Nights pass and I pick away at my skin.
Supine in this hallowed hollow of unwashed bedsheets and detritus
Spending my time, the most precious currency to date, trudging through virtual stacks of head shots of those I've known or half-known.
A healthy reminder that you are alone.
You are behind.
You ****** up early, kid.
You are behind in some sense, even if half the acquaintances pleasant or otherwise in your class are working jobs not much better than yours.
What I really hate is seeing joy.
Seeing these people and their ****** happiness, it's great.
    Really strengthens the misanthropic beast I've been feeding all week
    And it feels good, anger
Especially when the only other things I'm used to feeling are
    worried or
    bored
So its nice to indulge, I guess
I don't have to look for something to fuel my complaints, my bitter unwarranted jealousy –
    that's an annoying component –
    the awareness –
    this would all be much more enjoyable if I didn't notice these things about myself
but noticing is a habit I've nourished
    for years far exceeding
    the time spent with a cigarette between my fingers

I've been brainwashed. Several somebodies have taken a cerebral antiseptic to the outermost crevices in my head, trying to scrape away my thoughts deemed poisonous. Condemned, pieces on the wrong end of a long finger, almost touching the targeted areas. The finger long and rigid attached to an arm, long and rigid, like that of a cruel king delivering a death sentence.
    Scrubbed me clean, they did. They know I am fond of it, so they went deep, taking extra precaution. Scoured. Sent me off, bid me goodwill with farewell kisses, waving handkerchiefs from modest doorways and lattice windows, farewell. Be careful out there, remember all we've taught you from the kindness in our hearts and the space in our pockets, our hungry bank accounts.
    Play along, play nice. Let's sit and try to write poetry when it feels like we forgot what it was. Smoke more cigarettes than usual because they're lights and it's the same. Walk to town, around town, back to the second floor to your strange home. Forget how to measure the passing of time without using hours and days. Nothing catches my attention when every minute's watched, waiting for the next small thing to happen. Live a life both empty and full. Miss your friends, experience a dull ache in your chest, then clean away that sad feeling with the next small thing you have to do joy-free. You don't have to like it they say. You just have to do it so I'm told. Just do what you're told. Don't think about how long it's been since you felt alive. Don't think about why you don't feel alive.
    Just do what you're told. There'll be time for being young when you're old and comfortable, when everything's set in place for you to live without financial difficulty or crushing loneliness carefully ignored. There are several minds I miss. There are people who remind me to feel alive, remind me that I want to, remind me of the hunger carefully ignored but all pervading, present as a dull ache. Remind me what I enjoy, remind me what it feels like to want something. Rekindle the cold ashes that had once been ablaze with glorious thoughts and words to strike dumb. Remind me how it feels to be powerful.
    A life of endless toil, tireless subordination, unbefitting of kings among men, we who see what others cannot, we who endure the suffering of madness because poetry is the fruit of our sacrifice, the music constantly in our heads. We for whom simply being alive has never been enough. We for whom the thought of ending a poem after it's begun feels like admitting a friend's passing.
    We who don't know how to stop.
    We who will never want to.

I’ve got fire in my blood
    that doesn’t seem to want to die resilient
I try to quench the hungry coals
But my youth is too strong
My mind alight
My yearning eyes and flesh

I’ve tried to quench
I’ve drowned and drowned to no avail.
I gave up, at one point.
I submitted to quiet life and told myself it’s what I wanted
I shuttered the flame – covered it, alleived the
intensity
but only
superficially.

I’ve since given up giving up
and resolved to restore my youth
    which had been willingly
    sacrificed
the juggernaut of playful recklessness
beating its fists against the inside of my ribcage
trying with all its might
to remind me that
I’m alive

It is wonderfully volatile
I had forgotten the allure of excitement
of feeling something again
So the fire man burns and beats
sending dangerous exotic enticing signals to my head
Floods me with potential energy
to be dispensed
unrestrained
by
caution.

There are occasions that call for misdemeanor.
There exist instances of philanthropy in selfishness
        i don't have too many good things to say
so i'll just write my little thoughts
        on this little paper
                and call it a day

Another night spent lining my lungs for want of something better or worse to do. Remembering friction, remembering nights spent sparking smokes and staring drunk at the moon, looking to pick a fight. This night there are wisps in the sky with winds shifting them so I can’t decide whether my view is obstructed – whether I’m staring directly at the steel circle full-on or with impediment of future rain. I don’t care which it is, I’m busy thinking on the other side of Michigan, missing friends and mistresses, the families of fall and winter, the community thereof. I’m still in my staring match with the moon in a plea for it to tell me things I can’t think of myself. Cold nights, coats and comrades, brothers at arms and legs and minds. Sisters too, but fewer of them present in the alleys or the porches we torchers frequent, inhabit frequently to satisfy bad habits and good ones, keeping contact with the community of those pulling at pipes and Pall Malls because they’re cheap and we’re cheap too. Nights passed with a ceaseless and confused current through thresholds. Too much beer, too many smiles unmerited, dumbing ourselves down to engage in daunting discourse, drawing from the source of courage so many seek at our age. The watering hole’s dried up, so we didn’t drink water but liquor and beer, anything to quell the fear of social surrender. I’m not here for you but I don’t know that yet, so I’m trying revive the dying conversation though I lack the concentration to resuscitate this discussion on life support. It’s doomed to negligence, and so are you though as bipedal beasts go, you’re a looker; the minutes mind themselves, I’m too busy for time, I’m waiting for something to happen, trying to tip the momentum with whispers, smiles, grace.
        Tomorrow I’m going to wake up hung over the edge of my bed to curse my head. I’m too tired to kick and scream so you just picture me putting up a fuss against pulling on my pants and slumping downstairs and we’ll call it even though we can see it’s odd that we do this to ourselves, that we spend so much time and expend such effort to effect ourselves in similar situations one night after one day after others. This is where the present costs too much. This is where we leave our heads and shoes. This is where I subject myself to symptom, when I lose bits of myself at all these thresholds we cross only to disentangle ourselves. The bed sheets are a ******* trap, a maze a labyrinth, and I don’t really wake up until I’m back asleep and by then it’s too much too early to make myself more human.

Drinking *** to reminisce about fun times drinking *** and talking about dumb lines where a sociologist posed as an astronomer and took the moniker to heart claiming forbidden foolish nonsense of black holes and super novas and the Goddess that is Neptune. But he also forbade the odes of the old testament, he nicked the hold on my head and soul and feet until I couldn’t walk because I was too busy kicking my *** and licking my teeth with thoughts of dinner stolen from the solemn souls in the coral reefs – those that Neptune created and nurtured with nursing fingers and eyes that hid cruel truth from the water, the creatures that didn’t suffer the bite that God’s daughter took so long ago, but the flow of the current never ceases it never reaches the bleeding feet connecting repeatedly with the bottom that serves me to sit and think or **** about the gospel spilling from the hostel of the professor’s mouth. And I doubt the drought that lifted my spirits out of the well with the spout of Neptune’s *****. These days I’m on it with a sense of self-flagellation that only makes sense in the dimension of my imagination pondering the nation of the brotherhood of stars and heavenly bodies that weigh so heavy on Mars with the clingy core dragging desperate attention from divine inventions of intervention with rats and cradles. Neptune, who’s cradled in fables and left to such imaginations as those. Invention allows the suspension of disbelief and spite if one might rest in humility in face of such things as humanity where miracles are mistreated and under-recognized and falsely advertised as products of greedy eyes that lie in wait to shake the foundation and tune it to the stellar station or broadcast populated by the whispers of holy apparitions misconstrued as static.
Jacob is the heathen with reason to grasp his brother’s heel and deceive him. The treason to sit up to stand down to kiss the hem of the gown of whatever clown performs a pretty act while he’s in town. The frowns expound and expand for the man whose body spans the sand of the holy land.

I woke up in a cell for the second time in my life not wondering how I managed it again because I
        knew what I did this time.
Drove back from another nights of drinks and dances and smokes
        Kissing the lips I thought I’d never kiss again, maybe
Telling lies and climbing stairs to avoid making people move for me
        So they’ll remember and move for me later when I need it.
People passing substances I’m not supposed to see or consume or be around
        To a degree, at least
                because a few men and the State of Michigan said so
                and I’m bound to their word because of my lifelong place of residence
                and the people who elect to keep things from change.
I sat in that former attic
        The very place where I’ve committed such acts and slept soundly.
Took two on the way home and lost myself on the road
I slipped and slipped. The miles slowly spread my mind out on the highway
        to the point where nothing was left behind my eyes.
The signals sent from the two black holes on the front of my face
They tried to ignite the synapses of sense and caution and consciousness
        but forgot the spread of sense on the highway that the two and ten brought to be
        and so backfired, backed up with nowhere to go but shrivel and dissolve through the dead
                nerve ends
        and spilled out my eyes til I could no longer see.
I don’t know how my mind found its way back into my head after being spread so thin over the asphalt
        Disbelief and depression and shame came with it –
        I suppose some of that must’ve been on the road
        along with a longing for the mattress I’ve dirtied over the years
                the one on the second story of the place I’ve dirtied for years
        Yeah, that one, all the way north of where I wasn’t supposed to be
I did a couple hours’ worth of things I wanted to do.
        I may have to trade a year for that if the high demon woke up to heavy traffic.
I have these three sins gathered under my skin, sticking out quietly.
Again I’ll stand before, and I’ll stand before another
        to receive the boredom and discomfort this state of land and collective mind sees fit
        to pass out to a kid who passed out two times too many.