After the Shrooms

Ever see the stars? Ever see the stars look fierce?

Black road ● Rose light ● White sleep ● Red eyes ● Blue road

Stand in the lanes in the rain in the rise,

the night a tsunami overcoming the treeline?

Black road ● Rose light ● White sleep ● Red eyes ● Blue road

Everyone was searching for a loophole in The Plan.

At 5 a.m., men were rummaging trash cans,

roaming the halogen fields

looking for Sunday.

Black road ● Rose light ● White sleep ● Red eyes ● Blue road

Astrophysicists by the pool. Banjo players in the drive.

No cops we didn't need, no criminals we didn't want.

We sent up Ginsberg; it was all defeated

but the ladies had afros out to  h    e      r        e.

Rose light ● White sleep ● Red eyes ● Blue road

Maybe you know me.

I've stayed awake longer than you,

saw dawn in the rain on a road

halfway back from affirmation.

White sleep ● Red eyes ● Blue road

Saw my life take the turn I've wanted,

safe at the end of my red eyes and the blue road.

Ever see the stars? Ever see the stars look fierce?

I saw them, left them saying

no more no more and no more.

The edge of the world has incredible views,

but tonight I want to be home.

Blue road ● Blue road ● Blue road ● Blue road ● Blue road

I'm not an honest man, but I know when to run.

Cuz those stars. Those stars look fierce.

You can't fuck with those stars get more serious

every time out.

Unshielded

I was a bourgeois dude

hacking as a starving art collector,

the other way around

or something.

It would behoove me to be less weird:

less "sexually flame retardant"

less of a "cave man swatting at shadows"

less warped into normalcy

like a crushed plastic bottle

bent back to form

with milk-white cracks

where it proved resilient.

But everyone's got a deep-sea deception 
waiting to manifest,

one-upping one another's torture fantasies,

trapped in the neverending rectangles of colliding dioramas,

red-carpet walks through infamy's underpantsless volcanectomy,

ultraviolet-keyboard-roller-coaster-ride

through-cartoon-style-decapitation-and-return,

aquablue wolverines crawling out of the sky and Brahms in the air baby, please.

The speech is free, the meaning is pricey.

As our fear-filled future leaders

sling dicks and scrap it out

in chortle-heavy DC air,

Filet-o-Excess with Carbon Classic

and the balls of war make me

a better friend of pleasure,

ambition’s enemy.

Some unbeing ozone afternoons,

I throw the sourness away—find my way

of washing the silver

off of the miracle,

silencing flags,

colors loud

as the dictator’s bullhorn,

staking claim to invented trinities, infinities,

proud to be fodder for the legalese,

for eviscerated mysteries

unfolding like Times Square--

for policies you've never known,

crawling toward an everlasting...life

goes calmly

if you don't watch it unfold.

When my loves are invisible

I keep my eyes closed.

Mission Creep

I first felt it slipping away while it was coming on strong

like a perfect storm of perfect storms

half over once the clouds blow along.

Anticipation is 3/4 of all pain,

all agony, all incremental gains on violent collapse.
For vampires to hemophiliac
I take the blame
go rightless by accession

force-fed in extreme silence

by those unlimited in dreams

who pander to the emptiness

inside my inner libertine

jungle lawyers, secret coroners

tending to the furnace of their golden ages

where façade and superstructure turn dispensable

as the cries

of a billion creatures

oiled up by Extradispensable Needs

scams and shams

and outrages dispensed into ether

assuring more mayhem

the way it should be.

It's so easy to get dark

when who controls the darkness prospers.

Overfull of myself
like triathletes who inject their own blood

the day before racing

where the advantage wanes

there comes tremendous pain

I tried to map the impossible

nexus of variables

tangling up to Us.

But every time voices

voices chime in

like a jet with an acronym

muscling into my sun

lest some lost wing of calculus

lets me plaster the last

cornice of Babel

and witness the foundation hold

the answers answer less and less,

expand their libraries, divide their librarians

til eternity turns into a monster

ventilated, uncontrollable, lawful in the extreme.

So the Tower crumbles here

gets constructed there.

So you cannot gather up the ocean

without drowning in its arms.

So smile for the chimera
mutable as species
too delicate to last:

Nimrod, Icarus, Washington.

I am quiet but in me

the songs of your cul-de-sac

do not go unsung.