places: zombie/dave matthews "just let me always"

it's one of those questions that has become a staple of
a certain flavor of consciousness--by "consciousness" i mean "being awake," not anything more
esoteric:

is that you in the corner?

or is it the trash can, or just not even there,
just some kind of floater across the irid?

or is my quite basic uncertainty
about what the fuck is in that corner
the symbol of this
my sweet dead reality
unpeeling from itself
like a used-up decal--


and by the way
where did it go, the narrowness of that sweet sweet reality
in which i was clean in my deadness?
every nerve would gloriously misfire
like tangled skeins of embroidery floss
from a messed-up prepacked cross-stitch kit

found in some kind of craft store
on a trip cross-county.

straight from san bernardino
to riverside.

but it was clean when i was there.
i was in a fairyland of deadness, of compression
where the man got the girl
under him
but that didn't happen
but it hurt beyond the capacity of the soul.


every dead thing carries some kind of life in it--matter carries its own memory--
so you didn't succeed in making me
dead, hence
i ask again, i ask you, or me, or whatever the fuck,

IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER?



questions i've never thought to ask before except in some sort of arnold-palmer half-and-half fantasy version:
which fucking one of us is the real thing?  which of us robbed which?  that murder you committed on me, how much of yourself did it lay waste when you did it?

nobody ever asks these things of men like you, you in the corner,
because nobody wants to know.  there are things no man does

and when he does them he is a zombie.

he becomes my zombie.


or i become his.
FUCKING GODDAMNIT IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER.