We ride bikes
to parks in our heads
and pedal our bodies
to safe-ish places
  in our beds.

We spend cash
in eight minutes,
that we worked
eight hours for.

We talk about
our ceiling
but are content
at our floor.

We experience
suicidal ideation,
on a day-to-day stasis,
and insure our
  troubled vessels,
on a six month to
  twelve month basis.

We ride bikes
alongside trainless tracks
and wrestle, naked,
on our backs,
smothering the grass,
muddied past our feet,
we ride our bikes, incomplete.

I had a God; he was a
good God. Keeping me  safe
with money, image, and  time.
Blessing me, solid;  
until my waist grew as thin   as my wallet.  
Buying all of your time.

I want to be on t.v.,
but not just any t.v.
I want the ratings to rise
  with my celebrity skin,
my trending name,
  commercialized sin.

I want to be sold   separately
and told that I'm desperately
giving my body to a   image heavy God,
sleeping on the skeleton of Malibu,
drinking dreams with a celebrity dog.

I want to be  on t.v.
I want to be  every  thing
and  more.

I had a God; he was a good God.
Played me his songs,  wrapped
  in his time.  Kissing me goodbye,
tel  ling me to sell shirts; telling me to
keep up with the trends.

She wore a windbreaker as red
as her parents voting habits,
and smoked American Spirits
as rough as the next-door
skateboarder's hands.

At 18, she was bored by
teen-aged touch,
and looked towards the
thirty-five year-old avant-garde
painter, who meandered in his
sun room, like a soul
pretending to be lost.

At 20, her parents told her
to go to college, to go to
'some place other than here'.
So, she went and had skinny,
Greek fingers with chipped nail-polish,
dip down and inside of her, without
judgement, without thought, and,
with this touch, she felt free.

At 24, she was an undergrad with
an apartment and a guy named 'Blake',
and Blake said Brown and she said State.
And when Blake left, she felt complete
despite losing something meaningful.

And when her story started to go on forever,
her body spread across the pavement like
seeded jam on burnt toast, scraped thin,
without image and without future, lost
inside crevices and cracks, a memory
or thought, wandering nothingness.

There's a reckless wind
whipping 'round the
frayed ends of my hair,
its exodus from the sides
of cars blurring by.

Jazz drummers cycle
flurries of taps and nods.
Twitching wrists for dollars,
their cornflower blue suits
rising with the street sound,
becoming a tent for sweat,
reaching for the dangling dark  
held up by clouds and the
screams of horns and the
chimes of chatter.

And here I lean, inside a corner
between an entrance and an exit.
My dreams are starting to
last as long as these cigarettes,
I probably spoke into the chainsmoke --
being pretentious and afraid
under the spill of streetlight.

And here I am, harmfully hoping
my friend comes back, that he
didn't suffer, that he is with god,
that god exists, that I grow into
something that would make
him proud, my parents proud,
make me proud.

All the pretty girls trot the walk,
like surreal thoughts with
white converses and high-waisted
jeans holding the eyes of the few
guys and girls going home alone.

There's no proper way to end this
besides for raw ***, real violence,
and more money.

My government only cares about me
once every four years.

My bank account controls me.

I can't buy anything unless
it wants to **** me or love me.

loving you is a punk show
Passion so unbridaled
It leaves the participants
Comparing bruises
Not the kind left by pain
But extacsy

Your pretty face,
all scattered in black,
back to the steel --
that's how they
disappeared you.

My emptiness is
measured in rust;
drenched in the rain
that'll soak your dust.

I've wrapped you in
the red wind-breaker
I've never owned,
hoping it'll change some--
--thing, anything at all.

That'll soak your dust.
Please, Please, tell me
you won't leave me be.

There's your voice
an ear-worm in my --
I wish you'd come back,
my little guy.
I'm such a degenerate
with you off of that
tight-rope I've found my--
--self on. Why'd you gone,
Where'd you gone, my son.
Where'd you gone, my sun.
Where'd you gone, my son.
Where'd, Why'd you gone.

That'll soak your dust.
Please, Please, tell me
you won't leave me be.

If you wanna be the same,
be the same with me --
I swear we’ll always
blend right in.

And when you say
you don’t like Jaws,
I'll still be a Peeping Tom
behind your books.

When you lie, Maggie-Pie,
about the movies you’ve seen,
it makes the Tom Waits you like
seem contrived.

Degenerate drug kids,
too high to be a star,
in love with moments.

Give me my moments,
my lifeless promise
to always have a car
and insurance.

If you wanna be lazy,
be lazy with me --
I swear we won’t
ever do ****.

And when you bop
your head to Kendrick,
I’ll watch you melt
underneath the strobe.

Place your finger on a globe,
tell me where you think
you could be, then tell me
about your perceived
self-worth.

Degenerate punk kids,
with more ink than squids,
and a tip-jar future.

Give me my future,
my hurried ten years;
you know my twenties;
you know my reason.

Give me my reason,
give me my reason, give me my reason.

I go back to Hampshire
to pretend I have old friends.
I drive around the mountains
to look for an end
to the violence
that's been breeding inside.
I've been a god ******,
god ******, god ******.

There's a dying wild
surrounding this town;
a girl limping with her mother,
holding ****** hounds.

You can consume it,
the blurred out dreams,
that these rubber-lovers
hung in Christmas trees.

There's a sense regret
amongst the ****** chic;
a romantic degeneracy
not lost on the teens.
Push in the fate,
to let something out.
I'm such a god ******,
god ******, god ******.

And I blot the ******
remnants of the past,
fire a cheap cigarette
and cut myself on the glass
of the car I drove into
the bank of your dreams.

To get out, to get out,
I've become such a ******* fool.
To get out, to get out,
I've hurt everyone that thought I was cool.

Dragging a baseball bat through the alley,
old-fashioned stain, auto-signed by some
body that used to inspire, you know how it goes

And, of course, it's raining a type of
slippery sludge that gets on and under
regenerating skin, born today, dead today
forever and ever a boulder pushing life

It all stings, oh god, it will accurately burn
the way that a forgotten face trips into smoke
before the mind's wandering, hazardous dare
Then, before it was ever known, you break
into the breeze, a tryst of truth, floating

Where he stands is so close to where the
bat meets the flesh, bursting under babble
Swinging with the explosion of repressed
rage, stolen memories summoned into a
frenzy of freedom and self-imprisonment

Violent before the new world,
breathing into a rumored hollow carcass

When our bones rub softly,
I can take my teeth out and
shine them like skin cutters.
A yellow-bird dress you wear;
the same matchbox socks
that you wouldn't bother.

Sometimes, all the time, I
shiver in the gelatin lake
and what a faux-shake
it would only take
to make you care.

Baby, maybe, you
could love your child
like the sultry sandman;
place them on pinkish pillows,
and pretend your stories are
as real as your lashes.

And what a lamb,
kneeling in the Irish grass,
drinking all that is in her glass,
before breaking it over a wet stone,
and holding it to her throat, singing,
"I've always been surrounded, but
have always felt alone."