Americans eat a lot of mouth cement.

I would like to get a job where I’m paid to stare at a thumbtack instead of a computer.

Should I create a new email account and then enroll that email account in community college so I can accrue more student loans?

When I was fifteen I ran away from home because if poems were fish then they would have long hair.

Do you remember the last time someone caught you eating a pile of freshly raked leaves?

I don’t know what happened to this country’s meat consumption, but I think it moved somewhere and built a wall.

One of my favorite things to do is rub a banana peel on a penny until it rusts.

The summer after my brain fell apart, the town flooded, but no one blamed me I didn’t have a boat.

I heard an interview on the radio recently. I’m not sure who was being interviewed.

If the inside of your shoe becomes discolored caress it with egg whites and milk.

hard animals

On a map, the world is unrecognizable / in a staircase, it becomes cyclical / a rounded jail, a tall bird cage / our every step a bite, a tooth / piano key / hard enamel / hard animal / we gnaw bones / whittle coarse edge into point / carnivores that chew chew chew / tonguing our deep exasperation / and softly, spit it out again / this pulp / this chewing tobacco / our spit filters the earth / our spit a bitter tonic like salt in the wounds of monsters.

dissonance

i. My head a split tire / thick bolt wrench limbs / my bones a tire iron / static and rust, the infiltration of oxygen / you smile and the heat waves falter / shatter in little droplets / against the palm of your hands.

ii. My head a pit fire, a storming wind / thin oxygen thin sky / the smell of a rainfall / interrupted.

iii. This mundane spilling out / we are made inanimate, we are / walking through the motions, wading in fog / tearing into lightlessness like / ripped meat / from the bone.

iv. Running gets us nowhere / I am still here blistering sympathies, insufficiencies / silences stretching their bone hands / round necks, caught on lockets / like lifelines; they call the names of your ghosts.

august looks like winter this year
my drug dealer asked me on a date to go ice skating
i google insomnia and delirium
i look for another doorway in the bathtub n in my bed
it doesn’t matter that we’re gonna die
i feel like im dying often anyway
what’s it like to breathe heavily
across a snowy ocean
an android greets a life sentence

if you pump my stomach
itll just be pink gooey stuff
youll say to the doctor
whats all this? what is that?
the doctor will say
oh..my gosh!
it appears as if shes in love!
or, was in love
the gooey pink stuff clogged up her lungs
and she died
from being in love
we can revive her if we take it all out
you and the doctor take tiny shovels
and start scooping the goo out of my body
i cough a little and come back awake
hey guys!
im back!
the next thing you know,
youre inviting me to your house again
and i bring my ukulele
and by 11pm that night
during our soggy and cold sleepover
im being rushed to the hospital again

*

we are not living in the world.
we are living in a map of the world. a world has been mapped for us. we are given the map as if it did not cover up something, as if there was nothing more. there was the world huge and vast and something that could only be brought to order, vaguely approximated for us to understand it. so we have a map.

*

Yes, you can think in binaries. but know that both are true. both are lying. become okay with this and you may exist within them and then one day you die and do not exist at all.

be happy right now.

*

**

lets try to summarize.

we are on this rock, with our small window of the universe and our rock’s pattern of movement predicating our general actions and motivations and moods. this pattern and the placement of the rock we’re on within the universe and a whole bunch of other crazy tiny things, like bits you can’t see or feel are happening all together. and because of this, we are alive. struggling to find meaning in the world. crying all the fucking time. trying not to cry. holding it in. holding it together. trying to hold it together.

you see what i mean? everything is fucking horrible and everything is so fucking amazing you can’t even imagine it.

you aren’t drinking enough water, i just know it.

*

so people. us. we. human beings. living here on this rock. feeling the change of the seasons, the pull of the tides. the water in its various forms. feeling all this every day for our whole lives until we die and don’t feel it anymore.

you know, sometimes it feels like we’re all already dead. do you ever feel that? like you’re dead already? like you have died. you are a ghost. you don’t feel the water inside you, the air around you. doesn’t it feel like you haven’t seen the sun in days? doesn’t it feel, sometimes, like you’ve never even really felt the sun at all.

and how many times a day do you realize you are breathing?

*******

sometimes holding a conch shell to our ear is the closest we get to noticing our heartbeat and when it happens we mistake it for the sea.

sometimes we forget we are alive.

****

so, the contents of this rock create change, beget change, if you will. with varying states of water and climate, the contents of the rock force and are forced into change.

this change is awesome. this change is hard and painful.

this is a slow change. this is an infinite amount of changes occurring infinitely.

things just seem to work here, for some reason. for some reason we have plants and we have animals. the plants make something that the animals need to live and the animals make something that the plants need. how fucking coincidentally awesome is that. so necessary, wow. think about that or don’t think about it. you probably aren’t really understanding how amazing this is. thats ok (its not really ok).

*
those moments of helpless clarity

sometimes in life there are small, brief moments of helpless clarity when we maybe stop for a second and realize:

our every day actions change the trajectory of humanity.

but what can you do with heavy thoughts inside of a small cage? i hope you have cried today. its ok. i love you.

***
said it before and i’ll say it again

weed. based. economy.
*

picture:

a child crying at their birthday party, because they didn’t get the present they wanted, because the cake was chocolate and not vanilla, because a balloon loudly popped, because not enough of the cool kids showed up, because their father is dead and they just learned that no matter how many birthday cake candle wishes they reserve for wishing he would be alive, it is impossible.

every single reason is okay to cry about.

***

sorry where were we?

Right,

Now I’m going to say something else that you are also going to ignore. its going to be VERY important. but you aren’t going to be amazed or moved or surprised. because its ‘obvious’, because you ‘already know this’, here it goes.

stop ignoring children.
they are and always will be more important than you.

are you surprised? you don’t seem surprised. God do you remember being a child? a varied blend of insignificance and confusion, curiosity and vulnerability. Children are important. Like wow. They are tiny half formed humans. They are potential and growth and contain limitless possibilities. Here are some song lyrics to back up my argument:

“teach your children well” - crosby stills nash & young
“I believe the children are our future” - whitney Houston

SIDENOTE:

If this all sounds ridiculous or not important or anything other than very true and very important, let me just remind you that the mere fact i can use popular culture, i can use commodified song lyrics that were written with the express primary purpose of making a profit, yielding greater return than invested - that i can use these lyrics to prove a point, is frankly, alarming.

you are right to be afraid.

the world is completely fucked up.

the fact that popular culture like this contains truth. that there is truth being presented in a way that many people know, in a ubiquitous way. but that the truth is secondary, maybe not even a personal truth. but used for a very hollow primary purpose. used to gain capital. popularity. wealth. status. power.

if the media is telling us any truth at all
they don’t believe in it themselves

and so we can’t either.

we just can’t be expected (are intentionally not expected) to take the pleas of crosby stills nash and young seriously when we know crosby stills nash and young is looking out for crosby stills nash and young, not the children. crosby stills nash and young are getting paid.

we can consume and understand the truth within whitney houston’s statements but ultimately cast the notion’s importance aside via the capitalistic medium (and intention) that produced it

***

of course we are lonely, the planet is lonely. every night we have to look up in the sky and see things we will never touch or know or reach. that is lonely.

*

***

Josh arrives in california

he is wary

it is dry

he gets off of a bus or out of a car or some vehicle that uses gasoline that has driven him to this point. it is the eighth of august two thousand sixteen and he is walking the rest of the way up to this monastery thing.

it’s up a mountain and it’s pretty chill one of josh’s friends had said to josh. josh is thinking about this as he walks up the mountain. he wants to feel pretty chill. the world is ending.

along the way he sees pine trees and a somewhat barren landscape that is both alpine and desert. it is alive but just barely and very rustic and josh does believe it will be chill.

after about fifteen minutes at a steady incline the landscape begins to lose meaning. it becomes colors of muted greens and dark greens and ochres and beiges of several kinds and rectangles and triangles and thousands of pixels of shapes and colors.

Josh stops to smoke a pre rolled weed cigarette he has been keeping in a tin in his backpack as he sits under the dry shade of a large coniferous tree adjacent to the road he is following.

he resumes his walk up the steady incline towards the monastery on the mountain.

this seems chill he thinks
and now

wow those trees are beautiful

***

The cursory readings are unnecessary. He knew. He knows. Key phrases and their outputs - quarterly, biannually, annually, biennially, quinquennially, centennially, decennially, quadranscentennially. The data did not have to go back that far.

Boy it sure is beautiful outside.

The trends have always been present, and consistent, and exponentially increasing. Certain keystone shareholders preventing the implementation of recommended practice policies, or rather, recommended practice policies have been implemented by certain keystone shareholders. Local and global food generation statistics. Freshwater supplies. Transportation costs. Material repository and/or golf course zoning statuses.

Between setting the dynamite, lighting the fuse and hiding from the explosion, at what point did you destroy something. Was it you who actually destroyed it. How culpable in the destruction is the inventor of dynamite. The worker who built the dynamite, the worker who built the machine that built the dynamite. Is it destruction if your intention is creation. if the explosion creates a mine, creates a tunnel.

He knew. And he knew that everyone knew.

Today can still be a good day.

*******

a sociological paper, written by karl marx

called utopia realized: a speculative study on the route to sustainable and equitable social harmony

this was found in a drawer.

it had been eaten and piss stained by mice. but here was his solution. Very clearly, he wrote about the future, our past, present, maybe what was coming. in light of everything going on, it was actually soothing. news of this was soothing. to know someone knew, someone saw this coming. they saw past whatever was happening to us right now.

***

THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT: PATTERNS

The concept of everything being everything else doesn’t just sound beautiful, its also freakishly true. Everything is a pattern. We are the result of patterns and chain reactions. If the fact that everyone has generally more or less ten fingers and ten toes and two arms and two legs is so blatantly obvious a pattern as to be ignored completely, it might help you to study the plants a while longer the next time you are outside.

Notice how the veins in the leaf of the tree look eerily similar to the branches and how the branches look eerily similar to the roots. Now look at the veins in your hands.

Everything has a pattern. Try very hard to look for it.

The following is a brief list of examples of where these patterns can be found:

• river networks
  
• fault lines
  
• mountain ranges
  
• craters
  
• lightning bolts
  
• coastlines
  
• mountain goat horns
  
• trees
  
• animal coloration
  
• romanesco broccoli
  
• pinapples
  
• heart rates
  
• heartbeats
  
• earthquakes
  
• snowflakes
  
• psychological perception
  
• crystals
  
• blood vessels
  
• ocean waves
  
• DNA
  
• soil pores
  
• rings of saturn
  
  

they are everywhere
*

sometimes. when i look outside, into nature. i see only the patterns that nature makes.

its sometimes so difficult to process the world for how it is, for how each thing is so unique, how can this uniqueness exist. how does this go on like this. how can there be so many flowers. how can there be so many winged insects. any wings at all.

but each thing has a pattern so similar to the next. we may not be able to process everything for how it is, but we can understand the simple additive motion of how it has become.

and its all a variation of the same thing.

***

A STEP BACK: NATURE AND THE ELEMENTS HOW WE OVERLOOK THE STARS AND ALL THE REST OF IT: AN INFORMAL REVIEW

so there are four season we go through, winter spring summer fall

four elements we need for survival, earth air water and fire

no this isn’t everything, don’t say oh there’s more, yeah i know there’s more, there’s always more.

but this is the least we have and need. the very fucking least. we have these things and we need them. the seasonal changes and shifts. the coincidental necessity and availability of the elements to create life in myriad forms.

so it just so happens we have these things. absolutely ridiculous chances of this happening if you ask me.

i mean my god, the moon, have we talked about the moon yet?? the sun? have we gotten to the sun?

there is so much to get too i’m afraid we won’t have time for it all.

**

life is oscillations
concentric circles
spirals
infinity signs
loops
you spend your life in cycles
of cells
of relationships
of moods

you spend your life escaping and entering
you spend your life in a state of change
that is itself a paradox

the state is change, the change is consistent
have you ever watched a wave move before
its like that
the crest of the wave
the way something can be carried
the way it carries itself
consistently changing
somehow cohesive in shape
in direction
in form
but
the wave is not the water
the water is constantly changing
inside the wave
the water
the same water
becomes the next wave
the wave moves through the water
it is a constant state of change
it is a constant

we build lives in order to begin new lives

that is the hope
that is the goal

that is the ideal

we build our lives hopefully in order to trade them in for new lives
we build ourselves whole
and then (ideally)
we find someone who has also built themselves whole (ideally)
who loves the whole we have built as perfectly as possible
and then
it is dissolved away.
we begin a new life with someone, we begin a relationship

again we start to work on our life together in order to trade it in for a new life
we work on bringing both halves of each other
we have somehow found together into a whole
we build security for ourselves, we build functionality (ideally)
we build ourselves as tightly together as possible (ideally)
as perfectly as possible
and then
it is dissolved away.
we begin a new life together, with a child

this is the best. case. scenario.

this child will watch us die.
hopefully.

you are building something and it is always changing and it is almost already gone and this is life.

this is the goal
to build something as well as it can be built
so it is ready to be destroyed as it becomes something else

this is the ideal
and nothing in reality is ever the ideal.

*

NOBODY KNOWS HOW A BUTTERFLY WORKS
NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT DISSOLVES ITSELF
HOW IT REMEMBERS TO BECOME SOMETHING INSTINCTIVELY
THAT IS HAS NEVER BEEN BEFORE
NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT CAN DESTROY ITSELF
WITH SUCH PRECISION AS TO BECOME SOMETHING
THAT CAN FLY AWAY

*

NOBODY KNOWS HOW A BUTTERFLY WORKS BUT IT PROBABLY WORKS JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE

---