Wipe your eyes, my baby
Marlboro and shotgun casings
Pound piano keys and feel it in your bones, this fear you’re facing
Because Debussy can’t take away the sound through unsubstantial apartment wall spacing
Of neighbors screaming, growing skill in the use of debasing words
We’re growing sage to burn alongside the memory of heart-breaking firsts
That didn’t bring any fulfillment or remaining seconds and thirds
We are witches, searching for potions to provoke hard spells
To forget these troubles which were heard from the mouthpiece of hell
Our black cats and crooked hats don’t hide the fact
That these highs don’t last
And soon we will remember why we left yesterday’s December behind
Ice crackling softly in window panes becomes enough to remind us why—
These things don’t leave the solitary, unhinged mind
When there’s nothing else to replace what was once chased
On agonizing below-zero winter days
So wipe your eyes, my baby
Wipe your eyes
This won’t heal, not like the bullet wound and cigarette addiction
That you always lose
(And somehow manage to re-find).

Look at you,
You’ve forgotten the solace of your mother’s warmth, the succor of your father’s love form
Look at you,
Begotten by one worthy pair and yet having failed to grant them an ample heir
Look at you,
Failure, you wayward daughter with eyes caught in the confines of dreams
And yet you’ve seen everything there is to see.

milky way
provide a way to consign mischance behind to them who stray
earth is but a minor stain in lightyears’ expanse of stratospheric disarray

I’d love you violently if I had you
I’d watch your violets turn to dust and seem like new
(Until I had you)
The ones you left behind with your ever-seizing dialogue
This is a mere apocalyptic log in which
I tear apart those moments before turning crazy
I went crazy for
you,
your dead violets
and like petals—strewn, your
disconcertingly
violent mind.

I’m trying not to love you
I’m laughing at the irony of that truest truth—
That we were the slightest unalignment of stars in a sky of caliginous blue
You say you’re hers—
That’s not true
You say you’re hers, but
you’re just you.

sugar-drunk,
i was looking at you
to remember when life was just slow dances, expanses
of time
when we laughed, when I didn’t eulogize forgotten guys,
then, I saw no one but you
super drunk,
i was looking at you
just looking at you

I’m capable of disaster—
Godspeed to the mother of disaster
Carpe Diem, Beverly Hills is ready for you, faster,
our minds are rupturing from these rapturous months
it’s all a little much for us
Surreality, angular surreality
We’re two-faced, defacing reality’s ideals
Because it’s up to us, that’s the veridical deal
‘99 can’t party, no—
Not like the kids
who can no longer feel.

Marigold, southern roses
in my backyard
there she poses
Camellia, there we dine
red lights, red wine
red tequila
Marigold, flat-pressed roses,
that memory, it’s the tenet
of my broken-ness.