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.
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.
In my dad chair and at the beach,
just south of Incubator Isle
I found a parking spot on West Channel Road.
Crotch-forward watching presence of boys with their volleyballs and lambskin speedos,
dancing for pose the lot of them, though not one in particular,
intimidated by the dude alone, ‘we will never be like him.’
All the while,
The sand’s ahead of me,
the overlook from my balcony on Dumaine.
I wonder, thirst,
to swim in the bath of Sun and drown in each other’s moonlight,
our names forgotten and tomorrow’s ‘You Said Something’s’
before longing for the promised view, those parched dreams of you,
in my dad chair and at the beach.
The way speckled dust soars
like flocks of gulls behind the closed curtain of eyelids
the beating Sun lights them from behind.
In my dad chair and at the beach
I only dream of desert,
and not because it’s colder here than I thought it would be.
The pier’s to the left of you.
Tide rising,
at Five the dolphins break the surface of the horizon as they return from feeding.
At Six,
the gulls line up behind you to bathe in amber wind,
and the boys in speedos pack up as the molly returns them from Oz.
To know these things, the knowing waves to ride,
bucket basket of fried chicken plucked from Ralph’s,
the goodness in knowing the familiarity
that’s company of the most completed variety. It’s presence.
But who gives a shit about that.
Dig your feet into the sand,
they’ll keep cool and white.
Bulge pointed towards the sea the completed man and all alone,
legs crusted, sea salt, hell White Sands,
Truth or Consequences is a name of a town I know,
the Pacific brings you to New Mexico if you let it,
the wonder, rippling flesh of canyon land,
Far away from sissies sipping slurpees, skipping stones,
while kelp forests swerve and sway just under our surface.
Beasts and dominion,
the certainty of soil and sacred rock preferred.
Yes, crashing tides approaching
and
yes,
waves likes mountains seen off of Blueberry Ridge,
the dad bods of Winter, abso-fucking-lutely,
fawning thoughts of running into the ex who ridicules the sea of gratitude coursing through the veins,
it’s all here all of it if you let it,
But
There is some place, some place with
an exactness,
the decisiveness of the Earth,
where the moon rises above Albuquerque and I see it in your eyes,
With promise of a rising Sun as mine begins to dwindle beneath the sea.
At least in about an hour.
I don’t read as much as I should.
The thoughts of people busy me.
It’s boring to me, it isn’t necessary.
Not if you’re already looking,
listening,
fucking all around you.
The forcefulness of it all feels obligatory,
immediately offensive to the worlds
breathing around you
All of it combined into a singular
throbbing
pulsation that ignites
brilliantly
like soaking in the mirror of the Sun,
the breeze of the Pacific hitting the back and front of you, but like it does back East and South,
Bahia Honda,
the electrifying cool and warmth that hugs us so desperately,
yearning for eternity for us
to
Worship it like it were a God.
Like cock,
it wishes for us to worship it for the God that it is,
powerless, all powerful and grateful,
the submission to the world meditation only dares to dominate.
thomasdanielvalls.com 