• Sudan, Texas

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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.


    My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.

  • The Scattering

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    Anything that takes effort I back away from. Everything is overwhelming. Breathing is overwhelming. These persistent thoughts are overwhelming. I can’t talk. I’m like an inanimate object, a cubicle clown at an abandoned arcade from the 80s. The wind rolls through the electric canals, trash strewn on the currents, dust from the desert mountains, memories a half of a century old drift and haunt. The kiddie rides are all stoic now, no quarters to feed them, nothing to pop them back to life. The popcorn place is defunct, a boarded-up shell, but the café across the stream still thunders. There are the sounds of distant voices celebrating life with genuine joy, the clattering of dishes, the fall of the water outside, the crack of limbs in old trees, the ice cream stereo shop around the corner buzzes with sonic vibrato.

    I’m a windmill with hidden purpose. I don’t know what to do to occupy the spaces of a day. Meaning feels meaningless. The memories of an Amsterdam panic attack. I’m embarrassed to be myself at times for I am utterly flawed. I suppose I shouldn’t expect so much gratitude from the world. My stomach flips at the thought of life and living it. Another heartbeat passes and what good have I done? I shouldn’t expect myself to fill every gap of time with a chore. But I’m so conditioned by this sick society to always be productive. Give of yourself. Give. Give. Give. At every moment of every day. Drain yourself for the good of the company, the good of the rich. My time has been a commodity for someone else to exploit for their gain, not mine. The Generational Trap. Born into it. Live in it. Death by depletion.

    I surrender to the sun. Empty and nauseous. Dizzying heights in downtown Chicago. A pretty escape beckons. The lake out there a diamond blue. An apartment of glass, silent in the afternoon. A couch, a table, a pile of bullets. Too late now, you’re already three-quarters through. A piece of artwork on the wall is called Scattering. The city below is crawling like a machine. Everyone has somewhere to go. But why? Stand still in front of a window in a high-rise apartment building and look down instead. Stop moving. Stop panting. Stop ripping your soul out… Now what do I do?


    My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.

  • Yellow Yesterday

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    Yellow emotions skid across the floor of the only grocery store. Longevity unfurls in the cinnamon rolls. The man in the candy aisle is addicted to Hot Tamales—a fierce cinnamon-flavored chewy candy. Then there’s that yellowcake uranium house with the darkened, sunset kitchen that stands in the shadows. Aluminum windows, puffer-fish brick. The yard a mallow, deep green. Hidden. Safe. A place to stand and just think without interruption. He passes it on the long road—the drive from the dull, dull city mesmerizes once the country jungle is all around. A calliope garden of peace piping soul-swelling memories. Sometimes that ache of past life wells up. Memories derail the present, cloud the future. Windshield slide shows flash images of the pain that used to thrive. Nonchalant gravity disco pop-ups groove by the acid flower shop. Rings of power in his yellow eyes at the lake shore. Vast distances numb the guts, cold water, waves, a sentient red lighthouse watches with a golden eye, disciplines with a horn. A guy named Carlton falls in the water.

    And then that slant of sun again casting bright blocks and lines through the orange psychedelic curtains. His place in all of life swells in the soul. The red walls play gravity screen. He lies in a bed and looks up at the dusty white ceiling. Beauty breathes beside him. Whatever shall he do in the darkening days? What future glow to focus the mind. That ruptured mind. The effort it takes to climb from the time machine. The lost cities in the far distance, primitive again. Green and yellow without choking. A hospitable world with promise presents itself again.


    My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.

  • Inverted Heart

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    It was an empty night by the desk and the heart inverted for the purposes of other people. Chocolate hearts drawn in chocolate chalk melt out there on the stampeding sidewalks. Too tired. Too tired from trying to leap beyond the barriers of all that is right and good. I’ll never make it, in the end, will I. I’ll be another body in a bed and the rows of visitors will come say their rehearsed goodbyes before heading off to some Mexican café for lunch. My eyes will close forever unobtrusive. They’ll burn me up and throw me away and move on to the next. I’m not worth gold in memory.

    If anyone ever really knew. The fire in these fingertips. But I’m not even a chalice to spit in, heavenly father, there masturbating behind the altar. I am tik-tok Indian headlock. Those days out there on the Arizona prairies and the majestic treasures of dinosaur bones and petrified wood. Petrified? I’ll show you petrified. Just look back into the annals of my broken-hearted life. But haven’t we all been at the dead end of the road?

    I hear so many people talking now about the end of the world while at the same time someone’s biggest concern has something to do with French fries or a prescription drug or a habitual molestation of the mind. I have no kin kind. Those things called family have taken off to space. I wish I could join them on some spiraling yellow planet with rings… But then again, I would just as eagerly take the crashing waves of memory.

    And the world won’t even bother to know this. Some other’s words mean more. Somehow like hot dogs on a steel machine slowly turning in some shit life convenience store on the edge of a town with no soul. To ever think I would be there again. Me. Corroded like a vampire with rust on his wings. Me. A voodoo skeleton frosted in flesh. Me. A stock market number. A file. A digital memory. A frozen half-love. Left to die alone in a January Midwest storm of near snuffing it engagement.

    Fornicating memories strike horror show in my dreams, and I awake with a scream. Love turned Titanic. Iceberg asphalt and body skids down the yellow lines of disturbed antelope dreams. Lunging forth like a prep school foil. College. To be that Rolex on the wrist. Yeah. Maybe I can’t continue with that line of thought. It will leave me endlessly basking in a dirty parking lot at dawn with a floorboard full of Russian roulette razors and Spanish bayonets. Mother dashes out the front door screaming at her psychotic son she never meant to birth. He was stabbing the stranger in the stomach with a poison tip. It was something similar to a bee sting.

    I was never meant to be here. They should have gone through with the whole keeping me in the oven on Thanksgiving thing. I was going to be stuffed up the turkey’s ass. I was always stuffing, never meat. I was the 8mm mistake quaking on the makeshift screen in the basement. I was the one always watching from the sidelines because I was the one who never trusted the cage. But the cage is where they want you to be. The cage makes you controllable and convincing and good and like a conforming cow waiting to have your teats torn off and tossed aside to the thunder gods.

    It’s 10:13 in the p.m. and I am barely there. My heart keeps beating but I don’t know why. My motions are endless, yet I never leave here.

  • On A Day

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    On a day

    When I was blind

    To the world a bomb

    Am I the only one to see

    The darkness inside of me?

    Fragrant spells snow like crystal dander

    From the rooftops above another tangled bed

    A crippled winter branch

    Knocks at the window to see

    If we’ve been faithless rivers

    Flowing water slits like wrists

    In my fine apartment

    With my fine view

    With everything except what is new

    Out there dancing under the snow and street lights

    Wishes too good for me

    Life is too much of a dream

    Indigo dawn haze

    Paints forever beautiful

    On my wayward days

    Out there, the other side of the world

    The only reason to be

    A divine message

    This night of wind and drunk

    I wrap the wounds of all that disappears

    In the view of my rear-view mirror

    The only one who sees

    What everything meant to me