to be deleted.

Finally there's nothing else  except pen and paper,  your rodent heart,  and shoveling away the carrion,  hosing away the scum.  Your social media coma  ends with you straightening  your tie, warm, soft as honey,  razorblades gently disposed.  It can be sadistically overwhelming,  the promise of you  threatened by the promise of you.  Trolls repeating gossip in the  subbasement of your thoughts,  you practically carve the letters  into the page, tattooing evil into  evil while the clouds melt  away, anxiety scattered on everything.  **** 

The camera posted in the ceiling oscillates to the right and I feel like I forgot something. I think too much about sex, I think, or I think too much about things there are no answers for. Coffee in a stolen cup getting cold. Bears infuriated by the smell of cheap beer. I lazily humor myself with car-music memories and Tim O'Brien's July, July breaks my heart into its original pieces. There's an atheist playing salesman knocking on our building's door. I'm not a deva I just have a fondness for tobacco. The camera posted in the ceiling oscillates back to the left like the operator forgot something. I've paid all my bills and my enemies are in prison. If you think that life makes sense it's almost certain you agree with mistakes.  **** 

She could feel her integrity slipping to chance & mischief like the hollow promise of a seizure. Thoughts of prolonging sickness, her mother's disappointment and the pragmatic steps to organize a funeral were just marginally overtaken when she decided to call the doctor. Talpur's waiting room asymmetrical to the noise inside her. A little boy racing between storybooks and puzzle toys while his pregnant mother filled out forms. She held herself and waited her turn. His Pakistani fingers on the small of her back through the paper gown and her bare feet hanging from the examining table. "Breathe in," he said. She breathed in. His serious eyes were quite mournful. Some alien rumor of death winding through his stethoscope. "Breathe out." She breathed out. "Have you experienced any fainting? Lightheadedness? Dizziness?" No, just a headache and mild nausea, but it comes and goes and you just want it to be over. "I see." She couldn't help...

Evicted from Paradise for minor infractions,  they moved into the forest of mortality,  without saints or martyrs or any direction  than that contained in themselves.  Reptiles studied the newly migrating creatures  and each wondered about the other's inclination  toward God.  For years on end, they fought and hustled  and never was eternal salvation expected.  They liberated themselves from worshipping  a deaf creator and chose to dream and be  buried in noble dirt.  As though the truth of loneliness  were discovered in the forbidden apple,  as though the one who planted it  meant nothing and their Sin  watered every tree.  **** 

It was between late-May and early-June 2017,  and this older Cuban man on General Relief  would sip beer and smoke cigarettes while reading  a newspaper outside the Echo Park library.  I was homeless. I'd been homeless going on six months  since saying fuck off to this predatory goblin of a man  I'd lived with for almost a year in a convenient effort  to escape being homeless.  Since all I had was New York foodstamps and  what I could panhandle (just until I found that  pot of gold all my friends have told me about)  that Cuban man's generosity was one of the very few  things I could count on (besides a free lunch at  the Church near Chinatown and sleeping under  a tree at night.)  I didn't have much to say. I was between suicides,  struggling against despondency with less effort  than I can ever remember....  And the Comey Investigation was going on, the country  either thought or maintained ...

Inside my 2nd least-favorite gas station,  for the moment, I just need a pack of cigarettes.  But this overexcited foreigner  is determined  to get on my "good side."  He keeps asking me how work  is going  like I've brought it up before  or he and I have things in common  or he's not one of countless people  doomscrolling my browser history.  I get my cigarettes (and all the  change this time!) and while  this moron presses his empty  luck through regurgitated small  talk, I tell him how unconvinced  I am and remember to go  somewhere else next time.   **** 

The fuse-wires that connect hard human thirst to the logical  actions of our daily lives is designed and capitulated by many hands.  The threat of owning less, the embarrassment of knowing more: they harass weak minds with deep wallets, build impressive mausoleums from modest libraries.  Listen to the hardhats bitch about their wives dead vegetable souls, the sound of better tomorrows none had the blood to pursue.  **** 

Read enough news about national deficits,  the environment, increases in suicide,  it's fair to say our elders have lost their grip on Empire Building.  Sustaining hope for the return of Christ is  either key, now, or it's wisest to do away with  the charity and chastity that routinely ends in grief.  I used to give the average man some benefit  of the doubt, held my breath hoping  he'd do better than amassing platitudes  and worldly ambivalence  like so many baseball statistics....  No more. Let them etch out their epitaphs  with their own hands.  Let their children inherit a 9-to-5 landscape  of sore legs and hollow dreams.  Shoot their Camels, burn down their houses,  and wish their children and their widows godspeed.  Their charade of dignity won't be missed.  ****  

Grown men with families and  steady jobs  in desperate need of some wonder,  married  to sheepish wives who in turn  are married to vibrators,  move  through the small worlds  they are willing to imagine.  Their Cialis hearts and colorblind dreams  are tossed into the fodder  of an America that pretends to love them:  They bump into me in the supermarket,  in department stores, in gas stations.  They apologize, repeatedly,  making breath  seem like a waste of time.  **** 

 Social media's experiencing plenty of growing pains to anyone paying attention. Evidently, needy/community-seeking racists can disparage however many niggers, bitches, and mathematicians as they please so long as it's in tastefully circumnavigating language...yet if I make a darkly humorous reference to suicide to another user of the platform I routinely follow -- in addition to equally humorously offensive references and responses in the past -- I'm therefore creating an uncomfortable environment to anyone who just happens along my profile and reads said comment. Yuh-huh.  I'll be here and on YouTube and walking and driving around if anyone cares to reach out directly.  Or if you're really off your socially-acceptable rocker you can feel free to text me at 914 538 0260.  Unless you're a talking cup of coffee. In which case, I assume you're the one sending all those psychic messages without the luxury of Space Billboards, which I'm thinking aren't a...

Blasé  housewives search for  bullies and plagiarists  beneath  the incandescent ceiling  of the supermarket.  With the intensity of caged  animals  they wonder if Abraham lacked commitment or  if his god  truly relieved him of that burden...  Their sons read microwave directions  when they read anything at all.  Their sons pool up money to  buy used cars or steal  anything they can  as long as someone's looking.  The blasé housewives with Democratic jealousy  and Republican gossip exchange  familiar niceties, one  desperate ear to another.  Their husbands ignore them. Their daughters  focus on everything like a Rubik's cube.  Beneath the incandescent ceiling of the supermarket, you  notice this angry woman repulsed by a monkey with flowers.  **** 

Whereas misinformed nostalgia can only lead to foolishness and lame confidence in superstition, some practical/accidental yearning can render such doubt into extinction.  With this in mind, consider the following: My father had his fifth heartattack in 25 yrs. when I was living by myself and suffering from every lie, insecurity and assumed-value of everyone around me. I became very suicidal and checked myself into the hospital. And along with some new faces and a more-familiar social life than I'd known in over a year, I got to navigate some new insecurities, lies, and a different kind of value altogether.  That is, we had a t.v. room with comfortable chairs and one perfect, democratic night, they had the original Charlie & the Chocolate Factory playing, and between me and the others on the psych ward, you could feel this indelible innocence, some cross-channel, resistant to insanity and decay where all our meaningful  and meaningless scars are reduced  to topogr...