful minority who abuse the defenseless and cause half their misconduct offenses.

Silence sells you the story that you'll still save the princess as soon as you learn which castle she's in. You're only compromising for the interim.

Silence is a weapon

It strikes like an infection, it grows so slow you don't notice your toes go, you say "take my feet, I'll never drop to my knees" and after those leave you beg just to keep your pelvis, you don't deserve this! You're entitled to a sternum! It must say so in the constitution.

But our rights are just privileges so long that we’re silent while those born equal to us are having theirs violated. And the constitution has been toilet paper for as long as the people who use it have been sitting in jail. And our silence keeps them there.

Our silence sinks more ships than loose lips when we watch them leave to never come back here, cross the sea and spill some blood to save our freedom from people who have even less power. Our silence leaves every victim of violence without an answer and still we can't find our voices no matter how clear it becomes that our silence brought down the twin towers.

Silence is a hammer. It slams us in place holding together an engine designed to spread fear and corruption by dividing us and them, and thrusting us into a spiraling race to the bottom. But I choose neither side of this cycle, I choose a third option. Love is a weapon. Love is my message. Love for those who seek refuge. Love for those who fear others. Love them so much your silence burns like tinder. Our love needs to spread faster than wildfire, burn hotter than climate change because we don't have time to out wait an ice age of silence.

The Real Sal Jesus

I like to believe that you haunt my playlist. Sometimes when I'm listening to spotify or pandora and I have my phone in my pocket so I can't see who's playing, and something really good comes on—sometimes, if I've never heard it before, I can imagine maybe the reason I can't recognize it is because it's not even from Earth, but rather some magic grabbed up my phone and queued a song on my playlist that came from beyond, from the celestial, and when I hear that fiddle line, the one I've never heard before, I imagine you wrote it and now you're playing me Goodbye like some phone hacking phantom.

I see you casting strings with the Divine, still smoking cheap cigarettes but bumming your fire right from Prometheus. I see the Buddha bass slapping next to Hari Krishna's Harmony of Flute and Harmonica and Jesus plucking banjo with his nails. Accordions strapped to Orion's belt cut back and forth in a Slalom funk and Thor shredding the guitar like thunder while your strings stir dead stars back to life and claim the souls of saved and damned alike and open the ears of sleeping titans. Justin is there too, directing it all for the music video, getting snapshots for the album cover. And the camera shakes a little when Rigly runs between his legs, his tail wagging like a Logan driver, and you just laugh like it's a punchline—a laugh that makes me wonder if I'll ever meet another person in this world who gets my jokes, a laugh like the only man in town who knows the Emperor is nude, a laugh like the Devil told you something earlier, but it only makes sense after he's cheated you. A laugh I remember like the horn of a missed train—'cause it's fucking gone now.

Sometimes I imagine I'll wake up and I'll hear a new song on the radio and I'll check it this time, I won't be afraid to look at my phone because this time I won't be disappointed, this time I see the artist's name printed in big, capital letters because like you said, “the lower case is for the lower class.” I'll see the name SAL JESUS just where it's supposed to be. Topping charts with the amazing Mama Ghost. I'll tell people how I knew you, as close as Bukowski and Charles Potts, killing bottles of Canadian host. Learning the secret meanings behind songs by the Beatles. All nighters until our fingers were stained in ink and stiff like boards. I might have to embellish, however, the part where I was there for you when you really needed it, when it really made the difference between that waking reality and this horrible dream.

Maybe the reason you were such a brilliant artist is because our ears were blocked and all that pain had to go somewhere. I should have just seen you as a friend who needed help, but I never saw past the bar you raised with the talent you expressed, so I stuck you high on this shelf. Even now I can't think of you just burning into ash, I have to paint a picture, and it's not on canvas but on gauze because I'm using it to mask my wounds until my alarm clock goes off and I get to wake up and call you.

Ode to the letter Y

This is bullshit you're a fucking shitstain piece of vomit and I'm going to hate you forever you fucking asshole. How'd you do it? Smoking a bent and flattened cigarette like a true hipster? Twenty seven years old just like your fucking idols, what song did you play on vinyl? How'd you fucking do it? How? How?

You fucking cunt-barrel sewage seeping slipknot sucker punch sour puss laundry boots—who the fuck is even left to write about you? Who? Who?

I wish I could but I only write for myself. When Karen did it, my poems were bowling lanes with rubber bumpers, rhymes thrown at random, caught in heated rhythm, poetic devices triggered like coping mechanisms because as long as the words keep bouncing, I can spend the time at least that I'm reciting that garbage click-shit-bubble-wrap distracted and not thinking about Karen.

But your poem. Your poem scooped life up with a spoon and pooped it right into our ears. Your poem was hot soup with spice and onion and cheese to pack our bellies full with heat so we could survive winter, with a cigarette for after. And if you were only here to lay down those sutures like you did every time before, maybe this wouldn't hurt so bad. But your exit wound is bleeding from all the places your words used to fix because I don't even have you anymore to share all this pain with. Where did you go? Where? Where?

Your words added salt to pull the flavor out of the bland. Your words were the hand in the blender picking out the seeds as the days all started running together. Your words were a wild white wine wired wide from Hawaii—why. Why. Why?

Y is a letter glued to my mind. It's shaped like a fork in the road with two paths, one trod daily, and the other not as often but still too much. Y like a fork in my gut—why did you kill yourself? Why did I abandon you? Where did I go? I could have stopped this if I wasn't so selflish. I wish I could have told you

Strat

We could have left it at the store
To shine forever from behind a pane of glass
Enticing our imaginations every time we passed
Sending us on what-if journeys
That always sparkle
And never stain
But we had to take it home.

We could have left it in the box
Accruing worth until it ripened to a fortune,
Then went off to some collector
To shine forever from behind a pane of glass,
A safety barrier between what if
And what was,
But we had to take it out and touch it, hold it, play it,
Know that it was ours.
Ours. Ours.
We could have hung it on the mantle,
Rubbed it down in wax and let it sit preserved.
A relic holding stories stained in love and beauty,
Fixed forever high, visible and honored
A reminder of a song so soothing we would cover it in gloss
Before what is was burned into what was,
Before the cracks began to crawl along an edge
Before it all got so warped by thick, wet air and stress
And the tune went sour.

parasite

You can't sell your shit on the sidewalk dude. You're being impolite. This sidewalk is public, it belongs to each of us, people need to walk by. I just nearly tripped over the outdoor display from the shoe boutique as I squeezed between two sales racks on the corner of Forever 21 to get here and tell you that your wire-wrap jewelry cannot be sprawled all over the ground like some tweaker tomfoolery. It's bad for business and America Loves Small Business so get the fuck out. If you want to share art do it the legal way. Use a small loan from your parents to make a brand. Have you considered copy-writing the way you twist and knotted that gold chain locket? That's the American Dream, turn abstract concepts into concrete properties and then dis-assemble the process to disempower the workers so you can mass produce them in Bangladesh until it makes you enough for jewelry stores to display on their outside racks. Then you can afford to live here.

I did it, why is it so hard for everybody else? I came here in 1972 with a skateboard and backpack and earned every cent of my $300 college tuition, with enough left over to buy a mansion by waiting tables, serving fish and fried onions for three summers. And now I can't walk down the street without everybody asking for something even though it's become easier than ever to make your fortune. Just start a non-profit organization to use that as a tax haven, then hire a bunch of college kids to hit the streets asking for money. Not five dollars for a bottle of liquor, you amateur, thirty five dollars every month for the rest of their lives through membership fees. They can't stop you because it's freedom of speech. This is America, you have a right to spend money however you please. You can spend it on drugs, rent, debt, courts, just start making somebody else some fucking money or I'm calling the cops because I'm trained to feel sick in my gut at the sight of anyone with-holding from the parasites.

Pussy's on strike

"Pussy's on strike"

A friend told me, half in jest with partial self-awareness, he wasn't ignorant but he wasn't ignorant to his own ignorance.

He was blind but he knew there were things he couldn't see. He talked about male privilege ironically. He said these days you're committing sexual harassment just by giving a woman a compliment, and even he was probably guilty of being a misogynistic piece of shit.

But I feel like maybe you could change, I don't know, maybe I could explain.

You think pussy's on strike because you don't see what happens when you leave your friends in the shadows alone with that pussy.

She doesn't tell you because the last time it happened they didn't believe her, they told her it's not a big deal.

Just let it go, they told her. Try to co-exist with someone who moments ago tried to make you their meal.

You think pussy can't take a compliment because you didn't meet the guy that day that followed that pussy around for forty five minutes just trying to be nice to her. But I get it, why should you be blamed for that weirdo? After all, you aren't a threat to the pussy, at least not necessarily. You just haven't given the pussy any reason to think otherwise.

You're right though, you're not that weirdo, and this isn't about you.

You think the pussy is striking? No sweetie, the pussy is charging like a bull and it will trample right over that china-shop manhood, pissed you've been prodding it with a stick to watch it twitch.

Spent so long calling it an object you confused it for one, you forgot the pussy had a name, and the pussy had a voice, and the pussy is using it to roar and scream, and the matador is naked, red cape wind blown and flailing in the sun. Glass soldier, still standing proud for each of the knives it dug into pussy's backside, belt notches to remind the brittle boy he's better than the people he treats like cattle but he's too blind to notice the slaughterhouse is loose

The pussy's not on strike, the pussy's stampeding. They ain't at work, you asshole, they're fighting for their lives. This ain't a competition, this is justice. The pussy coming so run, now, little glass figurine. Run.

Blog name change incoming

The name of this blog will be changing since Kip is Dead. Reborn, the new name will be Krip2Knight.Blogspot.com. Yay.

Carry the Fire 1

Forty-thousand-year storms are hitting every weekend, the northwest is burning and dead trees mixed with rain makes mudslides and I don't know how I feel about the future right now. I wonder if I'm using the time I have left well enough. Am I living up to the privilege of breathing? Existing in the best possible place and time, queens and kings dancing on a playing-card ballroom? And I wonder if tomorrow I'll still have power, if I'll have food and water or if it'll be me on CNN filmed crossing rivers and borders with nothing to go back to.

I say please not California, please not my house, my family, my friends, my people. Please not me. I carry a lighter but I don't smoke cigarettes unless it's raining. I'm afraid to look into the future but I do, I look at it, and I say I don't know what's coming tomorrow but I'm going to survive you. I know people say humanity is a failed race that doesn't deserve to make it. We boiled our own pot time to fry in it, but I say human beings are portals to another dimension. We can dream of something different and then make it that way. Our species is a gift to this universe and we shouldn't surrender it. Our consciousness is a spiral and from it comes choices, feelings, love, attachment, loss, grief, touch, connection, trust.

So throw that away, go ahead, I don't give a shit, but I'm going to keep it, I'm going to look into the future and say God I will survive you because it's not too late. But the longer we wait the harder we gotta work. We ain't getting raptured but we can bring the party right here by dreaming of something different and then making it that way. That kingdom of love is waiting for us to build it. So why are we taking up air conditioning and every gift from our ancestors if we aren't going to carry that fire and dream of a better future?

I'm mother earth's child and I've pissed her off but she ain't kicked me out yet. And it's not too late. I'm still breathing so it's not too late. All we have to do is fulfill our purpose. All we have to do is survive. All we have to do is dream of something different. All we gotta do is make noise. I don't smoke cigarettes unless it's raining but if a flood comes, and we're on the boat together expect me to light one because we may need to make fire.

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.