American Summer

Floating through a sickly grey.
The remnants of a barren cityscape,
coated in ash.
Myrtle grows through fissures in the concrete.
Dilapidated monoliths penetrate low-hanging clouds,
the atoms of which act as mnemonic devices
bursting with treachery.

Lost in the liminal space
between invention
and recollection,
I feel the residual of your touch.
It lingers over me like dew on the early-morning grass,
or perhaps like the roar of passing jets,
drowning out the chorus of cardinals that
once perched on our windowpane.
The telltale signal that a new day was upon us.

Dusk.
Distant footsteps come to me
as the faintest suggestions of life.
A quiet cacophony.
Hushed intimations.
The sad fate of peripheral meaning.

I press on regardless,
beset by some unknowable obligation.
And yet there they are.
The foul tendrils.
Dendritic branches slithering down my body,
tenacious and psychotic, or maybe just resigned,
castigating a form that’s not all there.

In this stupor I am met with an image.
What could it be but that which most defines me?
The atrophied limb.
The vestigial skin.
Calloused and calcified.
Tumescent and putrefied.
It festers in the crumbling darkness,
fetid, overflowing with bile,
carrying with it the memory of satin,
a pale violet mass awash in
that familiar orange glow.


  A sleepy hello.
A restful smile.
Loving eyes peering through interlocked fingers.


Was I not the fool who spoke too much?
Spoke so much yet said so little.
But for a time, we traded stories
using little more than subtle gestures,
conducted symphonies with nothing but sideways glances.
And yet I still let you believe that
it was only you who couldn’t sleep alone,
the death rattle of an ego in denial.

One year removed and I’m sleepless still,
lost in the liminal space
between rest and exhaustion,
recollecting tall tales passed down
in a dead language,
a dense tapestry of symbols
built by and for two.
It grows more faded as our worlds continue to pull apart,
further, further, further still.

And though it brings me no solace,
against my better judgment I can’t help but wonder:
Do you still speak it?

The Liminal Space // Dead Language (Midi Demo)

Lyrics:
Emotional assimilation. Trauma is worn scarred-tissue skin seared by state sanctioned aspirations. Underneath my will to live clings tight my will to die. The silent secret of my strength is all the shame I’ve centralized. The people I see whose suffering’s steeped in dreams of nothing when their eyes close to sleep don’t see the void that they meet as so much more comforting. I dream of nothing when I close my eyes to sleep, each day awake just lies in wait to shape clean breaks away in vain from daily debasement. Engage the escapist, unendingly inaccessible until ingratiated. I dream of nothing but ending my self-defeat. Apparently my revealings of my injuries are just my manipulative tendency. And these techniques spoken to me about responsibility and integrity are suffocating placating sayings placed to efface me. I was taken through the threshold by the tension I’ve espoused, fitted for full integration into a burning house.

Tour Tape 2k18

27. Spite is its own overcommitment and a self-preservation instinct. Self-love is enough even if it’s only saying to yrself I’m surviving while passively practicing silence. Tell everyone that I’m thriving. As though I share ya’ll disbelief at the doublespeak dressed as apologies. Those closest to me cut me off when I speak. Macroaggressive and projecting, thus not worth mentioning. Backward I move too, but I trip over the casualties, life lost is no cost for a lapse in humanity. Congratulate me, sight unseen. Congratulate me, a nigga finally free. Take leave of the speech of the truth you hate and shout it down as fake, lie in wait, lie and wait. Lie awake each night, or D) All of the above, yo I love to lie and I live to love. On god I will not participate, lemme rephrase, no more faith in the process, potential as progress, or intangible sweet nothings prepackaged as promises. All them lil vacations in the crossfire between you and yr future selves is of a trajectory of dishonesty that leaves transgressions propelled. You see the tragedy as yrs to manage, a wound if you grip tight enough you think you can bandage. I’ll only accept apologies in cash or true change, but I will reclaim my time all the same. Dolo, left to wander, wondering what it is to mitigate my guilt in not standing up and saying what I just won’t tolerate.

30. My wall is a garden of dark marks, interwoven strokes rapturously posted up, not ruins but still sutured to a corrupt culture awaiting chances at its deconstruction. My whole family stillborn in the cut, living, working, dying as yr laborers yet labeled non-essential by you fucks. Yr walls imported, pretty sure you used the word ‘glorious,’ but you can’t both use and ignore us, or fuck and pretend to adore us. What type of love is only true in its desire to stay hateful? What type of world did you think you birthed where you thought I would be grateful? You really thought I would be grateful??? U thought!!! I overanalyzed the size of the affect of life as a mark and an object of disrespect. Remade in H.I.S. image, redacted, refitted for symmetry, but over the border my future’s free of that conspiracy. Wishing to keep yr threats well-kept as yr weaponized debt is yr wall my nigga. My wall’s the earth and more than the dire you tried to sweep up under the rug my nigga. You gentrified a whole continent with a whip on some hand over fist shit nigga. Tell me, am I still the embodiment of the evil that yr daddy did live nigga? Yr wall is imported, I’m pretty sure you used the word ‘glorious,’ but you can’t both use and ignore us or fuck and pretend to adore us. What love is only true in its desire to stay hateful? What type of world did you think you birthed where you thought I’d be grateful??? U really thought I’d be grateful??? U thought! U cannot fucking steal my joy. U thought!!!!!!