You're waving your arms. You're trying to convince me that words are more than words. You're cracking open peach pits and looking for flies.
You're wrecking the car, darling.

We're finding places in the pavement to rest our heads, and all I can hear is: I told you so.

I'll risk the dying. I'll risk the trouble. I'll risk the risk. I'll take the keyboard and smash it against the wall. I'll call it a poem, and I'll miss you anyways.

Here, from the cracking ribs rattling toward something so close, so cutthroat, to the moment where you finally get to watch the bliss bleed out.

It's all just one big blood-pumping, give-me-now balancing act, and the things that see the walls of your fist are the feeling you can't shake.

So I will hold you tight and make a lunatic's prayer of you, the world in gloss and the *** you said made you holy. It's useless, but I still try.

Our hells may have been the same, but our heavens weren't.

I think they're playing poker
outside my window
the man in the polo shirt
is yelling about spades
as the little girl dances
in her sweet cotton dress
and the frail woman
finds her way to a cup
for her golden gin

I snap a photo
with my film camera.
in this moment,
everything is perfect.

A man without
scars is like a river
without water
like a room without
a window
or a son to carry on
the name
and a man without
a woman
is a man without woe
or sand or a heart
to be broken
a man
who is dreaming only
of a tractor
and wide open
fields with no hay
to be mown.

Breath and leather,
ragged, eyes that
smooth over into dark,
fingernails and teeth
that catch at a chest
of two parts whiskey
and three parts grief.

Another scarred fist
perched on a dusty bar
and beer against a lazy
mouth. He left before left,
his skin robbed of promise,

like beginning, dust again.