I wish I was your little
whiskey girl and you
were pouring yourself
into my bottle to come
drink me up.

But you drained me
dryer than the Savannah.
Now men build boats
inside me, and I haven't
a corkscrew to get out.

I wish I was your little
*** doll and you were
dizzy over me, slurring
I love you's and burning
with me in your throat.

But you don't drink
expensive liquor anymore
not since you spent your money
on losing lottery tickets
and vinyl.

I'm top shelf
but that is only because
you put me there
to forget about me.
And now you drown
yourself in wells,
blacking out
the parts of you
that loved me.

Black skirts and black blouses,
Black slacks and black jackets.
One hundred black bruised hearts.

Black faces and phrases;
“I’m sorry for your loss”s and “If I can do anything…”s.
I’m burning up and down,
Dying to run from this place like a tiger escaping his stripes.

Anger spills over,
Punches are thrown like whipped cream pies into a clowns face,
Fists fly, crows on great gusts of pain,
Noses bleed and suddenly

                      I am home.

Sliding on the ***** of death
up to see her,
knowing she would be ashamedly proud.
Watching for effervescent soda bubbles,
thinking this a terrible,
terrible April fool’s trick
only to be greeted by her ashen smile
inside a tiny                  
              wooden
                    box.

“No one is ever satisfied with the success, is ever satisfied with the success, is ever satisfied with the dream.  It’s the hunger before a meal when you realize how good it is to be alive.”

With each passing day I feel youth slip from my bones like scoops
falling off a summer ice cream cone to blistering pavement. 

All of my friend’s dogs are dying of old age just like mine. 

Childhood trees we used to climb have either grown too tall to reach
or were struck by lightning.  Decisions, no matter how trivial, become monumental
in the scope of time.  There is no end in sight…only the faintest memory of humble beginnings, leading us
blindly into the vacuum of tomorrow, ******* the dreams from our head to feed the plague of survival.

That’s why you bruise with a breath.  Your heart beats too hard for your house of card frame.  Your body—desert willow—thrives on nothing, pumping cells full of carrots, vitamins and codeine.

Last night, While you were sleeping, I sank to the bottom of the ocean
with a seven mile chain attached to a thousand pound anchor and a Swiss army knife.  Slipping
through seasons I fell colder and deeper and darker, waving and giggling as I sank
for miles, watching the surface light blur and fade completely until I was in night,
a gentle pulse of luminescence massaging me with it’s glow, the old-ironsides squid laughing,
the rave fish pulsing with dinner plate pupils, the leather armor jellyfish are calm as Sunday's first ****,
and the flat rainbow fish spin their data and vanish into black.

All I think I know at 22:
Why they call this the information age;
What Buddy meant when he said, “There is a distance the size of bravery”;
This is the best part.

I can feel it seizing understanding
beating against words fleeting through space
as I run up this slippery staircase
I know so well, the one,
with the black tape to gripe my fall,
despite the rise, I feel,
I am landing every time -
each foot, an undulation of fear
to let go, is to stand
still fixed in emotions once heard and said,
said fairly obtuse, so I say
love does not exist.
Love is existing
like it exists between my thighs
stroke nothing too long though because
violence is en-vitiable
as is love
projecting the desire for the absolute
insatiable. insatiable. I need. I want. I feel
helpless in your devotion to me, in your separation from me
from me to you, to you I'm in a -
and there you have it.

Cold and naked like iron church bells
I rang thoughts each more hollow than the next.
Through my mind I skulled over tomorrow,
my bare-mattress weight stuck to my twenty-one-year-old
bones hesitating with the heat.

July tastes all moonshine and sunshine
until your alone without company and the fruit
of adventure decays romance from it candy sweet
fragrance leaving like a raspberry bruise,
a penalty scared on your mommas red lips:
How ya gonna make a living sweetheart?

Eh, I’ll grab a buoy and drink wine until
my teeth rot and ill say **** tomorrow,
Ill **** drunks and scribble my tin sorrows
in ***** yellow journals. I’ll bear my chest
to strangers with ******* hard against the moon.

Because I know
when I find routine,
I’ll be skin-laced and bored,
undertowed and unseen.

The old metaphor rings
too true as I think of friends
lost to the lives they lived.

Brave words ****** out of
young lungs and spoken before
they ever had the chance.

Beautiful young faces glow in pictures,
like rookie-year baseball cards,
capturing untold potential.

Not a bad thing, some will say --

“to die before growing old”
“to stay beautiful forever”
“to live such a full life in so few years”

-- but still, best friends cry,

eyeballs turn to cracked glass,
and cotton-candy hearts callus.

Because they can never leave us the right way.

So I  maintain the lemonade nights
and starshine days in my brain.

Thanks to Angels,

I treat each magical step
like bold beams of light
shot out of the dreams
we strive to make right.

between hugs and struggles
that tempt our inevitable fate,

let me tell you,
“I love you”,
before it’s  too late.

465

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—

The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—