It's 4:18 in the morning and everyone here at home is asleep, they can't hear me tossing and turning in my bed, the squeek of the springs are keeping me awake.
It's 4:19 in the morning and I'm packing a bowl wishing you were here next to me.
It's 4:20 in the morning, I flick my lighter and inhale, hoping you feel a little buzzed too.

Soon to be so real.
I choose a name
to take
the place
of the
name she
gave me
at birth.

Why would I want to be named
after your **** addicted friend
and unrequited love interest?

Soon to be so real.
I choose my own
good name
to take
the place
of the
name of
my cut
blood ties.

Why would I want the name
of the alcoholic ***** sprayer
who saw the baby face and ran away?

I'm not
the men you knew.
I'm not
the man you will.

I am the practical
implementation
of a carnelian lust.

The trumpet of
the name of shame.

Dead soldiers, lined up in a row,
Short history, how many more to go?
Dead sailors, some of them in an alley
Not sailing anywhere anymore are they?
Dead airmen, and also dead marines.
What if we’d been where they’ve been?
Men and women, fathers and mothers
We are burying our sisters and brothers.

Hut, two, three, four,
What the hell are we fighting for?
Five, six, seven, eight!
I’ll go to heaven if it’s not too late!

Dead soldiers, not just bottles of beer;
More come back home dead every year.
Used people, we let them get thrown away
By listening to what rich crooks had to say
Their empty promises were all about glory
But remember, most of that word spells gory.
Expendables, in the Big Game of profit.
The proceeds, none of them ever got it.

Hut, two, three, four,
What the hell are we fighting for?
Five, six, seven, eight!
I’ll go to heaven if it’s not too late!

Salute and makes parades, of course
And pin the cheap medals on a corpse,
A kid under orders to invade and ****
Hoping leaders wake, but they never will.
The politicians get rich in office when
They sing  patriotic war songs again.
Someday we all can stop all the killing
If love, providence and all gods are willing.

Hut, two, three, four,
What the hell are we fighting for?
Five, six, seven, eight!
I’ll go to heaven if it’s not too late!

I work for Jones & Co.
You are likely somewhere down below,
I have grown used to this unnatural height.
Once, here, as a younger man, I read articles,
working on cases just long enough to cultivate indifference.
My first firm party, I was made to wear an ivy laurel.
We were mingling on the penthouse deck,
when a gust unceremoniously removed it from my head.

Jones is a superstitious man,
he has a dream-catcher above his office door.
He designed a vaulted spiral staircase on our fifty-first floor.
The one separates Jones from his company,
the other, us from below.
Five years of billing in six minute blocks,
labyrinthine increments, Herculean costs.
A kind of optic chiasma where the nerves cross and people get lost.



B.E. Twain

That American bandana in my closet?
I stole that.
Her mom liked me and let me borrow it for our fourth of July party,
and when we were giving our stuff back I forgot it was in my room.
Then I saw it and decided, this is mine now
I don’t think I’ve worn it since.
In the eyes of the law we call this an “adverse possession”
the intent to own and keep something that isn’t yours.
I know she’d roll her eyes if she saw me putting our relationship into legalese.

That stormtrooper nutcracker?  
That was a gift,
a Birthday gift,
an April Birthday gift.
Who the hell gives a Christmas present as a birthday gift?
She did.
I kept it.
And with gifts there is no “consideration”
which to lawyers means a bargain or exchange of promises,
a gift is a “I love you and want you to have this
because I like to make you happy.
But also, if we end I want you to look at this for the rest of your life
and wonder what would have happened
if we could have survived that last fight?”
You don’t get to bargain for that, you get the gift and the grief.
and she gets to know that you’re going to miss her every day.
Sometimes I wonder who the lawyer really is.