As children, we wonder
over the subtle vibrations of our voices
traveling through a frayed string
between two empty cans of sweet corn.

We grow up watching spaceships scream across
endless stars, and the stars have names
like Alpha-232 and Gamma-786,
because wiz-kid men in observatories have to be practical.

Our back pockets have the universe on a leash, milliseconds
from genius, because the 4G internet is so **** fast.

There are virtual realities more real than summer grass,
crickets humming on computer screens in winter,
and the voices and faces of the dead swimming on televisions 24/7.

Infinity has never been more fathomable.


It makes you wonder, when the sun crumbles into dusk
and you’re on the back porch with a cigarette smoked and dying,
how we’ve never managed to engineer a cure
for loneliness.

listen--
         it's two-thirty in the morning.
         there is a song playing, and it doesn't remind me of you,
         but i thought you should know
         because this next part is important.

the singer is Elliott Smith,
         and he's kissing his darling between jailbird bars
         just like that time--remember?--when we kissed
         through the gap in the barbed wire,
         and our hearts danced like the strobe of police lights.

                      (we were trespassing)

i'm not thinking of you,
        because while i'm out here smoking,
        and i wet my lips so the paper doesn't stick to them like heartbreak,
        i don't imagine your cherry Chapstick or the way it left
        mellow pink stains on your cigarette filters.

these are the facts:
        i've nearly forgotten you;
        i'm not still hung up on the smell of lavender handsoap;
        i haven't rifled through a single Facebook album;
        i don't know the name, address, and telephone number

                    (not to mention, i haven't memorized a single
                               stupid, snarky tweet)

of your new boyfriend
       with the pretentious French last name.
       anyway, i don't know why i decided to call,
       i guess it was just to let you know
       how i'm doing just fine without you.

i found salvation in the
molten crown
at the end of a cigarette.

salvation walked barefoot
on its pilgrimage to me
through twenty-one years
of scars—
it walked through my grandmother’s
lungs,
scorching them black,
and through my mother’s
cancerous and toxic
trachea.

it walked through
a thousand anti-tobacco ads,
nondisclosure agreements,
hospital wards,
my father’s own clenched fists,
and soft yellow stains on discarded
funereal vestments.

it found me after all that,
waiting patiently
for a way to **** myself
slowly,
something that mixed well with alcohol,
and would leave me
bitterly satisfied with the semblance
of poetic justice.

gooseflesh bulbs on the satin of her skin
like early morning dewfall;
her lips slicken
with blurry, mascara-tinted tributaries
(**** it—she can’t even die pretty)
so the wind carries her
like litter,
a years-old newspaper
with no particularly interesting headlines,
from the 12th story window
in the cerulean dress she bought
just for the occasion.
the dead-end city lights bear witness
to her own dead end into five thick inches of concrete.
and with its downtrodden palms
the city blushes her cheeks with abrasions,
shadows her eyes with bruises,
tattoos her lunar body with its worn-out brands;
it takes her in.
and the ****** kid on his paper route finds her there,
and stops,
and stares,
and wonders,
and eventually lifts his sneakers back to the pedals
and keeps on biking,
because there she is, dead on the side of the ******* road,
and what the **** can you do?

She has a smile like broken glass,
sharp, glinting in the sun,
and her feet sway with the secret rhythms
of a bonfire in the wind;
maybe one burning books, cassettes, and *****.



Her hair is the black of nights that inspired poets
to write odes to broken gods.


And her eyes—those swampy, willow-the-wisp lures
that guided a hundred men
to ecstatic and drowning graves under the murk,
they call to you like misplaced lighthouse beacons
yearning for a shore and harbor.

So when you see her vampiric skin,
white as cobwebbed moonlight,
of course you are drawn to it:
drawn to the bleeding gashes she makes when she cuts you
with her tongue,
the furrows she sows with her fingernails in your back
to plant the seed of unrequited want,
drawn to the burdened lockboxes she buries so tantalizingly deep
in her soul.

Go, excavate them in the drunken sharing of mysteries,
and then tomorrow morning,
when you know better,
leave her curled in hangover,
awaiting the next in line to pretend that they only want to heal her
of the infinite, parasitic sadness
that people like you
have built up in her like a lonely castle
slowly and endlessly
over the years.

somewhere in the desert, on a road with a speed limit no one ever knew,
you drive straight and fast towards a horizon verdigris with storm clouds, and the only reason you can guess why your foot is magnetized to the gentle resistance of the pedal is because some sorry and broken-down corner of the world, speared through by the highway, has to be better than where you are now.

art and famine go well together,
because every taste of
beauty
only ever makes me hungrier, thirstier,
and I swallow every drop
until my withered heart finally
and gracefully
abandons its tired post,
gives up on its lifelong work,
lies silent and unticking under the broken constellations
that it never could fathom.

I invited the wolves at the door in for tea.
We calmly discussed my circumstances:
No money to pay rent,
No fulfillment in waiting tables,
No way to silence the noise catapulting through my brain.
Their crash-and-burn solutions were inelegant,
but held a certain visceral appeal.

I could drop it all and drive through the dizzying heat
in my old, un-air conditioned Ford.
I could drop out of college--why not?
I've flunked three semesters in a row.
I could balance just enough caliber under the ceiling of my mouth,
and pull a trigger.
The *******-esque spatter of blood
would be my crowning artistic achievement.

"You're not getting any better," the wolves explained.
They were right.
The sinister beauty of depression is in its ups and downs,
the way it coaxes you into believing, just maybe,
you're finally getting better,
you've finally escaped the labyrinth,
but the wolves always come knocking again.

They always seem to know where to find me.

you, child, are everything.

you are hope and love,
the hand of death,
the tar that swallows species.

you are the morning dew that glistens
and whispers rumors
about the end of the world.

you can be anything you want to be!
is the lie we’ve all agreed to murmur
in your eager, gullible ears

because we know, cruelly, you will believe us.

clasp your hands, child,
in those moments of fulgurant despair
when God seems almost real,
when He seems to stand over you,
all His divine hosts ready to proselytize you
in your moments of weakness.

clasp your hands, squeeze them tight,
fingernails biting into flesh,
because sometimes pain is the only certainty,

and remember the promise, child:
ignore the whiskey-soaked father standing over you
with the notched belt;
ignore the bleeding bread-crumb trails of dreams
left scattered in your wake;
ignore the miles-long nights and worries and grudges
and the abandoned i-wills and i-swears;
ignore the emptiness that swells in your chest until
you cry, alone, because yes, you are alone.

ignore the ceaseless tide of days
where you feel nothing.
do not worry, child: these are the side-effects of greatness.

you can be anything.

my heart
is a small room.
it is crowded, even just
by you,
because the walls are close
claustrophobic
and they seal you in.
i’m sorry if it’s uncomfortable—
it’s only that
i’m afraid
you’ll slip away and flee
on your fabled and bandaged feet
after you see
what’s inside
my heart.