I am a well-maintained automobile,
battery charged and tires rotated,
brake system probably needs to be adjusted and my drive-shaft may need to be realigned
but otherwise
you could probably make a decent profit off of me.
My blood is thick motor oil, and
my scent, a lit cigar
ever-burning down to an infinite ****.
I'd probably go for about $10,000 (if you turned back the odometer 20,000 miles).

when i was a child
i was told tales of
mosquitoes' songs and
car crash children;
i covered my ears
as tightly as i could,
but it is common knowledge
that nightmares always
prevail, and i was haunted
        night after night
with the reality of
what our world has
come to.

tell me, when you were young
did you dream of
drinking with the
'grown ups'?
    --i did--
     then i met a razor blade
     who told me
     i have an addictive
     personality,
     and i fell in love with
     a boy with an
     alcoholic father
(things changed after that
and i learned that
naivety is a gift
i gave away a long time ago.)

some things don't change:
there will always be three hundred
and sixty five days
in a year,
( except for when there is
threehundredsixtysix. )
there are times when i
wished i was a constant too,
but then i realized
i'd be stuck in my past
and that was a very
scary place to be-
now i am thankful for
the constant flow
of in and out, the constant
change of the tides.
although i cry at change
i w e l c o m e i t.

one of these days
my mind will no longer be sharp
and i won't remember
my children's names
and my sister will be gone
and i will be
                    alone.
i would like to think
that i'll be happy
just to know ( silence )
but in reality, i will probably
spend my time wishing
i had treated my mother better
and had not let the
alcoholic's son free.
(i will be plagued by
nightmares once again,
the same ones of my
childhood.)

then you were gone)

                                        and all of a sudden
i felt my bones turn to dust
&i; became nothing more than the
distance between two dirt roads
that led to a dream i could never quite reach.

i became nothing, which scared the me that
used to be something, until something was nothing
but a memory.  but

nothing could see all of the universe
at the height of the swing set and
one single-cell world underneath something's
fignernail.

i am still nothing,
and nothing is okay with that.

but even though i can hold all of space
within the palm of my nothing hand
i still can't learn how to breathe at night
when all my lungs can find is an undisturbed silence
and my last remaining memories of you.

if only we could choose which scars
fade and which remain;
i'd rid myself of every that bore
semblance to your name.