Tonight is for peanut butter
and blue dreams,
soaked in ***** blasts.
I feel okay but my friends are
dead and it will always last.
Don't count on me
to care too much.
Don't care for me,
because you can't
count on me.

I've remembered the neon signs;
all the life I've left behind.
It's not easy being lost at twenty-three;
my bark is hard but I'm
a rotting tree.

The strands hanging from her Selsun Blue scalp
like pasty, jittery children's legs;
beyond buckwheat, before bottle-ship shoulders.
And she's so kind with her philosphy books and new diet,
I think back to when she was four and where she believed in me,
for the first time.

Her jawline is made up of alien angles,
she has tattooed forearms;
peach fuzz skin decorated with cheap, olive maps,
pointing towards a choreographed heart,
towards a neon mind.

And she has one thousand paper coffee cups
discarded across the urban earth,
spilling out onto the asphalt jungle,
much like every chance she gives.
Bloodied and twenty-four,
an abstract thought in a lonely existence.
I've never known.

And beyond the Marlboro clouds,
a God so violent and true,
there is a shriveled, purple stare
prefacing the burnt orange fog.

Where felt-up boys and girls
go to play, a perfect Devil, watching,
boundless in carbonated memory,
drunkenly gazing at trauma, fire --
celebrating each skin-sticky melt
that happens in each razed brain.

Vanished on top of an green-spread hill,
******* in the damp Irish air,
a neutral party does emerge,
taking in the tumblr wave,
witnessing water-logged Amazombies,
bruised with ambition.

Laying on a sheetless matress,
day-drinking until bottled spirit dry.
Loveless in a ghost's nest,
never believing I
could be something more,
something from a Christmas card.
Take the long neck, smash the body
and fantasize to the shard.

I have taken
her shimmering body
and have made her
believe it's dull

I drank in the steely woods, fragmented to all within;
a manger boy without his Godly toy, swallowed by the sin.
And without the gaze of the zombified masses,
scraping their plates, buying, then christening their glasses,
I realized that I was the fire that I had always feared;
a pretending son of something other than what I am;
a shimmer of a crystallized storm, smothered by shame
and tortured by the resent of recent rain....

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah
A desert-dry painted scorned
Ripped to shreds by hell-gate thrown
Forever summoned to grated life

You know what I think is sad
I used to miss the way you would curse
I missed every lie you said,
even though your lying was the worst

The tapes in your bag said it all;
the discs you spun said 'whatevs'
or 'I'm deep and loving'
I betcha you thought people heard The Smiths
and didn't think you were bluffing.

Your poetry was garbage, too --
I don't blame you for scrapping your work.
You lied about cutting your legs,
the pain under your pale skin,
you exhausted every quirk,
and wished for more within.

I betcha you're sitting somewhere
twenty-something and super-bored.
Probably still choking on your cigarettes
against your matress board,
criticizing people thinking differently
I hope one day you read a book
and ask who would publish me

You're probably the words
stuck in some other's throat;
resenting you and the
****** Mountain Goats.
I never liked to criticize
the way you looked,
but your teeth are the
second most crooked
thing about you

The roaming rebels smoke their pipe-dreams
by the eroding wall.
Their pockets are as empty as their hearts
and they know it, and know
that you know it.

Her hairspray is a mist around her
beige-caked face --
and she swears she used to look good.
She swears that things used to matter;
that words once made sense;
that her boys won't forever stand by that wall;
that her boys won't forever stand still,
swept by the grains of time.

And you, in your desired attire,
in your calculated speak,
will never know that they know you don't know.
And you, well-adjusted and forever fluent in their inability to be temporary --
in their heartless self-awarness, with no ambition --
will sigh with sympathy
unneeded for the ******.

Chipped, cherry toned toes, pressing
across the cheap, linoleum flooring,
She's wearing nothing but an
over-sized sweater from a college
she's never, ever been.

And her hands hit her hips,
her grin leaves **** those
smoky-stained calcium cuties,
wrapped by chapped pythons.
In which, you have to admit
that 90's bob bouncing is
as killer as cancer.

Coffee table eyes, glancing,
gliding between every take,
she lifts the bottom of that
balled-up, decade-old sweater,
revealing a tuft of brunette hair;
a place where you can touch her;
where you can escape and stop
lying to yourself, you nihilistic nothing.

II.

Breathing the cold, in the murky-dark,
she, laying on a decadent country,
huddled in my authoritarian arms,
we stared at stars, streaking across,
waiting to escape like them, instead of
relating to those already dead beacons.