i’m not on drugs
baby
i just love
you

frosty the snowman
had two eyes
made of coal
if that is not
poetic
than I
do not know
what
is.

we all have messy
hair and thirsty
hearts here
at the red-light
arcade, can’t
we be alone
together
like
in the
books?

[]
                  ballerina on the subway

     sublimate that cigarette sunset

if you don’t know, now you know

      pop art
for the modern world

            (she’s not that kind of girl)

          normality is a paved road,

where is all the time
we were promised
it asks
give up the **** that
weighs you down
it writes

on a yellow
                                       post-it
.

like
moss to a stone
moths to a light
sand through the hourglass
it is right
to think these days
of our lives are not
so operatic as
all that. but

can we still
appreciate those little
words lined up
so neat like beer
glossy on countertops
in an advertisement,

fuzzy phrases so
utterly known
by the rhythm
of their words
the warmth conjured
by sounds needless of
cognition it
is comfortable to
enjoy these things
yes because
they prove the world isn't
neat and syntactical (it is not)
as if it were
they would
not be sayings but laws
like  grey
immutable gravity
and nothing but the
neutered cry of a
flat response could
know anything so strange
as poetry.

there is a broken thing
reformed in amber
disarranging the spectrum
of sensical causal motion
nail biting following
migration patterns of neural
activity and we bless the few
who cut clean and learn early
those bespectacled masses
cannot intuit the limited scope
of aversion to blurry pink clouds
gussied up in peripheral vision the
pineal gland controls circadian
rhythms gushes dmt when
we die i wonder i
wonder what that (vestigial)
little pinecone knows
that we don’t
cased in spongy
grey matter and i don’t think
much of time as metaphor but
my watch strap broke
yesterday i hope
that is
important i do

nothing so simple or complex
as love but(i carry it in my heart)

press the butter
into my hand
watch it slink away
dissolving oval opal
full moon winter
cold preserves,
or so they tell me.

galvanizing current of blazing unknowns
hung in the sky on tenterhooks
salve and siphon
strung together, web of calloused fingers
don’t need to laminate the little gestures —
just the feelings behind them
poster board picture placement
cull the very thing you’ve ignored
the shore shakes and shimmers
and i can endure this ocean no more.

yoll so n so
whiskey is romanticized
cigarettes are
romanticized
death is terrifying

i like whiskey & cigarettes
i **** cold marrow
from blustery bones
corkscrew, touch tone phone,

deceptively white kitchen
i like to think i’ve seen too much,
wow that hurts
crackle of jet black entropy
emotions fading a gradient

i wish i knew
your name
like a fist
in my head.