the patrilineal line pushes sunward, brambled and triggered by the Higgs field Rube Goldberg of aphoristic cautions, natural catalysts that chant of rebuilding or immense ruination. the matrilineal knots inward on the spectrum of equine intimacy to punctured blindness, swirling like the vacuous empty womb of ontology. each father, a discovery lost, like jaded Orphism or adolescent solipsism. each mother issues anomic aphasia and stubborn surrender. they will hush hauntings of heritage under the children on stairs, little ears eavesdropping over banisters. a watchful listlessness sustains the glib authority of parenthood.
Ekwus began as one ambiguous stochastic being divided in two at the tongue, into Anger, into Patience. Anger was quick to sense, flippant and deranged, the bitter relishment of being. in the presence of Patience, however, Anger disappeared into her totalove. dissolved by her taste, Anger designed the natural mechanics of organic cells under the soothing pressure of wait. wanting this perfect feeding cycle to proliferate, Anger fired a cosmic hurricane with its trail which materialized into Discovery and Loss, spawning the origins of fatherhood and the question of absence. wonder (infantinomi for discovery), being so sensitive, looked weak to Anger. when Discovery was beat, they divided into three gods; the chromosomal being Creation and Destruction, the third some combination of gravitational math / the returning of soul to the body ten times (they call them Mnemosyne).
Randomness slowly ceased with the swelling of conscience in the universe, a surge that will erupt repeatedly in what is known as the anecdote or myth. the thoughts of others drove Creation to hum a melody from which the sentient horse was designed with artistic inclinations for sewing. this was the first species and they roamed stars freely. equines used their own integumentary for their work, which Creation culturally appropriated. she began to dress in doppler-trimmed horse-hair bricolage. her closet incited Love from fellow gods and invited revolutionary class-related warring from the equine. Destruction attempted to impress Creation by building a machine for ripping the mane off a horse’s neck in a single switch. Dazzled, Creation hungered for egregiously abundant bundles of mane, which Destruction found encouraging. unfortunately, a salacious side in gods demoralized and dismantled the sensibilities of the equine kingdom. at the battle scene finale, Creation strung a bow from the king’s mane and played Anna Clyne’s prince of clouds on a double necked violin. gravitational math / returning of soul to body ten times watched from the back of a black sheep and asked his eldest sister, Loss, to surgically extract the piercing in his heart and stitch it into spacetime. Here, a heavy memory of Discovery spins into blackness. Loss and gravitational math / returning of soul to body ten times begot Death, aesthetically akin to an author-sculpted stone never sculpted to appear as anything other than a stone. the line of mortality continues, gaseous and solid, as planets.
remember, the children live upstairs.
Destruction continued to sluice colliding atoms from Anger, and explored supernova energy scientifically. Anger tracked his cabinet full of bottles, discolored with smashed atoms, draining slowly. Instead of seeking immediate retribution for Destruction’s thievery, Anger enlisted entropy for the universe to prolong the course of destruction. while this was happening, Time stretched out on the sofa for Creation, both nude and easel settled. Patience, the mother of this rebellious pair, responded to her daughters sensuality by having an affair with Curiosity. after their entanglement, Patience grew weighted with Accident, an encumbrance, yet also an embrace of evergreen learning. Anger fumed into the guilt of Regrettable Mistakes, bringing no-fucks-given into anthroposture. rumors suggest Negligence may have been the third part in an ignominious threesome. practically orphaned, no-fucks-given spent xyr formative years chasing Destruction until their unionization. they met at an asteroid fringe knocking orbital weapons into small stars. they were an explosive cluster, but no-fucks-given only drove Destruction to Creation. to break the penchant of xe’s co-dependence, Destruction warped no-fucks-given into the past. through remorseful incest, Creation tempered Destruction with the spawning of Control. Destruction was penalized by Anger’s sight of his offspring, and worse yet tormented by Creation’s decisions as to who the godmother of Control would be. no-fucks-given had found and befriended Creation through casual inebriated brunches while Destruction razed the universe with his mistress. Control was raised with her godmother’s intuition and uncovered a perpetual balance between risk and expectation, both of which were love crafted to be childhood friends. The genderless child of Time, Addiction, grew up alone until xe met Control. When Loss visited with her children, Control was sundered by withdrawing afflictions. she seized at the family bbq, and Time ripped off a finger worth a trillion years called Healing. the touch of healing sent Control into a torpid slumber, the first comatose. Healing studied interstellar anatomy during this time while no-fucks-given smoked cheap tobacco with Addiction.
remember, the children live upstairs.
Curiosity whispered into Accident‘s ear that an uprising was imminent while Negligence walked about absent mindedly. the Oracle of Gambled Anticipation also gabbed to Healing about an upcoming war. when brought to the supreme gods, the original division of Ewkus, Healing won an accordance with the council for granted medical service immune to violence. Anger cursed Negligence then sailed for war. Destruction, enlisted as head commander, decimated orbital geode and starlight source indiscriminately. their combined power would surely supercede that of the equines. tucked in the darkness of space, the equine people watched in worship, pulling Anger’s power into their flanks. the ambush of eighty billion equine erupted spacetime which launched the rebels into hyperspeed (time arched into an incapacitated state) and their collusion was meteoric. the gods fled to the surface of an atmosphere rich asteroid in panic. old age struck them heavily and a pantheon was constructed to discuss retirement packages. they first invited the equine people to rest with them at the cost of their language, conscience, and intellect. They would agree on the following conditions; they kept their memories of their comrades, that their bodies on the circling children known as Death would bloom into gardens, and that they would remain innocent creatures in their ignorance. the ennui of Creation called for the development of an intriguing servant species to ride the equine, but also be spoiled and starved throughout the gods retirement. As the final sacrifice in the equine uprising resolution, gravitational math / returning of soul to the body ten times plummeted into Deaths core and allowed the servants, or people, to rest by the weight of their being.
remember, the children live upstairs
new gods blossomed into a movement. divisions and procreations torrented through the higher power, giving depth and layers to the people below. they tended to a fresh god, the youngest celestial known as Soul Food in a Communal Garden. they worked with allegiance to the primordial stars, Anger and Patience, but the gods’ celebratory copulation made room for distraction from the meekness of early people. The curse of Negligence unfolded after his discovery of the couples reunion. Negligence and his tears dehydrated him out of existence and flooded the garden below. Regrettable Mistake, partner of Anger and Negligence, had been pregnant to term when she heard of lost Negligence. Her daughter was born as Suicide, the namesake and post-parted depression of her mother. the flood spared no fauna and from the psyche of people, Soul Food in a Communal Garden divided into 3 gods (ego, id, superego). The Cemetery is a single stone that was revealed in one section’s mudslide. all the dead plants and sleeping people were piled together beneath this stone and a garden was repaved over the soil by all living hands. Treeforts began as a colossal oak that folded it’s limbs to protect a nymph of which it was found. the nymph invited up the people that remained and the few that accepted received individual tree forts. their descendants would always seek shelter in solitudinous nature. a smaller number of the id-bark people found one or two others to let in to the treeforts, but only after a mystery laden emotional hunt was completed for each other’s understanding. the final garden god was Organization, a regenerative people tilling the land and communicating effectively. these people and their progeny will reap the rewards of sustained real estate. they live in the mud where they conduct deals and superegos and such.
remember, the children live upstairs.
as the people grew, Expectation felt both hopeful and jealous of their fortune. with Habit, they birthed Romant. Romant fell in love instantly and vowed never to love another. his love died almost immediately in tragic accident and Romant created the Afterlife to chase her; he also created Heartbreakingfailure to feel driven. the souls from the Cemetery all followed Romant between the sacrificed heart of Gravitational Math and the initiation of NewBabylon, or the surface world wherever a chair is sitting next to a bookshelf. in this new realm, Afterlife worked eighty hours a week with little managerial experience. requesting assistance, Organization was brought in as a consultant to advise on the situation. the underrealm endured chaos from overcrowding. this underground nightmare jaw needed to be divided into separate space for kindness and malevolence. one would be called Intergenerational Neighborly Kindness, and the other Moth Faucet, each with gods to reign. seemed simple, one group bakes pies for the house next door and the other sucks their mouth around a pump of furry insects. the horror and beauty of each inspired people to believe that the gods of the afterlife were adjudicators for placement. the truth is that assignments are random.
remember, the children live upstairs
Romant was successful when he remembered the neighbor his love would visit as the neighbor had aged and ailed decades ago. his love was waiting on the steps, thinking about Romant. their child, Lasting Trust Communication and Sexual Desire had a transformative childhood and grew up with flawless development. after a near perfect mark education, Lasting Trust Communication and Sexual Desire chased a wild hermetic vagabond life and took pictures of naked people. Of this feral mating spree came two other gods, Laughter and Forgiveness, each of which born into fatherless homes. Anger adopted them both for their resilience. at first they were the gentlest of children. yet after time, Laughter adapted the cruelty of Anger, whereas Forgiveness was frequently sneaking out after curfew. with ingenuity, Forgiveness crafted a conveyor belt of Anger’s cognac bottles camouflaged with rose bushes. when Forgiveness was out on a walk, she found Heartbreakingfaulure and was struck with infatuation then sprinted back for a plucked rose. their allure strengthened over frequent encounters. after weeks, the thinning of the rose bushes exposed the escape track. when Forgiveness made the decision to attack the persona, apply pressure, and open an innerconversation; Forgiveness summoned more power than Anger and hammered him into the earth. the child of Forgiveness and Heartbreakingfailure was Eternal Growth, the last god to be born.
remember, the children live upstairs.
One god that sought to challenge Destruction evolved from Organization. this was Capital Gain. besides constructing a market and enlisting sponsors for fear mongering advertisements, the input output machine of exchange burrowed in our attention. people felt they were at a loss, even when asking for necessities. the need for status, class, amenities, materials, exotic pets, assets, sets of vaults, vaulted expectations, touch or take jail time all bundled into an eighteen month budget. Destruction targeted their resources. the adaptive and agile Capital Gain burgled new industries of their character or culture. only their bureaucracy was weakness. knowing this, Destruction enlisted Risk to forward repeatedly conflicting memos that bottlenecked the operation. after the sabotage, Capital Gain remains watched by people from menial means, the blue collar Geiger counter for unfettered greed. the last purchaser of a factory hat was Heartbreakingfaiure, now referred to as A Soaking Hat on a Head that Never Turns, wanders aimlessly, dangerously close to the countdown. people sometimes catch this hat brushing past commoners at a frigid humid dusk.
remember, the children live upstairs
worship any gods, or perhaps even
the equine race, as you please.
their lives are
cyclical, repeating endlessly. furthest from who we are
is the Anger or Patience in us,
both manifesting only against radical behavior.
in pure forms. they skip the nuance of social wants and
variations because
they are unbalanced for. Ekwus
is the tongue of teeth,
the universal constant,
reassuring vitality.
Connotatively interpret this as you would.
there is balance in your
being, shaped in organic broken pieces.
make sacrifices to these gods. know when to
humbly accept them among you
and when to expel them from their interference. you are
an important scion like the finger
of time. the blood in your veins is strong like gravitational math.
you are as much god as Ekwus, just a bit younger. so be honest
and fuck up
a bit.
the universe was divided for you.
early morning ember eyes, i remember the fifth of november
free spirit of the belfry, you left me Bastielle broken and
liberated, stuffed stomachs of guillotine nuggets, suicide romance
for celestial emancipation. nothing would be this nice.
an angry patient of lovelillness, lilting with discovery
charm, drawn words of loss and harm.
accented and deranged, the inner monologue will try to
understand its own irrationalizations. you will put this behind
you, call it water, call me the bridge
please
you are a mosaic of abeyance
your exoneration is docility
it is in the color codings of wall paper that i realize this
a small ptosis makes your shape and the yellow ribbon in
the snow is laying against my forehead just before the ice lands.
i’ll kiss the roots and reused water bottles until you know
a home of some kind. out of peculiar compassion
i lashed out and hurt you when
horseplay doesn’t apply here. to pliable words,
give it back. give me our bad bed jokes and stop
so you don’t have to...
the devil tucks a nightgown into his wife’s suitcase.
he is meeting the casual interference of touching an ancient surface.
he thinks about being hungry.
water boils in the kitchen and the air duct whirrs.
he will let go now.
the devil decides to remake himself.
he tends to a dying garden.
the garden doesn’t take it well,
being exposed to secondhand cinder heart and all.
he resolves to fix the ventilation, but do we believe him?
dreaming something sweet, his home is burglarized.
the police are doubtful.
it looks like a fitting emptiness.
the devil hooks up with his insurance agent.
she can’t cook bacon and he’s floored like a fuckin hypocrit.
the devil watches the scorched tendrils.
pomegranate plants gnarling.
he digs them up drunkenly on one early morning.
the devil takes monstrous bites and spits peach pits into holes in the ground.
a great tree grew
he starts cooking classes and takes it seriously.
gets crafty with cobblers
opens a cute shop selling pies in cardboard iron maidens
he gives them to other workers on holidays and throws them
at his ex-wife’s adulterer
read the letters
m.t. - microcosmically tired
the creaky steps of temple goers
in the temple made of bodies
the ceiling tiles leak
i’m just a broken floorboard
too soaked in salt to creak
blackhead kisses - your forehead, myforehead
face me when i’m speaking or you won’t see the blackhead beetles
sitting on their porches, hoping for another ridge to complete the canyon
Their cig butts and antennae trimmings get caught under my beard
white flower spores crawl into the cigs for shelter
they bloom in the night
point out to me somewhere on this map. do it blindfolded or
using a computer modulated random function. we will go there
immediately. i’m packing your hair ties because you will
know what to do when you tie up your hair. there
are more of your things i’m packing with me. we can’t forget
your charcoal toothpaste, it will soothe sore stomachs
and scare the locals.
when you have enough grapes you get a full belly and want to play
games like throwing grapes or squishing grapes.
there’s room for 8 lbs. of grapes. and we might have a t.v.
in our room, depending on where the pin is staked.
i hope your shows are on so i can watch your freckles
highlighted by the screen before you throw grapes at your favorite characters.
this is when i put my hands on your temple and shuffle them until your hair is pulled back and i can get a good look at you.
i’ve got a biig toothy charcoal grin and you start to get one too.
i leave charcoal lip prints all over your forehead until your pores
are clean. we are the same in this new place.
we are the same anywhere on this map.
maybe this match will light it.
locked out from all sides, i
flick matches through rain on
the trash heap. my brain
somersaults circles around this house, comes
back sopping, my spine
a wet rug.
maybe this one will do it.
the raw chicken rotting in Sunkist
makes a drug den out of my trash bin
for flying necro-vours. repugnant
to those that don’t indulge,
the smells draw in these creatures drooling.
they leave buzzed and bloated.
the matchbox is tilted and
pooling water in one corner.
i am reminded of christmas,
and self-worth and fir needles;
all of them piled to a corner.
a disorderly fly slips in with my brain. it stomps
the smell
on my neural rug. the smell
takes on visual form as a consequence.
now the trash bin appears in the image of
sunflowers firing silly string
that evaporates into swallows
and soundless wind chimes.
tempting, yet still foul, i do not grow
wings. instead
my eyes start catching gaps in the rainfall.
maybe this one will light it.
lit phosphorus lands on the plastic and melts
the delusion a bit.
it still might catch
the fly and my brain
borrowed a memory to have coffee and
try to understand one another.
they agree that chicken should
be served next to a sunflower
arrangement.
the wind chimes are meeting crescendo,
the rise of digital grinding
or reversed throat clearing.
the matchbox is half empty if i let it be.
there are two legs growing in
my stomach,
one to break the fall,
one to twist on impact.
they both come in handy
for self shaming
in the days leading up
to christmas.
before i
kick the fly out,
I agree to hear its song.
the song touches upon
the warmth of sun kissed shit.
and the fear that maybe this match will do it.
my brain is getting cold again
and might take another lap.
my brain may
bring back trash or
invite more flies.
the matches will sit and sog
while i wait. all that is waste
and hygiene grows
until i burn it.
if the matches can’t catch,
what do i do?
no motivation since
the swallows leapt from silly
string canisters and matches started campfires and
taking in the world like a kid on christmas used to be a feeling you could find year-round.
we had big dinners before we let food spoil.
what i’m saying is,
we ate food
before i turned my body
into a necro-vour,
a nothing eater,
an air swallower doing nothing but drowning.
we were born as cold endings. we leave unfavorable litterings around riverside benches. our response delays to telecommunication are unparalleled. in our code, the repeated hypocrisy of pride and financial requests further prolongs a deafness to the litany of humility. you may find us, soiled in conscience and overly conscious, scarcely staying awake only to squeeze the feeling a little longer. We will look up from the carpet and lie until our teeth are too obviously whispering to each other. the pieces we promise come up as crumbs. the crumbs we promise already vacuumed by our lips. we suck in everything until we suck in ourselves. sometimes in sobriety, we scream for a prayer and annoy bystanders. every now and then the prayer is dialed and the authorities are summoned. we are only helpful in the way that we help officers earn their keep. it’s weeks of leeching before that. i laugh at the blood spilling from my finger because it looks like turtle calvary. i seal it with a hot spoon, a tiny torched alien saucer. it’s all i’ve laughed at for weeks. the turtles are being experimented on, objective repurposing. my body gets pins and needles too, and i feel a new wave of turtles that want out.
while my left arm limped like a acid rinsed maulstick,
the brush thistle fur stood piloerected on an enamel easel,
adhesive with etiquette.
as if studying a misstroke, i lowered my face to the mouses and
heard the speedy shrieking as if i were a distant jabber
on fast forward.
an impression piece, this glue trap is our starved selves.
without shielding my fingers, i feel an engine through the frame
and rinse myself
in ticks sedated by crumb blood. like turning a dial, entropy
leveled with the mouse for a second so it would have a moment
to speak.
the thumping fell asymptotically. slowly sense and context
began to sweat through the mouse yelps and the language of mice
bellowed, syncopated rhythmically
in a foreign poetic crease. unrehearsed noises, list of mimics,
maybe one of a lover, a parent, a gathering partner, a tail biter,
a dying elder, a frightened child, a cannibal, a predator (as best the mouse could),
mice having sex under the house next door;
any potential proctor of judgement day.
entropy caught on to my stopping heart and dropped me off,
where the squealing resumed unintelligibly.
a gloved hand
reached for the brush and canvas, taking a knife for a maulstick.
waking with drooling lateralism
under a well of concussed songs and the headrest item cairn.
we found coked quiescence
between stolen sheets and the
stuffed mouse under your grandma’s jacket
in god’s original morning,
the afternoon.
the mouse’s name is molasses, and she has proselytism
in her thin fabric paws.
we gave her a name smoking laughter. we gave her an item and
another condign name that got caught in your throat silly noodle.
the touch fuses,
and plummets from the clouds we watch
to the eyes we recover. we’re tucking the nominalizations
behind the headrest while snacking on sobriquets.
our snooping creations
find me the least convincing.
the cat is chewing on the queue, and it skips
around the well’s walls. the music tunnels us
to sleep again without the day passing.
there’s a name for this somewhere, me on your side, drooling.
can’t tell if hell’s cough sounds sick. this summoning circle, it’s scribbled angles are squeaking out vesuvian furballs. chalked rugs are singing and reflecting in my eyebag shadows. least spectacular was the fourth coming, where we all sat around and ordered things off the t.v. sickness is the best retreat. from the circle’s center, i command furball demons to lay eggs in the ears of my sleeping enemies. the fur of their young turns them on and they find life enjoyable even during the annoying bits. except when i speak, the spawn turn thistly.
the microwave is erupting from molten solenopsin and directionless fury. call steve, he’ll fix it. Once we dreamed of drinking over an escarpment from the mountain’s foot. on that ledge, i’m still drinking; my friends are surprised to find the giant’s heel unlatched from a cave sandal before it buries them. impromptu graves, a volcanic glass tomb and fire ant mound to memorialize.
<— arrival of purchase, chia pet—>
the necrophilic lung loaf of flood plains, it’s
the retreat of the senile raindrops too moistureless to ripple.
wrinkled colors in the stealth breath of apneia,
sage tenderness in telepathic tick death, tech speak,
a garden of cubed tomorrows shared by lovers, separated by
a hospital curtain. they will tell you something
i didn’t know. We thought life was hell’s maze
and we had to keep death at our right hands to get through it.
bully me with a change of plans,
malignant like myxamatostic church bells, bullied like a sandy
sick plant, dehydrated and bunny-eared. desert of silence, flood
plain of flames. it will be what i never said frequently. it will
be an accommodating question, the locating of your slippers,
the tender poured drink spilling like high tide
port slosh over shaky varicose fingers. until
it is the drip, titration drums, smut smothered white bull
so the next generation will have to speak on our paths. our
escape is clogged even in old age and until
it drains, we won’t know the resurrected taurus, its lapping pool
enclosed by reading benches, bread and empty garden glass for
more tomorrows, speaking loudly
behind the same curtain
under the same sheets,
rippling before their congestion,
drain untouched,
moondrunk
field bunnies
before the swamp.
the cat thinks poorly of your presentation, but even without the laser pointer i find it flawless. you will request your doctoral degree in bunny studies from gape-mouthed rabbit pundits after arguing your thesis that, plausibly speaking, a suburban population of Leporidae are self-domesticating. you’ll submit a grant for rabbit-human integration that afternoon. this was all planned in part by our bitchy language speaking bunny mendicant made perma-guest. years of living with him has left us confined to the second bedroom only, entrance and exit out the fire escape. you, me, and the cat aggregate around you laptop. outside the door, our savings have been poured into a celery palace, leaving us with bunsen-made pesto pasta. our psycho roommate aside, i’m so proudof your work. thank you for sharing those hours with me.
gonna set your hair bundle on
fire to highlight those ember eyes and the residual
pink dye, fading
flame alive again. at a new alter
you are alone with jesus with whiskey until the teapot
screeches and reaches the organ
that shakes loose the sniper rifle. you look at me
through my apophenic shame.
what burns around me is beautiful.
even the string lighting up behind me on the trigger’s
spring, firing shots as the firearm falls. green
again at the bullets pupil, save it for our extinguisher, for
the colder funeral. i lost an hour six months ago that
i wanted to think of you. now i face an extra hour
trying not to think of you or
holy firewater or
your dad’s face deliquesced on the kitchen tile
after it was melted on a gas stove top.
why the shame now baby?
i know it’s not what you wanted, so i just dreamt it
up. Your smug look is the berg between a free-flowing
solution of your laughter, cutting ice.
the torrent kicks at my shoes and i look down to
see all the moments you thought i was funny. now i’m at the altar,
beard ablaze with molten nerves, drying your
laughter to fear. us in the way it is. i beg you to
light the string and empty the cartridge,
and i watch you mouth, “it’s not working”
with a fire extinguisher in your hand
and i look straight up into traffic.