Today I wanted to buy the copyright to the process of hallelujah
******* in joy the same way whales eat krill
You just bottle it up inside your lungs until you have enough

Inside my fridge I have vacuum sealed jars of hallelujah
There’s nothing religious about that
Jars labeled things like
Loss of virginity
Rob lived this time
The homework is complete

Hallelujah

It’s the same way prayer works
Backwards
Pulling bits of god like an inhale

I want to hyperventilate on your hallelujah
Like a gospel choir on speed

It collects
Over time
For instance
It was maybe a month in to sleeping at Delia’s and Toffer’s house
Before I realized
I didn’t have to sleep in my car anymore
You go into the bathroom to **** and realize
Hallelujah
A jar labeled
Found a Home for now

I know science can do this
For the sake of all that is a monument to a single life
So that on your death bed, or at your funeral
Everyone there can hold a jar

Cold and warm at the same time
Vibrating in their palms
In violent joy
Like mozzletoff cocktails
They are thrown
And when they shatter there is a song
That has been collecting for years

The same word in different tonal joys

Your life

Every good moment

Hallelujah

My father is an old truck
Sunbleached red

Breathes broken bottles
A faulty catalytic converter throat
All the smoke trapped inside

But the nicotine helps his brain function

Cinderblock sturdy
But skinny
A single pillar holding the roof up

A man built in a time when you had to tell things it was time to die
Leave them in a field somewhere and forget about

How do you write a love poem to a car of a man
Built in a time without airbags?
A car of a man who crashed with you inside so many times
You learned about rebuilding from experience
From trial and error

And how do you forgive a man who can no longer tell you he’s sorry?

Trucks
Don’t feel
Don’t give up
Don’t hurt you on purpose

Sometimes something inside just breaks
And no one catches it
And maybe you crash
Break a nose
Black an eye

As far as I know
I am not a broken man
But I’ve learned where all the parts go

And if I am my father’s son
A mechanic more often than a car maybe
Then I will be fine

The truck is dying
And beyond repair

You forgive it for that
It is old and past its time

And maybe it can’t say that it’s sorry

But there is a field somewhere that you plan on leaving it
To collect weeds
And rust
And be forgotten

So you forgive it

The doorknob to the closet
full of my skeletons is made of
funny-bone

But there are days
when honesty tugs a little too roughly and
I realize this isn't all that funny now
Is it?

As a writer
You learn presentation is key
In the bend of language
I create this man
I want you to believe me to be

And so I tell you these stories
like they are jokes
Like they are no big deal

Like the first time I got drunk
was with my friend's mom
who was a known child molester
She tried to order us ****
But couldn't work the cable

Or my friends and I used to travel our city
via the water drainage system
Near the mall
We got lost once
and while standing
in ankle high water
we saw at least 20 homeless people
sleeping on pallets
We called that place *** City
We had to get directions back out

There's a possibilty I have been an accessory to ******
Around the time in my life when I learned
How not to dwell

My body was a wishbone
My father meant to break
But every beating
left me the better half

I find so much of it funny

My brother's most recent suicide attempt
My mother's
My father's Alzheimer's

He once chased after our mailman
naked
Asking him about some letter
from some woman
I have never met before

I find laughter
and beauty
in the bend of language

When this chest becomes a broken radiator
and my heart grows cold
The metaphor mutates Campfire

Come here
I am lonely
and I have a story to tell you

Can I trust the eyes seeking mine?
I want to
Because they look like home
Through sepia tones
A bittersweet nostalgia before
We learned how easily people break

I want to trust your arms
They look just big enough to hold me
When I know the only way I feel safe
Is in the shape of a ball

And if you were any more beautiful
I’d be *******
Much like the ten beers I should’a
Said no to
Before you
And they
Had me sycophantic and stumbling
And already
just a little bit
*******

I want the smell of you to linger on my clothes
The same way fire does
After a book burning
Just a little bit shameful

I want you to stop my stammering
With a kiss
To preoccupy my mouth
Long enough to subdue my stupid

I want to let go
Of the fever that makes my back sweat
When I see you
And the worry
That your eyes might lose their shine someday

I want you
In all the ways that
I am probably not supposed to want you
But I do

I want our wrinkles to one day fit
Like ****** up Ziploc bags
It’s that bad
So kiss me
Before I tell you that

And maybe
keep your eyes closed
Until I can trust them
Because I want to

This is a true story of ******’s ally

The old man carried a cello and a stool
Bullets divided wind
So many straight lines he could see them like sheet music

He sat the stool down in the middle of the street
Held his cello
And played under the gunshots
Until everything was quiet

And in the outdoor acoustics
Made by apartment buildings and the morning cold
He played a fifteen minute rendition of heartache
On a cello tuned to the key of thunder

His high notes were so much screaming
And the deep low notes bellowed his hunger
It was the simple sound of savagery
When people needed another way to know what pain sounds like

They could hear it in the way that the strings
Absorbed the rust from his arthritic fingertips
Scraping the sound of struggle

It was the most painfully beautiful music
He played to the soft continuous metronome click of reloading
Beauty like a rose that dies in the hair of a girl
Whose own rose is a blooming ****** chest wound

Thought maybe he could replant her
Like the earth might give her back

Anything plucked from the root dies shortly after
He played for her
He played for courage
He played like a prayer to be shot doing what he loved

We all wanna die doing what we love

She was shot picking roses

He played cello
On a playground of bullets
A song that begged
**** me

Where is your god now?
When all you wanted was to be a casualty of love and music

He finished
Beads of sweat like ***** diamonds
As the morning sun mocked him for living another day

Some of us get to walk away from this
Without a single scar
Even if we wanted one

He walked away

And shortly after

The bullets began to do what bullets do
When they pierce flesh

I am sorry for ruining all vaginas for you
I hope you can recover eventually
She said

I hate to burst your **** bubble
But I’ve slid some lies between your thighs
When howling at your moon wasn’t so much praise
As it was longing for a change of ***** scenery

People change?

How I feel right now
is like when one time I was sick
And my parents recorded a show I watched
so I could watch it later
And at the end of the show
there was a number for a contest to go to space camp

I called that number
It was disconnected
I always find out the important stuff
A little late

I cried that day

I just wanted to go to space camp

And I just wanted someone to love me like a black hole
A warm black hole to put all my love into
**** me in and fix me like there’s no turning back
I mean in the darkness of space
They all look the same
All yank at you turbulent and fiery head rush passion

I mean we all love the same

So I am sorry I overshot your Venus
To crash land in Uranus
A semi-purposeful curious passion

You coulda yelled ****
We felt like ****
When we walked away

Parts of me have always been missing
And I tried to fill the gaps with you
Problem is when you might be gay and are fighting it
Your closet is a ******

Not your fault your beard looked funny on my ****
You can’t wear a person like an accessory
I can’t slap her like masculinity till I feel straight again
Some things aren’t right
I’m not right
And you are so messed up now
Because you have this superpower to turn men gay

You can’t turn men gay
You can only remind them of the pain that lies
In lying to themselves when they know
None of this feels right

None of it will

Dear former lover
Former black hole body
Former holder of my confusion
And filler of my empty spots

I ****** up by ******* you

I ****** up

Living is a cross
That any one of the rock-faces
Comprehends.


We are drawn
To many seas.
We drown wholesomely
In the failures of confrontation.
The rain
Drenching
Our doorsteps
Has nothing to do
With the simplest desires
And lacerations
We bring
To the smallest acts
Of living.


The child
On the broken catwalk
Hearing the sounds of our hunger
Without understanding
Throws echoes back
To the earliest abandonments
Of love.


Minor devastations preceding
Horror
Resonate the ineffable.
The mothers that wake
At the slightest sound
And the fathers that
Smoke all night
And the rest of us who are
Vigilantes from the demons
Of oppressed sleep
Find at dawn the clearest
Images of bewilderment.
Even the best things
Collapse beneath the weight
Of ignorance.


Living is a fire
That any one of the wave-lashes
Comprehends.
___
Source:
http://www.universeofpoetry.org/nigeria.shtml

There is a point in everyone's lives
Where they wake up screaming
To discover they haven't been sleeping
And then they go to sleep
And can't wake up

God's humor is a punchline
Of straight faced barbarians
In the shapes of a funnel cloud
That coughs up battle hymns
Like pieces of tuberculosis

Love is chemical reactions
That bounce off the walls of your brain
Like children playing pong
That will lose their virginity to each other
He died when she left

Women are works of art
That are made of the bruises of an apple
And the sweet parts are cut out
Like the passages in the Bible
That the priest won't read on Sundays

Who's afraid of Charlie Darwin?
Was on the sidewalk in chalk
And every pedestrian walked by
And walked into a war zone
While a mutt licked the words disappeared

I've always wanted to fall in love with a satis
I'd set her high on a Trojan horse
And maybe the ranger ain't the death toll
He's off whistling a tune that sounds a little like silver bells

It's never my own words that I get caught up in
And like Brackett said it's the little things
But it's never come 'round right
But I'll be laced through your fingers in any time

I'm sizing up a rope and a steady beam
To put myself between the bullets of reality and dreams
Where the archer's pulling broadheads out of a scorpion's side
And the sheperd's purse smells just like a flatline

You used to hold your hands over your ears
So I whispered my devotion into your confusion
When I laid my head down on your *******
That's the first time I've ever heard my heart beat

And every time I look in backward angles
Your face bleeds into the corner of my eyes
And if worlds apart should be the death of Casanova
Then I'll go down with the ship whistling the color of your hair

white walls,
the cackling night,
festering liquor,
and a chance to break from my landlocked liturgy
collapse on the fine-toothed grass.

my head -- a dark carnival of shared substances --
smolders at the grind of its gears,
as my Black Venom mistress dribbles
drunkspeak for an hour, and aimless
boys find holographic truth
in a hallucinagenic bathroom --
"we should mean less than this."

close the door to bedroom crypt--
"you've got to die to be born again"--
Black Venom undresses me
while the shutters of perception
rattle open, then closed, open, closed, open--
a grey wind and erratic desire fire, fall, pant,
realign to destroy body in the name
of a newness to follow--
if I'm mad,
I'm quite good at it--
if I'm sane,
I have no intention of staying that way.