the archive

[scottermite]

i am wasted potential. i ought to invest in a potato peeler
and start thinking about if i really need other people.

i'm just a fool you love to be cruel to
good as dead in either direction for how you've forgotten me
'good thing your brain isn't big enough to get your feelings hurt'

[scottermite]

everybody gets hurt, everybody lies
not everybody multiplies, but everybody dies
everybody finds themselves staring into the open sky
wondering what it might mean to even be alive

[scottermite]

i had a lot of poetic things to say
diatribes about the crackle of a cigarette cremation
and skulls dripping blood.

all of it is useless strain
fruitless effort that was never going to go anywhere, anyway.
i leap at any chance to prove myself
that doesn't involve my ineptitudes
and i've forever been a savant when it comes to those archaic disciplines...

now my skull is stained with red
and blood can't afford me any acetone.

[scottermite]

i knew this bastard who would dangle glazed christmas hams on strings in front of my gaunt face.

there are two schools of haint: one ancient and domineering (cruel and obvious), and one found only through careful precision-
there is that bastard scepter, who carries garlands of grief to throw at passers by, watching through stained windows at the platonic ideal of gothic victorian mourning.
there is another scepter, a wraith born out of wedlock, who copies images of the split second he occupies to gigabites; he squints at the back of band shirts when their models pass him by.

[scottermite]

first, god created coming of age.
... i was just getting used my long hair, before that plane-crash postcard.

absence and my hair grew longer...
absence; when i loiter alone i find-

emptiness? contentedness?
absence and i realise my place on freight-train tracks
(mind, not that i feel steel underfoot).

the genesis of managing to come of age is squinting madly & i find the riverbeds around my eyes erode to canyons.
... but, that thing is burning a hole in my mailbox...

[scottermite]

i was so scared last night, i was so sober
"This isn't happening! This isn't real! If I can't see you, you are not there! You are not there!" i think,
and in tandem this morning i scream.
i am so afraid... but it doesn't reach me or my brain in our green haze.

i was so scared last night, of other things too.
my own ineptitude scares me!
any number of months ago i would have curled into the warm embrace of anyone
who would steal me away and resign me to cruel simplicity, simple cruelty.

but when left to my own devices, i started to figure out
if you pay enough attention it's easy enough
to put one letter in front of the other in the right order
still, in attention i am poor...

I'll trap the air in my lungs
Open up and scream for hours on end

here: you'll find me at that place,
i showed you the photos- my bleeding lip, my bleeding human heart
(or, you saw them after my 'virtue' expired and i took a trip there by myself)

where i ran barefoot so i could feel the earth
with my headphones on so i could feel connected to the miracle of consciousness
('trying to communicate with cats'.)
it could be a clue to lead you right to me,
perhaps it was the start of that willing victim's decomposition
(if i know anything, the smell of rot attracts pests like you.)

Show me some sympathy,
In his image god made me ugly...

[scottermite]

what the perfect place to stumble around drunk with that boy!
i think- if he would stumble around drunk with me.
(i have no money, but i have half a mind how he treats the drunk...)

what the perfect place!
house lights left on for boys who will eventually emerge home
all slipping, muddy boots and sweat-soaked, and stinking.

let's stand in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night
our little world, our glorious kingdom...

[scottermite]

i read the conquest of bread in year nine,
i have wizard statues at the head of my bed.
i like ancient digital cameras,
and i like to press their dead buttons that click just for me.
i spend my time rotating locations at which
i sit with my arms over my knees, barely thinking, moving only when necessary.

the water is hot enough to flush my skin pink and i let it,
i sit there and i let it melt off the grime i waste my time collecting.
i have a favourite song for the moment but i don't listen as it plays,
i don't think about anything at all.

in a perfect world i'm a housefly perched on walls mottled with muck.
carried on stained-glass wings through gallery earth,
i take note, take stock, fill myself until i can fit no more
and have to deposit all what i've seen back home.
but it is not a perfect world, and i am a repulsive ape
and either side of me is nothing.
an island of life sitting in a black, salty ocean,
nothing for miles around like the last volcanic emergence
that remains untouched by empires toiling a million miles away.

i am shedding the boy who cried wolf, and adopting my own identity.
it feels like a lesson in exercising caution in prayer, being careful what you wish for.
and i have been!... or maybe i just know what kind of story i'm in, these days.
i no longer wish to run out with my nose underneath the shoreline
of the black, salty ocean. the gentle waves turn to gnashing rips
and punctuate the deafening beat of helicopter wings.

when attempting a copy it is best form to vertically mirror your muse
so your brain doesn't recognize it, allowing your eye to overrule
the brain's mistakes, and his antiquities, and his idiosyncratic symbol language.
what a pity, then, for one whose muse does not fit on a sheet of A4.

i read the conquest of bread in year nine, but inertia is king
and it scares me when i think of your revolution, your seizing of the means,
since your predecessor preferred to fatten himself on just the fruits.
when people ask how i've been i leave you alone,
because i'm not sure how to talk about it.

[scottermite]

FORCE HIM TO TRY UNTIL HE IS CRYING
YOU KNOW BEST AND HE IS A LIAR
YOU KNOW HIM BEST AND YOU KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE
YOURE IN HIS MIND TO HEAR HIS SECRET THOUGHTS, AND HE SAYS:
IF YOU DONT EXTEND YOURS HE WILL FIND ANOTHER HAND TO EAT FROM
AND IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN
UNTIL YOU'RE THE THIRD DUSTY FOOTNOTE
IN THE PATCH NOTES RELEASED BY SOMEONE WHO WANTS THE BEST FOR HIM


(everybody thinks they know what i need
and somehow it is always to suffer in neglect.
you think you know me so well.)

[scottermite]

there is a store in our mall
which sells crystals and statuettes.
the interesting thing about it
is their not-secret secret policy;
anything which slips from your fingers and shatters
against the linoleum, is yours to keep.

but you are meek; you enter & daren't touch anything.
and on your way out, you turn sharply
and your bag knocks something heavy to the floor.
it shatters, and that scream of porcelain makes you wince.
don't you know your impersonal approach
entitles you to none of the shards?

(you like me better when i leave?
watch how soft i get.)