why I rejected your friend request

This one is for my friends

Who wonder where i’ve been

Hiding – just out of their sight

Or deep in the funkhouse

I measure my worth like I

Measure my days – sometimes

I don’t fully inhabit the person in

the images I show to the world

On such days when it takes a little more,

I turn to tea or toast or poetry

But sometimes I must sit down and

Confront some dizzying questions

I think my face rather ugly then

I look lost and slow and chubby

So my focus shifts to better expression

As soon as I am reminded of this

It is not for me, not, certainly,

In this lifetime, to live up to your ideals

But maybe once I start controlling

My facial expressions -  I’ll say hello

Carpe...damn.

Wake up calls work for

those who are asleep, and not

for us who keep our eyes closed

wilfully explaining away

every lost opportunity

as one that never was found

what does it mean to

stand up for myself

and discount the doubt for a minute

to take a clean confident plunge

into the unknown depths

it could be beautiful

it could mean wishing i’d

done it sooner and better

it could mean learning a lesson

but what i will never know by crawling

back under my own oppression

i will never know at all.

Too many times

Too many times

It has happened that you overreach

And bring to ruins a carefully

Calibrated reality

It is no longer allowed 

to look the other way

As the constant friction remoulds

your differences into opacity

Surely there's more to understand

Perhaps the hour is not now

Perhaps this is all you will have

And other things may begin to matter.

shed your sticky angst

But before you walk away lighter

put down these words in a cool, dry place

a poem is a safekeeper

Carne

I ate half a bird yesterday

and it (the eating, not the bird)

led me to contemplate,

if poems are gentle, compassionate?

Let me explain, I stake

no claim in kindness banks;

but death is not always,

a matter of unkindness

And we are trapped in 

bodies flawed. The goat it

bleats, the cows fidget

And I will never figure out a widget.

Are we vulnerable to precision?

The killing machine is the same for me

and you and all the animals

(do you think they think they're free?)

I've toed the line of agency to 

practice the art of the possible.

Still the world has failed to well show me

how bacon can be the smell of evil.

scene

Trust slipped loose, and the shingles

sprinkled like salt on the open wound.

One by one all day we hear

the faultlines crack and wait, look around;

for the crash that will always take you by surprise.

Outside The Box

It gets stranger in the night,

a time of cold, suspended sight.

the nub of my wrist in your strong embrace,

and the taste of summer rain.

We burn by the candle's wick,

drown in the swirling intrigue.

You hold me by the nape of my neck

and fear chokes my gullet.

Strangers love like stowaways,

hungry and funny by turns.

Hysterical. The red is from the wine.

Oh, but some of it is mine.

I bear no scars from secret trysts;

I play well known outsider's tricks.

I go where strange friendships are found,

and return like clay, unmade.

Break your own heart and mourn it well;

the love of self is a lesson in hell. 

And tortured souls arrive at the place, 

none too soon and a little too late.

Words don't count for much, except when they come along like this

The Crime is Never Perfect, Jean Baudrillard

__________________________________________________________________________________

To contemplate our face would be madness, since we would no longer have a secret for ourselves, and would therefore be wiped out by transparence.

The mirror does not give me my true appearance. I only know myself in reflection, such as inside me I will never be. But it is like this for every object, that only comes to us definitively altered, including upon the screen of our brain. All things thus offer themselves without hope of being anything other than the illusion of themselves. And it's good this way.

Luckily the objects that appear to us have always already disappeared. Happily nothing appears to us in real time, any more than the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars in the universe would behere at once -- in real time -- and the vault of the sky would be of an unbearable incandescence. No more night -- perpetual day. Happily nothing takes place in real time, otherwise we would be subjected, through information, to thelight of all events, and the present would be of an unbearable incandescence. Happily we live in the mode of a vital illusion, in the mode of an absence, of an irreality, a non-immediacy of things. Happily all things, the world and others, come to us definitively altered. Happily nothing is instantaneous, nor simultaneous, nor contemporaneous. Happily reality doesn't take place.Thankfully the crime is never perfect.