Red eyes, another early morning, another night split off from the whole of experience and
coalesced into memory, fragments of vision,

And tonight the ghost of my body rides shotgun in a chariot of fire, and below us lies everything we’ve ever known, and above us lies an infinite unknown,
and yeah just three years ago I thought it was the end, stood at the edge of the city and unraveled like so much thread,
and look,

I’m not proud of everything I did in pursuit of making it through the night,
and look,
I’m not too proud to tell you that all I’ve wanted was not to be alone in this,
And so here I am sitting up, resplendent in all the glory of an afterlife I never lived to see,

And I’m begging you not to let this become another poem about the past,
Another obituary hung on the walls for me to forget about come morning,
Breathe into me,
I want to come alive,
I want to begin for real,

Give me something real,
Quit smoking and start again,
I don’t know where to go from here but,
I don’t want to die,
To speak it feels impossible,
But I don’t want to die
I don’t want to die
This is a cry for help
Show me how to live facing the future,
At last, I’ve decided,
I want to be around to see it

Smug *******,
Slick ******* in leather,
Lace, black eyes, something to prove,
Howling wolf, barking dog, ain’t nobody in the neighborhood slept in years, and the moon just hang, basking in all this wanting,

Something about those songs, the fangs of cold, the taste of something familiar, ghost hymns of a different life drift in visceral on the wind,

And suddenly,
I believe it all again,
I believe in him like never before,

Silhouetted against the stars, knuckles cracked, lightning veins ignited, infinite energy, purpose, poise, a story unfolds from his lips and by the time it hits the ground it is already legend, an entire mythology of strife, defiance, divine power subtracted from the divine,

And so what I’m really saying is that,
Yes, we can take one last ride,
Yes, we can crack the walls and split the street,
Yes, we can spill out of our bodies and into something greater,
Yes,
We can raise hell sometime,
In fact we can raise so much hell,
That nothing can ever hold us back again,

And dawn breaks, as it has to, on every night we’ve ever fallen into
never expecting to fall back out of,
And the very last punks in town,
Light a cigarette off the sunrise and
Wait, with baited breath, for the night to fall once again,
So they can dust that record off,
Put on their best leather,
And return, reckless and inevitable,
Into the dark that raised them

And I get my head sorted out walking the block in the cool city rain, flowers pushing up through the cracks in chalk outlines, bones rattling all the way down Vine,
I’m thinking about home, about all the times we leave before we stay gone forever, about everybody who ever said a prayer for me in the dark of some bedroom, everything so quiet now, I can’t even hear the longing anymore,

And maybe that’s how it goes with things we love in the night, maybe they’ll all be post-it notes left on coffee tables in the harsh holy light of morning, stray paper in an endless archive of those who have forgotten,
and those who are forgetting,

And my blood hums softly in these rings of light, ready as always to become something else, sustenance to the ravenous hunger of another, something to pass the time,

And lord, I don’t mind,
Everybody’s gotta get by, after all,
Sedated by something, whether it’s a hand finding another hand across a crowded room,
Lips finding another set of libs beneath the glow of something neon and prophetic,
A few lines on the weekend,
An entire constellation of glass bottles, lined up on a countertop like condemned men waiting for a firing squad,

And yeah I’m still getting through it,
Doing better about it most nights at least,
But every now and then a howl will rise in my throat, some old curse come round again looking to get exorcised,
And ain’t nobody left around to show mercy now, the wind picks up, we talk all night in circles,

And she says,
Honey, it’s time to go home,
And I linger on the threshold,
Just long enough to watch the sun break over the rooftops,
And I give myself over, again,
To the terrible momentum of release

Strangers in the cold, maneuvering the night and its labyrinth of nostalgia traps,
The holy ground of memory,
I remember, I remember when everything was so,
Underwater,

I was somebody else’s ghost, crybaby angel of death, corner booth of the donut shop two minutes past the clock tick of the witching hour, I’m feeling the heat,
Electricity jumps from neon sign to stainless steel countertop to the back of my throat and I swallow premonition
after premonition,
until my hands tightrope walk over blacktop abyss of their own volition and the floor,
just drops out,

I’m spiraling again, getting ****** up on the collapse trip,
I’m afraid to desperation and I don’t have the drugs to sort it out,
I don’t know how to tell you what is wrong because I can’t even explain it to my dreams,

and sleep hangs heavy like the shadow of the gallows, my caged ****** blood sings to me of electroshock nooses and I’ve got this entire genealogy of disappearing and I know I have to run,
I have to run and keep running and only my body remembers why

And I know, or at least,
As much as I can hope to know,
What you must have thought of me, then,

Wasted on pretense with all your illusions dispelled, you watched from high above the world as a country devoured itself, and it was like all at once,
It all became real for you,

As the skies burned,
the streets grew teeth,
the police bullets fell,
the infernal jackboots of the great fascist Other pressed against your door,
And kicked,
And kicked,

And you thought this would be it,
That hell had finally come to collect on all that which you owed,

And I know, because I was there too,
I, like you, am afraid here,
And I, like you, haven’t known peace since that night,

But you, desperate,
Looking for a martyr,
Found nothing to blame it on but me,
And your eyes,
My own brother’s eyes,
Found nothing in mine but blood,

The deep, irreconcilable blood of a whitewashed history,
Misrepresented context,
The propaganda of hegemony,

And I let you go on,
I let you make me whatever kind of monster you needed me to be,
I knew then, as I do now,
How badly you needed to feel once again like you were in control,
That your enemy was small, and laid exposed in front of you,
Begging to be destroyed,

Brother,
I know now that you are gone,
But even through this,
This impossible distance,
I cannot apologize to you,

Brother,
Mine was never the path of reconciliation,
I chose the path of strife I knew you could never follow,

I don’t believe we’re going to talk our way
Out of this,
Or anything else,

I don’t have faith in the system which gave birth to this,
This endless parade of monsters,
To save us from them,

Brother,
If you need me,
I will be in the darkness with you,
Not clinging to it’s walls,
But trying, with every beat of my still living heart,
To tear them down,
So that the light may come in,

Brother,
Until that day comes,
I will keep a candle lit for you,

And when it doesn’t,
You can tell me I was wrong,
And I’ll reply,
At least I died trying

Strung out on the dream,
Cars pass, flashes of light from windows,
Fragments of memory, a broken summer come home to lick her wounds,
Winter presses the needle down and the record sings, the blood sings, the street sings, black sky sings, god, it’s no wonder I can’t sleep, I want it to be quiet, I want it to be so quiet my beating heart becomes a firing squad, no, I don’t want to talk about it,

Familiar feelings, cycles of rebirth and devastation, oh god, oh god we’ve been here so many times before,

And while the neighborhood sleeps I am waiting, a savior from the sky or money in the bank or a real connection, there’s demons rising from the sidewalk and I’m feeding them scraps from my table, I’m looking to get recognized and carried away on the back of something stronger than I am,

And round the block the silence is the sharpest knife in the drawer,

Something vicious on the wind,
Something we just can’t talk about,

I look to the sky and,
I watch angels falling,
And I try to decide,
If their wings are broken,
Or if they found the only way,
To make it all quiet

I ignite something holy and inhale, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive and everything else is dead,
Everything that was truth is speculation now,
I trace the patterns in my premonitions and lose the math, equivalence, exchange, endless abstractions and animated characters, a full reset, a new era of movement,

It comes in waves, gnawing at the edges, only what is real is holy and it’s breaking through the walls, begging for a seat at the table,

I open my mouth and it all comes back to me, I’ve been asking god all the wrong questions,

Love, carve out a place to exist through me, I am transparent and constantly shifting phases, I’m real enough for now, I’ll be smoke by the wedding, look for me where the spinning stops, look for me
where nothing else remains,

Greater powers, leviathans of divine purpose I love you, I love the way I surrender to this, something impossibly large and revelatory,
how sweet it is to know that
none of this was ever in my control,