hot's shit

1.

Every day when the sun climbs the rungs of the sky
I will for it to lose grip and slide back down
Beneath the horizon, embalm the earth in cool darkness
I can’t take another day because I haven’t finished all the ones before
But you must, and somehow you stretch to accommodate just one more
And you stretch your hand to scan your tapcard
And you stretch your leg to climb up the steps
Light burns my scalp through the bus window
And as I stretch my neck in discomfort I wonder
What do you do when you want to go home
But you’re already at home?

2.

Hour-day-week-months
Whatever human increment you so desire
Pick up the cassette. The one with its tape pulled out. Rewind it in an instant: a reflex
Skipping across time, the smoothest stone clipping the surface of a lake
And suddenly you’re face to face again only this time you tell yourself
You’re better, kinder, more incisive
And all the same you are suddenly worse, selfish, weakened
By tendencies/by tenderness
A conical sonic boom of trauma indented in the angelic core, Israfel’s

“u-n-me”

With great effort you turn and connect gazes
The tender being’s eyes opalescent with soap tears
And you’re no linguist but who doesn’t understand when someone
Looks at you with the expression of
“You can do more
But not better”

3.

Come, revel in your fantasies
An eel writhing in open seas
Intrusive thoughts—no, lucid dreams
“Contemporary memories”

And now I turn the tap off and step out onto the floormat
Pick hairs out of the drain and flick them at the toilet bowl
What’s more free, I ask as my ears drip bathwater
Than something that isn’t where it’s supposed to be?

4.

What clothes do you wear on your body
In a world that is continually updating its signifiers
Refreshing
Overhauling and reassigning
Do you want to restart your computer now?
The most reliable fluctuation

What principles do you hold true to yourself
In a world that will punish you and glorify you
To the most extreme extents
For the same singular belief
Deliverance in deviance
The eternally lasting alloy

What words do you say to someone you love
In a world that will pin your limbs in the sand
Twist at an unnatural angle
Make it hurt
Just to point at the droplets of your blood sizzling in the hot dust and say
Look, you bleed and therefore
You know you are a human
As if I wouldn’t know that
Without having been forced to suffer
As if I haven’t been human my whole life
We ride boats toward creamy sunsets
And we don’t need to choke on seawater and foam
To realize that the ocean is beneath

5.

Today is splendid, they say
No, today is just Splenda.
To live in the world today
Is to walk in place along the perpetual fanbelt
Toward things that will always stay just out of reach
But justify it by saying “it’s about the journey”
As for myself I like to walk backwards
And dive for old fruits that will never ripen
Because sometimes you can’t help but crave
That sourness
The only way to remember
How sugar tastes

6.

Identify as un/deserved

Bill: external negative energy
Coming in just x payments over the rest of my life
A drug received, inhaled, intravenous, steadily delivered
Slowly accumulating before boiling over periodically
My fingers being popped one by one under an army boot

Re-becoming yourself is like viewing a photon. I wear my heart over my bones and now that I want to wear something else, God/lingering karmic force blocks out the sun with a blanket of shame

Sometimes you can stand under the open sky, mouth agape
You can let all the responsibility precipitate onto your face and down your throat
And you still can’t wash off the mud your feet are trapped in
You know what...someone must have mixed their superglue into it

“I’ve been to paradise
but I’ve never been to me”

7.

“Why do you say my name, even though it hurts you?”

I do it to expel you from my body
The initial sting of slicing open skin
is nothing next to the fruit that grows within the flower
You are reduced to one second snippets of tenderness, a montage of the softest bits I’ve ever encountered in the wild
Rattling my head like balls in a bingo cage
I’m sick
I cough. Small sharp breaths thru my nose
As if respiration conduces elimination
Fearing the day that I wake up and can no longer
Hear the memories loosely jingle in my brain-pocket
Because that is when I’ll know the wet pavement has hardened
And I’ll sense it before I think it because I won’t be able to lift my head without feeling that dense sunken weight, my little concrete cloud
And no god has a chisel long enough
To reach the bottom
Of the well of my unfathomable yearning

And I would open my mouth
And say more than just your name
“if I wasn’t afraid of inhaling
a memory I want to forget”

8.

Nobody wants to think they’re the bad guy
And at the same time
The moment I feel the most evil
Is when I unpeel the wrapper
And swallow the mint of self-righteousness
That I need to counterweigh my repentance
Nutrition for contrition
“trades?”

9.

“How much more growing up is there to do?”

I ask myself as I watch the 66 bus depart without me
Tires spinning
Me spinning in the whirling turbulence
Of finding “my place” physically/financially/
Psychically
Get happy, get hurt, rinse & repeat
Washing machine spinning
The clock at the studio spinning
Just a bit faster, I will it
Every moment it’s like
Find money/yourself, lose money/yourself
Who am I? The money i spend (“spin”d)
And without money? Just the uncomfortable part (fidget, no spin)
I’m rambling
Both right now and in my daily routines
and I’m oddly tired
For a mindless robot
I guess spinning takes AA batteries

At some point though
You stick your foot out and drag it in the sand
To slow the roulette wheel
And you realize that all along
Growing up has been
The goal of a lifetime