You Bring the Fruit Punch and I'll Bring the Arsenic

This is a collaboration between Michael Justin Hatfield and me.

I.
     These fatal echoes
     flowing just under the surface
     of our days,
     when avowed,
     wash out the uneven happiness
     of past hours
     until knowledge becomes
     only the static noise
     of a contagious stream,
     mortal sewage that
     bogs memory until we
     make of ourselves
     mere shadows on a
     drifting continent.

II.
what vacant gords that bobble
limey greekly little isotopes
branching out from a gluttonous radix
sharing leaves and when we burn
we burn together pungent smokes
and each born twig is bifurcated
manifold and more ramose
tentacular and more morose
callow crude and guileless
with signs
of further virescence

III.
     blank embers of
     adjectival rain oxidized
     verse represent our
     ink-bloated momentary
     translations of a world
     whose arteries leak life
     into a flood of
     unwarranted life
     to praise in poetry
     sing songs of not fear
     not anxiety not a weaker species
     because evolution ends here
     language is a pinnacle
     of dying phonemes
     semiotic structures
     the babbled plateau of meaning
     because death is only acceptable
     the ash rain of ancestors living cyclically
     in linear times
     can only be tolerated
     if the prayer of humankind has been answered

IV.
choke the oxygen from your words
let the flood be of gags
for strength does not ignore
but confront
for life
is blanching at cessation
and its disgust
is eternal

because a pause beckons putrescence
not one + worthy of aspiration
save those developed from negatives

so now leave the merry buried
their worlds have died with them
the sweet shells of their smiles
should remain worn in one way

for cliffs, for falling
the clouds are never thick enough
to mask for you
below

V.
     don't believe in inverted mountains
     shallow imprints of movement
     straining toward a vaulted core

     don't believe in suspended memories
     or the predestined moment
     where the last breath of humanity
     has been waning

     we are all falling through time
     away from death and past birth
     or the basic assumption that
     all life is good or evil
     forgetting ourselves
     forgetting arrival's knowledge

     but growing fond
     growing fond of backwards
     motion
     the flesh that was never flesh
     tearing through the air
     that breeds our simulated experience

     going toward the original reason
     the first instance of particularism
     fighting in darkness
     like cockroaches