A sapiens with loose skin

A sapiens with loose skin
I read a history of the world
and I’m obliged to report that
it’s loosened my skin
from underlying muscle and bone.
I used to revel in the stretch,
love the predictable 
deformation each time
I’d incidentally waltz
through a moment and joy
would bend my joints with purpose.
This history incised somewhere,
snuck in and slid right underneath
and cut all the fibrous, connective cords.
A bridge with its supports blown.
Calm: seated, star-spangled skin flaps
and sways me sideways
just like my thoughts.
Routine: walking, reverberations thrum 
and remind me.
Energy: in a sprint, I risk deforming
my character, and I can’t be returned.
This is what it feels like
to be corporeal but find no meaning.
My sense of strict adhesion to
principles, predictabilities, assumptions
is no more. 
I think we tend to think
that the knowledge we seek will bring
pearl skin, gleaming and desirable
and certainly beautiful.
Maybe there’s some Truth to the idea
that with sagging-skin age
comes “wisdom.”

Collection; unrequited

In autoimmune denial
I think my immune cells
are silently marching
into a dark crystal ball
they want to tell my future
and to do that
they have to attack
the truth
Haikus from dark days
A cyanide bite
Now red tears pour from my side
I swallow the pill

Drunken wandering
Left, left right, thoughts stagger home
Eyes erupt tonight

I’m medium rare
Blood not boiling, but I’m cooked
Matter of time, now
A game of chance
The dice roll
Imagination slithers to
Snake eyes
The probability is small
But big enough to let hope hold on 
With one white-knuckled finger
It aches in every way
But it’s better
Than the frostbitten ice below
Frozen flakes of the cold future
Crystalized into something so sharp
It deflates a wildly thumping red heart
To even think about
Its tapered pointlessness
A damned river
Even when you
drop
to your knees and beg,
voice flaking with dry words and
sentences like sharp gravel
pulverized
by the punches you’ve rolled with,
the lacrimal pedestrian
pays you no attention
hands you nothing to drink.
Gray, canyon-cracked, dehydrated
nothing can grow
until you water your world.
Where is my mind?
Did my burning legs carry it far
when it felt so lost I had to run?
I’ve been searching
Shining spotlights into the
dark days
I hung up paper signs on every corner
“Lost Mind” they read
I might be wrong
Did I lose my mind?
Or does it not want to be found?
A letter to the wind
Fold the paper wings over, gingerly
But remember, even soft things can cut
Kiss the seams with care, and linger 
Be clever with how you fortify the front

Throw the paper plane, respectfully
Smile slowly as you turn your nose up

And don’t let thoughts of the wind…

Linger
To whom it may concern

1.
To whom it may concern:
I love you,
and I’ve wanted to 
tell you for some time, now.
The thought of you is something I hold
confidently, comfortingly in
the palm of my hand.
I cradle it, I move it around so
I sense its particular weight.
Your presence has a way of resting
against the inside of my back, like you’re
hugging my spine. 
It’s comfortable; I grow 
when I am support.
These days, it’s so reflexive to 
see you and think,
“Oh, if you only knew…”
It’s natural to feel that if you felt
this loved, you’d start loving me, too.
It’s a fantasy, like the ghost image sensed
between sparse and 
scratched pencil lines.
Nothing inside me seems to care
what the artist intends: 
even against my will,
I see what I will.

Love,
Avery


2.
To whom it may concern:
Since last we spoke, 
I’ve dated and become intimate
with the meaning of “unrequited”—
I showed her my hand,
then as dealer she dealt her cards.
Now I feel flushed
down the plumbing, lost 
in leaking pipes that taunt me,
those cardiac canals will haunt me.
But I’m not blinded, sadly.
My eyes still fill in
the ghost against the pencil lines, 
still tell the artist’s intent to
fuck off.
That’s the sad part:
I addressed this 
to whom it may concern.
But now I’ve found out 
the only one concerned is 
myself.

Love,
Avery


3.
To whom it may concern:
The metaphor of a healing wound
feels apt to describe the way
a scar has slowly formed.
There’s no distracting sting when
silly air floats by boldly and
whispers to my red flesh—
instead now, I just reflexively look down,
and with my eyes I bow low to
the off-color shape that 
outlines my mistakes.
Sometimes when I’m stretched a certain way
I feel not a pain sensation
but more the somber memory of
an infection that left a scar.
Know thine enemy; I’m trying…
You’re a foe that won with
your carefree and clueless sword
and like cinderella with a shoe, 
my scar always will fit your blade. 

Avery

Compostable hope

Compostable hope
You’ll sometimes see a treehouse dangling in the air,
But dangling feels, deeply as a swing at its inverted apex, like the wrong word.

Although the tightly packed, insightfully architected
Wooden planks with no cracks for water and no room to fall –

Slabs with such beautiful gradient shimmer that your breath runs away
And your eyes jog along their ringed, concentrically grained roads –

Craftsmanship worthy of megamansions poured into the construction
Of a temple to childhood, innocence, frolicking frivolity –

A skylight seamlessly blended with shingles, serendipitously
Forming a hole for twinkling starlight to tickle the floor –

Although the tightly packed, insightfully architected
Wooden planks with no cracks for lacrimal tears and no room to fall

Project out over the world below and cast shadows and capture light,
And compose a view torn with love and care from a fantasy.	

You know the trunk is firm, and planted, in both biological
And metaphysical senses of the word. Truly rooted.

–––––– – – – - - -

As it turns out, when the universe was nascent and had cosmic-scale axons
Still seeking their myelin caress,

It received universe-class training as a little-universally-big league pitcher.
The pitch of choice, as it were, was a curveball. Straight-up 12-6.

It’s hypnotic, watching the universe step onto the mound;
Dig its cleat into the well-trodden cleft between rubber and dirt;

Load up energy and tension in itself and its observers, the potential building.
Eyes flutter shut for a brief moment, an exhale imperceptible except by intuition.

The glove covers cosmic hand and fingers, 
obscuring a configuration you need Baseball Sign Language to read.

“It’s a fastball,” whispers intuition. 
You’ve seen this pitcher before. You’ve faced him.

You’ve spent so many hours of your waking life with eyes glued to reels,
Spinning spinning spinning, you know what comes next. Always.

Our biggest, unpalatably friendly giant curls up his left leg,
Briefly joins the flamingo species, striking the most remarkable balance.

Leg extends, gives surrounding bouncing O2 a razor-thin paper-cut.
The ball faces second base, and you’re squared up. Fast-twitch fibers at the ready.

And you start spinning. No, sorry, that’s the ball. The ball spins! Now your head spins.
Our universally revered little-universally-big league pitcher threw us a curveball. 

Your eyes pop. Straight. Out.
Because that tree trunk suddenly has an irreparable gash in its side.

The 12-6 sliced clean through. Your roots, your core, the pillars of your existence are shaken
Because your treehouse wobbles. It oscillates. 

No one has ever encouraged you before to think about the utter terror
Encoded right into a sine wave.

Nothing can reveal the elasticity of twine soul like a sine wave can,
When it decides to pluck your heart out with a twang,

And starts slinging it back and forth as it’s functionally meant to do.
Soul, like a soapy bubble, follows and threatens so probabilistically to burst.

Back, forth, back, forth, back back back forth forth forth back forth back
DON’T DON’T DON’T FALL. Please, please don’t fall.

With heart gone, blood a truant, there’s only one fluid left to lose.
Tears.

Please, please, please you beg. You’d speak the words if you could,
But there’s a waterfall flowing frontally down.

Irises color the down-destined river, their spectral rainbows
Reflecting along undulating elongating swirls.

Please, you cry. Please, don’t fall.
This treehouse of magnificence –

This castle of creation and palace of mundane paradise.
This house of the humans who give everyday existence its sense of home –

This Napoleonic defense, this mammoth moat, this untragic tower,
This seed germinated by sedition against our little-universally-big leaguer –

Against his Sadistic, Satanic, Slimy Stochasticity.
Yes, a truly UnRandom House –

Please, you cry. Please, don’t plunge.
This treehouse into which you’ve packed your most precious belonging:

Hope.
And it will fall.

- - - – – – ––––––

While detestable in certain high-schoolian contexts
(Not so unlike our now-infamous pitcher),

It’s tough to deny that biological systems possess
A certain conservational magic to them. Net nil.

This is true for biological systems of any scale.
Physical systems, actually, too.

Even pitchers, no matter which twisted way they choose to throw the ball,
Are bound by forces more terrifying than their fluttering butterfly parents

To conserve their energy. Let’s don our hardhats 
And climb the abstraction ladder we can’t help but lean against.

By some conservation law they teach you also in a high-schoolian context,
Momentum gets conserved. And so the ball flies.

Of import to this discussion is that this phenomena occurs
Irrespective of the pitch and behavioral manipulation. 

So here’s the derivation to fill your cheat-sheet,
Something you should know so well as to locate topographically in cerebral folds:

When curveball strikes,
And tear falls in a constructively destructive and beautiful waltz with your treehouse,

And wood and water hit ground,
Here’s the thing:

Something will grow.

Some fleeting reflections on a plane flight which felt distinctly riddled with metaphors for life.

Some fleeting reflections on a plane flight which felt distinctly riddled with metaphors for life.
Each in the mask of their own molecule, perfumed scents flying unexpected lives.

Some sit in first class.

Some sit wedged between some others who were given unfortunate slices of life.

Some dealing with nascent life intentionally. Some intentionally but originally without intention. Some purely without intention.

The occasional, but honestly expected, bump.

The terrifying lightning bolt that extends its gnarled, oxygen-deprived blue finger down down down Crack Flash Silence.

A phone’s battery slowly dripping down, volume attenuates like receding hope.

Recline at your neighbor’s expense, although can you call them a neighbor if you can’t see them?

Which do you prefer, the window, the middle, the aisle? You’ll need to have been a passenger first if you want to strain and hold close a heavily informed opinion. With just one flight, paradox flies in your face.

It’s rare when you can really be connected to the world, that damned WiFi.

The shorter the plane ride, the more fortunate, although some of the shadier folks like the serenity and the seclusion. I’m inclined to think masochistic their desire for unending flight.

You are, however, a unique kind of masochist if you spend your time watching the seat-back embedded map. Oh my word does time crawl so, so slowly.

Tasteless things to chew on. Well, the crunch might be nice. But will those pretzels and nuts ever be filling? And it’s hard to know if your neighbor has an allergy. Well, it’s easy to know but hard to find out. By which I mean it’s hard or even undesirable to ask. So it’s hard to know if your neighbor has an allergy. Probably best to not think about it.

Lips go desert-dry. The experienced passenger spends not an airborne moment without Aquaphor on hand (in pocket), ready to bring comforting moisture to an uncomfortably de-fluidified set of lips.

Some of us fear this time terribly. Some get more used to it the longer they go, having begun as children with a freshly-born Build-A-Bear to hug crushingly tight to their chest. For some, the slightest hitches spell doom, although for the weathered travelers not much has the capacity to raise the heart-rate; well, perhaps on the furthest end of the spectrum some experience a heightened heart-rate out of excitement instead of terror. Turbulence has such a thrill, does it not?

The safety card is there if you choose to look. But if you choose to look you also might wind up rather unsatisfied with the crude drawings of plane entering water, earth, fire but surprisingly no air. The simplification seems sinister. So it is advisable to look at the safety card, but only to look and not to read or even glance at its contents. Proceed at your own risk; you must sign the waiver before takeoff. 

The cup of styrofoamed liquid fidgets nervously, any unexpected (or even expected) bump has the potential to send it flying. All you can do is keep your arm a combination between loose and tense, absorb the shock however you can to spare first and foremost your new white t-shirt and beige pants, second and foresecond maybe your neighbor, maybe your neighbor’s electronics, maybe the maintenance man or woman in the afterlife who’s going to see the stain or maybe the person in life 2.0 who’s unfortunate enough to encounter a not-wiped-up-in-the-previous-life puddle of cold or warm but definitely staining liquid. Yes, this one’s a bummer.

All it takes is a glance across the aisle to see and become engrossed in one traveler’s head nestled into an adjacent traveler’s shoulder.

Would you like a plastic glass of complementary barely champagne? It really is a step up from the service we provide to other passengers sitting behind the strange curtain, which can only really be attributed to tradition if we’re to consider its implications in the context of modern progressive thought.

What’s more comforting, a pilot piloting or an autopilot piloting? Sorry, it was probably most comfortable not to even ask the question. C’est la vie.

Sometimes the plastic seat backs have vestiges of older days and past lives. Who on earth would be dialing, and who on earth would they dial?

The Amazon of the Sky Mall.

Perhaps on lengthier flights your shoes come off. It generally works. Sometimes the stink sucks for someone. But not always, so it’s not worth worrying. Unless the air-conditioning is cruelly cold, in which case you suddenly discover the magical and physics-breaking warming properties of shoes. 

It’s amazing how the white but combustive noise blends into the background. It’s amazing how money can pay for its mutability. But it’s not muting. It’s antithetical matching. You match the noise of life’s engine with money then spend money to pipe more sound that’s elegantly composed and hopefully overtakes the unquestionably chaotic grumble sitting just outside the double-paned plastic that sometimes, somehow, contains an asphyxiated insect inside.

The bathroom line. The puzzle played by puzzled people who puzzle over where to stand to avoid never-acknowledged but always-cogitated unfortunate and awkward contact between body parts that in another context shouldn’t touch unless there’s mutual consent to call it dry-humping.

It’s anyone’s guess what the bathroom will be like. Sometimes it’s an achy yellow. No, the light. Sometimes it’s a party-bus blue. Those are the best. They really do accentuate the cheek bones in front of the mirror. It leaves you wishing that damned WiFi would work so you could snap a picture and send it to friends and maybe if you’re feeling bold to an other of profoundly nerve-wracking but adrenergic significance. 

As a man with a bladder full of tepid airline coffee everyone drinks to combat the low air pressure, you curse evolution for neglecting the penis bone and curse Darwin for even incepting you in the first place with the curse-able concept of evolution, because in ignorance man finds bliss. You are, of course, a phallic pendulum subject not just to gravity but also to the buffeting and differentially temperature’d air on which this flying life floats. 

And as a woman you curse the lack of penis bone, and you curse the lack of a lack of a penis as you wonder what on earth you’re to do with the material science marvel of a toilet seat, two pancaked planes machined with precision: plastic, and urine.

And there are mile-high fantasies.

That damned sound of retribution as you press the button and suck away your waste. You don’t actually know where it goes; you secretly hope it gets dumped out from 30K+ feet and you don’t really mind whether or not it disintegrates in the air before landing on what’s likely farmland (because that’s what most of the land is like; empty except for things that keep us from being empty). Maybe you secretly or not secretly hope you’re unexpectedly over a metropolis and the air failed to do its dissolution job. That would be comical.

Perhaps you’ve been bestowed with the either very-minimally or very-maximally existentially taxing duty of sitting next to an emergency exit row. At some point you’re required to give some sort of verbal confirmation that you’re willing and able to perform. In the minimal case, you potentially pay one action potential’s worth of attention and concern. In the maximal case, your bestowed responsibility precludes the other experiences of this flight from shining in their glory and horror.

Ah, then the hunger seeps in. Of course there’s not much to do about it unless you planned beforehand or don’t mind the packaged items of questionable origin – as a rule of thumb, nothing so flawlessly replicable ought to be ingested.

And of course, we can’t forget the ambition. The bag made extra-heavy with books. And if operating systems bore weight, the operating system bent down extra low under the pressure of many and heavy-worded documents. But, laughs the low air pressure. Closes the eyes. Drifts, drifts, drifts...

The ascent and descent are inevitable. Usually harmless, occasionally traumatic if you’ve been granted permission to have a cold or otherwise compromised sinuses. Every seat-back has an icepick for your ear, in case your request for a cold was approved. And a jolly strongman whose sole mission in life is to swing that pick with precision bounded by one half the diameter of your ear canal. Those, I would submit, are the most fun flights. 

If you chose the more reflective of the seats, and can see out the window, and clouds decided not to come today, and your vision is sufficiently good, and your neck sufficiently flexible, maybe you get a glimpse of the hyper-urban super structures and the other super structures and patterns and fluidics that underlie them. Maybe you, for a moment, reach a point of ultimate understanding. You perceive a level of abstraction attainable only to the Gods. Note Bene that it’s the Western norm to consider God a deity residing in the sky.

It is, of course, only fitting that even granted all the above Bernoulli probabilities resulting in Heads, you reach clarity primarily on the descent. And even that is more beautiful when night obscures the colorful details and all you see are the lights.

Sugar

Sugar
I don't particularly like sugar
It's not that it doesn't taste good
Because lord knows that it does
But people forget something
Sugar and dopamine aren't the same thing
I know it tastes good
But where's the feeling good?
People eat sugar when they're happy
Sugar when they're sad
When they're down
When they're up
It's like tiny wings
And your thumb
Thumb for up
Thumb for down
Thumb even when your joint
Hurts
All you want is the streak
Enough of the graceful lows
And all the sudden you're flying sugar
Highly addictive - an obsession
The sugar obsession 
Is because it makes them feel
Sugar makes you feel
And I can't feel
So why
Would I want to eat that sugar
That's going to make me 
feel ill
Feel gross and glutinous and 
Globbering and gahhhh!!!
So...what's my sugar?
Everyone needs sugar
Without it you're confused
You can't think
Can't walk
Can't talk
Things stop. Making sense
My sugar is the real sweet stuff
You could call it slightly
Cannibalistic
Or you could call it
Vampiric
Or you could call it
The obvvvviously better of
The two options for
The first of four on
The Meyers Briggs
They're really the same
Your dopamine just happens to come from
Consuming something that's abundant 
7 billion times over
The other beings blessed (?) 
With walking around this 
Giant, giant bakery
Replete with the pastry chefs in white hats
Glazed, sugared bread lining white shelves
With clear glass coverings to block the
Urge we all have
To stick out our hands
Grab the sweets
Oh, they taste so damned good
So see
I get my sugar in a secondary way
Most people eat sugar
I eat people
And when they're not around
I get hungry
But the problem is that now I have a diet
And nothing will satiate it
Except for the 
Dopaminergic human
Who rings the bell when she walks into the 
Bakery. Who smells the sugary air
Whose pupils dilate
Who's overwhelmed by the choices
Who experiences
Who feels
Something maybe like elation
That's my sugar
And now I'm trying to 
Cook for myself
And it's not working