Like a child
we toddle through.
every step our first
we topple often.
We are grown through
various concoctions made from
two parts seventy- cent easy mac and one part
abandonment or love.
Like a child
we are gifted hand wrapped delusions
picked uniquely from one of a thousand
wal- mart aisles.
We are treated with capitalism
and early morning hits.

Like a child
we are brought here alone
and taught to make friends with ourselves,
to love ourselves.
We are told that loneliness is a sin.
That the only thing that can
erase our fears like chalk from a board
is being with someone.
Like a child, this is when I am loneliest.

The world is burning
fueled by the guilted poor
a barrel of narcotics and greed
funded by the rich.
Disgusted and beaten by the cracks
in the sidewalks,
he drowns himself in a bottle of honey.
Jack **** can save him now.
He wants to leave.
To float the waves for a few weeks,
the salty grey sky will become his home.
And when it rains he will write fire.
Riots will flood the page
and all will know that art is god,
that money is just paper and cloth
and you can't build a diet off of it.
He wants to leave
but he was born as this.
He raises his head and sees
only death, no life-
life.
the very word is no longer freedom
but bars interlocking the windows
we see from.
He is shaken.
The barstool he fell asleep upon
is flaming with orange.
Calmly he lights the tip of his cigarette
into the sparks
and steps into the cold.

He, once loved and revered,
possesses now a tranquil venom.
Poison in his veins was once his blood.
His heart no longer desires
the lonesome job of beating;
in conflict with himself
his body no longer wants life.
Yet he,
the master, the owner,
the righteous herald of his own existence,
loves only again what is lost.
his bones, no longer tentpoles
eat and scrape their way
out of their tomb.
Inside he wants freedom.
Inside he loathes disparity.
Outside he is no longer a smirk
in the corner of a
photograph snapped on
a night fueled by liquor and
fog of drunk smoke-
no longer lover of she.
His hands tremble for a lighter
and waste to ash in the air.
The buildings he once called home
crumble and topple
as his stasis endures.

There she lies, brilliant and exhausted;
limbs all mangled and strewn in the hottest places,
as if the sky was burning her skin with every breath,
or if the sheets, all low and rustled and tinged,
were plates of melted rock.
She is alone because she chooses to be.
From the place I am, the only perspective I have
is an artist's-
so I paint pictures of her sand smooth skin,
her obvious collarbones.
But, she does not appear as we imagine her-
outside the canvas she
lacks the depth and beauty we have given her.
Outside of the paper she is but a flat line.

1
We are
walking streets unknown
wearing headphones and apple products inserted into our flesh like addicts
all around an angry empty black tar pit throwing in capitalism and old socks
sloshing in snow and dancing in sun and basking in rain
vile and putrid beauteous dancers on stages indoors
twirling drunken swirlygigs and pirouettes underneath shattered naked lights
caressing the skin of the stars on early LSD mornings after long nights of jazz and jokes
taking buses and trains to avoid the dangers of atmospheric destruction
staying up late listening to your “Howl” in prison shaped dorm rooms blowing cigarettes out windows
we are those
who sweating and giggling make furious love lying on rocks under autumn leaves with the wind at 3am in september
with singed fingertips and blue eyes and red skin and dark hair smiling in the sunlight on porches
with circular gravitational searing earthmarks on our ashtray skin because we lost ourselves
we are actors
we are dancers
we are painters
  we are writers
     we are angels
    we are lovers
    we are killers
  we are dyers
we are drinkers
we are smokers
we are children
walking to the moon and back every night on tattered shoes and squelching socks haze of smoke
sitting on rocks and drinking until our kidneys scream in pain and demand we go home for the night because it is getting too late and they are getting worried
refilling zippos with stink and fluid and lighting countless tobacco stains for our lungs on wintry days in new york
taking showers at 3AM because we can't sleep and unlike any activity we are not exhausted
driving until the sunsets and crying in the drivers seat window because we are falling out of ourselves   into our own heads
blaring rock and roll or jazz in our small cell block on herb fueled afternoons reading Eliot in our beds
sitting at our desks pencilpushing out the last of our minds onto screens because nowhere else will take them willingly
wasting our time happily because we don't wish to save it for when we are old and unhappy so we choose to be young and unhappy instead
we sing songs of stars and satanic ****** rituals outside of symposiums for the sardonic
we are standing on the edges of buildings and nobody is telling us whether or not to oak leaf tumble until we hit the brick
sadly slumped in bottomed out chairs we zone our somethings or somehows in claustrophobic rooms
daydreaming daddies and dandelions and drip drops of pitter patters on tin childhood roofs

To the fly
buzz buzz tap tap buzzing on the ceiling of insanity-
*******
you are. Worth nothing
abandoned by family and imprisoned in a glass house
your death will be a grace unblossomed
a ******* of the ears, an unholy echo
my consciousness is screaming
outoutout **** fly
fly. out ****
your death was a pleasure to me a
smudge on the comsos

I travel lines
drawn in sand
painted on concrete
worn into the forest.
Lines lead us from
where we were
to where we want to be,
Open our minds but
spread our souls
Lines connect us.

More a squiggle than
a hard ruler- edged cut
slowly my line is wasting away
as a half life human.
I step from one to the next.

My old line led me down
a series of nothingness.
This new line raises me
elevates me to treetops
and leads me to
you
and your solstice skin
faded up to your eclipse eyes
which are tied to mine
with a line