My hooded head casts a shadow
across the overflowing ashtray.
My exhaled smoke is silhouetted on the
handcrafted clay.
In the shape of an oyster,
painted with the colors of
rebellious 21st century youth:
Red. Gold. Green.
With a flare of "originality."
Breeze, light, cold
escorts winter across my
aged face and I see all that my life is:
Tar. Work. Tar. Tar. Sleep.
Work. Tar. Eat. Work. Tar.
Tar. Work. Eat. Work.
Drink coffee.
Tar.
Sleep.
Die.
Is this equation what I am
reduced to?
Simple formula, obsessive compulsive
DREAM.
The exponents of my life,
variables and names:
Tar. to the power of X.
Tar. to the power of M.
But exponents and powers
mean little to drowning men.
Can a man suffocate on
his own routine?
Can a man fashion a noose
from the fibers of his
"adult life?"
Look, Ma!
I'm all growed-up.
I have murdered adventure
and the youth that lives
inside it.
I snapped one too many thin branches,
fell through the thin ice,
and now I am addicted to solid ground.
I will stand on the banks,
watching the children
ice-skate around my ashtray
that overflows with
every "yesterday" and
half-smoked "this one time"
that comprise my
former life.
I am a grown-up now.

Slipping out of focus now,
this slow fall into a shallow pit
has countless audiences on
seat's edges.
This is the kind of thing they make movies about.
Convoluted past exhaustion,
cliche spirals sell their earthly trinkets
and head for Hades.
Destination: Ninth Circle.
How is it possible? This
alienated deprivation of reality
is not all my own, never will be.
I have become everything one-dimensional,
a decaying heap of facades. Leftovers from
more photogenic weekdays remind me
of duality, of a set of gaudy earrings
I have apparently not yet forgotten.
But I find it better to let the corpses sleep.
Rest assured, they will wake eventually.

Tomorrow is a shattered mirror,
blinking at me, showing the sun's teeth,
as though fending off starving stray cats.
There was no sun today,
I worked while it slept below
its sheets made of the empty fields
that lie east of my home.
Dereliction, undiluted, joins ranks with the
birds who have forgotten winter is coming.
Blotches of paint on stormcloud canvas,
like Jackson ******* began painting the October sky
and gave up after three or four flails of his
glorified, dripping brush.
Although there is a reflection here,
it is a dream now. The details have been
misplaced, and we can only recall major
landmarks and plot twists.
The surface, however, looks the same
as it always has,
and will go on doing so,
through the death of tomorrow, and her child.