This is the flavor of failure.
My fucked up arrival
to the ash-gilded street.
A pattern in spite of my attempts
to do away with contempt.
This is my elliptical sorry.
This is my editorialized sorrow.
The ceiling crumbles like snow.
The thick-armed creature
of darkness carries my bones.
It reserves its judgments
and lays them at my bed.
It is no serious threat.
Its dawn-eyed dolls
are just the mess of my mind.
I should hang them
in the doorway
to keep the moths away.
I should turn off the light.
Bottle up a drop of the sun
as if it were a bug.
There are many who own me.
I am simply borrowed property.
This leaves me wanting.
I have been abandoned
by both factions,
the wanted and the wanting.
Deciphering the difference
is better left for the birds.
I envy those bulletproof talons.
Soon I'll have a pair myself.
No one has faith in me,
to become a bird
and one day take off. Yet
talons were built for those
who plummet from the sky.
My business sense is keen
as my attention to my heart:
which sputters
like a mangled engine,
which coughs like
a contractor, and shits itself like a baby.
I am a borrowed somebody.
Who left this in charge?
I have no control over the controls.
I am led by a green light
to a centrifuge of muffled memories.
I see royal black lakes with no bottom.
At night I clutch whatever I can.
Looking backwards,
only the undergrowth is visible,
the tufts of selfish behavior
sticking out like broken thumbs.
The past brews dark with the grounds
of so many ground up fantasies,
and my conscience swirls like a cream.
The more I filter, the more mixed it seems.
Now nothing comes out true or pure.
I have made sure.
I have nodded at the sunrise,
sucked the sweet from the sublime,
and counted every side of the die.
I am every one hundred pounds a lie.
