Man In The Radiator

 This came out of me suddenly. Starting with a small snippet I wrote in my notebook a few weeks ago with no real plans ever to return to it or build upon it or make it into anything. But a profound numbness and apathy has gripped the very core of my shadowed being and tore into me an inescapable feeling of hopelessness, isolation, and a total loss of my sense of self. There is no self, there is no me, there are only those around me who have pummeled me into the shifting, squirming little bug that is my existence. And from that, these worthless little words emerged.  Hoarded Liquid stitches of time Dissolving With my body's cold descent Into the blurry, bloodied Oceanic depths  Wrapped up in dead sea scrolls And several figments Of thinning hair strands  Another millennium-long night Coloring me in numbness  And dejection.  Dead cats paw At all the worms Exploding out of your heart, And wail at  Your ghostly visage Seeping into the broken walls Of your joyless childhood home Decorat

  Halloween Deserted Wounded paper bats, Front porch ghouls And their howling, gaping maws,  Leaves crinkling and crunching Like petrified petals of dried, burnt flesh Or fat brittle beetles  Wheezing and cracking open Beneath my slow, heavy footfalls As I march in loneliness  Towards the slaughtering procession, The candy-corn-scented gathering  Looking to trample over me  Squeezing out my guts and stringing them  Through thinning scarecrows, Scattering my ineffectual essence Into the last sharpened divinity Of petrified, orange moonlight. All the festering jack-o-lanterns  With the top of their heads unevenly cleaved off, Their jagged self-harm expressions  Mocking the depths of the ignited hollowness Lurking behind my eyes, It all means  Less than nothing  As October slits its wrists And painfully drains away.  Frozen in the dripping autumn sun, Abandoned at the convergence of  All my destroyed tomorrows Lurking and awaiting their attack  While plastic Frankensteins and little orpha