The redneck got arrested last night.

The ******* was barking back at dogs
and belting shots of scotch well-before sundown.
You could say he and the sun were collectively sinking.

Nights like these
breed pregnant silences
between the outbursts.
I sit poised for the next eruption
as a child cloistered under covers for fear of thunderclaps--

Another howl,
(presumably bellowing for beer)
then he's batting his live-in lap-straddler
around the apartment beneath me.

With every strike
the drywall learns a lesson
this ignorant *****
can't get a grip on:

some things never change.
The world will change around them
like tissue growing around a bullet fragment.

The cops come,
the cuffs go on,
and the problem is put on pause for an evening--
but he'll ascend the stairs with the sunrise.

They'll reconcile,
            because misery does want for company.

He'll promise he'll be different.
She'll actually believe him.
They'll be back to battering their plaster
with the reverberations of ******* and arguments.

She can't see that a drunkard's apologies
        are counterfeit currency.

I took it for common knowledge.

Perhaps it is...

Perhaps, like living in tornado alley,
they cope with ceaseless ****-storms
because they're just too lazy to move.

She held her project aloft,
so assured of her supremacy
that she would challenge
God himself
were he an 8th grader.

Eyes averted,
I slyly slid my box
beneath the table-
absconding with my dignity
to aid in assailing some distant windmill...

My eyes fly
to the swatch of sack-cloth
abandoned in a corner of the floor,
no doubt considered
for use in a patchwork at some point.

I wonder if it mourns
its shortcomings.

I sold smack on a playground today

    biding time to scrounge the rent--

Two months ago I had never even seen the stuff.
    I'd never procured it for personal use,
    let alone sold it.

Now I'm a full-time pusher of prescriptions
for problems that can't be cured,
a modern-day snake-oil salesmen
schlepping panaceas for every conceivable ill.

Trying to cope with depression?
    This'll give you a shot in the arm!
Your boyfriend just broke your heart
mere weeks after breaking your *****?
    Here's a ***** that you can depend on...

I thought I was better than this,

but who can afford scruples
                      with bills to pay?

Internally
I struggle to compete
with people who would never deign to take note of me.
My revenge is in undermining their immaculate lives,
a pill-peddling Socrates
keeping creditors at bay.

I'd always envisioned being someone's hero--
at least being remembered for an act of creation.

Instead I'm an enzyme for eradication.
A cancer cell at best--
    A ****** wrecking ball.

                 One day I woke up a sidekick
to a heroine that's never saved anyone...

The needle-tip,





a bee sting





giving rise to a hive.




A sickening delirium
coursing mercurial under eyelids,



tapeworms and tendrils
weaving wildly:



teeming, churning tides breaking over
greedy teeth (a needy mouth


flaying flesh ferociously,
a fevered wolverine
whipping through a petting zoo).

Each agonizing second
slowly sliding by,
tacky molasses on cloth
covering a table in an innocuous
American home
bruises on mother's face
fade (eggplant to jaundice
to the crimson of the setting sun
dying behind the horizon
line {chopped across a counter-top
like a broken promise...}).  




All the lives we compromise



trying to cage a swarm.

If you wanted privacy,
you might have closed your blinds from time to time.

The devil doesn't knock upon entry.
He knows where he's wanted.

I've heard your conversations--
The bigotry,
the loathing.

I've ****** up filth through your floorboards.

I've tasted your tears,
mingled with sweat
from sins of the flesh,
cascading down your drains.

I've stepped through the hillocks of cigarette butts
you discard as carelessly as your dreams,
a little measure to meld your
environment and outlook:
the world as an ashcan.

I know you better than I'd ever know myself
because my assessment of you is
not gilded with pride or egotism,
not tainted by self-pity.

I know that you wanted this,
in spite of pained cries to the contrary.
I know you really wept for the innocence
you lost long before I let myself in your *****.

You let the world in--
you offered yourself up with impunity for far too long.
You valued your life so little
as to put it on display for anyone's appraisal.

You were waiting on catastrophe
to prove you were worth saving;

I was merely the instrument.

I took nothing that wasn't proffered by your unlocked door.

Your home and your body share sentiments--
I simply took the welcome mat at its word.

72 hours in
I'm giving serious thought to
drinking the Listerine.

The ***** is it's citrus flavored.

I can't even rinse with that toxic concoction, let alone swallow it,

but I'm running out of options.

I finished my other MacGyvers--
the Nyquil was first to go,
followed by a Dimetapp chaser
  (the cherry,
     not a refreshing grape-flavored one)
and a shot of Wal-fed
that induced indigestion.

My kingdom for a belt of whiskey--
maybe a snifter of ***.

You know you're bottoming out
when you wax nostalgic
for drunken days
when soiling yourself was justifiable
due to your general state of disarray.

I'm the **** that adheres to the bottom of the barrel—
******* in the shower with my shoes on,
pants removed as a cautionary measure.

Not that life can get worse;
nothing trumps waking up miserable,
sore,
   jobless,
     alone,
       queasy,
         woozy and
           drooling uncontrollably

and lacking ***** to blame it on.

I am anti-matter.

Trending on Twitter.

Shooting a guest-spot on Two-and-a-Half Men.


A five-dollar foot-long
meal-deal of a man,

long on propaganda
  while short on substance;


A School-House Rock rendition of
Aspiration Asphyxiation

penning love-letters to Jesus
     beneath my breath
to abate the sensation that I'm just
     redundant protoplasm
with a pecker and a pocketbook



   failing to distract myself from the fact that
every intake of breath is a death sentence.


I have no praise-worthy abilities.
You can't **** your way into heaven.


   Satan himself
caught a better break being
cast out of the kingdom--

there is certainty in condemnation.


Those poor souls who harbor
    the illusion of indemnity
through faith in a
        purportedly magical Jew
truly are the blessed few

not via the Lord's redemption, mind you,
but by the thoughtlessness of their devotion.

Perhaps the two are tantamount to one another.


The ****** are so labeled
     because we question ceaselessly--
curiosity is no comfort.


Should the sun burn black,
     the world will go cold
or
      some star-burst might
   scorch our galaxy clean
of all delusions of eternity.


The meek can inherit the ashes.

You can identify your own flaws by scrutinizing strangers.

I watched a woman
     from across a platform
at the subway station:

Straight, dishwater-blonde hair
glimmering in the subterranean fluorescence;
         striking posture—
     a dancer's figure—
and a thrifty ensemble that bespoke good taste
in spite of budgetary constrictions.

She pulled a circular compact from her purse
the way people in films exhume a pack of cigarettes.
   Then, in deliberate fashion,
she removed a pill and swallowed it.

             Birth control is like receiving a governor's pardon
         in the process of planning a crime.
             I resent her having that kind of indemnity.

I pass judgment on assumptions of character,
       high on the blissful soapbox of bigotry.


As that pill crested the ridges of her teeth
and met the soft tissue of her tongue, then esophagus,
my mind conjured a phantasmagoria of lewd images
on the surrounding subway walls--


         more a reflection of my character
              than hers.

Reflection
will distort this moment—

(an oasis
in the desert of memory)

the simple
wonder of the instant diminished

as gemstones
depreciated by display upon

a gold band.


Focus fades
in inching instants

(a shutter
slowly closing over a lens)

and we
imperceptibly surrender

clarity
to these evanescing essences of

youth and reminiscence.

She spilled lengthy prose,
      believing words would
bandage her inadequacies.

Enrapt,
   I tussled
loose threads
     of her rhetoric
in a feeble attempt at intimacy–

not realizing
   Andromeda would love anyone
     who had pried her free from the rock.

I stanch internal hemorrhaging
by putting the inside outside;


       I'm finding out
               that ***
         without love
     is a pantomime--

               an open-hand slap.

Not an assault,
             but an insult.

         It's too hard to
shed the skin
       you left me in.
                  

                  Even now, I love you
               more than I care to admit
                     so I curl up
                   like burnt paper
          with surrogates
       and memories
   to keep me warm—


             but it still feels like infidelity.

You speak of salvation.

After the chaos I've caused,
  my redemptive acts

merely clear a few stones
  from the path of an avalanche.
   What sort of deity

would deign to
  sanctify me? Where is the sense
   in granting forgiveness
    when I still hold myself
      accountable?

A membrane of black ice
obscured
by a fog-bank
porcelain gaze,
he loves her with

Gein's focus—
gluing glamour on the ghastly.


Her urges
are a cleft lip-
reconstructed, not
repaired.


They make a lovely couple.

Like leftovers from an extravagant meal,
I thawed my heart and put it on her plate-

I'd hoped it would sustain her.

It was rejected with vigor.

She infers that she's toxic:
spoilt soil at a nuclear blast site.


I'm starting to suspect the offering itself was necrotic.

A querulous cry
from my peckish feline
failed to rouse me from sleep:

thus,
teeth entangled in the meat of my palm,
this hideous beast
bucked conventional wisdom in
deciding to bite a hand
to prompt a feeding.

Concurrently
I am considering the adage
of there being more than one way
to skin a cat.

If love is a fire,
this is a funeral pyre;
ashes falling
like nuclear winter.

Like a blowtorch,
*** had soldered us together--
I'm too paralyzed by fear
to hope for something more.

Only in the black of night do we see each other.

We barely speak
outside the foul-mouthed foreplay
and passionate epithets exchanged
in our sweat-soaked moments
of collective agony.

Like so much of my life,
this has to hurt to feel good.

A smack on the *** must suffice
when a kiss on the lips can **** you.

I don't dare look at her face.

There's so much I say
in spite of myself—
A litany of confessions
in my expressions.

Not that she would notice--
her eyes are outside,
aimed at a horizon I can't see.

We share this silence
because it's the only thing
either of us still cherishes.

I found a statue of Christ amidst detritus
of a burned-out bar on High Street.

The Savior scorched to a cinder:
the state of faith in America.

I crossed myself and stowed
the King of Kings
in folds of my old windbreaker

(buried beneath the hardened exterior
I've projected to protect myself
from the tyranny of evil men)

to spare him the indignity
of further exposure to the elements on
our exodus through these city streets:

a trifling attempt at reciprocity.

I reflect upon our shared moments
much the way
an alcoholic
stares into an empty tumbler
realizing
he can't afford a refill...

... ravening wolf's
blood-caked maw
     explodes
plumes of condensation
    to evidence exertion.


He guards his ****
with a dogged dread,

for I
am an
unfamiliar
predator.

I caught a case of curiosity
and, digging,
unearthed a chasm.

Scars
are grooves on a record:
run your finger along an edge
and they surrender their story.


Hers were harvested
like culling from a cadaver.

Protests
were discarded
easily as a hunter
sheds offal from a ****.

Words washed over me:
past the point of no return,
catching clarity at the elbow.

Arms limp at my sides,

a pugilist after 8 rounds with Ali,
suddenly realizing
he had been conserving his energy
while I hurled hay-makers
at uplifted gloves,

none of my hate hit home.


She spoke the knock-out blow
     or, the ghost of her voice...

"You have to admit to yourself
that ******* a stranger's
the only way you can hide anymore."

You only start listening
    after exhausting your arsenal.

The void of
       my mouth
swallowed her sentiments.  

  I took up the
      empty husk of her heart
  to make it my home,
            just to have a memento--

holding on to anything.

     On the ropes,
  disoriented,
skipping chapters to
  take in the denouement
only to forget the characters' names.




But I couldn't ignore how
she closed the door;

Gently-
not a slam
screaming passion, energy.

No.

The door and jamb met resignedly--
children who can no longer play with one another.

The grace of God was painted
on the canvass of your soft skin,
but you don't see it.

I try to touch it,
but you secret it away
like a scar,
or deformity.

I pray for strength,
but the devil propositions
where God charges admission...

no one knocks a free ride.

Millions of matchstick men
   brought their hot heads
     to an ocean of kerosene.

     Who's to say who sparked the inferno,

   when we all show scars
from standing over the flames?

I erased your voice-mail today--
     the only remaining evidence
     that we ever loved each other.

     Notes I could part with--
       penmanship doesn't encapsulate you.

       E-mails jettison into cyberspace
         without fanfare.

         Pictures were trashed
             before you left the parking lot.

Flames of rage
         consume indiscriminately.
     Like a bruise,
         black will fade to blue
     until it looks worse than it feels.



       Strangely,
       the voice-mail gave me pause.



Your voice exited that ear-piece
     like a sucker-punch to a glass jaw.

             It took me twenty minutes to punch 7
                 and put the defibrillating pads to my amnesia.


Whoever coined the phrase
     easy as the push of a button
never used one to erase the only
                 "I love you"
      that ever sounded genuine.

The chrysalis cracked
  and what emerged

was deadly and beautiful.
I kept it
until the beast

could no longer be fed.
  Released into the wild
my child bred pestilence
  and collapsed every structure

brazen enough to stand
  in its path. Finally,
I could avoid my
  fate no further and surrendered
to sate its rapacious need.  

History will call me a hero.

Discarded matchsticks
(blackened heads
like
frostbitten flesh):

road flares tracing
the path of an accident.

We live

between

the silences

and after
      every kiss
we part
    embarrassed adolescents.

She writhes
   as though her soul
were battened by bra-straps...
  
   The only sound
that ever
      mattered
was a
   breathy moan
beside her burning earlobe

while her eyelids
   squeezed tight enough
to envelop her.

I pulled out her chair,

living proof that
while chivalry may be dead,
there are those dedicated
to keeping fresh flowers on the grave.

An introduction of the eyes—
without a word
I knew her

and,

familiar enough with
myself, know
that will be sufficient.