xxxxx

i remember asking for art. and so, pain, little blossoming acid ticks, ants. and it's a fault in my wiring, fault of mine. i'm sucking on a muesli bar, biting skin off my lips, and the worst pain that doesn't translate, isolates.

like a cold sweat from a steaming kettle, feet too warm, painful teeth, sunlight on an empty stomach.

and none of it matters. none of it is seen. i asked for art and my guts are risen. i can't even crawl out of this playlist.

and all the bizarre fucking truth of, in a few hours, i am not even alone. i am in love with my soul mate, in my charming house, with a new job role, and i have an axe wound in my very centre. you don't get to be sad when you're happy.

there's too many ways in.

i will have stronger bones, exact

THOUGH: VARIATIONS ON A THEME. I AM ALWAYS SAYING I CANNOT SAY ANYTHING. I ACCEPT THAT. I WORRY. I ACCEPT THAT. I ACCEPT I AM ACCEPTING THAT AND HAVE AND WILL AND ARE AND AM.

THOUGH: VARIATIONS ON A THEME, SO.

THOUGH: it is hard to be who we are because we change so constantly, fucking, so that it all combusts, all confuses. the words catch inside this glass compartment, snaked beneath, yes, bone. a fire drum, they all are lit but and catching. i can't spit them fast enough off my tongue the tar. so it is like autumn leaves noised small gathering points of violence.

THOUGH: keep the song going and the film going, clenched white bitter nice.

(get it all out, these variations)

THOUGH: VARIATION. i'm not typing into a typewriter. i am mumbling into my phone in traffic in noise feeling stupid and lonely and not lonely and how my arms look like in mathematics and eyes. and my voice and the words and

THOUGH: that is the variation. i am always saying. i cannot say anything. it's shit wrong.

(we are human and not human milk-glasses halving into infinities)

THOUGH: i need to put all my words into a bottle i can't break.

(people made from cigarette ash the pilled skin from the corners of hands a little felt tip and cracked moss lime juice a final small heart carved from a christmas carol)

(half-dusk, pulling dry skin from your lips shaped like once heart, blue paint splashed out all across a pavement, girl with black eyes.)

And the story is mine but it isn't about me. I am a speck of gravity of breath upon which the lines of my life converge. In those words, they are my friends.

THOUGH: i can't tell the story what keeps me safe. i just can't but can tell you how it feels, the metallic taste of having an imaginary friend, every time he spoke it is finding a two dollar coin frozen to your icy pole your grandma's owl-fur smile, buying an electronic thesaurus to play hangman and loneliness and feeling very much like you are cool, shitting your pants at lunchtime and unable.

pushing over your best friend on a basketball court so his knees bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed and sitting by campfire walking through thick spiderweb, fishing for your dad's reason with five children together your brothers' friends, chlorine in your eyes and songs with every lit fuses, watercolours cigarettes smoke blood noses.

don't interrupt life as it obliterates you prettily.

THOUGH: i need to believe in more of what i capturetranslate and less of every single person in everything looking at me with skinny eyes and the things my brain does not participate in and plays defensive and why every word or beautiful every knife we bring into us. but i still feel. a bloodspark impossible itch on the side of your hand the rub of form. so i record as much as i can mess, to the start of my noise feels across my eyes. what i am under.

mistaken burnt taste of birthday candles gone, autumn leaves, for cigarette butts cold metal

lots of words aren't mine. and use them to try to anchor a story together throws me into these glitching tapes

all i am, known to only you always have.

too much, too soon

and no one know. my honest truths can't be shared they aren't

THOUGH GIVE THE FUCKING TRANSCRIPT:

standing lopsided, over the toilet, and this was another moment where i had to think that i was fiction. there were too many details here for this to be my kind of real life and there was nothing. the details were all the thoughts crashing about my head they were gold fish ran through static, sucking impossible from a fish bowl more like jam jar. sudden violent echolocation. just out of reach of being beautiful. never explain what it is that catches that sparks faulty gods from the world inside me

they scrape me and these attempts to describe them only throw me
i hate these thoughts for trying to tell their first names, the switch has already occurred i know. the thoughts are faster than i can exist here. i call them chemicals with no other understanding

do you know when you arrive home drunk and crumpled a little fizzing with quiet vapours? it is three a.m. and there is mud in your head and you smile like a kid and think you look quite attractive creased folded by the breathy night, origami shot in strange colours you are so many dogeared pages of ragged very earnest paperbacking

and you drove, well, blearyeyed through the hum of dawn takeaway papers, sticking about your fingers and your jeans and your shoes. first light and melted cheese and worker bees and sometimes thinking already dew of your front lawn spinning, and shivering filled with bravery and spasms of right fucking then it all in you.

and the hard excitement of at the slightest bit of attention every time someone almost sees fumbles the two embarassing drinks for colour, the mentally falling downstairs.

still: i do not exist except for by the most jarring penmanship typewritten ghosts or someone with bloody nails and fingers and missing half of the alphabet on your code

(and see, the pale hairs on the inside of my thighs in a light the bathroom hanging in the air around me.)

i don't recognise any sort of lightning bolt here nor markers that bring me back to life. this is any white tile bathroom glued to a planet and taken for granted overwhelms me. so it all just hangs softly and you look into yourself all with spiderwebbing and losing people you love and forming into quiet pools.

i feel like dogfood and a cold sweat of skies. the rain comes down all down. i feel like cigarette film, crushed beetles, autumn leaves digested to thick wet last copperrod bile. i am dull, unabled. i don't want paper animals to be more permanent than i am. or to hold to the day stronger.

but i rub at bursting blood vessels at my eyes, all the satisfaction of mosquito bites, find comfort, remain unsteady, belonging not breaking. but i am sweating in a raincoat upsetting myself. but then look up see just how fast the clouds move when you see them and i am a cloud moving i am going to be a cloud moving you will see.

be a part of "we" crack me open and burn away my tenses show true life of the sentences that press my bones altogether. i have spent my life yelling into things swearing i was trying to speak and met with only vapour. always white hot in my head, eclipsed, my scalp my cuticles my teeth.

(little birds building nests above liquor store neon signs drunks.)

the story is you. i wonder if that forces you into a corner. a certain form of you. an oddshaped tree a sadness for insects inside homes for little birds at the bottom of a subway your soundtrack spun into an armour of everything. for you.

the story is mine even when i am an unreliable narrator strip away everything but the patterns i hear in lowercase

or make into an uneven list or turn to flux or feel the lighting bolts that love my heart.

the story is mine, you might believe in my kind of shrapnel. i know your nights and i will know again. i know massive graffiti, crosswords in progress, red ink, clean shoes, spinning, always see the things, always remarking, loudlyquietly, guess on all the pages that you are, morning sun beautiful.

cannonball and a lack of context: i cannot introduce properly. when does a story begin?

(I hear saxophone watching a passing church steeple against a stormy breathy nightsky it is the kind of thing that makes me feel more tongue and steam than sky though. damp towel. static cling. mothfur.)

so i will feel the way i want to feel and tell the way i tell the safest place to be. the safest place i've found. i want only to show the fractures repeating through. i want you to see the warmth of your bruises the violence and the colour. jarring want. crippling kisses. hope.

pale filmscum, discarded guts, sloppy autumn bones. staccato-fresco of bird shit.

i am hunched over.

"i feel the effect."

(tape clicks over.)

scrapsong (redux)

I saw you hang yourself to an end of a quote

some small fate that your books fall by my keep

and that smile before we spoke, almost always whispered:

I swore that the stars no longer rule.

you hold my world here, to see you writing yours

carved between stone and the length of sorrow

could I tell your greatest fear is that:

all of love is only borrowed.

the dreamers stand, on weight to move the water

or mistaken for the rust-less

secrets you won't know:

slow bird, so last, fierce.

—Ian William L.

express domestic delivery

"My head swims, stupidly, drunk on a Monday morning on loose strings, spotproof and anger, a limp of silence. But for an old Asian lady, cloudily, trying to record the phrase "express domestic delivery", reading napalm on a businessman and how pretty those characters are, though, struck upon a folded page. Then the sky tasted, tarpaulin across the tips of my drifting synapses: how you become your own once-called empty armies, so long before, so you need.

So you need to do a headstand, or a crown of bone. You need an insect bite and to crush the insect between pulpy fingers and suck against acrid, acidsweet guilt. You need to sweat ice cubes, to think of rashes. You need, in scratched glass and soft lines, a message: I am so fucking wrong. All my kindness with shrapnel. All my labours of and, alien of love that, this is.

This is the morning wires, the way, one machination evenly and remote, a day, preternatural of broken timbers, skinned knees, little stones. I am gorged on the lightness."

—Ian William L.

oils (redux)

"But then a small wind, a shivering light bulb, an ocean lapping against your tongue. And this sweat, like a bullfrog splayed, and muddy snowflakes, the guts of the day, and fingertips. And you are not entirely okay, because you were just great. And now your thoughts click like a telephone, the heavy kind, a nickel pressed to your forehead, and then removed."

—Ian William L.

thrashing line (redux)

"The moment you thought to ignite fell more gravel than breath, and careful ache. I still feel the debt. I love you and will give you more. But tonight, I am turned out—a milky film slipping through waste glass, cigarette eyes choked to the street, the divine speck left cold."

—Ian William L.

212918052014

I am losing my voice. I am always losing my voice. I always have been. I let the world into the head and chop me into firewood. Be Ouroboros with an ax wound. I write backwards, suck it in like blood. Vampires between the paragraphs. I am screaming a mountain. I am rock face less. The tense always fucks me. The wanting and the not wanting. I feel imaginary sadness. None of this matters or is worthy.

But I have to record something.

I breathed heavy and nothing came out

I made nothing beautiful. I see it, though.

SOMEONE COME OUT, AND SAY: I UNDERSTAND YOUR CONDITION.

Practice.

Swallow down another photograph.

Filter blur.

I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing under all of this.

Study the chemicals. They go so fast. Faster than my keystrokes.

Why couldn't you just be louder every moment you are saved?

Mute. Nothing. Silence. Clenched teeth. Head in my hands

Atomic illumination of information and connection.

Life is good. This is all my head inventing.

Experiment.

Call this flux. I have.

I am failing my dreams. It's true.

So, this exists in tandem. The mirror side of my shadow. Always has.

I just breathe in songs and berate myself until my feet feel floor. Until I retreat.

But I tell the truth. I am not a writer. I always say that. They always disagree. But this is proof. I am trying my hardest and only this mess falls out. Rings of scissors. Schisms. Traps under feet.

I will invent a way that lets me speak the story that is singing jet flight and ends of everything behind.

My head hunts me.

I will speak.

(some absence) (redux)

That paper cup holding back—a night sweat cuts, to a lip—in expanse of his breathing in—moving out into the grass, never stopping for—a streak, scant, of star flashing—palpitation, or eyelids firing, or weight of love—cast forking spider-silk I claw, from—wakeful blood-tremors—that clasp lovers holding back.

—Ian William L.

dust, maybe, never mine (redux)

"This picture I keep blurs into gasoline, burns until I nurse a blood nose and I am singing. I smile, and it stings, and I name the shapes, really, just chasing them back to smaller bones, thumbing at rings of so many taller trees. I hear autumn, my car keys, your lighter fluid and your eyes. Still, I have tried, to understand your sparrow pieces, and how they chip at mine."

—Ian William L.

traffichead

The circumstance is that everything I feel is apocryphal and artifice—day-star and elemental—inclement and pale.

I am not telling a story. I am telling one single lonely missing colour.

It feels like a bird on a streetlight at dusk, the smell of hot water, smashing a glass against the wall, a slight static, notched bone.

drain the sea

I bit my cheek, and maybe the night. I am no longer a submarine in a lonely place.

boxxes 1111

origami of peeled, dried skin, little ships

bloodied lips, blood vessels

set on a glass table, pretty

neurotic headache, the dog chained

to a dead dog

song to sound old mail

celebrate us! us.

breathy nightloves

"On your best days, this is the best thing I could tell you. All in racehorses around your bones. All of everything, and barricades. But on your worst days, I am trying to ruin you with beauty, with calcium, with streetlights and astronauts and smoke. And I am to trip over love for your shoulders, your paper envelopes, your bit lip, your brace."

—Ian William L.

the others in static (redux)

"I cannot speak it, picking gingerly at static honeycomb. This is licking the television screen switched off, breathing out—heat strings, chemical jars, asphalt beaches. This is a scrap of paper with the secret of everything. This is Mona Lisa's grimace, cold headaches, staring into midnight, trying to conjure a dead rabbit. This is advertisement space. This is meat. It is a wrong, whoreish bell—pale contraception—an engine of colour to wet along your palms. This is a gap tooth wonderland, appendices not correctly attached, ugly math. This is something. This is a feeling. This is not a word. This is only left with a paper aeroplane, bowel cancer, apocryphal, home."

—Ian William L.

several years, cannibalism (redux)

"But on a night of water I went under, and saw your break again—the tide to a lung, the moon she wrote down, quickly to courage."

Ian William L.

microwaved angels (redux)

"I just need to see the light through my own tightly bruising eyes, what are microwaved angels, and the neon rattling spittle of want and death and beast."

Ian William L.

feelingspines

"I am the conch that hears you, burying hard against an earth."

Ian William L.

II: love, scrawl these skies

"I am so filled with love and taxes—with this smokescreen of grace. I am these warm hands and throwing curses."

Ian William L.

microwaved angels

I CAN NOT SPEAK. I CAN NOT. I CAN NOT USE LOWERCASE, OR NOT USE APOSTROPHES. [HELLO, HOW CAN WE COMMUNICATE?] I WILL INVITE NEW RULES TONIGHT, BECAUSE I NEED TO SAY OUT: CLOSE MY EYES NAND WISH IN NUMBERS. I WILL FIX MY—CORRECT MY FINGERTIPS LATER. I JUST NEED TO SEE THE LIGHT THROUGH MY TIGHTLY BRUISED EYES. LIKE MICROWAVED ANGELS, AND NEON, FUCKING DEATH, ITS COLD MUSHROOMING STUBBORN SPITTING BEAST, A WANT.

I AM AFRSI AFRAID FOR ME. ONLY B BECAUSE I WON'T BE ABLE TO TURN THIS THESE INTO BANK NOTES. THIS IS AFFLICTION WTIHOUT WITHOUT YOU—YOU NEEED NEED TO BE SEEN OR ELSE.

MILKY VISION STAINS ME EVEN NOW.

I can hear: I love you in the water.

maybe i am hearing you.

I will never write the book and have always dreamed.

I just need to see the light through my own tightly bruising eyes, what are microwaved angels, and the neon spittle of want and death and beast.

several years, cannibalism

Glassy way, of skeleton eyes and hands and hearts, the subservient would be dead, of time and signals riddled from every mud, and swamp of skin, beckons a trap, let beneath their dayed march, and only serve / I stand inside this box, a flickering light, switch of, madness and simple, in night know no timelines. But you were a key, a cord, and selling liars made eyes—you come to know yourself, in bloating me, to grow the tree, that eats and eats, and withers as a forest, that grows out the murder to skies, that fears the fall / Sometimes when I stare at walls, I expect to find myself staring, slowly there, and it's in these moments what lose control, lose a little more to once mirrors. Something you can't wish back, something that wants be found the night: the world you want, to have some ghosts / But change is, snowmen turned to strangers, the path of secret, metal sky, friends cast from the typeset / But no beauty bore, only an alchemic safety, of bodies constant and contained, once Midas lost his mind / Hanging if it were that rope, then ends could lead to hands, what helps, not a gunman, the fate of graves, if only the dead bird could show its song / All that comes is sleep: he makes for a wounded flight / Please keep, gladiator, good friend / The weight of balance is, to strike then and collapse, but or slowly, you know me like paths, my broken puppet bones—It's time! So stage show precisely, call malice from hope, a sword that does not miss, boxes of your breathing, I will find / He makes for a silent walk, but on a night of water I, went under, and saw—your—break again, the tide to a lung, the moon she wrote down, quickly to courage / We are ant eaters, we are catalysts—the knowledge ends and ends, and brings the light to her / Rain came blue again, lets us steam to eyes: the seasons change, and they are the first pieces thrown / Shuffling hair, and, creases, waiting: You cannot hope your life away! he folds that under the others, dusting his feet off, and listens for: