There is no center, no focal point, no default. Everything is relative and only gleans “meaning” when compared to something else. Emptiness is not the default with fullness the “other.” To assume so would be to assume arbitrarily ordained rules of some sort. They don't exist. With this in mind, it really is all up to me to paint my existence. Nothing exists outside of myself and what I construe with my fingers, mouth, nose, tongue, skin, eyes, ears and brain. No one else has any answers. Answers don't exist. The only answer is that there are none. No one can validly tell me what to do. Of course this may all seem obvious, simplified and basic. But its the nature of things. And I can't let that go. The absurdity of everything impresses upon me like the ice of 4 degrees fahrenheit on a january monday morning while walking to work. It cant be ignored for me. So my quest is to accept it, embrace it and use it as my paintbrush, my pen, my arrow, my knife, my fork, my sweater, my anything and everything and nothing.

I am 21 years old. I have maybe 70 or 80 years left to walk through the four seasons. This hit me while sitting indian style and staring at my legs that seemed markedly different than they were 5 years ago. They are rotting before my eyes. And yet. At the same time. I realized that to view this change as decay, as sickness, as “bad,” as the “other,” I had to be comparing it to some externally predetermined ideal. I have to let go of that ideal. Any ideal. It is allowing ideals to hold too much water in our minds that keeps us in agonizing states. Not that I would call this agonizing though. I suppose gripping would be a more accurate descriptor. Ideals. Ideas. Over thinking. Straying from what I just observed (my legs) to the idea I had in my mind of what they used to or “should” be. Hah.

My apathy pouch

I have fashioned a new pouch in my brain out of native american leather, out of old remnants from other thought forms (most of which have to do with caring about some entity or philosophical object--anything can be a philosophical object), and frogs, all put together by tiny metal "pushers" that resemble shuffleboard sticks.Its hard to discern whether this process is consuming more space in my brain or is in fact repairing something that has already broke.

It can go either way.

It can be likened to a sac instead of a pouch. A sac with nothing but a membrane from things to pass through it. Things just ravel there,


I no longer feel like this.

Quick Sea

the wall of extroversion

dark and sharp

style has made you into an alien

autumn leaves cut my face

i'll let your hands unbraid me

tired and anxious; "don't stop buzzing now"
i want to say to the fly next to my ear
pursuing me with dozens of eyes

i have plenty
mine require a switch though
and a sequence
a stimulus
an impetus
a push

i think of it as starting
at the top of a cliff
letting gravity place a hand around my ankles
stringing me down into
turquoise layers
of sea turtles
and emerald mud
and no space to breath
just thick water
displacing my lungs

down at the bottom
among the fish skeletons,
the blindness,
the steam roller
of 6 miles of sea green

i've found out how to not
resist
and how timely

Birthday Filth

I've wandered into
one of those salty days
in which i sink
my melted, tired flank
into a decayed mattress
for seconds, minutes, hours, years
culturing my epicurian filth

wincing
here and there
in response
to my sour,

a delicious, juicy sour
curled up in the shallow morning breath
come in from the moldy window
and then
unfurled by a fuzzy tongue,
invisible and born
out from the wormy, chicken pecked garden

the perfume is mixing
like oil and water
with the sight of my overgrown toenails
mmm
and now for the punch
i open my mouth wide
to inhale,
reshut the trap,
and leave my snaggled incisor
hanging over her flaked, red bed

Can I finally relax enough to write? We will see based on what comes after this sentence. God I feel weird. Good weird. New. Freshly shaven as if a sickening growth has been sheered from my psyche. My assurance in myself, that I can survive on my own (and even thrive), has been refounded today. It didn't come from anyone else's soothing words or charity. It came from my teetering closer to the edge of floundering entirely and being completely repulsed by the ensuing nausea that would accompany that. I threw up the stupid fences I had set up around me and told them to go to hell with themselves. And it felt pretty fucking good.

Initially I gave up one form of dependency for another (in other words, sulking in my own woes, assuming I would sink so low to the point that someone ELSE would come scoop me up and brush me off). Then it became clear to me that if I did that, I would continue to be a prisoner. With a self ordained sentencing. Well, then, another thing became obvious to me. If I can create my own misery, I can create my own happiness! It only is right. I can let reality gnaw me into a gray carcass or I can carve my own, new way through space. So now I've managed to conjure up some hand tools from the pits of my brain and I'm teaching myself how to use them. The process has begun.

what brings me so..
close in
causing me
to fumble
with my weary
hands

i will

fuck you
all

i let the flower between
my drunken thighs
blossom

all you ripe buzzing bees

i've prepared the landing
site

carefully unfolded the silk
petals

come and sleep
on me

I feel like I'm clinging. I'm clinging to my books and my music and my changing ability to interpret myself. I'm clinging to my nighttime fantasies and my nighttime hopes and I'm clinging to you. I'm clinging to whatever I can still feebly grasp with my numb fingers.

Why do I have moments of sheer ecstasy and utter exhaustive despair in one day? I want off this ride right now. I don't like crash landings. I like climbing down into madness slowly and surely while falling in love with the flowers along the way.

How can I describe how I feel? Its hard when you don't even feel fully conscious. That's the only way I can put it. You can't describe something in detail if your not even there to feel it. I'm not even here. But... I don't want to die before I'm dead. So I continue to fumble in the dark for the switch.

My limbs feel like they don't even belong to me. I feel like everything I see is as if on a giant screen. The characters are surreal and absurd like clowns. Everyone looks like a clown to me. And clowns make absolutely no sense. All my parts are trying to break off and get away from me. They want out. They can't bear to take orders from my drunken brain anymore. I don't blame them. I'd get out if I could too.

I think everything is going to collapse. The trees, the walls, the floor, my body. The air is going to combust and my eyes are going to burn up.

I feel like I am becoming an owl. The night invigorates me. Its an inverse universe and I belong to it. I feel at ease in its vague shroud. The day time lets me see too much. The night air glosses over all the wrinkles, cracks in the pavement, and dead grass in the yard. She gives me instead beaconing lighthouses lining the sidewalks and strange, material winds that seem to wrap their hands around me like shy and passionate lovers. The night is my lover. She doesn't speak. She doesn't rely on plastic imagery and gaudy color. She doesn't explain herself before she acts upon me. She just takes me under her thick, nourishing wing and silently prods and licks and beckons and reveals. She doesn't know those baser senses. And she makes me forget about them myself for a little while. At least until I can no longer push through that thick, sweet night fuzz and drop to my grave for the scathing, scalping sun too soon to come.

Mourning comes. I wake up confused and longing, waiting for colors to fade, counting the hours until I can escape my muscles, and my skin, and the yellow of my hair, and everything else that wears me down.

-s

my senses, oh my wondrous senses, bloomed inside of me. scents, breezes, sun rays, glimmers of light on water, animals, swaying branches, glittering leaves, swirling dandelion fluff, they all blossomed in front of me as if a numbing, blinding skin had been shed from my entire being. god, i fucking felt so alive! i felt present. not for want. content. i could have not cared about my impending death any less because i had what i wanted: the sensitivity to be completely overtaken by everything right at that moment.

-s

stop smiling at me

you're blurring
that pernicious
thread

between passion
and
mere
sympathy

-s

when you finally listen
to the voices
inside your head

the voices
that tell you
to pick
your neighbors flowers
and eat them

the sweet voices
that earn you candy
from a kind old man
you pay ninety dollars
an hour

the glorious
drownded
voices

to which you
tied anchors,
buried in a trench,
and marked
with a cloudy grave

and yet
here they are
back again
simple and sweet
and undefiled
covered in honest blood
like a baby
fresh cut
from her mother's garden

when you finally listen,
the whole dialect
of the world
turns into an alien tongue

and then all you can do
is do
what your little head
understands

-s

the horror movie
of the day
is walking out the door
and knowing
that the cement
beneath my feet
only has to meet
my head
with just

enough

force

and i'll be dead

-s

Drugs.

-Dominick

words

dictionary-
you phrophetic stone

from six to eleven
i wrote your orders
reverently
and stored them
neatly between my ears.

never satisfied
until i had the spelling

correct
correct enough
to transcribe myself

correct enough
to belch orders,
to construct picture frames
and a snug jacket

then the year struck
that i filled up the jacket

completely.
the buttons dug their teeth
into my belly-

and i realized
it didn't fit anymore

-samantha

It all could have been done with a fire to woodblocks and ink and arrows.

-Dominick

The fish make better company than people

Go in and swim

Gobs of air abound

and you with your hot air

you'll sink and you'll drown

tears don't mix with gills and slime

they'll find you in a week

among nickels and dimes

-Dominick