Hereafter’s Chaos

I tear a teabag open, down its middle

feeling its fabric sachet tear like a temple

curtain

and I feel its dirtlike brown innards spill

into my fingers, creep past my ruby-painted 

nails and settle in the cup below. 

It fills my consciousness like telling

a fortune as the world ends, as the skyline

turns a marvelous burnt Munchian orange, 

as telephone poles split and wires fall inward

upon themselves, as gutters slit themselves open

and pour inky black waters over oil-slicked 

pavements, ruining their rainbows and 

recreating the world under her hot surface.

Unbecoming, Unremembering

I settled into the swirling colors and swam

in their depths, in their aqueous nebulaic form

I listened to them on the thrums of guitar and I

heard time flicker by my ears, melting past me

and encasing my being.

I greeted time like an old friend, asking her to sit

with me here, in this place with a couch and a table,

an empty canvas and my curious cat, be with me, Time,

stay a moment – sit cross-legged and open-hearted.

on the floor with me as I smear a canvas

in oil paint of many hues – hues of personality, hues of

self, hues of meaning, hues of unbecoming unremembering.

I smear paint on my flesh, let it enter my eyes and turn my

whites a rose color.

I crack my knuckles and felt time dissipate into the wall

not bidding me farewell nor telling me when she’d return.

Wreckage of Self, Unspooled

In a still and undisturbed ocean,

there sinks a perpetual shipwreck 

inside of my brain’s front door – 

hull split down its center with her floorboards 

spiked in all directions, and her innermost 

wires holding me by my wrists reddened with

the pressures and forces of manic, drawn-out nights –

her majesty’s smoking, sputtering, barely-turning

engines hold me close to a half-submerged 

deck as my throat, gaping and grasping for air – 

fills forever with rushing grey water – rushing grey water

that submerges and encases my corpse, once,

twice, eternally and always – and I drift toward 

a resting place where gentle recourse lies.

Visions

I live on a moonless planet where stars above are numerous

where colors above in the black sky are visible whirling behind my

closed eyes, where I may dance free, hands grazing the 

popcorn ceiling of my cluttered bedroom.  

Home is where the booming voice of God calls out and

says to cover my face in makeup with nowhere to go,

the time is 2am in this quiet, tiny town, lit by porchlights

where everyone knows everyone

and yet, it is where no one wishes to know me.

In this place, the night’s pale yellow lights dazzle down upon 

the house, standing alone and reticent in the quiet night,

like a pattering rich, dense rain of mania, thence comes the

starry-eyed scoundrel from the back of my brain, and 

she tells me to ink my flesh – thrice, needle in, needle 

out – and permanence reigns forever. I think to my 

ancestors – rajahs and jungle-dwelling soldiers, 

conquistadors and anusim. 

I think to their capsules of wonder, poked into flesh and 

peril injected into their bones. 

I ponder – did they bear my illness, did they carry

my malady folded like paper prayers in the cracks of their brains?

Home is

where fragrant tea is drunk late

into the seeping morning, where

pills are left untaken in the blue pillbox littered 

with small

stickers to make the thing more bearable and home is where

my unfettered mind is my untamed, unwell, only 

mind, wrangled into a cycling normalcy.

A Divine Defenestration

Watching gentle disappearances splay open

like an aqueous creature’s emergence from

a dark, unending lake – a lake where dreams

sputter and kick into brambled-over nightmares –

a lake where unformed plans turn to hallucinatory

mush and observance of antiquarian tenets without

rhyme or reason, where speaking becomes rushed

and words become garbled in my throat, and none

can understand me – this is the lake of fire, this is

Gehenna where claws enrapture my vision and draw

me up toward the court of God – and I demand of Him

why he made me this way, and I ask Him to beg my

forgiveness for this! Yet He responds in a series of 

grunts, groans, and what sounds like a giggle – and He

sends me thrashing back toward my Body – self, self,

is this all there is?