There is a story here, if you'll have it
In the haze of deadbeat ghosts and week old smoke that clouds my judgement, I have witnessed prophecy
And now I cannot return, though I once thought myself King
I can only move forward, in step to the funeral dirge of Father Time or some other holy ******* they call master of puppets
So I am forced to contend with the notion that I am a pawn, after all
Which begs the question, am I less a puppet because I can see the strings?
Do you believe that God lives between every set of parallel lines?
And if I sing, how loud must I get before someone stops me?
So to honor my brothers and sisters, and a generation at war with apathy and glamour, I raise an appeal to SOMETHING or someone in the stars to wake
And take my hand, for I am too weak to tread the surface of the sun alone
And if I ever manage to return who will be left to sing?
For the puppet and the master, to this fiery waltz are we destined towards eternity
And should I look upon his face will we know each other, naked beneath the armor and the smoke?
And will we laugh like old high school acquaintances, or will he press the lips of a gun to my temple and tell me I had a good run?
I'm afraid I'll die not knowing,
Never looking back, not even in the face of Armageddon
I only hope for some scrap of paper, crumpled up and tossed by the side of the highway
Written by someone who knew all along the way,
And who deigned to let me in on the joke
I guess that'd be alright

Sing me to sleep, Allen Ginsberg
The entire fluorescent universe pulses and breathes in your chest
Or mine, or his, or Hers, particularly Hers
And I wish nothing more than to be nothing
Or everything
Tell me, were our souls cut from the same stars?
If I trace the hieroglyphics of our scars will I reach some understanding?
Will I ever look upon your papier-mache mountains or caress your Mohammedan angels?
Will the blood red sun burn my bitter heart out before the Benzedrine kicks in?
Tell me, will I touch the face of God or grasp at phantoms forever?
If this is the apocalypse why do I feel such discontent?
I wish nothing more than to be the center of gravity
At which all things meet, and break, and fall away
To drift in to emptiness like crumpled up phases of the lonely moon
Tell me, are my veins pumping gasoline?
Was I born to die on the road, and what manner of Valkyrie will lift me to my rest once I do?
And who will I thank, once I am there
For the opportunity to sleep?

******
Animal
Savage
Dead man walking, right?
You going to ******' score ******?
You going to ******' score?
You're ******* right I am
I'm gonna hit the lights and let my veins glow electric
I'm gonna turn my blood black and spray it all over the walls
I'm gonna sleep tonight in the abyss, baby

******
Are you hearing me are you feeling me am I getting through to you do I ******* stutter?
Are you ready to get out of my way or die *******?
I'm going to tear the ******* roof off this place I'm gonna skin you all alive
Till it's just me and the messiah complex dealer with the keys to the holy city
If this is a standoff then let's have at it if you wanna play cowboy I'll show you cowboy
If we were made in any image at all it'd have to be the rats, right?
Well I'm the big bad wolf now and I'm done ******* around

******
Deadbeat
Family man
Feel cool with that gun in your hand?
Feel cool with that hole in your neck?
You're ******* right I do
I'm going out in style tonight
I'm going to find the rawest nerve and plug it into an amplifier
I wanna hear God cry

******
Is this happening are you seeing this are you ******* kidding me?
Is there anybody even on the receiving end?
Is this a sick ******* joke I'm choking on ***** and hate and I have enough rage to bury everything
I don't want to rest until I watch everything suffer
Am I sick? Am I losing it have I lost it already?
What do I have left to lose?
What manner of beast is this now?

******
Wretch
Vermin
Is that it, huh?
Is that all there is?
Don't ******* patronize me
That's gonna be it, alright
I'm gonna finish it the way it began
Dim lit basement, flood of chemical angels
Beauty in the most high
And death will show me sympathy
Because junkies die alone

Now for the poem, let me be worthy
Let me roar and shake and rattle and tear the roof off the conscience
Let it rip me apart and bare my broken ribcage to the abyss unafraid
Let me fill with fire and speak the voice of the Divine, let the human experience be made lucid and the soul of the devil cleansed
Hold still in my Hallelujah visions perfectly captured Polaroids of the spirit, the fevered music that vibrates palpable through the air
Hold me to the standards of the giants upon whose shoulders i stand
And let the ones I love know that I am with them, stronger than any power empathy could provide
We are deities all and stitched from the same grace
This is for Clarity, for Jacob, maybe even the Prodigal Son
With tears in my eyes I submit to your mercy, baptize me in the electric current of a decade long cold war
Let us destroy and rebuild and create a new world to hold dear
Decorate it with the shavings of suns spent and discarded endlessly on repeat
Let us be the gods we see etched into our irises
Let us be the ones who write doom on the walls
Who else could we ******* be?
We are the same, irrevocably
It's on and we can't turn it off and so we'll push the limits until it all burns out

Bohemia
When will you be angelic?
When will you empty your graveyards and let your cities fill with the music of the ******?
When will you sing for me, for you, for us?
For your children looking for God in the halo of a street lit drug deal gone bad?
For your forlorn lovers shooting up with sub-par sadness off the street?
For your crying, bleeding masses that scrape their knees ****** at rock bottom?

Bohemia
I'm addressing you, directly
Devourer of culture, ******* of pretense
Let they among you without sin be the first to burn
Hold you nothing sacred?
Have you not the decency to scatter your ashes somewhere clean?
Somewhere beautiful?
Somewhere perfect?

Bohemia
When will you learn?
Is there no context to your suffering?
Is there no reason for your guilt?
Is there no honor among street rats?
Where are you going with this, anyway?

Bohemia
I am not your prophet
Not your God or your king
I am your vessel
Speak your will through me

Bohemia
I need to feel it
I need to see it
I need to HEAR IT
For the mind destroyed by madness
For the heart shattered by shame
For the spirit, for the blessed ******* spirit
I need to HEAR IT

Bohemia,
Let me hear you
If you are outcast drawing the curtains on your insecurity
Let me hear you
If you are restless heart itching for the next sunset
Let me hear you
If you are just barely scraping by
If you are waiting for God to explain himself
If you are sick of sacrificing your mind to television screens
If you are just trying to make it in America without selling your soul
If you are broken, beaten, or damaged irreparably
Let me hear you
Let them hear you in the streets
Let them hear you in the grave

Bohemia
You are angelic enough
For me

You are in the waking light that hits the pale skin in just the right way, seraphic
And the hazy nostalgic appreciation for the way it can slice the room
The first cigarette of the new day to take the grating edge off
And every cigarette after

You are in the sigh released just after sleep and just before dreams
Pure and total catharsis
Something just more than coincidence, and just shy of fate
The York Peppermint Patty after some grand victory

And I watched you fall in love with the music you've known since childhood
Mystified as if it was the first time
Breathe with the room, the world and everything in it
And sing, from coda to coda in the cadence of your own vision of angels

I watched you laugh through the narrow streets just before the dawn,
On another spectacular adventure
With the knowledge bright and vivid
That your thrill of life was still alive

And blessed or cursed as we may be
We don't have to talk about it
Because the lights are on for both of us,
And we truly just know
So if this curse is my cross to bear
I'm lucky to have you
And if you need me, I'll be on the outskirts of the world
Waiting to throw popcorn at the stupid ******* players
In their stupid ******* game
That you and I
Just get

Fluorescent messiah born in a haze of marijuana smoke,
Baptized in stale beer basins to be sacrificed to the hallucinogenic sunset
Half blinded by the stars like iridescent angels swimming in the reflecting pools at the edge of periphery
And of their blood and body the people lined up for miles to make offerings,
To pay tribute at the feet of the once and future king of the wasteland
One by one by one the wisemen wept and the shepherds sang blind hymns to the flock
And the Sphinx was the only one brave enough to ask the question,
If the form is blessed and the essence black, should the Son be blamed for what the Father lacked?
Swept up in a tidal wave of holy disgrace and blissful in deranged glory
Hallelujah, he is Risen!
Like the flag hoisted above embattled Eden
Kicked in like a broken door by savages on the prowl for petty victory worthy to hang above their mantle
But indomitable still, even crucified, martyred on a cross of felonies
And on the day of Last Judgement, when the Second Coming is at hand
Will Paradise echo the elation of the believers?
Will the kingdom of the Most High relive it's former glory?
Will the wasteland know peace again?
Maybe, brother
Maybe Eden is for the birds, and Paradise is better off burning
But the faith, and the love, are not so easily destroyed

The Western World split open and out from the acid washed sky spewed forth calamity, bright and feverish
And from the ever dimming divide emerged a crow, with a face like Christ and Charon's crackling throat
And he spoke sweet apocalypse, like caustic vinegar dripping down my body, burning holes in my hollow chest
"Come join the ******, wayward brother on the razor's edge of ruin!
Come drink from the lip of the sunrise and watch the nuclear bombs rain down!
Come burn down the courthouse where they put your youth on trial and sentenced your weary heart to hang!
Come exorcise your evils on the altar of our blood and conquest, my love, my seraphic saint, and be reborn in the water of the sinners womb
Drink down poison and spit up fire into the lap of every **** and paramour and prosthetic companion you've ever had
And let them wonder how you escaped from prison,
Exhume the bones of the demons you aborted and hoist them victorious over your head,
Because you ******* earned it"

And I listened, I took to heart
And so here I am, alive
Here I am 19 seasons in the abyss later and bursting with electric heat
And in case you haven't heard,
I'm ******* vicious now, honey

And I won't mince words here so here we go:
On the first day you were conceived in a flash of cosmic brilliance, unveiled to the ****** Earth like the masterwork of a sculptor
On the second day you calmed the raging sea and brought the mountains to their knees
On the third day you blew a fiery kiss to the circling specters of your fallen heroes
On the fourth day you signed an autograph with your sugar tongue in the small of Satan's back
On the fifth day, you took a ******* nap, ****'s exhausting, no one blames you
ON THE SIXTH DAY, on the sixth day you raised a rallying cry to the four winds, for the artists sculpting chaos from the car crash wreckage, for the anarchists burning bridges to nowhere from nothing, for the young streetwalking heartbreakers, the desperate twitching addicts, the ******* and the dying black boys all unvindicated, to JOIN THE ******, to pull the trigger and let the world go supernova, to shatter your nervous breakdown heart and scatter a thousand pieces of yourself to a thousand different heavens because you are a being too ******* brilliant to be contained, don't even try it
ON THE SEVENTH DAY , on the seventh day, you held it all in your holy hands and became something new entirely
On the seventh day you became the most powerful version of yourself
On the seventh day you put every dead star still burning out in the palm of your hand
On the seventh day you laid your weapons to rest and for the first time, the first time you knew what peace sounds like in the early morning, drifting in with your first smoke of the day
And I'm not a betting man, by any means
But in an arm wrestling match between you and God
My money is on you, every time

I felt you, Hemingway
Ghost lit in pale blood electric lights
On the downslope of the Holy Spirit's introspective nightmare
Cacophony in the bathroom stall, savages at war in the gutter
Kings in their drug fueled conquest of modern man's spatial reasoning
Angry cyclops guards the gate to the Fourth ***** Garden of Eden
The learned alcoholic in wino wonderland bursting at the seams for a halogen fix
Cultist camoflaged in black leather combat boots spiked iron altercation
Public domain genocide for the demure nihlist lower class
Never give those ******* the satisfaction
I felt you in Rapture, like lilac swastikas dripping melted candle wax down my frail spine
Blunt force trauma tinged lunacy for the jet engine martyrs, screaming at the empty spaces
For the imposters stigmatized by yellow journalist hype men
And the psychos just along for the ride
Be shameless in your insanity,
Be reckless in your love
Live forever to spite the mad god that molded your angry heart
And **** the sun with your empathy

Travelling higher than God through my former wasteland
Skyline was littered with star spangled pariahs
and the Earth swallowed the bones of the believers
And for the street youth, burning rage into their skin and choking the ashes down for supper they left no shelter
These are the spirits that sing your soulless chorus
These are the ghosts that bear your unborn demons in utero
These are the convicts that kneel humbled outside your door, crossing themselves in fervor every time you walk past
These are the junkies that sketch your morbid admiration in dull sidewalk chalk
These are the con men that pace restless across your bitter heart
And these are the children you lead to ruin, baptized by filth and fury

Wasteland, I gave you my youth
The screams of the lovers I buried with you haunt me still
Though the cathedral of the ghosts I made has long since emptied
My brothers, my sisters, my dearly departed psychoses
For you all I will return, a martyred liar,
Crucify me atop the graveyard of my artwork
And paint shades of vivid gray with my ashes
Wasteland, I've given you all and now I'm nothing

they sighed
The 5 o'clock mass of late winter apathy
Borne ceaseless to and from and back again
To Salt Lakes to frozen sky to unfeeling supermarket self checkout lane
To the dawn that brought life and the dusk that killed again
From sea to shining sea to burning bush
and a grand halo for all the art majors,
scathing editorial for the industry people
On the freeway passed out stone black sinners under veil of Southern sky
And narcotics agents circling up and down the block
Cancer dependent martyrs all,
The Saint, the Wolf, and his ****** Lover
Trash can fires turn to frozen hellscape
To Babylon out West past the Rockies and North of the Gulf
Mother of ghosts slaving away at an impotent family supper
And she let a single tear fall and whispered,
"This one will bring me luck,
It may not be much now, but just wait
There's gonna be a ******* riot when the Wolf comes home"

Wicked winds howled senseless from Great Lakes to Navajo
Screaming eulogies for the frantic madmen
And the love of rage they shot their veins black with
And the additive-free sadness that filled their lungs with ashes
Broke down church bells tolled, once, twice, three times on the hour
Resounding enough to wake Virgina her revered dead
The heart of mighty Shenandoah beats in shades of revolutionary red
And DC sleeps uneasy under armed guard
Here is where your mother lies and bleeds empathy to the tune of Suburbia's solemn hymns
And here is where your brother ticks his weight in manic speculation and nervous wondering
And here is where you straddle the nuclear armaments of culture atop the shoulders of those lonely mad giants you hold so dear
A dying breed, a skeletal frame of burning purpose and relentless conviction
The last great hunter of the American Dream
They said their prayers, their rosaries, and their benedictions floated carelessly off to nothing, from nothing
Laid to rest on the edge of a cornfield six feet under cold Earth and laughing heavens
Heads bowed in lurid admiration tempered with contempt
For the soul of the devil of the world to come

Art is filthy,
An angry breath of smoke
Post-***, full of shame
Bad joke in stoic company
Aborted attempt at playing God
It is starving hysteria,
Naked and afraid
But it is all I know
So I'll sing it to my ******* death rattle

End times upon us, great, crushing, inevitable
Black dawn sunrise in the west
Evil walks fearless on hallowed ground
Holly wreaths wrung out tied nooses
Hollow gallows for hollow men
They're all ******* anyway
Holy of holies in radioactive decay
Brilliant and brutal
Atmosphere is the enemy
Headlights hostile pedestrians hostile
Mirage from heaven hostile!
Abhorrent destruction assured
All sides hostile!
Nerve endings fire fire fire
Senseless mindless
Waking reality constant violence
Have mercy on me

***** squalor punk paradise
Outlaw gravestones unmarked
Mountains cast heavy shadows
Valley honors no dead
Newspaper op-ed hippie commune expose
And communists all up and down the block
Vintage retro holocaust-chic
La Boheme in the land of gods and monsters
Masquerade ball at the Masonic temple
And marijuana smoke permeates everything
All cells and viscera
Homeless vagrant lowly pauper
Prince of rats king of nothing
Filth & filth & mottled fury
Broken ****** Christmas morning double suicide
New year tastes just like the old one
***** hair on ***** streets
Piles of burning mattresses without sheets
Papers called me a disease, parasitic epidemic
I think I might believe them

Dragged out screaming, senseless from the hallows of martyrdom
My father's mother's wayward brother
Baptized in propaganda and searing lead
Kamikaze death machine to paranoia fever dream
A noble experiment in utter catastrophe
Half measure, interstellar tourniquet
Stem the free flow of blood like inconvenient statistical evidence
Dripping down born-again ****** America's chin
Vector-like, everything explodes outwards
And on trajectories like these only friction is holy
Murphy's law in ecstatic altercation
A furious life lived under an anachronistic magnifying glass
Truly the only thing worth decaying for

Dogs howling eulogies, desperate
     To late-night-early-morning lovers shot dead dead dead in the streets
      Sunset to sunrise hit the pavement running over with blood
I am wrapping paper holocaust, strung out,
     Livid in lost motion
      Gypsy caravan euthanasia breaking news bulletin
Losing teeth losing sleep
     All shades of bitter gray
      Color chalk-outline landscapes
        But the sky held fast heretical blue
Streaked & stabbed & sodomized
Satellites, searching searching seaching
    It's a wash, a cheap trick of the light
    Sidelong glance cast nervously over the shoulder
       Immigrant dream of bygone peace
Boulder pushed eternally up a hill
    Sisyphus for the low-life lowest common denominator
While ****** shook shook shook her head
    She only likes the men with bombs
South of the border north of Hell
   Spanish gold dust shot up winding black black black roads to frantic nervous system
  El rey esta vacia, scrawled slipshod black ink under the overpass
  You can't see it without some kind of death wish

Down and out, broken like so many burned out automobiles
Yet blazing infinite with immeasurable conviction &
Rapturous with the weight of destiny
Manic hysteria drove them off the overpass
Hipster Valkyries raised them to avant-garde Valhalla
And the eight o'clock news made messiahs of the lot
Nirvana sold last weeks newspapers on the side of the highway
Rolling with a sweet glimmer of a shark toothed smile
On the horizon hunting for a high that can't ever be attained
Holiest of Holies on a red lipped mountain top
Or a supermarket bathroom stall scrawled with ****** madness
The Lord's Prayer in black ink, brutal and simple
There were misty eyed girls on the morning train to some great and unenviable elsewhere
And by night the crows circled six times, once for each of the dead end dreams swallowed that day
Candid and conscious, where the wild ones roam the city
Burning the flags they wave and waving the flags they burn
America's sweethearts on the run from the police
Sawing at heartstrings like bows on a twisted violin
From the mountains to the valleys the winds screamed senseless in their joy
Liberation and the kiss of a lipstick Judas were on everyone's mind
Martyrs a mile a minute, a dime a dozen
Down the line the angels wept gloria mundi
For the sinners sung with passion, the saints stoically mourned
The revelers and the rioters and the street kids looking for a ride home
The toxic kissed stars that set the city lights the shame
And the masochists, blessed with a gypsy goddess' double edged kiss
And broken down like so many burned out automobiles
Yet blazing infinite with immeasurable conviction &
Rapturous with the weight of destiny

In the depth of pagan nightmares, rose the shadowed curtains of my doubt
To choke out the nonchalant sun, aloof on the morning sky
Two deaths, I died last night and a third might bring good luck
But for now I am alive and I feel like the Rapture
Tracking time through ticks on my track marked clock-work veins
While dead buildings mock me through the streets
Where has my supposed talent gone?
Some specter lingers, inverted above my bed
Number 12 in poise, but not quite enlightened
Frenzy is in my muscles, my ligaments laugh like high hell
My teeth burn like the Ohio River and I've bitten off all my nails
An atom bomb in a gilded cage
And a real tear-jerking ******
If you haven't put the pieces together by now,
Don't try

I hear the rain
From where I lay
     The filth ran off the surface and seeped into the soil
     In this way things are never truly cleansed
All the planets at once aligned
Save lovely Venus, who spun out into the black
      To dance with the ghosts of the hundreds of dead moons crumpled up and discarded
The swords of angels cauterize the crying wounds of nature
      And a ****** of crows descends on the Great Plains
      The last buffalo roared to shake Heaven and raised Hell instead
Of mountains that sighed and rivers that fed
    Mortal men shrugged at the meaning of intimacy
    21 revolutions around a singular moment, and clarity still escapes
Lie still and the sun will swallow you whole,
      If the Earth won't open up first
To **** and be killed is a dear privilege
But still there were vagrants up North, and 'round trash can fires the cities heard them sing
Father to brother to son
    Mother to sister to daughter
        Lover to loved to nothing at all
And nobody to wait out the night
Even the rain is unmoved

Conceived in hazy agony
The path to the city of gold stretched endlessly into the mountains
My father walked it once, and I think I'll stay home
There is an eternity between each of my words
And in that space ghosts wait impatiently
For me to cave in
The American South is all ablaze
And two headed catfish swim the Ohio River
Appalachia's lullabies end as bitterly as they begin
Life comes together in fragments
And ephemeral cycles reach their waning stages
God took pity just this once, and the following day brought apocalypse
An ending fit for songs that would never be sung
So glorious they never could have saw it coming
But I'll drink to it regardless

Baptize me
All lace and white fabric on pale skin
You tasted like July the last time,
And the smoke has lingered ever since
You dyed your hair and cut off the dead ends
My fingers can barely recognize it now
Your attention explodes across my awareness
Like a shooting star, because for all of its brevity
It is ******* enthralling
You made a holy fool of me once
And here I submit, on my knees
To be enfolded in the judgement of the crown
You sigh like the wind in Appalachia
And sing like the old gospel choir
And you whisper in French in my ear
You don't know much, but it's more than me

Wildlife has a way of returning to the forest once it's been burnt to the ground
The death and decay are cleansed this way
And life vindicates itself of the indignities it has suffered
It is this perfect symmetry
This cyclical harmony that nature is blessed with
Fell short, the night you burned my house down in departure
November of last year, you were crying and screaming on the sidewalk
And this November I didn't sleep a single night
The floor is littered with garbage and clothes I'll never wash again
And the shower I passed out in, let the washing machine turn the water cold to wake me up
I couldn't stand to touch the surfaces anymore
They can't ever be cleansed
I can't scrape you off the floor, or the shower
The couch, or the insides of my eyes
And the bed, where you told me to never forget
Maybe I'll crash my car again, maybe you'll come home
There's an apartment in the city I always imagined
And it's a real place, I'm sure
I'll probably never see it
With your clothes and mine on the floor
While you're making breakfast, humming and smiling absently
And I have the first cigarette of a new day
Light streams in the blinds and cuts the room in half
And I always imagined that being there
Would make me realize that it feels **** good to be alive sometimes
The winter is coming back now
I wake up uneasy in a haunted house
And last week I saw your mother
Buying groceries
She told me to take care of you, once
And she smiled sadly at me and gave a small wave
Some days it gets easier
Some days I collapse entirely
Some days I think I should burn my house down
Literally this time
I've had enough of metaphors and cliches
For a lifetime, at least

I fought the highway tooth and nail
But it always has a way of getting under my skin
The lights dragged on in lonesome streams
Hundreds of miles in any direction
Someone else's name is in my chest
And I'm powerless after all,
As a crown without a king
In retrospect all things seem just as cliche
Season unending, the smoke teased in the early morning sky
The moon collapsed as sailing ships left the bay
Again, and the tides were more or less used to it by now
But shock still sets in regardless
Expectation suffocated in the divide
Between those ******* city lights and the savages in the gutter
But the headlines read that the worst was behind
And the Dow Jones is up, so God Bless America
Everyone was beaming and the world smelled like peppermint
And it was like Disney World came to the Midwest
Or so you'd think to hear them talk about it now
It's all too much for me
I'm too nervous to look up
Or re-evaluate my priorities
Powerless again in the face of uncompromising uncertainty
I catch myself hoping that everyone feels this way
So maybe one of them can tell me how it ends

The pretense died at the foot of the stairs
On the flip side of where I stood in awe
Between ***** glass and an impenetrable divide
Locked out in the cold with the devil's company and my last few cigarettes
I close my eyes as I inhale because I can already feel him grinning at me
I know he thinks he's helping, but he's ******* everything up

I woke up this morning
Two years older
With the epilogue to a stranger's eulogy etched up and down my arms
And through the cracks in the window I could see clearly
The ashes from last nights cataclysm
Drifted lazily on the cold breeze to settle on the front lawn
Without much of a commotion
I haven't felt clarity like this in a long time
And honestly I never saw it coming
Nor could I have, I hope not at least
And I hope today I don't feel the need to be
Anybody in particular
And I hope today is one of the days I don't need to obsess
Over the symmetry in the way you light your cigarettes
In the passenger seat or the back seat
Primary or secondary
Revolution or complacency
It's all the same dilemma you're going through, really
And it's none of my business but it keeps me up at night regardless
Two years older and not a ******* inch closer to anything

A warped door swings off of broken hinges
A doctor stumbles into the hallway, sick with indifference
It's out of his hands now anyway, that'll be how he falls asleep tonight
6 Adderall in the morning, 10 Xanax at night
An atheist rolling the dice is really not so dramatic

Fever induced haze stole the dreams from the onset of sleep
Turned them to cigarettes lit at the gas pump
And indignation down both ends of the street
The first day we ran like bats out of Hell
The next we collapsed entirely
Swallowed by the Little Miami, ending up somewhere new
Like we planned it all along
All eyes averted as the calender hung itself
For the last time, and cried for November the twenty fourth
But the time stamped behind our eyes remained
Deep December year round
No fire came from the skies to melt the lonely West like the preacher told us
But we'd stopped listening long ago
So who knows how the speech ended, or if it just trailed off in tepid resignation
I suppose we could always just wait for the world to melt itself instead

I.
The Plea

Dearest philosopher, circling your gaze round the sun
Grow you not weary?
In celestial bodies of constant revolution and esoteric motivation your passions lie
Invisible to your yearning eyes,
These things which are your blood be they not also your bane?
Grow you not bitter? Grow you not jaded or deranged?
Even now, hear the apothecary as he calls your name
He speaks, his voice in shambles, and says
"Come, oh dear philosopher!
Many jars have I gathered here, many substances contained
Infinite combinations are possible!
Tell me, friend, for you are my last and best of hope, how can I combine them to thwart the stalwart and unfeeling advance of death?"
And at this look you now to Heaven, dear philosopher?
What in the stars could move you to speak?
Grow you not sullen, defeated or weak?
Where comes your strength in your belief?
Listen now! For the mother is on the rooftop
And hear how she cries for your attention
"Oh dear philosopher, of your aid I am most in need!
For my only son has died, and indeed
My womb is bare as the rooms of my house
And so I beseech you,
My angel, my fate is for you to allow
How may I speak to my boy again?
With your help, may he yet live?"
Speak to her friend, but first speak now to me
Speak fast and speak true for time is short
I stand here on the edge of the Earth
And with these voices I raise my own
Dear philosopher, for my sins how may I atone?
My dear, dear philosopher
Tell me now and waste no breath
How can I make this life worthy of death?

On the corner of 3rd Street and another downward spiral
The ghosts of saints drift above the haunted concrete,
And blood like cathedral bells stains the skyline
And they allowed the city of pariahs a goodnight kiss
And to die, by night and be reborn
Three days hence in resounding glory
But their utopia was stillborn
The sky stank of gasoline and there was a ****** on exit 52
The taste of cheap cigarettes was inescapable
And sic transit gloria mundi!
Tagged on the cathedral wall
The wind that howled was frightened and the skyscrapers echoed the cries of the abandoned
Hallelujah, haligh
Let them join hands and sing!
Let them meet unholy demise with divine grace!
And let their voices be carried off on the lonely wind
To disappear like so many ghosts in the snow

The Midwest trembled at your departure
And the way the wolves howled that night will haunt me till I die
This valley was wild and mighty once,
Now it's scorched Earth and holy floods as far as the eye can see
And morose the sky that fell, and sent the ravens all away
They used to mock you every day
Catholic school left you with knuckles bruised and heart bleeding,
And you were never really the same
Hell has thrown it's jaws open wide
And the view is the same from either side
But the ***** continues to flow,
And if the Lord is truly our shepherd then our cup should runneth over
An Adderall fever set your bones aflame as you screamed south on 75
Like you thought if you slowed down for a minute the ghosts would drag you back
Writhing, to the town where you were born
And you never apologized, nor should you ever
For the way your fists were always clenched
Or the way your jaw was set
Immovable and impassive as the slate gray sky
And the parking lot you sold your burdens in
What could they have known of it then, or now for that matter?
They were tossing salt over their shoulders for luck
When the news came through the grapevine
And I couldn't help but feel relieved
For the lone wolf dies when the winter comes,
And here the winter never leaves

Indomitable like the sea, she rises and falls with the moon
Kissed by the currents which brought her here
To a sleepless fire escape night spent exhaling her immortal soul in to Cincinnati's open embrace
The liquor has run dry but the grass is truly greener on the other side
And it's a straight shot back up I-75
To the football field they thought they could **** her on
The first few times at least
And the prom night she spent spitting ash in haunted houses
Laughing loudest of them all
Drifting across the country
Across the lonesome west grown crowded with ghosts
And the Ohio River grown placid with complacency
Medicine angel in the mist with eyes to the stars
Because ******* she misses them back home
Not this home, the one she left her heart in
At low tide she's back on the road
To lead the skyline in harmonies sweeping up to heaven
And she may not move the stars to wake
But she will laugh the loudest of them all

An old man on the street corner proclaims
"The End is Nigh!" with a cardboard sign held high
And he's stockpiling ****** and ammunition for the coming of the nuclear winter
He builds a bonfire of his welfare checks,
Because what good is welfare when you've got no government?
And he killed himself with a strychnine laced cigarette
Watching the apocalypse party on a Tv in the department store window
His last will and testament was tagged on a tenement wall in black ink
Notarized by the gutter rats below
To the President he left his shotgun
To the Pope he left his bag of pills
To the pilgrims who forgot where Mecca was and dropped to their knees wherever it was convenient he left his compass
To the pagans he left his lighters
To the street youth he left his clothes
To the witches put on trial, and to the witches in the wild
He left his body to be used as they saw fit
Provided they burn it when they are done with it
Because to the wind he left his ashes,
To the earth he left his soul
And to the protesters he left his fortune
$2.27 , enough for a train back home
His tombstone is in the subway terminal
And they leave flowers every day

The stars rained down Hellfire just across the boulevard
While Galileo turned the world over
Once, twice, three times in his hands
Then set it down, to light a cigarette off the sun
And there were young girls on the front lawn
Singing along to an antique radio
That called to them by name
And they kissed in the dark with intangible grace and whispered,
"Lord I never loved another heart like yours"
The halls are silent round this time at night
Save the generator buzz of angels
And the sky outside pulsed electric indigo
And laughed just like a child
The city is either haunted or blessed
And it is so strange that anything is anything at all

Waking up from catatonic states
In another catatonic state
Held aloft by razor wires
Attached at the arms, the legs
The back of the head
I float through acid clouds
Mingling with the ghosts
Of the maniacs who hit the gas and drove off the overpass, their screaming families in the back seat
Of the maniacs who overdosed searching for the American Dream in a cheap hotel room
Of the maniacs who put guns in their mouths and blew the demons out the back of their skulls
I am surrounded by maniacs
God, America looks beautiful from above
The city lights like fields of stars and planets
But this planet is foreign to me up here
America, I am a ******* alien
America, you are a ***** beneath me now
Gliding o'er all
Gliding o'er the blind, the deaf, and the decaying
But America, could you be beautiful?
Could some of the wretches below
Truly lift their mad gaze to the heavens
And cry out
"God is dead, but we can rebuild him!
We have burned down all the mega churches and TV prophets
And we have built our own churches in ourselves,
Wild temples where love and beauty still hold power over ignorance and hate!
We haven't given up on you, America!"
And Hallelujah, their cries came to my ears
In the ******* loveliest melody
I descend from on high, to better observe what I have heard
And oh, what a sight
I see a generation that is sick
I see a generation that is rotting
But I also see a generation that is growing
I see a generation rising like a tide
With flowers growing strong in their bones and fire burning rampant in their hearts
The devil and God are raging inside all of us
In all of us are Nazis and cannibals and politicians
But we are all ******* heroes
And we are all ******* Gods
And we are all ******* saviors
And we are not all ******* lost
So God bless you, America
I've never felt so alive
So God bless you, America
I will howl no more at the sky
So God bless you, America
Dearly departed no longer will I be
So God bless you, America
You've finally set me free
I will find my broken body
I will make myself whole
I'll be your hero, America
I'll pave your streets with ******* gold
Again I feel my chest begin to pound
And the old ache sets in my bones
I'm wide awake, it's morning
And it is the most ******* beautiful day I have ever seen

My generation is sick
Rotting inside long before the expiration date
Walking around like the dead men they saw on TV
Looking for God
Between the lines of a ****** romance novel
With some protagonist who teaches them that your life only matters
If somebody loves you
And dies a martyr
Or in some silver haired, silver tongued figure
Spewing second-hand reassurances that their anger is justified
And their voices will be heard
And a return to traditional values is coming
An open palm in the air, while the other itches to drop the bomb
Or on a tiny screen injecting radiation sickness directly to their brains
Mesmerized by idols dancing like marionettes on vile strings
Spewing filth and mindless drivel
Taught that ignorance is trending
Taught to hate by the hollow blonde shell of some Ubermensch
Recording himself vomiting obscenities for their amusement
Looking for God
Everywhere except the ******* heavens
Where shooting stars and celestial bodies
Pass endlessly through their periphery
Ignored, leaving a generation of wishes unfufilled
Buried under glittering detritus
Rotting to be accepted
Rotting to be trendy
Rotting while their parents give them the world
And they can't be bothered to glance upwards
Squandering fortunes on popular hedonism
Awash in a narcissistic sea
Where the lowliest wretch can gain more disciples than Jesus Christ
A generation of men
Devolved to beasts
Who will pounce at the smallest hint of exposed flesh
And cry out injustice because the prey asked to be devoured
Who will equate chivalry with chemical imbalance
Tattooing false hearts on their sleeves
On their knees begging to be loved
& A generation of women
Content to be objectified
And content to objectify themselves
Hearts bleeding for the plights of the lowly
& beautifully, blissfully blind to their own
The harlots & the sinners
Projected larger than life into the subconscious of
Children with no larger ambition
To sacrifice themselves, and be reborn a cheap photo copy
Full of style and confidence, and devoid of essence
Angels that burn like neon lights
Extinguished quickly, to lie dark and dormant forever
Hell is full to bursting
With all the souls sold for social media
& a forged prescription for Adderall
The madmen are the brave ones
Howling at the sky
That none of this means anything
And none of it is okay
Howling for some ******* reason
Howling for some ******* peace
Howling because nothing else makes any ******* sense
Our society's ship is anchored
And still the current drags us back
Endlessly, and forward again
Repeating history
And our Captain is dead, we've murdered Him ourselves
And of his flesh we made a feast
Of praise and adoration
For the blind, the deaf, & the decaying
And there will be no bleeding hearts
And there will be no expanded minds
And there will be no saviors
And there will be no promised tomorrow
The once glorious future is a funeral pyre
Our ancestral utopia is a ruin
Spray pained red white & blue
Littered with the corpses of the ones who died believing
There's nowhere left to conquer
There's nowhere left to run
There's no room in this Hell
& There's no room in the next
Only the madmen remain
Howling at the sky
Asking God where the **** he's gone
And the heavens shall remain silent

Drown Cincinnati, drown!
We sang from the balcony,
Give up your blood and sweat and be cleansed!
And as they drowned below they called to me for help,
But I'm sorry brothers, I have looked in to the gaping jaws of Hell and I cannot go back!
Euthanize your idols, burn your high fashion statements!
Build a bonfire of your vanities!
Your ancestors ***** the Native American people and now you bear their graven image on your T-Shirt
Oh but how they were HOLY
Holy is the slogan sewed in to the denim
Holy is anarchist ideal held together by safety pins and hairspray
Nursing at the breast of punk's decrepit corpse,
You read the eulogy, screamed "Anarchy in the UK!"
In to the microphone
Although you never left American soil

A match is dropped and the Ohio River goes up in flames
And the smoke filled up the ****** lungs of sweet little lady Liberty,
Rose scented thrift store day ream turned black
Black like the street punk's spiked leather vest worn ragged by a lifetime spent running headlong into brick walls
And red, God how they saw red!
Red like the cherry tipped death inhaled by your sunset haired dream girl in the passenger seat
Hark! These herald angels sing
Drunken anthems to bar rooms of disillusioned art majors newly reborn as kings
Killing time by means of self obsession, searching for the newest thing to be offended by
And what home have you to return to, Prodigal Son?
Climb the police blockade and cry your apathy to the skies!
Lest ye be judged by a jury of your own co dependent peers
Scratch your writing on the tenement wall with nails painted black
Black like the flags flown high on blood thirsty sails far out to sea
And tell them, tell them how you wept for art and nature!
Son of rage and love, your blessed values were imported
Leave the sealed halls and sacred corridors of your ideological temple
And turn your blood shot eyes to the sky
To witness, a manic depressive pilot writing in smoke
"Help us God!"
But then, he felt pretentious so he circled back around to replace "God" with "Mr. President"
My love, your strung out serenades will never melt Bohemia's frozen heart
Set all the fires you will
Set fire to your vanity!
Set fire to your love!
Set fire to the Ohio River that raised you up
And return to the basin of your birth

War is declared on the 8 o'clock news
By the dead-eyed ghost shoved in front of the teleprompter
The artists marched on the throne of God to vindicate their suffering
and called it alchemy when it turned to gold before their eyes
On wings of wax they kissed the sun risen high on the sky
and then ****** the night away
And they went and told it on the mountain,
They preached it into the sea
And held mass in abortion clinics and asylums,
And delivered brimstone sermons on the street corner where they sold opiates and muscle relaxers,
9 dollars 10 cents a pop
A Crusade on Wall Street!
And a Jihad on Main Street!
And the nihlists selling barbecued ribs on the side
Revolution! A maniac wielding a megaphone like a Molotov cocktail!
All of creation destroyed and recreated with almost historical accuracy
They called it justice atop the gallows and called it tragedy when it was in private
The writings on the asylum wall held comfort and good tidings, this time at least
And at least Hell lit a fire to keep away the cold
So the artists marched on
Awash in their Midas glow
******* into oblivion and forgetting to shower
Bringing God to his knees,
Crying for peace to the domed ceiling
With 50 dead spirits waiting in the wings

The valley is flooded and the filth laid bare
Crawl out from the shipwreck of your distorted ideology
And submit yourself to the judgement of the crown
With black x's etched deep in your skin
And knuckles ****** from self righteous vindication
March on to sew senseless violence
Goose stepping in time to drums of war
Played by misinterpreted ghosts of revolutions laid to rest
My boy, you wear the *******!
A threat too minor to register, pounding your chest and crying wolf to disinterested sheep
Reading the bible from outside the church through cracks in the stained glass
And you remembered half the Commandments, that should save you from Hell right?
Son of the North, America holds no refuge for your weary soul
Drop your bombs, wage your wars
Chemicals will flow on endlessly after your blood has stopped
And your ignorance will leave your grave unmarked

Reaching towards the sky,
On my knees, my palms begin to bleed
As well as my feet
A stigmata instigated by my self destructive tendencies
But just what does that insinuate?
Am I another sick starved madman with a twisted messiah complex?
Will I end up stark & raving, naked on the Cincinnati streets screaming obscenities & salvation?
Is that the worst that could happen?
Is this the worst case scenario on the other end of my linear destiny?
But no, this destiny is not linear
It's thermo-*******-nuclear
Manhattan-like, I shall disassemble and reassemble at will
My revolution is ALIVE
A revolution of fire & chemicals swirls madly around my subconscious
I'm no pragmatic protagonist from any perspective
I'm a *******
A modern day strung out anti-hero
Spray painting realistic ***** on the walls of reality
Reaching for the sky
To **** the ******* sun

In the great wasteland of my youth
I buried all my loved ones I'd slaughtered with my own hands
Every girl who ever loved me I shot right between the eyes
& All my brothers I knocked unconscious and burned alive
Why?
Why must I senselessly sever every human connection I've ever made?
Faulkner told me to **** my darlings and so eagerly I obeyed
In the great wasteland of my youth
I alone drift wraithlike from nothing to nothing
Just me and my ******* poems
Which I deliver like resounding benedictions to cathedrals of the ghosts I've created
Lord knows I always wanted a captive audience
In the great wasteland of my youth
I am king of nothing but broken bones
Broken hearts & broken homes
I rule scorched Earth and tattered sky
I command the cruel seas to rise & I command beauty to die
I am king of nothing
In the great wasteland of my youth
I am a demon of some repute
Seeking lovers incapable of love or objective truth
And objective truth I've only found in bottles of pills
Downed by the lovely girls I've later killed
Sacrificed to the emotional gas chamber of my bohemian holocaust
In the great wasteland of my youth
I've destroyed all the places I could hide
& am now forced to comprehend this monster inside
And what I've always suspected has been present all along
Brothers and sisters, I am an atomic bomb

The resounding noise in my head pounds out wicked rhythms on a heathen's drums
Unholy ghosts ******* holes in the hallowed curtains of history
As I burn the images into my wrist
Detailing a hieroglyphic history of chemical dependency & psychopathic tendencies, of which I've got a few
In my fevered dreams I put a gun to the head of all the filthy parishioners in their their pews
And they've all got my ******* face
Am I actively plotting to ****** my own faith?
Or is the devil's choir singing to me
Moaning joyous hymns sweet and slow?
I will not have it
I will not sit here and be stabbed in the ears by any more serrated symphonies
If salvation is what I need I'll make it my own ******* self
All the angel-faced harlots & devil-headed preachers in the world couldn't wage a winning war for my sick sad soul anymore
I'm not the devil & I'm not God I am something else entirely
I'm a revolutionary revolver with six shells saved for the Son of God
And I'll fire blindly out into the universe
Blowing holes in the inconceivable unknown
Until Someone asks me to stop
Or I run out of bullets

It hit me like a nuclear war
While she was on the floor, with her voice rolling down the walls
And her sickly sweet blood dripping from the ceiling
Her hair is a supernova, and her eyes are the Big Bang
Setting off infinite unseen particles on an atmospheric trajectory in to the widening gyre of my consciousness
I cannot contain it any more than I could put a leash on the sun
I am the new original sin, and I'll **** humankind to their home made Hell with a smile on my face
Paradise is right outside of my periphery  and I could not care less
She is queen of beast in a dream kingdom
A howling nightmare for the pure of heart and the porcelain of skin
She is love that rips flesh from bones and I laugh as she consumes me
I'm surrounded by fangs on all sides and bathed in brilliant radiation
My body is dead but my brain is alive
With electric currents coursing through kerosene veins
And gravity bows in horrified awe
As I rocket upwards through subspace shattering the speed of light
Shattering the walls of sanity & safety
Unleashing celestial leviathans in to the screaming maw of the universe
I shed my skin light years ago
No longer am I human
No longer am I made in God's image
She is queen of beasts and I will be her king and in my kingdom I will need salvation no longer

I saw God in a cheap motel
& He said I was trying too hard
He told me I should lighten up
But I was too preoccupied tracking time through vibrating echoes in the air
Rapidly evolving and devolving
And screaming out of my ******* head
My consciousness deserted the hollow husk of self
And like a gas, expanded to fill the room
Shattered the ****-stained windows, and expanded to fill the world
Laughing skinless skulls filled up the tessellating skies
& their hysteric soundwaves penetrated the oceanic depths of my mind
Where Machiavellian machinations revolved ceaselessly
Circling unattainable ends
I need to release the pressure
But my consciousness has grown so colossal I no longer know ******* it
I **** out all the venom & vinegar I drink
And my lungs refuse to give in to poison fumes
& I cry out in frustration
Will I ever meet God again?
I wanna tell him I lightened up

The bat is still gone from the bell tower
Was it really ever even there?
Is this bat symbolic of some long silent God?
Or the silhouette of a real ******* monster
Skulking down the sidewalks and alleyways of my demented subconscious?
And just where the **** has it gone?
Does it streak high above on sunless skies
Screeching its demonic secrets to drown out the roar of ceremonial rockets
Shuttling the newly ****** & departed across the river Styx?
Or does it hang inverted from stalactites in the tomb of some long surrendered ideology
Filled with no riches or spectral guardians
Only this ******* bat to stand sinister vigil?
Is it something sinister or something sacred?
Or is it just a ******* bat?
Am I just filling in empty spaces with sub-par symbolism and psychosomatic horrors?
Hell, I'll probably never know
All I know is that the bell keeps tolling
Whether there is something there or not
And I think it's gonna drive me insane