The good die young
                         The young die dumb
                                         We didn't iron our shirts
                                                          ­I guess we're not chosen ones.

Tania slurps her cheap beer and uncrosses her legs,
exposing fresh bruises from the soup factory.
She outlines them in marker and draws
a smiley face on one located on her right thigh.
These bruises tell me that my life is composed
almost entirely of bad decisions, she says,
replacing the cap on the marker. I ask how
a decision could form such a perfect,
purple circle. Between swallowing
beer and peering into the rain,
she burps. I can't say, but--
I mean, do you want
to have ***? Later on
I drive her to the
hospital and I visit
a therapist. For
a few months.

Vivienne Westwood
Always wears Chinos
By Moschino
When making Cappuccinos
And insists all that drink
The aforementioned fare
Wear clothes
Adorned with safety pins
And have blond spiky hair.

Vivienne rarely makes Cappuccinos.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.

There's something missing in this heap of hearts.
i'd happily admit he'd fall apart
without his special taste of what was to come
after every horror night he'd slept,
beauty truthful, I wish i'd seen
his glory days, our glory days
we breathe as one, and there's music to come -
but an unstrung guitar would yearn for it.
Something like diamonds or vague metaphors
like years of friends and friendly enemies that struck a bone like a tattooed hand a chord
something like that which fills the soul of rueful smiles and before they left -
he knew that was where he took his breath.
One day I'll come to understand why deprivation is my vice and virtue
and why good things come to those who forget -
but for now its grief for ghosts and phantom hands left unheld
that keeps us both waking during the night.