You float over the concrete
the way driftwood rides the ocean waves,
smooth and graceful.
Your arms rise to the sky
in sync with your legs
like a puppet,
but you hold your own strings,
you control your own movements
so seamlessly
as if you were born
with a board beneath your feet.
Your eyes hold focus
how a starving man
holds a scrap of bread,
not fully moldy in the garbage.
You spin and swap your body
with the lash of a whip
and how I wish you'd crack me
just once
so I could taste your precision.
How beautiful a sight it is
to see someone so perfectly aligned
with the Earth
that gravity allows you a pass
on the rules.
And when you're finished
the passion that beams from you
is so intoxicating,
I'm too unsteady on my feet
to try to follow.

Apple Jacks

Up into the sky, the girl with velvet pants, a hip and tender blue, she loves me too, she loves me too.

Feet upon the dash, sun rays on our face, our ashtray filling fast as I push harder on the gas, I'd drive a thousand miles to see her, I'd drive anywhere to be near to her, I want to be there when she smiles, even for a little while. I will be there. I will be there.

Mountain tops are wrapped in white, the highway pass stops being plowed at night, we've seen the sun it set, we've seen the sun it rise, and set again today, we're heading far away, because I will be there, I will be there.

A notebook filled with scribbled ink and our ashtray's full with inspiration but out of energy. There's a song stuck in my head, but only the two lines that she's said, I sing them over and over, and over and over, she wrote, "I will be there. I will be there"

I'm nearly running out of stamps, but I've got many more postcards I want to send, we haven't passed a town with enough people to have a mailbox, and America is getting thin, skinny kids with their line tattoos, girls dress down and never look as good as you. I'd rather go nowhere with you than everywhere with somebody who won't ever be there. You can be here, but you can be so ******* **** unclear.

We just ate two hits a piece, of 350 micrograms of lsd, we've still got more than half a pound of some Gorilla Glue  Hybrid Blueberry strand, I'd like falafel wrap and a red stripe too, we have enough to buy food for you.

I've never been sad or lonely since we started to go on our road journey. But I'm in love with your elbows, I'm having an affair with your elbows. Sometimes they don't return my calls, sometimes they don't even call at all, I will be there if you cry, and I'll be there to say goodnight. I will be here to make you come, so long as you'll be here to *******. So let's drive around and have some fun, while we drive around in the sun. Will or won't, yes or no, to and fro, we've counted twice to just be sure, we have 10 toes and 10 fingers. I've counted yours, you've counted mine, i need to see your elbows one more time. I need to find your funny bone so it can crack me up, and we can race through states in this cardboard box. Can we put plastic wrap instead of using tempered glass, on this rocket ship Jimi's Blues, it's the only thing I want to do. To see backward into the fading sun, we can eat dinner or have Twix instead. I won't forget if you still put in. Just let me lick the numbers off your mouth. Just let me lick the numbers off your mouth. We haven't gone anywhere, so we can just stay here, I will just stay here. But please can you go to the store, I need new skateboard bearings and a kid-size box of Apple Jacks.

Vast, empty, midnight hour,
hunchbacked lampposts glaring over parasitic black earth
choking its host.

A parking lot,
an ecosystem’s blemish—
hot tar seeping into the pores of the earth
like a stubborn blackhead in a lip line.

When no cars burrow into the blackened hide
like lice
the great absence of life
is an atrocity.

I imagine myself skateboarding across the tier
as the small town cops
watch languidly with vague interest—

A skateboarder’s paradise
where wheels and accomplice minds roll across celestial barriers
blasting infinite pulses
into the microcosm.

What greasy punks have their mother’s van parked here,
huddling by the heat vents
and jerking off into a Pringle’s can?

Empty parking lot
looks like a cemetery
filled to the brim
where headstones meld
over a mass grave—

delineated by white lines,
the apparitions of vehicles and their hosts
haunt the frozen space.

Another horrible excuse
to waste land,
a wasteland in and of itself
where Tom Eliot saunters aimlessly
and buries the dead.

The saddest sight to behold,
this vacuous parking lot
littered with stray shopping carts,
phantasmal plastic bags,
gum splotches,
***** stains,
candy wrappers,
cigarette butts,
used condoms,
lonely cops
and patient drug dealers,
ambulant skaters,
tired punks,
bored teenagers,
somnambulists,
stumbling drunks,
hunchbacked ***** lights
prying for life beneath its sallow gaze—

The air encapsulated within the perdition
stifling,
the pavement below stifling,
a constriction only visible
when emptied of its contents.

A cop wakes from their choking nightmare gasping
to find themselves trapped,
****** in this parking lot
where the walkie-talkie buzzes
with the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The warehouse store
looming above the waiting room
lifeless, silent, dark countenance—
Big Brother sees all in the gaping maw.

Cascading before me,
stretching towards the highway passing by,
waiting for the panorama to finish scrolling,
the treadmill to cease its cycle—
all the while lamenting life’s absence
and reveling in the potentiality it possesses.

The soda can rumbles in the bowels,
tumbling into the gaping mouth
into which I enter a hand
to protrude my sugar rush.

sssni-kah, then the slurp of an obnoxiously pleasing sip.
I let the carbonation tickle my tongue,
reveling in the effervescent sensation.

The smell of old tires,
malodorous oil and gasoline,
and stale cigarettes fill the air.

My vexatious sips go unperturbing the dense atmosphere
that thickens outside the small air-conditioned office
and into the gas station,

where the mutters and sputters of drills,
kakadoo, kakadoo,
the squeaking and squawking of rotors and axles,
the interjections of swears and grunts
fill the air.

I peek through the ***** smudgy glass window in the door
to see grimy overalled ants meandering
under the body of our red mini-van
hiked up into the air like a figure skater,
suspended by the rusty clawed accompanist,
not a tremor of strain, unflinching,
letting the greasy men crawl underneath, hiking up her skirt
to examine her anatomy.

I walk outside and sit on a dusty tire stacked with others
on the side of the building--
some growing forlorn in tall grass
weaving in and out of the aperturous rim,
the fingers latching onto fissures and pulling it down
into the hungry earth.

Another slurp and I set the can down
to step onto my skateboard--
rolling across the gritty pavement,
snapping ollies and pop-shuv-its
to add my timbre to the cacophony
leaping out of the open garage doors.

I look over to the barbershop adjacent to the station--

The off-white single room squat allowing the cylindrical swirl
perpetually pirouetting atop the door-frame
to dazzle in a placid manner.

It is there I get my close trims
and pull a lollipop from the cavernous bowl
sitting atop the counter.

The barber, working silently behind his dull gray mustache
and dull gray eyes.

Outside the barbershop to the left,
Leicester Highway ambles onward,
diverging at a fork just ahead of the lot,
and the road adjacent that winds down my neighborhood,
Juno Drive.

I've never embarked down either divergent,
and I wonder which one is the less traveled.
(Frost, guide me.)

I go to the mailbox teetering on the edge of the highway
and hastily grab our mail,
the wind slapping at my *** as the cars whisk by
in their infinitesimal haste.

I feel like time slows once you step onto Juno Drive.

I turn around and saunter back to the station to see Billy,
my Working-Class Hero,
who I mostly see strolling up to the driver's side window
of our dull red mini-van
to loosely rest his arms crossed atop the window frame,
resting his sweaty forehead on his sticky hairy forearms.

Leaning in,

his blackened hands with his greasy smile
behind a scruffy scattered beard caked with dirt and grime,
atop a dark red leather face--
but eyes bright and merry.

His laugh, a phlegmy two-pack-a-day sputter
hacking and pummeling through the van,
all the way to me in the backseat peeking around mom's shoulders
to catch a look at this superhero anomaly.

And his southern drawl wrenching out of lungs
caked in tar and exhaust fumes,
that torpid slur that executes like the garbled hum
of an Oldsmobile engine chugging restlessly--

His laugh, an engine that won't turn over, sputtering to life
but falling right back down into the dirt,
lying on the oil-stained cold concrete floors ***** boots slipping over
and sticking too like wads of gum.

The charismatic mechanic who knew the answer to all things,
always ready to flash me that crooked greasy smile
stretching across his ruddy leather face.

I step back onto my skateboard, with soda in hand,
mail in the other,
and silently say goodbye to my Greasy Eden
before making my way down Juno Drive
towards the first house on the left,

following the road as it snakes past the trees,
alongside the creek, around the bend,
and out of sight.

We sat outside the coffee shop
next to a fire,
watching the sun set behind decrepit buildings.

I lamented over the lack of a roller rink in the area,
reflecting on memories of wobbling around in circles
with dizzying lights and blaring speakers
ejecting Pink, Daft Punk, and Eiffel 65 onto my critical youth.

I felt like a king.

We finished our smoothies and retreated
to an empty hotel parking lot,
where I taught her to skateboard.

One foot over the front bolts,
the back foot over two of the back bolts
but resting over the tail,
kick, push,
it's in the ***** of your feet--
weight distribution.

Tic, tac, scrape, thud--
she falls repeatedly
and gets back up.

I admire her resilience and perpetual smile--

This is what skateboarding is all about.

We roll around the hotel parking lot,
our endpoints being a lone luminescent lamppost
and a telephone pole beleaguered by a plot of shrubbery
that demarcates itself from the pavement.

We circle around the poles for hours,
forming an imaginary oblong track between the two,
our laughs carrying into the cool summer night lullaby
that sang the drowsy small town to sleep.

The fading throb of the wedding reception
at the bottom of the town square by the wharf,
carrying over to us.

The stores closed up hours ago,
silent empty windows reflecting the lonely streetlights
and our ambulance back at us.

We skated on unperturbed into the night hour.

A man walks outside the hotel
to have a cigarette on the sidewalk--
I imagine he is watching us and admiring our glee.

Rolling between this telephone pole and lamppost,
the glare and reflection of the empty silent windows,
the soundtrack singing above our heads,
our laughs, and the tic-tac of skateboards
and groaning of wheels over stubborn pavement
bringing my melancholic reverie to a halt,
recognizing and understanding happiness in the present moment--

This is my roller rink.

The concrete jungle.
Home of the dreaded concrete beasts
Who lie in plain sight for the world to see

Crouched in marble ledges, twisted in metal beams
Wrapped around handrails, perched in their cemented trees
They laugh at those who cannot perceive
Because they don’t believe.

And who am I,
Yes possibly me
To find my identity
In removing my wooden sword from its sheath

Placing it beneath my two shuffled feet
To answer the alluring call of the beasts beckoning
To my hero’s heart, for my eyes to blink
To suddenly see them as they were meant to be.

In a world between
Real and imaginary.

For it is I,
Yes I believe it to be
Chosen to find my destiny
In a single push

That propels me
Into the path of the snarling beasts
Approaching their stairs and rails, ledges and beams
Gaps and bumps and ramps with speed

And as they stare at me hungrily
Opening their mouths expecting me
I will stand strong on my wooden sword
As the wheels of fire erupt beneath

And the scenery blurs in the flash of the rapidity
I bend my knees and grit my teeth
My eyes narrow and the drum in my chest crescendos its beat
A shout explodes from my chest, a primal scream

As I press on
In the concrete jungle.

Home of the dreaded concrete beasts
Who quiver in plain sight for the world to see
And whimper at the sight of who they now perceive
Because I do believe.

And it is I,
Yes undoubtedly me
Who will find my destiny
Conquering the concrete jungles of the world unseen

Surfing the concrete waves of the world between
With my loyal vessel being the wooden sword from the sheath,
That remains steady in the face of danger beneath my feet.

I am alive
In the concrete jungle.

It's late summer, too humid and hot to really do much of anything
without having your t shirt sticking to your back
like an extra layer of skin.
that time of year when the air makes the city turn still-
just for a second.
if you don't freeze the frame, it'll be like it never happened.

I'm lurking like a ghost in the woods,
my blue hair glinting through the trees.
I'm finding abandoned concrete jungles, broken skateboard decks
and graffiti scattered like memories from when everything was okay.

Sometimes, if I'm too sad, the universe lets me find a house.
One that makes me gasp; one that turns the air get a little colder.
I go alone, others tend to rush in,
spray paint in hand, loud footsteps and rough voices
echoing through the deserted hallways.
I am always quiet, always still,
i make sure to blend into the walls like i am breathing
with the creeping ivy.  

My heart is still searching for the place it will call home.
I've seen a lot of dilapidated houses and i'm still searching,
unable to find what I'm looking for.
My heart found an apartment in yours.
I never realized I was subleasing until someone better came along.

Its late summer,
and once a girl told me that it will get far worse before it gets better.
Well, its getting bad again but I'm still breathing,
so i guess that counts for something.

Collecting thoughts, imagination as vivid as the colours of a sunset.
The endless saturday, the drinking, the endless sun.
As the sun beats down on your face, and they reveal more and more skin
You look around and lovers are everywhere
None of them care
The day is to bright and the future is endless
Colours blazing brighter than the sun
All the girls, don’t want a son
But you can care less, the sun is endless and so is your life,
Every time the sun is up, you find the fountain of youth again.
Turning you from 18 to 7
Caring is not your middle name
The world is your toy
So skate around the board walk listening to 3005
Searching for a new potential lover
new goal
You don’t look for cover,
like a mole
Cause you are reincarnated
You remember that school is today
but why go on such a beautiful day
the future is now
whats the point of sitting around like a cow
The ocean as blue as the sky
where your dreams are shelled
in a bright yellow sphere
and as the sun goes down after the day
Now son don’t be in such a dismay
Forecast says, you’ll be young forever