this is formatted funny so read it correctly right here or else

adrien, !
you’re so cute
hair falling round that
oversized nose
in shaggy daggerchunks

eyes wise and colorless
underneath
i find it hard to tell
how actors really are
i pretend you are
civilized.

this is pretty bad but it has been so long

it’s beyond midnight
the streets lay naked, untouched
in alien lamplight

raley’s is empty
old parking lot abandoned
i pee on their sign

it’s not even cold.
one car passes me so fast
but i imagine

i’m the only one
the sole human survivor.
nobody still is

calling out to them
pretending i am lonely
are there others too?

but i’m not alone–
families sleep in their suburbs
all coincidence.

i hear, distantly
another train passing by
walking takes so long

but it is
so perfectly good
twelve thirty

“ahoy,” he said, looking at me
and motioned for me to come closer.
his mouth moved in a subtly broken way,
and as I neared,
I saw this was because he had
a shark’s maw. not a person’s.

I was getting hungry,
which is to say,
one letter away from becoming a country.

“what’re you doing in here?” he asked me,
grinning, mashing raw meat in his jaw,
eyes glinting.
“I’m not sure,” I said, that being the
most honest answer
I could muster.

“boar?” he asked, pointing with his knife.
“it’s wild,” he said, and snorted at
his joke.
“no, thanks,” I said, knowing
exactly what he was,
exactly what the table was.
knowing all too well what the food was.

I had to get away,
which is to say,
I had lost all my ways
in that great dark building
and without one how could I escape?

“large breakfast?” the shark-man asked
in a knowing manner.
“no matter. take a bread roll if you want,
but don’t feel obligated.”
I stood and looked down the table.
I saw no bread rolls, not one.
the ocean began to lick at the table legs
far, far away.

“I used to spend thousands of dollars a year
to fly to paris
because I liked their daytime television,”
he told me. I could feel him rummaging
in my head, feeling for words he could
put into sentences.
talking to him made me want to brush my teeth.
“oh, yes, frankenstein was a real troublemaker
on those trips! how we would laugh at the
bellhops, trying to lift his cablecars.
skinny armed nobodies.”

I coughed gently into a fist. the sea air
was frighteningly chilly. the waves lapped
at dishes on the far end of the table,
giving them a new look after the foam
had had its way with the plate.

I walked for a long time, or
maybe no time at all? who can tell.

and suddenly I found the latch,
cold and rusted. without hesitation I
wrenched it open, thinking, “this took
more effort from the inside
unless the dark has drank my strength.”

eyes squinted in preparation I pulled
and the door opened wide:
this was not the place I had entered from.
it was a beach. the door came out of
a giant rock. as I held the door open,
a wave splashed sea water inside.

I was amazed at what I was seeing,
which is to say,
I had become a labyrinth;
unnavigable.

on the sand at my feet I spied blood
drop after drop heading down the beach
and as I stared three spots were washed away
by the surf. I looked the other way and
found that the tide had already swallowed
that half of the trail.

I was afraid,
which is to say,
coming undone at the ends.

but I followed the dots of blood
until I rounded a bend on the beach
and saw laid out before me a
great banquet table, stocked completely,
and in one chair at the end
a man slowly bleeding, slowly eating.
he easily had enough food for a hundred.
the table, I noticed, cast no shadow.

I was entranced,
which is to say,
stuck in the entrance.

inside it was huge,
and empty, like a dead airplane hangar
or a dead animal
with steel girders holding the roof
for great rusted ribs.
it was dark. the light from outside
was easily swallowed inside.

it all had a sick luster.
it all had a quiet way of being wrong
of being incorrect in design and purpose
of being real when it shouldn’t.
my watch said it was still before noon,
and so, I went in.

the door closed behind me, spring-loaded
and then, caught in the darkness
I began to panic.
behind me, I felt for the latch, the
handle
for the doorknob
to no avail. I was stuck in the dark,
a complete, all-consuming dark, moist
and fathomless. I couldn’t tell if
my eyes were open,
or closed. not anymore.
so I began to walk around the thing,
the great dead building,
one hand against the wall for reassurance.

I began to grow tired,
which is to say,
I felt like a round rubber mass of nothing.

I tried to check my watch, using
the glow-in-the-dark face
but the light was taken before it
could even think of reaching me.
even when my face was pressed against my wrist
searching
I could hardly make out the watch itself.

suddenly I noticed I could see my hand
running along the wall
and desperately sought out the source
of the light, but saw nothing.
it was as though my arm was
becoming luminescent. or maybe,
I thought, maybe I am imagining it there
to feel better.
probably, I thought. most likely.

people are unable to give your their full stories.

for years i read books instead
ignoring these so-called friends of mine
faking phone numbers and acting as though
i had not done any such thing
ignoring birthday invitations and
reading my way through life.

people cannot tell you
why they are the sum of their parts.
they cannot, with any certainty, devote the time
to explaining why they say “cool”
more than they say “awesome”, nor can they
tell me why they blink
three times, in rapid succession.

they cannot say, “i do not like peas because
my father hated them, which in turn
impacted on me; primarily because when i was
still listening to my father, he was always
ranting about them, justifying himself, or
so it seemed.”
the cannot say, “i will not let him down.”
for they do not know the reason themselves.

for years i read books instead
where authors tried as well as possible to
explain a character away
molting page after page of explanations
each sentence ultimately a waste.

they explained how characters changed and yet
i yearned to understand someone even more,
even someone fake. completely understand. how was it that
people were so complex that
they could not tell me what made them up?
that an author could not even set out to
make someone up properly without failing?

people cannot tell you why they whistle
the first six bars of some nameless symphony
or when the first time they thought about sex was
or what they want to do.

they cannot say, “my first blanket was made from
wool, and i hated the house i lived in as a baby,
and as that blanket is my only connection
to that house,
i hate wool.”
they cannot say, “the wallpaper was disgusting.”
for they do not know the reason themselves.

i think authors are just
trying to understand the people
who aren’t their friends anymore.

this is part one of who knows how many pieces re: i forgot i started this and can’t exactly remember what i was planning to go on about

if you were to leave town
on highway 1
(which is the westernmost highway
in america, or something)
and walk (not drive) to the coast
you would see it, I think
assuming it’s still there

I was ravenous, you see
and that is to say,
I was full of ravens.

it’s a large building,
you know, kind of like
half of one big sphere (or
even half an eggshell, I
haven’t actually seen it all
so I don’t know).
it’s got steel girders, or
some sort of rusted metal,
maybe just iron, spiderwebbing
all across it.
like a faberge egg, then.

I thought it was abandoned,
some sort of old government
place, or a nature lab
maybe a greenhouse? but,
it wasn’t. it buzzed, or
beeped, or blipped. I
don’t remember (nor was I
ever sure at the time)

I was only there because I
had gotten mad and stormed off,
and that is to say,
I left rain clouds in my wake.

this should be formatted all weird so click here to read it as originally intended! 

yeah, I know, I already know
in fact I already knew
that you’d be a
“fuck the police”
that you’re a “fuck the police”.

cassiopeia vomits and you, you’re–
well, you’re something.
that’s for certain.
not to say I ever really thought
that you weren’t, or that
cassiopeia ever thought you weren’t

not to say your father,
your mother,
your family,
not to say they didn’t
know you were a “fuck the police”
themselves,
just,
they didn’t care, really,
I don’t care, truthfully,
(it isn’t actually that exciting!
or interesting!)
and you don’t,
either,
do you?

of course not.
of course not.

note: this is a pretty old poem, as far as my poems go. i wrote it two months ago, long before i was ever going to start using a blog. it was to ask for the recollection of dreams, and has been called my best work by several people.

recall the day when
spring grass underfoot we fled together
laughing and talking of exploits past
the honeysuckle scent of rebirth lingering over the fields
to the tree standing sentry alone
in that soccer field
a towering elm dying of ancient ailments
knotted and dripping sap
down bug-eaten tattered leaves
and beneath the tree we lay whispering of cloud-forms
and the way color changed if you held your eyes open long enough
and of each other
recall the moment when we fell into a slumber contrary to our sun-lanced hours
and were witness to opalescent nightmares, tragedies of Grecian proportions
thoroughbred thundermares laying waste to the moors
recall the terror trapped within yourself
the terror which so enraptured your young capricious mind
toiling as grendel’s mother under the lake did
in murky lack of light
recall it and share it
for us

the first time i saw my backyard
at night was
tonight

i can still see every color but
they are diluted
the green darker the fence blacker
leaves half transparent
grass hinting at insect master plans

i don’t know what kind of tree
that is and my cat is
probably just as unsure

it has been a few hours and
the dark is more complete
but i can still see the
greenly hints of
something something something.