How do dead people feel.

“You’re so much more than the crack in my side
You’re the only thing that keeps me alive.”

I scrape out the words on cardboard and pieces of paper. I have been too listless to try and figure out what it really means to me. These days I write down the words first and just hold on to the rhythm of them. Meanings… don’t really mean much anyways.

I can give it any meaning I want to in retrospect, later, when I feel better. My mind will be more vivacious, hungry and beating again soon. I just need rest now.

Stream of Consciousness for Dead People

Water moves in drips and waves

And it lives in valleys and caves

And it comes and goes and never stays

The layers, the liquid, the fog and haze 

And a million miles of coral blades 

That guides ethereal glowing wisps

of long lost prehistoric electric fish

That have eyes that pop and teeth that are hooked and brains that are blackish and concentrated into a disc

Of clearish languiousity and luminosity 

Enough to tell that the bottom of the ocean is a skin away from hell 

And a hair short of flesh from the press of the earth

In a jar, we all start and we end on a hook 

Through the eyes into the veins and ventricles and chambers til I feel

Like embers beneath your feet 

As you brave the waters 

Brimming with eviscerated reptiles 

And scented with dead roses that fell from the porches of people who live near the sea, in the dark

We don't think about roses in the dark.


Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 

Grave News: The Year Long Feeling

Grab a grain from a clock and toss it into the sink
The subterranean world of dishes as they clink
Dully under water and a thousand grains more
Of all the rice I didn't want that I bought at the store
Floating sadly and swelling
Crisp color is draining
And everything is a shade of grey and it's all blending together between the blades of the knives that were all used for butter and the residue coagulates and one falls and crushes
slowly into a sponge and emits small rays of light that somehow fell through the window and turned white in the
water

An entire year I've been angry that I can't sleep every day.
I've just wanted to sit and be very quite...
But I can't
I can't, so I crawl on the floor just to make it out the door and hope that the world will swallow me whole so that I don't have to go to work anymore.
I do not turn on the lights when I get home, it is dark forty five minutes later
I'd rather drown in the grey rice water than light up the room and see all the places where there should be faces or a painting or a desk or something to dust or somewhere to rest
I want to walk through the house and know I won't trip til I fall in my bed and wait for a dream or a nightmare to start flickering in my hollowed out skull.

Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 

Poems for Dead People (When I get real lonely, I summon ghosts to dance for me).

Bug
You're a piranha
Segmented like a bug
And surrounded by fauna
Chloroformed and waiting
Beneath an awning
And I just wanna
Tear you to shreds
But your teeth are sharper than a broken key
And you're not afraid to sink them into me.




OCD
Creatures will ignite
When left alone at night
Sharpening claws against a flame
Lifting bricks on their shoulders
It just isn't the same
When we're older

I envision myself being impaled
Every time I screw up
Corkscrew through
My rigid torso
And I  think 'oh I'm messed up oh'
And I drop a plate on the floor
And think 'I don't want to live anymore'

Creatures will be spastic
Drastic, snapping like elastic
Lit up and glowing so fantastic
And it's a shame it's static
I don't feel the surge the next day.

Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 


The Viewing 


A horizontal mass
The weight of a human hand

Grave News: What Does it Mean to be Hollowed Out?

I woke up to a flood of light coming through the tiny slats in the blinds. It was too painfully bright, even with the blinds being as tightly shut as was possible. There was no going back to sleep, but I stayed in bed anyways. The light was so intense, I became lost in noticing the way it transformed my room into something much more crisp and colorful than usual. The light was uplifting, powerful. I could tell the pace of the flow of clouds outside by the way the light dimmed and brightened, the flood swelled and receded into my square space which was my entire world at the moment. After becoming completely absorbed in the movement of light and shadow outside of my room, I felt a timing with it, as if the heaving and lessening of the light was in unison with the slow and steady beating of my heart. And that’s when I felt it… when I realized how slowly my heart was beating, how I felt no motivation to move and barely enough to breathe… I could feel more than ever how sorrow was a physical burden. It does not just weigh on your mind… keeping you from thinking. It has a physical manifestation, a weight that you can feel in your hand, like a fist sized ball of condensed, concentrated mass. And that heaviness, that single, smooth ball… it sits in the pit of your stomach, making you feel always empty, but with no desire to be full… from there it pulls down your muscles in your shoulders, it makes you hunch over, distorts your spine. It emanates coldness from your core outward, and after a while, its pull on your muscles stops straining them and simply makes them feel limp. You stop fighting against the heaviness, and you willingly let it pull you down… your head stooping so low that you let it go to the floor and curl yourself into a ball around the ball within you… becoming one with the terrible weight of pitiable misery. 
The light swelled powerfully, and I felt a mutual dramatic, upheaval within myself. I could throw that heaviness out, I could vomit it out, hurl it from myself, forcibly carve it, cut it out of myself. I didn’t have to live with it; I could be ok if I wanted to… I have power over myself… 
I tried to stay with the sweeping mood of the light as long as I could; I tried hard to pretend to not notice the dimming of the light again… I rushed to throw the covers aside and throw myself out of the bed in one movement. I pulled open my top dresser drawer and felt myself sinking already. I was beginning to lose momentum as I had to make the tedious and every day decision of what to wear. I stared at the contents of the drawer for several moments before realizing that there was nothing there that I would wear. I closed it slowly and opened the next. I started to convince myself that what I was doing was pointless… how was I supposed to dress myself if I didn’t know what I was doing? And if I sat down to first decide what I was doing, that moment of randomness would be gone, that mood I felt would have sunken already, the day was already lost, it slid like oil from my cupped hands, leaving an uncomfortable residue behind. I lulled myself into accepting the justification that one action would just destroy the next, and finally I decided to lie back down in bed. After all, I had all the time in the world. Nothing had to be done today. I had enough in the bank for the rent for the next few months still. I could always have my job back when I needed it. There was no need… for anything today. 

The Pull

...          Gravity gravity gravity.

I can feel something pulling at me, from below. I’m stuck to the ground, I always have to be touching it, touching something that is touching it. Have I ever been completely off the ground? I’ve never been on a plane…

It pulls and pulls and over the years I’ll sink more and more into it, it will pull me close, until I’m dying, so that it can whisper in my ear as I finally lay panting against the ground… what does it want to tell me? Why does it pull me.

I could lean down… and tell it not to pull me, not to force me. I’ll fall down eventually, when I’m tired. But it is a forceful and possessive lover; it will not let me go. We’re always touching, we’re always near; it’s constantly reminding me that it is there. And I just want to be left alone for a moment, one moment for me. I g o into the hallway. I slam the door behind me. It is still there. We are still sole to face. I go into the kitchen, open the fridge. It is there deciding with me, peering at the jars, mulling over the sealed plastic bags, humming at the vegetables in the crisper. I’m not hungry. It isn’t either. I sit on a bar stool, my feet leave the ground, and it panics, it’s pulling, it’s creeping up through the wooden legs, and I can feel the heaviness of my body with each breath. I step off the barstool and it sighs with relief and I can feel everything in me sink to my feet as it desperately pulls at me. It will never cease its pull. So I crumple into a pile on the carpet and let it caress me.

Poetry for people who have died.

Blurry Eyed

It’s been years since I’ve slept

I’ve just been smoking in the depths

Of these chambers divided

The shape of a heart reunited

You said that you liked when my eyes got smokey and small

You said that you loved that I’m not that tall

But I feel like a brick fallen from a brick wall

When I think that you didn’t mean those things at all

So I will cry until I make myself ill

And I’ll go live with the trolls under the hill

I’ll leave you alone

I’ll turn to stone

You never loved me

But I always will…

This poem was also featured on Randomly accessed poetics 12/11/11. 

Anchor Story

...

I think I went insane. I found the softest part of the flower bed outside and sank my hands into it as far as I could. I wiggled and wormed and stabbed and worked my arms into the dirt up to my elbows. I made my hands like beaks and bored, moved all my fingers freely, waved my hands as if to someone I knew, all in the dirt. I couldn’t even see what I was doing and after a few minutes of manic alternating movements and gestures inside the earth I wondered if my hands were even moving at all. Maybe I was just imagining it so well that I could feel it.

            Why was that the first thing that I did after he left? I woke up staring at the empty space next to me, feeling cold. I was confused; I didn’t know what it meant. My head was still asleep and rocky and it was forced to analyze the situation of the empty space on the bed. I imagined him in the kitchen making me breakfast. But he would never do that. I still wanted to go look for him there, or peer in the backyard and maybe see him sitting in the sun. I knew though, if I wandered around the house like a ghost I would only sink every time I turned a corner or opened a door to more emptiness. I didn’t want to see how alone I was. I went straight into the front yard and stuck my hands in the dirt. Maybe to anchor myself to the ground.  On my knees, up to my elbows in the dirt, sucked up in pain, eyes seeping slow, the weight of my entire body and even more slipping into my knee caps,  my toenails pressing uncomfortably into the ground, I just kept thinking of the word ‘corner’ again and again. What could it mean, how could I occupy myself with this word, where can I fit it, how can it comfort me. I turn a corner and I see him. He’s only around a corner, I told myself. Wasn’t that true no matter where he was? Some corner, of something, a street, a wall, the outside of a house, a chain link fence that kept someone’s dogs in. He’s just around the corner! Around a corner. Around some corner. I am too, I’m around a lot of corners. And if he just follows a few, passes a few, turns around a few, he’ll be back here, and I can take my hands out of the dirt and hold onto him for anchorage instead.

Grave News: Drilling a Hole

Even A Crow can Count

If something can count, what does that tell us about that particular something?
It may not understand time, so it might not be able to count minutes.
But it can count how many times the sun goes up and down.
It can count bb pellets shot at it.
It can count cars going by.
It can count places it has been.

But what does it matter if it's the fifth day it's gone without being shot at and if it has seen 27 cars go by that day on the third street it has sat at.
A release from numbers, patterns, and predictability.

Second Hand Souls

We Buy Used Souls.

And refurbish them.

With Acid.

BUSINESS

These are the business services that we offer through our business.

• Decade Apples
• Children Giving Children Sunburns
• Radishes
• Elliptical Embers
• Graveyard Pop 'ems
• Greased Gavels
• Even a Crow can Count
• Everlasting Grape Stains
• Too Many Groundhogs to Tell
• Story Time with the Salt Witch

All of these can be requested by people interested in BUSINESS.