semantics

i keep my language in the laundry room, where it can do my dirty work.

pulp symphony

dear everything that is anything to anyone, this is music written on paper, made from the tree that was once you. this I've written on your skin to aid in the creation of a composition, our concert which will serve as the soundtrack for our love. the anthem of our convergence. it is a symphony dedicated to the synchronicity of our heartbeats. a tribute to their conjoined murmurs; hers of ash and mine of dust. dust rises and ash falls, the distance between which our love can be measured, the tip of my tongue, the warmth of her kiss. let those words be said from those lips, and so i'll pray that in our time both our peaks and valleys flat-line together. a singular plateau of what we were, and will always be. then, i will come back to you as a crimson worm, divine and offered to you in worship. your body will be veiled in snowflakes and illuminated by fireflies so that i may find you and till you back into earth. from that earth you'll become a tree, one strong and tall, one i hope to come for, find again and chop down. and once you've fallen for me after that last blow, i shall put down my axe, chew on your sap, and fashion your flesh into paper, just as i have done before, to compose another symphony of ours. Comment Read

ill will

i was born in the direction the fingers are pointing, christened in her guilt cascade; the illegitimate son of contempt aborted, disgraced, and anointed (in shit). 

irrational violence is imminent, linearly quantized. it's only a matter of time. please do not be in my path/wake. i couldn't forgive myself. 

- the spiritually, morally, and metaphysically corrupted

enemy of the Good

Nothing perfect exists anymore. The Perfect, with a capital P, did once live.

pride before the fall

pride before the fall. i didn't invent the wheel, i patented it to reap the profits. mark twain is in hell. you'd trust me to trust this. someone's calling all cars for a death rattle on deaf ears. i am the cowboy killer, and this is my first rodeo in years. you think i am listening but i am really just watching the candlelight between us dim, trying not to stare at your forked tongue or the venom it drips. it flows like lava upon a city of outstretched arms, grasping vainly towards divinity. praise the rudderless who navigate the black eyed oceans en masse, hailing the sunset and losing their voices to the wind. plotting piety in wet sand, making reservations somewhere near the scene of the accident, scene of the crime, to be seen and not heard. deserted on a desert continent, an island with no horizon. hang yourself potraits on the drywall using sheetrock anchors fisted. street-sweepers sweep the bodies of dust under the tread of a 1,000 sons enlisted. execute my memory and shower me with gifts of foresight. change the channel while i light a coma candle. open your arms and love me into eternity. the fingerprints on your throat are like 10 tiny maps of a heaven prepared for evacuation. my blood, it holds your pulse. now enjoy the exploits as the caped crusader super savior stranger fills his quota, this is where i become a jesus christ supernova. a shadowboxer bruised and blind, left to walk the streets alone and out of time. there is no more trick, only trade, sorrow for an illusion or banality for the blade. afford me this soliliquy and i'll drown you in my iniquity. an orchestra of throats, strangled and slit with piano-wire. a cardiac-arrest overture in D minor, string accompaniment courtesy of adrenaline, blood, and vomit. i'm still so far from hitting bottom, far from anything resembling a clear moment. from the hills i have watched the skies, the horizon will burn while we are alive. enjoy the fireworks display for all to see and repeat seven Hail Mary’s after me. say good morning, you exiled god, patron saint of the broken fists and paper heart. spare me the rod. i release you from the sins of your father; seventh son of a seventh son, but the Eucharist is as far as you go. playing the silent movie villain, scrambling to tie myself to train tracks, praying for technicolor in an afterlife of terror attacks. under the burgundy stretch of spaghetti western skies, i'll draw a cartoon were the carrion fairy dies. no stranger to sin, i barter my indulgences with 30 pieces of silver that turns an empyrean cheek from my wrath's bludgeon to the ingorgement of the glutton at his fiscal feast, spare me sheba for i am a simple beast.

self-fulfilling prophecy

i need to befall a great tragedy. i have never experienced complete devastation. i don't even know if it's within my capacity to be devastated, so it's completely normal that i fantasize about it. for me time stops then. everything in my vision gets washed out into monochromatic tones, solarized silhouettes and shadows moving all around me. i feel a halo of fire. my heart stops and my blood and veins become canals of molten steel. my fists are heavy and aching. in that moment my eyes tense, the same feeling as it is to cry, only all my tears have run dry. no more tiny peace offerings. it's then that i feel completely fragile. only then, when it's dire that i fashion a black hole of the sun, having dug everyones grave, do i feel anything at all. losing all hope is freedom, is it? then i need to break and be broken. i fantasize about that lapse of time for me, when the grey clouds seal off the sky, hiding what i'm about to do from heaven. that will be my end. tragedy will give me that one reason to keep from breathing any further. Comment Read

love as immolation

he throws himself onto the pyre, in a vain attempt that it shall stoke, his sacrifice to build her fire, if only he may breathe her smoke. 

i know how you choose your words so well, so i wait for the story you that you can't tell. Comment Read

free assoc.

(free-association attempts at prose poetry) take two-hundred, wash down with alcohol, and imagine you are swallowing me. then call me from the hospital bed if tomorrow ever comes for you. i'm attacking my piñata of dreams with a foam-rubber bat, the words "doubt" written on its length in times new roman, accented in italics. there's a single railroad spike through it's end. i try peeking out sideways with my one good eye attempting to spot it. even still, all i see is nothing, just a formless void where in i can only hear the sound of the papier-mâché unicorn swaying somewhere above me in the wind. blindfolded and tracing shit-streaked impressions, from force-fed watermarks to bar-coded expressions, i am mopping up your makeshift confessional booth post aftermath of a reluctant salvation gone wrong. ours is the single arrogant zenith in hyper color, awry and recognizable only by the sound of grinding teeth and nervous laughter. setting your body ablaze. a siren going off in our heads, hearing gunfire within earshot. yawn in the presence of messiah and laugh on your way to the gallows. like spitting in the hangman's face. an orchestra of throats, strangled and slit with piano-wire. a cardiac-arrest overture in D minor, string accompaniment courtesy of adrenaline, blood, and vomit. i'm still so far from hitting bottom, far from anything resembling a moment of clarity. from the hills i have watched the skies, the horizon will burn while we are alive - so long as long as i'm drug behind this pale horse, past the desert, and into the city of scrap metal and prosthetic limbs so the glorious sandstorm of analgesics and gunpowder may follow in my wake, extinguishing all pain in baptismal fire. from the town center i will watch the events unfold that will ultimately lead up to what becomes known as my aftermath. enjoy the fireworks display and repeat seven Hail Mary’s after me. i'm leaving through a hole in the sky - exiting stage left via this asphalt gravemarker, just as the martyr awaits the falling axe. seizing the opportunity i stand my ground and wait for the hi-beams to run into me. i fight to breathe just long enough to watch them continue past me, a mannequin laying with serpents of grass, meeting my maker. so now i am this ghost, bored at his own funeral. i begin mocking the spectator sport, holding my numbered ticket in the waiting room of a waiting room in purgatory. "yours were hidden hands..." say good morning, you exiled god, patron saint of the broken fists and paper heart. i release you from the sins of your father; seventh son of a seventh son, but the Eucharist is as far as you go. i gave you until the end, contact killer who broke contract, now the motorcade has left the vacinity. can you hear my missing heart beat to the rhythm of her hiss? there's still no sympathy for the redemption of guilt. she never broke character, she never miss-mouthed the words to her favorite songs, but she hardly sang the hymns almost always lip-synched anathemas. her lies are as sad and numerous and real as innocent death row inmates. the statistics are staggering. her truths are the byproducts, the grey areas of solace. is it as simple as, "we so desperately do not want to die?" survival starts with "no. 1" yielding to the boot that reconfigures the jaw, and succumbing to the mob-terror at the grand opening of yet another ant-colony. it is easy to smash the mirror, streaked with knuckle blood and saliva, but it's harder to put the jagged lies of the originally malformed puzzle pieces back together so that the lip-sticked kisses line up with the scars reflected on it's surface. (in alliteration) their doodling daughter, drunk and depraved, drowns the dead at dawn and drags the lake with her dredge. dancing dutifully down into the dark along side these denizens, she's then dipped in dismemberment and decapitated in the daisy field. "come close," called the coffin dancer, he who can capture the crucifix will cry for corpses. coaxed into the cavity, these creatures are caught between the colors of carob, causality, crawfish and curses, causing the creeps crawl, cast aside and cared for in closure. the carefulness of closed doors, ones whose cracks peek conspicuously from the corners of her pink and crimson cuts, clamoring for cure, clotting with ash and capsized by the cannibals’ coup (d'etat). today i took the teeth of a total stranger, in a trance of terror, talking in tongues . trapped by black tape and tied down with gasoline soaked towels. traces of blood taste of tigers' milk. tearing the tube that's twisted around the tricep, try tapping the vein until the futile attempts at tiptoeing towards tomorrow become too tremendous and tiring. traffic tension and tether tightening will surpass the trumpeter’s heraldic tune for tragedy or his temper-mental pension for taking lives and target practice. in the wrong hands the wrought iron writhes, awaiting the roar of the raging refugees. reprimanded and resentful, the ramblings of the remaining rapturous are written between the red flames and red blood of the ruler’s red right hand and left wrist. these only can be read only by the rotting embodiment of righteousness, the recluse who rides again, and retains the reigns as such a renegade would remain. here he is to be raped in the rafters during the witching-hour, then laid to rest in the rich soil of the rose beds. his is a religion now to be reaped by the wraiths rising from the rungs of ruin, clad in robes of resin, ready to revise the birthright and reunite the rabid ruler with his unrequited love for any reason to revert to Russian roulette. (out alliteration) the good, the bad, the flailing arms grasping vainly toward divinity and all of its smooth, greased, featureless tentacles of a glory unattainable. praise the rudderless who navigate the black eyed oceans en masse, hailing the sunset and losing their voices to the wind. blessed be thy haste. plotting piety in wet sand, making reservations somewhere near the scene of the accident, scene of the crime, to be seen and not heard. deserted on a desert continent, and island with no horizon past the mirage of belly-dancing beauties breathing smoke and firing trick-shots from the backs of elephants into the angry mob toting pitchforks and cellular phones. the angered who scream directionless while their plastic masks of normality and comfort slip down covering their eyes. they constantly have to do this. drop the ball and reroute personality. reconfiguring themselves. "insert soul here," i say first, singling myself out amongst the other phone booth inhabitants, "then discard immediately, and prepare to evacuate heaven," second. all this while losing altitude but before imploding into the supernova that was my once my belly, the epicenter that single-handedly created the supreme moral vacuum, a black hole of conscience, what/who is unfortunately known today as... "cut to the right, pass to the left," i'm told. subtle is the score, but the gamble is obvious to me now. my house of cards contains 50 suicide kings, and 2 queen of hearts. i have hope in spades, retribution in vindictive clubs, and i always remove the jokers before each hand is dealt. chance is a funny thing because although i've used up all my wilds, i am but one trump card short of the pot, which i cannot split for any reason, no matter the ante. and for when you try and raise me, i promise to see you one thousand fold, all while shuffling the deck and calling the dealer on every fucking bluff. i will "pull his card..." as they say. and yours too if i must. unlike then, now i wish i could have felt your skin crawl under my fingers when they touched down upon your neck. how foolish was i? with a better nose i could have smelled the bile on your breath. i am sickened to think of when you touched me with cold hands out of pity. perhaps with a better voice my words might have done more than flatter. perhaps with yours more honest, my senses wouldn't have dulled. and yet, even with all these things i know now, it would have happened the same way because even now i still wish i could do it all over again. Comment Read

rites of spring

could i retreat into a landscape of white and void of color, where within the comfort of cold no beauty could be know to me or lost? why can't i? it seems as the days drag on and the faster time goes by i lose more and more of my idealized self to routine and complacency. i find myself less clever, sharp, or witty than i remember being when every action was executed with vigor, every moment was exciting, and instances were intense and all-consuming. is the cost of a life lived ad-naseum, or is it perspective? i really dislike that i only seem to pose questions and never seem (no, never ever) have sufficient answers. when it comes to expository endeavors, i always feels as though i owe more, more to whoever the reader is, and more to myself. i could spend hours on writings or otherwise and be left feeling in debt to both myself and those i share them with. am i being too hard on myself? who's to say? i wish there were such an authority, a final say in my everything. someone to break my minor level addiction to repetitiveness and second-guessing stasis. it just isn't enough for me to be clever anymore, if i am anymore at all. when all is done i not only feel like i've somehow accidentally omitted my true feelings, it's also as though i'm incapable of articulate, concise self-expression because my dishonest (however provoking) writings aren't conveying anything other than a superficial message. my real feelings are best relayed through a series of polysyllabic grunts and sighs. a few misplaced feelings assorted into collections of expressions such as, "i hate life," "fuck," "end me," and "i adore her," seem to be the most cathartic phrases i possess. does that mean i cannot do more, or better? is the ability to do so inherent as i thought it to be, or learned? have i just not learned to express myself they way i'd like to, poetic and complicated? or are "end me" and it's fellow phrases superior in their simplicity? i just see good art and simultaneously become inspired and jealouse. "why couldn't/didn't i do that?" and in retrospect i understand that art and see that i could have. but then again, everytime i try my hand at it i fail. is it because i go into it without virtuous intent and/or inspiration? do i have nothing to contemplate and reflect on? or am i just incapable of doing so in the fashion i'd wish to? this should be the title of this discourse, - "Why can't I?: Aaron's futile quest for answers." i believe my attempts are done so in vain, so therefore the result is a vain product, provokingly empty. but I also do not want to believe there is a formula to good writing. sure there may be some key-stone tactics to approaching a body of work, but all and all i want to be naive to believe that the best works come through autmatically, effortlessly, without revision or premeditated form. maybe i'm right in saying i'm naive. i don't know what it is i need to be proud of what i do, if i should be. for some, nothing is ever good enough, a recurring theme in the serial of my existence. i need feedback badly. i need that mentor, that authority. i need (to be) a hero. the most wonderful friend told me once my biggest weakness was that i too often doubt my abilities, and am so afraid of failure that it prohibits me from doing things, accomplishing things. that comment has single-handedly driven me to defy myself. i keep that sentence in my memory, and apply it to everything i do. Comment Read

21g

time goes by so slowly. and time can do so much. when everyone dies they say we lose exactly 21 grams. is this our soul? and if so, what exactly can be summed up in 21 grams? our whole life? every fleeting smile from a loved one. every triumph. every defeat. every laugh with friends. late nights driving around town. every emotion. every thought. every decision made. the memories of a hand once held in love or agony. every relationship that defined you. can life really be summed up in the weight of a small stack of nickels? as i reflect on my life i travel to all the places ive been. contemplate all the events in 20 years that put me where i am. its mind boggling the incredible amount of events that all had to happen in their EXACT order to bring me to where i am now. where am i now? does it even matter? in the grand scheme of things the human race is only a blip on a billion+ year timeline that involves the creation of the universe however that may have been accomplished. billions of years of single celled organisms that eventually became the flesh and blood of who we are today. why am i here? why are you here with me? who knows. i guess we just have to roll with it, and accomplish in life what makes us happy, because what other reason is there to live? assuming that the 21 grams is in fact our soul, everything that makes us who we are, all of our memories, joys, and happiness are just going to ultimately float off into nothingness when we finally bite the dust like so many have before us. Comment Read