Cremation Diamonds
To Persist
Early Life
Her Father Died Yesterday (Working Through It)
A symphony of chewing.
A full restaurant.
A blessing.
All she could want.
Thoughts thank and sprung forth.
Sprightly.
A sprig of parsley and a swig of Pepsi.
grainy film footage of a pretentious stage play from 1971 indicating the stark nebulous ponderous chatoyant amorphous expression of divine feminine rage in clairvoyant brilliance negating the void space
The Counting of Killed Conscious (The Self's Laughter)
The Lower Hand of Love (Slow)
I felt your presence. I knew you were going to kill me. I knew the blow was coming.
(Your plots have always been obvious.)
You could have done it cleanly. Could have been a tight five.
(You ought to have been previous past-tense finished.)
You got me in the ear instead. Ten hours later I'm still alive.
(Long-time coming.)
Ragged breathing and bleeding out but still here.
Every second's infliction as death nears. All there ever was. Loss of life.
Satisfied?
The end of people and their bodies and noise.
The entire earth a silent factory, self fulfilling.
Satisfied.
Punksong Pankration (Chemical Recreation)
Question Mark
A mysterious text appears.
It presents itself.
As suggestions.
Persuasion.
Paranoia.
Perhaps passion.
Of some fashion.
Irksome.
For Commercial Use Only (888-666-4444)
I go outside.
In one of my outfits.
A stranger takes a photograph.
Of "me."
Some me he or she sees.
They.
Them.
Thinks they've seen.
A camera flash's freeze.
Unnerving.
I don't know if it's art. For personal use. For display. For wireless global transmission.
I don't know if they think I'm somebody. I don't know if I am somebody.
I'm not trying.
It's just like this.
Aura's real.
Get close and I'll prove it to you.
Die Like a Dog (Love Song)
"Rambling, incoherent."
It denies itself. It defies.
Negates. Dies.
Suffering in public.
The artist's trust is in the trickery of budgets.
Watered down diet ass is what you ordered and piss is what you get.
This is what you get.
To Revel in the Hatred of an Audience (The Two-Way Mirror)
Deficient, Disordered (The Boots That You Ordered)
The perverse air of surveillance as a car approaches.
Judgment low in the engine.
Or worse, some electric hover, government-mandated.
Perverse air of surveillance?
What if—
Perverse surveillant air.
(Ah,)
Thaaaat's better.
Yes.
Keep them both in.
Yes, yes.
Ha-ha.
Really reveal all the secrets.
Show them.
SHOW THEM ALL!
Reasons to motivate.
A croaked fashion illustrated.
Hold me, fold me, crease me.
Read it sideways and upside-down.
Release me.
It's an instruction manual for something.
(Right?)
A sermon.
(Probably.)
Crooked and cross-wise.
Since you are holding a bag of demons, may I then ask you—
Do you like your new map to the moon?
Burn it.
The playing of two-twee a tune.
(1, 2, 3, 2)
Bury it.
(I hate myself too.)
Saccharine, sugary.
(What else is there to do?)
Offer it.
Does it feel good on the tongue?
Excoriate it, excavate it.
Silver moon and golden sun.
Find yourself in it.
(You get to a point where you're just saying shit.)
Find yourself irritated.
(Do you ever get to any point?)
None of it means anything. Nothing does. Attention spoiled. We give none.
An Honest Job
I saw the hunched older man in his baggy faded burgundy crewneck T-shirt tucked high in indigo denim jeans, brown braided leather belt, the type of jean-and-belt combo a man who shops roughly every 20, perhaps 25 years owns, the utilitarian dungarees of a man immune to cycles, clothing old enough to vote, disinterested, allergic to persuasion, unadvertisable, unassailable, a man who knows what he needs to hear and be told when he'll hear it and who he'll let do the telling, a sensible man, a man so unlike me.
I knew his mind instantly.
(I am psychic.)
He'd just left a tidy modest white pick-up truck with his name etched on the side in what may-or-may-not-have-been Times New Roman, I don't know, they've got all these new fonts, right, all this proprietary shit, man, you know what I'm saying, it looked like Times New Roman, alright, I mean it looked like he probably did it in MS Word '98, look, I think it was Times New Roman, okay, and on the side of the truck in plainest lettering was a name, his name, the text LOS FELIZ HANDYMAN, and a phone number.
Eyed hid in a sun-bleached ballcap's low lid, he moved with determination into a comely bungalow, presumably his worksite, cautious to scrape his round brown boots at the doormat before entering.
Look at that!
And all I can think is — God Damn, every now and then you do still see it — the Living Ghost of Work that (Maybe) Makes Sense, honest labor that just might add up, a day's work for a day's pay, but us, the rest of us really are committed to various forms of increasingly desperate and callous financial crime forever, huh?
Huh?
Huh.
You in on the take or getting taken?
This is a swindler's world.
Hell, who knows.
Maybe that guy went in there and killed an entire family.
Splattered them the moment I was out of earshot.
Gut renovation.
Know what I'm saying?
I don't know him.
(I'm not actually psychic. That was a joke.)
I mean—
(If I could read your mind, why would I ever tell you?)
You can steal some other guy's truck.
(I can.)
Some Other Guy, right.
Very other.
Some loner, alcoholic, no friends, no family?
Type of fella that could swing a hammer but just couldn't keep it together?
Yeah, you could kill him easily.
No one would know.
Fuck's gonna care?
Some landlord?
Please.
Or hell, you could go find the guy's sad-sack hovel of a home.
Take over his identity, his licensing.
Just start driving.
Pushing that truck around, with your new name on it.
That's you now.
Picking up jobs and killing killing killing.
Criminal depiction.
Daggers for diction.
Killing your way across the city until it's you and the final victim.
I should have known that guy was up to some shit.
En Bloc
I need water not wine but it's what I've got that's wet.
Have we met?
I forget.
Canned evil. Sparkling.
Evil can. Evil.
Dumb stunt.
These girls are old enough to drive?
Fucking goes quick takes forever.
No, No, No, No (No)
The sad sound of attempted discipline failing.
An unsurrendering child.
Refusal.
You Were Born Able to Do It and You Forgot
Automata
Roamer
A wounded hand's trembling claw clasp on canned wine.
Fingernail dirt and gum grime.
Ain't seen the shower in four days time.
Holes full of clothes.
And shoes too.
Soles all walked through.
A sniff an animal whiff of himself.
Pits.
Heavy meat souring.
Expired bath.
The breath.
Mistimed wilderness, firing.
"They always smell good when they look like they're going to. I could tell from her hair," he thought to himself.
"Only things is . . . I can't tell if anyone has a job anymore."
VFM
Mephiticus
Typical millennial.
Dogs as proxy children.
A ruined relationship duct taped with rent.
A foreclosed future and nostalgiac nausea.
"Some slut in a jeep.
Some whore in a corvette.
He knows what he did.
He can sleep outside,"
she said.
"I thought we were past this."
Her arms cross.
The body leaks.
Disastrous.
"You need to stop killing people."
Smells awful.
Stinks to high hell.
Worse than shit.
Pure guts. Wafting entrails. A hovering ghost.
When You Said Forever What Did You Really Mean?
Deceiver/Devourer
Do you want to actually meet the devil?
Do you want the full reveal?
Do you want to see what god sees?
Do you want it spoiled?
Rotten?
Peeled?
Do you want the recipe for the potion?
Fuck I feel seen.
(We're all gone soon.)
Surf the flood.
Float the monsoon.
Flee.
(write your wrongs and read the room)
Ex-Planetary
Announces its power
Denies its power
Through denial, manifests power
Destroys itself
Is reborn through destruction