Bundle of Joy
My head is full of
ping pong balls
bouncing around.
Plink plonk plink plink plonk.
Constant motion
I can't keep up with.
Little paddles pop
them here and there.
If I am lucky,
they will slowly
make their way
out my ears.
It will be a long, painful birth.
My thoughts are just one big
fricken bundle of joy.
14 years later (or Studio apartment,1999.)
my dog sleeps upon another
mattress
the same music pours on and on
the same dynamics
1:52 a.m.
naked below the waist
behind this table
scar across my left finger
has sealed the gap
to a kind
of fissure
my skin pale from lack of daylight
money burning fast
hair combed back neatly
a class act all the way
outside I can hear the bar
downstairs filling with college kids
and I don’t feel bad for skipping college
or
the last half of high school
now, 14 years later from those classrooms
those kids down there could buy and sell me
within seconds
but I have a nice television
and a modern stereo
some pages published
out of Reseda
and a lust for failure
unsurpassed
by anybody.
Tapping the source.
I kept tapping the surface, then the sheet of ice cracked into a spider’s web traveling forth and prostrating toward the sun-smeared white expanse, driving the cracks into the feet of the chromoly sky until the cracking sounds gave way to the warm water beneath the sheet, and I dove on in.
how can I be stronger if all of my energy is gone?
what doesn't kill me
piles up on my
shoulders
pound by pound
beating down onto my
skin
the weight of all
the horrors I've witnessed
erodes away at my
back
turning my
skin
into dust and dirt
flakes of emotions
brushing away
with each gust of wind
what doesn't kill me
turns my
spine and bones
into wood
an infestation
of termites
crawling throughout
the crevices of my
ribcage
assisting in the
deterioration
of my
hope