The subtle act of meeting
old friends with lines on my
face, pock and blemish
dominating the right side of
my face, left to them. Swing
left if you've an inclining.

How many times have you
reached out to a friend, tiny
gestures or grand statements
that state the grandeur of
relationships, twos and threes
and dates and early mornings.

Left to myself in bed I sleep
and toss and dream of friends
I remember and forgot about,
not but a text message away
from a rekindling, idling in
neutral and there's a hill ahead.

I didn't think it was
that bad. Just the way
she was talking, she
felt chilled, okay and/
or something like it.

My friends say she
becomes the people
she hangs out with,
maybe gets a tad bit
obsessive in spurts.

People pity weakness
in the same way they
pity ignorance. They
don't know what's right
and it may **** them.

Time wasted neck-deep in
idolatry, pretty bottles of
pretty liquids, light gold,
amber, charred oak brown
soaking vanillin and wood
which warms the tongue
perfectly.

I pop my pinky finger in
funny ways, relegating
flow of blood to necessary
extremities only, thumbs
or forefingers or whiny
joints screaming loudly for
sustenance.

There are days in my past
I wish I had skipped,
accidentally sleeping past
my alarms and the sirens
and noises of cars passing
past my window in whichever
home I find myself to wake.

There are days more recently
I have skipped, my mind
spending hours drunkenly
slipping from action to act,
poor me and my problems,
always worthy of an award,
a statuette of broken glass.

I am guilty of overthinking
a sunrise, some certain
moment of minuscule
collaboration between brain
and dirt, ***** truth of it
being I am unable to think
past my own two eyes
but able to fathom a sun
setting and not fretting
whether or not it is to rise
when I wake.

When I was five (and this I barely remember mind you, I was five or so—maybe younger, who's a boy of five to say—and all memory is as cloudy as Seattle in copyrighted images or Tom Hanks movies I've never seen or something) I carried a dead squirrel into my small white boyhood home by it's bushy tail. I presented the creature to my mother as a gift, like a dog with a dead rabbit between it's jowls, limp and nubile. I guess it could also be a rabbit.

I was proud. In elementary I took upon myself to own the blacktop playground for what it was; a mound of black something to step and pound on and run and scrape knees and kick things, forms of kickballs or tetherballs, always red. I remember standing in line at Sunny Vale Elementary and promising the girl behind I was not cutting but not quite knowing how to say it.

The summer after we moved. I don't remember school after that, not until third grade, but it was different. My attention felt divided. I was a boy in two, interest piqued by different sectors of memory, such a selective doll. I remember reading with my father and having fun with my mother. I remember my father's beer and my mother's youthful smile. She will be forty-three years this year. My attention is divided. I am a half-man in two.

How sad must I make myself?
When petty annoyance turns to
dust, a swirl of caster oil on my
tongue, need I stab in infinite
direction for something to grasp
onto?

When does blood end and choice
begin? How much *** must I smoke
to stop paying attention? Do you want
to be here?

The answer is assuredly No.
I know because I know you.

You will numb yourself until the
little tiny hairs of your forearm
rise and prickle and beckon for
sunlight, escape from dark room
of blanket piles and ***** clothes.

Do you want to be here?
The answer is in the How.
Should I keep projecting or
wear my insecurities on my sleeve
like a good boy, feelings and
resolve and dedication to family?

Where did my poem go?
Does it want to be here?
Should I pull it up from the
ether, all hot ember and critique,
or might I let it flounder and
drown, all not together and
scatterbrain, best left on edit table
in drunken somberness and
existential envy, slow motion.

Do you want to be here?
I am asking for a friend.

The day he locked himself out is not specific, a
Monday or a Thursday, some square on some calendar
I tossed in the trash years ago.

We lived in a small white house yards off a small suburban street. I dubbed it The White House. I cannot remember how many of my holidays passed inside. It's all stuck in fog.

Some time later my mother and brother and myself moved not a quarter mile from The White House; a trailer park, owned by Aunt Charlene and her callousness. She cares deeply for my mother. I still pass The White House as I drive to my great-grandma's home, years later. It is hidden from the street, all branch and leaf and overgrowth, flora hiding its face from the cars and their people, the birds, sunlight, illumination.

My great-grandmother's eyes are thick with a knowledge I am fortunate to not possess. Great-grandma. My father's grandma. Mother told me he began to drink when Grandpa Jesse died and never managed to shelf it. I meditate on my genes. My great-grandma is 84-years on this earth. I have trouble bringing myself to talk to her.

It is so much. So fast. I am a man now—not grown, hardly seasoned, no hint of gray—of 21-years. I have not seen my father since I started smoking. I wonder, now, following all these years of silence what, exactly, we might have to say to one another. He may ask about my girlfriend: I may ask of his. Years apart, a ridged gap, and yet still a kinship, some foreign hurt deeply threading the vein.

The malignancy of feelings.

I bury my anger and let it age, whiskey soaking in the oak, cultivating a taste, a character, an identity. I cannot change this. It is my blood. I will always bear his name. He may die before me. I will always bear his name.