Set the mood: Can you feel the bitter? Taste it, drink it, **** it, love him. That is life and if these are the best years of it…then I’m not sure we want to see the worst. It’s called an epiphany…a warm rush of ice, slitting my lips. ****** as they are, these lips are open for you. So speak. I am here for your assumptions, so assume. Please, good friend, assume. Right here, write this down:

I need a voice to speak into. Ears to teach me to listen, because either I'm deaf or God's mute. Cause I've spent too many hours branding paper with my pen in these half-hearted prayers they call poems.

I need true empathy, not the GreatValue knockoff from a dimly lit aisle or Made-in-China substitutes worn around my friends' necks. Empathize with our loss. The traditions you and I will never know. The traditions we both know we’re going to miss.

I need a way into your mind, a shortcut through the jokes and labels. Ask your heart to crack its wary shell open just enough for me to slip my secrets inside, cause I know you're just as lonely as I pretend not to be. And I know you have secrets, too. Whispers are like questions begging not to be known, but I'll whisper to you anyways and beg you have the answers.

I need someone to talk to, someone who thinks about the skies at night. Stares off into the nothingness, screams into the emptiness his whispers. Someone who can blink away all the light. I know I am young but I am a witness to the symptoms of true thought. And you? You are infected, as well. You think. You are a liar, like me, and a natural-born beauty, as we all are. I see what this world has to offer today, and it’s you.

So how much time must we take? I think about you thinking about how much world there is. Or how little there is. How little all the people are. How the people look like flowers.

But not us as we sit on the roof of some ****** car. Its walls are ridden with messages from us to God, and he wrote back in dyslexic lettering, “I lvoed yuo all alnog.” I may seem more shallow and less a witness. You may seem like little but a confused sadist, desperate for an experience. But behind your perjury, you are scared.

You need a voice to speak into. To feel your words, molested in the dark. You know more than you say. Speak to me what you speak to your mind. Watch the flowers sway as we sit, immaculate. Slip your secrets inside my heart. Speak to me. Just speak.

I don’t need to love. I need to speak. So whisper #1: Why is the sky so ******* blue?

How do you feel about the word: Insatiable. That is my mind, forever devoid of what I can’t seem to pin. It is dull, throbbing hunger for more-more than a distant attraction claiming to be mine. Picture sent and picture received, but my body receives nothing more-more than desperate experiments. Countless hours of sexing in the darkness of a toxic Hummer. Toxic money burning a hole in my pocket, inches from the burning of his slick on my ****. I hope his *** bleeds.

Let's light another cigarette, and watch the cherry bloom. A single rose, shimmering and flaring like a nuclear waste, and the light is out. So let's smoke some more-more mirrors. I often peer alone through those sheets of glass. “Substance, ketamine, satiate me,” I plead as I see me and I hate men. My faith in God is never mutual. These prayers are useless. His want for me is beyond repulsing. His money is useless. My body is rotten from the mind, out. I am the king of self loathing. I am useless.

Yet I go back for more-more pain. More quarrels. More lies. More-more. He only takes more. And I take him, too. Wait for it...wait for it...wait for him to; Come! O gentle souls. See how my confidence sways in thine wake. You are purity. You’re innocence. You're what I crave. To be free. To be whole. To be done. So do me like the ****** you know I am. I hope mine bleeds, too.

My veins are coursing, pulsing, shattering at the edges with blue. I am blue in both my complexion and my complex feelings and thoughts and pains. My veins are blue, and I am cold. Taste the metallic crush of my slang. It is intolerable, and I must not tolerate. The ripe stench of escape burdens my mind. My mind is escaping. I know there’s more. Toss the rug over the barbed wire and run. Run. **** that ***** and make her beg. Make her plead. Make her run. Sanguine with ketamine. Run, ******, run.

“I think I’m a coffee table,” I whisper as I lock the door. My hands are cold as I slip them into my pants. Tonight, my icy hands are yours and though I am alone beneath my sheet, I can will you to be here. All I need is the slick of my spit and the broken borders of my mind.

Welcome to Gomorrah. A nation built on depravity.

He is The Coffee Table. No need for names or personality. So long as he spreads himself thick on the stained furniture, he is stained furniture. It’s an art, and he takes it with stride. "Take it," the chandelier cries in the most meaningless of tones. Money for *** never did mean love. The camera is watching.

She is The ****. Nobody knows of her children twice never born, nor do they care to listen to her tales of men who swear to love her as they beat her with their fists. But, like the author, she would rather be loved with a brutal, manipulative passion than to not be loved at all. So as long as those legs are spread, and there’s a chandelier between them, she is content with being nothing but a ****.

She is The Victim. Born forthright into this world under the name “John.” How can God forget something as vital as her *******? I understand He makes no mistakes, but He made a mistake. So she stands on the corner waiting for johns. (Ironic.) Raising some money. (For what?) To fix what God ******* up on the first time around.

He is That Little Boy. No longer searching for answers to why his piano teacher gropes as his fingers dance across the keys, and hers across his lips. Confusion and anguish are washed away by a tide of childish reasoning: His father works. His mother drinks. And somebody loves him.

Funny way of showing it. Depraved, really. But this is Gomorrah, a nation built on depravity.

Turns out The Coffee Table is a romantic. Likes to slow dance to nothing, stare at the stars, and cook dinner for you to the tune of Bing Crosby. He’s not a coffee table at all. The **** is a mother. Third time, she carried the baby, lost track of the deadbeat, and found her independence. His abuse was a rhythm she never cared for anyways. As for The Victim? Cost thousands of dollars, ten STDs, and her family but she is a woman. His mistake is fixed. How about That Little Boy? He is now just as much a monster as the woman who taught him to play E flat. Turns out they have a lot in common: At age 38 he likes little boys too.

That is Gomorrah, no that is America: An explosion of pure sexuality displayed for all the world to scrutinize, slander, and wholly enjoy. Pleasure has no morality, so let's watch the show.

I think often. It's a habit I can't seem to break like a gambler with his gambling and a priest with boys' knees or what brands red A's on our chest. I think we're a bit too trusting and I know we're a tad naive. I think it's best we love each other from the safety of three feet. This finite planet and our infinite greed pair up wondrously said the axeman to the tree.

The world that has made us has gone from a fine fitting coat to an ugly old shoe. We say we've outgrown, but what of the sea? Let's poison it. What of the the ice caps? Let 'em melt like a bowl of forgotten ice cream on my coffee table. I have more important things to devour. Gotta run, culture's waiting.

So I follow the rabbit down the hole wait I stop! Curiosity killed the cat I bought with a two dollar bill my grandmother gave me as payment the first time I cleaned that labyrinth of a cellar beneath her house: musty, dark, repressive I thought I was inside of my ten year old self then through the dark I can hear a rustling, "God?" I plead, my hands clutching the windex. No answer, there never is so I head into the shadows when I see the rabbit and this time I bolt for the hole but my head hits a wall. I concluded that life was a cruel joke as cynicism ensued.

I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't dance, couldn't sing because boys like girls, and girls like boys and boys don't cry, but I cry. As does the gambler and the priest and the woman on the horizon. I could have bet it was an angel and the gambler, he did. She steps into the reef and we hear her song and I know that she's me and I'm him and he’s all of us and the reef is that cruel joke I learned in the basement chasing rabbits but it's awful pretty from here is a warning to you when you think God is dead and death is synonymous to halt:

I'll swim inside this reef 'til the day I die. Water slipping through my fists and I'm yelling no I'm whispering no one's got a verb for trying to help. Water's to my neck but I'm not stopping. The coral ends here where I can finally sink sink sink my body in the trenches, spread a dustier me across the oceans, fill Earths' blood, a mass of veins and rocks and steel blemishes with my own maze of veins and thoughts and inauthenticity…


♐ ♐ ♐


Bury me naked cause where they say we're all headed headed it's gonna be hot hot hot like a medics sweat dripping down his nose as he beat beat beats on her chest but she's too big to get through. Too big, too fat Lady Liberty's choking on fries we're the world's laughing stock, the UN's singing jest for me, jest for me, jest at Mother Nature's giving way to political pressure same as Gods giving way to backwater pleasure and curses, a moment of weakness but 14 billion years? He’s old.

It's 2011 and more people hate hate hate from pin ****** in the ocean spewing bile in the deep, now whose fault is that, really? We're all shallow like my lagoon, my tropical retreat where there's no oil. No God. No smiles or tears. Can't sing, can't dance...can only be me. Who's gonna say that they're one in the same? Heaven's not a cloud and Hell's nicer than you think and I do. I think often.

My bed is empty. I count the seconds down until you appear: 1...2...3 times you've asked me to leave you alone. Leave you alone? How can I let you be so cruel, so uncaring, and so completely and totally near to my voice. I can't. It's not who you are in this world-we call reality sets in and I grab my **** as the black of guilt sets in.

Black. Gray. White. What room am I in? There's ten feet of tile by ten feet heaven bound. The claw foot tub grips at the **** stained floor, fighting gravity's nagging whine. It's all too real. All too fictitiously crisp. All too false.

The ivory room slips into the field as the brown drains from the vomitorium. Bathhouses, **** me. Lesioned tricks, **** me. Loneliness, *******-off to Cair Paravel.

I'm an ice cube in an ocean. Don’t drown, don't go, just come.

Rhythm stops and I study the damage. Laying alone on my bed, skin burning with the genocide of my seed spilt for you, I realize you are gone. With the revival of my senses I realize: You are a dream. A fabrication of lust and desire. But this moment, these feelings are ever changing. This moment is real. This time it's you. Tomorrow night: Tommy Anders, Brent Everett, Mr. Corrigan! Pornstars extraordinaire.

That's all I get nowadays.

Do you know who I am? Do you understand why I do what I do and think what I do is exactly what should be done? Do you have even the slightest respect for my decisions? For who I am? Do you know who I am?

That’s alright. Neither do I.

If I have said it once, then I best say it over and over and over again until you start listening: I feel like I'm underwater. I am in deep oceans, not blue or pale waters, but a horrible, dark abyss. I am drowning in a strange love for the spin-offs of truth, dignity, and cultural revolution. Now that is situational comedy.

My world is composed of nothing but reruns. Clips of him drowning on repeat. And when I drown, he drowns too.

I pray to find the sun so that I may trade all that I have for its warmth to melt the ocean into sky, and this glass from my skin. I don’t need to keep my heart shatterproof, I am no porcelain. I am an independent. Fill my flooded lungs with fresh smoke. Make the water go. Make the bad go. Go. Going. Gone. The sun is gone. All that I have is my fragile body, my ***. I am under sexed, overlooked, and infinitely exhausted of these nonsensical rants. If I could sketch a message into the night sky it would plainly read: I feel like I'm underwater.

So here, in these reefs, will I search for my meaning. But I think it’s best we all come to terms with the plain truth: Submergence is submission. And I refuse to submit to your societal pressures. I will decide what is wrong. I will say what is right. If I wish to empty my lungs of this saltwater, find the sun above the surface, and turn off the abhorrent sitcoms I cannot submit. I can only drown.

“Not another one! Look at him, look at him!” she yells.

His veins are coursing, pulsing, shattering at the edges with blue. He is blue in both his complexion and complex feelings and thoughts and pains. His veins are blue, and he is cold. Can you smell his insatiable mind? Taste the metallic crush of his sanguine? “This world is intolerable, and I must not tolerate,” she reads from his tear stained note. The ripe stench of escape burdens our minds as we watch his soulless body hang. My mind is escaping. Toss the rug over the barbed wire and run. Run. Sanguine with ketamine. Run, ******, run.  

Do you know how to drown? That’s alright. Neither do I.