i like informality

beer straight outta the bottle
pizza for breakfast
wearing a shirt 3 times
before washing it

doing dishes by hand
reading old birthday cards  
stayin up til 2
even though i have to be up at 8

bonfires
backroads
gettin lost on the way to a bonfire
because i took a backroad

going to a bar
on a tuesday night
and kissing a stranger
just because i'm drunk

and lonely
and through the years i've aquired a taste
for whiskey on lips.
And besides, isn't that

the only reason we're here anyway?

A mother whispers into the fire of Night
I hold a match
I hold Yarn
I Am Wool
Shrinking to the formation
The intricate designs of your rib cage
of your brother's belly
of your Grandfather's waist
Am I simply a fool?
And Who
Doth I ask This question too?
A Torn book
A tattered sonnet of Man's sore feet
blistered eyes that are Green
That are Brown
That are Blue
I Lay with myself Tonight
I am Awake
I am Loud
In your Night
I Am the Janitor beneath the hardwood floors
of your Dream
I am the
Poorly Waged Electrician
With Shoes that resemble an old dog
I Light Your Highway
Your Street
Your Morning coffee
your
cigarette
Am I The Child?
I fall in love with women I see on the streets
Their Wavy hair
like a French sea
Her pale complexion
the Brown Glimmer in her eyes
And I paint on her on Tombstones
On Coffee Mugs and on carpets rolled up for the Dumpster
At Nights
I prefer to dream awake
and sit with a BathTub of words
of stories that melt like cheese
that stiffen like Ginsberg ****
that Shriek and Strum like Tom Waits stomach when he starves on backroad streets
And when I cannot
reproduce
I make love to a woman
And a poem is made
and I kiss her
and my lips say 5 am
and I wish her not to go
But the Dog
is waken by Robins
by the Pigeons
by the digestion of night to day
by the Greek Gods and Goddess' Light
That Falls down
like long hair of woman you have so longed for
and you kiss her chest
And there is no Death
There is no Sleep
or ****** addicts or gasoline or paved roads or shaved faces or mothers or Dostoevsky or Beethoven
There is just her
and you run your fingers across her skin
through her hair
She is the bottom of the Ocean
You are a homeless crab
a Shellless Clam
falling down
down
down
to the bed of the great ocean
and there she lays
With a reflection of Youth and Beauty
And her complex simplicity makes me think of
me as a boy
running behind brick collapsed business buildings
Kissing a girl behind church
Buying Icecream with Josh in Winter

That's what a woman does
She erases Death
from the palms of your hands
and your thoughts
and you sink
to the bottom
and you watch the Coral
The other fish
swimming along
and you laugh
Because you do not know Death
And Death does not know you.

The party was great but afterwards is but a hangover headed south.
A wrong turn  a strange bed even I dont get the words slurred from this drunks mouth.
To young and just right.
Today we break the ruloe's and bask in rewards of this awkward fight.

Im a character in a paint drying scene.
I'll tickle more than a fancy if ya know what i mean.
Hey I think she's loose hell so am I.
Tagged the town ***** and me just another demented slightly insane guy.

My hearts a backroad ruff to the ride.
Hey i said Id return hell why does everyone run and hide?
Sure i say forever but how bout tonight.
My love a airport and this plane needs to take flight.

Are you okay you seem a little off my dear?
It's okay its seems i have that effect on everyone here.
T is fr TEXAS  and P for Portland ya perves.
He doesnt crash but often swerves.

My love life is like Christmas its overpriced and over to fast.
Course when your paying by the hour guess its okay for the party not to last.

Im cheap as a motel and more messed up than the carpet inside.
I'd make even the devil blush if ***** deeds in him i should ever confide.
My love's like a backroad so they say.
A great place to dump the body  but honestly who the **** would ever wanna stay.

The ink they drew on our arms faded with each day.
They told us it would last forever, but they knew nothing.
We had said forever, but we, too knew nothing.
We thought we could do it,
We knew it would be hard, but we were committed, willing to fight.
Until the fights lasted for days,
Until we grew tired and hungry,
Until, instead of battling together, we battled against one another.
And then with each passing second,
With each look of desperation,
With each sigh,
We grew apart.
We were slowly dividing.
The miles that separated us were nothing compared to the silences.
We blamed everything on that,
We said that the distance that separated us was merely physical, but it was emotional too.
So 2 years ago we gave up and called it quits,
But you called me the other day
To be honest, I hadn’t thought of you for a while
And when your face light up the screen on my phone
It darkened my day
I had forgotten about you
Not accidentally, but through lots and lots of sleepless nights
But you called,
And I remembered
It all flooded back and I hand’t been prepared
So I sank back into our past
Our history
Whatever it was that we were
And this poem doesn’t really make much sense,
But neither did what we had
We would talk, hang out, hold hands
Then we wouldn’t speak
You would call, we would drink coffee, longboard, and as if we were truly flying,
They days swept passed us uncounted.
Then you wouldn’t look at me during school
And you wouldn’t ever actually date me
And you wouldn’t make it facebook official
And everyone knows that if you’re not FBO, then it’s not real
Or at least thats how it was in high school.
So I left, I moved away, I forgot
Then you would call again and we would talk and laugh and even cry.
Remember that time you told me you loved me?
I forgot about that too, until you called the other day
You said you loved me and my world fell shattered
You dropped a bomb on my complacent life
And the buildings and routines crumbled
And like that Glen Hansard song,
We were falling slowly
And in a hopeful voice, we had said that we still had time,
But I was a thousand miles away
And you had a girlfriend
And time had run out
What we had in high school, whatever the hell it was,
Wasn’t going to work this time.
So we stopped talking
And those letters that I wrote to you freshman year are scattered along some backroad highway in Kentucky
And yeah I know you’re not supposed to litter, but I had to get rid of you somehow
I had to wash your smell off my skin
To erase the words we had spoken
So fine me!
Because this has already cost me everything
Remember those nights when we would lay on deck and look at the stars
It sounds so cliche now,
But those were the nights when nothing else mattered
When the world was just you and me
Remember when we said we would move to Colorado
We would buy a cabin in the woods
I would write books and you would read every last word of them
You’d teach me how to snowboard
And I’d fall, but you’d pick me up like you always did.
And we’d go home and eat chicken noodle soup
And you would hold me until we were no longer frozen
But thats all just a memory of something that should have happened
A frozen dream that will never thaw out
Why in the world did you call me?
The scars had finally healed, but you had to go and reopen them
You took a scalpel to my heart
And I don’t know when I’ll ever stop bleeding.  
I read once that we will never forget our first love
And I don’t even know if you can call what we had love
I don’t know if you can technically love someone that you never even dated
But I’m throwing all technicalities out the window.  
You were the first
and the only boy that I have ever wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
I wanted to travel the world with you
To be so lost in each other that the maps would never be able to tell us the way home
Because just like that other song,
you would be my home
Because Home is wherever I’m with you
But now your just a memory
A healing wound that sometimes breaks open
One I look at now and believe will never heal.
But eventually, over time, if you ever stop calling me, it will.
And sometimes I’ll look at the scar and remember you, but I’ll feel nothing more.
So as hard as this is for me to say,
And as much as I wanted it to work out
Please, please don’t ever call me again.

Mine is a generation of taboo.
We are tribal tattoos and cheap motel room honeymoons.
We are slander,
and slang,
and brittle teeth.
We are born-agains and suicides.
We are podium preachers and cracked-pavement prayers.
We are melted plastic and oxidized metal-
sometimes we gleam with the Liberty Green of corroded copper,
sometimes we crumble with rust and stain calloused hands.
We are the last stand of Art.
We are the manifestations of forbidden bloodlines
and insanity.
We are just as much our mothers
as we are our fathers,
and we are everything that they are not.

We are stigmata.
We are red paint on white canvas.
We are fast food coffee.

We were born to the sweet smell of formaldehyde
in rooms dressed in florescent white
that share plumbing with the morgues
beneath the linoleum floors.
We are the mix of ***** and innocence that lingers
in the kiss of a dimly lit basement.
We show and we tell but always only for the right price,
the wrong reasons,
or the promise of an exchange equaling to the feeling that
this is a mistake.
We are rosary beads counted between gnarled knuckles
and dragged across smooth palms that long
to sweep tear salt from flushed cheeks.

We are Heaven's lonely singles.

We are skin stretched out too thin over skeletons.
We are the complexities that machines can't calculate
much less imitate.
We are the futile cries that once tried to keep towers from falling
when the sky came crashing down.
We are the pardoned and the withered.
We are the hardened faces of those that have
worked too long
and been loved too little.
We have been told that the safest place for your soul
is in the hole of your chest,
but only if it's reinforced by
four inches of concrete and steel,
and strapped tight with a Kevlar vest,
because they said people,
at best,
are manslaughter.

But we have never been great listeners either;
when we were growing up
we pressed our hands to hot stoves
even though our mothers said not to,
because we couldn't just be told what it was to burn
we had to feel it for ourselves.
So every now and then we will crack open
our rib cages in the hopes that someone will come,
light a fire,
and decide to stay.

We hopelessly spray paint things like wings
On deserted brick buildings
So that, at the very lest, we can feed the
Hollow-eyed passerby the belief
That these streets still have guardians,
Even when we, ourselves,
Abandoned such ideologies in
backroad dumpsters
along with our deities’ infidelities.
  
We are the period at the end of the sentence.
(Or maybe we are the ellipses...)
We have redefined the American family
and proven that even Christianity knows how to hate.
We were raised by sixty-percent divorce rates,
yet we still believe that we are soul mates.
We are the jokers of the deck:
either smiling fools or wild cards.
We are cocked heads with smoke billowing from throats
coated with blisters and cough syrup.
We are back alley scavengers crawling on all fours.
We are the era of the Auto-Tuned voice,
proof that with a pretty enough face anyone can sing.
We are foggy mirrors with smiles drawn on them
by print-less fingertips.
We slip up the thighs of our lovers
and swirl down the drains of sinks with chipped paint.

We are the hearts in your hands-
Crush us into powder and brush us across your face like Indian war paint,
Give us up to the sky so that we can be revived by lightning,
Dance to the rhythm that we beat,
Squeeze us and watch as we seep through the cracks of your fist,
Conceal us in your pocket and only ever speak to us in a whisper,
Or,
with all your natural voice,
sing to us
songs about thunderstorms
to wet the dusty desert dirt around our rooted toes
in the hopes that we will blossom in the most vivid colors.

Just do something with us.

Don't sacrifice us to the tops of lost bookshelves
to collect dust
or rust in the rain with everything you once loved
but grew too old for.

Hunting dove down on the backroad
way on back only the rancher knows
he doesn’t care so we wait for flight
12 gauges ready to start our plight

Ring necks, white wings, and mourning’s are game
chichi birds make us swing all the same
listening for the whistle and the beat of the wing
one of us today, will win the brass ring

Limiting out is what we’re hoping for
but if not, you couldn’t hope for more
outside with friends and family alike
kids getting bored, gone on a hike

Men at the truck with cold Coors Light
relaxing outdoors, no one’s uptight
suns getting low, they are about to fly
here they come, hear the wings sigh

Draw a bead and a lead and fire away
one bird down, hope there’s more we pray
birds on the tailgate at the end of fight
get em’ all clean before the black of the night.

maybe you were right: i never brought
home flowers or chocolate
cleverly arranged in the
shape of a heart and
i couldn't afford a day at the spa
but i'd always sit with my bare ***
on the cold bathroom tile for hours and
feed you toasted bits of cheese on ritz crackers
while you cried in the bathtub i'd
braid your hair as you
let your fingers wrinkle until
the water cooled off too much your
******* got hard and bubbles
stuck to the cut of your shoulders

because you were there when
my mom's little car died on a backroad
under the old black tree
that scratched up the sky
you pulled your pants up
over ruby knees and asked
me to fix your bra
smoked a cigarette lying upside down
across my damp chest
facing my feet and
made me make a promise
while i traced music notes into
the soft flesh of your back with
my ***** fingernails and found
the cracks in your porcelain ankles
with my tongue

you said my love for you is
something that will never make sense
and you never know what to do
with your hands when i'm kissing you
but you moaned the chorus while
i sang verses into your bellybutton
and tied a couple fingers to the
soft web of hair behind your ears
we were like two locusts
fighting in a gossamer heap

two weeks later you were dancing
in my kitchen like a daffodil drunk
on robotussin wearing only striped
peppermint legwarmers and
authentic dreamcatcher earrings
so i bought a theremin from
your favorite pawn shop
and taught you how to tickle it
and as the wind picked up
whipped your hair into a
crucial comet's tail and rustled
the caterpillar from the windowpane
back to it's home in the wormy grass
i could hear the warm whistle
it made when you played with it
alone in the bedroom

i am crying now while
driving down highway one
recalling how your nose crinkled
when you smoked crushed roaches
or the way your hair tasted in the morning
and how you used to spit a
little bit when you laughed
and i can still hear that haunted echo
even as the saltwater swells
and splashes past the rocks

that sun machine is just
a distant memory now
but it left burn marks on my skin
and the floor where we tumbled
and fought the first time
i called you beautiful

i've been waking up to desaturation all my life.
i don't know why but i've been
rolling over in the same grey-skinned body,
opening shoddy eyes, heart heavy
as a hangover. i climb into your chevy with
it in my hands. i know this is the fifth time i've lit
a cigarette since i quit, but my lungs needed the ash.
did you know, in a car crash, just one person
not wearing a seatbelt would worsen the casualties?
so if you see the casual ease with which i bare my chest,
know that the carnage of my reckless form,
hail in a storm of steel and violence, at least felt sorry.
the starry dark of a backroad, an explosion of light,
a bright metal supernova and colors even my eyes can't doubt;
we'll all find out exactly how heavy my guilt
is when the body sorrow built ascends through the windshield.

Some in my family say
Uncle Sam was my salvation
when I was a young man
hell, maybe so, I don’t know
but he kept me out of jail
and paid for my education
which is how I found myself
in West Memphis, Arkansas
surveying Indian mounds
that some fool professors thought
were put there by the Choctaw
but I knew they’d got it wrong
all along, it was the Mississippians
which makes perfect sense if you think
on it considering where they put ‘em
but I digress, I must confess it
was my fondness for backroad bars
and blues guitars carved from wood
of crosses burnt by drunks in hoods
and strings plucked by calloused fingers
of old men with shoulders slumped
like sagging barns and Ford pickups
you find out in them parts, singing
songs about long gone women, all
kinds of aching age old pains lingering
enough to make a man’s heart rain
until the US Army Corps of Engineers
blew the levy’s to send those tears
out across cotton fields and mounds
I know the Choctaw didn’t build.

Gravel, dirt or old blacktops
cruising around, not many stops
through a pasture or tunnel of trees
backroad therapy sets your soul free

Driving around, might even get stuck
No high dollar cooler in back of my truck
Just an old igloo, full of beer on ice
Drink them to fast for that yeti price

Backroads and beer
Nobody else here
No cops around
Jamming country sounds

Just me, my lady, my old red heeler
Flip channels, check score, cowboys and Steelers
Blanket and a picnic behind the seat
Pull over in the shade for an afternoon treat

Might stop at the creek for a skinny dip
Squeeze her tight and kiss her lips
Chasing each other and splashing water
Keeping cool as the evening gets hotter

Backroads and beer
Nobody else here
No cops around
Jamming country sounds

Mountains blue, pop the top
This is so fun may never stop
Out in the country is the place to be
No suit, no tie, completely free

Ol red starts barking, sees a rabbit
Pull over, he jumps out to grab it
The chase is on, we watch and see
Reds tongue is flapping but rabbit ran free

Backroads and beer
Nobody else here
No cops around
Jamming country sounds