Made a home in
The County of Emmet
The smell of another Lucky Strike
As you’re trucking, state lines in the rear view

You made the trip down
Took you over to the field
To watch them circle the bases
Spring of ’01, the last time I’d see you in health

Made your arrangements
Buried you a block away
78 of Nemaha, right over on 6th street,
The paper read

Time of Day mid-afternoon
The smell of a Texas June
I’m sleeping in a car,
The news is crossing state lines, impedes my innocence

I learned about selfishness and mortality
As the youngest of the grandkids
Just trying to find a spot to sleep in your basement
I never heard your stories about the war

Casting waves of pure lore
To line the yielding lips
A heart of splinters like the crown of thorn
Chasing the shade of an eclipse

Shirt drawn open, pulling smoke
Staggered to the racing strait
Tilted head as he spoke
Prose of prayer to the landscape

Pleading to follow the saints
Plunging to kneel like a ribbon to gravity
Make him in canvass and paint
Trace him in the chasm of apathy

As the horizon peaks and pales
He's dizzy with indigo fumes
Abides home by the formidable trail
And cursing the mirthless tune

When they ask I’ll say
I didn’t go anywhere
Because I didn’t believe I could

I’ll tell them that my hollow promises
Although, tethered to good intentions
Were only a chasm of misdirection

I will speak on how our appetite
Wasn’t an insatiable craving
Rather an agent of dodging our realities

That the bounty of gifts and
Assuredness of future company
Cannot abate the 13 hundred miles

When they ask I’ll say
That the madness of two
Wasn’t sacred or shared

I’ll clue them in on how
Connections are opaque
And being ironically self-destructive isn’t fun anymore

I might say that I knew you
But you forgot me
Because there’s well-dressed guys in every college town.

Ain't it sweet?
We're the first generation
To have our nostalgia packaged and sold
Directly to us.

God, most men have to
Search a pawn shop for that.
But not us.
We are the pawns.

Ain't it sweet?
We turned ironic self-destruction
Into a photograph filter.
Now everyone is comfortable in grey.

All of our jokes are about deprecation.
But the humor only lies in
The idea that everything we value
Is constantly depreciating.

Ain't it so ******* sweet?
We couldn't get enough reality television
So we sacrificed a nation
To a reality star.

Now I'm peering over
A pile of dog-eared books
Of poem and history.
Tell me when it's safe to come out

do you think your parents would've gone into medical debt to save you
when you turned blue
if they had known you'd be this way

maybe the money and time
would have been better saved
on someone who wasn't pacing the room
24 years after the fact

looking for something to support
his body weight
a belt around the air vent
where is my pocket knife

born with the same demons & disease
as Pistol Pete
even your heroes are tragic mirrors
you need to talk to somebody

and stop relenting when you go too far
all he wants is for you to feel small
cower and adhere
to a militant narcissist

can't we all just admit this isn't how
it was supposed to go
and I'm the sum of
my own mistakes and fears

Between the fractured minutes you spare,
Dare to mend the "have's" and "have not's"
Shrouded in sequence of doubt,
Attractive to solidarity

Sewn and trussed, composed
A patchwork marionette
Dances a laborious bore;
Yawning freckle of instance

Seen in different colors
Is the combusting stars;
The Leonis and jagged thread,
Hanging dead in the absolute

Fortuned are their frames
And the art, dulled beyond corners
One, alive in sound and vibrance
The other, roamed in the spoiled moor