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Freds not dead Mar 2011
I scratched out the names but let me tell you about them

He sits in the sun talks of life
as a passion, he’s tried to **** himself twice
once in a car, once with pills and cheap *****
now he jumps off tall things like cliffs and
antennas and people’s shallowness but he uses a parachute
which seems necessary
he jumps and the blood forgetting it is blood
nothing matters
he tells me it’s the closest humans will ever get to
flying.

The next
He sits in the shades of his four walls.
He can drink a bottle of gin and still drive
To his ex-girlfriend’s house and break his teeth
against the window. He takes pictures of alley ways
and flatlands which make up all the tiny pieces of
America. He screams at night, plays golf and tells me
simple things that make more sense than theology and philosophy,
things like Be Cool and Life Takes Time. Billboard truths.

She presses her lips against a strong sky,
a thing she hopes to believe in. she meditates daily and swears
she’s seen her soul make breakfast and burn the toast.
She floats so well people call her a Queen. If I could be level
headed she’d be my wife. She’s been hiding her perfection
and she knows it, it might be why nervous breakdowns are part
of her diet. She has made meaning out of thin air, I’ve seen it done.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
You’ll sit around with your girls
Drinking cheap wine
You never open the blinds
Leave the light out
What you think doesn’t move me
I’ve almost starved trying to feed myself on you
I hope you call me crazy and laugh at my words

I burn bridges to create
I can’t get inside of you without tension
Without some form of heartbreak
Imagined or created by fire

If we had stayed clean, unstained
Unmoved, unexcited
I would have stayed that lovely catatonic color.

I filled myself to excess on your beauty
Your cool-head lack of insanity
The way you clung to my neck
Pecked
At my bones
The quiet mornings with your body arching
Your fingers in my hair

I burn bridges
Because they are practical and boring
You meet on the bridge
You don’t scream from your gut from the river bank

I can’t say I haven’t tasted sweetness
Like a syrup in my filthy mouth
Fruits turn gray
Fingers scratch the skin after the collapse.

I burn bridges because of my obsession with fire
With devouring,
With the passions that destroy

You lay in bed scared of Death
And jealousy is all I’ve got left
You wake up and you go to work
And your co-workers smile
And you smile and you mean it, the smile.

I can’t fit that anywhere.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
My brain is a wheelchair
And people think I am flying
Over cities and wastelands
Jungle gyms and green public pools
I assume the role of deformity
I am my very best Judas
Because I am lazy and can walk with the rest of them

My heart is deformed and dumb
And perfect people pity it
They hold it tight and translate
Its mumblings and tantrums
Into innocent sermons
I feel bad for my heart too
It should have been thrown off a cliff
Like the ancients used to do

My hands are plastic machines
And I fear them more than God
They scratch me in my sleep
They poke holes in my stomach and my faces
But worst of all
They write letters that show people
places I’ve never dared to be.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
Alone he woke. The cold bed meant nothing. Real fingers, real light cutting through the real denseness. Today will be marked with an X.
Wide eyed, blood turned to kerosene.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
The cities change faster than my mortal heart
Without something melting
Over our poorly lit souls
We forget the words growing on our teeth

In all the clusters of the shiny people
Where you and I lose our own concepts
Change and slide into new skins
Trying to adapt the last centuries into this one

We are idolized and hover in our moth costumes
Around street lights sticking out our rich tongues
Without the poetry of death and taking lives
We can fly around at all speeds. Free.

The veins of the city pump underground
And I see nothing but what’s in front of me.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
1.
You say the most awe-full things.
You say things.
And if that's not troublesome enough
You really put your guts into it
When you say:
"If you want me to dance
I have to be able to hear your
beat"

That strange flight
I don't make music for dancing
I make music so the dancer and the dance are impossible.

2.
The ears attached
The you can only say one thing
when dancing is impossible
The thing is:
"I want you to give it to me,
Anyway you want"
Standing on the ground
in a bedroom open-ended
hair, shooting out like rays
I can't tell if I lied or not
about dancing.
Freds not dead Mar 2011
You know
When I tell you
Calm your
Head
I’m not telling you to
Let go
I’m telling you to not grip
So tight
To stop clawing
So hard
You have life’s thread
Under your nails
Along with centuries of dirt
Blood from the Great
Wars
And you sit
Thinking
You are alone

When you wake up
Soon
And realize the things
I told you about the
Past
And you send me a post card
With a modest, honest
Un-artistic picture of a
Snow bird
Signed sincerely
With love

You know I will write you
A small letter
And I will fill it
With some kind of
Stuffy intellectualism
Something that starts
Slowly like
As
Heidegger said or
Derrida shows us about writing
Or
Emerson told us we don’t miss out because of this and this
or
Even worse
It was Nietzsche
Who told us
About how to treat criminals
And you will grip
And claw
And chew
Those words
In your cage of a home
And staring through
The bars
You will know
That
All that
Heavy literature
And all this talk about
Freedom
Time
And killing
Can be known so simply
In a wink
Or the flash of
An eye.
That’s why we are criminals.
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