as yet untitled

Great strokes of laughter echo and bend.
the head will look at dollars and see bodies.
the head looks at itself and sees no dollars,
and it knows that dollars aren’t it at all.

nothing is worth itself, itself worth nothing.
these heads have seen themselves cut up and used up and scattered in the grass.
they’ve seen themselves grow back tangled and new,
they’ve seen nothing and they’ve seen that.
They know what comes and what will pass.

the broken people in my head have shattered beauty. That
which they starve for doesn’t even know itself. To them,
the beautiful are all born with ease and grace and nothing.
they look at beauty nothing and make of it love. Their ideas
of the tragic broken beautiful are nothing, empty thought.
and light silhouettes beauty against the trees,
and beauty falls down graceless,
its head on the floor.
everything dim and it lays there
all the more beautiful.

but the people in my head recognize non of this.
they implode at suggestions of greatness. Every time
they watch themselves grow back from nothing,
every new self they witness, every birth,
only convinces them further of death.
at every birth
they loose more of themself.

terrified of stable images they recognize nothing,
in awe of horrific love they fail even to cry.
silhouetted against eternal potential and possibility,
the glorified children in my head falter instead,
and walk themselves awake into another end.
they denounce every moment of every past life.

terrified of wasted time, they decide instead to deny all
motion and to sleep inside themselves.
and in the finite escape, the false escape that belongs to no one,
the sleeping waking medication escape, the children in my
head sit down contentedly and speak to themselves.
they whisper, “I am back on the bottom again,
I am back to nothing. I have unbloomed, I have made of myself
the ground and the floor.
I no longer have mercy for beauty,
I am pacified.
I have returned to nowhere. I sit now on falsities,
I feel now a false veneer. Nothing is abrasive.”

and afterwards they fall far down and come to their minds again.
when they drop hard they don’t even know what the real image of anything is,
they look back upon their lives confused.
every single past moment is fractured into states of mind and levels of clarity.
in the past they will find nothing and throw it all against a wall.

to them the only self anymore is the body
and the long-seeming general sense of a person.
a person of which they know little, know nothing.

a great horizon of blending mixed half-remembrances at their back,
faces and partial memories, a childhood that
plays itself out without color.
and in this series of broken mirrors,
I ask myself,

which one is me?
I read from my sense of myself,
and fail to see how
I can point to a thing and believe.
I recognize not the
words and gestures
that are said to be mine.

looking at love I realize I am looking at the sun,
I look at my hands and try to smile and try to weep,
and then I remember slowly in shades of black
that I am not allowed to look at the sun.
that I will go blind.

in my dreams, I sit in rooms
and tell myself to remember my dreams.
I don’t know what the real image of anything is.
I let myself rise again to the bottom of my mind,
I lay down amongst the children in my head,
and I unbloom. I am pacified and motionless.
nothing is abrasive while the children, the children
cover me and assure me that I am in my mind.
the children assure me that all the images are real.
and as the children return me to the untrue I feel myself heavy,
I feel surrounded by air and by a false veneer.
I feel myself sink to heaven, and disassociated I
see mirrors everywhere. Everything projected is fast,
everything projected is weak. The children convince me that I do
not know my face, they make of my hands frail nothing.
they push my head into the air.
and they tell me how to listen to nothing and make of it sound,
they make of my mind and unfixed thing. They shake the windowpanes,
and I seem frail as they twitch.
so, feeling honest and incoherent, I sleep.

I awake and don’t know the real image of anything.
and then, in great strokes of laughter, I see myself.
I see beauty and it makes of itself pieces.
when I see love it is silhouetted against the sun.

and imagining themselves whole, the people in my head
deny great possibility.
the broken pieces in my head have no idea of themselves,
they look at beauty and see it cracked.

when I open my eyes I make of myself nothing.
so I close them and try to make of myself something,
but all I feel are angular hollow peaks and ridges. I feel cavernous immensities.
I feel resonating waves, I feel noise, I feel an overbearing uncertainty.

and when I hold my breath to make of myself something, I falter,
I feel that there is no time, I feel small and unable to stand. And I see what I have always
known, they when I lay my head on the ground and feel nothing under me,I resist myself,
and I stand on myself.

but with blended mixed remembrances, faces and great strokes
of bent words and confused desire.
out without color and our from this series,
the half mind will watch.
itself is me-I read myself and fail to see.
their heads won’t even look at my hands, gestures.
looking at my head it looks at itself and sees
no dollars, and the darkness I’m not
intended to see.

darkness shattered broken pieced to death.
nothing has worth, I sit in rooms and
tell myself to remember.
cut up and used up and spread into skin
and I don’t know a real sun.
the images cut with lines, tangled
and new.

and half of me is all for their grand claims of love.
but they find none of their ideas in my head,
They stop and look with my eyes and try to recognize
a person
but they see many,
they see more than numbers,
here, they see that they are a part,
a momentary part,
so I show them.

here, here are all the less loved, here are the finite.
a greatness all undone, the fault of none.
what are these half memories,
what is a childhood filled with bodies.
I recognize or see that today tells me to point
at a thing and believe.
and, in love, I know I am looking at the sun.
and in the sun I see all of us to come.