i met my friend in an online book group we shared a love for gritty dark urban fantasy novels and a real friendship developed over time he killed himself before the final book in his favorite series had been released now i sit with it loaded up on my kindle unable to start reading as […]
my friend, Shandon, took his own life a few weeks ago. he isn’t the first of my friends to choose his own way out, but it hit me harder than the others. he loved dinosaurs and Richard Kadrey. he wanted to write and was making headway. then life hit hard and everything fell apart. i […]
brooding overa garden ofplastic flowerslamenting thelack of bees the eagles hangfrozen abovethe highway inthe throes of aperpetual stateof construction stopping off insmall townsbarely blipson the i-35corridor underthe mercilesssun baking thebrown flat landbetween dallasand hillsboro everything isjust a flawedveneer coveringstatic transmissionswhite noisewith spaces shapedlike cartoonhearts deflatingwhile trappedbetween vacillatingstates ofdepressed dismay
cast forthfrom the abyssonly to racetowards itwith everyfleeting breathseeking meaningin a reasonlessaccidental lifeafloat uponan ocean ofsalted fearsdelusionallyseeking anyattentiongood or badbefore the briefmoment inthe dying sunends only tocollapse onits own emptyconstant hungerbegging foranyone at allto affirm thatwe existedwhen even thatis more thana pestilencelike humanityever deservedseeking to feedthe emptinesswithin ourselvesby going withoutstriving to beseen draped ina cloak […]
happiness is sunlight in a mason jar laughter trapped in a plastic baggie sorrow is a bonedeep ache rattling about an empty heart an infusion of bitter petulant truth life is an illusion a prismatically flawed interpretation of chemicals a shimmering heartspasm cascading down six feet deep inch after agonzied inch haunted by words unsaid […]
i wondered whythe sun failed to risethis morningit has to come to termsthat it will now riseon a worldwithout youit feels sogoddamned unfairwatching a star fallknowing nothingwill be the same againi hope you knewhow muchhow fucking muchyou were lovedor how very muchyou will be missedthe sun failed to risebecause it knewit wouldn’t shineupon youand now […]
i dont hate you for finding your long needed escape i hate that you left me here with your nagging fucking memory of dreams that we can never accomplish because you shot that final fix into your arm and it didn’t fix a goddamned thing but give you peace and tear another piece from my […]
the blood on my knuckles reminds me no matter how insufferable i may have become in the downward spiral my heart still wheezes along despite the weight pulling me downdowndown. how long had it been since we last said we needed to talk more often before we both got busy losing each other in incessant […]
the moon is a yellow blotch, staring down in morose despair, spectral nightingales whisper soft, their songs filling the evening air on his throne the fool does sit, watching over his kingdom of lies, listening as the nightingales sing, the yellow glow in their ebon eyes in the heart of seeming madness, the jester king […]
i still remember the paramedics names the first responders the ones that couldn’t save her steve alan and rich a list of men i can never forgive for being five minutes too late
he missed her like a last cigarette and a shot of whiskey but when he woke the next morning with a pounding head and the cold sweats he remembered why she was gone seems old memories look better cast in amber and a haze of smoke
we shared an elevator something in that allowed him to share his trip with me a messy break up a near restraining order restrained by covid she moved six months later she reached out he flew from new york to dallas they had a rekindling he offered to move she wasn’t ready he was slighted […]
the shapes in the darkness shoot forward to tear chunks of flesh from the corpse seemingly suspended by the ropes reaching up to entangle limbs to cinder block a vacant eyeless stare facing the light never to be felt again
his heart a paper lantern left untethered to the mortal coil drifting upon the thermals ever higher towards yon frigid misery what light beckons from the frozen heart of sorrow’s bastard impossible heartflaked lattices glistening with pure impurities –a pause; rippled sighs, from painted mouths; along the sharp edge of ignoble dismay– she was draped […]
she plucked a pinion from my broken wing with which to pen her vacantheart goodbyes she scrawled it upon the sheets in neat rows to fill the impression our bodies had created i bade her do not look back she obliged leaving an ink coated trail out of my world time ceased meaning anything for […]
autumn has enfolded the world, there is a pleasant cool to the day driving with the window down arm out feeling as the air kisses hades mark as the music plays too loudly but i don’t have my voice today, i cannot talk as the words just sit in the back of my throat, lodged […]
lint is a timebomb a punk rock poet staring his demons directly in the eye a modern day kerouac with a two foot mohawk joe strummer is dead joey ramone is dead david bowie is dead lemmy is dead sometimes just knowing the world didn’t even stop for one fucking minute stabs me right in […]
the tangled skein of tumultuous serendipity a bondage, so secure the blue tinged extremities icicles of mourning and loss
he is aware of his cracked spine yellowed pages lined with faded ink around the margins black and white illustrations long out of date filled with words he knows intimately like a lovers embrace in bold typeface yet never has he experienced the full definiton except from afar he is a walking dictionary a repository […]
i tend a flower garden of multi-hued anxieties full budded brooding with baby’s breath depression on moon dappled stems the twinkling flickers of light the sullen reminders of love’s faded embrace as perfumed paralytics drift on the lonely breeze i tend a flower garden that grows across the cemetery of my mind where every interred […]
she was a loosely tied sack of pine needles dripping pitch and half hatched sea turtle eggs she was the punt to light the fireworks the spark that set the sky aflame with hyacinth blossoms in plumeria haze she was a half eaten sausage on the sidewalk swarmed over with ants desperate to appease the […]
what is left to us now that you have taken the joy of sunrise leaving only bitter memories of light my first exhalation of the new day still carries your name across the azure fields of watery remorse trapped in a spectacle of empty words where you are still the only thing that feels like […]
she was a cabinet of mismatched dishes precariously stacked against the bones of her contention chipped like the fine bone china passed down from shaking hands to orphaned hopes but she is a cabinet of untold wonder with hidden secrets waiting for a curious soul to find untold depths ingrained in the spiral grains hidden […]
he paints lives he has never seen imbuing the canvas in all the loneliness dripping along the smeared easel of his soul he dresses paces makes excuses lets the anxiety bubble through his hopelessly compromised immuno-integrity the blinds are closed as his head pounds darkness is all he knows as he puts brush to paint […]
the world is a peach in a chemically altered catatonic state of disbelief. as it sits bobbing in her gradually fluctuating orbit the entropic wave rolls out from the mold laden stem. once ripe now seething with unraveled dysentery collapsing in upon itself as the basic building blocks behave at the behest of binary bindings. […]
quicksilver tongue of past refraction humbled by the sandstorm of time the whispered song lures lecherous sailors to the reef made of her prickly desires in hooded hues of coral pink
i was the moon she was a cypress with her long hair gently trailing the muddy water incapable of seeing my image in the dull brown flow her toes dug deep in the eroded soil as i sat fat and foolish upon the clouds mourning a loss high below her her wood grained inoculation frozen […]
i was nothing but a ceramic clown spinning spasmodically through the hellnado in the eye of her cyclonic insecurities the fervor inherent in her fever brought beads of sweat across the cleft lip of honesty
she kissed me with lips that had taken a cerulean shade the chill as certain as the grave sank into my sunken cheeks uncertainty in the whorls of fog that made me wonder what was dying in that listless kiss of frostbite burning through her vacancy heavy eyelids drift along her morose benediction in this […]
i clutch at love with arthritic hands as futile as holding a stream as successful as a chicken at flight
through tear streaked eyes the lights along the highway take on an ethereal dimension while every atom screams all i can do is wait for this barrelling spectral reconfiguration as the photons penetrate the angst ridden plague that coats the neon speckled hand of the goddess that grips my synaptically challenged disfunctuon
in that one moment it became so clear that our dna is mixed with something greater even as i lay in the gutter rats garbage and stale piss all around one look at that watercolored sky painted in pastel disillusion called to me the pinks transitioning into purples as the sun turns her blind eye […]
Life, based on the one about the woodpile, the bed of leaves and losing my panties. We entered utopia unprepared and so goddamn satisfied with it. I’ve wondered, do you now exist there? Content for eternity? I don’t think it’s only the strong that survive, it has to be only the weakest. I’ve withered and […]
love is a tool to sell more chocolate it is a scam invented by the pharmaceutical conglomerates to sell more antidepressants it is an ideal insipid poets try to marginalize actualize desensitize in the pathetic whimsy of capturing chemicals in static refrain love is a drug and i am standing in line waiting for a […]
nothing can ruin a storm of insular misery reflected by the dark gray skies above like the incessant honking of the neighbor’s car the rusted implement of more than one wreck with an oversensitive alarm that grates on the oversensitive fool that is trying to have a good cry in the emptiness of her passing […]
i am done holding my breath waiting for her waiting for a big break a moment of recognition i am done thinking that clever word play earnest emotion an open heart a curious mind mean more than a roadside oddity to beautiful women she had been pouring gas to show her disinterest yet i was […]
I broke, we broke, like moonlight over that shadowy elm, like sunlight under the bedroom door, spilling my insides all over, i bathed in her shimmering aura My petals hit the ground like tear drops, i reached frantically at the airy bits of color, and my stems have broken at the roots, dandelion dander drifts […]
the earth dies around me the green turns to yellow turns to brown turns to mulch for once the carpet matches the drapes or the depression matches the season or whatever blah blah blah i have never had much but for a minute i had it all so rock bottom isn’t a new locale but […]
she was as ugly as an old pair of boots but she never stopped smiling i would see her here and there tottering on a barstool at any bar at any time she would yell when she saw me jukebox repairman i would smile order us a both a beer and a shot she talked […]
i am overcome by everything in papercuts i am reduced until all that remains is the slicing down to the subatomic level leaving nothing but the breakdown
hope and sorrow are conjoined the same as the butterfly pinned to the page the struggle the hunger weak defenseless driven by unsated need irrevocably changed after so long as something lesser than what was always inside to finally feel the wind lift you far above the places you only ever existed in in this […]
i dance as if consumed by saint vitus a natural born to balter across the stage of his life awkward limbs just off of the beat but with a smile that says i don’t give a good goddamn about your opinion let me balter to my heart’s content
Why won’t you just die? I remember flinging the words at you like I’d hurled those lawn darts at the neighbor boy when he wouldn’t stop laughing that time I fell and ripped my jeans right in the bum snot and tears plastered to my blotched face as the nurse told me to leave the […]
we were going to get a hedgehog a farmhouse with a well tended garden an alpaca a couple wombats coffee with the sunrise it may have never been real to you but that was where i went in the quiet moments slow dancing barefoot across the living room floor i saw it all so clearly […]
it’s four in the morning a time for introspection(unwanted) to come stomping down the staircase of my brain stem to kick me out of dream where my soul isn’t burning with loneliness(unending) to stare up at the ceiling as the last suckered tentacle of replayed dreamfuckery stabs deeply the velvet bag of dried spices pressed […]
the couch is a serious of cigarette burns next to all the places she convulsed in the throes of something adjacent to love my hot breath blowing through the valleys of her disconnect between fiction and the den of sin we had created under the strict guise of genuine affection self infliction an addiction i […]
there is a lily growing beneath my tongue it breathes in every whispered ode to love its petals dance on my every word painting them in subtle lavender exposition though my tongue carries the sharpness of the blade of grass to prune the impudence in the garish display when i said forever it wasn’t an […]
he spent his life repairing the bells in the church tower long after his mind was filled with the constant ringing he learned to feel tone and timber through his rough hands the bells sang for all in the county to hear with a delicately poignant tribute to the heavens that brought smiles to all […]
i set the cathedral in my mind ablaze unable to withstand another moment in vacant worship unacknowledged the bones of the earth stone pillars that once supported the temple to incalculable beauty to her now a crooked row of tombstones the swollen mounds of dirt where all my adoration tinted bereavements shift in tectonic decomposition […]
overcast skies over underwhelmed laconic ramblings the beautiful women of dallas are out in droves this morning with happy eyes over masks i am just waiting for the rain to wash away any trace of my passing huddled in a parking garage grasping at the butterflies in my stomach with a bear trap hoping to […]
i would love to get a kitten but judging by the state of my life i am barely able to keep myself alive i was going to get one before i had decided that she was important enough to leave the world i knew behind before she decided i was not to be part of […]
he was a rusted buoy sitting on the dock staring out at the sea in which he happily bobbed for years the salt has pitted his skin with blemishes no circular grinder could hope to recover the noble death the one he would have chosen if given a voice would be to sink beneath the […]
it’s crazy i am crazy in my head you can decipher all of the clues the things that mean other things that sound like one thing but are most definitely not you know home home is her you know i am an orphan half by choice no one can see me. i am unvisible to […]
when i am at the brink the edge of manic swells or negative spaces of depression i say to the universe beep beep, richie when i was too young i read it under the blankets with a flashlight through the night i wanted to be bill sure he stuttered but he was the leader and […]
the plastic bag hung suspended like a jellyfish in the invisible water at an aquarium i watched you as much as you watched the fish together we watched the crowd holding hands exchanging looks where no word need spoken as the jellyfish hung suspended like a plastic bag in the humid air of a parking […]
sometimes i have the overwhelming urge to shout but the words get tangled on my tongue my brain misfires i blush then turn away some days i choke on the words i wish i could say typing erasing messages never to be seen again it’s quiet in the places that used to ring with peals […]
i am sorry you don’t want to hear it i don’t want to have to say it but i am sorry even if it is not worth the pixels it illuminates you’ll never hate me half as much as i hate me without you. let’s just pretend i was never here.
i wrote i love you in cursive down her spine tasted her sweat and desire as it dripped from my beard but in the quiet moments when teeth and tongue were still it was the memory that kept me going as cobwebs draped her once loving heart now it is the aftertaste of being pushed […]
where is your fire your passion your sense of wonder stuck to the bottom of her bare foot in ashen footsteps that lead anywhere but here do you think i control this that i control anything that i can assert my will to enforce change on this world of miserable half-truths i am not a […]
i can tell i am not the same as i was before new skin same scars the smile doesn’t fake itself quite like it used to all the dull aches have taken to screaming my eyes are more sensitive to the light have i grown more disillusioned or more in touch with myself as the […]
everything seems bogged down in rain and drowning and dream and that moment she walked away the casual swipes she cast as she did now the storms have come to dallas i cannot tell if i am awake or dreaming did i write about this or did it sing in my head as the slide […]
measure twice cut once the sound of the tape measure retracting extracting retracting again before the soft whorls of wood fall to metal teeth as the saw savages the grain he measures the coffee in four even scoops a shake of cinnamon a dash of salt as the water fills the glass carafe in the […]
she found the broken toy on the sidewalk as she headed home it wasn’t much to look at parts were missing paint had been scraped off but something in the sad painted eyes spoke to her somewhere sometime someone had loved this toy discarded it when the magic had fled it’s plastic body but she […]
desire is a scarab skittering along my brain leaving only empty places where rationality once sent paralytic blasts to ease the burden.
it has been a fiction less month as the friction of reality burned the skin from my knees as i knelt begging for what would never be there is a reason my tales never have happy endings there is no such thing just brief excursions into fantasy where the hero slays the evil finds true […]
it could be any of these empty parking lots across the goddamned city where no one cares under the gray sky of her dismissal that they find the dried up corpse of insipid verse once work realizes i haven’t been in for days
i am well aware that i am a great a lay but emotionally i am a glove compartment of unpaid parking tickets if they loved me half as hard as they came they wouldn’t only call when they knew that city hall had burnt to cinders across town
i cannot figure out why these beautiful women pay me more than a passing glance my words don’t have the reach my soul has no glimmer my heart is a scarred mass of wilted lily petals tied with coarse string into a bundle in my chest my face is a child’s drawing of the boogeyman […]
a fat spider sits in the middle of my dreamcatcher unaware it didn’t spin this web overfed on dreams of you. it stares off into the dark multifaceted eyes shining with a glow i recognize reflecting your smile the poor bastard has no idea what that smile has done to me the thought of those […]
i feel my heartbeat in my throat choking me my heart has escaped torn free of the membrane that suffocated it cracked ribs bruised lung wrestling its way up my esophagus my larynx strumming my vocal chords in a song of drowning
she is a nymph of the storms her smooth skin a tapestry of coal dust clouds with tongues of purple infused golden arcs her stare a blizzard in brown deception far deeper than any storm primordial her voice the rumble of future pain shaking the leaves from the trees i lay nude beneath her majesty […]
obsidian flaked insecurities interwoven through the soulheather like thistle thorns on the stem of tomorrow and the chimes sing in the breeze heavy heart laden with prudent heresies gold flecked irises unblinking an owl in flight soft silence on the wing of night tremulous tumor inconsistently consistent in depth of unholy need the fangs of […]
it is just the average soul crushing hellfisting on repeat a kind of struck match to the tinder of despondent fuckall
as i peel back the onion skin exposing the onion skin beneath expecting the new layer to be an epiphany of sorts in a languid absence of answers, there is an epidural effect as the spine stops responding to signal i just wish the needlework stitching of the vivacious nurse with almond eyes who blushes […]
i call your name in the silence between notes in the lull between lines it is in those spaces i fall apart.
i am a glass bird pecking at the keys in the futility of feeling anything but lost much like the bird i cannot reckon my own fictional existence in diction in fiction in prose i expose that when the man was removed from the cave in plato’s allegory he spent the rest of his life […]
she broke the spell of her lullaby of frustration now the universe is restless her limbs deadened from so long immobile she sang softly beautifully of what was lost beneath the weight of loss the levees crumble
a year of rejections from the life destroying to the more mundane decisions my art was not good enough i can only assume there is a lesson in this as well but the depression has swallowed any sense of learning my heart is not enough my soul is too tattered my words ring hollow my […]
i have accepted the fact that there is no beauty comparable to you that i will always be chasing after your ghost that i will never give every piece of myself to another after having it delivered return to sender to my stoop the simplest of realizations are the most painful
i saw you briefly in the corner of my mind’s eye standing silently at the edge of the crowd for a second our eyes met yours widened mine squinted as i tried to believe what i saw was truly there you vanished lost in the faceless face of the crowd while i stood on teetering […]
i woke up with a mushroom growing out of chest i noticed because of the bioluminescent glow beneath the blanket it took me by surprise the ethereal blue glow like electricity flickering in a pattern i recognized as the pulse in my ears now my body effuses that tell-tale throb of electrical glow as the […]
when this malaise this bonerot this thorn of ivory driven through the pupil of hope this whipping winds of salt upon bare nerves when the chemicals malfunction a blight covers the landscape within the sepulchre inside the still chest of the parakeet caged in those brief moments of busy when the shackles slip for a […]
the thought of your ocean breeze tousled hair soulful eyes locked on the horizon if i could sketch you with the skill of monet the art would suffer in comparison it is impossible to capture your heart which shimmers in the most beautiful way best to love you from afar where my sharp tongue can […]
as time shifts gears to rocket propel the future into present present into past past into murky remembrance certain shades fade to dull sepia emotions erode until it is impossible to recall the love she showered in the face of how easily it was for her to leave it all behind like consuming raw pineapple […]
each headstone another marker covered in misrepresentation summing up a life of dreams desires hopes and failures into a placard reducing the spirit interred into rigid numbers polite reminders homogenizing an existence into cold information while erasing all trace of the individual weather battered trail markers worn down to smooth stone with decaying blossoms eventually […]
the needle breaks the skin the plunger pulled back to allow a spiral of red to dissipate into the solution before being injected back into the vein to rush through vascular chaos how many hits of you still flush my system in the quiet time before the sun fully rises when the world still sleeps […]
as sleep fades the world begins to impose itself only the faintest hint of your lips remain pressed firmly against mine the last wisp of subconsciously kissing you throughout the night i squeeze my eyes tightly shut in hopes of falling back into dream into you where the promise of my heart’s content can be […]
the dishwasher glugs along to fill the room with the secret sound of the ocean just beneath the surface as it swirls among the coral dragging the waterlogged corpse of creativity nibbled by eels little fish in every hue darting to tear at the gray skin; as i sulk in self-manufactured well manicured misery.
he crept along exuding a pestilent stench pus oozing from his open wounds of self-inflicted pennance wretched is he who truly sees himself for that man shall never know a moment of peace in the flurry of whispered truths.
i am going to use the straight razor today in the pit of despair i didn’t trust myself to hold the keen blade against my scarred skin for fear of going too deep but the electric never really removes the entirety that dwells just at the surface naked to the human eye but still scratches […]
you are confused, possibly bewildered hurt, i am sure if you are reading this then you have pulled the trigger ended whatever charade of a relationship we had found ourselves languishing in i am sure i am devastated but good for you i likely will be in the midst of spitting tear soaked ballads into […]
the sun rose the engine roared the cat yowled i woke the bird sang the neighbor showered the silence settled i lay the plane circled the squirrel scampered the wind blew i listened the couple fought the police came the lights flashed i wrote across the page it appeared the world was the same even […]
entwine the stems of roses three a sprig of thyme to tether thee around the hill the clock winds back a golden light beckons once pitch black a boon is granted in the emerald light as voices whisper from shadowed night as your legs quiver like a newborn foal the fae they call for your […]
i don’t know if i lost part of myself or if the parts of myself i tried to give away eventually returned there are so many things i don’t understand that i stare into the abyss screaming for answers that are only swallowed by the darkness from within my photo-negative facade the human x-ray unable […]
it’s one hundred degrees and the power is out the stale air carries the tinge of brimstone satan’s breath carries over the land to hang heavily like the body of the first poet from an old oak tree
is there ever a time when a man can shed his skin awaken to be someone else a new pattern emerging from the flaked off scars a new epidermal epiphany or do we all fall back into the routines that lead us off the cliff on repeat until the final curtain draws to the applause […]
one sock a tab of bubblegum stuck from the hot sidewalk beneath staggered steps the sweat dripping magnifies the cruel glare of the infernal eye in the sky one bloody footprint leading from the scene of the crime the setting where once upon a time died a gurgling death choking on the tears of disenchantment
fifty-seven years ago there was a march that led to a speech that led to a dream look how far we haven’t come since then the news reports interlaced with graphics of graphic brutality fifty-seven years ago which was one hundred years after the war which is no longer considered a dream but a nightmare. […]
through misery through joy the sun truly does rise again to that i say with all due respect and admiration fuck off sun inconsiderate ball of burning plasma with no respect for boundaries no matter how i blackout this room your tendrils reach you cast your judgemental unblinkingly gaze through the hole in the ozone […]
o’er the dreams i dreamt when sleep i slept the tenebrae of loss doth permeate for none call in the night the whooping crane pierced by fangs with venomous drip beseeched by the betterment of mossy regret to perch high upon yon beleaguered soul
Mike's Manic Word Depot 