Continuing...

Continuing...

brian s gore
These are, my boggled thoughts in synchronized letters, typed from cold, dry, rashy hands. My narrow cheeks itch behind three months of trying to grow a beard. I’ll roll this cigarette.
I sit in a heatless house with a squeaky door at the porch on the side of a mountain alone.
I listen to inspiration.
In cigarette fogged dim – poets penetrate the silence. A cursor awaits my next words, which could mean less than those before them, which could mean not much at all. Someone needed to know what I was thinking, though.

Computer in my lap, smoke between my lips –
my itching eye-lids flake dead skin – my chin and throat and elbows are red with rash from dry desert cold and arid winds that seep through the windows and doorjambs – I drink water equally cold and dry – I drag.
One light glows inside, one outside, the fridge-motor stops humming with a click and the deck-door slams with each gust, otherwise silence.
My keyboard clicks by my mechanist fingers. “Hold my cigarette,” I tell them.
In my bed on the couch in the living room of a three bedroom mobile-home, I shiver.
In a hearthless house, I’m surrounded by echoing silences pummeling each other like waves.
Tempests bang drums in my migraining mind and I wonder – who is beyond this?

Why doesn’t know Conundrums are infinite, so the only way to follow one is to be at the center, with every eye open. They whirl about you, the ever diminishing veins of a single leaf found in a cyclone of brothers and sisters falling from their parent branches. Why must crows stay, reminding of stark winter’s sorrow? Trees in autumn are a ticker-tape parade, but it all fades the same. It’s just another claim to say that time is worth anything material. Pennies saved amount to pockets full of copper, green finger tips. Eventually, I’ll have enough to have something else. Why is that worth?

I still can’t afford this smoke (altered significantly since first printing) I sit in Texas’ musty Summer evening and see more jet-setters than stars in the sky. I feel free yet trapped
on old brick porch-steps; slugging a beer, listening to beats; and I still can’t afford this cigarette.


“My Fingers”
“Monetary systems are as true as a Geo-centric universe,” I tell them.
“And further, Life has no center.
It’s permanent as a cliff’s face, meaningful as erosion, and
creates as it simultaneously destroys.
There, I’ve said it.”
Back in my pockets, they fidget with coins.