Poets are bipolar--
musicians, OCD.
I wonder if we’d have much art
without insanity?
Coleridge smoked *****,
Poe preferred whisky.
If not for their addictions
would we have their poetry?
Blake had manic visions;
Hemingway was suicidal.
The heights and depths of their emotions
meant their minds were never idle.
Garcia tripped on acid;
Iommi did *******.
Would they have played such blissful notes
if they weren’t a bit insane?
Yes, we must treat the ill,
we want them with us still--
but if we lost all craziness
there’d  be genius that we’d miss.

For some a heartbreak is worth a fifth of *****.
Others, a pint of ice cream.
For me, it was lots of **** last time.
But, you, you're a different kind of hurt.
The one that keeps you up at night.
The kind of heartbreak you can feel in your lungs.
Each breath becoming increasingly more difficult to take.
You are the kind of heartbreak that you never truly get over.
You are the kind of heartbreak that feels like it can only ever healed with a bullet.

mediocrity is nothing
ice cold
grid patterned wave
unfathomable
and equally squeaky

put me in a box made of pine and lashed with leather boot strings
drip drop drizzle
the smell of rain
is **** on concrete
unkimonolike

moving like one of those
blow up nightmare monsters
whipping wildly at a used car dealership
feeling not unlike the owner’s mustache
which is to say greasy

frankenstein shoes and bubblegum sinuses
texture and 8bit timothy grass
talk to the priest nudge him my way
we’ll share a cup of milk and honey
dont forget to eat the stars like blisters

ice cold
mediocrity is nothing
but my *** hitting the ground
when i slip on a wet rock

The cluster of ice in my glass
  looks like a milky fist.
I shake my cup and ask
  about the weather.
He says, 'Hasn't rained in
  one thousand or so years.'
I say how that's unfortunate;
  he says how **** happens.

This party transitions into
  something out of an art-house film;
the Cali-tens are dancing to some
  80's song you would vaguely recognize.
They bump into one another
  like bees in an electric hive.
A Russian drinking a Russian
  asks about drugs.
I say into my drink that I
  don't have that many friends.

Looking for a bathroom,
  I am bumped by hips and lips
into the former eggshell/cigarette stain wall,
where I find my partial reflection
  looking back at me in that familiar
transparent parent way.

I find myself apologizing.

the girls in the back
of the local pathetic
laundrymat
(where nothing,
none of my things,
comes out clean)
speak ugly slavic.
their loads must be light
as they're only half dressed.
I put my clothes,
all I own,
except the one's on my back,
in five dryers
and go sit
on the paint-peeled
two-tone maroon
bench in front.
today's heat is indefinite,
and I wonder if someone
has stolen my
soap and basket yet.
this is downtown,
the turf occupied
mostly by addicts and foreigners
and the rich,
the richer than me,
meander lazily in and out
of bars and salons.
the beautiful plump brown skin girl
I've been falling in Love with
has straddled her bike and left.
she didn't even see me
smile at her.
now there's the asian man
stereotype, smoking incessantly
like me.
who spends most of his time
daydreaming of some other life.
his thousand yard stare sees nothing
and I'm hungry, but I won't eat
the restaurants are all white owned
and nothing is good or cheap.
there's garbage everywhere
and no one seems to mind.
when my pencil stops moving,
terrible writer's fear
I'll never have another thought
worth writing or bought.
time to fold up
and maybe scrape that
marines sticker off
the back of my truck.