Short Form

Assorted short form writing - prose poetry, lyrics, journal entries

Three Fine

Staring at the blurry manes,
Hidden brother try.
Twinge of truth that loses footing,
Crying father sigh.
Highway talks in time and hunting,
Angry brother stay.
Mirror practice, safe for travel,
Freezing mother gaze.
Open sores that eat the railing,
Otherwise I'll see.
Ugly food and ugly room,
The folk devils that be.
Deafen up & tell a tale,
Why you ever know?
Build the structures tall & high,
And change what we let grow.
So the fall you saw, the listed flaws,
The tales to let you hide.
Draw up lines to redefine,
Tied up language dies.
Diatribes of failing flesh,
Red-faced anthems sing.
Never learn to let it go,
And let the years all sting.
Lived a 30 year war,
Lived the teenage pride.
You're just as sick as me now,
But I know I'm alive.

Evangelist

Thinner now,
All neighbor screams and blank stares carpet lives.
No more sleep,
Just thoughts and scraps of people drawn in lines.
Turn away,
All surface lives that bless us numb and dry.
Sound them off,
They carry tunes that you can’t place in time.
Future gone,
Their curtain call to leave your heroes blind.
Stories old,
Those useless sounds weight the hollow shine.
Muddied dial,
Too clouded by faces scrawled with signs.
Faded out,
We’ll soak ourselves in pools of pious minds.

F for Fake (song lyrics featured in zine accompanying Serena Alma Ferrario exhibition "Ich erinner mich wir waren alle verdammt cool", 2014)

All their eyes
Staring at the shadows in front of them.
Hands make time,
Shake the fear and laugh, make fun of them.
No one grows,
Smear the paint of people all over them.
Play their roles
And pass their eyes and doubt straight onto them.

Growing and try to turn around,
It's this town, it's this town,
It'll always drag me down.
I can see,
That you're reaching and you're trying to reach me.
Never you, never grew,
This is something you can't do.
It's not here, it is gone,
It'll always be this way.
Try to be a person
While their frozen in today.
I am gone, I am gone.
But this is something less.
Looking back, drawing lines,
I know it's not a mess.

Tired of their youth,
Leftovers of people I once knew.
Here to make it whole,
Draw the lines and move away from you.
The skeletons they draw,
They jump and fall and sink into it all.
Gonna leave it sore.
The cold small pond where they all rise again.

Visitors (song lyrics featured in zine accompanying Serena Alma Ferrario exhibition "Ich erinner mich wir waren alle verdammt cool", 2014)

Make it plain, leave it out
In your time.
Step away, moving on
Twist his mind.
Haunt the lives of surface kids
With dreams of me.
Level you out, see your cross,
It sets me free.

You stare back at me
I read, I write.
Your roots plant the seed
Mirror my time.
I sear, I burn
Pieces of truth.
Come back, show me
People you knew.

Dirty Coffee (taken from Psychiatric Letters)

Thin and murky.
Add sugar, add milk.
Still thin and murky.
Dirty water, dirty coffee.
You and me are brothers,
I mean friends.
You’re my friend.
Kind nurses and psychotic roommates are too distant.
Too impenetrable.
Not you, I see through you.
You’re cheap, just like me.
You don’t let me down,
Cause there never were any expectations.
Do what you have to do, and not even well.
Closer than you think.
But you don’t think.
Cause you’re a cup of coffee.
I’m talking to a shitty cup of coffee…

Honeyspain (taken from Three Fine zine)

This town is a cemetery.
Whenever I’m here, I’m a dead man walking.
I’m a ghost.
People talk to me like I’m still alive, my old self,
But have trouble listening when I answer them.
I watch my words get lost along the way.
I don’t like speaking in my ghost voice.
I get angry at myself for talking like that.
But I’m bound by blood and life to stop in.
Some of that life is gone, freeing me.
And soon the ties will be cut and I’ll be gone too.
No more ghosts.

Dream Fits (Epileptic Words – taken from Grody Home zine)

I was 21.
Sid Vicious was there.
He was my friend.
We blew sockets together.
My brain got torn wide open.
My wife looked different to me.
Everything looked different.
My dad seemed unfamiliar.
Everything was firing.
The landscape shot up.
We had a fit.
I recognized their faces.
I recognized this town.
I saw their weird maneuvers.
I outlived my brother.
My hair fell out.
My hair went gray.
My mind fired up.
My body got stuck.
My organs never asked.
They just shut down.

Subway (taken from Grody Home zine)

Hard, angry stares born from soft, weak wishing.
Long, stringy hair falling from thin, smoking bodies.
Smelling of old dog, shadows of a trick turning mind.
Echoing streetwise words, frozen in opiate amber.

The Lost Decade (featured in Der Greif, Issue 6)

Tired of heroes. Tired of big ideas. Tired of people's views and opinions. Tired of everything that is wrong with the world. Tired of everything that everyone thinks is right. Tired of everyone's revolutions. Tired of all the hate. Tired of everyone's bullshit optimism. Tired of the human obsession with itself. Tired of the time we live in. Tired of youth. Tired of all the promise. Tired of all the trying. Tired of all the failure. Tired of everything that's being said. I'm tired of everything I'm hearing. I'm tired of everything I'm forced to think. I'm tired of everything I'm forced to see.

Mr. Crazy, Mr. Klein (taken from Psychiatric Letters)

Mr. Crazy is Mr. Klein. Toothless. He gets all his food in various states of mash. He’s worried. He lives with his mom, who’s old. Really fucking old. He gets very agitated when talking to his mom or the doctors. He wants out. He seems very scared. He brushes his crazy hair over a growing bald patch. Frizzy and grey-black, it tangles over the thinning, naked proof of age. It seems strange to me that, even in his state of loss, he still cares about if someone thinks he has hair or not. Something happened to him to make him who he is now. It wasn’t nice. I don’t know him, but I feel scared for him, thinking about where he’ll be when his mom is gone. I probably shouldn’t call him Mr. Crazy, although he most definitely is.

Guitar Cable Towel Rack

A lightning bolt straight up from the stomach
To counter the violent twitches that rack the body
An electric shock unveiled from underneath thick-threaded waves
Yellow guitar cable hidden underneath towels for days
A trap signal to occupy the same space as visiting friends
An Ian Curtis inspiration, a kneeling death
A maelstrom of thoughts in a dark-green-tiled 70s European bathroom
Waking up with hollow certainty
Alcohol and drugs drain the body, so it stands in the clear light of morning, empty
All certain, focused sleepwalk purpose
No pain, just adjustment and the knowledge of a few more minutes
A universe underneath all the certainty and presence, waiting to unfold
An eruption, so mentally violent and clear it detonates months of squall
Clarity in a form that invokes reverential shock
A form of emptiness so complete it has no inherent quality
A bottom so cold, damp, and hard it affords no negotiation
Unrelenting, life makes you live
See how you play it the next time around

Epiphanies

My anger is personal and all my own. No universality to the tinge that drives every action and reaction. In a wholly individualistic society, you can only ever be you with some tenuous ties to others based on what you do or don’t do with your mind and various parts of your body. Every take as a screaming child scrambling for attention. All the dadless little boys wanting to show how strong and independent they are. All the little children puffing out their chests and making right what’s in their hearts by forging ever more complex alliances so as not to have to look in the mirror. All the yearning for traditions that were themselves a cover-up for the seething underbelly of yesterday’s confusion. Truth is your street and all the stories crammed into your head until you were old enough to feel disoriented by them and the world around you and you began creating your own (hi)story to make sure you really belong inside your own head and body. A surge and struggle to make right what the mind simply cannot. And then…suicide arises as the purest form of creation. To stop yourself from being to stop the endless conversation. Suicide, like Ahrendt said, as the most optimistic act a human can undertake in dire times. To be willing to end this life before ever giving up on the idea of a hopeful life.