Not an amulet, an off white vertebrae; bone.
Brass wire, a loop at one end.
It bends as to make sure this will fit.

A gauge that measures mesmerization,
And we both must get along, but
Not because we're not tough enough:
Most of us aren't soft right yet.

So many stiffs, folly after folly.
The whole carful of loose cadavers,
Dangling, their feet hang with wet snow
And carnage,

Not even musk deer pop up,
They've all gone. Roosting in a parabol,
With X's sprayed to their groins.
Burning pop couples

Doing it like laboratory mice. Capybaras
Hiss, my own burnt blood is also
Flocculating.

Turn the cup upside down and
See the fire's balmy lachrymal opaque
Moss while it does not drip.

This is the story of man you asked me about;
Devoid of a muzzle, fur onto his chest; coarse
Hair in a garland.

It is the God of a tool that buzzes into the night.
A plateau for this most sensible study.
We feel another coming.

And when you awoke, your larval tongue
My eye mush, a song of verse and melancholy.
This half list of greatness, a tally we both wish to see.

With the buzz words, "the starving strive," there's no ****** to tilt the pain of not choosing to live life with blind eyes. Even the meek survive is inscribed, each inner-lip that spells out love is just another disgrace four-letter word of a four-letter cause. The environment we live is mocked and shaken to the core, what is this, "One Life To Live?" It's not one day at a time, it's day in day out, sit straight up, you can't just observe. As I choke from swearing, it's curse words that ring bigger than my mouth, I prefer to leave my pants off just get some head, choosing cuddling for grammar wars that then go on eating out. My prayer life is just another absentee ballot with full circles voided, I'm on my knees each morning and night, but I can't figure out when I'm going to start saying the right words. The horror of the story of being a kid, living life as a child has come and passed, I went from eating cereal with orange juice and Chocolate Nesquick, to stereotyping heavy metal to passing grass without letting the teacher's snoop in and find out. I listened to Paranoid, Parabol, Tool, Marilyn Manson, Black Sabbath, and the Irresponsible Hate Anthem, we wore our shirts inside-out, until we got a block away, then flipped the tags and turned our shirts right-side out. I couldn't mentally prepare for loss, ACT scores, or four years away bottoming out. I just jumped on my V-Card, grabbed a hot girl and took to the forest to get my card punched out. I sat on the back of the bus but not because I was cool, I just wanted to distance myself from any other kids that would try to ask me anything, and hide behind the seat in order to try and skip school. I'm fifteen, Dad bought me a suit for job interviews but its funerals I'm using it for, my best friend's Dad died on Christmas Day, but we were getting high and tripping too. One week later my Uncle is learning from Smith & Wesson, except it's footsie he's playing with his big toe, and it's his head that's learning the lesson. Four days pass and Joey used red rope licorice for tie a noose from his fan, two hours later, I hear about a guy falling 48 stories, but the truth is it's my Cousin Stan. Whether they die in a box or shooting up on the bathroom floor, I get tired of wearing my Summer-suit on Sunday afternoons in winter on the way to the funeral parlor. Closed-casket, national anthem, an equilateral flag placed over the grave. This wasn't the first time, it was the fifth, but the **** is I'm just in the 10th grade. There is no variable, to taking breaths, but the lungs give up trying to breathe in, especially when you're dead. The mental anguish subsides with cigarettes and coffee, but the look on their parent's face every single time I'm there, it will always haunt me.

You're sitting across a table, in the next room- and it's the month of July.
                                                                                 And as the beads of sweat chip off your forehead
                                                                                                              like a shank of butcher's meat,
                                                                                                                        your dorcel fin peaks                                                                                                         through the sand where my toes peak                                                                       through. The picnic table where I write letters; post cards.
                                                                                                   I take photos, make reservations, and
                                                                                       even after I'm canceled on for walking around
                                                              downtown in my bright neon-pink underwear, I still roll to the
              left side of the bed sit up and drop the cigarette I fell asleep on. You're just sitting, first entry:                                                                                                                                                 Stardom.

                                                                                                I don't have room for you in the corners.

                                                                                                The corners of this room, padded walls,
                                                                                           shifty vaseline sway- the white cotton stick
                                               of a sucker pointing out of your mouth, its red numero forty dye shines
                                                                                                                in the specks of light flicking
                                                                                                  out of the horizon like a carousel ride
                                                                                                                              around and around.

                                                                                        I'm getting a bit dizzy, and even less honest.

                                                                                                                 If you want to see me spring,
                                   like the silly string on my birthday, yellow silly-putty; molding the monster face,
                                                                                                     I observe you through a kaleidoscope                                                                                                                   of dexedrine and morphine.
                                                                                              Your catastrophe with Xanax, passed out
                                                            in alien-green *******, at that party in the abandoned firehouse
                                                                            on News St., how you could lay trust on me after that

                                                                                                (a daydream with sawing you called me)

                                                                                             sixteen-year-old mishap of an afternoon.
                                                                                            &

Maybe you're the colosseum. The code to get through the glass doors is actually just '1954'. You could put up the painting of me at auction, or I could take a cruise from London to the Islands North of Siberia, a stop in a department store in Northern Greece. I stop and take a ride in the middle front-third seat of a older friend's younger brother's car, and force all of them to come outside and see the spider's eggs at Bob-o-Link. Massive cornucopias of cotton walls entwined with silk.

In the department store I ask to be introduced to someone who can take me by the hand and recognize me by my number, show me everything I'll need to shoot a full-length feature, even how I can get to Prague so I can do a little shopping. But the horror of seeing is so frightening, and the girl that I came with wants to do nothing.

I find a little shop selling Czech candies, music, and newspapers, so I try to buy everything but the horror is getting closer. I'm in a lazy Susan, how often does that happen? One more turn and I'll lose my stomach contents and then I won't need anything.

I take a climb up a street that says "Smrzlinu Ahead," but the houses on the street are all either empty or boarded up. I drift in the soccer field, watching my legs, looking over my shoulder. I fall for a pile of clothes that can hide me but are also very soft to lay in.

Another cruise- tropical, perhaps? Somewhere for coy adults, who shed their skin in Winter when their eyes start molting off. Someday I will place both hands into the ocean, I'll dream huge, and go swimming until I start to laugh. One day I'll sink to the floor of the bourn, maybe the same day I wake up and I'm not swimming alone.

I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”
There's A Wocket In My Pocket by Dr. Seuss

I got no more ***** on my arms, vaginal schemes and gospel psalms. Very private skinny tribes, lit up with oversized black lights. In the very end, everybody walks this way, they all move like idioms, they all wanna be lit up like stars. Some could be prevalent like cascading dreams, nauseous just like mesquite BBQ baby-back wings.

Fly away little bird, fly away. But don't try to leave
Or you won't get paid.

I know very well, just what kinda caption your capsaicin
Can be, lit up like honey blunts, golden stars on top of your christmas tree. Strawberry Swisher Sweets, Blueberry Dunhill flavors, poke your hand through the fence, make friendly on your neighbors. If you like Kimmel Live, Conan at Midnight too, recipes for the zombies, SS ****** Youth. Blow-up and be a party. Get off work and drink your check. Get down, get off- I'll show you. Just how Martin pays the rent.

it is a post-human resistance to still-born meat,
the floccinaucinihilipilification of the catholic retreat;
another God disguised to look like me.