The evenings never flow,
never dissolve like cigarette smoke,
they are a torture party
for invisible forces
that howl in my head,
reminding me of my loss and-
what feels like their perpetual victory.

Only hours ago
you were counting the notches of my spine,
you were whispering love
and grabbing handfuls of my hair,
I bit your ear,
you scratched my arm,
we made a melodious war
for guaranteed peace.

I think of you often,
a prisoner of disjointed sheets,
your amber eyes,
seeking foreign dreams in mine.

I swallow my longing to run back,
only to rest my head against a pillow
that smells heavily of your perfume.

The voices howl
and I don't sleep.

A prisoner of the hallucination,
hardly happy, quick to open a floodgate of personal misery,
talking often of unique pain, of places before been,
asking only for sympathy and creative license-
Past Ring Bearer/Future Funeral Singer,
you're selfish to think you mean much at all.
What was always is,
greater wisdom is greater sorrow,
ask the holograms begging on boulevards,
ask the nihilists and the naysayers,
or even the understanding heart of Solomon.

Life is a pastoral play using pastels,
washed away and rewritten over and over again.
Your superior melancholy is the loudest cliché.
If you've got any love, cradle it like a newborn babe.
It's the reason that will make you glad you stayed.

For every headstone,
there once was a bouquet.
For every brown, breaking leaf,
there once was a summer breeze.
For every noose-a necktie,
for every slave-a free.

No need to trudge the trough,
no need to join in the polyphonic symphony
of 7 billion people drowning under the current of time,
there is only personal progression,
but you have to shut up and dream for a second.

I am held in the scene by strings,
strings caressing, cutting the city's screams,
screams of jubilation and screams of paranoia,
paranoia at the approaching deadline,
deadlines always on our minds,
mind if I stroll through the wall of hate,
hate from your grey eyes,
eyes framed with your bright blonde hair,
hair that once before was described by my pen.

I killed you in a ****-poor short story.
I gave you a symbolic death.
It was a generous offering of peace.

Redemption earned but already forgotten,
forgotten along with those nostalgic rhymes locked,
locked in tightly formed verses of love poetry,
poetry for a tethered future,
future? Even Zion was built on ruins.

I killed your lover, too.
I sent her up in flame.
It was hard to have a habitual evening.

it don't matter,
how many times bat the lashes,
the monsoons, the misery, or malice.
it don't matter,
which god or when,
Molly will stick to the dark side of
"I love you"
until she ends.

lucid in America,
     lazy, loose,
ladies of marble, hearts of stone,
the clouds are gathering,
     the trees sparse,
     coarse winds cool, collide,
realign the telephone lines,
smoke exits the nostrils in good time,
     three-piece suits,
     hard handshakes,
     heydays and hollidays both end in headaches,
lucid, loose, tight as a feather,
     riding the Times and drinking  empty cups,
     full and flavored, gentle, gentle,
     the melody is quaint,
     but the melody will play,
sing easy, kissing the graves,
the skeletons are lonely, ask them to stay,
brief and brittle, the remnants of the middle,
quake and make me realize the end has and always
will be nigh,
    egotripping brothers and daughters at pearly gates,
    walking crates half in dismay, half soaked in rays,
interlaced, tracing barefoot on interstates,
humming with the meadowlarks, humming at the dark,
sometimes we're art,
mostly we're stark,
      dancing and dying at once,
      trival yet trying, the beauty we're still buying,
      lucid, free, and easy,
knowingly drifting the pains, the plains
      of America.

there is a
way,
  a truth,
       and a light,
and
  I'm often
    reminded,
        it isn't mine.

there is a tradition
and a constitution,
gods in powder wigs
talking through their
wooden teeth,
and I'm often reminded
my thoughts are fiction.

all new friends are quickly
old,
all parents
die of heart attacks
after analyzing high crimes.

there is a
way,
  a truth,
       and a light,
and
  I'm often
    reminded,
        it's outta my sight.

there is a piece of Anna's hair in my teeth,
there are blackbirds circling in a hollow sky,
and I'm supposed to have no doubts,
and I'm supposed to avoid shouts.

all babes get slutty or drown in bongwater,
and I'm expected to call them cute,
all patterns have a strange affinity for ******* me,
and all love is adrift in a staggering, stagnate sea.

there is a
way,
  a truth,
       and a light,
and
  I'm often
    reminded,
        I'm out of line.