its funny

a flower called impatient

still has to root down

and tangle with grass

you too

never to be caught dead

in the same social circle

as a window planter

or aluminum pinwheels

the same instruments

that brought you radio flyer wagons and torn-knees in your jeans

innocence

****

you window-shop

with a brick in your handbag

and a white patterned dress

A thousand night trains rattling through a wrestling match of junctions and burnt out- razed to the ash and soil as a field of maize in the dry season. Chaos. The lipstick from corner to corner were meticulously painted, a new hardware store in town. She reminded me of an article I read in the Baltimore sun about a woman who kidnapped herself to steady her supply of whiskey and cigarettes because her husband caught on to her taking money from his cash register at Rich’s Shoe Horn, a leather boot specialist in town right on the corner of Second and Hickory. I couldn’t trust her. Her chaos. I ran into two guys not from around here, wherever that is, with some fine lookin’ pinstripe suits and I automatically new they weren’t looking for grub or a shot of *****. Sometimes a guy won’t put his fingers on a cold bottle of beer, and that’s when you know fingerprints could become an issue later. I’ve seen it. Chaos. I’ve two-stepped chaos across the planks with the chairs up many a time. Shut off the neon, it’s time to nibble on the muzzle of a 38 until these guys dry you out like a broke *** ***. I just think of Bukowski every time they drain me for all my cash. I know it’s only going towards coke or some **** I’m not too fond of (due to past experiences). I’ve done it all. Chaos. Well, you don’t go into the pool hall business with dancing shoes and a three piece suit. Roll up them sleeves boy. It’s dirt. It’s grime. It’s…

Chaos.

Drugs Drugs Drugs Drugs Drugs,

What have you done to my life?

But ****** it all up.
*
Authored hearts on sleeves,

So biblical, I’ve held her,

Peaceful as a psalm.

a black horse and a white horse tangle in the blue black of midnight, somehow i hold on with a bridle laughing within my outer palm and pads of my fingertips. no framing nails no concrete shoes nothing holding me down with the pure rpm’s shellacking left to right like speed reading, or a flicker of fire just like it used to dance across your eyes when we lit the candles. i never saw my wildest dreams til i closed my eyes but neverthewhile did i fall asleep, neverdid i break any rules to get here, and somehow “never” became this personification that i used all the time- soon settled, cyclical sans stopping. ****.

always. i always horizoned my pillowtop mattress, sunrise coming up across abdomens of sculpted morning-after a long sunday shut inside a curtain made of framed carpentry drywall and what have you. i sat along the crevasse of the bed with my legs becoming two telescoping camera stands, eyes hungover from all of the imagery that monsoons couldnt drench myself in- i lie here still, partly, and i wonder. where we were alone, i am alone. where we would sleep, i am sleep. where we would love, i am love.

and i guess that’s the map key, the legend, the gold standard.

hello veil over a trench coat, i’ve come here to recite a few breaths and hopefully get you to take those sunglasses off (for my pride’s sake). just drop them around your ankles like your most comfortable pair of undergarments, kick them onto the beige bedroom rug and make me feel like a day early welfare check in a bread line full of starvation. slide me a napkin with a phone number from across the church pew. smoke my mind like a cigarette in the recovery ward waiting room. i bet you could slap the what teh ******* my face as swiftly as the day is long,

and it’s long.

and as teh world economy comes to a screeching halt and married men jump out of windows because money is some sort of commodity i will never truly truly truly understand, crying babies and ****** good womens remind me of you. grandmothers and the aunt everyone loves to hear drunk at christmas is your smile. your scent isn’t like my ****** relatives. that would be gross. and luxury automobiles and the adromeda galaxies in one corner of the paint job you happened to look a little too closely at is just a speck of your complexity misdialed like a phone number in a crosseye white pages disaster-
say i was to rush to this decision.

say i bent, hands on knees, puffing.

say joe camel between my pointer and ******* kept both of them occupied for once

say i was running up to tell you that i don’t know you

but i think i should

i should

when an angel loses its wings they have to take an escalator. nobody points and laughs. nobody cries either.

its probably the silence that hurts the most. just like when i had to take an escalator.  i felt like a teachers pet transferring schools for a military parent. hell i almost felt like the class pet fireball the splotchy hamster dying overnight.

all of you paying your respects

downraining the playground flowers

all because we shared the same battle or discomfort or inconvenience and then we had to part ways and maybe you’ll think of me sometime

because when an angel loses its wings and they have to take an escalator it seems like a really really empty department store at the bottom

felines over the air, with goodnight glances. Furled up, knotted, branches out over you and the shadow makes sense (2+2), it’s familiar. It’s one eye closed when you’re REALLY drunk. I mean spell things upwards of four times. I mean talking and you really don’t give a **** drunk.

A bottle that’s paid for. Fuse is hissing, you stepped in the wrong county drunk. What am I doing here? “oh wait, you’re here” drunk. Toilets. Lots and lots of toilets drunk.

******* drunk.

Drunk with love. ******* let it go. “Formerly so easy” drunk. Not today pissy pants and shaved browline. No, not Today. Sober up *****.

Seafoam green out of the corner of my eye with a windsor knot, sleeping in the window seat, on the windowsill perched like a crow waiting on the spoils of a burger and fries. Stupid whiskey flask follows me from town to town in my breast pocket navy blue with a 40-R in the hemline to let me know the mediocre, average life I should’ve traced along the stencil of… a greywash and black existence. Several openings in the vent by the window ran up my face in a reversal of every law Newton ever jotted on parchment paper and sealed with gravity and a drop of wax. He must’ve wondered about regular things often. Like emotion. He must’ve had it figured out. He must cook one hell of an Alfredo and win a lot of chess matches to tackle something like gravity.

Just below the surface of the clouds above the jets sits every passenger waiting to live in a fury of turbulence, the time i smile most. I’ve been benched like a burnt out class b wide receiver waiting for some stories from the stars out tonite in rural michigan. The clouds solemnly swear under oath to bury the hatchet convoluted in a he said/cumulonimbus said argument that i’ve been trying to break up since i’d been daydreaming about her on a quilt. A spare tire by the treeline. A spare, tired heart in a beat up way. beating. it beats.

If you ask the willful, they don’t always reply right away when you’re out here. In a subconscious picnic of memories hog-tied in wicker. I’m waiting for nobody that knows I’m here to appear over a hill running like little house on the prairie to apologize for no reason. The world doesn’t owe me anything, but debt is wheat, easily swayed. One minute, I don’t know it very well. Easily swayed to anchors.

Anchors my love, anchors.
And dirt.

There’s a gold-line interstate dancing through the state of mind, down through the snow storms of cotton willow seeds, to make your heartbeat freeze. 2x4’s hug the windows, and throw off the symmetry, of the three houses in a circle, where the town hall used to be… your grandma planted tobacco seeds. And the service played her lover “Taps” in 1943. And the money they sent home, bought her pills and some relief.
Oh Tennessee.
Tennessee.
Tennessee.