Wasn’t no gunshots

Wasn’t no gunshots

Wasn’t no father

Wasn’t no digital mind-space

crowding the memories outta

wormhole of time

some blasphemy turned inwards

human anathema

a time-tested formula

a shitpost original    .

              

The floodgates never opened

I was stifled by fading roots

with leathery ink-stained hands

I was always late on my paper route

Delayed as a thunderous teenager

Yet so punctual with delaying the news

to himself

as an adult.

There was never enough time

Because time took me down

before I realized that it pilfered

they made use of their resources

I squandered mine

Others were working hard

I was bitching to apparitions

How there was never enough time

There was never enough patience

Those roman candles above

Were auguries to the end

And like a scrappy mongrel

You hid between the couches seeking solace

From the inevitability of their cacophony

Havoc, as gunshots: you never hear the one

that kills you.

The nerves scratched by the skin

the money spent of avoidance

the eyelids under the picture frame

worth a thousand more stares

same void, different womb

entities unto themselves

stalwart as a cross and casket

flame-bearer unto the dark pall

instead of a setting sun

spilling its guts between palm trees

and mountaintops, seascapes & innocence

photographed relentlessly

octothorped & redone & retouched

The Sun’s millennial demise:

everyone forgot how to just be there

and take it all in

but enough waste, bring us water

lifeblood, the grim: tales of woe gone viral

real infections driven underground

digital desires wiping childhood

off the neural map

once and for all time.

The blissful eyes stitched shut

the ignorant mouth unsealed

the blessed beasts wandering

through a morass of unknowns

what remains

for the masses beyond

the great erumpent silence

awaiting everyone

 at casket’s limelight edge.

I didn’t have anything for you

when you called with distance and half truths

The lying by omission, some lighthouse

It’s half the battle figuring out

that there’s no other way to go

But out because the inside

we’ve been there done that

it’s a mirror in there

not worth the gaze

or pennies for the boatman

to the hell

that further looking

elicits

What was there besides?

what scythes our demise

which fruitless conversation

did we clarify

it was all in the grasping

and the fruit in the wanting,

the execution in the doing

that’s what began this,

that’s what ends this

that’s all

this will ever be.

Love, as gunshots: you never hear the one

that kills you.

what ends me every night?

and now.

–2019 (?)