Mouths open, Angel's back with friends.
A chorus of the celestial,
Wings tucked, halos blazing.
(Deaf, and you'd swear they're screaming)
Melody simple, beautiful, and toxic,
Blasting insanity back this way:
"They can't take that away from me."

Cheap Whiskey is still angry,
Writing about your arms, and your eyes.
Stuck in the rhythm of the Jazz Insatiable.
Voices, in harmony,
On the way to death's cousin
The "not - quiet - enough"

It feels nothing short of genius loving you.
Any notions, thought in such volume,
With such swiftness, should be going
Somewhere important, or to some
Great End.
Yet, all imagined here, stuck, throwing, with my own lungs.
Rings of smoke, and
Red sound. 

The Lines draw themselves,
If the dirt leaves a history,
If the wings help them fly,
If her car's still ******* running,
If the knife slipped a different way,
And the blood didn't stain. 

But what should I do when the voices get louder?
When it's all I can do, to give each
Frequency its face, how do I put her
Back in focus?
Humming, and a hot mind,
My teeth break,
And I sing back.

Difficult deciding that you'll
Never be so sure,
If you faked it so she'd want you,
Or if you faked it for that smile. 
Wings, splayed out across 
My open torso, begging for a story,
Maroon eyes, that tell furious truth. 

(There is something to be said for my future.
I'd hope it would be: The city I 
Resolve myself in, might rise and
Fall with the air in
My chest. We might inhale, 
Together, the streetlight dreams,
Before choking on stale air,
And hurling, in unison.)

Clotted outside, rushing throughout,
Stains don't bleed. But the scars do
Leave marks. The Lines 
Draw themselves. 
Despite my best efforts to 
Stop them.

The Queen, snowed-in, stopped for
Cigarettes and milk
Then drove another hundred. 
The Governor told her not to. 
I suppose I did too.

But it's two weeks later and 
I'll be ****** if we've heard
From her. 
Passionate about black lines,
And smaller yellow ones,
Metal arches, sweating salt
Since stained rain came,
And big green signs,
With numbered shields. 

She said, before she left, that she felt,
"Like a consequence.
Something that is constantly flaunting
How severe it is. 
A recourse, to a long-forgotten mistake,
That just learns to be dealt with."

Traversing the wasteland of white
Can teach you a thing, or 
Three. Like how you're not ready
To move upwards, if the
Phantom's shovel keeps filling
In your igloo. 

Every time she left,
I wrote myself down. 
Stories about how, when, and who
Should-Be-Growing,
And the day she lost Heyworth's smile.
I changed her name.
Poetic license, and whatnot.

It doesn't take long to 
Realize, picture or
No picture, they'll all
Still say their 1,000 words.
They earned them, when they
Caught you with the flash,
In-between dreamings. 

I don't need to hear from her.
I know what she'll say. 
A scathing remark about my advice,
A bite-back.
"Lay off the smokes. The Greyness may not claim us, 
Flagstaff, but sure as hell, has it made me paler."

I want this to be about you, 
But it's not

It resides in the hours
That I spent wide awake
When I couldn't sleep so I smoked
And I couldn't dream so I wrote
What I hoped I'd see

For the metaphors 
I couldn't keep churning out
So I smoked some more
And I spurted out
Lines about lines

For the driver on the dented highway
With the window cracked
To feel the chills of the air blowing past
Listening to Bob Dylan tell her
The person she was supposed to be but
Never was
And never will

I want this to tell you how I feel,
But it won't

And if she drives far enough she'll reach that
Looming exit
The one she knows she must take
Back to the life she's sick of living
But fights through the pain
For the same reasons that I
Fight through, because
I want to meet a pretty girl
With great vocabulary,
And a smile like Rita Heyworth

I'm still looking for that girl
To drive me across that highway
And recycle old Dylan lines
As if they were personal dictums
She had synthesized herself
And we can freewheel this road together

See I'll never be that great poet that
Three hundred and twenty-nine thousand people
Have watched on the Internet
And that is a comfort

Because the truth resists simplicity
And in my heart of hearts I am a simple man
And telling the truth through words in meter
Or in stanzas
Will never come as naturally to me
As it does to Dylan
But in my acceptance of my ignorance
I become more powerful
Than I'd ever need to be 
Poetic.

So if writing is always my hobby
And never my workhorse
If I can self-satisfy through 
Strict stanzas that I will
Seldom share
If it is only to a girl 
Driving on a highway
Singing songs about formerly-modern America that I
Recite these rehearsed thoughts of mine
Than I will have succeeded

Because my career will have been love
And maybe I can write this 
About you.
And then, and only then, it will be.

It’s all laundry and cigarettes

White-knuckle odd jobs

And freezing your *** off, at 7 AM, to

Help your buddy out

Breaking and bleeding, and

Smoking and shirtless, and

Spinning your finger and thumb

Counter-clockwise until the

Resulting ring of fire and fury can

Torch your inhibitions

No one ever restricted you from

Rioting with grace

And through the windshield of your vision,

The streets wake up to the smell of

Alcohol and experience

It’s all rubble in dumpsters, and

Spray paint that swears 

Oaths, to bands and bandages

Singing the praises of 

Stolen promises, their swiftly

Prying minds can’t understand

And you’re standing

In front of the truck

Arms outstretched

Pistons firing air through your

Organs, that vibrate with the

Trepidation of nightmarish resolve

It’s all battlefields and accomplices,

The kid that kicked you down so,

That you’d eat the dirt,

Place your teeth in

Leather pouches,

And taste defeat for decades

You’re pleasantly high on the 

Smoke of your still-burning debt

You’re a supermarket superhero

You’re the queen of the Gasoline Dream

It’s in the way that

Your outline is

Edged out

By your insides, and the

Arms of the chair have become

Wings, that unfurl over

Valleys and oceans, of headstones,

And nursery wards

Tinted windows promise nothing

Regarding secrecy of soul

What would your wisdom teach me

About sentience?

There’s God in this rain.
And he’s washing out the colors.
There’s a Greyness, worth noting,
That steals your spirit through your eyes.
There are cigarettes in the amp.
I’m home.

There’s a blur, surrounding the line
Between the edges of him,
And where they meet everything else.
His arms flailing, brain on fire,
Jamming to the song,
With just the drums around him.

She’s broken, but a non-believer.
The bane of her existence being that
She’s bearing existence, but she’s still 
Smoking union butts
She had no intention of
Signing up to receive.

I find myself longing for
Fall’s warmer whispers.
Too dried out, I’m 
Sweating through all my
Summer shirts.

We stood stateside to ******,
Saddened and somber but still
Awake, tailed by cops that were
Bored, and our parents. I remember
He wore red a lot that year.
It was all that would hide the blood stains, on his sleeves,
From where he’d stitched his heart.

Looking through cabinets to
Find old winter hats,
And auburn-stained reminders,
Of past seasons 
You’d loved and lost.
And the drives to 
Second states, for
Finding friends in unfamiliar
Circumstances, when the air
In your face is cold enough to chill,
But bitterly addicting.

And divines have prepped their
Snowy canvas, blowing the
Corpses of the crops
To the floor of their woody settings.
A fresh start for all of us God-likes, 
To crunch leaves under our 
Brand new boots.

And he’s got his records, and
Some books to go with them,
And a drawing from a bus ride that
Took longer than he’d planned for. 
And he can’t wait to show it to everyone, and
Embellish the story it told him.

She’s got her thumb out, somewhere.
Praying for a chance to write the Bible down 
On the inside of a Buick.
She hasn’t loved her mother in weeks.
She and I don’t talk much anymore.

But I’m praying too, to the
Gods I keep. And spending each Sunday
Still, all-set for snow.

So bask in the glow of your cell phone light.
Dance to the unrepeatable beat in your head.
Tread lightly where the ice is thinner,
But fear not for lack of hands
To pull you back up should you fall through.
The Greyness shall not claim us all.