mplr1

REALICIDE YOUTH RECORDS

Jim “Crocket” Swill

“THE GREAT EQUALIZER”

"The Great Equalizer" is the product of my experience in Lebanon, Oregon (September and October 2007) working on a rye grass farm, Burger King, living on a small mountain with an 85 year old man and a high school buddy, isolated from anything I've ever known, far from the communities I tied myself to, in the name of seeking personal identity and in the name of facing yourself in the natural world which shows no mercy to the weak. A lot of people I’ve met envy this experience, but it is not a vacation. All it takes is a little step back to make you understand how important it is to be grateful for what you have as opposed to waiting for it to die and or fade away. You can look at the most beautiful scenery you’ve ever laid your eyes on everyday, but it doesn’t seem to take value unless you have another human being to share it with. We are social animals, social creatures, all revolving around the same quintessential desires. The people I experienced gave me a better understanding of American society as a whole, and made my own faults and shortcomings all too visible, without reservation and without intentions of pity. Always stay hungry for life, no matter who thinks you’re crazy, you have to concentrate on your own life first before giving consideration to changing the lives of others. Reclaiming your identity is not a selfish act. This is for the man and woman you become outside the public eye, and void of all allowances to that eye we provide.

The beer bottles pile up and begin to make that sour piss stench.

Out over the blueberry bushes, down by the beehive past the apple tree

I was sobbing and growling, pulling my neck and face with my fingernails.

Socking knuckles in my head to make it swallow.

The blue-black pain that knots and grows dense;

each punch like a miniature bell and strobe

until the blood comes out on the pine needles

dripping quickly.

Why would anybody do that? Am I dramatic or genuine?

It’s hell to know sometimes. I’ve lied to myself all these years.

How hard could it be to do it again?

Do I want someone to see my blood?

Is the violence for release or for indulgence?

In the woods on the butte I have no place but the last totem.

I am the weakest and the youngest;

no control

no voice

quiet as my friend wastes himself

drunk wandering and pacing,

begging to be told he’s the best.

Flexing muscles in the mirror:

sad repeats of his crack head comatose father

again and again.

Violent and brute rapist wannabe,

pushing me like a wall with a sinister smirk.

Everyday I feel younger,

more helpless and stripped.

Silently I exist in permanent idle.

Each night I’ve stared down the valley

to the real pitch black

anxious for monsters and men.

Come and kill me.

Come and fucking kill me…

After 2 years of vegetarianism

I sawed off a fishes head with a dull knife

then baked him in a piece of foil.

I threw the head like a softball in the tree line

And couldn’t care.

I had strayed from all consumption death based

For so long

But as death became the ever-present state of mind

I could feel it feeding off my fear

And I to ate the sustenance of death

In oil with bone

With a soiled, sun burnt scowl.

I was out in the field along the fence setting vole poison.

To my right, unnoticed until right then was a bone pile.

Yellow jackets had built a combed nest in the socket of a sheep’s head, as a large black bodied vulture was stretched fat and sluggish on the next post,

pulling his red head back to stare at my body and scoff.

I was of no use, I wasn’t facedown yet.

When I scurried over the barb wire, I was careful to avoid the electric line.

Hopping down my shoes crunched thru some brittle parts of a ribcage.

Reaching towards the 3 jawbones, I was swarmed by hundreds of flies

all clustered on the few pieces of green dry muscle left seldom on random parts.

I pulled different broken skulls out of the dirt, until I found one intact and threw it with the other bones in the bait bucket.

It was amusing, the fact that vulture had been feasting on the meats left on these sun bleached bones, and now I was scavenging thru his remnants for my own peculiar purposes, unrelated to survival.

I asked a boss back at the shop of the farm what I was rummaging thru;

"when farmers want to put down a sheep they just take up to that corner and either tie them up or shoot ‘em."

Imagine how it feels to be one of a heard

loyal, feeding, consistent.

Your master takes you aside, anxiously you trot behind

only to be led to a corner of carcasses and vultures

sometimes shot on the spot

other times starved out in the corner.

Sleeping on dead animal pieces

in a shadow of humming flies.

In the stark sunlight as I walked off, the black bird a few feet closer on the post behind me, eyeing me intently.

I took the bones home and soaked them in bleach water.

I decided to send my friends the jaws and keep the skull on my dashboard.

Chainsaws roll through dust storms.

Wind chimes made of broken rustling branches.

Spiders up in my mouth and hair.

Poison oak oil

rolling logs up hill

bark peels back, one million ants

one million pill bugs

various gray grubs

same skin and tin cans

same ash and cum

same vomit and creatine dehydration.

Throw me to a beautiful landscape surreal and flawless

So far from all I’ve ever grown familiar with,

and watch me wriggle in the clutch of the same nomadic mind.

Another silent night

where I feel fattened and alone.

Masturbating is hard because I feel I'm too ugly to do it.

Showering off all the brown rivers of soot and dust.

Standing staring down in the dark bathroom.

The drinking water and the shower all taste and smell like blood and eggs.

I spend allot of time in the bathroom.

Shitting and showering are my only moments truly alone in Oregon.

As I sit back on the toilet next to all the fishing mags,

big hunky grins from opey faces holding giant dead trout and steelhead; I close my eyes hard and plug my ears with my fingers.

As I feel the shit escape me

I think of running down a long grassy hill faster and faster out of control.

The blue sky searing open blinding white

as my legs fling outstretched and loosely toppling forward down real crazy.

All the feelings of security I get when holding a girl in bed

biking and meditating

or looking someone in the eyes while screaming.

All the joy and abandonment of this menial anguish come rushing through me,

and once again I'm there in the vulgar Zen.

The Zen a man encounters after

pissing,

shitting,

fighting,

eating,

and cumming.

True serenity.

splitting wood on a tractor crank

hydraulic pushing to the splitting maul

each time the wood splinters deep and groans

crackling loud and dense

burrowed centipedes as long as my hand feast on larvae

pupas with tiny eyes swollen and wet

throw it in the stack.

it was a field burning day,

dark khaki smoke drifted over the sun turning it deep red

like the cover of a science fiction novel,

A sun cultivated from another world not our own

I wiped the sweat off my brow with my dirty arm

the old geologist asks if I “got enough jism to lift” the rounded oak log next to him

oak is the heaviest and toughest to split

fur is the easiest, and makes the cleanest break.

He can see the fatigue in my eyes and laughs.

Hunched over, his voice projected to the ground

he says

"there once was a man from Nantucket,

whose dick was so long he could suck it,

and he said with a grin with the hair on his chin

if my ear was a cunt I would fuck it"

On the coast I stared off into eternity.

The sun had set and you could no longer see the ocean.

The Oregon coast casts a deep mist over its beaches,

only distantly could you hear the ohm of the ocean wave

and occasional shrieks from bonfires.

We were fascinated flipping up debris,

tiny parasite crabs would leap off by the thousands and burrow

making a barely inaudible pitter pattering as they hit the sand.

We continued flipping the seaweed covered slop until we realized in the right light

we had been flipping up dead seagull carcasses with our hand,

the tiny creatures feasting on their rotted salty organs.

I stared at its ribs and empty eyehole

wingspan splayed open barely submerged

gnarled chest cavity stench on my fingers, I cringed

and the tiny fascinating cricket like crabs became overbearingly disgusting.

Sizzling through tissue with their microscopic mandibles

scattering and digging.

I couldn't help but feel phantom pains of being eaten inside out.

The jagged stone were like gateways

ominous and silent.

We had stumbled on a group of very young teenagers with a good fire going.

They offered a tent they had found, full of clothes and a sleeping bag no doubt, and had dragged it to their camp.

I felt instantly angry for whoever’s tent it belonged to,

now broken and half burnt.

They screamed and chased one another, talking loud bullshit as the very young girls stared at us and whispered.

Too young and we knew even if we did muster up the testosterone to try and make advances we'd only be met with the guilt reaction.

It's the feeling you get when you're midway in a sexual trespass.

The "don’t do this don’t do this" feeling before your dick goes soft and you can’t even penetrate the most deluxe of moistures.

One came forward and shook my friend’s hand shyly and ran away,

Silently. We advanced forward.

We got stoned on the coastal line with some brick weed scored from a beachside tweeker,

A man too stupid and culturally relevant to even mention more.

Tiny warm pools and low tide.

I began wondering what I was looking to lose.

The ocean is a brilliant place for evaluation,

almost as if you can meditate on some shortcoming or flaw so silently

that you could cast it out to the sea, a feeling of permanence and grim finality held its web. So much wonder and life, like a whole ‘nother space on our own planet never to be fully understood, only as a barely visible womb into our species beginning.

I was very guilty,

I had made allot of mistakes to get here,

breaking hearts so viciously that it was welling up in me to eat me inside out.

I knew I had to let allot of my ego go, a long way to go,

I sat on a rock surrounded in a rippling moat of tiny sea tentacle plants.

I often thought of my ashes,

but tonight I knew it wasn’t about me here,

it’s what’s in front of me I could never understand

and my past mistakes would just have to teach me

no matter how cold and ruthless it was

that pain was mine and only mine but still not just about me.

I had rejected love for lust

and now here alone I was gonna have to wait for each inner demon one by one.

Today as I poisoned voles, in the blistering heat, high off of exhaustion, I masturbated and came on a dry black field

3 times.

I got violently ill instantly and began to vomit what liquid was left in my dehydrated body, on all fours as the sun beat down on the back of my tomato neck.

As I was bent over trying to drink the water I had brought with me,

I saw a glint of a shadow pass over me.

The vulture was back, except with a certain cockiness this time.

He kept his distance, strutting back and forth,

sometimes standing still and wobbling left to right.

His eyes on my head as I puked after each swig,

“fucking heatstroke!” I sputtered out,

A line of bile from my lips to the dirt.

I learned later that day due to the incident I had lost my knife out there on the barren.

Old letters are going to be the fucking death of me.

The sex becomes a hyper painful series of memories

deeper and deeper

the moaning imbedded down in my brain.

Unmasturbatable, cruel and masochistic to dream of.

Nobody cared for me as much as she cared for me

And I treated her the worst.

I try not to think about karma in these moments

I don’t want to pay up for my bad deeds

but I am paying, loopy geese senselessly paddling and quacking

all those damned turkeys dipping their gullets

yellow jackets settling

all make me so furious.

It all makes me enraged and want death to the nonsense,

because I can show no love without hope for it back. I know no sense of pure love, without reservation, without intentions.

As I lay on the bed, the shutters down

a dim white light is cast over me in the cool shade

melancholy, curled in the fetal position

fantasizing of her hands the way she used to rub the stress knots out of me

and we would lay there petting one another like fiends.

It all makes me sick

in the dead land

far away from anyone who could ever love an insane child like me.

Never knowing if my exhibition of these elements are for pity

Or for genuine release.

Building, suffocating, hoping to outlive love with greed and despair

all blanketed, tucked under nice and snug

cocooned into the tree branches waiting in anguish to be reborn.

Hatched open and instantly in the web

how desperately I miss it

how evil I was

how undeserving I have made myself

all so true and physically untouchable.

The woman further on down, thru the apple tree clearing

past the beehive

is a victim and a vindictive devil.

She speaks nasally but deep in her lungs

their is a fluid rattling, a grizzly baritone

feminine very distantly.

All the curtains pulled shut.

The whole living room illuminated with a red gleam

The sunlight striking one lone transparent surface of cherry stained glass.

Red carpet, red nail polish, and a cartoonishly large steel bowl of red red jelly, stagnant on the kitchen counter.

The smell of Marlboro lights and must

wavers in the air.

Stocks rolling fluid over her big screen.

She is so still when she speaks to me, her eyes dart from mine to the television’s, panicked she might miss something I guess.

I know deep down she is nothing but a junkie,

An honest victim of the medical business,

but inside past my reasoning I hate her.

They even say she has 3 different doctors to get 3 times the dose.

Isolated in the mountains, the only guidance, the only connection to society is FOX news.

“I would kill an Iraqi myself”

But she smells of death, sounds of death, and in her eyes you can see she’s been dead for years.

Ever since those first failed operations

And that first cluster of cancer cells.

Ever since she swallowed that first Oxycontin.

Rotting in a legal delirium.

No matter of the precursor, she embodies something overbearingly sinister and dark.

She is a devil, I say this seldom;

but she carries with her the mason republican cigar Satanism

that old batty whiskey rapist politician

that Christian racist good old boy shit.

Dark is the lifestyle and mind state of a heroin filled redneck republican, hoarded up in a mountain waiting to OD beneath the glow of the big screen TV, amongst potato chips and dried up dog shit in the shag carpet.

I collect bones and feathers

I hunt for snakes and lizards

My wrists are scraped open from bark

The darkness is becoming a part of me

in there with the wild

the great equalizer.

I smother my face with berries

I dig for stones

I will make the forest my understanding

I will not be afraid

fear only gets you killed

and what is it that city taught me

how to depend?

how to sell myself short?

I was out poisoning the voles, gunning it, stopping in the hot sun.

I treaded knee-deep loose dust towards the ditch tunnels

hollowed out, bridged beneath the road.

I climbed down and checked for hornets, webs, and snakes

and proceeded to jack off

in a drainage tunnel

with the slight sound of flies

and an occasional passing truck overhead.

I knew then there was no peace,

and like an animal hides to hunt

I hide to masturbate.

How human of me, playing another exterminator

after another exterminator.

Skeeting on aluminum and soil,

hidden away like a malicious troll

getting rocks off in the field again.

Up the stairs, past all the tacky gold frames

Dead relatives, friends of the family, hunting buddies, colleagues

The photos so faded, if they were old then

Certainly dead now.

But at the top of the steps there is one gold frame

Isolated from the rest

Its own pocket on the wood paneled walls.

It is a photo of young George W. Bush

Asking you to cast him your vote,

As well as ALL of the members of the republican party on your ticket.

You know this crowd never forgets.

Their eyes are riddled with judgments.

Every fault is fair game

no smiles are genuine,

down thru the ventilation grate I can hear every word they speak

about the Mexicans

and the blacks

and the taxes

"why would anyone complain?"

"they're trying to stop them from keeping us safe."

Leave the TV. on to sleep

I stood out in the total night and closed my eyes

kissed my forearm, imagining it could be another human

and wrapped myself up with my seemingly phantom limbs

Every spinal column bending

Every childhood nausea there with you

Every piece of caustic nostalgia mummifying your state of mind

…as if your sadness separated from the body

and you are enraptured in a moving canvas of hallucinatory memory

Yourself as a child would never recognize you now

as you’ve grown older and more bitter

determined and deeply wounded

Men are no longer boys when they can no longer remember what it means to laugh

at jokes not cynical

with people who have no agenda

to smile for life as opposed to a reward

as we grow it becomes more in equal

branching apart farther and farther from our core

extremity

Childhood is life without the cycles of extremity

Empty driftwood cabins

on hazy chill afternoon

remind me of my surly American vision.

The man with the all day 5 o clock shadow,

cigarette hanging loosely

as he rapidly shuffles pages.

A dusty set of wood planks over stagnant algae.

His eyes cocking right to left

darting over anxious poems.

Boiling water

evaporating until the pot scalds.

When desert soil crackles for 100 miles,

your bones in the frigid waters

on charcoal sand,

cigarette hanging loosely,

pages ashen and drifting out to sea,

over sidewinders and horseflies

damp moss rotted gloomy diners.

Coca cola signs faded pink and white

as a snow haired sea beaten man

stares like we wait for an elevator

towards the ocean horizon.

Forever western

and prime American

For nights on end we watched the orb weaver female spider

building web and capturing moths.

As she hung in the corner of our doorway

under the floodlight

we began to duck each time we passed as to not disturb her.

On particular days she was no longer present

but seemingly replaced by a smaller, brown spider with much longer front legs.

They would switch roles; one would be present the other absent

confusing until they appeared once in the same webbing.

The fat abdomen being female, the long legged brown spider a male

and he was attempting voraciously to mate.

He would draw out tiny strands connecting to her main web

and begin to pluck vibrations,

luring her closer and closer,

each touch hyper delicate as to ensure he was a spider not prey.

As I leaned closer I could see how intricate his playing was.

He would gently pluck with his back legs, sometimes tapping.

Then as if his middle legs were a violins bow, he would drag them back and forth slowly and precisely

luring her away from her center to his line.

For almost a week each night we could see him struggling.

She'd come closer and closer

until he would reach to touch her head

under which circumstance she would strike and he would dodge

breaking loose and hanging upside down by one strand far below

seemingly still and dead, defeated and frustrated.

But of course he would shimmy up and try again and again.

One night we caught them not a centimeter apart.

He was caressing and tapping her skull.

Her mandibles and fronts rising to strike, but she would settle

as he would begin petting her rapidly

then raising his abdomen towards her

he would spear at her with impregnation.

The female orb weaver dodging.

Such incredible risks and stunts for the sake of reproduction

for in most bug culture, when the male has completed his mating task

he is either eaten or simply wanders to die.

Risking being eaten alive - never ending will to carry on

yet somehow we most advanced animals possess the ability to limit will

even stop will and determination

and replace it with fantasies of futility.

The spider knows nothing but goal, yet we know nothing of a true goal

all seemingly worthless in cosmic sense.

Determination is essential to the soul.

A life of worthless wander and inquisition offers you and world nothing

but misery and incomplete understanding.

The male spider is gone,

and the female orb weaver remains

swelling for now

building, shredding, and rebuilding.

The rain ran slowly

misting us with an autumn cold as we pushed wheelbarrows full of tree bark.

Later on that day while driving we took a sharp turn

and the sheep skull on my dashboard slid to the right of me and stared into the face of my roommate.

That skull was mine. That was the deciding moment.

I collected another rodent skull with fresh new moss growing on the crown

The situation all blatantly insinuates death

stands for and remains as death

The wise old guidance

the fast talking liars and hustlers

heroin devils

gabber mouthed demons

my own identity ghosting out

beaten into wood grains like termites and insecticide wasps

writhing in poison

Multiple times I've hunted down their combs of eggs

and sprayed them down with it thoroughly

as to ensure they would freeze positions

and grasp the walls like a taxidermy

limited limbs locked with solidified toxins

a tiny model diorama of a working hive

But why

only before this I could find no tolerance for extermination for the sake of extermination

but a place like this will change you

life carries on and on and on

calluses build internally and externally.

I am an exterminator

pissed on graves

garbage rotted yellow novels

spray painted billboards

buried money

broken radios and TV sets

all oxidizing, rusting

all of every perpetually burning.

In the dance club

I saw wolves bear teeth.

Drunken and rapist.

All 1970's retro overload,

fashion overtones that alienate me:

women’s hands touch you all over

every step you take a hand runs down your body somewhere.

Anonymous Aryan orgy

trying so so hard, everyone forcing forcing

painfully squeezing the conformity heart

clenching out all its blood over their child minds

sexual and blunt

a girl says "spread the news, I’ll spread the legs"

Camera phones and ipods galore

washing over our flesh with bleach

and hard cleansers.

Taking sandpaper to scrotums

and high-pressure garden hoses to vaginas;

all waxed and ready for semi child pornographic fantasies,

hipster slick grime and bigotry.

Of course nobody dressed that well could be a devilish asshole right?

Cigarettes held, big smiles, phones on and out, texting while gabbing out lies.

tell a few hear a few

and throw down your greatest imagination game.

Guts swoll with liquor

Dicks soft and flaccid

Pussies dry and resistant

but the minds still know

that’s the only aim

In a blistering haze

Choking on the smoke

Nauseated by the bass and sweat

Vodka spills down a girl’s cleavage

Eye liners running

Striped shirts, tailored well

Prefaded

FAUX

Wasting so much, pouring out so much

Desperation

Dance like they do on MTV

And inebriate your desire

Clutched together for safety and compassion

My roommate blacked out drunk

and claimed liberation by burning dollars from my wallet and smoking them, saying "I'm trying to get on some of that America shit".

Led smoke clouding my car, his dreary blank gaze forward

dying embers falling on his lap.

When we came home, I tried to sleep

but every 5 minutes he would drop something

until I saw him stumbling with two fistfuls of dollar bills.

Blank and desolate, his face was a landscape of illness

and he lay in the shower with his clothes on

flooding the hallway

until he became sickly cold.

And while I was asleep he flushed our money down the toilet.

My paycheck gone in an instant

but he’s not sorry.

I've known many addicts

many junkies and drunks

sociopath logical liars.

Unable incapable

of truly feeling for anything outside of their own selfish agendas.

My handwork somewhere floating underground, dissolving.

He wanted to make me feel his never-ending debt.

How his money disappears to faceless credit card companies

and cruel medicine wards, failed college courses and cocaine binges.

I always pay for his mistakes.

I always pay for his sinister mindlessness.

I always fall under the shadow of his brooding arrogance

and soul consuming self loathing.

I always must relive his nightmarish childhood.

I always must wear his failure as my own because he is a parasite.

Stronger, smarter, charismatic, socially acceptable and malleable

but rotten and sick with the disease of addiction and worthlessness.

Consuming my life minute by minute

I am out of control.

Each hand taking off more skin.

Each wound cracking farther apart with each movement.

Everywhere I hide my past will find me.

All my junkie company from teenage years

waiting to talk their lies in loud banter

or insult one another viciously on account of personal shortcomings.

I must let go and abandon all hope.

The only thing that doesn’t seek to infest me with self destruction is my own will my own way and nobody will follow

because it is to be lived, walked, and sensed in all experience alone.

While the leeches are throat high

and the blood is running it’s thinnest yet

everyone will spout out ces la vie! ces la vie!

But do not follow others voices that are so sure…

They are afraid and want the company of your failure as well

abandon abandon

the only true commandment.

Drove halfway across the state to see a waterfall behind a chain link fence.

The skull rattling on the dash

reflecting in the windshield over long thin roadways stretching around the hills ahead.

Godlike sunrays shooting thru dark clouds on tin country warehouses

sheep bleating

wind against my jacket

standing on a stump alone

looking down on decayed spinal columns

looking down lava rock

thick moss

and burger king wrappers

overhearing teenagers beg for cigarettes

and talking loudly over smoking bowls

down in the canyon.

I know this moment is more beautiful than 90 percent of my life

but the melancholy shadow stays over me

sad and quiet,

incapable of feeling engulfed.

Protective of my brittle soul, defensive and reclusive.

I walked down alone to the north falls of silver creek and cupped my hands into the stream beneath

and spread the cold stone water over my face.

Its scent of minerals and soil was almost Baptist.

I arose to the sunlight in the pines

drops of water hanging singular on twigs

my face reflecting inside

breathing deep and trying to escape

but the pavement was even out here in the woods.

Farm work ran low so I was given a job at Burger King.

Managed by a vengeful obese hag that looks like a toad, giant ½ pound burgers dwarfed in her biscuit like arm and babyish hand.

Back to the old 16 year old grind.

Tran saturated kingdom.

All my fellow employees so dedicated and loyal.

Sticklers for stipulation

waiting to snitch

waiting to brown nose

proud of their self hatred

as they condescend me pizza faced and dumpy.

But I know its passing

and we're simply just getting by.

I shouldn’t hate them,

if I had worked there as long as they have I'd be sinister.

I don’t write about it much because every night there is seriously a replica of the night prior, no changes in the regiment of the fast food chain.

Giving pieces of my mind, heart, and time to the fucking King.

They’re one of those burger spots that’s markets their poison with the “FUCK IT” mentality.

We’re all gonna die someday,

Might as well be a heart choked in bacon and mayo.

The oil is melted from a giant white block of shortening

the ice-cream is high in butter fats

and the grease that runs from the meats on the rotating grill is gloriously fluent.

It’s surreal after awhile.

Everybody is a drug addict, a convict, or just a loser, a pure unchanging stagnant loser with no aspirations,

only instant gratification.

I’ve been offered random pills 3 times in one week.

The images and alarms,

angry customers,

judging my incompetence.

But it all fades when my daydreams drift into dunking heads in deep friars

or shoving 5 pounds of burger down a throat with a broom handle

gets me by.

Some days you don’t even have to do that, because you can see their weakness shine, as the meat hits their lips and the dopamine is released from the flavors on the tongue,

This will be the vice that buries them in their greasy graves.

An estranged sense of karma.

"greetings and welcome to the one and only Kingdom of Burger, how may I service you this evening?"

Trade in love for lust.

Her eyes burn thru mine

Caustic memories

Eating away like hot acid.

Voices of disdain in distance

I deserve to remain unforgiven

Screaming orgasms

And kissing

Our teeth clanking together

Inside outside one another

Our faces pressed, flooding with tears and sweat.

But I don’t replay the sex that often

Just mainly the part about the kissing over crying

I’ve never known anyone so passionate

I don’t think I ever can

I definitely don’t deserve to.

Her trembling hands in mine

As I wrap my arms around her back while she reads a cookbook feverishly

Her walls filled to the brim with collected torn photos.

I was too young to absorb the purity

I wanted to be abused

But she just kept dishing out the compassion

Flooding me with her devotion.

Now I know she’ll read this, and never believe me.

Writing this kind of shit is cowardly,

Like passing notes in a junior high school.

Except I’m supposedly an adult,

And this is “my book”.

Dear diary, what am I to afraid to say out loud?

Hopefully somebody will mentally pity me somewhere far off.

Fuck that, I don’t want that

These poems are just bad habits.

Remember

All day and night

She’s with a new man now

I’m with a new couch to sleep on

And a new sense of appreciation

For the past moments I burned alive

My name was baby bird because I couldn’t feed myself.

As a child I had no control,

now I thirst for it.

As a child I had no discipline,

now I make the effort.

As a child I had no guidance,

now I search for it.

As a child I had no extremities in my emotions,

now I am nothing but.

Petty rebellion

angrily waiting,

waiting in line after line.

Leaned up against a crutch,

Dull and numb.

Confined to the limits of others.

The force to run

is there

Everywhere.

On self help tapes from the thrift store,

from the mouths of fanatic motivation lists.

It’s always waiting for me

like a jacket awaits the winter.

These seasons have yet to change over

but I can sense it as in autumn.

Unafraid

I want it this time

because it’s not a joke

only failures think so.

None of this is petty to me

I write poems for nomads, thieves, pussies, and Americans still in the grit.

I’d rather hear feedback than applause.

Hate it because you want something better and I'll give you something better.

Sadness was all about every drive I made.

Far far away I would begin to feel so deeply discharged

as if in a foreign land.

America changes so drastically state to state

with the same chains of stores

but the life is fully different.

In Oregon I was truly a youth of an unquestioned generation.

We were given no wars to fight,

no name or a song.

Our wars were on going and fully engaged unanimously,

self destructive.

So purely bored that we would thirst for something heavy in damage.

Our name was never coming.

All the past 5 decades were being broken down into a retro chum

with newer gadgets and less ideas behind them.

Expansions on entertainment

drug breakthroughs

and the music is there only as a button, t-shirt, patch, and sticker

accessories that lack origin.

Is it wrong to expose oneself so explicitly?

Isn't privacy what I fight for?

Revealing crass opinions and social secrets for the sake of my own lack in inspiration from life outside myself?

I've always written for public,

and I wonder when writers say they write for themselves

what that even means.

It doesn’t even cross me as being remotely possible.

I always get the shit for saying

“Life is a game, there are winners and losers in the game, and I’m out to win. It’s all one competition, there’s little equality and balance even to be created let alone presently existent.”

People don’t like to feel like I’m trying to beat them,

But I’ve lost long enough.

Grow tougher.

Bonded by our relations,

divided by our statements.

The wood smoke smell stays with all my clothes,

and that smell insinuates peace and solitary.

I was stricken with many realizations over coffee this morning

understanding others as myself.

I thought of all the times I'd masked myself over only to be interpreted as a fool,

and how many judgments I'd jumped to

over a voice not poignant enough

or a sentence unclear.

How many times I falter and how commonly I judge others faults.

I should have listened to her words and her eyes.

She spoke so frequently thru them.

To me she would give me all the truth she could bear without me coming down on her,

but I was waiting to strike.

It’s cold and the snake was still

in the road, sea foam green and vibrant

on his back splayed.

It was cold and the snake was still.

My groin aches in pleasurful agony.

The thoughts are racing in and bouncing like moths in a lampshade

to never escape, only flail in total frenzy.

I haven't seen a drop in what feels like eons.

I’m thirsty and delirious…

I remember pulling off panties with my teeth and snarling

running my tongue against the whole side of a body

with intense pressure

tasting nothing but sweat, and dirt.

But those images are like peaking drugs,

It starts to turn into frighteningly intense bliss.

It makes me wanna scream

until tears well up in my eyes with maniacal joy.

Doglike, godlike

over and under,

overwhelming.

I hold the back of my skull and remember her hands pulling my hair.

I hold the back of my neck and recall her pulling me into her groin.

I hold myself back

and sigh through gritted teeth.

I watch the bodies turn in the spotlight

assembled from many corpses

all constructed for the sake of esteem.

Our times have no value for the body.

We are merely extensions of past extensions.

Where we made a shovel there is an arm to hold it,

but our minutes are so totally devoted to completing the task of human absorption

the arm is just an extension of the handle

and the body connected an extension to the extension.

The builder is simply an ideal

floating unconscious.

All the elements of control held amongst its presence

but no external distractions from objective.

Simply put we are the shovel as much as the shovel is the shovel.

The man behind the shovel no longer exists.

It is an idea that digs the spear.

The soil is still soil.

The hole is still the hole.

But the man is one with its tools,

so much so that it has become our duty

not privilege of conscious being,

but our souls mission to dig into this earth

to dig into the body.

To hold a corpse and call it art

to hold a corpse and call it fertilizer,

to hold a shovel and call it bone and flesh

its one in the same.

Our times have no human triumph reality, only a dreamy haze.

A quick flash of nerve ending and artery magnificence

but no concrete appreciation.

We must constantly be reminded of our beauty

or brilliance

because it truly means nothing.

Magnificent animal as I am,

I am not nearly as magnificent as the ethereal idea of destruction.

Complex as I am, it is brutally pitiful

in contrast to the true control which holds no physicality.

Control which holds absolutely no limitations from question,

only perimetered by human existence.

The ghost of

knowledge, gain, power, excellence, and failure.

The force that pushes the shovel into the soil and digs for the sake of digging into eternity;

because all the knowledge will never be touched even glimpsed

only sought after with such sheer perseverance that we become the tool we created to search.

We are nothing but a searching vessel in a pitfall of an ocean;

a digging pick or a winding drill.

Bodies or no bodies the human is there

to search forever on in hopes it’s only a few feet away.

An employee at the burger king told us his high school romance tragedy.

his inability to maintain a woman’s respect, or attention,

and for a while I felt sorry for him.

I had been the same once, but not nearly close to the age he was now

and I could see him destroying himself with such vigor

for pain and self pity were his only vices and releases

the only way he could give himself a second of worth

was through making us come down with him for that moment

in his tiny, and awkward hell.

But then he felt the need to say

"I love heavy period man"

"what?"

"I have this thing, extreme menstruation, that’s the best"

"you get off on extreme menstruation?"

He smiled and held it; he wants me to give him that moment of attention

anything he can find, for a second glance.

It’s that indulgence in self deprecation which plagues this weak hearted generation.

Isolation birth.

The same few faces, familiar voices

in the burnt field, an ash haze

eternal and dark.

Dark dark days in heat:

where I'm bloody burnt and swollen

my leather hands

on spindled meat.

Heavy smell of sap and burning plastic

I keep silent around everyone.

It’s not that I have anything to conceal

I have nothing to give them.

My heart is one of menial enjoyment and labor,

manually pumped just to get the job done

for it would die on it’s own free will.

Ghost faith:

a mind distanced from society,

hands on my own body and the earth

hands running along oiled gears.

An old man leans back and smiles vacantly

as my furrowed brow remains focused on the spaces I have yet to fill.

His life a testament to a dead America

begging for welfare checks, disability checks, unemployment checks,

not him, not the past.

As time progresses we are weaker, slower, malleable, and desperate.

WW2, KENNEDY, NAM, DESERTSTORM, 9-11.

Flowing down a river than doesn’t spring from earth

but from the spout of technology.

Data streams and melted coins

pushing us up against the bricks until blood runs through the molten.

Our dreams drank by guzzling mechanical dogs drunk on the power of human erosion.

Bearing teeth.

Exit the fast food job back to the farm.

14 days straight, fuck you Burger King.

My boss down in the fields tells me she pulled bodies from Oklahoma cities federal building,

not bodies but arms and teeth.

She has guns stashed all over

and showed me how to pass a man out with the lower jaw.

She is a tough smiling fast talking motherfucker

who takes no shit whatsoever except from her girlfriend

which is understandable.

She is an ideal American

who knows utopia is only about 10 minutes long at a time at best

but she is not miserable, far from it.

She knows the value of respect beyond everything else.

The only true community we can hold is that

and only that can be sustained.

I would give anything to go back to what I used to think of as hell.

Hell looks like home after all,

for this is purgatory,

the middle zone of dependency.

I keep shrinking into debt

and asking money from my family they don’t have.

And all these years I supported myself without a penny

they give me an opportunity to better myself

and its working too well in the ways nobody intended,

To a degree where I'm being eaten inside out as the truth is forced up thru me and out.

Burning off old skin of a snake.

I used to sleep long until the nightmares came

sleep was my only escape from the sadness,

I would wake up alert and force my body backwards

because the reality set in too quick

it was cold, and my legs were numb from my tiny couch.

I often have a sick desire to fight

I’ve never won a fight.

I want to bash in the faces of these strangers who replace me

the men who love my old lovers

for I am a jealous maniac you don’t want to cross,

though I have no reflexes, the emotional damage I wield is cruel and forceful.

I would and will make every attempt to tear into the very core of you with my misery

and break you to my level,

but it’s not enough.

Being conscious of my anger is the only cure I’ve found.

Embarrass myself in a glorified dear diary.

Ego maniac existence

diet, literature, goals, philosophy

games for suspended orgasm

manipulated for the sake of cum.

All the earths’ people

and all the earths movement

gravitating towards flesh.

My heart sank into my stomach

and quietly I cried like a little kid.

Tears running down a pinched grimace,

eyes red and swollen,

teeth shown,

blushing and sweating,

curling and frantically trying to numb pain:

pain that weighs heavy on mentalities,

agony that pours over the very core of a mans being

and dissolves him like boiling water over a block of ice

to a child,

smaller than that even:

for a child can cry reasonless, can switch in and out of emotion.

A child can be easily resolved,

but a young mans heartaches only blend into silence and solemn misery.

Without a word I carry on.

Without a word I buy my groceries, drive my car, and wash my clothes.

and just like everyone else I keep it my own:

all our own, unable to communicate with one another,

learning nothing,

for sadness is a slap in the face of the chameleon.

It’s shitting on the marble floors of the royal charade-

the anti function.

Though you can see it in thousands of eyes you will hear it from few voices,

and feel it from next to none who are not your close companions.

I can only hope to drive away

across America again and again.

Trying to shed pieces of this miserable skin in the winds of desert highways.

His face was disgusted.

The old man had found my poems

and a drawing my friend had sent me.

It played out like an intro to a twisted sister video.

He was saddened by the disrespect,

he was appalled by the vulgarity,

he was shaken up for the turmoil of the culture he will never understand,

because he is happy and content.

But yes pa I do hate this America

and I have a large vendetta with the post 9-11 society.

Systems that imprison human beings like cattle with crack,

schools that fail to recognize art or band classes as important as football or drill team,

commercial standards of demise based beauty.

Simple things that drive so many to suicide

I lied and explained as if I didn’t write them

but all he shook was his head

back and forth.

He knew I wrote some of it,

unable to understand the sadness which is our empty tired worthless generation.

We are selfish but looking to affect everything but ourselves.

He would never understand a juvenile death wish,

he could never see the overwhelming horror of ghetto survival,

he could never feel for an imbecile who knows our world leaders deserve to die.

But they are truly the demons behind the gavel

flicking tongues in uproarious laughter

spewing white Christ fire scalding over children’s minds until they are numb and painted with guilt for any inner desire.

We must educate ourselves not on our beliefs

but how these beliefs can be expressed intelligently enough to be defended as valid revolt.

Pa I don’t want to die, but there are many kids out there who do.

I wonder for hours on end if I should join the military

or fly overseas

or keep living nomadic and unstable.

The art communities I’ve cycled thru begin to appear more and more worthless.

Entropy is the scene.

Strike your finest misery

and pose pose pose

for fucks sake POSE!

Everything is truly corrupt

I've known for years.

So what is the difference in a marine

or a painter?

Me writing down my thoughts and them not doing so?

I've only known artists as insecure sad beings

insanely struggling infinite

but still elitist and supremely arrogant.

All one collective ignorance,

closed minds to all average Americans struggling to understand.

To support a family

to buy taco bell

it’s all simple getting on, getting by.

All the same quintessential desires

seeking happiness, serenity, love, and respect.

I do not see these poems as my art but as my action

it’s necessary for my sanity.

Art purposes always remain vague to me

frustrated at the fact that I don’t always appreciate or see the point

when talent is no longer necessary

but having talent is almost neglected

and not having it paraded

and cheered on for all of us not willing to give it our all

but simply seeking immediate acceptance

for simply standing up for a few minutes and lying.

I cannot sleep on this.

This culture that is running on fumes

bleeding out a dry vein,

pushed to all limits and back again.

Always put on new masks and claim renewal,

doomed to repeat the past with less quality.

I held a chainsaw in my leather hands.

I walked the fields with concrete covered boots

and I stood in the rains of Oregon gray

only to find myself smiling,

content with my isolation,

with my acquiring of a little self sufficiency.

I feel that is one of the few things we can change:

our voracious consumer mentalities.

Exit the line of reliance,

take your jaws of the breast,

and simply callous the hand.

The hand that feeds becomes your own

and there is no desire to bite.

An uneasy understanding and calm.

I smile in the face of fire.

I cry in the state of taking favors.

I smile in the face of freezing winds of soot.

I cry in the moment of silence and remorse for a lack of choice.

Today I skinned a deer.

They sliced slits into the tendons of the legs

and slid a board through,

lifting the body with a forklift.

It’s limp head drug off the back of the pickup truck

with a slop of blood,

watered down from the garden hose shoved into its anus to wash it clean.

I watched its eye closely as I pulled on the hide

while the farmer cut the white membrane connecting the tissue to the skin.

It’s eye looked broken and blind

as clean trailess blood rolled down its face over the pupil

depositing just below the outer rim

before overflowing and running down over its snout

the diluted blood dripping onto my shoe.

He asked me to pull the legs by the hoofs.

It was young, so the hooves were soft and spongy.

He proceeded to saw them off at the kneecap.

I stood silent and motionless holding the dismembered legs in each hand

still staring into the bloody eye.

We then pulled the head down by its tiny antlers

and sawed into its neck.

The dense musk smell poured out over us.

My hands were chalky and sticky with bloodshot muscle,

which when struck turns to a maroon jelly around the exit wound

which is orange and shattered to particles similar to sawdust.

The head fell heavy in my hand.

I put it on the ground by it’s antler gently next to the pile of hide and tore my eyes away from its.

"what do you think?" my boss said

"Allot..." I said solemnly

“I guess it’s been done since the dawn of time"

"damn right, nothing wrong with that at all"

but I thought so has murder, rape, war, theft, orgies of drunken blood fights for royalty.

Allot has been done for centuries

but I really didn’t know what to say aloud

except "I guess its good learning experience."

That was met with a smile,

an honest smile man to man.

To my knowledge, the deer was shot twice from his driveway as he spotted it from his kitchen window at approximately 7:00 am, still partially drunk.

"We gotta buy it; we gotta give them our money"

Transparencies over a solid white wall

and I find myself days later unable to ignore my bones

after putting my hand to the cloth sacked skinned carcass of the deer hung by the forklift in the garage.

My cage of organs, phantom spilling onto gravel.

Purples, yellows, almond, gray, and maroons all slithering out the bottom of my ribcage,

plopping vigorously as one solid mass of pumping tissue,

stopping stretched out gelatinous and slug like,

blood shot Jell-O cartilage.

I saw it each time we scraped the insides out like a pumpkin.

Walking through the shopping mall and unable to stop talking to myself.

nobody to sarcastically cope with, imaginary actions and behaviors.

Singing along to junk radio

and the daydreams disassociate.

Soon I know I might be different

spending so much time alone.

As I stood in a dressing room naked, I looked cancerous in their light.

I could feel vaguely how it felt under the deer’s hide pulling the skin off like a sock as I held my own ribcage.

It’s s all there changing.

The face and the words

my mind feels feverish

as I feel closer to the off.

Past the rains…

give up the ghost, give up the ghost.

I know nothing lies in the Midwest I haven’t already disposed of, fucked, or burned to ashes.

I see a new public eye to immolate for,

selfish power madness drove me to seek shelter

and a weaker sense of being

but the pain of isolation is far more satisfying.

Celibacy, hunger, dreamful deep sleep next to smoldering wood

cannot be rekindled in insipid Ohio,

where the old lovers wriggle like eels in my death bed

and old friends shoot junk up their nostrils.

Wash their bellies out with whiskey

and lose their minds by defending their credibility.

Poems for people who give no shit

because artful fuckups are standard

and self driven methods are a hipster sin.

So I'm ready to give myself a new sense of importance thru new public eyes to see me in the naked frame

and give holy credit to shit piss and cum.

Fashionably vicious.

In the style of most loose cannons my eyeballs don’t hold up well under interrogation.

You can see just about anything I’m feeling in my mug.

But what is America without rigid discipline in the field of concealment?

All simply for the public eye, the eye in your own reflection as you glance rapidly 3 or four times when walking into a door.

The eye on the cameras above and the eyes from darkened glass beyond your senses.

I have these simple rituals that keep me in line from living like a treadmill.

Always pick up objects or papers you feel may be significant or dream related

and never spend more than seconds in a reflection, though it’s sometimes impossible.

The only utopia as Milan Kundera says is when Adam looks into the well and sees no reflection of himself.

I've spent a lot of my life driven towards control.

Born from recess torment

Born from rotten little girls

alienation, obesity, gullibility, weakness

and through my life of weakness I was clouded by revenge.

Through my easy American spoiled boy life I was determined to inflict every piece of pain outwards.

Through my eyes and actions

I yearned to eat all my peers alive with hatred

sick to death.

Sickened until all of my self control dissolved

and through my subliminal cycle of vengeance I am alone again

with nobody to bury me,

nobody to look over my childish mind.

I've hurt so many people,

lied so many times,

led an illusion of empowerment and security when internally I was built of sand.

Whisked away in horrifying seconds to be spread out over the desert of human life.

Into the billions of faces flowing like a river of identities

and my misanthropy becomes of path of futility and internal weakness.

My hands any other hands,

my words pre ordained,

my clothes pre assembled on a million mannequins,

and I see so many of my old friends frustrated with their surroundings

as if they’re different,

as if they’ve made an alternative.

Outside your club and your canvas there’s the real world out there

turning and passing, with your societal role

not your social enslavement but your duty to humanity to offer yourself and your aid.

we pretend we are not dependent on everyone else,

but my hand is your hand, my words are your words, my clothing and my possessions passed on endlessly.

I arrived in Oregon with a fear of the darkness

with a fear in general of the unknown.

My artwork vanished thrown to some obscured corner of life,

blank and anonymous paper virtually forgotten.

The names and faces fade.

The jealousy and anger all child’s play.

My old enemies pacing furiously thousands of miles away

as I pace furiously but for no reason outside of myself.

I always thought of my life as mine, my own this and that

but everything was for phantom eyes, for public allowance,

and the judgment from the ones I love.

In these fields you can see the stars and the milky way,

all the satellites,

all the cars from hundreds of miles.

Each step a molestation to the great silence our earth bares.

When you come screaming crying and cursing

the earth shows nothing but silence

ever moving and untouchable.

All cries muted in time

cast out to the sea of winds.

I've met more people here who’ve seen a man die.

I've met more people here who have calluses opposed to flesh.

The great victory of our cruel and twisted pioneers

who raped many a child, killed many a peaceful man,

and turned many a nurturing breast into a leather wallet,

all for the sake of the promise land

to which I've lost part of my mind.

It’s too late to judge whether it’s for the better.

All I know is something in me is dead.

My body doesn’t know what it feels like to be touched vulgarly.

I don’t know how to interact with a mask.

My hands aren't soft like a child’s and my face is nothing but skeletal, full of blood and tissue,

vibrant with an irreplaceable sanity thru a kind of insanity to some.

As I came to the west I was a punk and an angst ridden son of a bitch.

Now it feels like that’s all passing thru me laughing all the way

because I can get the joke I used to play on myself.

I hope to bear with me the solace I’ve gained here

and return to the mania with a purpose besides sheer anarchy.

Into the death and back again with a face full of fire

and a body willing to cross over into the darkness

with the wild and the natural.

Artless, boundless, and there standing

with the thriving life we never see but feel all around us.

Watching our every move from which our actions are inhibited.

Into the green wall beyond the pane of bloody glass

to the death and the darkness

the womb and the grave

the land and the sea

the face and the photograph

the great equalizer.

CONTACT SWILL: [email protected]

(CIDE index)