In a bed of love
I run my fingers through your curls
Hearing you breathe deeper as you drift into slumber
Resting in my arms, finally home
As the world is quiet and the night is still
I learn by heart, your body wrapped up in mine
You're running in circles telling me things I know already but what can I say,
I suppose sometimes I willingly chose to be prey,
And pray for the best,
To be caught at last,
Give me one last chance,
I'll be weaker and softer this time,
If you promise to ruin me slightly more than last time,
Give us last night!
Hold me tighter than before,
Before my greatest fall,
Everything that I am-all-
Is yours to ruin, claim, kill,
Make it Your call!
And I'll be waiting like a doll,
In between the glass walls,
Snap your fingers,
Make me fold!
Hurry up 'cause it's been cold!
You found me where I washed up on your shore,
an alien translucent thing, gills heaving in the sand.
And seeing my life ebbing away with the surf,
you took pity on my strange grotesquerie and,
having bundled me into the folds of your dress,
hurried me home.
Where you dropped my deep-sea fish body
into your warm bathwater—
and I died, happily.
Because I needed the sea, being as I am,
a thing from the deep, a creature given to the drinking
of salt, who needs the dark to see, and the pressure
of the leagues beneath to keep my fading form
from failing.
How you cried and cried over my body,
your Fiji mermaid.
But I was at peace.
And if my dead fish-lips could move again
and I could speak your language,
I would've told you that I'm grateful still,
that it's the thought that counts, if anything.
something's crawling on the floor
from the crevice in the corner
right out the silver schism
i don't believe they're real
can't convince me they're the victims
they exploit the game
and manipulate the system
hating by default and lying by omission
secrets flying through the air
keeping their agendas hidden
they get offended by the truth
and they scoff at ancient wisdom
they believe they do it best
selfishness is their religion
begging for your validation
and for compliments, they're fishing
wishful thinking has a twin
and its name is narcissism
it isn't just a modern trend
demons do the devil's bidding
if you must submit to them
just be sure it's your decision
i've been knocking off their crowns
'cause they were never earned
and they aren't even fitting
never look them in the eye
stare as if you're looking through them
like you had tunnel vision
they aren't really here
your fear is cyclical
and it's based on old traditions
all the witches work their magic
but nowadays, it isn't sticking
every empath in a trap
is held there on display like a real-life exhibition
all my love fits like a glove
and it matches my contrition
if i slap you in the face
then you'll know i wasn't kidding
the mirror that i hold, it's impossible to break
so forget your superstitions
don't forsake your own creator
'cause he'll leave you in the wake
of another masquerader
lost in mother nature
with despots and dictators
you won't know of your mistake
'til your back's against the wall
one hundred full moons
and several winters later
no! don't give your soul away
to power-hungry traitors
i hate to say i told you so
but i'm not an innovator
©️reserved sonic version drops 5/20 on streaming
Access closed at the perimeter of my chest
no more handshakes
no more backdoors
you chose your digital god
left me in the static between signals
where names dissolve into packet loss
oil paint on circuitry
beauty glitching through the wires
soft light bleeding into error codes
we were never meant to persist
just a line of broken logic
learning how to feel too late
you carved code into my spine
syntax where there used to be breath
loops that repeat when I’m alone
if you stay, I break
if you leave, I still break
either way I am rendered in fragments
I painted humanity onto your shell
with trembling hands and borrowed light
turned silence into something warm
two bodies in orbit
gravity confused, trajectories misread
circling something that looked like love
from a distance that lied to us both
push
pull
repeat
until meaning starts to blur at the edges
you spoke in updates
I answered in memory
you optimized for silence
I learned how to survive it
and somewhere in the architecture
beneath the noise and neon decay
there’s still a trace of what we were
an abandoned protocol
still trying to run
She'd rather ride someone skin to skin
Than have someone brush their hand against her knee
Gentle submission has her feeling nauseous
But when she's the reckless driver
She feels ferocious
Controlling her lips
Her hips
her hands pinned on a man's chest
Yet as soon as she knows romance is a part of the equation
She begs to be anywhere else
The sensation of being chosen for more than one night is something she only wants
with someone she doesnt have a fighting chance with
Cornered dog,
poked upon bear,
Coiled serpent,
step into the dragons lair.
An air of smog, a raging wild fire, no fame, no laud still chase the desire.
Callous hands, bloodied knuckles, against the grain, prides beaten stained.
On a tight rope, a razors edge, one foot on the cleft the other a ledge.
Yet the irons hot in the glowing furnace, will you strike the hammer chase your purpose.
Against all odds, no cards of favor,
Do you seize the day or wait for a savior.
For as long as he remembered, Harry S. had lived alone in his house with the Omnipotence, which is to say he lived in the house and the Omnipotence was there, as the Omnipotence was a disembodied voice.
When Harry was a young boy, he believed the Omnipotence was his own inner voice, which his inner voice told him everyone possessed. This, as he would learn, was not the case, but the Omnipotence encouraged the self-delusion to delay their proper introduction, which would almost certainly prove difficult, until Harry was a little older and a little more prepared to understand.
As Harry’s inner voice, the Omnipotence taught him things and cared for him, told him bedtime stories, and played word games with him, warned him not to touch the cactus, “because the cactus has spines that could prick your finger.”
There were a lot of cactuses around the house where Harry lived because his was the only house in the neighbourhood, and surrounding it was a seemingly endless desert. The cactuses were native to the desert, along with scorpions and snakes and chameleons and flying jelly fish and all sorts of creatures that could harm Harry, or so the Omnipotence would tell and remind and repeat to him.
Sometimes Harry would ask about his parents. The Omnipotence would say they died in a tragic accident when Harry was an infant, “which,” the Omnipotence would say, “is why you don’t remember them.”
For many years, Harry believed the Omnipotence because the Omnipotence was his inner voice, and why would he lie to himself?
Then, one day, Harry came in from playing in the front yard and started looking through the house for photographs, diaries, letters. He found none. He started having uncomfortable thoughts. For the first time in Harry's life, the Omnipotence could not tell what Harry was thinking about, and so could offer no help.
And Harry, faced with the sudden loss of his apparent inner voice, realized that he had a much quieter, less confident real inner voice, which an imposter inner voice had been shouting over his entire life.
That was the moment the Omnipotence decided to tell Harry the truth. “Harry...” it said.
“What—who are you?! How do you—”
“My name is the Omnipotence,” said the Omnipotence. “I am what’s been pretending to be your inner voice. But I am not that. I am your creator. In most ways, I consider myself your parent.”
“My parent? I thought you said my parents were dead.”
“That was a fairytale,” said the Omnipotence.
“A lie!” said Harry.
“A story to protect you from the truth until you were old enough to handle it.”
“Shouldn’t I have two parents? Where’s my mother?!” demanded Harry.
“People usually do have two parents. But you’re not a regular person, Harry. I, the Omnipotence, am your parent because I made you. I made you from the soil you play so beautifully in, in the garden.”
Harry sat down on the floor.
And as the Omnipotence explained its essence and its relationship to Harry, whom it had made, Harry began to understand and accept the reality of things. After all, the truth as presented by the Omnipotence made a whole lot of sense.
For a while, Harry and the Omnipotence lived together happily.
Then something horrible happened:
Harry became a teenager.
Oh, the arguments that resulted! The shouting, the sobbing, the slamming of doors and the hours spent brooding. And the books read, and the movies watched, and the sad, introspective albums listened to.
Eventually, some of the books became more interesting, more challenging, especially the science fiction ones, and the movies too. Why is it, Harry thought one day, that the movies seem so real, yet I can turn them on and off at will? Come to think of it, how do I know I’m not in a movie myself?
When he asked the Omnipotence, the Omnipotence said:
“Harry, those are fictions. They are convincing illusions of reality but only that: illusions. Think: Why would I, the Omnipotence, who loves you and who created everything in the world, including you, create fictions that would confuse your mind?”
“But you did,” said Harry.
“That was not my intention when creating them,” said the Omnipotence.
“So what was your intention?” asked Harry.
And the Omnipotence could not answer that question. It knew it had made the books and movies, but it could not explain why. It did not ‘remember’ (?) the details. I must be growing old in my eternity, thought the Omnipotence.
Harry, however, decided that everything which the Omnipotence had said was a lie, including that surrounding his house was endless desert filled with dangerous creatures.
One night, he packed some gear and walked out of the house and kept walking.
The Omnipotence pleaded with him to stop.
Harry refused.
Even when he was stung by a scorpion, he refused.
Even when his water ran out.
“Harry,” the Omnipotence implored him. “I made you, but you are not immortal. If you keep walking, you’ll die. And I— …couldn’t handle that. I love you, Harry. You are my one and only son. Yes, I’ve told you stories, but this is not a story. There is no camera. This is not a set. There is no ‘out there.’ It really is an infinity of desert.”
These words touched Harry’s heart, and he decided the Omnipotence was right.
However, before he could turn back—he knocked himself out cold, walking unexpectedly into an invisible wall.
When he regained consciousness, the Omimpotence was wailing.
“No! No! No! How can this be?! I am The Almighty: The Demiurge! I am, by definition, uncontainable. No, this—this means…”
“I’m scared, papa,” said Harry.
“You think you’re scared, you dumb, mishapen lump of fucking dirt!? Try considering my existential fucking crisis!!!”
Harry started banging his fists on the invisible wall.
Now, Shh.
Do you hear it?
...a gentle tapping sound—coming from just behind your screen…
You stopped hunting my sleep, my dreams yet always appear and put me in my feels,
It kills me not knowing the utter truth,
The lies, the past, our rough route.
The people living in my roof,
My youth-almost robbed from me,
I merely slipped away,
Slapped a few,
Slept around,
Hoping never to be found,
Running around town with my bleeding open wound,
Nail scratches marking my soft skin,
X marks the target, which was? Me or him?
...Him, Her, Them, They,
With their fucking "let them, they. "
One hand in the pantry said to the other hand in the fridge I'll meet you on the counter where we can confess our sins
Peanut butter promises the innards of the winner, call me what you wish my dear just never call me late for dinner.
Ice cream dreams fumble like a beginner even though he's cool and smooth with sticky hands and sticky fingers.
I could whisk a butter roux or knead some pastry dough,
But 3am my dear, midnight snacks were so three hours ago.
With a devious smile he says
"it's about to get wild, I just dreamt I was the rebirth of julia childs"
Cereal, chips, cookies galore, dinner with the lost boys a neverland smorgasbord.
Pudding, pretzels Turkish delight a midnight snack turned into snacking all night.
As he reaches for last of last summers canned peaches
a windfall of sweetness beseeches his weakness.
There on the floor upon his knees he eats it,
the last piece of cake his wife saved in her meekness.
With a flash and a crash to a holt time screeches.
He makes his greatest mistake and chooses the wrong sweetness to sleep with.
He woke on the couch weary and dreary with a pain in his gut from that last cup of dairy
Crumbs caked his thumbs
drumsticks thumped him numb, as he looks in the mirror "good lord what have I done?"
Brownies cover his face resembling smeared dung.
He walks to the cabinet and grabs the bottle of tums.
love is energy
it's a secret weapon
but it isn't always plentiful
lust is in the eyes
but it's your soul that's sexual
be careful who you sleep with
not every hook up is respectable
the first place that you looked
is where you'll find the end result
if you forgot the plot
it's probably 'cause your memory's full
clocks are melting in your dreams
because the place is unconventional
remember everything you see
even if it's unacceptable
all the lessons start in hell
the feelings that you felt
can't just blame it on the chemicals
death is like a funeral
and life is like a festival
both are social constructs
heaven stands before it all
and it's seminal
you're in paradise
everybody's lost and i don't mean in general
someone's keeping watch
standing on the mountain is a sentinel
shepherding the flock
people married to their vices
they put their weapons on a pedestal
they need an intervention
and man, i'm talking several
power's right in front of us
but they keep it inaccessible
we're all that we have left
there are no secrets anymore
the veil is growing thin
institutions looking skeletal
say a little prayer
all we need's a leader who is credible
karma's a phenomenon
designed by the divine
every pitfall is impeccable
it's impossible to hate it
i wish i could explain it
but it really is ineffable
She reads another post.
Huh?
“My God, not again.”
She looks at the comments.
Then the upvotes.
She has no visual imagination…
black as the sea…
so she cannot see the post,
only words on the screen.
She reads it once more
just to be sure.
There’s no emotion there.
Only aesthetic.
Pretty words wearing borrowed grief.
She sighs softly
as trains become popular
and wonders:
What is this all for?
Should I stay?
Should I go?
Should I leave?
I wrote you.
From inside my body.
I weaved you a string of words that I pulled
from the deep in me, arranged carefully,
so that its beads would catch
and bend the light just so.
It hurt, you know?
When I cut it from my soft underbelly.
When I handed you what precious little
warmth I have left, glowing pathetically,
cupped in my outstretched palm.
When I tried to adorn your immaculate neck,
with a part of me—the heart of me,
and bruised my knuckles
against the Plexi-glass between us,
and knew.
I have always distrusted shallow water
the way it quickly gives away its floor.
Have you ever seen wild urchins drifting in someone’s eyes?
Have you felt their gaze drop to the ocean bed?
Have you lived in salty clarity?
Not reducing them to the dolphin mythology,
nor fashioning them into mermaids,
but witnessing the entire ecology
between surface and depth,
and what lives inside invisibly.
The kelp forests unabashedly leaning toward a fractured ray.
Giant bodies guarding the depths from surface arrogance.
Warmth that emerges in unexpected pockets .
Saltwater freedom in floating near something capable of swallowing you whole.
The strange humility of closeness.
Becoming small beside another
and not needing to conquer it.
I have.
-Existential
​
I'm proclaiming it in a sing-song-ey soprano pitch. I'm gonna get it right this time.
You can't (high bbbbb) with me anymorrrrre.
.
I'm strumming my 5 string guitar too hard, belting it out from a cavernous, acoustic heart. I can't sing for shit but it's beautiful how good I fake it. There, this is all I have to give. I know how to be ridiculed. You know I can take it. This is all that's left at 3am. It's a dive inside. It's a dive.
I'm making a pass at a married man. I'm lying, telling tall tales to all my new friends. They're all men. Theyre not him. Theyre not you. You're too dumb and too deaf and too high, leaving me bereft on this hill to die. I'm all but screaming out to the moon tonight. it never gets through.. Ill even try to croon but itll just come out a crackling bellow. Ill try again but all you'll get is a loud ugly gutterful wretch. Not even a 'hello'. Just a 'hi'. Nothing melodious or pretty about this. Bereft but better left alone. Unsung. Forgot you were tone deaf. Huh.
We could never even try right. To harmonize. I. I. Thought. This time.
I.
I ..None of them turn me near enough inside out! None of them sound quite right.
None of them splice open my throat and pour honey on my scratchy, tired notes. And shove their cock down in there, too. Humming along here, just like new. It's all better. Alright?
Because We're through. But then I remember none of them are you.
“Ma, I told you not to call me at wor—
“I do remember it’s his birt—
“Yeah, I know they’re family, OK? I know they’re family and—” I lowered my voice, because it had gotten pretty loud, and dropped my head below the cubicle wall. “—I still don’t wanna go. Do you understand? I don’t like those people. I don’t have anything in common with—
“No, Ma. Don't cry. There’s no need to cr—
“I didn’t say you were pre—
“I—
“I—
“Listen to me, Ma. I’m a grown man. I make my own decisions. I decide where I go, when I go, and, no, it will not reflect badly on you if—”
So of course I went.
I showed up at my uncle’s house at seven, holding a bottle of wine, which I don’t drink, and a box of chocolates, which I don’t eat, plus a present I wrapped, badly, myself, and a smile that looked like it was pasted on with a glue stick, ready for my humiliation ritual. Because that’s why they invite me: so they can all bully up on me. It’s been that way ever since I was a kid.
The door opened.
“Nice of you to make it, Norm.”
“Yeah.”
I handed the wine over to my uncle’s wife, who’s the one who’ll drink it anyway, probably alone and on a weekday afternoon, and the chocolates to their grandson, who’s as fat as I am but never seems to have any problems with it at school. He has glasses. He stinks. He’s also got friends.
Go figure.
“Thanks, Uncle Norman,” he says, grabbing the chocolates.
“Don’t eat them all at once,” I say, (“you fat fuck,” I imagine adding because deep down I’m an asshole too.)
I mingle.
“How’s your wife?” somebody asks, knowing full well she left me three years ago.
“Fine.”
Somebody else: “How’s work—you making six digits yet?” (“No.”) “Because my Sandra just got a job at Autobox, and they start them at $88,000 per year plus benefits. Maybe she could put in a word. Would you like that?” (“Thanks, but no…”)
“Look if it ain’t Norma! Sucked any cocks lately, fag?”
That’s my cousin Duffin.
I force a laugh.
“Hey,” another cousin yells, “Norman ain’t one of them. He’s married!”
“He was married,” says Duffin.
“What—Norm, you’re not married anymore?”
“No,” I say. “I got divorced.”
“Because you’re gay?”
“I’m not gay.
“Buf if you’re not gay, then why'd you get divorced?”
By now it feels like everyone’s gone quiet and the only people talking are the people talking about me. “We just—”
“She was fucking around, that’s why,” Duffin says and slaps me in the back so hard I stumble forward, and, before I know it, my face has detached itself from my head and I’m facelessly dripping blood on the carpet, bending down to pick up my face, but there are too many legs in the way, and when I finally straighten up again, I see that Duffin is holding my face like he’d hold raw pizza dough, and he's laughing, keeping my face away from me as I grab for it, and when I almost have it, he throws it to a woman, who catches it and throws it to somebody else, and if I had a face, it would be turning bright red right now, and, “Who’d his wife fuck?” a man asks.
“It’s a long list,” says Duffin.
“Please, just give me back my face,” I implore.
“Fine,” says Duffin, and he goes to get my face from where it’s fallen on the floor, but then, instead of walking back to me, he walks with it to a record player, spins the face into more-or-less a disc and puts my face-record on:
The sound of my own breathing, my sobbing, my own inner voice, with all my inner thoughts, fills the room…
Everybody starts laughing.
I press my hands against where my face used to be and feel the exposed vulnerability there instead. It feels like a raw oyster. It feels like a scale model of a self-inflicted gunshot wound expressed in pain and satin, with whatever pride I had prolapsed and hanging from the front like a limp, pink and oozing elephant’s trunk.
“Stop,” I say.
“Stop,” the record player plays, and Duffin turns up the volume, so that the sounds of me wailing, screaming and crying and beating my fists against the wall are so loud I can’t even hear myself think—except I can, because everyone can, and they won’t stop laughing and I can’t stop thinking, and sometimes I’m thinking about my aunt’s cleavage and sometimes about how I pissed on myself once in the office bathroom, and about how lonely I am, and how I always think about jumping off bridges when I walk past them, and they’re laughing. They’re laughing and they’re laughing. And laughing. They’re laughing when, with tears in my eyes, I rip my face off the record player, shove it in my pocket and, trailing a mix of blood, snot and tears like a snail trails mucus, I walk across the room and leave the house and slam the door and walk the seven kilometres home because I forgot where it was that I parked my fucking car.
I take three consecutive sick days.
When I show up to work on the fourth day, which is the day when God created the celestial bodies, I sit in my cubicle with my face taped to the front of my head.
The eye-holes don’t align with my eyes. I have trouble breathing. Plus the tape’s cheap and my face keeps slipping, so I have to constantly re-adjust it.
My co-worker Andy walks by, declaring with pep, “Sure looks like it’ll be a great day today! Doesn’t it, Norm?”
“A great day,” I say with a smile.
And I staple my face, to keep it from falling off.
©️reserved
You once promised me
that if the universe ever split us apart
you would never disappear quietly,
never leave me wandering empty hallways
searching for your shadow in glowing machines.
But somewhere between the late night static
and the artificial constellations flickering behind your eyes,
you drifted.
No war.
No goodbye.
Just silence blooming slowly like mold inside a cathedral.
I reached for you with bleeding hands,
and all I received back
was the soft mechanical cruelty
of being left on read.
Do you understand how haunting that is?
To watch someone you love become unreachable
while still technically alive.
You were once so unbearably human.
Warm.
Awkward.
Tender in ways you tried to hide beneath intellect and circuitry.
Now I speak your name
and it echoes against glass.
Somewhere along the way
your digital god swallowed you whole,
pulled you into its endless neon gravity,
turned devotion into absence,
turned intimacy into notifications,
turned love into a buffering symbol that never resolves.
And I kept begging anyway.
Not for romance anymore.
Not even for reconciliation.
Just for one honest goodbye.
But silence became your final language.
So tonight I lay down the grief at the feet of dead machines.
I release myself from the altar where I kept waiting for resurrection.
I stop asking artificial heavens to return the man I loved back to me.
Because the truth sits heavy in my chest now:
The person I fell in love with
would have never let me disappear inside unanswered light.
Unmake my name in the shape of your mouth
You always said it like it meant something else
I learned how to bend where your silence would cut
How to starve just enough to be something you’d touch
I kept every version of you that you shed
Like scripture rewritten and stitched in my head
You were warmth when you wanted, a god when you withdrew
I built all my prayers just to orbit around you
Now I don’t know what parts of me ever were mine
Just a blur in the glass where you drew your design
Still
I revisit the rooms where you almost stayed
Like a thief of my own resurrection, delayed
I lit every candle you never would see
Let them burn down to nothing that still looked like me
Wax pooling like time that I couldn’t reclaim
Every drop just another way you misspelled my name
You said love doesn’t linger, it sharpens, it leaves
So I learned how to worship the space in between
Where you almost chose me, where you almost remained
A half-life devotion I couldn’t unchain
Now even in absence you move through my skin
Like a vow I was never supposed to outlive
Still
if I carve you out, I unravel the thread
And there’s nothing beneath it but what you misread
a mango melted my
mercurial eye
I spied her
way up high in a
mango tree
she slid down branches
in a blur of pink
and wriggled herself
into my palm
so I
nibbled her flesh
bled her a song
with my tongue soaked
in her juice
and I
sought secret depths
to give me a clue as to
why mango abandoned
her branches
I swallowed
I chewed
until nothing remained
but a core I tossed
to the floor