Look at them!
Don’t you see them?
Count em’ all!
Betchya don’t get that every day.
Have you ever seen such a thing?
I have. It’s in-sane!
None of them know me like I do and
that’s
fine!
They’re mine to have!
You should really try it out.
I think you’d really like it.
I know I do!’
I took video of a disco ball.
I tilted it a bit, trying something new, added Paris filter,
went to bed, woke up renewed when Friday came to play.
That night,
I posted up a photo of a drink I’d had,
added animated glitter, something nice and something fun in filtered Oslo,
shoes in bed, renown and into Saturday, tbh
I’m kind of like a God.
Later that day,
a steak I always have at Disneyland.
Something special with a slice of mushroom, Autumn’s kinda gone I guess but at least we’re living life in Lagos, three sugar cubes in this old fashioned and before I post my postured smile with Mickey Mouse if only for a millisecond do I convince myself that this is living,
glittered steaks and mirror ball –
These things are my Eternity.
Looking back at these stories,
taking record of all who’ve seen my shared and walloped under my gains,
I convince myself that’s true,
that I am living legend
and in my euthanasia see as I replay these victories one last time
that I have known the world and the world
has buckled under me.
Stroke of woe, my bitter complaint,
Contemptuous towards these pangs of Sin,
Shackled,
For I am wicked,
Shackled so I’m judged;
Still weak-kneed to be righteous,
Mine affliction confused
With these cold hands I wish to clasp
together,
Kneading the virtue of my Right,
With the blasphemy of my Left,
Weighted by His omnipresence,
His appointment to have me tried,
Beneath His shadowed Light so brilliant
I succumb with fear before His eye,
As my heart goes soft,
This deserved pain of love,
The agony of fools,
For I know not what Man I am,
For I have fear that comes on me,
Fear of what Man I might have become.
I’m laying on a lakebed 40 miles North of Barstow
And I’m thinking about bucket hats as something you can
barf into,
Heart strings that sting,
And the magic’s hitting like it’s hurting, feeling like a
horny Himbo
And the sky right now I mean like Jesus fucking christ —
A universe cathedral.
Milky Way the arches,
Praising something like itself and my back’s on the dirt
and there go the desert gods of aliens, winking at me and
the hand’s outreached and you come to view, at least to
mind, I wonder where you’ve been, wonder if you’d stay,
wonder if I’d keep you if you did,
wonder if the Gods up in the sky that zoom and zoom
are but tensioned boredom,
precursor of grief which befalls always at the end,
and if Gods like wistful love
are just longing, laying, pining need for you
to lift me off the ground,
then perhaps this taste piercing my throat
salivating for salvation,
knowing how I want you knowing now I need you.
that’s Venus rising to the left and just above our Moon.
Rolls his eyes at poetry but collects Funko Pops.
Nonconformity is conformity.
Careful who you give your love to; they may just be in need of your friends.
After careful consideration, being a fool is existing in the middle place between idiocy and genius.
Due diligence should be the name of a band.
Hey, so I’ve been thinking (for once).
Blasting music in the desert in fear of hearing nothing.
We could taste the Sun from where we perched; tangy, soft, lemonade.
End of the day, days from then, moments from now – reached the end of the timeline there,
There was always going to be the
Uh,
End.
The you of you, the men of you, the echoes after you,
Me getting over you, the end of that,
That was always gonna happen. At least I thought.
Now,
It’ll be him who has me to get rid of;
I mean you,
I mean us,
and your burner IG accounts
(possumkingdomdc)
(nother)
(jasonruerennequin).
Catch yourself up enough to bite you’re the one who winds up tangled.
Catch yourself tangled up enough you learn how to cut through the rope.
Unlike that of a fisherman’s,
Not nylon,
Not of anything that cannot decompose.
But of flesh
And all its rotting
Potential.
The inevitable promise of the mortal.
Of a name.
Of a family man now off to fetch a new visage, another one for himself.
I don’t blame you.
That’s selfish and elementary.
The weight bears on my lungs. Close above my heart,
arrhythmia
Like the barren longing for his arms without him,
Or the smell of him when I try to forget yours,
(despite yours being equated to soup)
The jokes he laughed at versus the ones you didn’t.
The jabs you made versus the one he never could.
And now its him on the chopping block,
The selfishness of me; Lord,
Allowing yourself into me, allowing you to stay,
The selfishness of me; Lord,
Allowing myself onto him, allowing him to go.
Some deserve the grave, and others the world, gimme Purgatorio.
But him and unlike you,
Deserves the neither of us.
The stupidity of course,
Beyond you, I always known, said I ‘Should’ve known,’
The allowed lingering of you.
Your perseverance isn’t an accolade you ought to boast on your pinned chest,
Rather,
Fine,
A weakness that has only come from being unable being to unbar myself of the majesty and tragedy of you,
And rather than ridding my grief of you once and for all,
Have surrendered to the cop-easy entry of band-aiding all the ways my everything of you meant your every day for you,
I’ve crushed love because of you,
And that’s entirely my fault.
Hiding behind your burners,
and still,
for some tormented reason,
still hiding behind some wall of my heart forever stained
With your smell of soup
so long as I refuse to mop it off once and for all.
perhaps, per chance,
some stains are permanent,
only over time are they forgotten, nay, tolerated.
You wouldn’t listen to me if I tried,
Never tried and now it’s all I’m trying to do,
To prove to you that I should’ve done something then,
Trying to show you I’d do something now, but –
‘Now,’ now,
not the now of the other day,
The day I let you go, and I don’t know where you’ll go,
But I’m hoping it’s a place some day I’ll be,
could it be some place I’ll be,
Try to let it be a place I’ll be,
this is me trying to beg, I want you hearing that,
The fear in my tremble, I always say being scared is pussy shit, but –
The thought
– Comes
– up.
Should I surrender myself,
Cut myself off from myself, and concede,
To you?
No longer trying, but doing like an exhale into your arms knowing you’d carry me,
Allowing you to insert the way you do,
Giving my ears to the words you choose,
Given you my pain;
Trusting you, your hue of blue,
– instead of this stupid shit I’ve done?
This knee-jerk crap with the little red button,
‘Nuclear option,’ blow it up,
Trying there, I did,
Succeeding there, I do;
That efficient self-destruction shit.
There I did and often as I do.
– I cut it off when I fear what I’d become once it ended.
– I’ve seen what happens when something like us does.
So selfish of me to assume you don’t,
Selfish of me to have believed you’d understand.
You wouldn’t listen if I did,
But would you listen to me if I tried?
So selfish of me to ask as I’ve evaded your patience,
Your fucking touch of grace,
– But,
Would you take me back if you did?
I cut a limb to feel my heart
To fix myself, at least to think I could
Dragged feet to soaring wings
I thought from the bounds of Earth
But the depths of Hell.
I cost a love to feel my pulse
To heal a thing, at least I’ve tried
Confused remorse, just missed the grief
Realised flight not from the coldness of flames,
But the abyss of self.
I left a life to feel some soul
To feel some thing, some thing to feel,
Blinded pupil of the approaching Sun,
I sought flight from my throat to the Universe
And still found no way to go.
When that passing-by, retractable roof decides to protect our lovely basin once again from the seven stars above, the color of the sky turns into something a little brown.
But with some purple to it,
don’t you think?
It’s too bland and too basic, very
‘Show’s over, folks, grab the tarp from that end over there and will pull it over them together,’
to be something suspect to grey.
It’s purple Brown, with
Charcoal particle,
covering our night sky and all those seven little stars,
under lit by the amber brilliance of those ever glowing, One 34 in the morning
streetlights,
One 34 in the morning and all two-hundred 23,
thousand,
sodium
street
lights.
(‘That’s it?’)
Eight hundred and 6
high-rise towers in Los Angeles,
and that includes the ones that just light up at night to convince you people are working in them.
There’s also any of the following awake at night and driving (‘We’re thinking Blade Runner, baby’):
Five,
million,
484 thousand
cars,
one hundred and twenty-three thousand, 669 motorcycles and one million, 68 thousand, 213 commercial vehicles (‘Bjork probably eats this shit up!’).
That’s a lot of light.
Varied light, too.
Although there’s been no word from Bird.
LAX,
the purple lanterns lighting that one bit up on Riverside.
All of it.
Beaming upward.
Towards that
Tarp, that
combination of the charcoal particle, the
smog, the fog, all those cigarettes – the exhaust of cars, factory fumes, the coughed out black of 2-stroke lawnmowers illegal in California (I think) that turn neighborhood soundscapes into ongoing vamps of cystic sacs popping, the tar pus of them all blasting with expelled squalls of toxic gas out these hyper-active metallic sphincters of robot moose,
And the fires…
(Remember that photo of the horsies on the sands of Malibu looking towards a blazing horizon, camels too, like Jesus Christ)
And then it all blends in with the clouds? The lot of it all, you know, just all of it combined, the pollutions,
the light of it all,
With the fumes and …the clouds.
Clouds.
Clouds of which –
Which I suppose we, hm. I see.
‘What you could say. ‘Is.’’
Well I suppose we could, we
…could say…
I suppose we could say that the clouds in this instance are something suspect to grey.
Sure,
The lid could have some grey to it. Fine.
By which case, in addition to another observation made moments ago, I stand corrected and renowned. ‘Renewed.’ proudly.
The error here for real, is that the sky is sometimes just the cloud. Sure.
‘Obviously(!),’
You know. ‘It’s just a cloud sometimes,’
And now,
Here comes a single star.
Could always be a drone, who knows.
And ah! There’s Jupiter. Could be, at least I’ll open up my app in just a beat. Looks big from where I’m sitting, there goes the cloud and here comes the sky. The sky,
Looking like a little indigo.
but with some green to it,
don’t you think? Huh!
Yeah,
There is no freedom.
Not for me at least.
Bottles of pills, the three for months,
the ones I need and sometimes skip,
in a paper bag from Kaiser crunched up
in the glove compartment of my pick-up truck.
Driving from the Sunsets I used to seek
the dog is sitting next to me,
Lucinda and Sharon’s strumming all for me.
Searching for my farm in Nebraska unknown,
where the job awaits
and my man slow-dances at the bar on Tuesdays.
He forgets my name but not my drink,
his denim’s stained, his toothpick
soaked,
looking like he’ll hit you with his eyes,
that’s when he cries,
when a strong man dies,
it’s what his daddy used to say,
Daddy’s something he likes to say.
He promises he’s never satisfied,
promises he’ll fade away,
it’s what he wants
His only want,
the power of his certainty,
the tears on his cowboy cheeks over the stars outside the club,
the muffled sounds of neon crust his skin with dirt and
the tilted hat masks his pain.
He sets the five AM alarm to work it out,
always working, never thinking, handiwork,
the medicine of using hands,
sweating blindly, parched for water so he lights a fag and drinks his milk,
has a rocking chair that overlooks the oaks
but,
prefers the wooden steps instead,
The ones that lead him to his farm and to his work where he works to pass the days
and gaze
at the nautical sky as the Sun dips beneath the plains behind him,
in his Nebraska unknown,
the one I found for him,
the one that’s far from what he used to know.
The Tuesday’s rolls around,
those tumbleweed days into nights,
slow-dancing at the bar like the ladies we are,
lassoed and roped from whiskey to groped
Daddy this and daddy that,
safeword’s the whispers mother never shared with you
the secrets of what you are,
the maps of where you’re going,
where they wanted you to go,
And boy
were you going.
But where you going now?
The bottle’s running low.
The other two are shot to hell.
Too broke to have the farm
but broke enough for handouts.
The ones that
That keep you in California.
Bring you back to California.
Trap you lost in California.
For that
crinkled bag,
the three bottles for months,
the pills you need but sometimes want to skip.
Sure to die, but sure to ignore,
to flee with Ruffy in that pick-up truck
and daydream of slow-dancing at the bar with what you are,
no, what you wanted,
knowing what you wanted but you’ll never be.
Wanted the Nebraska unknown and tumbleweed dreams,
blackened journal lines, line-dancing too
Something else that’s more for me,
Driving back to L.A.,
prescription filled,
every day and every time,
wanting to be free.
Thomas Daníel Valls 