we live in a world
jostling syllables trying to
uncover a word among
the cacophony caw-calling
around our heads drowned
in white noise bouncing against
itself and each other like
my hipbone bumping my femur my
tibia fibula to an aftershock left
in my footprint unfit
to mar beaches and snow because it's made
of carbon in a crystal structure building
me up into something organic in a world where
organic things take apart the other elements in a puff
of smoke like magic melting titanium and
iron into the shape of our name rattled
off a roster of dead&dying we hope
to immortalize with the brands we are making, breaking in
to with the mountains that
scream so we nod our heads to the sound as
we catalog the disassembly of
this world in headlines faster than machine
gun fire punctuating the static with
lipstick-stained capitalization because
everyone has to scream louder than
the person at their shoulder just
to be heard as a whisper more
than the silence of suffocating in
smoke from cigarette sparks someone
couldn't stamp out when they fell from
the ninth story window with
a paper airplane whipped out to sea where
it's always hurricane season and we can't
leave the shore instead watching the tidal
wave of internal bleeding from swallowed
debris of centuries of erosion and crashing
cars building up the traffic we lost
our shadows in the flashing lights and
sirens screaming at us to run toward
the horizon and the sky faster than
light so we cut corners, trashed
rhymes and semicolons—they were
bad for business—and marched up as if
we were building Babylon, reaching for
a moon blackened with soot from
our furnaces burning the crumbling
skeletons of iambic eras starved away, their
ghosts haunting radioactive in the night we
couldn't outrun but were swept
away by in a flood of dark matter dissolving
our cerebellums and cracking the universe into
forgotten chaos forsaking reason and rhythm as
the atom split nothing into something into
nothing again, matter stretched too thin and
we spun out of control and left behind form:
this is the breakdown.