"Take Me Home"

I can't write poetry anymore. For the twelve millionth time in my life I stare at a yawning universe of blank paper and find no godly imperative to populate it with the spindly architecture of stunted lines or microscopic stills of the burning panoramas of my dreams. I can't wend some cohesive thread through a complex of emotional truths and somehow remain unscathed by sentimentality or moments of weakness. And yet, try to square this with the literal combustion in my ribcage; my current iteration brimming with "how I really feel about things" and a spectral honesty that I once-only-and-still-best muster quite late at night.

And so instead I try to orchestrate grand fictional schemes, like throw everyone into the fire and burn off their weakness and challenge them to duels with themselves and narcotize their epiphanies and strand them someplace. But this is always what I've done best: shoot from the hip with swagger and sentience, scatter my suffering asymmetrically so you can feel your teeth clack, bang my head against bulldozers, press my back up flat against walls so the impact is not absorbed but shatters my limbs like ceramic. . . Anxiety my lacquer and laxative and language.

You've magnetized me, so the iron in my blood stands at attention and erects abstract sculpture signifying the innumerable times I thought the my Life was over.