THE GRIST MELD

being a collection of poetry otherwise uncompiled by ~vilmibm.
scraped together from backups, an old blog, cobwebbed hard drives.
all written between 2012 and 2015.

touch my back

        touch my back.
        write your name
        in looping cursive

        with your finger tips
        with a blue ball point
        with a splintered stick

        carve it with a paring knife
        trace it with a velvet glove
        clean it with ten grit

        burn it in with a soldering iron.

        burrow into the small of my back
        and curl around my spine,
        to hug it when it tenses.
      

install a mod for plants and feels

        downtown i walk and stare
        up at buildings solid like in
        video games:
        inert pixels
        covered in dead windows glowing
        with looped lights.

        if i can get inside i'm
        somewhere else,
        a level outside this space and time
        surrounded by NPCs who stare through me
        and repeat the same sad days
        whether i'm there or not.

        every inside is a place
        separate from its exterior.

        roll in with a katamari
        get so big you tear the walls
        into yourself
        and see the void surround.

        somewhere else, walls still stand
        like shitty western sets made volumetric.
      

in the bathroom, a bored metal clanging

        the living are the flesh and blood
        ghosts of the dead
        shouting nervously and
        scaring the silent buried.

        we'll talk about it when there's time
        and gray enough to cover
        years of skin
        stretched too thin
        over the unspoken.

        dead moss remembers the sun that caressed
        and the piss of baby deer,
        and layers of dead butterflies,
        and the tall trees turned to soot
        as it passes back
        into soil
      

up and out the charnel stack

        i spat wine and black globs
        became ash became ants streaming
        out of toilets and pooling
        around me:

        a black mass glistening and
        writhing like the alien from Alien,
        threatening without hate.

        oh frightening mass:
        i consented to fuck you
        but forbade you touch my feet.
      

is it published if it's just on facebook?

        online at 4 am
        my vanity is a rose
        with its thorns 
        bent inward and watered 
        with wine.
      

some haiku cut-up from cyberpunk novels

        and everything else
        coming in on the phone lines
        the body would die

        not my department.
        the turrent swung back and forth
        and she was lonely.

        like badly spliced film
        but now after eating poor gurdle?
        there's twelve of them

        he had no armor
        gathering the wild forage
        i saw the screen

        i need custom work
        he always wore his spacesuit
        she didn't say a word.

        he told the soldier
        i will own many shiny
        you ever seen that?

        but i said nothing
        and then i held him away
        extending his hand

        i owed him money
        my mother always taught me
        dna death code

        himself exactly
        the dog was still rather gaunt
        look at the weak tree

        cry yourself to sleep
        i went out on the surface
        clanging of cages

        She worked quickly now
        I was filled with peace and hope
        as bodyguards should

        “I know what you mean"
        "You intend to destroy us"
        "Unless you join us"

        Same in Galveston:
        spiraling out of control.
        Glyph 3: The Robots Revolt
      

the strange life and death of a sentient car

      my mother: robot shrill drilling my parts together
      while dad and dad and dad and dad
      made sinew out of molten metal.

      out of the belched black smoke
      of a factory womb i rolled
      onto trailers overpacked with
      siblings only i could see.

      i can't forget the smiles
      of the men gleaming cold
      on showfloor after showfloor eager
      to usher another stranger
      into me.

      you found me and i hated you.
      you ground me down and stared through me
      and only at me to judge and pick and re-
      configure. my insides boiled over
      at the whim of your careless stomp.
      i sang the songs you taught me strangled
      over wires and wanted to spit them out.

      i saw the truck coming.
      i knew fear and joy and you,
      then, more intimately than ever. 

      i held you 
      in my mangling embrace.

      at peace i rest; your tool no longer.
      in pieces i am whole; in pieces i am total
      

frazzled hack

        you took my picture and gave me a soul.
        you put it on facebook,

        but it was a ghoul soul decayed
        and rotted upon upload.

        pitch over your pinterest and pour me out:
        i am not your arts and crafts,
        i am not your beautiful wedding,
        i am not your year in review.

        delete my tweets from your computer:
        i don't want to be in you.
        take out your disks and ram
        and disembowel them.
        bury out back the remnants
        upside down backwards and re-
        polarized.

        but leave me on your g plus page
        empty and sepulchral
        for google bots to grope and pull,
        parsing nothing but mistakes.
      

love letter to literally no one

        oh, sweet avenger:

        fist my face and pull out my anxieties tarp-wrapped like a river corpse and
        mashed together like black mold balled up by shaking fingers.
        rub it on the walls and write a poem that smothers
        this place with inner filth like waterboarding in reverse
        and in slow motion.

        now, touch your lips to mine.
        shotgun the fetid air from my lungs and
        transmute it into perfume designed
        by one who loves scent
        in the way only the blind could:

        i will love myself like that one day.
      

emergent behavior

        My flesh laid out a scheme for me
        Into which my fractured bakelight bones
        Do not fit comfortably.

        My eyes are peach pits desiccated
        And spitting tears of slime and mold
        Onto desert hands whence life has vacated.
  
        My mouth is a graveyard tasting of decay:
        Sticky bittersweet coating teeth and tongue
        Morbidly resisting attempts to brush away.

        My feet are burlap bags of broken glass
        Stumbling, slicing, and grinding
        Their way in circles over yellowed grass.

        My body is a metal worm
        Stimulated but unfeeling
        Waiting for science to confirm.
      

the death of ritual

        there is a myth that humans don't grow hair.
        instead, our skins are bat wings
        showing arteries that trace
        maps to nowhere.

        if all our blood was collected
        would it be greater than the ocean?
        though we build statues ever higher,
        our refuse outstrips
        the science we've neglected.

        when quiet space we conquer
        what truly have we won?
        to Mars though a ship may spring
        what peace can we sequester?
      

machine of hours

        From air and æther
        I make ghosts
        Out of friends.

        From the null ache
        Of dry lipped eye sore
        I make statues crookedly
        Staring at the heavens.

        From you
        I make myself
        And all these machines
        In between
      

movements in an office building

        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at ground floor elevator
        the janitor at cubicles
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at desk area
        the janitor at second floor lobby
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at ground floor elevator
        the janitor at kitchen
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at second floor elevator
        the janitor at second floor lobby
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at second floor lobby
        the janitor at second floor elevator
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at second floor elevator
        the janitor at ground floor elevator
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at second floor lobby
        the janitor at desk area
        a computer at cubicles
        a gnome at kitchen
        the janitor at ground floor elevator
        a computer at cubicles
      

dr. hospital

        loose windrows
        come unfalteringly.
        Indeed, Algernon;
        the patient lay still
        with all the hapless silent lovers.
      

the ugly sun

        we turned our eyes to the moon and
        the clouds stopped,
        the moon an ugly sun obscured.

        our eyes are dead, all seeing
        the dream that repeats and will
        one day replay not over green
        but gray when us and them
        are cavities, open to space.

        linked to me and back,
        my spine is drawn and we
        don't know yet gray from green
        or one from another.

        the blue blanket drawn lazily
        moves on: slipping, falling,
        crumpling from the bed.
      

thick liver

        "thick-skinned, liver, believers
        very social blesssssing"
        estranged mock
        crapshoot.
        Inevitably, concedes,
        Tinnitus.
      

depressive effectiveness

        frenetic fame
        children
        
        pregnant. motioning,
        continues
        
        blurted
        speechless
        
        Sluggishness, distored
        production.
        
        depressive effectiveness
      

through steam

        a brown constellation
        among black night-hairs

        leads not to undiscovered lands
        but rather the same

        shit-smell and
        sweat-curls

        I've come to expect.
      

press haiku

        PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
        A FIGHT WITH TWO WILDCATS
        No, he was all right!
      

in the shadow of lincoln cathedral: an elementary text-book

        The bodily heat falls very rapidly.
        "It's my lungs I'm worried about," Mary said.
        Gabriel, why did you ever set your heart on me?
        You had charge of the funeral arrangements.

        There was no tribute but their tears.
        You had charge of the funeral arrangements.
        [Sidenote: Result of the contest.]
        He did not want to let Renovales go.

        But the contest irritated the king.
        That husky young boy was her son.
        "Did they tell you, Mariano?
        She must stay at home and work for others."
      

simple sorrows

        The grass of spring covers the prairies
        with all their simple sorrows
        I saw nothing about fairies
        in the plains of the poems of heroes.

        with a flock of sheep
        he now swats the pill
        a bleeding heap
        dreaming toward the till

        he hardly spoke a word out to the southern suburb
        an unofficial organ to georgetown
        with an intermittent urge
        beneath a mustached frown.

        perhaps even with the wonderland dreamer
        this works with the scalper.
      

the mindless other jupiters

        Jupiter shall emerge
        with grace and tap gold whisky from her crystal keg
        and see the whole man converge
        cutting the lashing of his waterproof leg.

        Every incident should have some bearing on the denouement.
        have you ever seen a ghost?
        every fiction should have some bearing on our denouement.
        what was his proudest boast?

        blabbing by rote
        an exceptional touch
        has been slightly torn or wounded in the throat.
        fingers say too much.

        pile the words of the earth
        to protect him and teach him his worth
      

lajima

        Symertoerton
        LOS ANGELEyajima
        abilityists