I believe
there are three ways
to win the public heart.
Blind the public eye with
shards of their broken chest.
Steal it from them
and refuse to give it back.
Or tell them Satan says
thank you
as they watch it stop beating.

If it works, it twerks,
the mirth of birthing
a dance to entrance
men of poor taste
whose race to the finish line
between her barely-there thighs
has two gold medals--
stamped on a certificate.
Pick a name, take a number.

My cellophane soul
music akin to jazz-
ercise revises your
body until all that's left
is cliched telephone
lines drawn beneath your eyes.

The questions are
optional and the
whip cream bra is
delicious.
I dare you to
tell the truth about
seven minutes in Heaven,
the greatest restaurant ever
to steal a bathroom in for
*******'s sake.
This game, man,
and you'll prove you're a man
by dropping your pants and pride,
because you picked dare
not twenty questions.

Don't let me be
acquaintance ancestry.
Celestial bodies deny me peace,
your sensitivities shielded by a moonlight sheet,
picketed by skyscraper evidence markers.
They died from lust for light, broken trust and fright.
I'm looking for the inevitable morgue.
I, malnourished of day,
recede among the intangible tangents
of lesser-used thoughts.
I let the shadows take me because...
they should have a long time ago
and I was too scared to let them out of my veins,
let the abstract crack on my neck
leak demons and my trust.
Don't let me be
predetermined possibility,
never so whole as seraphs and satanists,
guided by singularity.
My lives were revolutions,
guided by weaker constitutions
encapsulating a prescription purpose
that tours me past milligram monument men,
marble ghosts braver than I am.
Let me be the helpful dream,
the stitcher of seams;
it seems the tie is torn too much,
the threads too thrown astray,
too tangled to discern the strongest chain,
the strongest way to reinforce
the conclusion of my weakness.
Let me be the used-to-be,
the once-was boy who could never see.
Blindness is a condition I accept willingly,
and deafness with it, and old warmth's retreat.
Let me be cold, forgotten gold,
less a frozen dawn than a synapse half-way gone
buried down beneath a tombstone treasure map
with an epitaph two decades long and footnote dates.
I never liked dates, smoke breaks, moments that
persist longer than they should,
like I have.

Volatile Voltaire
once said something I believed,
but I've forgotten what it used to be.
Some candide (candied?) little thing,
sweet and soft spoken, recited it to me
like a national anthem without the music
I wasn't up to facing, anyways.
An influx of responses filled the dashboard
of my fighter phone as I wove among
dogfights, catfights over who's in the right
and who he was in that first that night.
He just stands like a complacent general
off to one side, directing troops of decision.
He didn't want a D-Day.
There's so much more to life than
brass ranking you earn by not taking a brass bullet.
Let your best friend do that.
He had no aspirations.
(Cleopatra had aspirations.)

I'm not trending.
Have I lost my touch?
Has the flock departed my
exodus for greener pastures
or mountain testaments?
Do the rhymes not carry
the meaning like they used to,
like sailing ships in the steel ages?
I let the winds take me anyways,
take my life and scatter
syllable seedlings across the sites
of battles just old enough where
the ghosts are getting tired.
Maybe I need a touch of comedy?
A critique would be appreciated,
dear reader.
By the way, we made some mistakes
in the last issue you had with us.
On page seven, we established the fact
that I was confident. This was
proven false with a report card report
mailed to us by the fine folks in blue at the
Teacher's Union.
On page nineteen, there was a photo
made of words that sounded like
love song lyrics.
That romance is currently defunct and we
apologize to any soldiers and shippers who
attempted to invade that lost region
on the life map.
Page twenty-three had a mistake,
the byline citing a girl who died
inside.
Our apologies for installing her name on
the neon sign and reminding you all
of the casualties of existing in the first place.
Finally, there was an absence of malice
in the letter from the editor on the back cover,
his eulogizing of his overdosed career
hardly harsh enough a reprimand for
someone who will never listen.
Thank you for your understanding of
this, even if the rest is a mess.