A right of passion or presumptive plea,
Resting a broken head on bended knee,
Seeking a second chance to finish third,
Or some salvation in a prayer misheard,
Atop your graffiti kingdom, shotgun glare,
Choking down that manufactured air,
While men gain strength from all you lack
But grow no taller standing on your back,
And you read them like a burning book,
As home became the stands you took,
Finding shelter beneath the lowest rung,
Or solace on some fool’s gold tongue,
But your compass heart has been misled,
By monsters swirling through your head,
As they tirelessly stoke the fires of doubt,
That weary feet can’t quite stomp out,
But in time, you’ll chase away that blaze,
If you refuse to become your darkest days,
There is always a road from the abyss,
So as I leave you, please remember this:
You are more than what you’ve been,
Embrace each ending, start again.

I follow rainbow gutter rivers back to my empty downtown apartment.
When I was young, I looked up at these buildings in awe.
Shiny glass towers full of giants,
staring down at me, ant-like and enamored.
You looked beautiful in your wedding dress,
they said.

A decade spent selling disposable garbage to the masses,
rereading Ogilvy on Advertising and wearing uncomfortable shoes.
Today I’m one of those giants.
Do you still throw darts at my picture?
Do you ever think about me,
at all?

A thousand miles away, a little girl asks her mother,
to make her a cherry pie for her birthday.
She knows it’s my favorite.
If we have cherry pie, maybe he’ll come to my party,
she says.

Seven drinks later, I told my dad I was miserable.
A hollow shell of anything I’d ever planned to be.
He didn’t believe me.
After all, I had never let him down,
before.

The last time we saw one another, we ate dinner on the floor.
You smelled like you’d been on fire.
A week later, I found a strand of your hair in my bed,
and sighed.

It was nearly sunrise when I arrived,
leaving a trail of clothes all along my floor.
Lying in bed, I thought about how long ago yesterday was.
All those slow summer mornings,
and three-day goodbyes.

I stare down at the streets below,
as innocent wide-eyed dreamers shuffle their feet on cold sidewalks.
Somewhere a young boy leaves home for the first and last time,
and I think about how beautiful you still look,
in photographs.

My friend Sarah sits alone at night and scribbles on a page,
Turning each line into a battle, a war that she must wage,
She writes about getting out, fear and doubt, her failure to fit in,
Seeking metaphors for moonlight as she bleeds out through her pen,
But she keeps her poems in an old shoebox so no one ever knows,
Because she gets more like on Instagram by taking off her clothes,
Don’t call it a plea for popularity; she’s establishing a brand,
That’s all that matters when the world fits in the palm of your hand,
As she spends every day surrounded by the people she’ll never please,
She can’t help but look around her and despise the world she sees,
Her parents can’t afford the artificial life for which they strive,
But orange is the new black, and forty is the new twenty-five,
She watches them sacrifice a future that was never theirs to lose,
And walk around all day technically blind, staring at their shoes,
Meanwhile her friends all speak in memes, aspiring only to be seen,
A million tiny little lives lived inside a million tiny little screens,
As corporations burn down everything they cannot steal or sell,
And politicians fabricate the facts to justify the lies they tell,
The television markets manufactured rage, advertising decay,
Meanwhile Sarah fills another page, and tucks it safely away.

The city screamed from far away, carnivorous call,
As those neon lights illuminated nothing at all,
I saw my whole life written on a face with no name,
30 minutes, 30 years; it still feels the same,
On a subway platform, I wore the streets as a cloak,
With murderous indifference, nobody spoke,
Adrift in the hum and shuffle, I circle empty squares,
Swimming in electric fire and unoccupied stares,
As moonlight cut the misty haze, scratching my eye,
I found myself the beginning of another goodbye,
Standing tall among the skyscrapers, drowning in shade,
An encore performance of a mess that I made,
And on the ride home, an old man played the Rising Sun,
Reminding me of the only thing I still can’t outrun.

Lost in the faint, unsettled dust of wonder,
We become the chains that pull us under,
The architects of empty wishing wells,
Or the ghosts that haunt these cheap motels,
And as hope crumbled into ash and rust,
I was left with nobody but myself to trust,
Just the paranoia upon which we all depend,
And the sad songs where we met our end,
Still my heart kept dancing in unsteady code,
As I buried my pride by the side of the road,
Singing black sheep, bedroom, bells of war,
I still remember where you keep the floor,
And as their laughter fell apart like rain,
I was left with nobody but myself to blame,
Just the empty promises that we all pretend,
And the silence where we’ll meet our end.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about your old nose,
The one you cut apart and remolded,
So you could feel beautiful.

There used to be that little bump along the bridge,
The tip wiggled slightly when you laughed,
Now it just sits there.

Today your daughter has your old wiggly nose,
And she looks just like you,
Used to.

I hope that she appreciates it more than you did,
And I hope it reminds her every day,
That she’s beautiful

Alleys and ashtrays, flesh and bone,
I woke up next to you and felt alone,
Still searching for everything I’ve lost,
Or some change to show for all the cost,
But I can’t make amends for all I lack,
Can’t hold my breath, can’t turn back,
As that circle meets us where we end,
And destiny breaks us where we bend,
My head was sirens, concrete and snow,
You slept beside me as I let you go.