What is our society if not a copycat catastrophe
          A cold-hearted calamity of blind hindsight
Severed chains reforged in the flames of minimum wage
          How we herald the heretic

Free is the slave who detaches their arms and legs
          To gift kings their reign
Jeweled towers of bone reach to the sky
          And devour the progress of our connective open roads

What is prosperity absent a shared purpose
          Like a brain held apart from its own heart
Human history imprisoned on a page
          Ink-stained chronicle of our original sin

Thinking we can get where were going
          By forgetting all we have been
Each obstacle a handcrafted impediment
          Dinosaur dynasty doomed to irrelevance

Dangerman
—a buyer and seller
of mostly himself

Petticoat
—a ***** on the take
and about to slip

Each made promises to the other
but both loved journeys
and valleys
and limericks
and turntables
and spirits
and skirt-raising
and slowdives
and lip-biting
and come-hither
more than their here-and-now vow

Trigger-happy begetter
with an ax to grind
killing captives slowly
with jagged little things
it's the strangest sound
in spite of the plight of
the ringing in his ears
it never fades away

I reckon numbers and lead are arbitrary
to a button man
whose wheels turn circles
mainly in his skull
revolving/rouletting
as infinite go-around

Never mind though, the time must be now
for a show of hands

Motherhood waited in the ship's hold
until the treasure hunt
brought her to this final island
a choice between gold
and the aging ******

The young who suckle at her breast
might one day run mum through
with the sword at Payback
—that unsteady little homestead
where profit and loss
share the same face

Never mind though, the moment must be now
to ring the bell

And raise redemption
like a burning flag of regret

He that trod upon subservient Europe
with the imperial guards' fighting prowess,
did himself and his heartthrob the empress,
entrench thrones jointly owned by their hookup.
He that caused guns to rage on Europe's plains
and cannons to thunder on Egypt's sands,
sent hussars and mamluks to distant flight.
He usurped crowns for his dear siblings' gains,
and enthroned loyalists to head vanquished lands.
But was banished for good from France's sight
after a stunning loss on Belgium's plains.

~
atop the Manhattan skyline
her similitude descends as rain
we see her wonderwork
we see her water-standing
her very abandonment of draperies
unassuming and artless
where the heedless moths settle
with bodies of mystic warmth
colored with rose and a dash of flame
~
– for Audrey Munson

a breeze scatters the ashes from my cigarette
all over my legs and onto the ground
now they make tiny mountains of rubble
along with burning villages where it's lights out
before their inhabitants could even think
of worshipping the sun

parting lovers never have much to say
but i think i'll write their names somewhere
and forge my signature on a love letter meant
for an ocean that is inexhaustibly rocking
while cursing the moon for always pushing it away
when it's just trying to fill her craters

the spoils of history go towards making
impermanent things permanent on things
impermanent like the arms of those unknown
and like my backpack swallowing pens
maybe it wouldn't happen if we stopped
romanticizing the ink

my body falls in pieces from the heavens while
you're on earth mingling with the best of them
and it's not until halfway through a cosmopolitan
that you realize you forgot to catch me and
now the ants on the ground are getting stuck
on a love that could have been

have you ever noticed the shape of hearts
gives them a symmetry that makes them
capable of being folded and neatly tucked away
out of all the people you've met in your life
how many of them would you reach in your pocket
and unfold one for

if there's a reason i've melted it's because
my cigarette tastes an awful lot like you

i see myself -
unshaven and distraught, at peace with who i am and despaired by a world i saw coming but couldn't prepare for.
i see myself -
sitting in the old house, civil war ghosts whispering through the cracks in the dry red clay. sherman burned this town once and now i get to watch the sun do it again.
i see myself -
the hedges are overgrown and i never stopped smoking cigarettes. the shadows on the walls are mapped out, a mimicry of life in an empty heirloom.
i see myself -
head in my hands thinking about history. The Last Gilded Age. The Second Gilded Age. what good are comparisons if no one's left to draw them? how does the past make room in a world already strangled by its present?
i choke back -
the same addiction that made geraldine shoot herself. it occurs to me that i am probably the last person alive to remember geraldine ever existed. i think that's what drew me to history - i've always had the past living inside me. there's a whole family tree intertwined with my ribcage, like kudzu over tarred lungs.
i fill my -
flask with weedkiller. i inherit an open wound. i try to find my place in a history that no one will ever read.