All Things Holy

You say God simply approves

When you condemn the dead

Do you think he'll approve

When you condemn in his stead

You take what you're owed

And then some more

Say meet in the middle ground

Then back us against a wall

Tell me, is it sin

To be created this way

You twist the meaning so far

It seems that even God commits

From your holy ground

Your righteous anger

Not so right reactionary

You claim to cleanse

This world of imperfection

You think that God will

Let you into Heaven

You talk of all things holy

You know the unknown

Breeds fear

Breeds anger

Breeds senseless hate

You claim hate is justified

On some poor scapegoat

It's okay, just if I

Am not someone you know

You're bleating like a goat

You're bleating like a kid

You're bleeding like a child

Left for worse than dead

You talk of all things holy

Like our Father on his throne

Sinners in heavenly glass houses

Throwing damning stones.

murphy's lawful love

I'm going down with all the troubles and none of the fame -- like a (rock)star's implosion -- delayed. Someone will dredge up bones that might've once been mine. Too much, too little, too early, too late. Why would you walk when you're carrying my weight? The dirt and concrete know me by first name. If something's pulling at your insides, fight back. I'm the soul and this is my body. Handprints last longer than gravestones, hidden from view. I see flat with eyes curved. 2-Dimensional. I see shapes and colors with my eyes closed. What remains of a man, cursed, sailing. Fishing (for compliments). And then the guillotine blade bears down. Free from his cage, the boy goes home. Miles and miles away from familiar city streets, no sidewalks, no trains. Someone else is driving this vehicle; seat-belt passengers don't get to back seat drive. The street signs point me away from home. It's dark out and I want to put my life in the palm of a stranger's hand. I don't recognize my own hands, and that'll have to do. I can write when I'm supposed to do anything but. Time works different in Wonderland. I'm like if Alice was from the looking glass. A reversed mirror image boy, doing everything correct but to the left; right but wrong. This other dimension is everyone else's. And I'm the one that does not fit. They don't like the way my rage shows them up like a beacon -- but do they know it's lonely being another kind of being. I could talk all night and talk all day and never match the sayings; I'm a foreign species born before eyes of midwives praying. I was not built for this. Frankenstein's monster knew a lot, too. My creators aren't scared of me because they don't know what I am. An amalgamation of mistakes and murphy's lawful love -- anything that could be wrong with me already is.

calling out to dead artists

Reassemble yourself on the other side of that eye. I'll be gone. You won't miss me, just the girl you thought you knew. But I'm the boy you'll never know. Pull the grass from your teeth, counting one after one. Can't have the wolves chasing all your dreams away. Cold headaches have me biting snow. 

I love the things that never wanna see my face again. The great unknown (calling out to dead artists). Brand new beast.

Lives are made to end. Mine falls apart, all because of the parts I wasn't given to make myself whole. I'm drowning 'cuz my throat closes down on me, straining like I wanna scream. Eviscerate the rage and what's left but the cloying taste in my brain that calls me a shadow of what I should be. Hurling misery at the wall like abstract splatter painting. Wish I was just a splattering somewhere below a good size building. Every word's gotta be perfect even if the screen is blurring, and every ploy for attention is a scheme to make you love me. Ears, never been pierced, but the heart has been under the gun. "Baby shoes, never worn" has nothing on "our son, never born". After all, I'm just an imposter stealing what could be. Eyes too big and a body that doesn't fit right; it's not my inheritance. Everyone forgets that changelings are just children.

keep crowing, oh, I came back wrong

Saying "I just want to be one of you" to the crows deliberating. And the ravens always know so much more. I've never been fully in my mind but I'm used to curling up inside yours. Is the music the only damn thing that keeps you calm? I keep crowing, oh, I came back wrong. There's a death in every little road trip taken, I am Theseus' ship on public transportation. I could suspend us all in time, with the power of the words I can't find, baby bird still can't fly. Every moment like the one right before hitting pavement. Only feel alive when your lungs seize, death rattle of a rattlesnake exhaling, breathing out for the last time. Clawing at ribcages to get to beating hearts. Find another frame for my picture, I just wanna fill up the wall. Too big for my body, and my everything hits capacity. Trapped and wrapped in ribs too shown. Turn a trick just as a sleight of hand, so so insecure. We could make it, could try, not your body's chance in heaven. Crashing down and killing clouds. Your fall from grace won't look so pretty.

sleep is an animal

Let all my ugly colors wander, in faster lanes from my soul. I'm begging to put the free in freeway. Let me be reckless, recklessly pushing my boundaries. I should probably get tested lest I keep testing your patience. Island out of concrete. Nothing good starts with screaming in a car. I don't want pity but I do like concern. The window's a world. Second chances never matter if you've got no stakes. I've got headaches but they couldn't touch chernobyl. "The only thing I haven't done yet is God" I was about to take some drastic measures and commit some drastic actions. I am a robot, watch me bleed. Hugs as band-aids on bullet wounds. Sleep is an animal, hunting you down. I can eat glass, it will not hurt me. Take me into your house and home. That night the stars found a little one to call their own. This will not heal the hole in my heart, drying up the ink dark poison with the tip of a pen. Shrapnel will always find its target eventually, and you will not leave unscathed.

forgotten under beds

I can't stop what I can't understand. We'll do what we thing we're meant to, meanwhile dreaming of half-lit fires and impulses that would send us home in boxes. It's always better to be more vague. I am a reflection now, a master of showing people what they want to see and being mistaken as see-through. I can't stop what I...

Sometimes you should put up a fight. Stop rolling over, we fight like dogs at the pound, wire mesh restraining our bared teeth and teary bites. Is it better on the other side? This is always a joke, and always still a cry for help.

I want to run away from home, walk a million miles, never cry again, dissapear inside a city that will never know my name. Become one with the masses, climb out onto my roof, hanging halfway out the window. Don't want to join the graveyard littered with ladybug corpses, forgotten under beds and in boxes. I don't want to lose you. I don't want you to forget me. We've never even met.

sea-struck

We're taking the power. Misery is power. So many wars, so little time. Failure's not really, only practice for something better. Hate to let things go to waste, go to waste on a nothing page. I'm mourning you, but you're still here. Inventing, inventing gravity. Pass the bear on the way by, get eaten by bear, eat the bear. Buried under wrong tombstones. Neurodiversion (I'll show you a meltdown). Fangs are for tigers.

How she says "I have a kid who..." like a deficit. I'm aware I don't have all the whole parts, defunct but not willing to go back to the factory; last chance price markdown, all sales final. This isn't just interest, this is possession. Crawling into other people's bodies like I'll fit better in someone else's skin. Curse earth sea disco. Sea-struck wind-blown boy, all alone on the shore as a storm rages above him. Salt-soaked down to his bones. "If I awoke from a dream, I would wish it was all a lie" and I would wish I couldn't lie. Create a truth serum that works, a cheat for self-control I don't have. Misery is (will)power.

hear the world in a mist or spell (Not Otranto)

 I’ve given up on trying to understand what poems mean from the author’s perspective, because sometimes it feels like my brain doesn’t work like that. I’m much better at reading lines and molding them into my own perspectives. Poetry from rephrasing other people’s words. Transformative work, I guess you could call it.

Otranto by Barbara Guest is interesting.

Now understand that I don’t know what it means at all, only what it can mean through my lens. I only understand the italicized lines in my own way. I take snippets and I don’t care for the whole. Otranto is a place in Italy.

The ghost in their nostrils like a memory of a smell that makes you ache and puts tension in your head. They only see the moon as it wanes away. Never say nothing can’t ever mean anything. 

Words burnt if they quickened. Faster out of mouths, tongues causing friction to catch on fire. The ship means something to create a bridge of worlds, take him somewhere new (or anywhere at all). Hear the world in a mist or spell, under a spell of faraway. The shared bitterness on skin, between teeth, salty tears, sweet smiles, bitter ink. Mosaics cracked still seem untouched. 

Borrowed sky asks for seeking direction, I’m directionless, pointing north in my sleep and every other way when awake. 

In smoke, in print, in dark. In print on fire, burning words and lighting up the night. Here’s something for “transformative”. Learn from invaders who crave it, how to burn something holy.

Armored wrens, soaring so heavy, falling so weightless. Beak-mark arrows to the heart. 

Night through a screen, eyes burning from light after the sun goes down. Can’t close my eyes, can’t sleep though the heavy pull of unconsciousness draws me closer. Always on the edge. Ghosts they store, then bring it out of hiding. More than a few still sleep in the closet. 

Watch as the towers bend to one another, heads bowed as if speaking, structure creaking, drawing into some cosmic pull. Much like sleep, only more destruction.

Drag a carcass over a blunt road like a roadkill animal. A funeral pyre for a body-less soul, they will never find it. On a ship somewhere, covered in mist. Maybe a killing’s taken place.

Whatever this is, it is not Otranto.

sempi2eternal

I'm just a monster with ideas, bleeding ink out on the page. Something so quiet, so desperate, tell me you don't think that way. I've got eyes tuned to illusions and an empty in my soul. A ragged, beating, pitiful thing, words can make an exit hole. We know better than to take what we deserve. Stars don't shimmer but the bottles do. You and me, 2 for 2. I don't remember galaxies, light pollution, big city. Get this gore out of my chest, flush the wound with reassurance. Lungs don't collapse like black holes do, not as long as you get consoled. I'm a stardust immigrant, but I've never been home. Born to nothing, dying to love. I look up to the stars but only see airplanes. Nebulae beings at our centers. Cradled in dark matter, and in the dark it doesn't matter. You and me put the sempi to eternal.

baby gators in the gutter

Audio, Disco, Inferno. Crystals rain like disco balls, shards between the fingers and soul. Skip the record player, skip and play the record. Go on take a breather, breather, focus off the chords. Stay chill like Benadryl. Baby gators (we are) born in the gutter, translucent. I can eat glass, it will not hurt me. Take me into your house and home. I can swallow shards of sorrow, it's words that splinter deep in bone.

flame-light wisps are killing trees

Doomed our lovers to the shadows at our feet. Just a ghost in my house. A patch-work case, I'm patch-working on it. An off-balance duet, don't mind my two left feet. Looking through windows. Daylight casts a shadow. I'm bad at both the waking, and the sleeping, headspace home. Come and bear these fangs and we'll unleash them, tear tracks red. This is not the language I speak, no not by design. Every day starts a new season, but baby I'm still on the last episode (season finale). Summer at night, morning in winter, eclipse like collision across the sky. Blame all the fires for their nature, it's human nature. Watching forest, exhaling leaves. I'm honest, but my flame-light wisps are killing trees. 

stuff of fiction, silly

This blood just doesn't feel right. Blank eyes look at you right. Your parents have the worst luck, so cover it up. I try to live in the music, the melody, but the words just don't come. At some point, disorders are your natural state of being. My tears are acidic, now my eyes hurt; fireworks, like the 21st of July. How can I ever live again, no life meant to live the way I dream of. Dreams are the stuff of fiction, silly, storybook nonsense. Come talk to me when you've calmed down. Can you use your words this time?

stars go supernova

I'm a fast-forward wreck with my head in the sane. Grainy visions overlaid on my eyelids, set the layer to burn. Eyes like telescopes, each layer magnifying a new detail. Watch a grain of sand, miss the whole damn beach. I grew up familiar with the ocean but now it terrifies me. I'm scared the only emotion I know how to feel sometimes is fear. A feature-length film etched into my corneas, but I never have the right words. Castaway all hesitation.

I've got stardust in my veins. Not in a cosmic, "fated-to-be" way, but in the way stars sometimes go supernova.

This blood doesn't feel right. Using light from the door to read at night, wishing my hair was shorter and I was bright. Your parents just have the worst luck. Better cover it up.

cultural grievance (atlas)

High-venom advantage. The predator I wanna be, offense, tired of being defensive prey. Time to fight back. Don't look before you jump. All I hear are heartbeats off-rhythm and static. I've got white noise syndrome-- I can't stand the quiet. Follow your leader with a gunshot, the system decides what end you're on. Pledge allegiance to cultural grievance, scapegoat in discussed agreements, moral uprising. The leopards will never be satisfied. So protect your face, or ready the cages.

No more do-nothing, say-nothing, explain-nothing lives. Broadcast the daunting, let your worries and fears rest on shoulders other than your own. Atlas is not to be idolized.

little mermaid on fire

There are worse things than leaving first. Like leaving last, an ocean of empty after all the fish are gone. The water's a nothing void without noise or movement. Waves rocking in a gentle motion for no one. Waiting for something to call it its final home.

A being other. Not normal. I say "fine" to enduring fire, but no one else sees the flames. Fall out of sync one step, falling behind like walking on coals. No need for your soul or soles bared to open air, judgment day. Another little mermaid on fire, pins and needles and ash and smoke.

///The new Little Mermaid movie looks pretty good tbh

bloodstained's the new trend

Do double time. Use your middle name to hide. Breaking hearts for the first time, seeing stars for the last time. Missed by half a mile. Sometimes shame is the only thing I know how to feel. Whole in pieces. Bloodstained's the new trend. I'm trying to live a lie, bite my tongue. Not another half-breed, just a breed of my own. And if you ever wanna meet his sea-haunted gaze, well, get fucked. I left behind, bulls-eye, target I used to be. Everyone in their own time will fall together. I want to come apart piece by piece, no anesthesia? Grab a hammer. No one could ever put together a person who's already whole. Summer Nights to combat a raging fever. I want to be you, all I needed was to not be me. If I go off in the deep end just to be like you in the worst way, do I get any reward? No good at being bad, too bad at being good. Bulls-eye, we are who we are, I was never an arrow or a bullet. Not even the entry or exit hole. Bulls-eye.

back to oh four

Survive too late, light of a lost life. No averting catastrophe, it's written in our history. Look the past in the eyes and unravel atom by atom, the Ship of Theseus in your DNA. Freedom is just for teens, adults get downfall and impending doom. Tragedy belongs to no one. Get hooked on the books of bravery. Back to oh four, the pumpkins are rotted before they even form. Brothers killing each other for their common good. Cain and Abel represented in new shapes, never put to rest except over and over again. Enemies are acquaintances with better aim. 

windowwalking from dusk to dawn

There's something in the music that just can't connect. Wrong output wrong line wrong note. Send me to the floor! I'm alright but nothing's left. He's no never more, fail your (failure) destiny, In Incarnate form, drop your pencils now. This is how we boys with fevers never get to work it out. Uphill climbs only get steeper but it's worse to back out now. According to my mood there will be casualties. We'll fix it in post. I'm far too aware of all I have.

I was not built to last.

You can give, you can take, but never both. Poor kid sabotages their only chance at life before they can even spell the word. No fuckup allowed, my own definitions chew me up and spit me out, this fuckup's got a long-lasting flavor.

Gently take me to sleep. Windowwalking from dusk to dawn, one in the ring and one in my bed. "Changed" is all we know. I having respiratory malfunctions, lungs, what are they good for when I can't breathe when I'm around you? Sharing the same air as I choke on your CO2. Die Tonight and Live Forever to replace our Good Night and Good Luck anthem.

like paper planes

The light cascades over St. Nothing. Offset the flames in your eyes. You take control of the story, you take control of how the story now plays out. Street corner preachers who make a street or corner to preach on. Death before dereliction. We're just wolf kids let loose on society, with a bone for more than picking. A hundred die a hundred more. Don't stop until you get it wrong. Keeping up with times that no longer exist. We let the tears tell us where to go. Like paper planes, send my soul soaring. Like paper planes, torn up on the pavement. Why are we outsiders when standing in our home. Invite me in. I'm outside looking in, let me in. I can't cross the doorway yet. Not a fighterhater. Loverloser. This is a cry for help.

"this side up ⬆"

Is this how everyone feels all the time? I've got devastation deep in my bones, an anchor to this earth I roam. Mind so high while my calcium sits low in my jaw, grinding teeth. So loud-- I can hear the vibrations in my spine, more links like neurons from my body to the sky. It's a shame I've got no basement to retreat to when I'm feeling low, so sitting in the dark will have to do. Blur the words, the fears untold, hold me in the slow motion. I go too fast or just drag my feet, so drag me to my destiny. They only say to dial down the volume, but it's your eardrums to risk. I miss hearing the hits on beat, nod to the bass and restrain your feet. Tapping faster, so I might feel less alone with the thrumming in my bones. 

Sorry for being normal, I was having an off day. My wires drop around my shoulders when it'd be better if they were just crossed, a digital connection to God. Every thought like an MSM. In the soft light I hope to die or freeze time. Sound wash over me, erase every bad thought chemical imbalance: I'm unbalanced, never had the knack for it. Clumzy with a z, never on two feet unless it's two feet above the ground. Graceful only on the stage, only in body but never in mouth or brain. Use both hands, better stamp yourself with "this side up ⬆" so everyone knows you're fragile. Small bones that are crushed under impact of words and emotion that can't be described any way else. You're so close to giving it up, but the last shred of self-preservation is holding on. Say fuck it, put your limits to the test, and your eardrums at risk.