The clock reads three A.M.
And you are listening to radio static
And you are picking feathers from your naked pillow
In the light of a nightlamp you kept near your bedside as a child
To keep the gorillas in your closet from eating you
Or whatever it is gorillas do with small children from the western world

And Somewhere in a country overseas,
A man is standing vigilantly on a beach
Waiting for the small mail boat from his home country
(which just so happens to be the same as your home country)
He is waiting to get any kind of word from the western world

Are you still out there, western world?

The childhood memories collecting dust on your shelves
and faint sirens soon lull you into a sleep that is barely more than a deep thought
where you dream of a girl with pineapple hair and an intoxicating aroma
And you think to yourself
Who still gives a **** about the western world?
And   then you kiss her lips and remember why YOU give a **** about anything in the

Western world

Is anyone out there, western world?

Anyone out there practicing western medicine?
Eating at some massive fast food chain that serves the parts of the pig you can't even name without vomiting?
Sitting on a couch made of the skin of an animal who your ancestors relied on to survive?
Buying jewelry for a member of the opposite *** whom you met no less than three weeks ago?

And in your light, restless dreams
you smell the pineapple girl's tranquilizing neck and you think
Is this happening anywhere else in the western

World?

Are people asking themselves questions they already know the answers to
And picking feathers from naked pillows at three o clock in the ******* morning while the sirens and radio static blare on
Because they're too proud to answer the questions that they know the answers to?
Is there anyone else confused in this vast low-budget carnival that is
the Western world?

And the answer is yes
This is happening everywhere
In this
Western
World.

Tonight I looked into the cold dark sky
Empty save the full moon,
Godless and lonely,
And I wondered how it must feel?
To be the brightest object in an otherwise empty abyss?
and then I considered earth
Full of life, yet alone with the knowledge
of its own greatness.
And suddenly,
The thought of the moon didn't seem so foreign.

I'm nervous.
Like really nervous.
Like shaking like a blender full of gravel nervous.
Like atheist in a foxhole nervous.
Why am I so nervous?
Because I have a nagging thought that soon I might just be the last-next-best-thing that ever happened to you,
Replaced by another, better next-best-thing that blows me out of the water.
Because you might decide I don't have what you really REALLY want.
Because at the end of the day, I'm still convinced that your attraction to me is the product of an elaborate facade.
So yeah. I'm nervous.
Like sweating fifty caliber bullets nervous.
Like ******* cinderblocks nervous.
Like chattering teeth cold sweats nervous.
Like dying young nervous.
Like being forgotten nervous.

And it makes me nervous that you put me on a pedestal
Because from where I stand, I didn't do anything to deserve this
I got drunk at a party and picked up a guitar and here we are almost a year later.

So I'm anxious
I'm distressed
I'm worried and jumpy
But most of all I'm nervous
Nervous because I think
You might one day figure out what I already know:
I'm not that great.
I'm lanky and goofy and kinda dumb sometimes
And I can be just as petty as everyone else
And I'm still pretty convinced you're colossally out of my league
So I'm nervous
Like shake-you-to-your-*******-core nervous

Like really nervous.

Here I sit.
Clutching this ***** little transfer slip
As the darkness sips the light
and the sky's absorbed by dimness
I ponder in the nightlight
As my self-knowledge reels,
A database of feelings
but which holds the most appeal?
A choice of voice
with little indignations
of different vocabulary
stopped by writer's block syndrome
Cork a drain
Unplugged and let the hounds run
After the *******
After pilfering caskets
Who know their own fear like a monkey knows these branches
snap
Trip wires over wiretaps
Who's the fool now?
and whose shoes must you fill?
When the working dogs debunk the formerly favored gods
and ham sandwiches for the ill
Except those who prefer vegetation to the pleasure loaf
Expressing superficial favorites came down a bit
from last year
After hipsterism destroyed all previous conception
of what "cool" is and does
So soak another moniker
'til the loathing and the faithless
destroy those of us with names
and replace a kid with numbers
Can you reconcile that?
Or count lies 'til they pass as facts?
In politics
Deprived of all that whatchacallit
Respond a lofty little miss
who won't take bribes or bacon bits
who's tripping all the time
and uses fresh air for narcotics
I see her
The same albeit as she spies me
I ask her as a comrade
What in confidence she accumulates
As little life and dictators
would sell me but in reverse
A pause
She responds,
but does so gently
And in a softer tone than she uses with the game-players
Four words one chooses not to forget,
"baby, beware of naysayers"

In fever dreams
The city sleeps
and wakes with a dose of DMT
Daytripping inconclusively
Is yellow to you as it is to me?
For a people of productivity
surely feel no joy.

How could you have ever called what we had love?
When we communicated through text
And over phone lines
Phone lines that stretched across
Boundless expanses of desert
A string
Three states long
With a tin can on either end.

So I made you feel something.
Okay.
Well let's be honest,
Love
Is not an emotion.
Love is not a mood you can be in
(Although you certainly made it seem that way).
Love is lying naked
Trapped in one another's embrace
And shutting out all the noise.

Don't tell me you loved me.
Don't tell me that's what you call whatever that was.

What it was was sickness
Manifested in two teenagers
Saying "**** the world,
I just want you."

It was just teenagers being teenagers
Loners being sick
Together.

Do not confuse,
You made me feel worlds better
But don't call it love
'Cause love is not an emotion.
Love is souls dancing
And the space between two bodies
Touching
Don't even for a second tell me that's what you think that was.
Because it couldn't have been.

I didn't fall out of love.
I figured out what love wasn't.

I can't come back.
Sorry, pastor, I can't come back.
Sorry mom and dad.

I can't come back.

I have seen crippled men beg for pennies outside the mile-high walls that guard the glittering, gem-encrusted Vatican.
But I haven't seen Christ.
I have seen good men's funerals picketed by angry mobs all swearing to be the hands of God.
But I've never met the rest of Him.
We've seen holocausts, crusades and conquests **** millions in his name.
But I have never heard His voice.
And I think those men holding those guns missed the point as far as his commandments go.

But that's not why I can't come back.

I ducked out from under the umbrella of religion and I felt the rain
And every day since I've been learning to take the wet with the dry rather than seeking shelter in what's comfortable.
And what's more, I've gotten a clearer view of the sky than ever before
And without that umbrella
I have seen something.
Or the outermost edge of something-
Something unimaginably large
Something not only too big for words, but too big to see all at once.
Something bigger than me and you and god and everything.
And I can't unsee that.
I've surrendered to the fact that not I, my children, or their children will be able to fully comprehend the vastness of everything,
But I am willing to die incomplete before it.

So sorry mom and dad.
Sorry god.
I found my own truth.

and that’s why I can’t come back.

The sun is resplendent and warming.
on this bench in front of these shops in a town we’ve never been to.
Italy’s a lot nicer if you’re in a small town.

I’m watching her peel an orange
slowly,
meticulously
she’s removing the skin from the meat.

She reminds me of a boxer wrapping his hands
before a big fight.

The last moment of meditative solitude
before the **** hits the fan.

She’s finishing with the peel now, setting the pieces on the bench next to us
as she splits it in half, an aerosol of juice sprays from the orange
she hands me one half
and begins to eat the other herself.

I peel the segments apart, eating them slowly
and spitting the seeds into the gutter.
she’s smiling,
the juice running down her chin,
and neither of us are speaking.

Later I’m smelling the citrus on her fingers
as she runs them through my hair;
it’s barely long enough to run fingers through,
and I’m thankful for that.

I’m thankful for that orange.
I’m glad I saw that small town,
the one without tourist attractions or snakeoil peddlers
I’m glad my scalp ever knew her citrus fingers.


it came,

I saw,

it went.

She said,
"you won't believe what I'm looking right now.
The flames must be fifteen ******* feet above the roof"

And I went outside and I could see the plume of smoke like it was a block up from the house
so I ran back in and got everyone out of the house and we hopped in the car and sped off
toward
the flames
-just like a gruesome car accident-
and when we finally came within a few blocks it looked like the revolution
gone and started without us
people were running and jumping fences
to get closer to it.
So we got out and started running
through back alleys
and back yards
and suddenly, we came around a corner
and there it was.

They said the building was abandoned, that no one had been inside when it started.
It wasn't much of a building now.
It was a skeleton
and the flames were maggots picking it clean.
Inside was like the brightness of the sun
and the fire crews were giving it all the water in the world
to little avail.
Gigantic plumes of tiny embers were jetting from its open ribs into the twilight-
falling all over houses and businesses

and all I could think was
"what if it
doesn't
stop?
What if this is it? and it can't be contained?
and the whole
city
goes down with it?"
We were standing in the middle of a riot ready to happen-
it was like a backdraft-
an explosion minus one ingredient-
a single exhaled breath.
So what if this is it?
What if the end starts right here, right now?

So I began to root for the fire, not the firefighters.
I prayed for it to collapse
and eject all that hot ash over everything
to end us all.

But it didn't.
and after fifteen minutes or so the firefighters were winning.
So we turned on heel
and we hobbled home.

Live to fight another day.

Not sure if you’ve ever
heard of
Phineas Gage,
but he was a railroad man somewhere
in Vermont
and one day he accidentally blew a
******* iron rod through his
******* think-box and
here’s the kicker:

He
*******
lived.

Now, this big metal cylinder,
on its flight path,
carved a cavern in Gage’s
cerebrum, more specifically
through his frontal lobe
and when the bleeding finally stopped
and they got his left eye all sewn shut
he told the first person he saw,
probably a loved one crowded around his
filthy hospital bed
to kindly
******* and Die.

He got out of that hospital bed,
eventually,
and when he did, he tried his damndest
to go back to work
but he just couldn’t.

What’s more his friends said he just wasn’t
Gage
any more. His personality
had changed.

He didn’t give a **** about
the sunset anymore.
He liked his coffee black and his pancakes
dry.
Which is strange because beforehand
he didn’t drink any coffee
and he didn’t like pancakes much neither.
He also became quite
the drinker,
which is funny considering he hadn’t had
a drop
of alcohol
in his life
before then.

You see I always thought that
personality
was something you couldn’t
touch.
That it was some grand unifying evidence
of the existence of the human
soul.
But here’s Gage,
who just so happens to take
a pole to the dome
and suddenly he’s just
not
Gage.

So maybe it’s true
that we’re all just
machines
and you can pull a man’s
favorite color
or his taste in music
or his eating habits
out of his head
and set them on a sterile tray
right in front of him.

That makes sense.

But everything in me
still wants to
believe.