Gravity the Tortoise (and other pretentious metaphors)

Chapters of life peak out like missing teeth

When I was a tortured youth I began collecting a journal of (mostly) terrible poems, songs, incoherent ramblings, and the like. Looking back on it now, it was an innocent albeit vague collection of self-important musings of a suburban kid that had it good, but enjoyed pretending that he didn't. He even went to such lengths as to join the Marine Corps to validate such misgivings. I, for one, blame Bukowski. Anyway, this collection of words hung around here and there throughout the years and somehow survived to see today after thousands of days floating in the trunks of Volkswagens, the bottom of sea-bags, resting atop high closet shelves that were too far to reach until moving day, and so on. Eventually, it was stuffed tightly between books of both higher and less importance in my bookshelves as I moved between the states of Arizona, California, Florida, and Wyoming (?). And when I recently came across this manifestation of narcissism, wouldn't ya know it, I came to find that some if it wasn't all that bad. So, I figured, why not subjugate the many singular masses that might visit this page to my youth's imagination, and in the process, relieve my bookshelves from it's insistent heavy sighs and hair flips.

At this point I would say sorry, but you're still reading, so this is on you.

The following poems are excerpts from 'Gravity the Tortoise (and other pretentious metaphors). Cue MCR...

Croque Monsieur

There is a headdress of flamboyant red and white ostrich feathers crowned upon the head of my damned soul, and I will wear it to Hell with a sigh of resolution, knowing finally that God exists and that he is just. So then I will sit in the river and play it over and over again, as I run my filleted fingers through the burning feathers of my burning crown. Until then, I play Indians and Cowboys with the ethics majors and the tobacco filled lining of my pocket. My fingernails are bleeding and the windshield wipers are broken. The sky is, and yet there is nonsense in this world that is so immaculate that it gives me calm. There is someone, somewhere, reveling in their intellect, and that makes me feel well, knowing that we each have the capacity to be wrong. And still I am face to face with the walls of zero and infinity, while still embracing other zeros and other infinities. Infinite zeros. And zero infinities. I imagine the dice, more numerous than stars, that have been rolled more times than the colours of love and sorrow welling in the isles of department stores year round. I imagine the dice that all landed on the same side at the same time in order for you to exist and order a Croque Monsieur and black coffee in the book store. But then you just eat it in your car, because you have remembered that your bed is waiting for you to lie awake in alone. 

Freckles

Esophagus the chimney 

Speak easy

Speak of dew in the early 

Morning

Close your eyes

Think not of spring

Nor the fog that follows along like love trampled summer 

And then fades away

With the first thought of sober sunlight

You see,

I've been thinking about sailing away 

I know that

My words are just freckles

To you 

Thoughts from a Barracks Room

It's been raining for some time now but it's only begun to tap my windowsill.

I guess the wind has shifted. 

I've been thinking of things that rhyme with broken,

and there's a vacuum cleaner humming above my head against a steady bass next door.

I thought I saw a flash of lightning through the window, but it doesn't thunderstorm in Southern California so I must be having a stroke. 

I wonder how courageous I will be when I go. We all believe that we will be strong, but somebody I once greatly admired told me that we all cower at the end. I hope that's not true, although I wonder why she told me that. Her son killed himself. That probably tore some innocence from her. 

I feel calloused today. Bitter and angry. It's incredulous how hilariously aware I am of the futility of my sadness. Just stop eating poorly. Stop drinking all the time. Quit smoking. Exercise more often. Spend less time evaluating mistakes, dreams and de javu's. It's so simple, and yet maybe that is what has me up in arms and sour. But I don't know.

The weather report says that it's going to be sunny tomorrow. I hate the weather reports.  

Rhyming has lost its Fervor. 

I've lost my skin 

2100

21 hundred late nights

21 hundred I can't sleep drives

21 hundred Christmas lights

21 hundred I miss you texts

21 hundred I won't forgive unless

You die 21 hundred deaths

21 hundred musicians

21 hundred shots of cheap gin

21 hundred fools that listen to them

21 hundred matches in a gas tank

21 hundred keys dropped in a lake

21 hundred plans that we make

But never actually happen

It's 21 hundred 

And I'm scared as all hell

It's 21 hundred 

And I'm falling asleep alone 

Like a boy in a well among coins

He says

Simile wing me like a bird

I don't know how much left 

I've got left in me

Yea

how many

Planck Density

Expanding universe. 15 galaxies per man woman and child on planet Earth. Mathematically guaranteed to anything and everything within consciousness. And, beyond it, which mathematically guarantees

nothing at all, but a white hot

Planck Density when you close your eyes. With all the weight of your

infant self's first taste of sugar,

it swims upstream through the snake of time that you exhale like carbon dioxide behind you, and into the

supermassive black hole swirling

in your head. 

Oooph...