I drink beer 'cause I got
mad falling-down envy.

Brood not on communication,
nor words themselves.

On top of the shelves,
define oneself's
explanation.

Gaze not but in shallow fashions,
lest dreadful fascinations occur.

At not what being said,
only at that which is
wished to be heard

Another pull of my beer,
another drag on my cigarette.

These are the things
most-worth thinking:

(so this is consumption,
inability to function)

long forgotten is my Alice,
is Laudie, even my Lynette.

There are numerous new reasons
for why I keep drinking.

(Who would ever make that presumption?
Could you prescribe such assumptions?)

Fall deeper and deeper,
like a boat on fire and sinking.

Combustible effervescence;
so easy to keep smoking.

So easy to keep burning yourself,
so easy to keep choking,
  yet hard to forget the thoughts
     that we've all been thinking.

(My money rapidly dying of consumption.
My thoughts now free from corruption.)

blues blooze *****
soak soke smoke
wright write rite right?

Burn your lips sipping
the **** from the crucible.

Crawling back again to you
over fields of broken glass.

Is better than falling in love anew
and maybe breaking my ankle.

Your eyes dry-rotting in the sun,
mine are water-logged and running.

Welcome to my home, oh won't you come in?
Allow me to show you around, would you care for a drink?
Tell me your poison, maybe a highball of gin?
I keep it in the kitchen with the coffeepot by the sink,

or maybe you'd prefer a tumbler of crown?
Whiskey is right in the foyer by the doorstop,
there's nothing like a nip right before I bounce.
And if it's wine you crave, it's in the living room atop

the tube television beside the VCR in it's place.
But if you've a tongue for peach schnapps
then make your way to the crawl space.

Whilst your up there I say, would you do me a fave?
Look in the attic for the bourbon, it's beside my baby pictures,
and bring it down for me. I'm sure that I saved
some from the last time I was up there alone with self-stricture.

Oh you don't care for bourbon, then maybe some brandy?
The cognac is somewhere down the basement,
but ignore the rope and the candies.

You're unsettled you say? Then ***'s how to spend
drinking the night away with me in the den.
OH! Just send a beer your way?! you should've just said!
A six-pack's in the bathroom, right next to the head.

a

A newlywed man was talking to me, saying that
he and his wife had just become homeowners yesterday.

"Last night was our first time in our new house,
but I didn't close the wood stove right... It burned to the ground
in the middle of the night"

He was clearly intoxicated, downtrodden and red-eyed.
It was 10:17 am in an airport bar, and I was four beers deep waiting
for my 12:26 pm flight as he was telling me this.
I looked away from the clock and into his eyes and said:

"Well it must have been a great housewarming."

I killed the rest of my beer and went for a cigarette,
and never saw him again.

forget the things worth remembering
remember the things worth forgetting

she was a bird on the water
she was clouds reflected
she was trees sighing in the wind
she was sunlight through Venetian blinds
she was dust motes circling lazily
she was Sunday morning ***
she was smiling at me in the mirror
she was bonfires under a pale moon
she was tidal waves of emotion
she was whirlpools of conviction
she was typhoons of jealousy
and I was there too

she is the silhouette of a cigarette pressed to my teeth
she is my shadow cast behind me in the setting sun
she is blue-tinged smoke silently filling the room
she is burning my eyes like chlorine in a crowded pool
she is bars of the cage where my mind is kept penned
she is electric fencing wrapped around my heart
she is buckets of tar drowning me in my dreams
she is written in cursive on the insides of my eyelids
she is slowly shriveling my liver and blackening my lungs
she is living in all the mirrors I look into
she is becoming brobdingnagian prose
maybe that's just me but,

I'm not there anymore.
So why is she still here?

When she says she loves you
it just means she's been alone
for far too long without touch.

And nothing's like a good ****.

I keep that in mind now whenever
women give me eyes at a bar,
or wherever it is that I happen
to attract one.

They don't like you, my mind whispers,
they're just lonely.

Lonely and afraid of being alone,
that's why they look at you.

I woke on the precipice of doubt and remorse
also I was on a painted blue cement floor.
I had spent all the previous day painting said floor
with broomstick rollers and discounts from Lowes.
Lukus's dad gave me the money for paint and
sent me off to pick it up, now I was recalling.
The wooden garage was a new building in his arsenal
of land he owned to house his various cars and motorcycles.
He commissioned me to sweep and paint the floors yesterday,
saturday, and I worked for 6 hours or more doing so.
When I was finished I took the cash he gave me out of pity,
and went to the bars with Nick and saw a Hadfield from school.
I saw him when I was smoking a cigarette outside with my beer,
even though beer wasn't allowed to leave the building.
I kept asking him for *** and he kept making fun of me
so before I could punch him I shut my eyes and asked Nick instead.
Nick had just been busted at the Diner with intent to distribute,
baggies filled out and ready for delivery in the trunk of his Honda.
He didn't like it when I kept asking for ***, so he turned away and went inside but I was drunk and walked to my car with my beer.
I didn't pay the tab, but my car started just fine.
I drove down to spring city and passed the apartment I had just been
evicted from on my way to the run down garage I had just painted.
I took the memory foam mattress that I had been keeping in my back
seat as a bed out of my car and carried the hulking thing inside.
When I laid it on the painted ground I was out of breath and gasping,
so I fell on top of it and shut my eyes.

"Gin and tonic Vince."
"What, no shots tonight Jason?"
"It's Justin, and no."
"Well howabouta beer Justin?"
"Yeah alright."

I don't care about the grass
I don't care about the sky
But I care for you and I

I don't care about the air
I don't care about the sea
But I care about 'we'

I don't care for gourmet food
I don't care for Baton Rouge
But I care very much for you

I don't care
I don't care
But I care

The bar wrapped around in the shape of a question mark,
as if it knew we didn't know why we were here.

Deco lamps hung above since long before we existed,
cigarette smoke left the stained glass tinted
an unfortunate yellow.

Right-angle mirrors play tricks on my eyes as I see myself,
rightfully hidden behind hard liquor on the shelf.

I can't help but try to remember the light of my smile,
so I try one out on my face for awhile becoming
an uncertain fellow.

The reflection in that tricky mirror seemed to be
showing that we had become only me.

stressed over a great internal debate
between a spray of Jack or Tanqueray,
but after about four or five shots
they taste the same anyway.

The night had already begun before Harold had awoken, and as his eyelids lifted, the sun was slowly sinking like a lifeboat with a gradual but determined leak. He got out of bed and crossed naked to the windows, where he pulled closed the blinds to shut out the last slanted rays of the day from pelting him in the face.
"Hahhh..." He sighed with relief at the reinforced darkness, and lay back down in bed facing the ceiling without bothering to pull the blankets back up and over his body.

He thought briefly 'I'll never fall back asleep now, my body just won't take any more rest, I suppose' he had been sleeping for almost 14 hours at this point. Yet he didn't move from his horizontal position, but instead lied still with his eyes affixed to the ceiling and felt his retinas irising open to greedily take in what strands of light still remained. It was odd, feeling his eyes adjust like that. The kind of feeling you don't notice until you really focus on feeling it.

Suddenly and seemingly without cause his head rolled to the right, and he flinched at the brightness of his digital alarm clock on the nightstand beside him. In a brief confusion he read the clock and thought 'How is the sun setting at 11:37 pm?..' but then remembered it ran 5 hours too fast since the last time he lost power, and he had been too lazy to set it correctly.
"It's 6:37 you numb ****," he said to himself in a voice little more than a harsh whisper, "**** clocks anyway."

Sighing again, he swung his feet off the bed and felt them pendulum to the ground with an unsteady muscle spasm and he was startled briefly by his lack of equilibrium. 'Sleeping for 14 hours at a time will do this to a person, especially a person as hung over as I am..' as he thought, his mind throbbed with every unspoken word and he averted thinking about the previous night.

He righted himself and sat there on the edge of his bed, or his casket as he liked to think of it, and let his head hang limp and buried in his hands. "Another day well spent," Harold's voice cracked and rasped on the words he spoke, and he stood to fix himself a glass of water whilst gripping an unlit cigarette that he grabbed from his nightstand in between his lips.

I wake and stand and walk and work
I live and see and hear and feel
I talk and interact with other people
All while thinking of bed in my head
And the great longing relief of sleep.

I wrote this without caring
if you read this or not.

This is drafted by the hand
holding a pencil, rock-steady

whilst the host suffers
this, utmost of seizures.

Save your money up and
pay attention to the details.

Or burn more this and

resolve the importance
of this subject at hand.

This is only the paper,
These are only lines.

strive.

Look at me!

The boardwalk itself did sheen with a collective sweat,
basking in the orange glow cast by the approaching sunset.
All remaining heat of the day was begging my body for night,
Through my shirt the sun burned, my skin cursed the light.

As the sun became a semi-circle and was concaved by the horizon,
I was on the dark piers utterly awestruck, whilst putting my eyes in.
We could see them down on the beach, each more painted in crimson
and, as the night progressed due East, all the people stood and listened.

And I glanced at the sun after it was far too late,
the rays had gone and my memories changed.

Leaving me staring at the back of my eyelids.

A loose wool-knit sweater had holes in the pattern,
through which her skin was visible both above and below
the dark sports-bra wore stretched across her *******.
I could see the thin straps draped over her collarbones,
and thought about the lines they leave in her skin.

Yoga pants squeezed her legs underneath of thigh-high socks,
and both were layered below tall leather boots with low heels.
An olive green fatigue jacket hung open around her and
was adorned with a colorful scarf that lay claim to her neck,
its tassels curled and bounced with each step she took
mirroring precisely the loose curls in her fair hair.

Finger-less gloves left her free to feel the texture of the
pages she turned one by one in a book pulled from the shelf.
She had sat down right in the aisle, planting herself in front of
the poetry section inside of a crowded Barnes and Nobles.
Sitting there with such an elegance, I lack the words for it,
completely unnoticed and free from the numerous
holiday shoppers that were carefully stepping over her,
books in their own arms, and heading for the cash registers.

"My future ex-wife,
are you still alive?"*

The thought hit me as I was out of cigarettes one Monday morning, when I remembered that the previous night I was only able to smoke half of my last one. I had put the shorted cigarette underneath of a spring doorstop, still in plastic and uninstalled, that lay resting on the brick pillars erected on the front porch of the house. For as long as I've lived there, that doorstop had been lying on those painted bricks just waiting for a half of a cigarette to protect from the wind and snow.
The filter, on that common Monday morning, was ice on my lips, and your frostbitten love was inside of my lungs.
As it smoldered and spewed twirling blue swirls,
I sat and recollected upon you.

Holes are the result of what they had brought
to the millions of targets the wrath had wrought
In a power-fueled rage, spitting words venom laced
towards every one of those whomever opposed

To leave nothing of the earth but a mark with mirth
planting fleeting toadstool clouds, making gods proud
Ruins remaining will reside strewn both far and wide
the once plentiful signs of life cast at last into Æther  

a manufactured moment of silence
lies seen by the eyes of compliance

The last four years I've spent
pulling away from my family
Digging my heels deeper daily
struggling and grasping at traction

Different women came and went
while I was finding purchase
Mother's tears slick enough to
make me slip, I swam the deluge.

A great divide
Between our eyes