I feel like I am made of wood.

Emotionally.
That’s not a metaphor.
The emotions I feel, to me, resemble the texture of unfinished wood of various shapes, densities, grain width, and tree species.
I feel like I am made out of wood.

My left eye socket is an old, rotting, dense cube of reddish orange wood.
My neck is an inch-thick, five inch-long block of white pine, with a screw and a nail embedded within.
My left shoulder is a corner of unfinished furniture frame, with three outside, three inside walls, consisting of three pieces nailed and stapled together. The wood is pale and the grain is fine. Not a splinter, except along the edges that haven’t been sanded.
The disks in my spine are cork. A pine dowel goes through them. Sometimes the split in the dowel slips, and the two pieces of wood get caught in the disks, and my spine fastens into a locked puzzle. It’s harder to fix than a jigsaw, and easier to fix than a car with ox horns on the hood.
My shoulder blades and arms are all a long, single board of wet, moldy, orange, stiff shit, with splinters like mulch, and it’s likely to break at any moment. It’s miraculous that it hasn’t, yet. It’s miraculous that gravity hasn’t pulled the damn thing off of the nails holding it in place, like a wet sheet of toilet paper pulled apart with such an ease that might suggest it probably didn’t even need to exist in the first mother fucking place.
Plastic cords are running through these pieces, like a stack of lumber sewn together.
I am lifted, and the limbs have no strength. My hands rise, my arms slide along their threads, my fingers dangle like shrimp threatening to leave the god damned cocktail glass, if someone would just fucking pull them out, already!
The spine fastens, the legs die, my body is ready to die, and there is nothing else for me to report.

That is the emotional state that I am in, however you take it.
No editing, no caring, no fucking whatever the fuck. Fuck you.
I’m too tired of everything. I need to stop thinking. I need to stop thinking.
I don’t want to die young.

You and Your Cardboard Life

Edit:
Dedicated to a friend. Chances are, if you’re reading this, it isn’t about you.

Flat is all you are.
Your ideas and your thoughts, when you share them.
The way you describe events is like a child reading aloud a time line.
Your personality knows one dimension.
Your life has only ever been from a single perspective.
Your body is anything but flat.
Your performance is whole, well rounded, healthy and gorgeous.
But you’re paper human being, invisible at the right angle.
Your art.
Your friends.
Your silly little pot of stupid phrases that you call a mind.
I dare not say who you are, for fear that you might prove me right.
So I hide behind you, easily enough, because your face is all on one side.
I could use you to wipe my vomit.
This is how I learn to hate.

The Old Man and the Cave

I apologize, now, for the story’s faults. I was making it up as I went along, and the longer it takes, the better understanding you have of how time goes by for the protagonist. It’s in its infancy, so a lot of things may change later on.

I wake.
Shit, it’s 9:30.
Call the number.
Nothing.
That’s two days in a row.
Try not to worry.
Call the other number.
Same.
Try not to panic.
Things will work out.

Online.
Try talking to a friend.
No response.
Try talking to another.
“Hola.”
Good! Now, reply!
They’re gone.

Pacing.
It’s not your fault.
They’re not avoiding you.
For God’s sake, don’t cry.
Keep yourself balanced.

Phone rings.
Answer.
Red Cross.
Show up on Monday.
Try to get a ride.
Call ends.

Pacing.
Pacing.
Pacing.
Pacing.
I miss people.
Try not to cry.

I now think of The Old Man and the Cave.

There’s a young man. He’s very sociable. He and his friends have a good time as often as possible. The company of other human beings is all he needs. The ogres living with him, mother and father, are unbearable. Home is where his friends are. He sees that space, the Earth, and everything else are the same materials, but in different forms. He knows that the mind generates energy in the form of thoughts, which make up the soul.
There is an accident. The young man’s trapped underground. He’s only ever seen darkness like this in blackouts and his nightmares. He must “see” with his skin.
He searches the rock and rubble until he finds water. It’s thick, filthy, and it stinks. He can’t tell where it’s flowing. He rips off a ribbon of material from his clothes. He holds one end on the surface of the water, and feels with his other hand where the water drags the loose end of the cloth.
The young man follows the edge of the foul stream. He steps on something that opens his foot. It’s smooth on its sides, rounded at one end and flat on the other, with both ends like knife blades. He keeps it and continues, with half of his shirt wrapped around the foot. He crouches with his hands on the water’s edge, inching sideways, following the flow of the bad water.
He’s very hungry. What can he eat?
On the edge of the stream, his fingers find a cylinder. It is smooth, and lays above the surface of the water. He feels one end digging deep into the rocky ground. The other end is beyond the reach of his arms. If he can dig this end of it out, he can use the cylinder. He pries his fingers around the edge of the socket trapping the cylinder. Rocks do not come loose, but thin layers of the ground, like pages in a book being lifted one at a time. Pieces of ground are stiff and hard, thin like boards, and rough. The cylinder comes loose, and a ruckus across the stream murders silence, unseen. Large things crash in the water, and the sound of spilling objects fills his ears. The noise continues and the splashing reaches his feet.
He waits without moving. He listens for the invisible scene to die. He has his cane. He can use it to feel in all directions. Ahead of his path is clear. Behind him is a clang, and a thud, and a rustle, and a squish. He moves back to feel with his hands what exactly his cane has been touching. Pipes and wires, sheets of paper and ceramic dishes, strips of plastic and balls of plastic, a wall of invisible junk in the black is here.
The cane. It’s one end was embedded on the stream’s bank, and it was rigidly floating above the surface of the water. It must’ve been holding something in place, that once moved caused an entire mountain of this junk to slide and shift.
The stream was cut off. He can still follow the current, but it would dry out soon enough. He continues.
The young man is still very hungry. He finds many things on his way, like bicycle handles and shoes without soles, but nothing remotely resembling food. If his cane found anything soft, he was quick to inspect it, but if there was any sort of edible substance in a place like this, he would suspect it would kill him.
Squash. He lifted his cane and drew it back down on the thing it’d found. The cane’s end had become reasonably wider. Whatever it was, it was stuck to the cane. He pulled in and felt about. A piece of wood. Thick wire frames tangled in hair. The cane stuck to a soft, cold stuff coming out of the hairy sack. It was gory and sickening. He pulled the mousetrap off of the cane and felt the rodent’s bones squeeze out of the opening. Only used things end up here. Who knows how long this mouse had been attached to its metal tomb. He was so very hungry. And he could use the trap.
The blind path has come to its end. In the distance, he saw three white rectangles, like light coming from a barred window. He couldn’t reach the window. He couldn’t reach its wall. The cane felt a foot ahead of him, nothing. He stood at the edge of a cliff, blind except for the three rectangles. If it was sunlight, then the rays were meeting his face, casting everything else in darkness. At the foot of the cliff, he would be able too see with secondary light. The stream was dry, but the bed also came to its end at the edge of the cliff. Beneath him would be water.
He lays down on his front with his arm over the edge, cane in hand, reaching for anything. There was nothing. If he jumps down, he might break something. He might die.

Years pass. (And years may pass as I write this thing, so I’ll speed up to important things the finished piece will cover, and revisit this story later.)

This cave is his home. He knows it in and out. He’s made a shelter for himself in here.
He finds various things, using them to survive, tinkering with them.
He’s made himself a hobby, making a revolver from pieces of guns he finds, bicycle parts, jewelry, reels from fishing rods. He’ll never use it, but it’s something to do.
The chamber with the window houses a filtration system. The bad water moves through it, nearly fresh on the other side.
The man feeds on anything he can.
There’s been no need to talk to himself, being alone, so he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t even think to himself that he may have forgotten the sound of his voice. When he wakes from snoring, he thinks it’s an animal or an item breaking free from the mounds of trash in his cave. Every day, he goes in search of the source of the sound, mapping in his mind the lay of his land as he goes.

One day, the ceiling of the great chamber collapses. The hole in the wall held open by the crib that made the barred window rotted away, and the trash caved in.
In the light, the man was blinded. He was discovered.

Everyone from the days of his youth were either dead or dying. The blind old man visits the graves of his dearest loved ones. He is accompanied by the few people who can, acquaintances from his first life. He never uses his voice.
Attending one grave, he cries. This is where his greatest love was buried. A tree grows above. He is seen sitting under the tree, moving his head and arms as he used to in conversation, but there is only the tree, and his voice is gone. He departs, kissing the trunk of the tree, and shuffles away.

In a matter of days, he has a home. He’s gotten work, and receives regular medication that is improving his health. Only a year after his beloved died, ways to lengthen the duration of human youth and overall life were being released to the public. She lived a life of her own. Wishing that things had gone differently would have robbed her of all the good and bad that she has made peace with in death. He doesn’t regret a thing.

(The story continues. It’s a long motherfucker. The old man’s blindness is cured. He rediscovers his senses. He finds himself raising a child. There’s this thing where he wants to shave, because he hasn’t in decades, but he can’t, because he knows that if he does, his kid won’t recognize him. He sets up a very long timetable, and trims an inch off of his facial hair slowly over time. When he is clean-shaven, his son-or-daughter will be an adult, and the old man’s long life will come to an end.
I find that I’m building up on a series of events, rather than inserting events into a formulated plot.)

Looking at a Painting

I remember that the summer sun was as filthy and overexposed as the Woodstock documentary footage. Grit in the air snagged on my hairs and fell to my scalp, and in caught in the sweat of the joints in my hand. The sweat on my head layered over dry, sticky sheets of itself, and captured the slightest gust. The heat in my arms and chest from thrashing at the grass. The pain in my heart from moving too fast in the heat. Brush and can in both hands, I worked to see what waited me on the other end of the paper’s transformation. I looked forward to seeing a masterpiece form before my eyes, and found that I’d been fighting the heat and the pain to cover a piece of paper in blue latex. A sheet of light aqua-blue latex.

Classroom Poetry

Thank You

I forget
The days I’d seen go by,
And what they meant to me,
The words you give me now,
As I’d heard them the first time.

I forget
What it was like
And how simple things had been
Before the child they’d always praised
Became the very things they’d hated,
The things within themselves,
That they thought were dead,
And tried to kill in me.

You don’t know
What it means to me,
What you’ve done,
Knowing someone cares,
And giving me something
That I will never,
Ever
Forget.

Possible Poetry Entry #3: paper_masks.txt (this is the title)

Morning’s paper mask,
Worn at ev-er-y hour,
Can never wear thin.

The face is not one,
And the others see real skin,
For(e) them is a lie.

I grow very tired,
As ev’ry night fades to mo(u)rn,
I add another.

Will they see your Transformation?

Twelve Haikus

The long haired man
Walks forth, dipping and bobbing
To his own rhythm.

Nobody sees it,
None understand the music.
There is only he.

So few can hear them;
Hammers ring a melody
Just for the landscape.

Sight is his alone,
Wandering through the forest
Of shattered mirrors.

-

Glassy fragments stand
Erect upon the stone ground
And fragment the clouds.

Their true form is seen
As the day makes way for night;
Beautiful from dawn,

The great illusion
Reveals the horrible truth
Of the dragon’s teeth.

As youthful light fades,
So fades the tolerance of
High expectations.

-

Sky, once blue, is red
With the spraying, foaming blood
From the mother’s veins.

Her children fall prey,
Their rotting corpses stacked high
And eaten hollow.

The man blames himself
For what he cannot control
Within the cosmos.

The final decay
Moves slowly and steadily
To begin anew.