cusp

night's edge slices

the west of rainbow's skies

i walk disembodied thru the mosquito grass

disconnected from any sense of doing or purpose

and i wonder is this what depression feels like

my health is truly faded, endurance a fantasy

things pile up in the just cleaned kitchen

a little more red leaks out of clouds

the grey inside becoming 

&&&

i scroll all my time away.

i don't even interact i 

observe, silently only

the bots know i'm here algorithm

is my closest confidant. 

*

it's not that i've said all i have to say.

it's not that i actually think i'd be remembered or preserved

or granted some small immortality 

in what is coming into being

i am the winston, the banned, the wormed

apple. pale pink in bathtub. 

it's that writing as i want to write

takes a lot of energy and quietness

a lot of cigarettes and thrown away typewritten pages

ello.coms and gravel bbs wiped off the face of the web.

all just as well because most of that was tripe.

i'm sure there were good lines somewhere. sometimes.

it was more an outpouring of too much info before 

that

became the national obsession. i'm only talking

about my own writing here. most everyone else's

i just admire the fuck out of to this day. 

but it's all gone now, except the little 

that was saved on simple reality writing.

**

i close the door against the lights.

wonder how or if i could write

a compelling story anyway. 

schroedenger's love is such a silly title.

the cat is dead is better especially for this century.

the gun went off

collapse

and really the story is not so special.

everyday there is betrayal, all the lives out here

just trying to find some kind of love

some kind of continuity in a fracturing reality.

has it always been this precarious?

i'm beginnning to worry about him.

i wanted him gone but not absent

not forever. just a few days. 

is he dead? because this is not like him at all..

****

he's not dead.

that's good.

# why the angst?

again it's related to the exhaustion

i would write but 

i would clean but

i would refinish the project

or take the dog for a walk 

or go into the store for a canolli and chips

but it's all so exhausting.

i feel like i'm invisible

yet spotlit

agoraphobia yet needy

i mean what would i do if i had to actually 

forage for food? liek when the revolution happens

i hope they kill me quick. i make a good slave now

but i have hot showers when i want them.

food cooked by other hands all i need is lucre.

what would drive me when all that's gone?

sneak into a looted publix 

slide over the melted ice cream

paw thru scattered pasta and cat litter

take out my trusty can opener

and feast on a can of tuna i found buried

under the plastic bags of rotted meat

marvel at the waste, shoot a zombie in the back.

no thanks. and with your global warming TM

that all seems very close to the bone.

aleady fields lose their fecundity

water moves to the oceans

the oceans take up summer in the mountains.

survivors will be few. it won't be my story.

ai?

technology will not survive the coming 

of desperate societies. mad max begins

as we watch from the garden of time. 

a story i didn't read but imagine 

as both prosaic and prescient with a bit o magic

thrown in because whimsy is in vogue. 

but metaphors are magic aren't they.

so many years writing and reading and to not

understand that at visceral level. 

and now in my old age

explaining it to myself as if i were

some neophyte in a writing class.

the trouble is. 

i could not write infinite jest

so why bother writing anything

it's been done. 

companison is the death of joy.

*

so if i were to write collapse 

or something similar i'd have to go back

to my own hopes and dreams when i was young

and honestly i just hoped i'd stay alive i guess

hoped i could stop stealing cheese from sav a lot 

and get my license back and get a steady job 

and get a trailer and a kid and a car payment

all the while wating and wondering what the fuck

did i want out of life and it wasn't this suburban thing

i'd fallen into with a man who never once meant

that he loved me never once let me know i was doing ok

told me who would put up with me more than once

and i have worked hard to erase that from who i am

but i feel like i am doing that 

to myself now. 

so i thought that if i piled something good on all my bad

i love that song. pure americana on the alt rock station

stick season. 

now you're tire tracks and a pair of shoes

i'll dream each night of some versioin of you

that i might not have but i did not lose. 

with phrases like that existing in the work

of humans and i think i need to write a book about love?

nah homie. it was just another sick sad love song.

i was just another heart that went wrong.

justification for a life that moves

through emotions like water and a stick.

i can't say that what i wanted to say 

would have been any help to anyone

least of all the dreamer. but i'd like to have existed.

somewhere on the cusp of becoming stardust again.