Last night drinking
cherry cured 'shine
from Tennessee
I caught the moon
flinching behind
a tree like a white
flower afraid to be
cut from its dark stalk
whereas in the spring
when I'm sober
it grows outside my
window before daylight
when moths come
and die gently while
I lie here listening
to their silent soft wings
dreaming of bleeding
in my sleep and find
no trace of a wound
aching in the harsh red cut
of another day breaking.

June 1st, 1997
You come out in what feels like a blaze of glory,
There is what seems to be the sun above you,
There is what feels to be the ground beneath you,
Everything is loud and bright, and you're screaming as loud as you possibly can, because there is nothing that will stop you

October 20th, 2001
Your big sister asks you what you want to be for Halloween this year,
You exclaim loud and boldly, "Daddy!"
You see him as a hero,
A man that can do literally anything and everything,
You put your blanket on your back and run around, pretending that you are daddy and not even superman can stop you
You scream as loud as you can because there is nothing that will stop you

November 15th, 2003
You're used to mommy and daddy clapping at each other, but this time is different,
You hear mommy yelling at daddy,
You distinctly hear her scream, "Your children need you more than I do, please do this for them, at the very least!"
You see daddy walk out of the front door with a few bags in his hands,
She kept screaming it as loud as she could, but nothing could stop him

June 1st, 2010
Your father has been vacant from your life for years, and you've gotten passed the idea by now,
Your mother still cries herself to sleep,
The amount of times she told you that she'd never be able to find a man like your father almost outweighs the amount of times you wish you had the chance to see him again,
Maybe to say hello, or maybe to scream at him
No amount of screaming will stop someone, but it especially won't stop your father,
You know this,
He at least could come to see her when she's back in there,
When she's hooked up to all of those machines that are pumping her full of the life she didn't even want at that point because all of the life she once had was taken away when your father left,
I hope he's happy with her

May 22nd, 2012
Your mother is getting bad again and your father is too busy away on a honeymoon with the woman he left your mother for,
The doctors don't really have anything great to say, other than, "We're doing the best we can, we know she'll beat it, we just know it."

January 18th, 2014
Your father hasn't talked to your mother since her first hospital visit,
Your mother is in stage 4 of cancer, and no amount of screaming will make your father come back, and no amount of screaming will stop the cancer from taking what little is left of your mother

June 1st, 2016
This is your first birthday without your mother,
You're hanging pictures of her in your new apartment,
Your father calls you, but no amount of screaming at him will make you feel justified,
This is not his fault, but the least he could've done was be there for his children, you never needed him as much as your mother did, but he still could've at least been there

September 30th, 2016
You wake up in what feels like a blaze of glory,
The sun is above you,
The ground is beneath you,
Your father calls,
He asks if you want to get breakfast,

He spends the next hour and a half screaming to you about how sorry he is, about how it was his fault, that he should've been there when you all needed him,
But no amount of screaming will change this

No amount of screaming has ever stopped anything

my actress, who
sweated blood on Broadway each night
off Broadway too

said, on a long stroll
through Central Park. she was successful
because she did not like herself

on the stage, she proclaimed,
she was never herself, and she fell in love
with every character she portrayed  

every script was a better bio
than her own, and the playwrights knew
her better than she knew herself

and when our walk
was curtailed by a downpour, she dragged me
into a crowded cafe

where she knew half the patrons
and the wait staff, and they all knew the different
personas she had owned, on the dry stage

rain now forced her to choose  
which selves to keep, and which to lose
while she sipped scalding tea

with me, on a grey wet afternoon,
only hours before she would again be under  
the spell of the hot lights,

and read verses from the pens of prophets,
poets--those who purloined her soul for the price
of admission, to a place without self loathing

There is a deepness here
I no longer recognise as my own.
How do you laugh so effortlessly?
Mouth so small
all teeth.
I used to have nightmares of you
reaching into my lungs.
You’d draw my breath
on a cold August morning
and I’d suffocate.
People are a lot like homes.
There is laughter at times
but for the most part
there is silence.

smudges on the glass  
were wiped away each night
by a mute custodian

who found a biography
in each set of prints he made disappear
with clean cloth and vinegar

he could tell which ones
were made by children, dragged there
with promise of ice cream, later

oh, the young lovers' prints  
were unmistakable--eager tracks being led to more
and more promising carats

and the thin marks left by the frail
made him wonder, if this would be their last
precious purchase: a reckoning; a remorse

the cases held diamonds, rubies,
by the score, but the silent sentinel  
saw only the surface

that was his world,
one of transparency, and fickle
reflections

he reluctantly erased these fingered tales
the marks life left anon and anon, for he knew
it was his duty to wipe the slate clean

to allow resurrection,
renewed vision of a bejeweled
world, just below his sight

You were always rotting
I never noticed
They remind me of you
Skin wrapped around ankle bones
Wearing through their soles
It’s different here
Guess some just rot faster
I peeled back the covers and found only the lacuna
The blue orange fuzz
Delineating the shadow from the concrete
You grew apart and dissipated
Smoke settling into cloth
The back of my sleeve
How come?
How come?
Everyone is always leaving
Warping through their bodies
Did you ever finish your story?
Soft knuckles rapping on your door
Knobbly knees
I know it’s selfish
Perpetuating the fabric of your existence
Like a categorical imperative
A crumpled head filled with spirits
Is carried to the tip
It happens every Monday morning
Hollow men run the streets
But they leave the rot
They always leave the rot

There’s a body smeared under my finger
Or maybe just dust
Guts pressed into the keyboard
The streetlight across the road is tilted at the top
Wires dangling strangely
They might drop at any moment
And set the neighbour’s flesh on fire
I couldn’t give a ****
Everyone keeps telling me I live in the bourgeois district
There’s a church opposite here
For the past three sundays
I’ve played industrial noise during mass
Hitting my guitar so hard my fingers bleed into the strings
And all along the fretboard
“Sounds like the bowel of a ship”
“Is—is that music?”
Wrists are beginning to collapse in on themselves
Fill the void
Shut shut
Open the windows
Shut shut
Play some Swans
Shut shut
Close the windows
Shut shut
It’s too early
Worthless
It’s too late
Worthless
Look in the mirror
There’s nothing
Look at your father
There’s nothing
Look at your friends
There’s nothing
She’s gone
Far away
She’s gone
Left you
She’s gone
Lost you
She’s gone
Failed you
**** up
Up
Drop out
Out
Take some acid
Acid
Blow your brains out
Out
Emergence:
The philosophy that consciousness arises out of the physical structure of the brain
Scramble it and we’d no longer resemble the same persons
Just vessels hosting multiplicities that alter as they deteriorates
Give me five tabs, then
Spike through the cerebrum
Phineas drunk on the pavement
Gage dead but still walking

lately i've been having these good days
i don't have sad wet cigarette saxophone nights anymore
i watched the sun wake up six times last week
i found a blue bucket of tulips &
gave them to a bald-headed krishna girl when
she sang to me on the sidewalk

i hired a boy to hide in the foyer
& peel a fiddle if i rouse from sleep during the night
or whistle through a harmonica
if i'm wet-eyed during breakfast
i finally got rid of all the pictures you stuck
to your side of the dusty bathroom mirror
except the blissed-out polaroid of us
perched on an old oak tree limb
like a couple of soft doves versus the turreted sunset

i deleted your number because you don't call me back anyway
i stopped mailing letters to your father's house
i haven't listened to the Plantasia record
you bought me since you left
i never feel the gray heat from your
staticky hand warming my shoulder
i forgave you for the blood in my kidneys
& old smog in my mildewed vinyl lungs

i sleep under the running green vapor light
of the moon & stars instead of the frothiest pillows
rippling on an ocean of sheets & project quilts
i finally scoured the lipstick stain from my collarbone
after what seemed like two years
i forgot how your armpits smelled
i sewed all your sundresses into a shower curtain
& i never see your delicate ribcage
peaking through the streams of hot water



i hardly ever notice the noose
you left hanging in our apartment

face plasters the wall a long boring walk i’ve seen three figures turned into the pavement perforated in memory dismal dysfunctional riding the hour hand crumbles into rust waving without a head layer cake wonder if she ever finished that english degree filling wonder if she went back to darwin filling catching a bus filling sitting with her legs crossed out filling eyes glossed into the crossing filling lines running into her pigments filling think i saw four strangers living together inside the head of my dead father didn’t attend his own funeral didn’t catch his own mouth didn’t measure the etch so his ashes formed back into themselves lost in the sleeves of a book tying a knot through his guts wading through waves of deprecated language without an end in sight

How many people ****** in this room?
Hopped up on speed or coke
Throwing their heads against the walls
Until they cracked like piggy jars

Crutch in a crescent
I lost a good friend because I couldn’t bear her
******* random strangers
As if *** meant more than friendship

**** these patriarchal structures
Disneyfied landscapes
Monogamous nuclear values

This world is wretched
And I took a part in it