Maybe we're from the same scar.
Maybe the same galactic gutter.
Maybe the same pulpy punch.
Maybe you were my sister
or you were my brother.

Maybe there is a place
where we used to go
to plant our feet
in what we didn't know.

Maybe there is a place
where the whistle grows,
the voices chatter,
the stillness slows.

And maybe, somewhere
or the whistle grows,
the voices chatter,
the stillness shows.

And maybe, somewhere,
or this place, you said to me,
"I hope you remember
that this is a false memory."

Look at me:
I'm the captain
occupying borrowed space.
Thrown on fading campus,
grown through the cracks
of a forgotten place.

Her eyes were yellow love
when she walked away.
Her pearl skin, thousand count;
so taut, smother ***** pound --
the steps beyond thought process
sullen, floundering less and less...

And when she becomes real again,
the hollowness, whatevered wan.
Broken, broken: he loves you
without any soul.

A ***** hybrid clouded his voice;
a southern drawl
and Midwestern daydream.
Mutt to himself, a fire to others,
a redundant reverie about a home
-- any home --
with pictures of bloodletting,
forgetting mothers, Adidas clad feet
belonging to hooded killers.

His hands sway in church
but his soul doesn't.
No belief in either concept:
God or soul.
Annoyed with the Christian claim
that one needs the other.
He speaks a voice that echoes,
then evolves into a rarity
too tame to flounder and fight,
too wild to sit and stare.

There is a couch and it is where I fall.
My seventeen year-old legs,
bandaged with bumblebee knee socks,
arch like ****** pink lawn-flamingo joints.
Crookedness meets at
cigarette skin thighs: grape-kiss fingerprints,
like mental leprosy, projected.
My eyes meet at where fingers told me to stay
and where the knuckles followed.

Acorn ***** hair sleeps in a tuft,
woken by the brush of a thirty-three year-old soccer coach.

-

My Vans grip sandpaper tape,
preceding clicks: sliding up and down,
like graduation day maternal comfort,
like dirt-under-the-fingernails *******.
Clicking wheels, sound waves
smacking across asphalt jungle.
Sounds escaping and reminding me
of how I'll never.

I'm not in love --  not sure if I can,
be affectionate towards the things
I don't understand.

I'm not in love -- even if I could,
I don't think I'd care like I should.

My breath is barbed;
skeletal strings shift into smoke,
drifting into the shadows
as the darkness will choke.

Pearl snow stuffs my skull;
my grandmother in an earthern womb,
sleeps under it all.
A tombstone the last thing we bought--
a report card of her life:
She is with Him in Heaven, In Paradise...
With Him, Without Pain--
is speculation but turns into thought.

The icy steps do not deter me
as I sit on the crooked concrete spine;
speaking to her, hoping the snow
does not make her cold, any more,
'I can stay a while longer...
I do not have to go home, yet.'

-

Eco-friendly light spills from under the door,
forming a pool as yellow as diseased skin.
The brass doorknob is like a girl I once loved:
******* the outside, hollow in the inside,
unable to be moved and okay with it.
Fury from a faucet fills the bathtub
and rings my ears with its intent:
to fill a void and go away when cold.

She lays in the water
the city treats better than us,
wading in a wealth of watermelon wash;
her body flushed from fading flesh,
pores swim and stretch around
cursive carvings, kissing cursed curves--
and I sit upon a bone-white curb,
stirring my finger in the soup of her day;
watching the drain ****, wondering
if she'll, too, drift away.

Ashland is a small town
on a small planet, in an
ever expanding universe.
The people here are bitter
and so is their spit, from
full-flavored cigarettes
and diluted kisses spun
from the lips of significant
others, that didn't listen to their
mothers, and married because of
irresponsible reasons, like personality,
respect, love, and other, 'Jesus, **** me
the **** now, so help me.'

Abstract thought is dangerous--
to the mind it's cancerous.
Alone and thinking about
melancholy shaped memories or
kisses that would echo through
your lungs, stomach, ******* soul.
Don't do it. Don't you invite the devil,
killing yourself is so concrete, it must
mean more than a concrete floor,
hovering above a rumored hell and a
definite uncertainty so delicate that it
eats into you with its sensitive meandering
disguised as beauty but, really, a violent,
violent, murderous host, hoax, fake but
eating your superficiality, programmed by
someone else, telling you it's you.

Ashland is a small town,
aren't we all a small town, inwardly.