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A no hope sky scar laughs lenticular, a vision stretched, a moment cascading down a mountain of gods. I suffer in the stomach, pangs of worry and dreams of the Greek island Crete. How I will ever get there? Never. My existence is limited because of shitty money. But I will go there on my own Odyssey. A mind Odyssey. Because that’s all I have. Reality is damp and strewn with disappointment, but imagination is bright and boundless, yet counters with endless suffering. A crocodile chaos soup in my Florida guts. Sitting out there on the everglades waiting for my leg to be bitten off. I can see the blood running down the world map. Sudan is splattered.

I once drove through a town in Texas called Sudan. It was a long stretch of nothing. A straight road, grain silos, mostly empty tan and brown brick buildings, adobe shelters with tin roofs that people called home, crumbling sidewalks, bandaged windows. There were lamp posts with broken bulbs, a few scattered trees, and a water tower that looked like the Tin Man from Oz with the town’s name painted on it—City of Sudan. There was a disintegrating white church of God, the door caved in, the glass portals to Heaven shattered, Christ laid out on a swamp cooler, prayers forgotten and decimated. Another old building, rectangular and extensive, was slathered with graffiti on one side, names etched in with urban color—Skylar, Britney, Trevor—where are they now? Why does this place stick with me like gluttony on the ribs?

If I was just somewhere. Somewhere with a sky or a lake. A magical forest with a stream and no bad dreams. A frozen pizza stands in the hallway, blue, cobwebs, a frail light from a window at the end of the run. Pepperoni eyes at Hotel Habanero. It smells like chips and salsa and sugar-heavy soda. Distant voices mumble in the wind. Somewhere a television sputters. Guts and genitalia are moving. Fear at the end of the road burns halos into heads, justice is nonsense anymore, the good get derailed while the bad sail on. Applause for inflicting pain. Laughter for sickness. But the real sickness is the garbage that floats around in their polluted brains. I want to go live on one of Saturn’s moons to get away from all these imbeciles. They so tarnish the world.

I was up at the Crags in Colorado. The chandelier rocks of gray and moss. To slip into another dimension, to escape this life that has been nothing but a shitshow from day one. To breathe without wreckage from the top of a mountain. To fly to Deathland on wings of granite and gold. I’m not that important in the end, I probably never have been. I’ll be cast off to the gravestone, hated and forgotten. Love for mankind but a cruel and whimsical joke. The torn divinity of all my disenchanted decisions. All I threw away so recklessly. I always have a knack for fucking up my own existence. Now the regret boils like a geothermal pool. My own geology kicks my legs out from under me. I trip, fall in, burn. I ache with all that could have been. Even when presented with all I need, I tend to go off the deep end, I dive head first into fire. Misguided eloquence burned to death. All the mess I leave behind. All the torn skin to be bandaged. There is no going back, and forward is hell. I’m just a wrecked fool. A deadly accident skidding across the freeway. Blood and bone ground into pavement. And now floating to the netherworld in a sheet of ice and sun. How did I ever survive my own exercise in living. My heart is void of meaning. My soul lacks LA energy. I’m a spilled cocktail on the boulevard of life and death. I’m as invisible as a blue sea. My wound is cold water languishing through time. I am destined to fall from the mantel. Broken shards lost in the carpet as another day dawns and dips. Lonely rattles from the other side.

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