I am
Galloping through sand, on a beach or in a desert;
Living in Москва, maybe in 東京都;
Loving someone I’ll never meet;
Beating up that fucker from seventh grade,
Even though I’d rather
Not
Think about him.

I am
The singer
And the guitarist
And the drummer
In all of my favorite bands.
I also play saxophone, piano, and violin.

I am
A different color
A different texture
A different flavor of myself
Of what I usually am.

I am
Always acknowledging
The finicky nature of introspection,
And how I am, in one moment,
Alive,
And the next,
Afraid,
or a shell.
But!
Maybe there is a much, much
Thinner line between
“I feel,” “I think,” and
“I am.”

I was in an academy of children
Prepared for the asylum
Swallowing God, swallowing country
The dancers, the prancers
The motherfuckers
The poets, the laureates
The intellectuals, the elite
New people with
Old mentalities
Stark in the gutters, in the hallways
In the corridors, and in
The mausoleums
Into which they stumble
Inelegantly
And cry out against their dogmas
Cry out against the unconventional cretins
Who fashioned them a macrocosm from
A microcosm
And forged an ourorboros for us
Forged a cyclicality which fatigued the world
And left us rotting
And hysterical
Itching for our requiems
Sweaty and uncomfortable
Naked in a glasshouse
Impulse and repercussion on display.

I was in an academy of children
These children, who are children
To their Father and
Children to their mentors and
Children to their children
Sweetened and left salted with equivocation
Left fucked in the sewers
In the alleys
And in the churches
And they moaned a pleasured moan
As they slid into their comas
Left unconscious to the meddlers
Measuring the girth of their divinity
A collective shithole
Feigning a voice of beauty
And holiness
That ministers their livelihood
Ministers their saintliness
They listen, entranced, and rejoice
And the voice
The voice carved skeletons
From their flesh
And the skeletons
Before being abandoned and erased
Signaled to me
That a pretense which enraptures
Is still a pretense.