grass is something created, bred from soil gathered in fingernails that have spent too many months rubbing through the lice-ridden hair of another man’s monkey. the little something stuck in the craw. fictions I’d like to make true. truths I’d like to make fiction, and then rewrite, redraft, and trim up the edges. living in regret like it was its own land. a land with an always-grey sky, no matter how many suns shine. the grass is never greener, and yet the bridge gets walked across over and over again. that bridge with the little charred pilings.

and everything that moves underneath it is just water under another burnt bridge.

the land I live in is narrow, nothing exists off the path. the limbs that reach out are all tree limbs I’ve felt before. I could predict their daily blather. when pruned, they grow back thicker. when embraced, they still like to scratch. brambles and underbrush and squirrels and discarded frisbees, all planted, all plants like spies to gather. one can’t help be suspicious. and no matter how long the line goes, no matter how many drafts truth up the fiction like a turkey under the baster, there is no convincing one way or the other. if you preach peace, you’re a sucker and someone’s going to sucker punch. if you paint wasteland or future, the earth will grow absorbent to make your pigments translucent. yet all the ephemeral hallucinations carry their own kind of magneticism, and using the word broken, using the word ashamed, has its own kind of pleasure. the kind of pleasure that falling has, the pleasure of finding yourself in pain. because in that land, pain is the remembrance of something else, the only singular burnt bridge left.

living there is a kind of addiction.

when I'm sick I like to rework it, like to go back and tell myself to let go. because shoving off from land onto the rapids, or the crashcrash my very own surf has its own expectation, its own kind of swagger. there are sealegs to be had, and I run my tongue against the rivulets, the spray, the pouring grey rain. everything is orange on the sea, even if it’s reflection of my own tarnished coat. goodbye to the sand, goodbye to the driftwood, goodbye to the solid lands. just because some other place lives halfway across an uncharted ocean doesn’t mean homesickness can’t kill. just asked all the slaves who were chained to lumber, just ask all the broken backs. but I am different because I chose a new land, and pushed against the shore with these very same boots.

the surf is strong, the pull keeps pushing back.

sweet land, I wanted you to meet me, not sandwich me between the waves and my own vessel. the weather is moody, the stars dramatic, and all the cities in flames. I didn’t mean to be such a pyromaniac. there was something settling about gas tanks, something conclusive about burst, and all the streets were haunted, all the corners held faces. the nose of a doorknob, the smile of a draped cobweb, the flickering residual behind pa(i)ne. the vivisection of waters, the swivels of too many hips. cities hold too many realities; they gather like marbles to jostle, and I shot my two-penny catseye and wanted the chalk line to grow smaller.

just got tired of fighting the inevitable by myself.

so I lit my selves on fire, lit my regrets like steeped fags. even as I fanned with my right, I bucketed with my left, still wanting coexistence of fiction and non, still wanting someone to convince. but nobody could keep up with the dialogue I kept, nobody got a word in edgewise. nobody controls time like a clockmaker, and did you know if you erase bumps from a cog, the hand can circle even faster? do you remember sitting by the fire on a windy day? not the same kind of wind, but the changing kind, the cruelest mizzen mistral. no matter where one sits at the perimeter, eyes are bound to stream, and no matter what you tell yourself, the choke is just water under another burnt bridge.

but the land existed before the flames, a land solid as sap after a clockmaker’s personal 3,000 years.

I will shove off, I will shove off, the waves, I will shove off again.