I was starving in
Pennsylvania.
One night, I had
enough.
Done with it all.
The poverty and
sickness.
The drunken mad
nights
and dog-fight days.
Brutality for breakfast.
Served sunny side up
runny yolks with
butterflies trapped in
the yellow sunshine.
Spiders built webs in
my soul.

I stood on the torn-up
couch in my living room and
yelled at the walls.

Listen, you devil.
You want me, you better be
ready for a fight.
I paced the floor like a
washed-up heavyweight champ,
eyeing the ceiling like a
drunken sparrow in a cat's mouth.

"Love is the worst religion,"
croons the dying television,

with no further explanation;
well, thanks for the news -

I see myself in emptied glass,
a bust carved rude and inchoate,

poet, captain, lost apostle
of the worst religion,

baptized in changeling pools
of day and week, scribbling

my night's peak breath
on the flypapers of insomnia.

Sun over sainted skin,
stars where evening eyes were,

swain's vespers, all of it
splitting like new ripe fruit

in sticky hands of the acolyte,
ardent hands of little silver.

He thought at us in hissing chops,
our phones open lone black lids

& bloom our rooms with oddities,
raving cardiac tumbles into blank scrawl

that came from no place we knew,
sloughed from an under-yeared heart.

The pain pressed out from the glass,
topographical agonies in the dark,

a rake's frenzies of bleak humor
aimed at no one in particular

until it drained to a feverish bankruptcy -
he asked how M. G. died, if we thought

that's what would happen to him.
Who knows what the others thought -

I felt his mind bedded down in self,
a corner stall of gravel and nails,

tried to distract with jokes of my own,
don't know if it worked or not.

The phone in hush, the hour now
delinquent, adrift, exhausted.

In the hills, the cities: he braced us
each to the next, acid-pitted night minds.

I.

Tim collapsed in the bathroom
of the cheap-grease pizza place
where he slogged away idles,

hole in arm. When he came back
from the hospital, I asked why
& he had nothing. A few years

went by and I saw him at a bonfire
& he said, hey, do you remember
that old knife game, mumbletypeg?

Well, it's not the knife flying,
not the blade sinking and shaking,
not the thrill of almost-pain,

it's getting low to the ground
hearing the world get quiet
as you grab the sharpness,

visiting a hungry paradise,
tasting the watery loam in teeth.
"I want to feel the most."

II.

Tim got sober and died
to a wrong way drunk driver.
By then we all knew life

wasn't fair, but this was unnecessary
cruelty by the gods or not-gods
or whoever is cutting threads.

At the next bonfire after that
we remembered him in slices,
how he always wanted to feel

"the most" - how he'd sit
at glazed parties with guitar in lap,
toying with that Metallica solo

to One with his tarnished silver
spider's hands, his eyes covered
in shine as he played softly

an easy laugh readied,
mind full to bursting,
maybe with mumbletypeg.

Glass-faced men preen
in high-polished chestnut,

affixed to a serene Medusa
with green-sunned fingers

that erupt from hive-eye blonde,
biting hearts down to their pits.

Green shirts drift up and down
the steep stair as razors of beer

shave us one and all, lathered
in tight heads of Guinness.

"All men **** the thing they love,"
shouts Medusa, reading aloud

from the depths of her purse
to her ****** and adoring date,

"give me your kiss, your sword,"
her words like ivy on old bells.

Not to be outdone, Brian turns,
looking like he's been here since

last night at least, and cries
"A drunkard is a dead man!

& all dead men are drunk."
Medusa is too busy kissing,

but we raise our glass hands,
exiled from heaven and hell,

slouching toward Tuesday,
& toast him from our graves.