erase

If I could
erase a memory
or
a reoccurring
silhouette of the past
it would be
of
you
&
the dull gloom
light (you)

that stays
lit in your
chest

YOU: Your ghost in the mirror, outlining my reflection.

It just wont vanish.
It will never disappear.

your exoskeleton

you wore
me
like an exoskeleton
glistening
and slippery

shed me
in your sleep

blossomed
&
flew
with the
vultures

the sacred, the pure

those bourgeois eye
always lie
to those saintlike
skies

beatified schoolboy's eyes
in the semblance of bombshells

angelic schoolgirl's eyes
in the guise of blossoms

their lips stained red
palms full of bread

church service
only grants
Prosper Oscars
to the homespun
milksops of
gregarious ailments

voices all chant
to the ghosts
in stained glass
window panes
who patrol
the haunted
pages of
fictive affairs

the splintered bells admits scandals in the confessional booths
the bloody altar reveals a disfavor to the knees of other possible reliefs

The Waltz of Hitler

The Waltz of Hitler

A player piano began striking minimalist compositions in a cold and bare corner of Hitler’s private cellar. Hitler closed the heavy cellar door and locked it behind him tightly. Dangling florescent lights swung in correlation from the ceiling like legs on a swing. The cellar could have held hundreds of people. A long blue velvet run way led down the center of the cellar. Where the stage began, there were red curtains that hid Hitler’s mothers dresses. Her black wedding dress, some silky self exposing lingerie, her fur coats, cotton and wool sweaters in dry colors. At the end of the stage sat a mirror. All along the walls perfectly aligned were Hitler’s paintings. There was a portrait of himself looking into a shattered mirror. Majority were of him as a child with his mother. A life-size painting hung over the stage of the runway. It was of his fair skinned mother naked standing underneath an apple tree. Her left hand was reaching above her head holding onto a branch. Around her neck was a golden necklace. Him, as a child naked with wings is looking up at his mother. His chest and arms are covered in bugs and his expression is distressed. In the woods are two deers watching the two. Off in the horizon is a glass mountain over a silvery lake.
Hitler stepped onto the stage. The minimalist notes derange with his movements. He stepped in stiff and orderly steps. His arms moved like his body was made from gears of a grandfather clock. He approaches the mirror, stopped, and saluted himself with much force. A wall of concentration fell over his observation. In his uniform pocket he pulled out a golden locket. There was a picture of his mother when she is a child. He began to cry. He closed the locket and held it close to his heart. He screamed! with his head pointing to the ceiling of swinging lights. The notes of the player piano swung in perfect correlation with the swinging lights. A castrato boy was locked in a cage in the corner of the cellar. When Hitler shrieked the boy would whimper softly. He was terrified of his rage. The cage was barley big enough for him to walk or sit. In the cage was a music stand. Hitler assigned him a new piece of music each night with bread and water. The boy was stolen from his mother by the Hitler’s army when he was a boy. Hitler wanted a castrato who resembled Hitler as a child. He never gave reasons why but his army compliantly followed his orders. They stole the boy from Italy where he performed in popular operas.
Hitler stepped off stage and walked towards the boy with fragmented steps. The process was painful for the boy as Hitler approached. Hitler stopped in front of his cage abruptly. Bread crumbs cover the bottom of the cage. The boy is sweating and shaking in the presence of Hitler. Hitler asks firmly yet quietly, “Did you learn the sheet music?” The boy, looking at his feet answered. “Yes,” in his innocent tone. Each sheet music was taken from his mother’s old collection of classical operas. “You must shower before the show is started.” Hitler let the boy out of his cage and led him to the bathroom. There was an oval antique golden bath that was once his mothers. The wall over the bath had a painting of Hitler as a child on an empty stage with a long light on him. The castrato boy would bath while Hitler ironed the boys uniform. It was the exact uniform Hitler wore. When the boy finished bathing, Hitler dressed him. Delicately, Hitler slicked his hair. The boy resembled Hitler almost precisely as a child. Let’s Begin, Hitler spoke softly.
Hitler led the boy to a platform on the side of the stage. He set up his music stand for him then stroked his right cheek sincerely. Hitler walked through the red curtains. The player piano finished it’s minimalist piece. As a new piece began as Hitler pushed through the red curtains in his Mother’s black wedding dress. He had her red lip stick coated upon his lips. His eyelids were shadowed with grey make up. The boy began singing in his pure and aberrant voice. Hitler could see his reflection at the end of the stage. He waltzed to the the boys voice as it correlated with the zestful composition. The lights swung in correlation with the sounds and the waltz. His tears led the make up down his face. This was Hitler’s hidden cellar, away from everything outside...

God: The Mirrored Mask

If God were in fact a man,
he'd be absent of wonder.
He'd be as lonley as any man could ever be.

Just like an empty well
where you call out a name
and all you hear
is an echo of self.

If God were that empty well,
we'd fill it with
gas
to create an illusion that it is full.

Yet it would be such an insincere substance,
an absence of matter,
like a mirage on a smokey skyline.

Like an artist stokes their brush,
overwhelmed with that feeling
of creation, they let their mind express
the patterns formulated by the conscious
wonders and ]
fears.

The artists steps back,
observes,
wonders if this is a product of self.
Maybe a gift from a foreign spirit,
the illusionary heavens.

For God (If Man or Women, Spirit or Concept)
can never ponder such things.
It is such a thing.

God: such a lonely creature
drifting through the sky,
swiming through the seas,
creating illusions,
destroying the lives
of those who wish not to beleive.

"Beleive! You must beleive," shouts the fearful ones.

In the distance,
behind those beleivers I see
a shadow,
a reflection of my imagine in the silvery waters.

This is
something we see. Yet, do we know it's there?

I don't see any trace of God yet it could be
something I feel. Like the rain
hitting my skin.
But that could be my illusion. My mirage.

I see Gods face
in the
banks.
In the billboard signs or the powerlines.
In the oil tanks and junkyards.
On the wasps and all of the blind animals.
The roadkill.
The cars head lights.
The perscription bottles and bibles on shelves.
In the ever so empowering word
'Goverment'.

The reason is that God to humans,
is an unknowingly reflection of self.
It is us in which we fear.

We wear a mirrored masks,
to scared to laugh
at our own senseless fears.

Afterlife

Bury my ashes with the seed of a tree.
I'll become something more. I'll grow into a towering tree.
Me: inching high above the forest trails, the axe men come to cut me down.
They interfere with my heaven; high above the ground.
When I'm run through the factory, I
get ready to become your
loose leaf sheet where you sketch what
you believe after life should be.

(Never those men in the sky.
Never those verses that lie.
Never the resume of who has sined and yet to die.)

Sketch a bird in flight.
Sketch a forest of trees.
Sketch a spider weaving it's fabricated design.

After (a) life:
It's a life without thought.
A life with pure instinct.
A life with a purpose.

Yet the men who come along crushing roaches for it's ugly exterior.
Yet the men who cut me down to produce your sheet.
Yet these men are the wanderers of hell who interfere with out current state.

Hell is (being) human.
Hell is disattached instinct.
Hell is the atom bomb.
Hell is created in the chest of all men as they pollute the waters and crack open the very core of this world.
Hell is the devolution of man.

Oh this world will live on without us.

After (a) life, this is where you'll be.
Becoming something.
Becoming anything more than man.

Threads: A Story of Something Real

They were breathing, synchronized. A heartbeat to heartbeat, grunt to grunt. The only other sounds heard were the sound of the wind blowing trash past them on the concrete in the lobby of the abandoned train station. The holes in the street signs outside whistling. This was an abandoned city where everyone lived off the remnants left behind. The abandoned buildings, the stopped trains, the old homes collapsing in on themselves. People were sustaining off of everything left in the city.
He said push but it wasn’t necessary. She pushed but after about two pushes, threads, multicolored in vibrant blue, teal, aqua, gold, fuschia pink, they were all pushing out from his wife but she was silent and felt uncertain about the feeling she was undergoing.
Just one tiny thread held the baby and the mother together. She desired a baby girl. A delicate one. She once said, “I want a baby, delicate like threads.” This was far from what she envisioned, but close enough to her wants. Delicate and a creation of her own. The baby moved liked a slug in the mans arms. There was no blood, just black wet threads soaked in the women's bodily fluids. The man snipped the little black thread connecting the mother and the threaded baby. “Is she beautiful?” she asked.
Well maybe he thought. Or its delicate. Or its something else. Or it’s rare in it’s form. He said none of that.
She propped her body up off of the old spring mattress. Her mouth became a gaping hole. She already resented the thing she desired most.
Whether anyone would call it a child, one would care for it or one would disregard it. They did both. The mother disregarded it. The father cherished it.
He tried to hand the baby to the mother but she crossed her arms and locked them in place like a gate. It was evident that she resented a baby of such form. A baby only there to taunt her of something normal or of something she can consider real.
”Why couldn’t I be blessed with something real. Give me something real.” Her voice raised louder. “Give me something fucking real!”
He took the threaded baby in his arms and it squirmed slowly and sluggishly. The father held it with admiration and smirked lightly. Looking down at it he gently asked, “What should we name it?”
He knew this was a bad question but he didn’t seem to care. She was naked on the mattress, her body smeared with dried up mud and scented with oil. There was a tiny lump in her stomach from where the baby had stretched her stomach vaguely. They could only bath in the oily lakes around the train station. It was the only water left. In result they were filthy and wore dirty clothes they’d find around the train station. It hadn’t rained in years. So they continued to drink the toxic waters in the local streams, all muddied and polluted with metal and oil. She stood up from the mattress and walk away towards the old rusted stairwell holding the tiny lump in her stomach. Poison oak wrapped all around the railing and vines ran up the brick walls of the stair well.
He watched her walk up the stairwell, naked and dissatisfied.
He looked down at the baby in his arms and whispered, ‘Threads.’
There were four stories to the abandoned building. They lived on the top floor in a little room that over looked the dead city. Buildings out in the distances, some were halfway burnt and destroyed. Most of them, the windows were busted out. Graffiti covered the walls of the train station outside and in. Some of the walls were broken in and the wooden floors were all warped. Its structure was close to collapsing. When the wind blew the building moved with it.
In their room there was a dresser pressed against the wall underneath the one lone window. The drawers were all pulled out and clothes and filthy towels covered the floor. Old news paper and old pictures laid all around the floor of the room. They slept on a spring mattress that smelt of mildew from when it used to rain and soak them in their sleep. All of the others stories of the building have old rusty chairs and book shelves full of old books, most scattered on the floor and some still on the shelves. Everything in the train station once belonged to the old reverend who past the train station onto them after he past away.
They decided to have a ceremony to express their comintment to eachother when they were younger. When they decided to live in the abandoned train station. The old reverend lived on the second floor. He knew their parents when the city was still running. Before everyone left it behind to find a better place, to find something new. The old revernd said he would let them live in the bedroom on the fourth floor.
When they were younger they lived close by each other. They both lived in the abandoned trains on the east side of the city by the river. Their parents died around the same time. They were in their teens. They both made coffins out of old wood from boats they found on the shore of the oiled river and old fence post from abandoned houses. On the side of the train tracks that they grew up, they dug holes that fit the coffins for their parents. They individually lowered their coffins in. They made a little shack over the spot of their parents coffins. They found four wooden posts and set them evenly in the ground in the shape of a square. They wrapped barbed wire around the posts and stuck cardboard onto the wire until in made a wall. They laid long strips of sheet metal on top. In oil, they painted on the shack ‘Hollow Bodies of Our Past Creators.’ They glued pictures all over the cardboard walls. They laid dead flowers all around the outside of the shack and never returned.
They became lovers and wandered around the city to find a place to inhabit. Very few people still lived in the city. If they did, they were in hiding or they helped each other out with survival. They came upon the train station. They found the old reverend inside with his candles and empty chairs in the concrete lobby. There was a platform he stood on with a music stand he had a book laid on reading from it. When they entered, he stopped and slowly said, “Hello, how are you?”
The three of them conversed and they explained how they would like to get married. He agreed and said they were beautiful people and that he would love to see the two recreate.
In the lobby of the train station on their wedding day they stood on the reverends platform. He decorated the lobby for them. He hung thread from the ceiling and laid some old mildewed rugs down. There were metal bins all around with fire burning inside of them. He aligned old rusty copper seats and sat stuffed animals and mannequins he found around the train station in the chairs. The revernd was dressed in a washed out torn up burgandy suit that he wore everyday. He made a large cross from old maple tree banches and proped in behind the platform. He read out of an old nameless book. The reverend spoke in his outlandish voice. “Here we are in a dying world yet we strive to survive. We wonder like the fish in a ocean of decay and we still find a tide to follow.” He continued on with his philosophies and told them to slip the rings on each others fingers.
The man had carved the women a ring out of wood. She had found an old golden ring in a gutter. They slipped the rings onto each others fingers and the reverend pronounced them husband and wife. Wind and water. Sun and moon. But the problem was that the sun and the moon serve similar purposes but are always separated. Just light the wind and water. It just moves above but never becomes one. They are never united.
Shortly after they were married by the reverend they found him dead on the second floor. He had made a bed out of his ancient books that had been past down to him from all his generations of family. They found him peacefully asleep with his left hand over his right on his chest and his legs stiff like railing. The reverend would wake them ever morning for a quick reading from his journal of prayers. But that morning he laid peacefully while his soul drifted through the cracks of the building. They brought him out to the river close by the train station. Along the shore there were boats washed up everywhere. They collected all of the reverends journals and filled up a little wooden canoe. They placed his body on top of his journals. The man covered the reverend with old moss and dowsed him and the canoe with gasoline. They lit a match and pushed him down stream. They kept one journal of the reverends and read it while they watched his body in flames, drifting down the the oiled lake. The man read, “And we’ll find ourselves feeling as insignificant as threads blowing in the wind. We’ll feel a drought inside when we are incomplete. But if this is a dream, our surroundings are our insides and our insides are our perceptions. We’ll one day find ourselves floating down stream in search of something real.”
The man walked up the rusty stairwell with Threads in his arms, rocking it back and forth. He approached the bedroom but the door was locked. He knocked with one arm and Threads in the other but there was no answer. He knocked again. Still no answer.
“Why wont your answer me?”
He knew she wanted nothing to do with him or Threads. So the man went to the second floor where the reverend used to live and began residing there.
Months pasted yet he never saw the women. She remained locked away on the third floor. He never attempted to seek out to find her because he spent his time with Threads roaming through the streets and exploring buildings for food and clothes.
The man found ways of creating Threads emotions. On old stained pieces of paper from the old books of the reverend, he would draw eyes and lips. He would tape them over the crease where Threads eyes and lips should be. Everyday he would draw new eyes, new lips. He’d watch how Threads squirmed and based the emotions on his observation. The man was happy. He had found a friend. A friend he created. A friend who would never judge, only listen. Whether Threads heard him or not, he would continue to think Threads listened and that is all the man needed.
He tried teaching threads how to walk. He would prop Threads little stubs for legs upwards and try pushing him and moving his legs. Threads would just topple over and squirm sluggishly. Even though months had past Threads never grew. Threads remained the size of a newborn.
The man went up to the third floor and rummaged through the piles of trash and miscellaneous items. There were rusty horns and boxes full of glasses and silverware. Old telescopes and dressers toppled over. He came upon a little infant pouch. It was perfect size for Threads. He ran back down the the second floor where he left Threads on the bed of books. He strapped the pouch onto his chest and placed Threads inside.
That day, when night set into place and the moon set in it’s spot in the sky, the man and Threads walked over to the wall where the bedroom was. There was an old rusty ladder that man never noticed. It lead up to the rooftop that the bedroom was connected to. The man quietly placed his foot on the first step of the ladder. He felt a raindrop. All at once lightning struck and it began pouring down rain. He thought it couldn’t be. It hadn’t rained in years. He continued on climbing. He was gentle with his steps because he felt Threads squirming in his pouch. After a few minutes, he made it to the rooftop. In the one bedroom window the man saw a flickering glare from candles. He approached in the heavy rain and quietly glared through the window. There he saw the ground of the room was spotless. It was not like before. All over the walls he saw writings engraved into the wood. He squinted his eyes and made out the words.
‘Bless me with something real.’
‘We are Gods threaded puppets.’
‘We were never the sun and the moon.’
Every sentence scratched into the walls were pessimistic and cruel. He peaked in a little closer. He saw her crouched over on the ground painting a baby girl on the hardwood floor. He quietly crawled in though the window. She looked up and dropped her paint brush. She looks resentfully at his chest. Threads strapped in the pouch squirming in a slow tempo.
“Get the fuck out of here!”
She throws the paintbrush splattering the man and Threads. The man picks up a towel and whips Threads off quickly. “You only care about that joke of a thing. Throw is away. It is here to taunt me. I just wanted something real. A real baby. We’ll die alone, miserable and alone with a slug of a baby. More like a stuffed animal. We are Gods play toys. Look where we are.”
The man is frightened and holds Threads close to his chest.
“What happened to you? Who are you?”
She removes her ring and throws it out of the window. “I’m somewhere else. I’m the moon that sets in the west.”
The man cries and holds Threads closer.
“Oh stop it!” She screams.
She charges at the man and he topples over. She rips the pouch off of the mans chest. He tries to get a hold but she grabs Threads violently. “Stop it! Stop!”
On the ground she starts ripping the threads out of the baby. The man keeps trying to stop her but she keeps pushing him away. Thread by thread something is revealed. Skin starts to arise underneath all of the thread. There underneath it all lies a baby girl. She lies on top of the painting the women did. She is an exact replica lying in the same position with the same colored skin. In the moment of shock and silence, the baby went up in flames. The burning matter didn’t smell of human flesh. It smelt of burning logs. Like the scent of oak from a chimney in the winter.
In the moment of the man on his knees trying to put out the fire trying to help the baby, the mother caught a glimpse of herself in the puddle of spilt water from her cup. She noticed her skin was melting. She felt herself burning and her skin felt like wax dribbling down her face. The husband couldn’t stop the baby on fire. He helplessly toppled over and watched as the two collapsed into liquid. This was a horror, this was nothing he ever wanted. With the womens last breath as she became a puddle of wax, she whispered, “This is something real.”

Sewn Inside

Direction sewed some design on your insides.
Then you discovered the patterns that consisted of roads and exits.
Where is the naturalistic side to your direction?

You noticed the force of the trees.
The tides moving forward, always moving to the shore.
The water always knows where it's going.

...where are you heading?

Oh the simple life of a tide, set with a sure purpose and direction.
But tides are contained within the water and the body becomes polluted.

...just like the body of you.

The patterns sewn inside you reveals a map.
Unravel that path sewn inside you.
Maybe that path isn't worth taking at all.