There Will Be No Rest

Lay me down. There will be no rest.
I asked to be a man. I was made a stray dog.
They have taken the pieces that matter.

I Am Not A Man

I am not a man.
I stole a man's skin.
We slept, he slept eyes open, so I crept in.
And I have been living in his skin.
Now I don't know what I am.

The Once Was

The once was athlete feels the change.

His soft body an extension of the scars.

The coil has been cut.

He is un-sprung.

And the tension ill-used.

I Stole Your Story

I am a writer, a poet, a thief.

I stole your story and told it to you.

Comedy

Poets are the black comedians of the soul.

Indifference

Indifferent, like a black cat crossing the road slowly at night.

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Handfuls of skin left beautifully by the sink.

When I Die, Three Ledgers

When I die,
there will be the good that I did,
and the bad that I did,
and the words that I wrote.

In the Fist of the Maze

I come out sweaty and dazed.
I haven't seen daylight for days.
I've been crawling blind through flesh folds
in the fist of the maze.

Dilated

I can't breathe

Time to leave.

I can feel my heart beat down the seam of my sleeve. 

The more I think, I'm thinking I'm sinking, I'm sunk.

Am I drinking or drunk? I can't tell anymore.

I walk out the door, into a warm night

and streets flowing full of red lights.

Like blood spitting quixotically through dilated arteries.

Poem by Graham Isaac Redacted

Poem & Photo by Graham Isaac, Redacted by Arlo Jacob Smith

In the story he killed the family bore. For two years there was a parade. A world away he thinks his mother worries. Survive Seattle on cigarettes and beer. A clumsy cowboy reaches hands in pockets, afraid.

Hercule Poirot

Agatha Christie killed Hercule Poirot. His death song was locked in a safe during the blitz to be published if she did not survive. The man she described as "a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep" would not outlive her. In 1975, with Christie's health and mind failing, "The Curtain" fell ignobly on Poirot. In the novel he takes his own life, after committing murder. The image of the incomparably punctilious detective was forever stained. 

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You may be human. Stop and ask.

Momentum

I have stumbled.
I am slowly slowing down.
Dripping fat like buttered bread.
Cooling, stale, dry and embittered.

I have stumbled.
I am slowly wearing down.
Stretching thin like spent elastic.
Formless, I fail to snap back.

Comfortable Privilege

Thinking about Ferguson from comfortable privilege. How do you make a death meaningful? A deep racial divide cuts across this nation and we all bare the scar. It is the way we are most connected. 

Empty Headed

I saw a movie last night about a people in ancient China whose artists spent years constructing elaborate statues of bronze, only to decapitate them as a gift to the gods. Sometimes I feel blood boiling and muscles coiling, my head is light and empty. I am waiting for the mold to be made and the bronze to be poured.

Marie

My sister's baby was born half size and deaf to her own cries, and I did mean to criticize, she wasn't getting proper care.

My sister didn't eat and the baby didn't drink.

Living in a hotel room that barely had a sink.

I didn't know what to think,  

with beauty stripped naked on the floor,

and she could still be there.

Barely breathing through cigarette air

in Carson City, the capitol of capitalism.

Where fat old men inquire into good fortunes 

and ailing wives in casino bathrooms. 

Where desperation rests heavy and sick sweet on conditioned air. 

If it has anything to do with winning you won't find it here.

y = a(1-r) to the power of x

This morning I awoke to look through myself in the mirror. This new symptom of my singular condition, although long theorized by better mathematicians than myself and manifesting on schedule, terrifies me. How could it not? As I type this now I find it difficult to impart the necessary force to depress the keys. I am with increasing frequency disintegrating. These are the last words of a man fading from existence. I will then attempt to be brief, in the hope that I may convey the core of my life's experience with these few words in the few moments I have remaining.
At the age of ten it first became evident that something was wrong with me. While I appeared outwardly healthy and continued to grow in size, I was in fact decreasing in mass. My volume remained constant and my density was stretched beyond the limits of understanding. A neighboring mathematician and close family friend, acting on a hunch that he would later call insane, began measuring me daily. Over time a pattern emerged and his most outrageous fears were confirmed, I was decaying exponentially.
He told me I was living half-lives and a time would come when there would be nothing left to halve. He then taught me the math, carefully and kindly illustrating the simple formula and function that would define my life. First I learned Archimedes' formula:

density = mass/volume

When I understood the formula and its components he patiently explained the function for exponential decay.

y = a(1-r)x

[Where a is the amount before decay begins (my initial density), r is the rate of decay (1/2) and x is the number of intervals (my half-lives).]

My decline continues to progress rapidly, but the rate of change will decrease over time as there is less and less to halve. A ghost of me may outlive you all. But that ghost's density will be so insignificant that it will not be able to interact with the physical world. In fact, it is likely that it will fall through the earth, a victim of gravity, to further reduce within its core.
I spent a life alone with mathematics. Feeding my diminishing whole with numbers; frantically searching for a different solution. And having failed to disprove the irrefutable, I now regret those years in the narrow halls of academia. The ghost that I will become will have nothing but time to remember, and very few memories.
Beyond the psychological, my condition cause some discomfort, but little pain. And even as I continue to fade, a strange calm pervades. We are not to know our future. The curve of my life was graphed and anticipated. With all my ability I could not alter it. Now that there is nothing more I can do, my mind is free to wander without the oppressive need for haste. I go willingly into the theoretical void. I am awake. At first, and at last.