i don't usually rhyme much
but my thoughts are coming quicker
i'm lifting into the sky right now
drunk on a curious liquor

i recall a scene in a bar last night
one involving a french tickler
i'm seeing her much more clearly now
my memory no longer flickers
i offered to take her eyes home with me
and her body didn't bicker
i took her to a street in pound town
and oh god, did she take me with her

at the top of her lungs, she called my name
sometimes she called me mister
but alas, it's the next morning now
and i think i'll have to ditch her

98 bottles of jack on the wall
my stomach is getting sicker
my mind is sharp like a noodle
my tongue is getting slicker

wish you could see me right now, mom
*******, i'll take a picture

i remember that night on your front steps
smoking cigarettes and talking with your mother
while
i cradled your heart and
you cried on my chest

i remember middle school english class
and your first thong,
pink and white and blue

i remember we made that bourbon summer
last until december

i remember bottle rockets and champagne
the morning your brother died

i remember carrying you home
in the rain
the day after you escaped from the hospital
and you cried then, too.

i remember lying on the cold ***** tile
of your mother's kitchen
whispering Neruda in your ear
shivering & sweating with you
that night we took ecstasy

i remember the first night
you let me slip an honest prayer between your lips

i am a citizen of the terrible landscape
preaching to savages
hair-raised, growling and
sniffing each other.

& the wind has
not a penny to spare
for the frightening world

i am the thought provoking senator
of this state
i dance naked on broken wrists
and beer cans full of tobacco spit

my mind is crazed
on cartoons and
my lungs absorb my own
existence in a cigarette.

i am perched on a roof
the green dusk sky stretched
out like a beach towel
above me.

thirty-four stories up
and i hold the moon in
a cradle.