apostrophos

i used to be good
at understanding this
mysterious language,
the alphabet of every day,
each hour
descending inevitably
towards Z,

but lately i slur,
trip over the consonants
& fall into the holes
of the vowels,
phrases tumbling
out of my pockets

(re) capitulation

and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:

i woke from a dreamless sleep
into a pellucid morning,

fear dripped into my veins
from the invisible machine
of nightmare,
had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows
until they melted back,

then
the necessary cigarette
left me
as always
unsatisfied

and doing nothing
(a lot easier
than it sounds)
was justified by
reducing it to
small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the height of The Idiot
is smaller than that of
The Devils,
and i don't know
maybe i felt something
a little like sympathy,

and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,
a weird shimmer
like the lake of heat
you might see
over summer asphalt,

for a damned second
heart pulpy in my mouth
like a bitter fruit
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like
the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach.

i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,
but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly
on the street outside
sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.

the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back.

then,
now,
this,

a shaky column of words,
a half of a pillar
in the rubble of the
ruins of the day

complaint

& i am so
motherfucking
tired,

so tired i can feel
fissures developing
in my bones,
the bigger ones,
the one in my thigh and
the one in my chest
quaking like california
under tectonic duress -

and this is boring,
so motherfucking
boring,

so boring that i have
canned myself like
cling peaches,
filled up my insides
with syrup & even my brain
is yellowed,
sickly with it

and they say
no man is an island
and i'm calling bullshit
from my roof
howling at the dawn
every man
is islanded,
surrounded by the pelagic
nothingness,
the whirl & whorl of sea
& wind
the sound of a seagull
that i take to be mourning
but is actually
hunger

day #---

the kind of morning
where i can’t get the temperature
of the shower right
and every other step i take
down the sidewalk
is a stumble

and i say to myself
this is going to be
one of those days,
an exhausting pageantry
of hours,
whittling myself to a sharp point
& by the time i’m drunk,
jabbing at anyone
who comes close enough

and my friend says
i drive people away,
says through a froth of drunk
and pot,
and later we sit
on his couch,
like a couple of knives
rasping in a drawer.
by the end of it
we have dulled each other
and the window is repainting itself
with a fragile blue

& the birds are
going apeshit in the trees -