CALAMITY

My mind is a fucked apart dead thing unless I’m having fun.

                        -Brad Neely

 

Jogging the gulch-adjacent path whereby blood-thick sludge finds course to tuck its flow at around the pace I jog around city park pond a few blocks from my house and the seasonal stuff in dust makes me sneeze makes me hack green olive oil spunk I saw where we watched at night for a month what Drew pointed out days before in an overgrown streetlight nightly I saw a face in the trees. But I want from art what I get from drugs only better and I mean deep mountain wind spraying my meat-wrapped fluids loud as a rustled field’s choral hush clogs a long grass valley. I say it’s something poems do and mean I liked it when I felt that way with a poem, I meant as generally as drugs as night shift at five Front Range Home Depots as that felt ethical compulsion to see the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam is tethered to my desire for shrooms in their brief overwhelming availability. Home Depot is a contraction of and variation on being restlessness. It sets the aisles and wrests the space between them. Nightshift work is endless light defining the shapes and space in my dreams more brightly from one another and I’d go off to stack pallets in whatever kind of bulb it is that makes orange that orange.

 

Small murder makes the space I occupy, all of them rented and when I do it’s hardwood floor that sells me in my desire to host parties well but the difference between carpet’s and wood’s underlayment becomes lost in my base lack of gusto to learn stuff I don’t have to right now regardless of the acres of rolls of padding-made embrace for the tread of years of steps and every trip resulting schlepped up orange rolling stairways that customers can’t use that lead to every no-home-bay and adjacent opened place to keep stock findable and within day shift’s reach. Carpet needs a machine to clean it. What does that possibly imply about the cost of comfort and its maintenance, the kept filth made tame by soft perception of gravel interrupting the sucked up lint hush coming out my suck-bot O now no-toothed gear that’s spun my kink to gums is good now, just good enough to slap a rattle and teethe the neck of a singing toy making sound with what once would have grasped it. The gates against laziness are lowered for me. I feel myself become dumber and less attractive. Small maturation in figuring I’ve always been and now am at a steady loss of excitement for the feel of fitness and thinking that urged me onward to becoming better. Small murder’s a day’s habit grown to overcome each day. Well, I do live.

 

Love chaps skin and kiss echo—so raise icons out a cyst and dovetail. I produce more trash than anything and most of it was on a list of things to buy and do and who you are. Beam cheese is this—stuck remnant of the lower price, the old facings, the new placement of something else on the shelf razored clean of beam cheese. I’ve performed many pulls from the upper right-hand corner of a sticker brought clean off a beam left naked and swelled with tiny pride at the automatic practiced skill of my experience. I’ve used that orange bucket for sale for dry trash in the bright night and restacked it for sale in the morning-light weird. Wired in but I forget what I want to say, “fuck,” probably but honest expression rots a lot quicker than whatever sticky sentiment’s behind it. That rots too. Let’s say lettuce is bought and sits as an untouched healthy impulse goes soggy in the fridge gone brown in the crisper and to thick sludge in your hand like spider webs sprayed with a hose is a reverse of the crisp white lexicon of people to kill as a document is glassed-off, bottom-lit, and inkjet fresh and as a thesis as legal weed as lesson plans as the caps I bought and watched light become weird in Amsterdam canals clogged with boats I never saw move.

 

All we lived becomes the stagnant moat between us, things in the self done and dammed—I’d raze our endless parts real in moonlight. But I just do this. So let's do this.