All Earthquake-Like

my words crumble
all earthquake-like
into an unknown darkness.
i submerge myself in
eyeballs that spew
warm self-criticism.
i escape the unfamiliarity
of these redundant verses.

the eyeballs
pry into past thoughts
into bygone poems:
"why the hell did you romanticize
this fragile ego?"
they squelch to me
in unison.

i harvest
the humour of the eyes
and they watch me
suspiciously.

they zap my wanton squishy
thieving grey-matter brain
(possibly with skull-piercing lasers
or other equally alarming weapons
similar in purpose,
and often the cause of
gaping holes in my
imagination.)
such weaponized pests
search fiendishly for
whatever self-serving scraps remain
of my lonely, silver tongue.

this is why
strings of rotten words
of estranged letters
squelch naked out of my fingers in hoards:
but these verses are without love.
these words disregard
how they used to lie still
silently fulfilling their purpose
on my piece of paper.

and nowadays
the only thing that i
can honestly muster
out of this vile brain
that now resides under the
constant vigilance of my pet eyeballs
and in the seemingly perpetual absence
of actual talent ----
is this satisfyingly weird
predictably vertical
sort-of-ugly
arrangement of words.