Feral Citizen
You Wake Up Sweating
I just want to kill people and I can't soften that
I started setting myself on fire a little bit
To microdose obscurity
And thinking about the sunlight
Who passes through the oceans of belligerent smoke
There's no way out of this
And swimming to the bottom of the river
It makes you understand how there is nothing
Left to understand
Nothing
Staring at the sky from beneath your puddle of blood
I do not think about a better world
We drink until we can entangle to scattered pieces
I don't remember the way that I came through to live in this place
You wake up sweating on a streetcorner
Recover the cheap case of beers that you dropped
and walk back home through the regular cataclysm
It happens very slowly and it is always today
And all the police are living arrogant
Aware as I am that we are going to kill each other
And all their guns bought by government
are what keeps me off their neck
I am being murdered whenever I can wake into morning
One long murder continuous like a conversation with water
And the sky at night is like black mold
I am crawling into a wound of the universe
Decrepit civilization is still crawling into my wounds
A little value in being coherent
A little value in being
I may have started smoking again
but it's pointless work keeping track of my habits
I slip away from myself
Walking to the grocery store and I walk back as a different person
Given up with being intentional
I make decisions now just to live in their catastrophe
To fall asleep in seconds
digesting incongruity through all of my canon
The membranous red skies remember me in their wavering
I am not a thinking soul outside of the world
I write this with dripping infection
We know each other when we are lost
And we are falling
Latency Problem
I don't want to have anyone in my life whose soul can't burn
black with hatred bright remembering
the swollen void where our future was
removed from us
I may have fallen asleep still with a knife in my hand still
considering the waste of days spread out from here
To make the future be afraid of me
To live in conversation with decay and forms of life like plankton
incarcerated to the gravity of this guttered indecision
Always a headache and I am always going to sleep
To identify with death... the death of your enemy...
the guilt of this sinking ship...
who draws her on down through the darkness
I aim into the sky so that the airplanes fade...
like light pollution consumed our stars...
all passengers become flies and spores
to fall and speak with air
I bought a gun and became exaggerated with reflection... I was
sick across the floor considering future... I bought
another gun to be a light along the road... there is
no light along the road
In time my tattoos will all separate from my skin... and crawl
together with their meanings beneath the earth
Why can't you just kill yourself and leave it all to be alone?
I don't know how to say this word aloud
I'll come back to life if I die I know if I die like this
Living more than I deserve
I wish that birds would fly beneath the hulk of munitions trains
to grease and derail this terrible engine with blood
With innocent blood that is poisoned and futile,
spilled to save its wasted life
I wish it were natural, automatic and invisible
that Empire could fall into its grave,
irresponsible
I now speak in its language to fear, to place violence and blame
at the outskirts in hand of the battered and frail
I can't sleep to dream how all of the birds will die first and we
define our life with inaction... how I write and live
and my body is not yet bleeding on the dirt
Undead
I am trying not to die just yet
I hope your children get sick just like mine did
I hope you never know what you could have done right for them
I felt that my body was starting to fail last week
I'll never really hurt you if I just kill myself young like this
I am in control of myself
These love and hate are my excuses to live
Now I smoke again to drink less
I only have this one death to give
Corroded will to lying curled beneath my desk
I don't remember how this happened, the pills got insufficient
The sun in the sky of love is flashing black and pale
The warmth goes out of my hands at night
So where do you get your meaning from again?
It comes from out of the walls like a radiation to weigh on me
I walk on my toes so I can walk through the air
As to living dying in multiple directions
Twice I have died I returned from that place
Eradicated
A revenant, I re-infest myself
I will not be killed forever until I harmed you first
Some injury like mine that you cannot recover
I started drinking again and I made myself sick
I keep smoking, sinking through the night
Fumbling with my reasons and I sleep on the floor
A blanket on the floor because this life for me
it won't attach together
I'm trying not to die just yet because
I am starting to see in the dark
![Rats Trujillo Rats Trujillo](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/rats_trujillo.jpg)
Rats Alice Trujillo is the author of two books and many zines of poems. They live and work in Seattle.