A perfect entity:
Past life regression as a metaphysical act of war,
Held still in flashes of light from beyond mirrors, captured in essence for sake of eternal memory, martyred for sake of one or two moments of hallelujah before total collapse,
Divinity! Break the silence! Moan your lovers name! *** into oblivion! Leave pieces of your kaleidoscope skin on the shellshock floors of echo chamber bedrooms for someone to find and remember you by!
Listen! The voices of the great suicide angels crack and bleed through stereos! This is the last great art form! This is how you establish a dialogue between yourself and abyss! The black hole named God will take your calls but will not return your light once it has left your eyes!
How beautiful you look like this, defending your faith from the hawks of war, eyes lit by the turbines of jet engines burning fossil fuels on towards confrontation, hair falling in waves around a single demarcation point that reads: THE ****** AND THE SAVED,
Try hard not to think about where you fall on any kind of spectrum,
Be fluid and give only vague directions,
Paint self portraits out of what you can learn from static,
Static is the only way our gods know how to communicate,
You have to tread lightly around an ego so fragile,
Return home when the damage is done,
Home where you were a Joan Baez marquee moon in my memories of sunflowers!
Home where you were a Carl Sandburg eulogy read in tripping staccato!
Home where you leave your lights on all the time to ward off spirits!
Home where your shadow climbs higher and higher into the night and leaves your soul behind!
Home where you listened for the sounds of Pagan rituals through the walls and hoped to find salvation in a chanted chorus!
Home where you let the deep red shades of a thousand electro shock patients turn your machinery towards eternal rest!
Home where I love you as a perfect entity in radioactive decay!
Home where you love me, and my great way of forgetting

Walking in the light, the summer heat rising from the streets we used to beg on as familiar daze settles back over the Midwest, not to release us until the fall comes to crack our skin open and let the dreams we talked about escape and drift into grey skies, the old neighborhood bleeds but none of us feel it anymore since we took new addresses, but the beggars still speak about Vietnam and it is hard to ignore the falling of shells in their voices, the echo of protests that even now make the peace seem uneasy, I am uneasy and I think we must have seen better days but maybe I was too strung out to notice before, I do not know whether I should envy myself now or then, but baby whispers in harmony to the rustle of lazy breezes, tells me to come home, and I perform another disappearing act, the act of turning  my back, the act of tearing the roots from the Earth to get back on the road, to seek a greater death elsewhere, to read too deeply into passing interstate signs, to con someone else out of a future by way of worn out cards and mixed up tea leaves, while the lines on my own palms scream things like "You May Never Stop To Rest" all night long, but still I keep faith, my hell can wait, the devil on my back tattoos "We've got a lot of work to do" on the back of my skull, I haven't seen it in years but I feel the itch every day, I could sleep forever, I could shave my head and change my name, but I never believed in taking the high road before, it might be too late to start now

I am an artist
Love me
Touch me
Romanticize me
Let me live underneath your skin and tell you all about what happens down there,
I can write it better than you ever felt it, I promise
Believe me,
Trust me,
Let me eat your sorrow and spit it back onto a page, sacrifice yourself at my altar and live forever at the tip of a pen,
There is beauty in this somewhere
There is music in my ears,
I can hear the people sing my praise,
It sounds like,
"Oh I love him, but he's bleeding,
Oh I love him, and he's bleeding,
Oh I love him because he's bleeding,
Oh we love him, he's always bleeding,
Bleed for me, bleed for us, we love to watch you bleed,
Bleed yourself dry *******,
Do not stop to clean your wounds, keep em comin, pour some salt on it *****,
We came here to watch you BLEED *******!"
I will take what I can get
This is all I know
I will let it all drain on to this stage
I will watch my demons form pools around my feet, while my sins float lighter than air away from my body
I will suffer here and they will know why,
Because I will tell them,
And they will love me for it,
And when I die on this stage,
It will be to thunderous applause.

To pain and to whiskey, we say the same thing: keep it coming
We get it while we can, and we might as well while we still know how to feel it
My grandfather used to say, "Any day above ground...", always trailing off so I could never be sure how he meant it, but at a hundred miles per hour with a cigarette in one hand and the other hand tuning the dial of a radio to eavesdrop on heaven, the context starts to cut through the static: you have no control here, you are only along for the ride, never let anybody know this
When they bury your best friend, do not attend the viewing, remember him forever as he was, the madman with the keys to the holy city, the messiah of a new age born in blood and chemicals, think of him in between the lines of his favorite songs, the only places where he was allowed to rest, paint him the Martyr with your words and the Saint with your thoughts, carry the torch as long as you can, then let it die with you in the river, never go back for any reason once you have reached this point,
When the girl with the burning hair kisses you, do not hold back, do not flinch, do not second guess, you may not realize that you deserve this yet but you will, this is where we are tonight and you are not going to miss a ******* moment, we are gospel, we are revelation, we are beginning without end, we are cycle reborn on the mountain, the zenith where the flames reach highest, the point where the paths diverge from where we were broken to where we can rebuild, love this, breathe this, live for this
When I was a child I feared the storm, and my grandfather told me that every man fears storms until he becomes one,
And today I have reconciled myself to that truth
I am the first storm, and I will be the last

With six hundred miles between you and the freedom you were promised,  the interstate speaks through your radio;
Springsteen tells you to hit the gas hard, to run and keep running and let the sunset try and catch you, cover the earth in dust behind you and never look back to assess the damage,
Joni Mitchell tells you to go home, to eat your pride and kiss your friends and to dig your life for all its worth,
Robert Plant tells you to go West, to firewalk with the spirits of those who came before, those who shared a vision and a madness and a feeling and who are waiting to take you somewhere beautiful,
Lou Reed tells you to go East, to disappear among the phantoms haunting New York streets and to let yourself become part of the Great, Inescapable Noise
Bob Dylan tells you to go forth with righteous anger burning holes in your pockets, to give back unto those who have been wronged, and to never trust the government
Jerry Garcia tells you to go forth in peace, with love blooming flowers from the cracks in your bones, to live simply and to hide your drugs well,
David Bowie tells you to learn which way they expect you to go, take a sharp brakes squealing U-turn and laugh as you speed away from everything they thought they knew about you,
**** Jagger tells you to stumble drunkenly down the path but never let them see you fall, to **** and fight for everything you want and keep them wondering how you survived,
Jimi Hendrix tells you that if you burn bright enough, turn it up loud enough, and bleed red enough, you can have them following you anywhere, burning the flags they wave and waving the flags they burn,
Jim Morrison tells you that the other side is within reach, that you can turn any lock with any key and reach Heaven without ever putting on a shirt,
Stevie Nicks tells you that whichever way you go, you better make ******* sure you're doing it on your own terms
Realize that you tread on hallowed ground,
This is the American night of the great mysticism, the holy vision of open road and unending sky, this is the night they drove Joan Baez down, the night that Janis Joplin collapsed under the weight of her own power, the night that Woody Guthrie cried his last bleeding heart tears because he knew the fight would not end with him, this is the night that you find peace in the great uncertainty,
With 100 miles of space left between you and this indeterminate future, the highway whispers to you;
"They will remember you too, if only you give more,
Your beautiful hair illuminated by neon halos, your body broken apart and taken as communion,
Your voice straining with purpose splitting nights just like this in half,
They will remember you too,
They will remember you"

I. Connection - becoming phantoms in a fever dream holding hands and jumping into the abyss laughing, the swirling chaos of existence reduced to the space between parted lips, a look exchanged, a dance from the edge of reason to the holy arms of the sunrise, a night in which you learn to forget and embrace
II. The telling of fortunes - between lines of palms and decks of cards, between the eyes of gypsies that have tasted the dream of freedom, between sleepy kisses and the implications of a future in which Things Are Looking Up,
III. Sobering up - learning which parts of yourself you hide because you are ashamed and which parts you hide because you are afraid
IV. Letting it the hell out - learning to sing and dance and kiss and **** and drive fast and start fights and swear and howl and scream and write and perform and bare your skin and your teeth and your heart and your naked soul
V. Nostalgia - the reflection that the roads you walked and the clothes you wore and the girls you loved and the friends you kept and the things you thought were beautiful will never take you anywhere but home, but ******* does it feel good to come home sometimes
VI. Reconciliation - the understanding that everyone holds true, that in a time travel scenario everybody has a past self who would kick the **** out of their present self, and more than likely a future self who would be revolted by both, and that this is the progression of time as we perceive it at work
VII. Acceptance - the act of bringing together the pieces, the act of becoming unbroken, the act of having faith that you will become broken again at some point, the act of having faith in the cycle, the act of rising, the act of relapsing, the act of creation, the act of destruction, the act of living in a way that will someday make for great television, the act of fighting even though you know you will lose, the act of making it all count for something

If I live to see the seven wonders again, I will be more grateful

When you think of learning to forgive yourself, think of Robert Strange McNamara
With the blood of a nation orphaned soaking into the creases of his suit, the stains that linger and the ghosts that weep, while the whole world watched his guilt manifest on television screens over dinner,
Think of yourself as the hawk of war, all the battles you fought before you realized you had more to lose than you ever could've imagined
Think of yourself as the navigator and the grand destiny you hoped to steer yourself towards,
Think of all those you had to destroy to get where you are now
Let them keep you up nights,
Let them haunt your dreams,
Learn to live with yourself, however you can