Standing outside with my cigarette
Lit up in this black dusty light
It, only wanting to be illuminated from within
But what?
That it’s all pointless
Nicotine-clarity
Dear God, it’s all pointless!
No seriously God it’s all pointless
And, these moments of sheer
And, what they call utter like there’s no getting beneath it,
Oblivion.
You blink
You see it all
The bodega
The street lights
The posters with the intriguingly vapid American Apparel girls
They all look the same!
They all look so different!
They know it’s all pointless too
You see your friend distressed because of her mom,
Pacing with her phone and her cigarette filter mashed to her ear,
All in one frantic fractious hand,
Her mom with the cancer
And, you see yourself with cancer
When your body ages twenty years and wises up to the fact
That you treat it like shit
But, you see yourself now, as endless
As endless as a single peanut that falls from the guy’s hand standing two feet from you,
He doesn’t pick it up,
Because peanuts are endless
He has a whole bag in his grip
You are endless
Someone from the fetish party down the block steps on the peanut
With her black leather boot
It can’t even be qualified as an accident
Because she’s not aware of the peanut
And, if she had been, she wouldn’t have moved
Because it’s just a fucking peanut
Dear, god it’s all pointless!
Thoughts of suicide parade through the very front of your brain again
But, what’s the point?
Suicide is an act of violence
You’d have to commit an act of violence
To yourself.
That’s a commitment,
Anne Sexton in her mother’s fur coat
Plath in the oven
Hemmingway, deer-hunting with his own skull
That friend of a friend, who hung herself.
Someone found her
Someone saw her after she did the violence
Is that embarrassing?
Is it like your brain being naked?
Is it like being caught masturbating your existence one too many times?
But you’re not around to know…
Maybe you are
Taking a different form in the oblivion
Chewed up by the gnawing and the glitch of it all
Did you win or did you loose?
What does winning matter?
Where did losing ever make any sense?
Well, I guess I’m afraid of becoming something I can’t comprehend.
But, then I realize I already am
But, then I realize I already knew that
It’s time to give the night another go
I will chase the sleep down
I will force it
I will drug the sleep and make it my bitch
Listen, I tell it
The awake and the sleep are
Ubiquitous
Everywhere
Also, one in the same.
Just take it like they’re both rolled up multiple times all together
In one of those rubber band-balls
This dream
This desire
Sometimes your dream has desire
Sometimes it wants you dead
You have to fight that
You have to come back the next morning like you did the one before,
Eyes splayed open as if
Someone had told you to hold a grenade
They don’t have to tell you
Not to drop it
You know that you can’t
But, you know that maybe you will anyway.
I want to stay safe in this life
Where I know why it’s bad
I swallow my pill.
Soon falling asleep on his chest
His heart,
I breathe on the offbeat.
