Forever from now, after we are dead and gone, scientists will x-ray our bodies. They will see the way our backbones sit behind our breastplates. Our chests will resemble busted church gates. Any soul big enough to do that to a body is ******* beautiful.

The ticket stall is empty
Sunlight bounces off the pavement
And reflects off the double doors

There are no posters in the frames

In my town
Most places are too cold for pretend

Against the white
In thick black letters
The headlining show
“Theater Closed Broiler Broken”

Bored at work
I take a razor to a white eraser

I slice an x down the marble white
So sharp the lines are invisible
Until I bend it

It will take much friction to hide what I did
But if I am too rough
It will break

The backyard is the smallest dead wheat field
Raccoons visit without fear

I come to leave food for my cats
Who I could not take with me
They already act like they don’t know me

I punch a hole in a wall
To make this place look more deserted

The giant broken window
The toilets filled with **** and bleach
Because the water stopped
The cigarettes in the driveway

I’ve never abandoned anything before

It feels like a place where bad memories come to pray
Like weeds finding life in deserted places

You make lists
Giving yourself reasons to come back
The bedroom fan
The screws for the bed frame
The beer in the fridge
To leave the cats food and fresh water

To pray in a church
By punching holes in walls till I uncover an answer

Outside
Raccoons are waiting
For the food to be left alone

There must have been at least a couple hundred pounds of it
All trash
All things to let go

I find pens
A glittery black heart shaped paddle from Halloween
Old poetry
Stories
Photos
A set of drums

This how you body-bag your excess
Give your heart fat a proper burial

It is shedding weight

Take what you need
Take what you need
Enough so not sticking around is easy

I have a runaway pipe-dream
That in the telling
I have whiskey lung
And a voice like carnival gravel
Like semi-ground teeth in a bag you hold on your tongue

A comic strip hobo
With a stick and a red rag

Fresh starts imply shaking dead weight
That includes people

So much **** gone
**** I never needed
And was never going to use
But I was living with it

Norm sits in his honda. He has whisky breath so ***** he feels it change the color of his teeth as he breathes. His voice has become all gravel from a circus pipe-dream about how he'll leave here one day. He feels it like rusty train tracks tracing his bones. It itches his joints, the rusting. He starts the ignition and heads home.

Jonathen
Jonathen wake up

She stands in my doorway
Green knitted scarf
***** pink pajamas
Eyes and skin jaundiced yellow
A ***** Babushka if I were Russian

If this were a movie I'd be cursed by now

There is a man with a shopping cart in the driveway
I think he's trying to break in*

With my baseball bat
I step outside full of all the anger I had reserved for the day

The street is empty and cold

It's the fear
We make it up
We always do