Sometimes there's something jarringly disparate About the fresh sea salt fog and the beauty queen moon of the Monterey wharf.

Sometimes you need the painfully cold sludge of a Cleveland street with no sidewalks and the crying skeletons of trees to match your black coffee soul.

Rainy days in Cleveland look like regret
They take the joy out of a 70Degree day
Like an empty Christmas present
It’s about as romantic as an ex Boyfriend’s third chance at failing you
But if you look closely
The rain drops aren’t committing suicide
They are sky diving from the clouds
Awaiting their first impression with the grass
They yearn to be soaked up by the Earth
The same way my eyes freeze in yours like a game of tag
Did your heart feel mine tap its shoulder when I whispered you were it?
Are you tired of how good I am at hiding? No matter how long you count
How I appear to be invisible then suddenly I touch base
I rarely ever play games I haven’t studied the rules of…
But sometimes love is like a fake leg cramp in a basketball game
Between a pro athlete and his little sister
Sometimes love; knowing it can beat us, humbles itself so we too can feel like winners <333

Before you know it, the week is over.
Some bills paid. Meetings attended.

Congratulatory cake sliced into two
dozen squares for an engaged couple.
When suddenly, suddenly you discover

that a certain reticence has breached
the comfort and security of your partner.
Followed him to the coffee shop. Wedged

itself between his breakfast sandwich
and speech. Followed him to the city’s
public square where a large group of

suburban mothers dressed in loud colors
practiced yoga underneath spotty skies
in itchy grass. Where sunlight appeared

and disappeared from his brown skin
and wind upturned the corners of the pages
of a novel he read from as the reticence said

more to you than he had all morning
and the bees’ only agenda was to land
on the wavering yellow petals of sunflowers

and then take off into a day that would become
tomorrow's news and next year's history.

4am and my eyes are killing me,
and I'm dull and sore and ****.
****. ****. ****. ****.

Leaning against an arcade booth
of Street Fighter 2 watching them
dance in green lazer lights.
We decided to go back to her friend's place.

Her friend got wine,
he got beer.
He ****** in the bushes.
Admitted he was drunk.

On the roof of her friend's apartment,
I ****** down a cold coffee,
and we played acoustic music.
We climbed higher on the roof.
They smoked and drank,
and just generally shot the ****.

Something bad happened between him and her;
she ran off crying, he's calling her a child, a baby.
He's pretending he's not mad,
pretending he's in control of his emotions
while lashing out.
Throws a beer bottle,
decides to leave. She
practically begs him for a ride home.
Me and her friend want so badly for her
to stay. Stay.
She leaves with him.
Drunk and ******, to drive her home.
I start walking home soon after.

I get lost on a street.
It's 2am and I'm jumping up and down
waving my hands, trying to get someone
to just tell me where I am.
A man across the street must be taking out garbage,
I walk across the street and say, "Excuse me sir?"
He shouts, "No! Go back across the street! NO!"
like I'm a ******* wild animal.
I ask him, "Can you just tell me where Bluestone is?"
He tells me to go north.
His input is useless.
I hope he dies of pancreatic cancer.

I kick a can and yell, "**** all of you, collectively!"
to the suburban nightmare I'm trapped in.
"I hope they nuke this ******* **** stain neighborhood!"
Kick an empty Arizona can in contempt and disgust.

I have a small monologue with myself
and almost break down on the sidewalk.

Walk back to practically where I came from,
and take the long way home.
On my way I pass a stranger who asks, "Dig?"
No ******* idea what they meant.
I dodge the skunks and grab a hubcap.
Wanted a trinket.
I think I'm gonna have a ******* aneurism.

Haven't really eaten, in a long time.
Wasting away. Physically,
but not mentally yet.
Yet.
Banging on instruments for
the perfect cacophony.
Stormy tonight outside Cleveland
as I stab away inside my laboratory.
Raining hell and I **** around
till my ears are almost bleeding,
screaming, more aspirin,
lighting thunder, and in the
dead sequences of recording
IT LIVES.
Strings detuned from a menace,
pure chaos on a note rings on,
SKRONK.
Skronk is freedom,
every voice saying what
every voice has to say.
5/4 and it's ******* outside,
and all I know is the key to
utopia is any note you like
in A major.
**** the signature.
Skronk is *freedom.

There is a screaming silence on the
privatized public transportation of
Cleveland. A scream in the hearts and minds
of a people who live with less than zero.
Car fires in the streets.
Syringes next to the suburbs.
Nowhere is holy in this great city,
a veritable Gomorrah.
It's not a jungle,
it's a prison and a **** shame.
Ohio is for abandonment;
musicians, writers, astronauts,
pilots.
All desperate to leave a crater
where they used to stand,
to blast
a hole in the heart of this state.
A hole it already has.
They make it less than zero.
Plastering Chief Wahoo against
their foreheads, houses, cars,
lawns, chests, arms, bars, streets.
Saying it's not racism,
it's tradition.
Meanwhile, everyone else is
trying to explain that just because
it's old doesn't mean it isn't racist
to the idiots of Cleveland.
Cleveland is a city made of
stains, tarnish, rust and apathy.
Erecting a chandelier
instead of a dream,
a monument to desperation.
There is a scream in the back of the throat.

I’m not quite sure, yet everything I do
appears to me as being viciously half-assed
yet sincere.
I write this mid-winter [I guess?] on the RTA
with twenty dollars on me and I don’t want to know
in the bank, with cold feet, both literally and metaphorically.
The future looks decent from a distance in bar light.
As I feign some resemblance of being classy and
collect more sodium on my footwear,
I ponder the passing of an officer who flashed a light
to look at me in the dark on my way from home.
It makes me glad I speak English, where there
are such hard, sharp and unsympathetic undertones
to phrases like, “*******”.
It’s dark on the way through Cleveland.
Try to stay warm.