the view from outside my window
it won’t stop raining — the rain with metals in it; you can smell it in the air can’t you? almost as if it’s mocking you and your smallness, your mortality, reminding you who’s up there and who’s down here swimming among the fishes; the streets flood and the music floods and the mind is flooded with memories of when the night is calmer somewhere far away from here.
the room
I stare at the blank wall, the locked door, the crucifix, the bookshelves, and they all exist in the presence of dust and soot, among the miserable, the dying creativity, the dead authors, the petrichor, and I think to myself when the flowers would grow as they eat through the shit that I have fed them; and I think to myself, why can’t I finish anything I have ever written, and they all just fade into the background at the first sign of—
the balcony
tonight, I smoked my cigarette and wished I’d die in my sleep; so I called my lover and then my ex-lover to tell them about the versions of me they both have seen; I was hoping for something, anything, that would make me want to wake up and continue wondering why in the hell I’m still alive; the smoke went into my lungs and into my brain and told me to shut my mouth since nothing— nothing— I ever say or do will change the way the world spins.
the light
he told me he had died before, for about three minutes; his heart went into overdrive, he said, and pumped bad blood into his brain, and then the flat line; he told me there was a light and that there was a god who wanted to welcome him to heaven and into the arms of this celestial being; he said he would’ve gone if it weren’t for his beautiful kids and his beautiful wife; but that singular experience, he said, made him believe in heaven and in god and in the angels that sang the song of death; but he has always been a bullshitter, dead or alive; must’ve been the bad blood.