Your first kiss
left a deeper
impression
than mere
lipstick.

Of course the two of us                        
                                                        want to get away from here
                                                            ­We were so innocent  Running
                                               ­             Hand in hand To the outskirts of this              
                                               Upside – down  town  Where  were  we  going?
                             ­                            To  the  mansion  we  had  built  with  daddy
                                               High in the sky of the     towering sycamore tree
                                                     But now going back           walking the dirt trail that supposedly
                                            brought us to        dreams             Kicking aside pebbles we pushed
                                                          ­     with        all our           might       to
                                                              ­  to        escape              from        the
                 ­                                                 Monsters        ­        chasing    us
                                          ­                         Seeing                              the
­                                                                 ­      Wimpy                   vines
                                                           ­                That                      were
                                  ­                                            once               chains
                                                          ­                    and       shackles
                                                        ­                      intertwined
                               ­                                              imprisoning
                                                                ­           all of the trunk
                                                           ­               seemed   unreal
                                                          ­               But  I  had  made
                                               ­                         Peace   with   it   all
                                                             ­      When I saw our shanty hut
                                                           Atop the mangled, dwarfed skeleton tree

So this is
What it
Is

The pendulum swinging

Back and
Forth

Back
And forth

Back
And
Forth

All the wine tasted
The beer all drunk up

Every kiss
Stolen
Every kiss
Given

And all our food
Eaten by thousands
Of rat-faced
Mad men

Yes
This is the place
In between madness
And sedation

Chaos and
Order

Where the sane go to dance
With 50 cent beers
Tight in their hands

With wondering eyes
Mismatched affections

Where nirvana's clarity
Is as cheap as an old French *****

Yet feared as
Relapsing
Into a fit
Of youthful liberation

Every trench
Has their bodies

I see them
I know them
I am them

The place tastes
Of dried tongues

Dragged through the
Red embers of ash and
Charcoal and
An old girlfriends hairspray

Every echo of sound
Is from the
Future as well as
The past

Here clocks sound as if
Their snoring from a brilliance
Of an ill spoken melodramatic monologue

Where tears were so "yesterday"
And humanity

Well, humanity...

Humanity shows

To be a thing
Of the

Past

The city has *** with itself, I suppose
As the concrete collides, well, the scenery grows
and the lonely, once bandaged, lay fully exposed
They undressed their wounds for each other
And there's a boy in a basement with a four track machine
He's been strumming and screaming all night down there
The tape hiss will cover the words that he sings
They say it's better to bury your sadness
in a graveyard or a garden that waits for the spring
to awake from its sleep and burst into green
Well I've cried and you would think I'd be better for it
but the sadness just sleeps and it stays in my spine
for the rest of my life
And I've learned and you'd think I'd be something more now
but it just goes to show it is not what you know,
it's what you were thinking at the time
This feeling's familiar, I've been here before
In a kitchen this quiet I waited for
a sign or just something that might reassure me of anything close
to meaning or motion with a reason to move
I need something I want to be close to
And I scream but I still don't know why I do it
'Cause the sound never stays, it just swells and decays
So what is the point?
Why try to fight what is now so certain?
The truth is that all that I am is a passing event that will be forgotten

This Whirlybird Backward
is falling head first,
and painballoon minder
is ready to burst,
so the Sun sets its course
'cross the way.

With darkening rhythm
well-finding its time,
and saddest professor
admitting his crime,
the edges so blurry
of which, is the night, is the day.


So turn me to stone here,
and set me the shore, dear,
that I may erode,
in a well-favored way.

The Record Store died and the windows, some broken; held the light of day in transparent
tangles, sharp cracks in spiky slabs of glass. Red splints... fissures of bluish tint, silver yellows
glint in shifts, misfit prisms.
An old poster roasting an English Invasion,
facing the setting sun's horizontal furnace. Here and there,
the odd box, coats of dust, strips of beige tape; these
huddle in long shadows of analog. Looking in -
hands on either side
of your father's face,
you can almost see hipsters thumbing empty bins, like
bowling pins in an empty lane.
Bowling pins wearing scarves.

I shuffle my pod and rock on.

conversing in loops,
you seem content.
they burnt
down your home, I kept a bag
of the special things next to
the door for a time.
Now you live under a centipede's
back, an exoskeleton of notched
houses, with the wrinklies.
your nails
are crinkled like a soil bed ready
for seeds, they lived in water like
soggy tissues, when you were a nurse.
you keep falling now
but they can't pick you up,
like you used to, them.