I Woke Up to Find Myself Elderly and Abandoned


Phosphorescent cockroaches scurry 

Hard against the edge of a shattered clock face

Desolate and silent

Hours wrapped up in chemical wind

Disintegrating into the surrounding desert sea,

Ink-dripping hands, forced into broken staircases

Point up desperately  

At the graying, consuming borderline 

A widening threshold in the night sky 

Cut up and folded back,

Vestigial bits of future leak out

Into melted clay present dreams 

Molding around my eyelids,

The winding, personalized abyss above 

Calling my name

Is riddled with bite marks,

Accidental bruises,

And incessantly itching scabs 

From all the times 

I had to crawl my way out. 


Moonlight still burns fire

That seeps into my tumorous

Rapidly aging flesh. 


Every fading star merely another corpse,

A constellation of someones 

I’ve all unrightfully lost,

All free-falling through this universal emptiness

Their spoiling meat and snapping tendons 

Make spontaneous bouts of sweet, nocturnal music

At each ill-fated, randomized collision.


It’s beyond lonely down here, the wind won’t stop 

My old body is hacked away at 

Carried and rearranged 

Splayed out on the broken clock face,

I blink 

Neurological makeup smears

And I don’t know where I am 

Or why 

I am still sardonically alive. 


-


Lining the infinite, spiraling desert,

While reanimated roaches,

Unknown aphids,

And interdimensional, omnipotent 

Predatory arachnids 

Ceaselessly crawl over me,

Terraforming my painfully shifting remains -

They whisper their secret plans;


“You’re going to wake up in a pink fog

Billowing from the dreamer’s last breath.

Invited to the grand temporal violation.

Flesh is scurrying backward

Unsheathing your polished bones,

The knotted sycamore stump

Cradles your shriveled, shrunken body

Wheezing, wailing, helpless, 

Wasted years etched down your wrinkled wrists

Hesitation marks kissed 

By the worms escaping varicose veins 

As the world sings storms of ceaseless rending

Butchering you expertly 

From everything and everyone you could possibly love. 


You’re 14,

The incision has been made

You’re 17, 

Light evaporates from your razor blade

You’re 21, 

You’ve adopted the plaque

You’re 23,

You didn’t take enough pills 

You’re 27 


You’re 31.

Haunted by the maw of time,

All failed attempts caught up


Not yet; almost

If you’re not careful,

You’ll one day wake up to see

Your unfathomable existential ocean of nightmares

Will come true, 

You’re 28. 


A call to the void rejected,

You missed your chance

Now suicide no longer suits you.

A newfound identity of future cataclysmic charade,

One more shadow in line to slowly,

Unjustly

Get What You Deserve.”


My scenery turns sideways

Watching the trees and pregnant ashen clouds

Drip and fall. 

How many days wasted?

How much time has crawled underneath

To die unnoticed and alone? 

All while chemical warfare marched on

In its many futile experiments

To reshape me, 

I should have been destroyed by now.


Waking eyeless in an unfamiliar world

A procession of fatherless, embalmed, crippled children 

Slither through collapsed smoke stacks

Infectiously transforming human remains 

And new nuclear flora,

Their melting porcelain faces 

With million-year-old frowns 

Are constructed by the same lines

Of all my past, childhood nightmares.


It’s the rapture again. 


Mirrors of black insect fluids

Embedded in their pallid, empty chests

I can’t recognize myself in any of them 

In any of this diseased, dejected lot 

Stretching backwards and forwards through 

Eviscerated, nonsense time.


But we share the same purple, swelling scars,

The same sleepless, shivering, anxious nights 

The same loss and the same desire 

For the end of all of this. 


Curled-up fetus position

At the end of time,

Weathered, elderly, alone

In the collapsing, inverting 

Desert clock face 

I’ve failed myself again

I’ve failed all the previous versions of me,

All the lost children stumbling blind, all too aware, 

Through this cascading useless life,

I’ve failed them all 

Because of my broken commitment,

My unwanted divorce 

To Suicide.







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