Blame your desperation on the weather
Match the gray with gray
Allow yourself a smile or two
Don’t overdo it
Don’t force something like this
Try to make this all less crazy
Wash your face. Tighten up.
Forget the blade, the poison, the stars
You overhear someone tell someone the time
You’ve let that slip into
the background
in the spaces where the unseen meets
Blame your low-key troubles on the
T.V. shows
Watch the skinny giants starve
Someone’s changing the heat up and down
in the pearl-sized world
And someone’s taken all the colors out for
some other playground
those invisible hands, it follows, have too much
pull and force on the everydays.
Keep yourself alive with twice strained coffee and sunny days
Cut your hair with the kitchen knife
Grow a beard, fake an accent,
Fake Silence.
Pretend to make it mean something, the collapse, the choking
Clean the living
room
wipe all the fingerprints
No one’s coming for you but you’d take a hug from a hired assassin
You’d sympathize with the serial killer about his sin
You’d be impressed by his breath which smells of green mints.
Blame the sickness in your blood
Which warns off love with sores and fevers
On boredom and hunger
Make something of yourself, make yourself last
Peel off skin and let it dry like pot pourri
Forget how to love the ones that hurt you
Forget to how to hurt the ones that love you
Bite your lip to keep it all in
Bite to the bleeding, then
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh
Build fires out of sofas and the kitchen table, make a vacancy of home
Laugh at humanity stuffed and suffering on its stilts
Smile at the honey moon you’ll never get to
Show your teeth at the whore Death
Make the damage worth the price.