Respite.

We'll feed each other anguish with a spoon, bullets and daggers sinking into the roof of our mouth,
determined to sap at the stem until the bitterness subsides or until we fall asleep, whichever comes first.
It's usually the latter.

There's not too much that Nepenthe can't mask.


We'll wake up and wipe the grime from the window, or is it from our eyes?
It has been so long that it's hard to tell.
Arsenic melts like sugar in our mouths.


If I could, I'd plant hyacinths over this grave, this arid dirt that has been plowed over and over. I'd buy enough to build a sea, blue like the great Pacific. When everything's blue, there will be no difference between the land and water.
No vast deserts to cross, to sky to separate.


We'll dig holes and bury our bones until our hands are raw, only to have them dug up again and reburied again,
iron shovels burning rusty blisters into our hands.

Condensed thoughts.

Truly great people are those who want to be great, not those who want to be viewed as great.

Peace in a time of war

"You are you, and I am I.

You do your thing, and I'll do mine.

And if in the end, we are together,

It is beautiful."

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The Rhine-

All I need is to see the water ripple like that again, to know that some things can stand still

while everything else moves.

But maybe I'm not there because it's not true, because everything moves with everything else.

A swiftly tilting planet.

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I am becoming transparent.

They can see everything.

I wonder who's watching.

Where do I hide?

Where do I hide?

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It was good like that. Iron petals tightly rolled,

clenched,

fingernails digging sharply into sweaty palms.

Walls of steel.
I was comfortable in my discomfort.

Then 
Orientalism.

You meddled in things that need not have been meddled in,

clenched petals forcibly unfurled,

warm fingers oil for a stubborn lock.

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Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh.

Some paintings look better from far away.

Siúil A Rúin

We made some sort of short, cinematic strip, arbitrary bits of our arbitrary lives pieced together frame by frame. It was, perhaps, a creation made when there is little room to create much else.

We ran it slowly, played it at night, not knowing how it would turn out, not knowing if what we projected onto those shadowy walls would be anything coherent in the morning.

Because, you see, doubt and beauty go hand in hand.

You're right; love was the absolute last thing in the world I was after, the last thought in my mind. It was the last thought not in my mind.

But somehow when we played that film, slides running across the stale walls of my room like your hand down the contours of my confused body,

I felt it melting slowly on the tip of my tongue, tasting vaguely of something I've tried so hard to forget, the caustic bitterness of hesitance, fear, the sickly sweetness of novelty, of desire,

melting as our evenings did,

breezy nights into restless dawns.

My body is a paper bag.

It's scalding hot outside, and I'm freezing cold. The sun is too fearful to be warm, whetting its tentative rays on a gray palette.

I'm sick of Keynes, but I'm sicker of Friedman. So sick, in fact, that I have no appetite, save for Red Bull and filtered cloves, which I crave morning and night. The smoke is the color of the circles around my eyes.

56 glass beads on this string, 56 colors of my moods this week. 56 seconds to insanity.

Not even 56 days until I'm sailing on the spine of a metal bird, crossing the Atlantic. Or is it the Pacific? Where am I going? When does it end?

These pages look less like a book and more like a rope.

I wake up a few times each night to loosen the noose around my neck.

I often forget

that people actually read this.

When I remember, it freaks me out.