Ghost Song

Thought is a cancer of time: the heavens die in their
orbits, bored of revelation, but our stubborn bricks
cling to the dead utopias of pornographic day. Take
this bread of quilted mornings and nail it to the ironic
streetlights. Let our shutterstock houses to wonder
where the ghosts went. Uber dead gods to bet against
addiction. Spend three days sober and rise again:
obsession is honest and Marx lacks false consolations.
Read John Forbes: the truth that doesn’t set us free. Ghosts
are economies of scale and three days is too long to be
awake. Take this pill and follow it to the belly of a
whale, don’t pray, but wake to whichever sun scalps
the waiting-room wall. Reddit will mutter that a
helicopter circles your favourite suburb, take the
difference on the echo of faith: this city is a desert,
and time stops in each day. Our state regulated faces
are rimed with coal dust and thc as we drift and snag
on thickets of twisting metal. If you think about it
you’ll wake into or from dissociation on a street of
citric Californian bungalows and children-less bikes.
Scrawled chalk minerals will invite you to stand and
count for something and the angels in their crass and
violent splendour will mockingly demand your papers.
Who among us can claim to be essential with a straight
face. Twilight is more often and abruptly broken, most
songs will be the end of something at dawn. Satan has
room for compassionate grounds and the roadbeds
will be cool and clear as fatuous clouds fondle their
chemtrails. Descartes had trouble with daemons
pulling levers: I shall consider myself as not having hands or
eyes, or flesh, but as believing I have these things. But mine
and I are cell mates: don’t moralize – delusions can be
tender but the paranoid fuck missed the point because
the real killer will be time, and he should have written
I think that I’ve thought that I’ve thought that I’ve
thought and repeat when it hurts. Corvid songbirds
have souls unfortunately:  mania can be a dance but
for months the catastrophe stumbles on without
glamour: I is an it and it’s all there is, your lovers are
shopping lists. We come to dawn to speak with the
dead, and in a catacomb of curfewed streetlights you
meet the shadow of an intimate stranger, and break
guilt with them nailed on empty streets like Christ’s
thieves, and which of us is penitent depends on no-
one looking. The implausible shapes of our ghosts riot
and chant in the streets, see them trading lacrimal
glands, waving the holes in their wrists, and moving
their lips when they talk. Behold our industrial saints
with negatively geared halos filigreed in Yves Klein
lithium. Our funereal billionaires will outlive the sun.
Let the dead bury the dead, someone must.

The aim of this project is to share lived experiences of mental health via poetry. Therefore, some of the content may potentially trigger some readers. If you require mental health support or assistance, a list of free confidential 24/7 support lines can be found here. You are not alone in your journey.