after about a year of not cleaning
wherever you live
a room starts to develop that stale bread texture
that smell or taste
and you live with it
or you seek it out and disinfect it
like some old gangrenous limb that threatens to fall off

you dissassemble the room
you've been habitating
and under a pile of socks,
a couch,
in an old suitcase that's never been closed
there's some papers
that you'd wrote on a year ago

the words look like these ones
the words sound like these ones
the words feel like these ones

and it smells of stale bread

you pick it up, bite into it,
to make sure
and you find that smell in your mouth
that texture.

and you sit with that
for a day or two

because you know you're not done
but you're too tired now
to finish

and now that the smell is out
in the open
exposed and a hundred times stronger
with your memories

you move the little briefcase,
you find a new place for it
where you think you won't smell it again.

and these pages, you've found hanging around this year
you place with in the briefcase too.

forget about it, with a couch, some socks,
and a stick of incense.

it's so much better this way.

i write a lot about
failed artists and writers

and my favourite books
have despondant anti-heros
who live life truly;
as real life is lived -
with great imperfections

and all their goals incomplete
or with great compromises,

and just to make you know it's real
the editors line the books with biographies
of the stories inventor

graduated from
ph d. in
married to
also wrote

a life that's pure, fulfilled
and free of any error,
or noble ones
or ones that were beyond their control

while inside
these little forwards
and biographies

lies something dark and horrible
that you know happens
even sometimes to you

and this character
wants to write a book
but can't
and has to deal with
the strange opportunities
and failures
life permits
because it's real.

(you know it's because
they've been so righteously selfish
in a way you can't be;
where you write about others
and not yourself;
and you keep your life
and that life you want to show
seperately;
and you wonder why you can't be
that selfish
and work on your life;
and not give your life
to the characters in a story
while leaving yourself behind)

21

birthdays make sense.
we celebrate death
as life, a moment
measured in cakes.