bullet tears me half-open,
and my steaming innards spill onto my hands
like hell's party streamers.
i scream,
but it ain't nothing more than another voice
in a twisted wailing choir.

inside-out on this dyer's holiday,
i'd kinda hoped to pass as i should've--
a half-smoked cigarette between my lips
and my lady waiting for me on the other side.
but then--
a lot of things ain't what they should be.

you'll find me in the morning,
not quite drunk,
kinda swaying in the bed of my pickup.
with a half-empty, half-full bottle of jack
held in my earth-dusted hand,
i'll be drinking the sunrise away
like it's something to strive for.

i guess you could call it meditation.

maybe i'll be hoping you'll find me
whenever i decide to disappear,
but i guess everybody lives forever somewhere.

sun-swords and their respective sun-warriors
hack away at the ogreish clouds.
among the towering daisies
flowering into their artful form,
we smile a little too deliberately.

the clocktower strikes thirteen.
before the day is through,
we will have faded.

if you wake up tomorrow
and find my bed empty and frazzled
with its own kind of morning breath,
look for me in the sky.

i'll be up in the clouds,
building my imaginary skyscrapers,
birthing an infantile nation
to fit in the palm of my starry-eyed heart--
playing god,
if only for a moment.

i'll be assembling scale-model futures
with nothing more than chewing gum
and a tuft of pocket lint.

if you find me there,
using the sun as my pillow,
don't write me off
as an unenlightened romantic.

but if you do,
don't worry--
i'll be up here in my sandbox
whenever you feel like dreaming.

in the bathroom of a delta red eye,
i'm looking in the cataract mirror,
its surface milky with dried soap and snot
and god knows what else.
in my open palm
is a scattered pile
of little white pills.

i'm not really looking at my misty reflection.
really, I'm looking past it,
past the wretched false me,
and into some morbid infinity
i've built for myself,
tangents of oblivion twisted together
like rubber bricks--
bloodless dream after bloodless dream.

libertine tears whispering out my open eyes,
i pop the rabbit **** pills
down my filthy throat.

in a nightmare instant, the plane leaps,
and my little death mints,
they're lodged in my windless windpipe.
and I'm gasping,
clutching,
dying on borrowed air.

trapped in my suicidal limbo,
i can almost see god,
beaming,
giddy in an ironic euphoria,
flipping me His divine bird
in a final
"*******".

there's a man across the street,
walking real casually
past the coffee shops and consignment stores,
hands stuffed in the pockets
of his black track jacket,
and he's whistling.

i watch him from the other side,
this lackadaisical nomad,
all sunshine and songbirds.
he's whistling his persona
in this transient fiction,
past his rippling reflections
in the shop windows,
all the while believing them to be
shifting images in god's great eye--
just one more happy creation.

he rots at his window,
a stale cornflake man
with eyes like ****** smoke.
behind his tree bark eyebrows,
he watches the children on the sidewalk
and paints wet dreams
of how they would taste
wrapped around his tongue.

this ***** fingernail man,
he smokes his cigarettes the wrong way round
and swallows the ashes.