Trick or Treat?

But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear.

            -MJ

¿Quien manda aquí?

            -MR

Sometimes I get dulled down. Sometimes my heart won’t beat. Sometimes I could dry up like a puddle on dry sand: evaporate into nothingness and heat.

Was I ever here?

It all makes for a lack of guile: the ego opens itself up unprotected to check the landscape, to check the wilderness, to check anything—to touch just to feel. Fantasyland consumes reason, reality nags. I want to live in reality or escape it, one of the two, but living as a ghost marks a terrible cost. How real is real?  

I help her get ready, my hand on her back. She smiles. And the vertigo wild, the tender excitement she approaches him with so soon after—I know I lost the chance to make that excitement. And yet it stays buried in me deep that the chance was there. It’s a mirage, blurry and elusive, flashing across the desert. Is it better to die staggering towards the flash above the dunes? Or standing still? 

Or is the absurdity of grand delusion what kills me?  

And the midnight ravers come telling me, motherfucker you thought you was special?

You know, I can’t even put it into poetry; all I have is weakness and pain. All I have is hunger for someone whose body matches the eternal potential I see sometimes in words. All I have is starvation. At the end of it all, the words are meaningless, of an amateur, have no potential at all. At the end of it all, I can’t think.

Lately my words are ugly.

Lately I’m ugly too: withered by the swirl of sand choking everything under a yellow sky.

Was I ever here?

Maldita sea.