Tell me,
How many sips does it take,
How many puffs does it take,
How many pills does it take,
How many sniffs does it take,
How many needles does it take,
To feel the way I do?

Sunlight beats in through the window
offensive and obscene.
I wonder what ungodly sound just awoke me,
was it only the alarm, or
was it the deafening sound of my conscious
that so disturbed me?
Upon waking, one has to ignore the weight of existence
Or drown in it's wake.
Sleep, running away from me, abandoning me,
Has led me here to this moment.
Rising out of bed, reborn from the night,
for the millionth time, and still
always questioning everything.
"What has my life brought me to,
that I must continue to wake for it,
and why is it more worthy than sleep?
Is participation in life truly necessary?
Why does each day bring with it the same
repetition I've always known?"
Sun rays never speak, never answer
The questions that morning brings.

An old lion sits on the balcony writing a letter to his lover describing the moment he first saw her; he uses the moon as his lamplight as he murmurs the next line.
"I thought: you are the best drawing I've ever seen..
The most captivating painting,
Most sensual of all the sculptures."

At the age of 10, I had a conversation with a woman.
I remember asking her what games her many children played.
Did they play as I play?
She told me they enjoyed roleplaying games, and I asked what she meant.
Dress up, she elaborated. Acting, make-believe, telling stories.
I remember telling her that I felt I had wasted my youth, my childhood, and this, as if I had forgotten I was 10.
There was a seriousness to my tone, stoic-like, and a mighty dignification must have kept that woman from chuckling.
That conversation was closer to half my life ago, and I still meet with that same unrelenting sadness every other morning and every other night.
I remember the half-dreaded birthdays that followed, the recent ones the worst.
And every year that passes merely confirms the suspicion that I’ll live with that yearn for the rest of my life regardless of what else happens.
Yearning and I. Whose to say we don’t have 10, 20, 30 more years together?
But it’s nothing to worry over in the end.
I’ve turned into a person who has high-highs and low-lows,
And I’ve found that the highs are worth going down under for every once in a while.

I spent the night creating,
painting,
sighing.
I sipped some water, my paintbrush sipped some water before being thrusted into a smear of color once more.
All the while I sat listening to sad songs from the 1950s
All of them complete with lots of twang and a few young bucks howling into microphones over lost lovers.
Leisure, and for what?
I’m beginning to think I was weaned on restlessness.
For I crave destruction each full moon
In despite of my perpetual need to create.
I run around looking a fright.
Cutting statues and watching them bleed marble blood,
Burning paintings just to hear them howl and drip.

At this point, I only hope he can rest peacefully
And that a part of him has been reincarnated into an unassuming cherub.
At this point, I just hope that one day when I’m old and grey-headed
In Soho or Orlando or in Florence...
I’ll come across a young man laughing.
A young man who resembles him: his unique look, the distinctive voice, distinct laugh...
I won’t know it and neither will he.
But perhaps we’ll meet again for a split second
In another time, another place, another life...

I would apologize but it would be futile,
Since an apology is meant to serve as a promise that one will never let something of the contextual nature happen again.
But I can’t promise you anything
Because I know this'll just happen again.
Of all the facets I have
You just had to find me wearing this one.

I’m searching for an answer.
Surrounded by monogamists I crawl and weep,
Surrounded by dogmatists I hunger.
I’m searching for a key to unlock the doors of profanity.
I don’t want to hear something about the seasons,
Or anything about ethics.
No more flowers,
Away with the aesthetic of yore.
Give me the affairs, the filth, secret lives.
Give me the runaways, the elderly, the jokesters.
Give me the casanovas and cougars.
I search this rotten boulevard and t
All night, all night, even during the day..
I’m on the search..
I’m looking for a key to unlock the doors of profanity.

We’ll play at being poets
You’ll be Dante and I’ll be Virgil
And I’ll guide you through hell and back.

There’s something about the heat.
The familiar sting on my skin that makes its way up,
Boiling heat that creeps through my veins and fills them up, up, up.
It heightens my senses,
It’s a breath of fresh air after almost being drowned.
The steam that clouds my vision to the point where I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live in a summer fog.
And I’ve never even liked the summer. The sun can go and **** itself for all I care.
What I like are saunas, gas lit stoves, fires, boiling water, matches, artificial heat, steaming showers, candles, body heat in a cold room.
Showers most of all, though.
So warm and wet that the mirror steams and your skin gleams.
Heat: it’s rising higher and meeting the burning tug halfway.
Redness surrounding my eyes, harsh against the plaster coloring of my cheeks.
A kind sort of fever, a comforting sort of fever.
A fullness that pools in all of the dips of my body: cascading warmth.
There’s something about the heat.

Watching car grills shimmering in the Southeastern sun
Listening to music with my mind on pause.
Jumping out of cars and walking home on my own
I see a tall blonde woman and a short black man walking home
She's holding her shoes, he's stumbling.
And I'm home before I know it, peeling my velvet jacket off, taking a long shower...
I listen to the music again,
Because it's always there.

The insignificance of human life is found in those moments where you confront your own mortality
And realize that everything is as it ever was and is as it will ever be.
But I’m not ready to face the insignificance!
We're here now; living, breathing, writing. Does that count for naught?
I refuse to face the fact that one day no one will remember the people I love and cherish,
The people who make up my world.
I want everyone to know their names and beautiful horrid faces.
I want everyone to know the people who shaped me and thus, I want everyone to know me.

I wake up- the scent of fine powders, perspiration, and arrogance all laced around me, permeating.
Duck under the sheets, shield yourself from the sunlight. Come back up for a breath of air.
Mornings are repetition at its finest.
Grab a fruit on your way to the water; peel it with sharp fingers; rip and tear.
You open your eyes to a world in which you are born anew, puffy skinned and amazed.
All the colors are a slightly different shade, more attached. Pale opalescence shines before your eyes.
All sound is but a whisper now.
Sweet release from a long sleep. Tire me again tonight, joy will come with the dawn.

Gone.
I have lost my mind.
It left in the night.
Gone is my mind and gone is my light.

Whether it’s 5 p.m or 5 a.m, I laugh as loud as I want.
Laughter is a stream of gold cascading through the air.
It is the end all, the ultimate painkiller.
The path to redemption.
Laughter.
Well, it is 5 a.m, but I’m not laughing.
I’ve been reading stories
Of sadness and sordidity,
romance and restlessness,
love and loneliness–all for hours on end.
So much for lightheartedness, there’s none of that here.
I’ve been reading amateur-made stories
That still tug at the deepest recesses of my depression.
One in particular inspired me to write a certain story of my own.
It was sad, it was juvenile,
It was beautiful, it was nostalgic.
The prose in that story should only ever be thought of
In the most proper manner:
shrouded in a hazy mist of wistfulness and bittersweet longing.
Different hues of glowing colors,
Images of fog.
For so long I thought I was through with this part of my life.
The part where I felt so lonely that I could drop dead of touch deprivation.
But it has returned.
Nothing will do to stop this acquired disease.
Mine is a loneliness, such as a thirst
That cannot be quenched with mere drops of water.
It becomes a way of life.
O’ joy, where do you reside?
Oh, forget it. You’re lost on me.

I am being crushed by the weight
Of warm cattails, two tons.
As the sun-kissed wooden fences make the world around me look grey- I suffocate.

Where will I be in two years?
Will I be dumbed down and delinquitized?
Will I be living on the edge with Dionysus and his friends?
Or will I be a scholarly, orderly student?
Will I be me, or will I fall into the clutches of some other identity?

Sadness and euphoria.
They are bitter truths that go together,
Like zealotry and bigotry,
Or monogamy and deceit.
Sadness and euphoria: sadness the shell, euphoria the oyster.

A ****** thing
When put there in the lamplight
But chosen with the utmost care
Pretend it’s just kitsch
And not some ******* you’d throw away had someone else gifted it.

Did you visit me in my sleep?
I dreamed we met up: I visited you in the hole, you let me.
A cop led you down the hall and to the booth
And you would not meet my eye, even in the depths of my subconsciousness.
You were despondent, distant.
But through that, I could feel the anger emanating from where you sat on the other side of the glass.
You were filled with anger.
Not at me, but at the situation itself. Maybe it was anger aimed toward other people, maybe it was anger aimed toward yourself.
You lifted the phone eventually, and I held mine, but neither of us spoke a word.
I remembered that dream today, how vivid it was, how I woke up a month ago now thinking I had actually visited you in jail several states away.
In fact, I was positive that I had visited you in jail in order to cheer you up. It felt so real.
After I woke it took me a while to remember that you had died just a few weeks ago.
And today after I retold this dream to a woman, she swore I described an otherworldly visitation.
I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you!
How many times must I profess it?
You did fine, and you’re doing fine wherever you are now.
You’re where you’re supposed to be, and everything is okay.
I promise, I promise, I promise.
I’m a skeptic through and through
But apparently not when it comes to you.
Tell me,
Do you enjoy being such an enigma?

Every time I glance out the window
The clouds have reformed into a new and more beautiful arrangement.
And every time I glance at the clock
I’ve wasted another hour.
After every time I eat
I wince and brush my teeth,
Every time I’m touched
I grimace and shake,
And every time I sleep
I dread the moment I have to wake.

As the sun comes up,
I realize I’ve been wasting away night after night
And I’ve done it all with a nonchalant air about me and a smirk plastered onto my **** face.
I’ve been wasting the gift that is my life.
I’ve had every opportune moment to put an end to my dilly-dalliances
And yet I have ignored each of these many signs in favor of bringing about my own downfall. Might as well bring out the corks because I’ve practically celebrated–whooped and cheered!–as I’ve run the course of life through each tattered obstacle
Bumping and falling like a drunk performance artist trying to make a buck at the county fair.

It only reveals itself after it's gone–
In the colors of rotting fruit, in the portrait of the dying.
In a photograph or a broken bauble.
It typically shows itself in the weary faces of the several-times-married.
It was in conversation with him that I suddenly realized–
He too was not oblivious to this fact.
Someone as aware as I am of what we're losing right now.
He in particular knows the feeling better than I, I'm sure of it,
Sometimes I can still see the outline of his youth,
A faded crease in time..
Youth, a mere thumbprint now.
It comes when he's caught in-between actions:
Looking up, sitting down, shifting his eyes, walking through doorways.
It shows in a certain thoughtful expression or when he stands up tall.
Youth is a neverending escapee, an eternal bandit.
For some it's best forgotten, for others it was the height of their life.
Youth, the time of eternal Spring.
And it's going, going, going, going–
And it's gone.

You only live life once, they say.
You only have one mom, one dad, and you only have one first car.
Well, I don’t care.
You only lose your virginity once, have one firstborn, you only have one death, they say.
Well, having *** for the first time is no different from having *** for the second time
Despite both archaic views on biology
And the backwash of a society that values peaking by young adulthood.
Children are neither here nor there,
And I don’t care about death.
Youth has been romanticized to the point of fetishization.
The plethora of coming-of-age novels and films represent this.
We live in a culture obsessed with youth,
It’s connotations,
Innumerable “firsts”,
Peaking by young adulthood.
Is it simply because children and teens are more easy to market to, being a perpetually existing group?
Is it because in a culture with such drastically differing generations, youth provides a connecting wire between them?
Is it because of the amount of people who look back from their mundane lives and fall into nostalgia’s pit?
Or something else?

Of Greyhound buses and cigarettes,
Whiskey and champagne.
Belongs to the fringes of society,
If anything.
Polemics as a past-time and books as a spell,
Loved nothing more than to rebel.
Never sober yet always clean,
Short and thin, eyes of evergreen.
Argument and sacrilege,
Living life on the edge.
You say you hate him and his disregard for ethics,
He doesn’t care. Yet he makes a lasting impression.
He won’t jump through hoops if you tell him to, but he will sit and watch others jump through hoops with you.
It is only now I realize he gave it his all.
It is only now I realize he was sincere,
However vain and bafoonishly depraved he may have been.
They say he experienced all the seasons of life.
When I saw him last, he was calm in his casket.
He looked like all possibilities–and roads, both taken and passed–at once.

I wish the world would stop turning for just a second
So that I could have some time to collect my thoughts.
Because there’s just so many of them.
And only one of me.

To age is to harbor memories in the oddest places; a design, a time of day, a color.
Aging is the unsettling experience of hearing a song from a decade ago
And having your mind still register it as a recent chart-topper.
When cantaloupe tastes of southeastern shores and washed up conchs
And flatbread reeks of the expensive dinners had during poolside nights at hotels.
When daybreak touches your face
And you’re hit with the scents and sounds of another morning, a morning long past...

My neglected duties lie in a heap on the floor, my head hurts as I stare down at them. So many.
And time? Fleeting.
I receive no sympathy from time. I evoke no empathy from my own conscience, nor fantasy.
All the unspoken words I’ve neglected to voice lie gentle on the nightstand.
And I sleep sound.

To live life is to catch a nymph.
You’ll find yourself in love at one time or another,
Constantly thinking:
I do it all for my pride, my darling; my bane, my worry.
Life is an egg cooking on the sidewalk.
Life is a line of camels being ridden through Alaska. It’s a littered beach.
White clouds peeking through broken windows, that’s what your life is.
And you only appreciate it in dreams.