Help Yourself

Everybody in the world has published a self-help book but me. I am the vortex upon which the genre has converged. I walk into a bookstore and all I get are personal appeals: "Boost Your Life, Curtis!" "Actualize in Just Five Steps, Curtis!" "Become a Better Curtis, Curtis!" I even saw "Write a Self-Help Book, Curtis!" Everybody seems really desperate to tell me exactly how I should help myself. But I'm just going to live.

KO

Round 1
I thought I was picking you up, but I was picking a fight, and without ever touching me you had me up against the ropes.
Round 2
Circling, circling, both rarely risking the raising of an arm to expose the head. Gloves soften blows surrounded by silence, but the harshest hits always land.
Round 3
Punches thrown over tabletops, feints right and left, referee's observer effect, exhaustion. I'm no survivor; I get tired. Battered. And one time I stopped blocking and your old moves got past me and the lids of my eyes slammed shut around your fist. And even with the din of my limbs against the floor I could not fail to hear it, "KO."

Metamorphosis Whorehouse

I invite you tonight to the Metamorphosis Whorehouse, where the act itself is but a channel for the consequential animal. Tonight, the question is who you would like to be with, but tomorrow morning, the answer is what you would like to be. Number and placement of antennae, sharpness of claws, shallowness of fur: Your choice of evening partner determines your subsequent transformation. Know that you will awaken unaccustomed to your new level of perception and mobility. With your legs above you in bed, will you be able to turn off your back? In the morning, you will be saddled with a numbed subjectivity. So choose, tonight, while you have the facility.

Sweet Dreams

In dreams I am Icarus, cooked by the Sun of the day; in free fall, as the last black vestiges of subjective skepticism are charred off brittle distant/nonexistent skin, pulled down by the heavy gravity of sleep, approaching an annihilating oceanic subconsciousness. And the bubble, bursting, cakes up anything ever used as material for me, and the thing that is plummeting through the meniscus of oblivion is not me; and so a wounded animal somewhere recognizes its cage, comprised of high school lockers, as meant for a someone whom its guards cannot remember and have always failed to capture; and yea, though this creature is unfairly charged, it is yet tried for this forgotten someone's wrongdoings; hunted/haunted by the faces of that someone's acquaintances, and it has neither wits nor history with which to defend itself, only a crippling chestful of guilt; and so it bounds through this funhouse of horrors for eight hours at a time in an instant, until game is called and the hounds retreat, only to call rematch the following evening

Trojan Horse

Glossing the crowd, within these white walls, I am a Trojan Horse. One by one they will slip from me. Triggered by words, forced out through smiles, as I orbit hors devours, they emerge from my ears, clasping strands of blonde hair, shimmy to ground, fanning outwards through dress shoes and high heels. Outward they go, working their mischief. And I, wandering, will be empty.

Blanket Statements

For that bedtime piece of mind, new Blanket Statements:

Sheets embroidered with comforting phrases.

Let our classic platitudes placate you.

Gems like "Dreams do come true"

"Things happen for a reason"

and other generalizations!

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