No plot? No problem.

-bits from the work

Skyscrapers stiffened and dulled through years of fighting the maddening slump. But the bend still happened, anyways, always. They were swaying, barely, just beyond the recognition of the naked eye. We ignored them all, the elderly, the obsolete. Giant tin kneecaps thirsty for oil.

Late. Then, too late.

It was one of those surprisingly, ungodly, beautifully-whispered days, as if the entire world had known and planned and purposely forgotten to invite you to attend. But, being the son of a bitch you are, you showed up anyways. Coat, door. Eye, check. Glass, clink. Purpose.

You know how people say the first year of marriage they gained marriage weight? That's like MaryJane and me. Beautiful wedding, though. And we've been happy ever since. 

Sequin eye contact, unblinking and undone. We alone could walk the tightrope of tabloid, blacked-out heartbeats. Nights spent tunneling vision with the lining of sleep; everything was glowing and only you and maybe I knew. Maybe we didn't. 

Rare are the mornings I greet my eyes in the mirror. I don't feel dead, but I'm far from alive.

And we will knead each other's concrete appendages like empty warehouses on the wayside of demolition. We will apply uncautious hands to contour and break each other's wishbones, the remains of which we'll keep as a blueprint of how we fell: hook, line, and love-bitten. I can't imagine anything better to wish the rest of my days on.

It got easier, but it never was easy. 

Champagne Year

-bits from the work

"My future is overcome with a cottonmouth thirst."

"People in their cars, losing a race with the stars. It's getting late and this world is closing. Don't you know?"

"But at the end of the night you can't shake the feeling of something being very wrong."

"The kind of vulnerable where you are telling a story and no one is listening except one other person and you don't even know them but you kind of fall in love with them right there. And that's how we met."

Fell Happy

-bits from the work

"It's not until a year later, upon asking the mirror what people believe about her, that she finally remembers that this mark below her right eye, a beauty mark's runaway, twisted cousin, is imprinted from when she smoked in bed with someone of equal phoniness. They both subscribed to monthly shipments of sacred ingenuity. Both caricatures of human beings, pigmented in a pearly, starved guilt that could no longer go unnoticed. Those nights, half-fated and full of rum-dipped feelings, we discovered could never be enough. We tried to save them, tried to tame and cottage their lies into a secret cobwebbed countryside more beautiful than real.

Now we know.

We must unknowingly press through them, first, and then turn and grieve- not for the disturbance- but for the gossamer's substance at all. We tried over and under again; the kind of rib-removing act reserved for children married to their balloons. Tried, yet our paper-mached strips ached and peeled for unprotected eulogies, for bullshit leap-frogging off of the mundane, for Molotov cocktails, for anything that turned our heads with talk of the road. The strips, still wet, self-destructed into monochromatic globs that spit final, Styx-diving words into our faces instead of tombs.

And that is how it really happened. We've been lying to each other all these weak years.

That convivial burn syncopated itself into her life's melodic wonderings: gambling drunk revolutions around the sun, who kept quiet, before tucking it in under calculated blankets of discretion at the end of . She hid it from us all. It took us years to catch the poison, finally stealing happenstance when the world wasn't looking. But it still ruined us completely, having already convinced our shaky dispositions the branding had maybe always been there; never knowing, never happy.

But that was only the first of many memory waves our virulent subconsciouses groomed to our perfection.

Never the last."

2.35 Centimeters

             I don’t cry, of course, because I’m 22 and I only cry when I have margaritas. And when I say margaritas, I mean whatever affordable alcohol that repossesses my moral compass and all non-liquid assets I accessorize it with. But the thing is, it’s not just me (or all the collegiate seniors dancing with one foot on the roof and one off). It’s everyone. We fashion ourselves beyond the world of reason. Everything’s not that okay, in fact. People are afraid to be pessimistic. Everyone’s feeling it, most of the time (according to a recent study predicting the apocalypse following the assassination of SoapNet).

Just because I read a lot of shit that describes some of what I’m feeling doesn’t mean that the rotting apple on the side of my highway of hopeless emptiness, that skims every major vein and artery with the most painful kind of throbbing, that of mediocrity, is, by some sick stroke of karma, lifted and recycled, or at least knocked 2.35 centimeters to the right so that it can regally decompose in nature. Like what I imagine strolled through the mind of the former President of my University when he switched tanning bed levels and no longer ultra violated his skin five times a week, but two, because he moved to a warmer climate. We’re all rotting. And we have been for a very long time. Ever since we left the womb of creation and double clicked to enter the night’s womb, with breezy dispatch.
            Have you ever thought of that? That us standing in this fleeting world of woebegone wars and up-the-creek youth, is not standing at all. Who are we kidding? We’re tied to this womb, and while some of us have extension cords to bother and sponge up the rest of this place with, most of us don’t. Our entire existence, the oxygen we breathe, everything that we need, could be simply forming us into whatever we’re supposed to be next. And so yes, I’m floating in the amniotic fluid of Sophie’s Choice, either fighting the bottom line or accepting it (either way, donning a stellar Polish accent and stashing hams under my street-wear). I don’t know about you, but I get tired of fighting it, the inevitable unfolding heist of raggedy madness. No, I didn't choose between my children, throwing one, like a bone of humanity to the Nazi dogs. This false silence of optimism, that hangs on gangs of held-back tears, does not just decompose us that much more quickly, but does so while robbing us of the respectable 2.35 centimeters.

The whole point of this was not to disarm those rare, perfect roses of even one petal, it was to say that Meryl Streep is most definitely an alien. Uh-huh. You follow, I see. If identity theft is a crime, as some may say, then I don’t want to be law-abiding. In fact, we’re all probably going to exit this womb and enter the next as one of Meryl’s temperaments. Dibs on anything besides Mamma Meryl a la Mamma Mia.

Merry Christmas. Whatever the fuck that means. 

Where You'll Find Me Now

-bits from the work

"We airbrushed sunlight into our routine relations, careful only to enhance the sketches at times when our subconsciouses had shrunk away and buried themselves in the devastating mediocrity of day, by day, by yesterday. Years passed. We carried the instructions in the faded back pocket of our souls, in case we forgot to manipulate our perception into an illumination of something worth existing for. Strung-out on the constant, unquenchable feeling of something being very wrong, unsurprisingly, we removed all evidence betraying us to reason. And we would have gotten away with it. If it wasn't for the single, expired bulb that ruined the lights we had so meticulously mentally constructed for Babylon. If only we knew then, or any time before the end, that Babylon has no lights at all. It is all I think of now. But everyone was sunstruck once, then set adrift."

Christmassive Movie List:
-My Week With Marilyn
-Martha Marcy May Marlene
-Iron Lady
-Like Crazy (again)
-Melancholia
-Shame
-Something something Ryan Gosling
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (because I can't remember if I've seen it)

Exposed to the Elements

-bits from the work

"That's when I look up and find I'm covered in a quilted sky of postcards I would send to you. Of feelings folded and multiplied in the mutinied love we constructed on that first car ride. The postcards play the love we had been promised would come, where the smiles are tinted in the extraordinary and gel on the outskirts of wonderful. We fasten ourselves beyond the world of infinity, hiding behind the sun because the earth was too small for us anyways. And even though our blueprints disintegrated, we continued to burn and burn."

Now Playing: Ghibli's "Pythia."Before listening to the first track off this album, I had a predisposition to shuffle Ghibli in the deep end of Urban Outfitters muse ick. Tracks like "Making Out," "Bring Weed to the Cabin," "Fell Happy," and "Honest Effects," are tip-toeing on trippy musical tightropes thousands of feet above diamond mines. You never know what to expect next. 

Staring at the Sun

-bits from the work

"By the twenty-third passenger window on the midnight train I wasn't supposed to take, you asked me if I was seeing anyone and I inhaled stars, binding them in a boxed set in my respiratory machine's gathering madness and the stars' velvet aurora lights the soul strings of my soul and lights the edge of the howling window like nothing I've ever seen and without knowing it or thinking it I respond that I see you. Because I do. Somehow that stolen collection of December stars reconstructed the language of my stringed respiration so that it was unable to orchestrate quite the same, while you and I balanced elegantly on the air reserved only for triple trombones and splitters of majesty."

"A cast-away graveyard of cigarette butts and homeless hearts. We try so hard to walk, anywhere, besides the sidewalks of life. We design walkable rollercoasters, and then discover they already have a father and mother."