Make-up won't make you pretty,
a smile will.

End times upon us, great, crushing, inevitable
Black dawn sunrise in the west
Evil walks fearless on hallowed ground
Holly wreaths wrung out tied nooses
Hollow gallows for hollow men
They're all ******* anyway
Holy of holies in radioactive decay
Brilliant and brutal
Atmosphere is the enemy
Headlights hostile pedestrians hostile
Mirage from heaven hostile!
Abhorrent destruction assured
All sides hostile!
Nerve endings fire fire fire
Senseless mindless
Waking reality constant violence
Have mercy on me

Dragged out screaming, senseless from the hallows of martyrdom
My father's mother's wayward brother
Baptized in propaganda and searing lead
Kamikaze death machine to paranoia fever dream
A noble experiment in utter catastrophe
Half measure, interstellar tourniquet
Stem the free flow of blood like inconvenient statistical evidence
Dripping down born-again ****** America's chin
Vector-like, everything explodes outwards
And on trajectories like these only friction is holy
Murphy's law in ecstatic altercation
A furious life lived under an anachronistic magnifying glass
Truly the only thing worth decaying for

-Knowing that no matter the day, the sun will always rise and it will always set and each time, it will be even beautiful than the time before
-There are always new books to read and new music to listen to
-A cup of coffee on a cold winter day
-Freshly dried blankets and sheets
-The butterflies that come with a first date
-Loving and being loved back
-Knowing that no matter where you are in the world, you and the people you love are looking at the same moon
-Music that gives you chills
-Lines in books that are so good that you have to read them twice
-The fact that you're young and the world is IN fact, yours

Down and out, broken like so many burned out automobiles
Yet blazing infinite with immeasurable conviction &
Rapturous with the weight of destiny
Manic hysteria drove them off the overpass
Hipster Valkyries raised them to avant-garde Valhalla
And the eight o'clock news made messiahs of the lot
Nirvana sold last weeks newspapers on the side of the highway
Rolling with a sweet glimmer of a shark toothed smile
On the horizon hunting for a high that can't ever be attained
Holiest of Holies on a red lipped mountain top
Or a supermarket bathroom stall scrawled with ****** madness
The Lord's Prayer in black ink, brutal and simple
There were misty eyed girls on the morning train to some great and unenviable elsewhere
And by night the crows circled six times, once for each of the dead end dreams swallowed that day
Candid and conscious, where the wild ones roam the city
Burning the flags they wave and waving the flags they burn
America's sweethearts on the run from the police
Sawing at heartstrings like bows on a twisted violin
From the mountains to the valleys the winds screamed senseless in their joy
Liberation and the kiss of a lipstick Judas were on everyone's mind
Martyrs a mile a minute, a dime a dozen
Down the line the angels wept gloria mundi
For the sinners sung with passion, the saints stoically mourned
The revelers and the rioters and the street kids looking for a ride home
The toxic kissed stars that set the city lights the shame
And the masochists, blessed with a gypsy goddess' double edged kiss
And broken down like so many burned out automobiles
Yet blazing infinite with immeasurable conviction &
Rapturous with the weight of destiny

In the depth of pagan nightmares, rose the shadowed curtains of my doubt
To choke out the nonchalant sun, aloof on the morning sky
Two deaths, I died last night and a third might bring good luck
But for now I am alive and I feel like the Rapture
Tracking time through ticks on my track marked clock-work veins
While dead buildings mock me through the streets
Where has my supposed talent gone?
Some specter lingers, inverted above my bed
Number 12 in poise, but not quite enlightened
Frenzy is in my muscles, my ligaments laugh like high hell
My teeth burn like the Ohio River and I've bitten off all my nails
An atom bomb in a gilded cage
And a real tear-jerking ******
If you haven't put the pieces together by now,
Don't try

I hear the rain
From where I lay
     The filth ran off the surface and seeped into the soil
     In this way things are never truly cleansed
All the planets at once aligned
Save lovely Venus, who spun out into the black
      To dance with the ghosts of the hundreds of dead moons crumpled up and discarded
The swords of angels cauterize the crying wounds of nature
      And a ****** of crows descends on the Great Plains
      The last buffalo roared to shake Heaven and raised Hell instead
Of mountains that sighed and rivers that fed
    Mortal men shrugged at the meaning of intimacy
    21 revolutions around a singular moment, and clarity still escapes
Lie still and the sun will swallow you whole,
      If the Earth won't open up first
To **** and be killed is a dear privilege
But still there were vagrants up North, and 'round trash can fires the cities heard them sing
Father to brother to son
    Mother to sister to daughter
        Lover to loved to nothing at all
And nobody to wait out the night
Even the rain is unmoved

Conceived in hazy agony
The path to the city of gold stretched endlessly into the mountains
My father walked it once, and I think I'll stay home
There is an eternity between each of my words
And in that space ghosts wait impatiently
For me to cave in
The American South is all ablaze
And two headed catfish swim the Ohio River
Appalachia's lullabies end as bitterly as they begin
Life comes together in fragments
And ephemeral cycles reach their waning stages
God took pity just this once, and the following day brought apocalypse
An ending fit for songs that would never be sung
So glorious they never could have saw it coming
But I'll drink to it regardless