Upon a November morning,

My slumber was made holey
by the piercing rays of autumn’s risen sun
-And burning through my pulpy sheets;
she bathed me in her tangerine tides.

I was slothing in the season’s syrup
when her crackling brush stroked my naked calve,
with the aridity of parched leaves,
sparking my consciousness.

Then the dream I longed to never leave began slipping through my vision like sand through my fingers.

Dizzy me; a drunken ballerina,
stuck in a pirouette,
Spotting both the bed which I laid in and the fleeting dream
I’d soon forget.

Floating across my fibrous floor,
not buzzing nor humming,
but droning my way
to the way I oft went,
I splashed my face with water.

Peering through me groggy drapes at a man who’s features lay stenciled on a crystal painting-
particular in their valleys, hills, and velvet edges,
common in their general function and reflection; common in their definians, textures and patterns-
I remembered I’d forgotten all I’d learned.

Stuck in the steady current of narcissism
I flailed about with thoughts of myself:

Sheathed beneath this skin on me face
stands a shell which never sees a speck of light,
or
feels the fingers of a warm November breeze.

Placid is my globe that lays below;
moved but not moving.
Used but not using.
Practical and sharp;
geometric in its architecture,
luxurious in its composition.

Dressed in vines
like rubied roots
sewn round a boulder,
sits my skeleton
-nestled in a thick weave
of tiny tubular wires.

A hard-drive that could
unravel to the moon and back
is pulsing to my frequency.

What majesty for such a common cathedral!

And then somewhere in the auburn glow
I was struck with a feeling;
intricate and terrifying,
unworldly yet bona fide,
It was gone in the flash of a single strobe
and replaced by a jolt of self-suspecting hypocrisy

Then I remembered



the waking dream,




I failed to complete:





Standing on the edge of a winter's beach, in a thicket of blinding fog,
You asked me how it came to this.
Meticulous and morbid I looked down, then up and set off on my rant:

What do you expect when a group of
overwhelmingly dominant apes
are perpetually conditioned to develop feelings of
inadequacy and greed?

The island is being
run, reaped, and ravaged
by
an infestation
of self-consumed and unaware lunatics,
fetishistic and obsessed with
the limitless acquisition of
popularly perceived power.

Its lord of the flies, friend-

Monsters won't hold hands until
they're finished competing
over
the gain of
their irrelevant and invisible legacies.

Grizzly is he
who starves for
failure to ration the salmon in the stream.
Foolish are we,
who fail to see,
we're all architects
of
this malleable dream.

We self-proclaimed kings,
entitled and blind,
will drink this rock dry,
fill it with smog,
and die in our own filth,
before we loosen our strangling grip
on translucent
power and control.

Like a cowardice gambler,
yellow and
unable to fill his p**** with fervor,
we will continue to uphold
our compromised losing hand,
and smash down those
who call for a hit
with a trembling cane
and
a liar’s twitch.

With each passing opportunity
to change our fate,
we will continue to march
in a straight line
of blind-folded buffoons,
stewing in stubbornness and pride,
stomping towards our own hellish
and
stinking self-destruction.

And with
the bountiful stream
growing parched,
we sit in our small-minded
hierarchical paradise,
sucking each others b***,
drowning our palmettos
to sooth our bottomless belly of gluttony;
crudely
spilling
goblets of water
in fits
of haste
-and all this in a room of mirrors.

without a shovel,
without another vein
of fresh water discovered,
we'll shrivel to prunes.
For
once the stream is
consumed and vacant,
once its bed is
cracked and arid,
we'll watch ourselves
in our mirrored rooms,
drinking our own p***
in a regretful and pathetic
crawl towards death.

Only in the wake
of
our crumbled self-infatuation
will we shed a tear
of
empathy
for
the destruction
of
our sacred home
-heart broken and stinging
with
disappointment
in its formerly favorite child.

The mountains groan
as they rot
in the
thick envelopment
of
grime and waste.
The withered forests-
ghostly and vacant,
branches stretched in silhouettes
of fragile death,
like frail glass skeletons-
frown,
blanketed in a dusty graveyard
of acorns and pine cones.

The willows weep,
bending fragile spines;
splitting at the seems,
shuttering and shattering
under the weight
of a
single skeletal squirrel.

Every animal,
large and small,
wanders
draped
in the pitiful rags
of
desperation and despair;
followed
by a black storm
of
inescapable dread;
helplessness hovering
shallowly beneath
a pair of
deeply sunken eyes.

So
on the eve of our apocalypse,
as you roll your final cigarette,
at the doorstep of the ocean,
I will see beyond your silhouette;
the burning sun about to set-
on the violet-gray horizon.
And I will realize
as I watch your bones,
dancing through your fading flesh,
in a final polka
with the sinking sun,
how great we failed our star and moon,
the earth and everyone.

Tears tumbling
like
falling wax
from a furiously flickering candle,
I will realize
the extent of our

DEMENTIA.

We-
children of an impeccable family,
rocked in the nurturing arms of mother earth,
who,
tirelessly turns on her axis
so to evenly bathe her children
in the feverishly fostering rays of the father sun-
have crawled over each other
in a cannibalistic heap of confusion,
suppressing the technicolor and infinite
expanse of perspectives held by the members of our family,
only to suffocate
the lot of us
in a putrid fog
of
arrogance, greed, and waste.

In the final moments,
riddled with guilt and sadness,
my eyes resting and placid,
as the darkness creeps
over the corpses on the beach,
I forgive
and
bid farewell
to the fleeting auras
of
my fallen and folly comrades.

I know
too soon,
I too,
will join them.

And
as I feel my flesh
begin to fade
with the
receding ribbons of orange sky,
my spirit yawns
and I chuckle
at the insanity of it all.
Huffing heavy breaths
of
the intoxicating grayness,
I wag my heavy chin
from
left to right
and
numbly cackle
in the
shallow depths
of all our darkness.

Formless and forgotten
as
the rippling wave
which washes over my static shell,
I am transformed,
chasing the light of the sun
around the revolving Earth.