Broken heroes of the first string
ready, aim, fire
**** the momentum and hold steady
The choir gave up before the song did this time, the final note dragged on for a decade of suicide, of bleached scripture, of double sided shotgun decision,
It's life or death now and I don't know how to fix this and neither do you so let's just burn it all down instead
It's what we've always done
Mortal doom painted on the windows of the brains shattered lobes, ripped open to exposure of the wicked senses, the holy spectrum exploding, the destroyers locked up and the keys swallowed whole, and the sadness drowned out momentarily in a triple C blackout haze
I called you prince once and spent the next 4 years draining secondhand love from your chalice, I was the Judas at your Last Supper, and I know you could taste the barely dried guilt in my bloodied kiss
I hope you can forgive all that now
Because I have watched the Columbus sunset a thousand times in my battered memory and it gets brighter every day while the next bell tolls for you and I both in moments of incarcerated brilliance
And I can hear our train coming now, and we don't have a choice but to go
I'll see you on the other side

Ash buried graveyards what sick thoughts I have of you on these nights,
These nights where I dream of love and hope to die in my sleep
The sky falls vivid and streaked with incendiary demise and I keep steady the best I can under the weight of total collapse
But here the dead bare the weight of suns within their broken chests and I am still hung up on my same belltower clockwork systematic *******
Awake, remember, sleep, forget
Purgatory cycles in ash tray limbo wrapped in the tea leaves of misplaced fortunes
Irreverent shadows tripping lucid dream aneurysms down both ends of the block
And ******* fathers moving dope from greed to desperation to section 8 prisons
The headlines on the marquee monoliths read:
"There is nowhere to go but up"
And this is the junkies last thought before he trails off into the sweet kiss of sunset
This is the last thought I have before I put down the pen and lie to myself that I've done the best I could
What did you expect, honestly?

Au revoir to the fever dream valentines strung out on the idea of an almost always that never was quite anything
To the ash tongued burn scarred stigmatized and delusional messiahs shivering outside the unemployment offices
To the leftist inquisition huddled together for the warmth of enlightenment,
In poorly knit thrift store sweaters,
In drug induced nightmares,
In outdated self referential rhetoric,
In visions of a reckoning that has already come they couldn't be bothered to notice
I can not be bothered to notice
I watch the dead eyed newsman cut his sweetheart a chelsea smile with dimestore switchblade and now he's reading to her manic and weeping from his ***** diaries
She's an actress and I can't feel anything anyway
The spirit is exploding out the back of the skull from shotgun epiphanies and the psych ward prophets are holding on for dear ******* life and I am losing control every second I think about it
I know they'll come for me this time, I can hear them calling for my blood when I turn my ears to the sky
Deliver my eulogy as if you were there to see the end
Fake whatever you have to for the crowd
Paint your idols in shades of gray and your wayward ******* fathers the same
We're building up to some kind of ****** here and I'd like to just get to it
Maybe the lights are only on because there isn't anyone home to turn them off
But I can't make any of that matter now
I have it, all of it
I have a medicine cabinet's worth of reasons not to wake up,
I have enough clarity of vision to know that I can't see anything,
I have a page that never fills and a poem that never lives up,
And I have a sign hung round my neck that reads:
"Days Clean: 0"
The only thing I don't have is something to lose

All things are holy and nothing is sacred
The psychoses, the diagnosis, the manic-depressive war, the acid PTSD flashbacks, the track marked arms, the scabbed over burn scars, the crisis hotline voices reverberating ceaseless from the walls of the skull to the gravestone that reads
WHY! WHY! WHY!
Father, President, Congressman, Representative, I have looked on the faces of your human annihilation and counted not an innocent man among the lot
Holy terror for the white supremacists in their gilded tombs!
They boiled their brains in the mustard gas ovens and voted for the Tea Party!
I am missing the connection at some base level and it is irreparable
There isn't **** to be done about it now
I used to love this, I don't know what happened
I lied to myself just to get a reaction and I felt nothing for the first time in my life
So plaster my name on your movement and take my face for your martyr
I don't have the strength to argue anymore

Bleeding from the eyes and ears on the 4th day of a burned out unemployed Hallelujah ecstasy binge
Watching the form of the essence of the madness take shape in existential tears as I cry mercy to the fury of destiny
Drunk in my distaste as I ****** my way to the edge of the world just to bust up laughing at the abyss that stared back
I don't know how to tell you what I'm feeling and I never have
I cut my teeth with the shards of a broken bottle rage still wet with whiskey and the blood of the exorcised demon
And I still remember the lights dicing apart the New Jersey Turnpike as a thousand white explosions shattered every cortex I had still standing
And you had me up against a wall that night, and suddenly I couldn't think of anything to say for the first time in my life
The streetlight halos illuminating the leaves on the trees and the asphalt in the parking lots and the cigarette butts in their graveyards and the homeless in their cells and the faithless in their crusades and the crimes with no witnesses
No witnesses
Something died in the back of my throat just then, and I've been coughing up fragments of its ghost every morning since

Planets align in the black of the emptiness before I drive back sixty miles an hour into the mouth of the storm to face the rain on my own terms
My sister's voice cracks the radio static in a haunting southern ballad as my brother's drunken affections get the best of him again
He takes his penance where it is due and so must I
And if this be thy will then I go before history with inkwell lips and kiss the lines of our memory onto the grayed out page,
I kneel at the feet of a misused culture and offer my humbled blood as sacrifice - take me for your poet and I shall serve my sentence in full
From the scraps of suicide notes I will cut a deeper manifest, and I'll be honest about it this time,
Of the rise and relapse let me preach candid and cutting, of the love and the rage let me speak grateful and true,
Give me the bent form and let me keep it free, give me the blessed spirit and let it keep me warm
Give me the final movement and let it **** me, as I know it will someday
Keep a locket of my ashes for luck,
And do with the rest as you please
I am humble servant to the human soul,
Just let me rest when I am done
And allow me this, a humble prayer-
Blessed be the madmen, deformed seekers for a deformed truth,
Holy Crosen Holy Williams Holy King Holy as the bughouse patron saint on a throne soaked in red wine and deep rooted hatred
as the blondehairedredblooded fury of fire made flesh
as the ***** haired waste inhaling spirits by the dozen
Watching the slow death of the mind in star spangled entropy, as a nation weeps its forgotten angels
Serotonin drought to misfired synapse meltdown
To end times propaganda on the evening news
Wake the dead in the streets and do not ask them for mercy
Blessed be the wicked, castraters of moralities grown weak,
Holy Creager Holy Dahmer Holy Gacy Holy as the evil woken in the black soul of the tyrant
as the unmemorialized graves of the systematic slaughterhouse
as the twentyfourhourtwentyfourhourtwentyfourhour news coverage seven days a week year ******* round
Burning the ghettos and taking to the airwaves with implacable outrage at the stylized fall of the West, The South cannot even lift its arms up to hold a weapon let alone rise again

Blessed be the fire with nowhere to burn but within
Blessed be the prophets powerless in their pulpits, and you may count my shaken voice among the paralyzed
Blessed be the ****** engineers of this brutal destiny -
This is all we know to do,
May we do the best we can with it
Amen

Black sky swallowed whole by dead dreams while blacker lungs succumb to inevitability,
And I remain seated watching heaven for a sign that grows grayer by the hour
Pluck my mortality from between the branches of the tree I tried to hide in and tattoo its signature in thick black letters down both of my arms -
A DAY WILL COME
And I remain
Tracing the trajectory of comets with drowned ocean eyes in the shifting desert sands,
Sifting through piles of physical copies of moments I could only experience in retrospect,
Reading fortunes in the cracks of skin well lived in with my own bloodied hands,
Flirting with mirrors to exchange my identity with the gilded prophet adorning the poster on a dorm room wall,
Drinking down the chalice of my coronation only to recoil in horror at the king I become
I asked for every second of this, don't let me tell you any different
When the clouds break and the face of creation stares back at me I will not blink
I will broadcast my downfall on every television screen and sickened memory,
I will hang my shame from prescription medication gallows,
I will press the traitors brand deep into my torn chest,
And I will not blink
I will stand by my ruined kingdom and I will wear the weight of my failure 'round my neck,
This is the only vow I can be sure of
Fill my pockets with dead spirits before I jump into the river to be carried to judgement,
And remember my face, in case you never see it again
A day will come,
Keep your eyes to the sky
Watch for me