I
The phone was screaming in my pocket
its voice was muffled by the pile of clothes
on top of it

The hotel water was almost too hot
it blushed my scalp
and cascaded down my face
in a way that should have felt like baptism
but didn't

After what felt like an eternity
the call went to the black hole
that is my neglected voicemail
now at over a hundred missed calls

I didn’t want to talk
not to Dad, not to Mom,
not to my fiancé,
and definitely not to some reporter
trying to make our ****** up family
the topic of the nine o’clock news

II
The pipes in the wall
clunked around for a second
as I turned the ****, cutting the water off
I stepped out of the shower
somehow feeling less clean than when I entered

For a moment I stood there,
towel over my head
in complete darkness

I closed my eyes and saw him
standing across from me
his eyes, locked with mine
dad’s gun in his shaking hands -
pointed directly at my head
unblinking, full of hatred, anger
and fear

They’ll call him a monster
and knowing what he’s done,
I won’t be able to say they’re wrong

III
Sympathizers will say that the divorce
messed him up somehow
or that he inherited our mother’s mental illness
or that he played too many first person shooters –
which is just ******* stupid

Lying on the hotel bed,
I nakedly examined the ceiling
mapping out the distance between water stains
like a cartographer

The last time he called me
he was in tears,
because some ****** from his school
beat him to a pulp
and shoved his face in dog ****

I can’t help but dwell
on something I said to him that night:

“People like that don’t change
they become ******* adults
and keep kicking people around
because they can
Because they’re rich and we’re poor
and they don’t want to see people like us
we remind them that the world isn't perfect
and doesn't revolve around them”

I don’t want to believe
that I planted the seed,
that the one time he listened to me –

IV
Six people died
most of them, kids no older than seventeen
one teacher, and a janitor - tagged by a stray bullet
two kids have been in critical condition
for the last three days

He must have been terrified
in those last moments
before the cops riddled him with holes

He must have regretted it
or at least regretted
not having an escape plan

He never did think things through
unlike me,
connecting the countries on the ceiling
drawing imaginary lines
of cause and effect
and trying to figure out what it means
to be a big brother
in the absence of a little one

The still quiet of the empty apartment
serves to only echo the steady tapping
of rainwater dripping onto the concrete
just outside the window

Everything feels like it should be painted
by Picasso, during his blue period
in various shades of the clam, but icy color

The fact that it isn't
gives the soul a sense of nervous
displacement. All of these commonplace
colors and shapes feel foreign and surreal

The world seems like it should be frozen
in both the sense of stillness and temperature
but it’s not

A warm breeze is moving the bland, beige curtains
and that is more terrifying than any monster
that has never hidden under your bed

The rainwater still drips, and echoes
and nothing is wrong, out of place, or eerie
except that it should be

and so it is

Two hours till Kentucky-
The world is on fast-forward around us
The side of my forehead is flat
against the passenger side window
Trees crowd behind guardrail for miles - 
protesting highway pollution.

Two hours till Kentucky -
On the eighth round about this CD.
about around the fifth listen, songs began to blend into one another, morphing into ambient noise
that filled the empty moments between conversation
and the struggle against waves of tempting sleep.

Two hours till Kentucky-
I pause the song to explain
the biographical significance
of a particular lyric.
You're too focused on
the nerve-wracking traffic to indulge me.

Two hours till Kenricky-
My seat reclined, I am watching the clouds
creeping briskly across the sky
through the panorama of the windshield -
a silent movie.

Two hours till Kentucky -
an eternity of moments
gone as soon as they happen.
Evaporating into the air

We'll be there
in no time.

Meet me, once again, at the breakwall
where we will spend time sitting
reminiscing about times we spent wishing
on a sinking star for more time to spend.

Let’s go fishing for our selves
in snapshots of past lives
and see if we can find,
in this murky water of nostalgia,
some kind of definition.

We will quest forth, finding more questions
than answers, and accepting them
with a peaceful resignation
we could never have in our raging youth.

I’d talk about how
we used to debate
with our words
carved into primitive weapons
for savage discussion -

To win arguments with each other
doing battle for days
not realizing that language
was not evolved for the purpose of combat
but rather, the opposite.

We’d watch the waves wash ashore
all the places and people we’d been
all the bits and pieces of past tragedies
will lay before us
like a thousand-year-old shipwreck.

We will laugh together
the way you do,
when you see the heavy black clouds
storming off toward a distant somewhere
and they seem smaller somehow
less frightening.

You’d say something about how
we were the most obsessed with our mortality
when we were furthest from ever facing it.

And we’ll sit there for a while
just thinking about that.

Church bells.
That's my first memory.
Waking up to the sound of church bells
with a rawness in my throat
and stiffness in my cheeks
that could only come
from crying myself to sleep the night before

The sun is leaking through the window binds,
painting the entire room this muted sepia
corraling much of the sunlight into a few distilled beams
that spotlight dust and dead skin
waltzing in the air

I haven't the faintest clue about what
or why I'd been crying -
just laying there
overwhelmed with great relief
like a mausoleum was lifted from my chest
and I was taking my first breath in months

I want to say it was a Sunday
I always want to say it with conviction
but that might just be the church bells
which I've heard
ring every day

be still - do not blink
I can’t wait to remember
this moment with you

one hundred kids drown -
Community is canceled-
what a sad world!

face lit by the screen
empty head, so full of thought
digging for some truth

aimlessly driving
through a beautiful landscape
made ugly by roads

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.