That other part of me is hemorrhaging again
You can see it if I pull up my shirt
It’s just below the scar on my stomach
Don't you see it?
That’s ok; no one does the first time
You have to get used to the idea that something
Something lives inside your body
Other than yourself.
It’s like letting the pus of an infection
Or the twisting the water out of a damp towel
Counting the minutes, are we?
Those cracks in the medicine cabinet are getting bigger
By the day
The walls are hollowing out
As much as you to picture me,
You’re going to be distracted by the woman walking the other way
Crossing your path wearing black stockings,
a low trim skirt
And a pale face that bears no eyes.
I’m past the elevators, in apt# 276—
Ignore the violently shuddering man in 274
Like an idling phantom, turning to catch you
Our synthetic blood laced with FDA-approved preservatives
The bass boosted from trunks of Cadillac coup-devilles
Synths layers—then delayed, and phased through mixer boards
Faces given masks to paint and supply over masses with
Industrial strength dream pop for Death metal Floridians
Mesa Boogie rectifier amps thrashing and impregnating ears
Scotch eggs soft boiled and left in saucers of cream and Irish whiskey
Children walking single file face towards modern Auschwitz.
Snail trails over rotten apple cores
Left by riot girl Eves
And warned by Adam O’ Conservatism
Ahead of corporate delusions of grandeur
The people raise banners to spoon-fed malcontent fools,
Hiding the holes in their teeth,
Using metal clamps for their jaws and joints
Hosing down any person not white in appearance
And pigmentation, putting the carcasses in
Meat grinders and rubber soles
The devil in the frying pan, ready to harden arteries like teenage *****
An incoherent mess of self-indulgent metaphors
Spewing from rushing fingers tips on clashing keyboards
And aching, sore, tense back muscles,
And weakened nimble fingers
From a late 20s savant or loser
Unfulfilled, unquenched, unsatisfied, but—
The time will come when we shine and when we reap what we sew
And live lives that we always wanted for ourselves
But the longer we wait the older we get,
and the days don’t last as long
The weeks fly by
And the eternal year of our youth is
but the quick and fleeting year of our age
At one point does the ambition and aspiration,
fade like our energy in our bodies?
We learn to live with disappointment
and join the herd of others like us
And praise the idols of the limelight
The industrial age for the modern American economy,
For when the night has a thousand eyes
And we’re a thousand kisses deep
And we shed tears only angels can envy
We’ll know what sorrow is
captured on film and described in books
Where literature can emphasize—
illustrate with text what paintings couldn’t
It’s a stupid septuagenarian fantasy that fades
With the vagrant woodsman covered in ash and coal
Roswell interstellar lights escaping over the 1950s desert
And the roads smelling of sulphur and shrimp
Crystallized cathedral spires
I’ll get naked for a dive bar lunch of psychosexual deviants
And Warhol-esque color coding mixed drinks under neon flickering
and horse fly buzzing
And clubs to dance till the apocalypse can edge our lust
Seek fulfillment in the retro ultra-nuclear fusion reactor made up by
Technobabble neuromancers sitting in platinum rooms waiting
for the show to be picked up for a revival on cable 25 years later.
We’ll run the blade against the grain and find that soft spot
For the blackened metal to merge with flesh
and can call itself bone when we know it’s all just really
Artificial.