The view from
between your legs,
with my glistening
face in the soft
lamplight is
more than
sublime.

The trust
is thick,
and
sweet.

Your happy
moans are like a
symphony from
Mozart as I wait
for the
grand finish.
dun dun dun dun dun dun dun
dun dun dun dun dun
Dun Dun

DUN

You pull me inward,
and I smell
Paradise.
Sticky faced
ambrosia.

I don’t know how it happens
but every nut job you meet in a bar
has a story they’d like to share with you
about their wild days of youth
or about how things and people were
decades ago without the usage
of what we have now.
they seem to be unstoppable,
their mouths are like pistons
running on an everlasting engine
pumping out these useless words,
these agonizing words that don’t
amount to anything
and the crazy part that blows my mind is
I continue to listen with great anguish
I am their ear, their therapy
I am the light to a handful of moths,
an oddity freely roving amongst them
these people were once people
a long time ago
fulfilling fantasies
they could never imagine
and now they have found me and latched on
as if anything had to do with anything
but I need them though, I need their agony
I need their glory and their damnation
because without their uselessness
how would I ever continue pumping out
these meaningless poems?

if I die,
it won’t be with roses pressed against my chest
or candlelight flickering
like some poet’s dream of a clean, quiet ending.
no—if I die,
it’ll be on a Thursday when the trash hasn’t been taken out,
the rent’s due,
and the world just keeps dragging its feet
through dust and noise.

will you write about me then?
will you scrawl my name in the margins of your mornings,
squeeze me into the spaces between your coffee and silence?
or will I vanish,
like the half-smoked cigarettes we used to leave
burning in old ashtrays,
forgotten until it was too late?

I don’t want the pretty lies,
no poetry about sunsets or fate.
just say I was here—
say I burned bright,
not with brilliance,
but with the stubborn flame of a bad idea
that refused to die.

say I laughed too loud in empty rooms
and drank too much in crowded ones.
say I cursed at the world
and loved it anyway
in the same breath.

there’s a kind of beauty in not being remembered
by statues or verses.
I never wanted to be carved in stone,
only in the raw pulp of memory—
messy, torn,
something you’ll think of
only when you hear a certain song
or smell cheap whiskey in the air.

if I die,
don’t put flowers on my grave.
put words on a page,
put stories in the air,
put that wild, laughing thing I was
back into the world,
if only for a moment.

but if you can’t,
if life gets too full of its own noise,
I’ll understand.
because dying is simple;
it’s the living that gets complicated.

I’m dying of thirst.
Not for water—
but for something real,
something unfiltered,
something that burns when it hits the throat,
like whiskey or the truth.
I’ve drowned in cheap gin
and it didn’t fill me.
I’ve smoked a thousand cigarettes
and still can’t taste life.

They talk about beauty,
like it’s something you can hold
in your hands,
like it’s a thing to be bought
or sold,
wrapped in gold foil and put in a frame,
but all I see is hunger.
There’s no beauty in the world
when you’re scraping the bottom of the bottle
and staring at a ceiling
that refuses to speak to you.

She told me once,
“You’re not what they say you are.”
What the hell does that mean?
What am I supposed to be?
Some saint in a robe,
some poem written on parchment
that never makes it to print?
I’m just a human,
drunk on the emptiness of it all,
suffocating in the silence
of people who think they know me.
They don’t.

They say I’m lost.
Yeah, I’m lost.
Lost in the noise,
in the crowds,
in the streets where people walk past me
like I’m invisible.
And they’re right,
I am invisible.
I’m invisible because I’m trying to be something I’m not.
Because I’ve spent my life
pretending to be the person they want me to be,
but I’m still dying of thirst.

You’re supposed to find yourself,
they say.
Well, I’ve found myself,
but I don’t like what I see.
I’m just a **** wreck,
a torn-up book,
pages stained with the ink of mistakes
that never quite dry.
You don’t get to fix this,
no matter how many times
you try to put the pieces together.
They’ll never fit right.
They were never meant to.

But, hell, it’s fine.
I’m still breathing,
still walking,
still waiting for the next drink,
the next hit,
the next lie to fill me up.
If I don’t keep drinking,
I’ll drown in the thoughts
that keep chasing me down,
the ones that scream for attention,
the ones that tell me
I’m not enough.
And maybe they’re right.
But I’d rather be half-dead
and honest
than full of air and lies.

She called me “brave” once.
What the hell does that even mean?
I’m just a fool who didn’t have the guts
to shut up when it counted.
I’m brave because I didn’t fold
under the weight of the world?
Or because I kept showing up
when I knew I’d get punched in the face
for being different?
Hell, maybe I’m brave
because I didn’t run when I should’ve.
Maybe I’m brave
because I let myself be a fool,
and I wear it like a badge.
But bravery doesn’t mean a **** thing
when you’re choking on your own blood
and no one’s around to help you up.

There’s no poetry in this.
No high-minded words.
Just the crack of my knuckles
and the taste of blood,
the sound of my own thoughts
screaming at me to stop,
to feel something
besides the empty ache.

But the truth is,
I can’t stop.
I can’t stop chasing something
I’ll never catch.
I’ve been dying of thirst for so long
that I don’t know what it’s like to drink anymore.
Maybe I never knew.
Maybe we’re all just waiting
for a glass of water that never comes,
and we convince ourselves
we’re fine
as we slowly fade away.

You want me to be something more?
To be noble?
To be a saint?
Well, I’m not.
I’m just a fool who can’t escape
they’re own **** skin,
trying to find something to numb the hunger.
And if that makes me a coward,
fine.
Call me whatever you want.
But I’m still dying of thirst,
and I’ll drink until it kills me
or until I finally feel alive.

Ferrel cats creep
under porches
to escape the  
rain and snow.
Some have half  
a tail
or a missing ear.
My cats watch
them from the
safety of
the warm house.
They chirp, and
stare.

I wonder if
these pitiful
orphans once had
a home and
knew love.
Did the owner
abandon them to
be unburdened by
empathy.

I wish I could
save those wild
cats,
those princes of
the alleys.

Sometimes, they wander
over to my porch.
I put a can of
tuna out.
They look at
me with cautious
green or golden eyes.
I tell them,
it’s going to be
Alright.
I know it’s a
lie.
Winter is coming.
But I feel  
better for a second.
And that’s all that
matters in this
playground of a
world.

Don’t you think?