spiders


I
at the times
when i’m full of
nonsense, words appear
in their most subtle
overtones, blanketed with
cliché
and distorted imagery, more often
than not the visions i dwell
upon the most; as when
candlelight draws the evening
to a close i’m
underneath the staircase
watching the mirrors slide my
alter-ego across the room, waiting
for my reflection to
leap through the glass
so that i might take
his place in the
real world
for every time our eyes meet,
i know i’m the one who’s just
imitating
his every gesture

II
at 3:03 AM, somewhat
tangible for being
merely
overheard in the static
wash
of black-and-white
technicolor drowning
in sibilance,
hissing at a blank eyelid
the shield for
a visionary and his
acumen
drenched in watery
landscapes that
look like illusions,
but everything
has been stolen straight
from the
consicousness,
and therefore,
is real...
or so i’m led to believe,
every night
before my
eyes cloud with glossy
images of
a candid insanity,
i’m led to believe that
everything
is a story worth sharing with
everyone
even though
few will understand
the method to the madness,
while underneath
i suffer the emotional
detriment
of wringing out the contents of my
thoughts
for ink
which, by
3:08 AM,
is relatively
invisible

III
when little more is prevalent in life than a half-empty (pessimist) bottle of Scotch resting
peacefully on a coffee table that once resisted beauty, and a drunkard with which to ingest
the toxin, and a liver that resembles the equivalent of a nuclear waste facility, and an almost
narcoleptic habit to catalyze the aging process through a slow and mordant death,

when time doesn’t exist because the mind believes that some intangible God will interact on
its behalf to prevent death at all costs, and reality is of little more concern to one than
the wrath of liquor’s jekyll-and-hyde effect,

when escape of the conscience is necessary to perform the convoluted art of self-inebriation,
an invitation to all sorts of decadent nostalgia and quaint sentimental misgivings about the
afterlife and the weight of the earth and why gravity makes the burden heavier,

	life becomes a perfect nescience of its perpetrators,
	those who always seem to drown themselves in the elements that they embody

when you strip down even the most interwoven of complexities to its fundamental essence, the
end result is comprised merely of atoms, endless strings of amino and ribonucleic acids, each
entangled in the helix of the other, perpetual and perfect and the reason that forever has
lasted this long,

when that pessimist bottle of Scotch speaks in place of its benefactor, halfway through the
night in twisted sentences that, underneath a microscope, strangely resemble those same
threads of existence, and it queries into the most peculiar topics, asking,

IV
why draft a screenplay
in which
the protagonist is slain
in the first
five minutes,
just to remind us all
why reality is infinite?

why poeticize
about rhyming phrases that
don’t fit together, just
because
metaphors
are
predators?

why should anyone have to show you
that
perspective means everything
when
you’ve already found meaning
in a semi-blank sheet of
paper?

because they’re all spiders,
feeding
on the insects,
and you’ve just
	staggered
onto their web,

V
and maybe, when one day you find yourself
writing your own verse
that’s
five pages long
and
never ends
and
doesn’t rhyme,
has an ambiguous
title
that aims to mislead,
is chock-full of cryptic phrases
and means absolutely nothing
to nobody,
never seems to make much
sense and
sounds too good to be true,
then maybe you’ll finally understand
what i’ve been saying all along.




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