These were the decades of truth and science—imagination replaced with tech, gods and goddesses replaced with avatars and humanoids, church replaced with rage rooms. Books replaced with keyboards.

The problem was the building materials.

There is something about the dream, the reality and the memory—a trivium of the lower division—grammar, rhetoric and logic—connected threads running parallel and perpendicular. A droplet of water creates a soggy remnant where one instance seems more alive than it actually was. Or maybe it is alive and we are the soggy remnants. It’s like your eyes are squinting inside yourself—trying to see a period or a comma.

She understood the reality of the shared experience yet she was directly opposed to the philosophy that followed, a philosophy that undeniably involves utilizing a purposefully generated discontent to influence spending by offering unnatural and expensive alternatives to keeping something that can’t actually be kept

After she was diagnosed — her entire adulthood felt like one big cancer. That’s what she said to her therapist. It felt like every relationship, every job, every grocery store excursion was in place to help me die.

Something regurgitated—used to court a lover and feed their eventual young. Predatory flowering—a carnivorous plant that receives nutrients by trapping and capturing, blossoming at the end of long stalks—bilaterally symmetrical flowers with fused petals. Conspicuous mechanisms designated as active or passive.

Go back to your pancakes and your french toast and your eggs over easy. This is the systemic institution of the systemic institution of blasphemy.

Alone feels like nature—immeasurable, mysterious, unrevealed. I cherish alone like I cherish fern gullies and swimming holes, like I cherish the skunk cabbage that emerges from the forest floor in early spring—Symplocarpus Floetidus.

None of this has anything to do with real life.

We live in a place where there are boundaries of all kinds simultaneously knowing of boundlessness and it is this knowledge that makes everything we exist within irrational.

My feet drag through wet morning grass and the whispers sound like screams. No one can hear them but me.

They don’t see how much pleasure their lover feels when they stuff their face—stick the food in so quickly they have to store it in their cheeks and swallow little bits at a time.

She was too young to think it through and so she hit that grand abyss of unknowns that makes being a child so delightful.

The three of us stayed still minus the boar’s breath which I continued to feel moving up and down my torso.

As if we create our own universe, our own sun to revolve around, our own jungles inculcated with an immortal photosynthesis that generates something more powerful than oxygen.

We are all technically murderers so why are only some of us behind bars. 

before i left she whispered softly in my ear / her touch tickled my feet and resonated in my belly / what did she say / she said it’s time to find green

I don’t know if my mom would have responded the way she did if it had been two men up on the podium again. Two men talking about themselves as if any of them knew anything worth arguing.

Today, as I sit here and write this, I struggle to think of a human who shows their love outwardly. I have no idea what love for something looks like on other people.

Betting on the inside isn’t for the sane of mind. 

Moss growing from leg to neck—rising along cheek bones, camouflaging lashes.