skonen_blades

When opening the door to the outside world
Means a broken dam of input
Enough to flood a farmland
That would drown the city of your mind

When the sunlit windows scream at your eyes
Become warning-sign billboards
Threatening the terrifying interactions
Involved with going outside

When the screens to the internet gush fire-hose dark
With pressure that can strip flesh off of bones
and kill all hope

When the future holds no promise
And the present isn’t so great either
And you can only speak in danger

When the cocoon feels like the best place
Not the safest place
Just the least dangerous place

Remember that our translation of reality
Has never been accurate
We’re great at recognizing patterns and assessing threats
But in this non-caveman existence
Of day jobs and apartments
We end up seeing patterns and perceiving threats
That may or may not be present

We’re all delusional by default
It’s how we survive
But sometimes we survive too hard

It’s cold comfort to know we’re all in this together
(To varying degrees)
But that can be like cold pizza
Which is to say
Better than nothing
When you feel like thick liquid in a chrysalis
Waiting to be born again





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The taste of the future is a lot like a bathtub full of lemon juice. A punch that you can sit in. A swerve ball of solar plexus centrifuge that calls you home like targets call the answering machines of arrows on rainy nights just to hear their voices. If calculators had souls, they’d be rectangular. Parallelograms of solace and want, needing fingers to help themselves to answers, to help them figure out the world. I’m glad calculators don’t have souls. If headphones were able to talk, they’d beg speakers to shut up and listen for a second. Backspace keys would scream not to be used. Erasers would run away from hands.

Here on the chart of wrongdoing is a line, a circle, and six dots on a graph describing the arc of your covenant life. Your geometry. Your parabola of existence is a plotted average among spikes. You memory sands off the corners. You remember skating on ice-garden professionals with regretful eyes tracking you every step of the way.

All you remember thinking, all you remember knowing, is “after this there is no back to normal. After this there is no back to normal. After this there is no back to normal.” It wasn’t just a line that was crossed, it was an entire border into a new country you were extradited, no, expunged into where you didn’t speak the language but with no embassy of your home town to run to. Any passport in a storm, you said, and you slipped on other people like suits at a sale until one of them fit.

Anyone who tells you smiles are free has never had a problem with depression. Smiles cost a lot to some people.

If you are what you eat then I am my feelings. If you are what you eat then I am my own sense of ambition. If you are what you eat then I am my ability to deal. If you are what you eat then I am my own imagination. If you are what you eat then I am my faith in my own self worth. If you are what you eat then I am the tiger I was supposed to be.

I keep expecting a bike messenger from a better future to come at me with answers. I stare for hours at the doorbell but nothing happens. I wait for either missiles or messages but all that happens is that time goes by.

I feel a darkness coming that will eclipse the others with its magnitude but I’m not sure about that. I sense the edge of it and fight it off.

I guess you could say I’m open to suggestion.





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When you look at me, it’s a swooping dare of instinct that communicates deadly intent along the wire from predator to prey. The quivering acquiescence of a humble foodstuff in the face of pure physical superiority. I would feel the same if I looked into the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I would not run. I would merely be food. There would be no other option. It would be my place in the universe, the food chain, and our relationship.

For every shopping list that becomes a hit man, there are too many that go the other direction, that wane to safety in the shadows and are content to be part of the river of history, not the crags that tear it open. If one builds towers to heaven, one must be prepared to meet God.

Peel the smiles off our knowing corpses because we’ll be keeping those secrets. All the grease in Tanzania won’t make these wheels squeak. If you want a sharp-angled rescue then simply come home. My scissored arms await your pliant body. We can take turns when it comes to the killing.



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There’s this shark fin circling around, poking above the waterline of my current happiness and causing ripples. I’m happy here but I know what I have to do.

I’ve been sending postcards back to an imaginary lover for years. The spider children keep guard and tell their racist jokes to each other outside the camp.

The men are barbaric monkeys. The women are gorgeous mannequins. We were created. There’s no other explanation. How can this awful collection of insecurities and destruction be a result of evolution?

The tentacles knot together nervously. The crusted beak and many eyes are scared of what they must proclaim. How do you damn a world?

It’s like a post office at the center of all creation but instead of letters, it hands out death.

People are wrong. There is a God. And people are right. God is dead. God is the creator. His job is done. He is not the director. He is gone.

There is a thing at the center that is a shaper. It ends the dead ends. That is its single solitary job. It checks what is happening in all creation and shapes it, keeps it perfect. The universe is becoming something. It’s gestating. It will take a long time.

This post office with its giant tentacled general send out angels of death to destroy and end strains of possibility that will harm what the universe is to become.

They are much like the enzymes that dissolve the tail that we all have in our mother’s womb.

I’ve been stamped. I’ve been sent. I have arrived.

The shark fin is growing as the shark rises to the surface.

I am on the couch with my arm around my wife and our children are playing in front of the fireplace. Our dog looks up at me and cocks its head. Why are the pets so much more sensitive than humans?

The inside of me glows and whirrs. My wife looks up at me with a raised eyebrow and a half smile before she’s torn apart and our entire neighbourhood disappears in white light.

I become what I am and fly down to the center of the earth and start pulling out wires.


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