A day in the life of an alley cat, struck dead on the least busy street in the smallest town in Nebraska.
1 am: Druggy, *** you money, ******, don't deserve love, not easy to tell mom. I think of you. Your lungs are begging for my scold. Control is the word you use when no other fits the sentence. You occupy my mind when I am restless, testing the limits of kindness and low voices.
4 am: Your smile, the warmest hot chocolate of your eyes, your knuckles, the baby fat that melted from you, it haunts me. It's like I caught of a glimpse of the wrong angel, the half rotten, beyond gone, but still glowing angel. I killed you with a .45 and a gallon of mouthwash. You dripped into the Earth as a puddle beneath my toes. Gracious Lord, do not forgive me. I know I don't.
8 am: Insomnia without poetry. Tired without body. Maggots without mouths. Catholic priest, without sympathy. God without mercy. Drug abuse, without the realization of undignified addiction. Suicide without the comfort of killing, certainty.
3 pm: Sentiment, true and real, above annoyance and protectiveness. I am now a ghost above a body, finally weightless, finally free of His hands.
6 pm: Joy breaks open like a candy, soft center.
10 pm: Life tears my fingers open, unwraps the flesh from bone like Christmas. I feel my tongue fall out. Dusty antique radios are cleaned, losing authenticity. Their songs scream, sounding a lot like Billy Joel, after the catgut snaps. I feel my mind crawl out of the china cabinet.
11 pm: Nothing. There's really nothing to say at all.

Moon child dances over water
Long hair covering eyes, color not seen by man before, unimaginable
Fresh bruises of rose, lemon, lavender
Appear on her soles

Stars fall from the black canopy tops of the forest I used to trespass in as a child, finding the definition of apparition and swamp and UFO.

Coyotes break the sound barrier over the water of the river that I used to fall in, pick bugs out of.

I find myself lying awake in the small hours of the morning, thorns pushing into my back and jail birds clanging the chains around the branches of the trees above me, the sky shaking to the tune of their wails and wings flapping desperately, cracks of heat lightening rattling them alive.

Night is the loudest color. I find this through broken flashlights. I find this through "Do Not Enter" signs. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.

Wash the soap from between
the folds of my brain

Lose my mind in the living room
T.V is all static

Panic in the dark
for what seems like hours

*Control is an illusion