& EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, Nothing

& EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, nothing

a motorcycle heading west on a highway no shadows, no sounds, only bright headlights and flashing handlebars. who can look down a road & not think, some day this will all be gone? 
it is the night almost morning 
between today & tomorrow, the closest i can be to seeing the future. in the future i think i might be alright.

on an empty highway at midnight the future is spread out before us, fumbling sheet music sight-read every crack in the pavement a note, our engine hearts a heavy beat that rises through the air, i can feel it moving through this emptiness the spaces between my feet & the ground every ragged breath & i am singing at the top of my lungs

on a motorcycle heading west on an empty highway at midnight, the clock resets to 00:00 & the day is infinite, we are infinite, there is nothing left but us on a quiet road looking towards nothing and forever & the headlights will tell no one if we pull over to cry from the beauty of it glorious and merciful and bright.

this is the future where we end up alright.

foreign(or) god

god comes down to say hi sometimes, stepping out with the people of all race and ages. god has an accent no one can discern. god is an immigrant stumbling over the foreign languages of grief, emotion, not recognising the subtleties between happiness and happy-in-this. and even god suffers from cognitive dissonance, can’t say anything the same way we do. trying to find the right words and only coming up with something we won’t understand or will tend to misinterpret. half the time god doesn’t even know what he means, those misharmonised thoughts making less and less of a self when put together. god is a collection of parts we have assumed fit him without asking. god wears the twice worn pants of someone else and has to hem them by hand. god is tired of this. god was tired when he heard this. god speaks softly so as not to wake the demons we tell children about when they come here: loneliness and depression and never really belonging. there is something so sorrow-filled in the way he begins to recognise we cannot do not want to be saved. god walks away and we justify his actions to ourselves as if he had done the atrocity. god has a limit to forgiveness and it starts with desecrating kindness. god has all the accents of the people we have turned away.

#prayforcharlottesville

i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.

after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?

and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.

bitter kisses

i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.

does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?

another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.

suck on the pulp and kiss everyone good bye. i leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. i leave a bitter sweetness on their tongue.

stubborn hope

the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.

we are born, and the war begins.

the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:

we are alive, and we fight on.

reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?

we die. and this is what is left:

stubborn humanity. forgetting, again and again, and thinking we can rise from this past in a different manner than before. to come from anything other than pain and leave more than just our fragile bodies, a lovely imitation of how we fell into this by giving the trembling want of life our startling consensus: if we were given more than what we asked for, cleaving a hole inside something already hollow, we think we may have been something beautiful. we think that thing that we could’ve held inside our empty hands the whole time could have been named hope.

the wreck of the earth

humans are in the same category
as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.

we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.

i am no exception.

and this is how we wreck what we have learned to love: by trying to save it or loving it in the first place.