there’s a wall around us
it’s invisible & mute
& we drink too much & fuck too soon
smoke cigarettes in flophouse rooms
we quit our jobs & shoot the stars
& cut our wrists & sleep on mars

03:36 on a Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at my monitor with fluorescent lights screeching through my eye, thinking about last week, thinking about wanting,  – work 7-7 in the office, and the place silent ethos of quiet desperation. I feel tired.

The movie drained me dry last night, and the ride home was just insufferable, rain pouring in ink sheets. Just wasting my time, burning my days with work and stressing out about the things that must needs get done and who I owe money and what, and who do I owe favors to this week, family or friends, and how did I end up with my entire life mortgaged to vapid day dreams and sneering generosities. Why do people who can’t write actually write short stories for the Amazon Short Story Contest and then send me pleading emails to read their crummy bullshit stories.

Why? Here’s a hint, and yes, I am a dick: you must read to write – and if you aren’t reading, your writing is crap. Don’t write about sex if you haven’t read Lady Chaterly; don’t write about betrayal if you haven’t read Shakespeare, don’t write about consciousness if you haven’t read Spinoza and Dimasio, and don’t write about the soul if you can’t quote Aquinas. Please.

there’s a wall around us
we are heady, we are groundless
& we burn our friends & kill their names
build insecure & petty fames
& tattoo things that we believe
skulls & bones & hearts in half-sleeves

I was thinking about her poem to me, “To Touch Versimilage,” and thought to myself as burnt French roast rolled down my throat and left sparks of pain in my fragile mind, that I would not write this as I would not imagine My lines in their crippled geometries scaled up for another evening thinking about her. True, there remains in all this a civil resolution though perhaps one without the absolute values, 23 pairs of chromosomes & Euclidean geometries conceit, a plunder of concentric betrayals and ludic impostures; I have new material and, some say, my own ghost’s lyricist, unSpooling secretly among the marginalia of my recipes, diaries, dialectic homilies, folding myself into a repertory of nocturnal maneuvers, and looking good from a distance, but fading fast, and just holding on. So I will write this and publish it for her. Maybe she’ll see that we are all a bit complicated, and that is okay. We’ll be fine.

there’s a wall around us
tell me how is it you’ve found us
cause we hide our tracks & watch the ground
our footfalls they don’t make a sound
we’ve cursed the names of our hometowns
we’re compass less & nowhere bound