I remember my name, but

1
I have no memory of being anything other than what I am in the moment
now: indivisibly helpless and cruel-minded.

Here on rot-stinking shores, diseased with shipwreck,
I abandon hope
a floatless boat,
a flightless bird
with wings for swimming,

a cash-colored imagination, gathering
all that was in one place
indifferent,
piece by puzzling piece, inept and true to life,
choice no longer waiting for itself to divide

into choices made by time alone
to desecrate all that is and was; here,
a focused beam of apathy melts
tragedy into history, big ideas
into empty punctuation.

Is it a virtue to speak without speech? a sin to walk without walking?

My back is behind me for good enough reasons
and I do respect the tide, despite the redundance

2
of life,

I sit and I sit as if all this were

nothing

more than a foggy mirror, my testes throbbing
ancient songs of seasons deep
in throes of repeating
last year (you remember what happened,
risking life for a moment of Good,
looking for God
in the least understood).

Frustration, capsizing
waves of blissful head-shaking,
love-making…

“Man overboard!” Eternity yells

its reflection aloft. I’ve been here before,
in all this embrace, repeating the words
made flesh to myself
in the dark and in time,
deaf already and losing my sight

3
in time, as if it were meant to be so, like bacon cooking in its own

white fat, thrashing in mortal thoughts that
pop and splash on everything around
but the eggs,
whose white shells await war-crack release,
a fragile inner peace-plop
lost in the recipe now and forever

as causality (a simple faith in the sense of things
we know we don’t possess) is
there in the eggs as in rain, covering streets
in sloppy-wet kisses,
numbing the feeling that “more” is good,
not a pathetic word ignored when
Art speaks volumes in favor of bad,
in favor of less,
in favor of nothing that can be said

4
but I seem to have more dreams
when I sit up in bed unasleep,
kept awake by an incantation:

howsandwhysandwhosandwhat
whensandwhysandwheresandwhat
whysandwhosandwheresandwhen
whosandwhatsandwhysandwhen
(repeat ad infinitum)

as nightmare flames ignite my soul, daydream embers
keep it warm, lighting wherever I am in vain
with lack to the point that I cannot breathe.

Nonetheless, the seat is mine.
There’s no one else unless you count my Self,
the “somewhere-else-as-always” of me,
the indistinct point of a desperate plea for help
and love on sand of plenty
as waters rising flood the city,
buses colliding with horses on pavement,
loose teeth tugged until off they come
tumbling, threading displacement among
the many, a rush to the end of whatever began
when we didn’t exist, and I wasn’t here,
yelling my head off as if someone would listen

5
“Chaos offers us healthy disorder.
A dose of destruction is good for the system
when taken with water, but the wet can’t be helped.
They will always be wet and before I forget,
vanity breeds rats on Sundays
to drown on Mondays
and that’s how the mirror stays clean.”

*This is an experiment. It's essentially 3 separate poems I tried lacing together, but I didn't think it was smooth enough to not keep the numbering, which I'm attracted to anyway.