casper the friendly ghost with rocket feet

bad associations

in everything

especially facebook

that sinking feeling upon opening

the cesspool, all these people

i sort of know, know too well

playing in their own filth

open sewers

disappointments arranged in pretty patterns

a vast swathe of write-off

my circumstances get better

and my head gets worse

coming home from work to my new house

with a whine to end the night

like every other night

what’s wrong?

how can i say it in a way that doesn’t betray

what an awful person i am?

let’s say poisoned, sick

can you believe a self-diagnosis?

strawberry river syndrome, the symptoms

of which include syringe-hugging self-portraits

where is my medicine?

i’ve self-medicated with opiates

sent love letters, lust letters

the righteous theme

playing in the relative major of D minor

woke up and worried

life confirmed the dread

said i’d be better off dead

cause my methods don’t work

and i have no function

every day several people at work ask me how's it going?

how’re you doing?

i say not bad

pretty good

doesn't feel right to actually answer the question

today i used less sugar

and said mediocre

and got a weird look, like

tmi or something

she wanted a definition

i said absence of greatness

and got a weirder look

nothing feels right

except feeling wrong

feeling wrong feels right

like it's the only way to feel

when i talk to people it stings

it’s so contrived

after it’s over i ache

it’s so empty

the things it could be, almost was

almost, always almost

i watched my friend descend

into a paranoid hell of his own making

now i watch myself do the same

entropy, health was anomaly

seeing the downward spiral

and spiraling down anyway

like emotions will always overpower intellect

that useless autistic weakling

neuroses grow like cancer

synthetic matter, synthetic thought

a cure for cancer? we are cancer

okay, i’m cancer, you’re fairy dust

i’ll grant you that, and you’ll grant me

as many wishes as i want

wishes in and of themselves

a resource that will last a lifetime

a resource i’ll burn through like

a pack of matinees, a wishpack a day

and when i’ve reached my last wish

when i don’t care enough to wish anymore

that will be my death

glorious apathy

the death gnosis

knowledge that there is nothing worth

wishing for anyway, when reality

has constricted to the narrow cataract perception

of this long-survived tumour

one for the almanac

rendered redundant in the next edition

just another double octogenarian

hushed senile struldbrug

someone’s gotta be cancer

otherwise how would you know that you’re fairy dust?

it's so horrible to think

anybody owes me anything

yeah, look at me

bringing so much sunshine into everyone's life

well i tried, i did try, oh i wanted to

but cancer has no function

and i'm an endorphin addict with no connection, okay?

that's why i'm so pathetic

because i can’t subsist on table scraps

still on the floor of the opium den

watching thin hallucinations

the ones i’ve seen before

running low on synonyms

recycling urine

apathy is malicious, to me

i require some sort of respect

as the magic of the past fades further into memory

like it was some lucky charm that wore off

microcosm of a petroleum-addicted society

divine death of a canary in a cage

sublime to save the miners

hacking coal cough, how noble

emperor norton incarnate

with my own currency, that no one will recognize

infuriating and depressing, what gives? what changed?

is it me or the world?

is it endorphins, is that what changed?

cause i know it would be so different

if i had those, the real ones, nature’s

prime mover

prime numbers make me sad

i’m divisible by thirteen