Orpheus, Orpheus
How you could charm the sun into rising,
How your father Apollo breathed fire into your divine mortal hands and watched with pride as you learned to make it sing,
They said that with a few strums of a lyre you could create life where there was only silence,
That you could move the trees to dance, the hills to laugh, the water to hum, the air itself to sway in sublime ecstasy,
I could forgive you then,
For thinking you could melt the frozen hearts of gods,
Pluck your love from the jaws of death,
And wake the dead to join you in song,

Eurydice, Eurydice
I know how you must have felt, swept up into something so glorious and beautiful,
To be entranced so completely you’re willing to ignore the warning signs, the prophesied doom and the hubris of men,
You lost yourself in those songs,
And they were all for you, every note he played bore your name and the whole world could only stand in envy
They said you were beautiful, a muse of the purest order,
And when you loved, you loved hard enough to shake the heavens and force them to pay attention,
I could forgive you, then,
For never seeing it coming,
The perfection shattered by the fangs of a snake,
Who has time, after all, to watch the ground,
When your heart has taken to the sky?

Orpheus, Orpheus,
How brave you must have felt, how romantic, strolling through the gates of the underworld with only your lyre and your heavy heart,
Confident that it was enough, that all the gods and monsters of this world could be bowed by the sheer force of your love and your melody,
And they were, Orpheus,
You drew tears from the burning gaze of Hades himself, as Persephone sighed in longing,
But you had a lesson to learn, Orpheus,
That the gods are cruel and men imperfect,
You were weak then, Orpheus, as we all must be weak,
Just steps from the light, you looked back to see your love ripped back into the world of shadows,
She had been your shadow all along, Orpheus
For all your beauty, all your power, you wavered in your faith, and doomed the both of you forever,
You, wandering the world eternal with your haunted heart and your mourning songs,
And she, trapped as a phantom too soon in the kingdom of the dead, always wondering why you couldn’t do it, why you couldn’t have just a little more faith,

Orpheus, Orpheus,
I know why you couldn’t do it,
I am just like you,
Held in the grip of fear, uncertain and desperate,
We’re all born that way, I think
Nervous energy faced with insurmountable odds,
Some of us ascend, overcome it all through supreme will and conviction,
Some of us descend, meet our devils where they live and lose the games they play,
But we all falter somewhere,
Even once, even one small mistake,
Sometimes that’s all it takes,
Orpheus, I can forgive you, then,
There’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t have looked back

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

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

I.
The people look like flowers at last - sick thoughts of dead men strike the clock winding backwards and ignite to illuminate my approach,
The people look like,
Cigarette burns,
Bullet wounds,
Casualties of Rollins' war with himself,
Of Ellis' numb utopia,
Of the Bukowski cynic suicide,
Of the thoughtless progeny of deadbeat generations desperate to push back,
Every street corner is holy, baptized in the blood of those who died believing,
A thousand fists moved to release a thousand frustrations, and a celebrity endorsement for each overdose death,
Angel mine, abate your gutter wars and mob mentalities,
The tattoo ink has dried and the clubs are closed for the night,
Where are the revolutionaries to go now?

II.
The revenge of the skinhead minority,
The born again soul of a fallen brother,
The madman defiant in publicized rage, the faces of the enemy painted with crosshairs on TV screens,
And the damaged finally able to stand on their own,
Damaged and unrepentant,
Damaged and brilliant,
Damaged with criminal record eyes,
with paranoia brain, with X's tattooed into calloused knuckles,
with track marked arms,
Damaged, the unstoppable tide of the righteous youth - caricatured in the spray painted stencils of their testaments

III.
The spoiled children of an undefinable zeitgeist with nothing to lose,
In ecstasy binges these angels hallucinated manifest destiny through non prescription lenses,
Studying traffic patterns I remember how people are afraid to merge and everybody is looking for just the right amount of trouble,
A fire dies and another is born almost immediately,
Careless ramblings in careless county - a land I'm sure was promised to someone, somewhere, sometime
But after the gold rush nobody could cash out fast enough,
I can't cash out fast enough -
Every girl has got the guilty smile of a teenage runaway living out a Janis Joplin fantasy, and all the boys line up like addicts itching to cop,
The air is so heavy nobody can hold a thought - and when I speak, It's the accent, they say, they can always tell,

IV.
Taxi rides in laser show utopia,
Sicilian saint newly minted tells me about the ******* machine and it's ravenous posturing -
be present & be seen,
Fake it till you make it,
Cop killers singing confessions for beer on the street corner,
While the socialist manifests itself in mispronounced beverages and faux-marked Russian volumes,
avant-garde hyperrealism & ritualistic sacrifice,
There was something about *** and dying on the radio I couldn't be bothered to hear,
A drunken brawl over a bad bet made, disappointing street race, police sirens distant growing moreso,
In ****** bars where ladies always drink free, I rewatch the fall of a ***** old man from the penthouse to the street all over again,
If you haven't figured it out by now,
Don't try

V.
In dreams I walk the Pacific Coast Highway dead of night, barefooted soul alive and naked in the Western night like a Jim Morrison poem, the traveler that never arrives, watching the sunrise form halos over the Sierra Nevada, like a girl I know back East who talks a great deal about plans, the best of which never even have an aftertaste of freedom
There is the same sublime anthems playing on every radio and palm trees forming crosses for any messiah who is willing to claim them,
Last train out of Anaheim as the tessellating California skies swell and give, catch and release,
I see the roofs of tenements lit up by Disneyland,
ocean reflecting the glare from Heaven,
faces of the impoverished reflecting the glare from Heaven,
everybody getting sunburned from the glare from Heaven,
I watch the lovers depart for Santa Ana,
Elderly Asian tourists for Irvine,
Hipsters for San Juan,
and the rest of the destitute ******* for Oceanside en route to San Diego,
There but by the grace of God go the drunk kids spilling out of greyhound buses, sitting till dawn contemplating skylines reflected on the bay, finding romance in every moan of living Earth,
wide eyed at possibility of removing themselves from the equation and finding the answer,
Neil Young harmonicas drift listless above Spanish villas,
Everybody talking like something bad was gonna happen but I couldn't see much thru the windows past the tourist burly shouldered slumbering beast,
I think it was somewhere between Yuma and Dallas, with Mexico stretched out like an invitation to an anarchist rally where I was haunted first,
I'm haunted by El Campo Santo, paved over restless Indian graves in the shadow of the hanging tree,
By La Calavera Catrina blessing the sinners as they pass, hollow faced and sunken on the ***** Spanish streets of their ancestral Apartheid home,
I'm haunted by Calvary, 3000 spirits hanging around unsure of what comes next,
I'm haunted by the faces of the beggars I couldn't spare a cigarette for,
In dreams the Western night releases me and I leave California a shade lighter,
And the handful of stars that manage to burn through the haze seem to promise me:
"You may be gone, but your shadow lives on without you"

I the poet
We the poet
He/She/They the poet
Will never be worthy of the poem
But allow me this as confession:
The fire that cleanses and the filth that remains
Yes - I have heard the sphinx preach friction to the dumb and the wise alike hoping to spark some understanding, dialogue, meaning,
Anything to feel connected,
Complacency as a concept is destroyed the moment you think about it
and the great tragedy plays itself on repeat ad nausea to the audience who are only still listening to get their money's worth
Yes- I have left several pints of blood and the better part of my sanity in the streets of cities with no conscience to speak of and I have been unaware of the gravity of my situation till now
Two decades of suicide played out in impermanent scenes of a purgatory I could only dream about once and am now the crowned jewel of
The ****** come, the falling action begun,
And I thought I heard the cavalry coming tonight but it was not for me
Red and blue lights reflect off of welcome signs,
Hands raised yielding into the air so as to avoid presumed suspicion,
And I get the feeling that any moment
Fire will catch,
lightning will strike,
The gunshots on the block will pierce the walls of Heaven,
Neon reality will light up a sign that reads
"EXIT HERE"
And the faithful will follow as they have always done
Yes - I have read the writing that would render my delusions obsolete but I cannot communicate with the demons in my skin, the devils in my blood, the cancers in my lungs, the rope double knotted round my neck that I'm sure will be called a halo when I'm gone
We are far past that now
The fate was always empty and the choice predetermined
But at least we know the score
And we know who our enemies are
The machine, humming static life into callous evening as the heart yearns for one last fix, and I wonder how much longer we can keep up the joke
Existence confined to the space between parallel lines -
From the altar to the ashes,
From the drug deal to the wake,
From the unknown back into the unknown,
Reality is all you can see down the barrel of a gun and it is your civic duty to pull the trigger
Let the world go supernova and remind everyone they're alive!
Alive! The psych ward prophets spoke sense to me in electric dreams! The martyrs monetized their own demise! The drifters smoke a pack a day and refuse to call their families! The junkies pressed the plungers on their salvation and are rushing to greet the stars head on as we speak!
The revolutionaries lost their keys and had to *** a ride home from the enemy!
The artists couldn't make any ******* sense of any of it!
Alive! Judgement at last!
Judgement the victory!
Judgement the cataclysm!
They'll wear flowers in their hair with clenched daydreams between their teeth as they count the footprints in the sand wondering which ones belong to Jesus!
Magnificent ****** *******!
Unrepentant bleeding heart liberal!
And I hate to ask but I need to know,
Will the concrete steps where I've lain my burdens all this time, my gypsy blood and nicotine cursed lungs, carry me to Judgement?
Judgement - Safer Than Heaven
Judgement - Safer Than Heaven
Judgement the Beast come round at last!
Judgement the circle redrawn!
Judgement the cycle reached final act!
Now start over

XXI. The World
As it was, again

January 19, 2017
The sword of Damocles hangs tense in the American night as a nation steels itself,
My friends stick to their guns, my enemies do the same, and there's all these children who don't know which side of a border they'll end up on when the dust settles, there's all these trees down south who never asked to feel the weight of bodies on their branches, there's all these people talking in circles and there's nothing but doom on the television,
Dr. King, I think of you this night, three days following the holiday they pinned to your corpse like a participation ribbon, I think of what they've done to you,
Dr. King, they murdered you, they dissolved you in bleach, they rewrote your history and their mouths defile you to this day
Dr. King, I want you to know there are parts of you that cannot be stripped away,
Two hundred fifty thousand raised voices, five hundred thousand raised hands,
Countless bodies in the street, countless jail sentences, countless tears shed in pursuit of a dream
Dr. King, they tried to tell me your dream was of peace, but it's always been about freedom
Dr. King, I know you would understand what must be done in the pursuit of freedom
Dr. King, you knew that nonviolence could only work until they came for your blood
Dr. King, you knew one day you'd have to strike back but they never gave you the chance
Dr. King, they come for the blood of your brothers and sisters today
Dr. King, they put words in your corpses mouth and teach it to dance,
Dr. King, they will claim you no longer
Dr. King, your chains will be broken,
Dr. King, one day, you will be free at last,
Glory glory, hallelujah, free at last

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

0.
Friends, lovers,  co-conspirators, criminals, junkies, artists, vigilantes, killers and heroes and the ghosts that haunt all indiscriminate, I write this in your blood, for you alone,

I.
I saw you each to each pressed together in a crucible, growing callouses in a garden of fire, fingernails black from digging the harvest of ashes, and when the lord came near you boarded your windows and cocked your guns because you could no longer hold stock in a strangers promise of love, not since your father branded his name into the tender skin of your back and told you, you are only as good as what you own in this country, and by covenant you belong to me now, some nights you still see his face in clouds of smoke when the cold chill of predetermined destiny kisses the back of your neck, other nights you watch the sky and wonder which parts of you will be left when the birds have had their fill

II.
Mercy and desperation,
Concentric circles divided by zero around a sacrificial pyre,
Something here cannot coexist,
Something here has to break to fit,
In longing the martyr dies never knowing what for, and in sacrament he is chewed up and spat out
In longing the basin fills, and in sacrament it breaks to flood the earth
In longing I carve out my insides, and in sacrament they will call me a museum
That is to say, the difference between a museum and a graveyard is a still beating heart

III.
Lear looked among his children and saw only sharpened knives,
Castro looked out over the ocean and saw only crosshairs,
I look out over the city and see only cupped hands,
Our grandfathers could level nations to prove a point and our grandmothers could only cower before men of such rage and power,
Make no mistake, these streets have witnessed genocide and remained passive,
Driving fast down these empty roads after midnight, you can almost make out an apology from the wind,
She says,
You have to understand what it's like to be gutted in appeasement,
You have to understand what it's like to become deadly against your will

IV.
In dreams a vision of Ginsberg, playing chess with his demons on the fifth day of a three day psych ward stay
Vision of Plath setting fire to her own head rather than have its contents laid bare,
Vision of Wolfe watching trains roll by paralyzed by fear of the future and his own hand in it,
Vision of Van Gogh unable to express love in any way other than to destroy himself
Vision of Virginia atop the lighthouse demanding payment for the transgressions against her
Vision of the poet as a saint performing miracles after death, vision of the poet as the archetype of madness realized, vision of the poet as divine mouth and unholy ghost, vision of the poet writing his own obituary and praying for silence

V.
We are blessed with the ability to tear down our monuments when they no longer stand for us,
We are blessed because we can justify anything we destroy
When Jacob's time came they carried him to Canaan and the Lion of Judah went on to fill its stomach with the blood of anything innocent it could sink its teeth in,
I take this to mean that there are some hungers that can only be sated by devouring everything you believe in
But what do I know,
I am a crown without a king
I am not much for devotion
I pick up the pieces of the monuments that once stood here and I sanctify them in hopes that one day this will mean something,
And if that day ever comes,
We will live again inside of something everlasting,
And until then,
I will carry this with me wherever I go
It's the least I can do

I.
I saw it all through the eyes of a child, knees scraped ****** at the altar of remorse
Who couldn't sing a single hymn without his voice breaking off
And who lost himself in the laughter from the congregation
I took it all in by pieces
The way the dreamers lusted for Icarus, but ultimately settled for getting high on the ground
The way the dreamers became junkies and the way the junkies died like clockwork every hour on the hour,
To be reborn as prophets on a newsreel clicking their tongues about the fall of America
Please
Get down off your high horse, brother
America has fallen and now you're just embarrassing yourself

II.
Mercy for the lovers, they know not what they do
Mercy for the restless, the senseless, the savage
Plucking at chords till they find the voice they need to reach heaven,
Sipping gasoline from the cupped hands of the sons of the revolution,
Mercy for the revolution, they really did mean well once
But their anthems caught on dead air and they drowned in the high tide of their own self importance
And we didn't mourn but we'll sure build them a monument,
A manifesto pieced together from scraps of torn up prescriptions, misspelled names on coffee cups, tobacco spilling out the seams of broken cigarettes
And it will proclaim to the world,
These are the fruits of your labor
These are the lifeless things you bled your youth dry for
Sanctify them, sing their praise from the highest peaks
And receive payment in your next life,
A hundred hymns per heart broken, and a thousand pardons per spirit swallowed whole
Mercy for me, you know I couldn't help myself

III.
We are looking at the underbelly of an evil machine
So when I speak the apocalypse please know I'm being serious,
Lazarus has just finished his third cup of coffee today and he isn't even pretending to be amazed anymore
How could I get that lucky?
Could I unlearn the branding of my soul or am I next up to the chopping block?
If I ever hear the wind cry Mary on the downswing of the blade falling to take my life it won't be soon enough
And I will look back on all the bruises in creation I've left,
In milky white flesh turned deep purple,
In starry American sky lit up by dissent,
In innocence exposed to the fluorescent light of sin,
and yearn to leave each one again,
Just to experience what it feels like to stain something beautiful one last time

IV.
A beautiful boy drags his grandmother's ashes down his throat into his lungs to spit back up epiphany after epiphany, balanced on the manic edge of destruction
An angel faced girl dreams of mountains, the whole world a church to be celebrated
A harlot sings desperate in the street to attract just enough attention to make it through the night
The devil lights another cigarette and waxes romantic about the one that got away
These are the heroes to whom I give silent thanks,
These are the criminals to whom I give violent condemnation
These are the faces I pick out of the static behind my eyes,
These are the hearts I wear stitched into my sleeves
I'd be nothing without you

V.
**** me once more in the neon lit halo of your love and this time give me a shot between the eyes, just to be sure
For I have seen the end and I'd rather just get it over with
String me up between the billboards for life and loneliness and hold me still in the holy visions I have of a last judgement
Shoot me up once more with my drug of choice, the sadness I spent decades mixing in my basement till I got it just right
And let me explode one last time,
Let me be vivid and shameless, let me scorch their retinas and blacken their brains till they start to see things my way
Build me a monument worthy of the king they thought me to be, not the king that I was
Write my eulogy on the back of the receipt for my soul, and never let the ******* tell me I didn't get my money's worth
Martyr me again, and this time I won't back down
I promise
It's the least I can do

I dreamed of Yuri Gagarin straddling an atomic bomb,
I dreamed of grace and annihilation weightless and atmospheric
I dreamed of gravity as the tyranny of man

I dreamed of a view of this world from the sun, ashes in a cosmic crematorium
I dreamed of ice and fire, winter and war
I dreamed of mutually assured destruction, eyes watching the sky

I dreamed of watching from on high, all glory hallelujah and twinkling giants
I dreamed of falling back down, arms spread in unbreakable faith
I dreamed of Yuri Gagarin, alone among the stars, saint of that great abyss, smiling as he met God, and asking him in a calm and reassuring tone, where he's been all this time

The poem is either a confession or a rifle
It remains deadly regardless

The disorder, the struggle, the heartbreak; the criminal record, the tears, the drugs, the breakdown, the music, the suicide attempt, the riot, the midnight, the fire, the comedown and the uprising

The girl you spent nights awake over, writing poems you knew could never live up, who you were always afraid would ran like hell and never looked back if she ever saw through you,
The night you got arrested, trying to spray paint a manifesto on a red brick wall because you didn't know how else to make them hear you, and you couldn't wipe your own tears through the handcuffs so you had to let your face tell everyone that you weren't as brave as you thought you were,
The boy who died just months after his 18th birthday, who never wanted anything more than to disappear and finally got his wish except in your flashes of memory and dreams of a different life,
The day you first stood in the street with your fists clenched tight around a sign you held high as God and twice as loud, and you felt ignited for the first time in your life like you could burn up everything that held the world down with a Bic lighter and unshakable conviction

So this is where you find me,
Somewhere between the personal and the political,
From the needle in the groove to the back of the squad car
From the drunken night to the show of solidarity
From the "I can't go on anymore" to the "A luta continua"
From the relapse to the rise,
You'll find me in the poem, and I'll be fighting either way

******
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

I cried when Barack Obama left office, and I cried for Joe Biden too, as though I'd lost parents of mine,
But Mike Brown and the others had it coming, they were probably resisting arrest,
So love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal

I go to pro choice rallies and I chant about female anatomy,
I retweeted a #blacklivesmatter tweet once, I think that's just as good as a protest
But don't talk about revolution, that's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal

I cheered Bernie on the whole way, but eventually settled on Clinton,
I would do anything for free healthcare and education, as long as my taxes aren't too much more
I love all the minorities too, as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal

The people who voted for Trump, should all hang their heads in shame,
I can't understand where they're at, John Oliver should set them straight
But if you burn an American flag, I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me love me I'm a liberal

I read Huffington Post, and Rolling Stone too,
If I vote it's a Democrat with a sensible economic view,
But when it comes to rioters in the streets punching nazis, there's no one more red white and blue
So love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal

Once I was young and my heart bleeding, I bought every Coexist bumper sticker I saw,
Even marched alongside the socialists, thought I could bring the system down with the power of love,
But I've grown older and wiser, and that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal
Love me, love me love me, I'm a liberal

Oh sweet communist,
Sweet communist daughter,
How they loved you, and how we let you die
A ration of bread, a ration of water,
A Tokarev SVT-40 rifle tucked like a poem between your shoulder blades, telescopic sights trained to deliver angels to Earth from the safety of Heaven,
A parchment neatly folded and tucked into your pocket, 309 tally marks for dogs who didn't deserve their names,
Sevastopol sleeping uneasy, singing all through the night in reverence to the Fathers that sent you here to draw their blood on Motherland soil,
Sing to us, sweet communist daughter,
We must be made to understand,
We must be made to hear,
Send us to sleep, so that we might learn who our enemies are
Send us to sleep, so that we might hear the music breaking through the clouds
Send us to sleep, so that we might dream of something beautiful at last

I dream of living to see the next revolution,
And of the men who will not live through that revolution,
Of the air humming electric static heat in anticipation of the inevitable riot,
Of the holy barricades standing in defiance of Heaven,
Of the enlightened kicking down the doors with guns and masks, asking;
"ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE PROBLEM OR ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION?"
Of gallows for the dogs of war,
Of guillotines for the capitalist pigs,
Of a firing squad for every reactionary content to oppose the wheel of history even as it crushes their bones down to nothing,
Of the end which justifies  the blood staining the cities red as the hammer and sickle cells that divide and multiply fevered in the streets,
Of the ghosts of iron men long dead still insisting that we take not one step back,
Because men get arrested, animals get put down
And God,
God made them as stubble to our swords, boys
And with blades clenched between their teeth so climb the dregs of the Earth to the surface to taste the apples they shook from the trees,
In 24 hour news cycles the slogans repeat to infinity:
"NOT RESISTING ARREST"
"NOT COMMITTING A CRIME"
"I WAS NOT A THREAT, WHY DID YOU TRY TO **** ME"
You can only force people to paint the smallest target possible on their own backs for so long before you end up in the crosshairs
I have seen the faces of  my saints painted on the walls of eternity -
Of Trotsky,  million headed proletariat staring daggers through the hearts of the tsars,
Of Cromwell, crusader for the ungovernable force of will,
Of Robespierre, headsman of divine terror riding on the wings of the Angel of Death,
I have seen the end and the means played out in countless dramas across millennia,
And the only question that remains unanswered is this:
Are you gonna be a part of the problem or are you gonna be a part of the solution?

"How much farther?"
The weary traveler, strung out angel with cancer heart and extrabrilliant soul, dead of night, cutting lines off each passing interstate sign that reads off the progression we've been working towards in a feverpitch monotone -
The end of the line is coming sooner than you think,
I cut a pack of worn out tarot cards with my free hand and set to work deducing meaning between highway lines,
Anything to pass the time

Viva Castro
Viva la revolution
Viva the people
Viva the killing of tyrants
Viva the guns of Santiago
Viva the exiled capitalists
Viva the educated masses
Viva the death of Apartheid
Viva homes for the homeless
Viva health care
Viva resisting empires
Viva never backing down
Viva always learning
Viva always improving
Viva learning from mistakes
Viva dialectics
Viva destiny
Viva the future
Viva the flame of life
Viva the hammer of justice
Viva the will of the exploited
Viva our comrades
Viva the titans living and dead
Viva Che
Viva Assata
Viva Fidel
Viva la revolution
Viva Cuba Libre

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

We are a broken
Hallelujah
We sleep uneasy we dream of running as far as hell will take us towards
Hallelujah
We forget to call we forget to write we forget to medicate we forget the name that we once called
Hallelujah
We dig in we arm ourselves to the teeth we can't trust we can't remember
Hallelujah
It is not safe here, we are drawing battle lines across the block we are marching the neighborhood we are holding hands to stop the shaking
Hallelujah
We know that alone we can be killed but together we are immortal
Hallelujah
All we have is each other and a clear picture of who our enemies are
Hallelujah
Our enemy is death and he is fear and he is afraid of the strength of our
Hallelujah
We'll take the streets and hold on
Hallelujah
We'll take the power and hold on
Hallelujah
We will endure and we will overcome
Hallelujah
And we will all sing
Hallelujah
And we will all sing
Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

I. Palingenesis: The Spirit We Inherit

We were born on top of graves,
Headstones from sea to sea,
Some places they put flowers over their coffins, some places they put gold plated markers in the street, some places they don't put anything,
No matter how far you run, you are not faster than the ghosts of this land
No matter where you go you will pay for the sins of your fathers,
You will incur their debts on top of your own and you will be wrapped in this when they put you in that ground
They will tell you that this isn't your fault
They will tell you that this isn't their fault either
They will blame this on The Other
They will tell you who your enemies are, and you will believe them
They will tell you to defend your blood, your soil
They will tell you that this is what your father did, and his father before him
They will tell you that patriots do what they must, and so must you
They will out that gun in your hands, and when you pull the trigger, they will tell you it is your fault, that they just don't know,
Where you inherited all this violence

II. Kenogenesis: The Spirit We Create

You will speak up,
You will tell them, in no uncertain terms, that you will not carry those crosses,
You will not fire their guns,
You will not tie their nooses,
You will not die for your fathers legacy
You will not surrender to your history
You will climb the rib cage of empire and spit in its eyes
You will wave whatever ******* flag you please
You will learn, you will fight, you will burn, you will live, you will love, you will survive and you will become greater for it
We were all born on top of graves, but that does not make us mausoleums
Let us not be haunted by our heritage, let us weaponize it
Let us say never again and let us mean it, never again, to anyone, anytime, ever
Let us be stronger than our fathers,
Let us pass through the crucible and come out steel, diamond, and fire
Let us drag ourselves forward, chains and all, and never look back
Let us break through the clouds, and watch the day rise upon this land, and let's remember what all those people died for, and let's make them proud of how far we've come

From the concrete purgatory of my burdened decades I hear them,
From the capital run over, drowned in the tide of righteous pandering fervor I hear them,
From the streets taken to by shock treatment portraits of deaths un-died, I hear them:
The mournful howl of the 108,000 in waiting,
Terrified for the fate of their soon to be brothers, sisters, competition for the future,
For the divine rewards the privileged will promise themselves for their narrow compassions,
For the killers slapped on the wrist while the innocent remain condemned to a life that no one asked for, without the consent of anyone involved,
Yes, the street preacher cries,
Yes to life,
Yes to opportunity,
Yes to the future promised to all of us by this great nation,
(Well, all of us, not all of you)
But when the destitute mothers of a generation abandoned reach out cupped hands for help,
He's left his wallet in his other ideology,
Divine privilege only applies to you before you're born,
After that you're on your own
All lives matter, until they're alive

A guitar, a kiss, a river, a lighter, a flag, a country, an idea
A glorious fire, a beautiful catalyst
They told me quit playing politics
I can't hear them over the noise from the streets, from the gutters, from the shelters, from the welfare office, from the edge of ******* nowhere,
I said speak a little louder now,
I said open this **** up right now,
I said tear this ******* prison down,
I said get all these ******* cops outta here,
I said storm this ******* courthouse,
I said hold them all ******* hostage now,
I said get real now,
I said organize right now,
I said build that barricade now,
I said stop talking ******* now,
I said **** them up for real,
They descend on us angry and vicious and afraid
They strike but we strike back harder
They **** us but we get back up
They ask us to forgive but we're fresh outta redemption
They asked Jimi Hendrix to forgive centuries of racism because he could eat a guitar and they loved what he spit back up,
Jimi Hendrix told em to go to hell,
Jimi Hendrix died believing,
We'll all die believing if we're lucky
Guns out, masks up, screaming as the breath fades from the lungs
Come on, take my Earth
Take it if you dare
Take it from my cold dead hands
We've been through this, we'll go through it again
But it's getting late and we're running out of options
It's liberty or death and we all have a choice to make
It's liberty or death and Jimi Hendrix chose both
Jimi Hendrix rolled the dice and landed on eternity
Jimi Hendrix took the world on his shoulders and rode off into the wind with a guitar and a book of matches,
And I wonder,
How many fires he would've set, before he could call himself free, and believe it

Cracked screen, broken glass, combat boot on the neck of the pulse of the revolution, the ghosts of fascists haunting skyscrapers staring back at me with eyes that stopped working in the 80s, protest signs written in dead languages I can't begin to understand, I can already tell where everybody stands - I can see it in the Eyes and on the t shirts and on the blog posts and on the graffiti tagged windows that read like picture books in a school for deaf children,
The orphaned poets, the ******* sons of *******,
Hell is wherever you're wasting away come Rapture, where you are now is where your ashes will be scattered,
Your memorial beneath your feet defaced and unbegotten by the seed of the ****** wind, and here you will be returned at the end of the day, your trail of tears turned to paths of lilies and roses and the desert sweeping your suffering underneath the centuries-
This is how you will be remembered, sand piled upon ******* sand

We don't drive nowhere without the radio on,
We are too naive to know better,
We are too crass to care,
We have been graves waiting for bodies to fill them, we have been half inscribed tombstones itching for an expiration date, but those days are in the rear view mirror, still just barely visible over the sticker that reads "What Fresh Hell", but we are lucky enough to have forgotten the way back, we have bled out every drop of retreat and we are going to drive all **** night regardless of whether or not we actually get anywhere, we are urgent, we are emergencies that cannot stop at red lights, we are a 911 call away, we are the angry heart of the river illuminated in burning flags and cigarettes and grand halos stretching the distance between bridges, we are Born to Run turned up loud enough to drown out alarm clocks, we are the ****** cataclysm that explodes into a new dawn, we are taking this one hour at a time, we are living like this until it's all ashes floating downstream, hit it again, one more time, in the dead of night, call me an ambulance, I'm not slowing down for anything

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

When the President tells you that you have nothing to fear,
you do not believe him
When the police officer with something to prove asks if you have anything to hide,
you do not tell him
When the father who wanted something more looks through you,
you do not reciprocate
When the angry kid with no outlet and an audience of his peers throws a brick at you,
you strike back,
one shot,
closed fist,
short swing,
straight to the jaw,
you do not continue,
You had a point to prove and you proved it,
The blood is its own reward, dripping down your neck to burn the words,
"NEVER AGAIN"
into your newly forged spine,
When they tell you that you are ugly,
You rip out the page in their dictionary that contains the word
"Beauty"
You staple it to the insides of your wrists and you call it a poem,
This is the first of many times you will do this,
By the end your arms read like Gospel, your hands pick Revelation from between the lines left blank by the ones who came before you,
And all they ask in return is that you tell your story where theirs trails off:
Yours is a story of war.
Metaphorical war.
Literal war.
War of the self versus the ideal, the means versus the ends, the culture versus the capital, the tyrant versus humanity,
It is a tale as old as the streets you stumble home on,
You cannot expect love to work like trickle down economics,
You cannot expect trickle down economics to work at all,
If there is love still to be had it bears its colors on the front lines,
Armed to the teeth, and hungry,
It is the only weapon you have that cannot be regulated,
And when the revolution comes you will let it burn those ******* where they stand

When they tell you that revolution can not be ****,
When the chains of expectation drag you into the dirt,
Shake the dust,
Pull yourself up by your newly forged spine,
Prove them wrong,
As many times as it takes

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

America, you never had a chance
America, you and I both know there's only one way this ends
America, you aren't going to like it

America, what did you do to deserve the millions of revolutionaries in your streets?
America, whose bones are in the ground beneath your feet?
America, what did your father say before he left?
America, what did your sons bring home  from war?
America how holy was your birth that you can't move on?
America, who will be left behind when you do?
America, I'm too sentimental about you and I know it
America, I watched the workers hold the line for months and you locked the doors
America, I watched those people starve
America, I watched you build a cage and call it Chicago, call it Missouri, call it Baltimore, call it Dayton call it what you want and forget
America, I watched you forget
America, you forgot your angels
America, the saints want to destroy you and I don't feel sorry for you not anymore
America, I let go of you in pieces
America, I watch your flag burn to cinder and drift away
America, I watch you die every night
America, I loved you once and now I'm nothing
America, how did you repay Ginsberg's love?
America, where did you bury Eugene V Debs?
America, did you follow Abbie Hoffman to hell?
America, where are your heroes?
America, what did you do to the workers who never crossed the picket lines?
America, what did you give the black kids for Christmas?
America, what price do the immigrants pay for your freedom?
America, who do they pray to?
America, what do you pray for?
America, I pray too much for someone who doesn't believe in you
America, you never had a chance
America, I pray you get one, I owe you that much at least

I am writing to convince myself
I am on the second day of withdrawal symptoms and I am kicking myself for using such juvenile metaphors
I am sifting through scraps of newspapers, each one bearing the face of Antichrist burned into my retinas
I am feeling myself swell with rage
I am clenching fists and biting tongues
I am limited in my capacity to destroy
I am becoming romantic about forest fires and wildlife again
I am becoming misty eyed at the thought of where we came from
I am speaking in tongues
I am establishing a dialogue
I am addressing Mohammed as if we met at a high school party
I am watching a child of Christ light a cigarette at a gas pump
I am trying to think of an excuse to leave
I am breathing in exhaust fumes
I am standing on Nietzsche's shoulders as if he owed me a better view
I am putting off calling my grandmother back
I am godless in my arrogance
I am strung out on my ideology
I am overdosing on words
I am fighting hard
I am losing
That doesn't matter

April 23rd, 2016, 3:00 am,
Still picking through the aftermath,
Hearing pieces of perspective drifting in through cracked doors, windows open so the smoke will not linger, sleeping off demons in unmade beds, while our mothers speak in tongues in different rooms, always worried about the way things have to end, I'm always thinking about the way things have to end, thinking if I drove on through the night I could watch the sun rise off of the water Sonewhere Else, somewhere where the rivers never  catch fire and the songs of birds don't haunt my acid flashbacks, where all I can think of are the choruses to rock n roll songs and the future I read between cut lines of powder and tarot cards that have seen too many miles, but wherever we go we are forced to consider what our names are worth, the contents of our pockets, the next time we will lay our heads to rest, whose hair we will find on our pillows in the morning, if we want to make it without selling out We Are Running Out of Options
When I think of endings, I do not think of death, at least not my own
With a working pen I can live forever,
The phantom poet in a fever dream, a message to Run and Never Look Back,
With enough gasoline, I can live forever,
A ghost whispering sweet release from highway lines, something barely audible over the hum of the engine and the cries for mercy from the radio,
I can live forever
Light another cigarette, hit the gas pedal hard, turn the music up loud, **** it all,
I can live forever
I can live forever

I learned how to love the same day I learned how to run,
Cigarettes make the first part easier and the second a hell of a lot harder
So on nights like this where we run out of breath, for one reason or another, we make **** sure that the radio tells us what we wanna hear;
Kingdom come in somebody's eyes, a straight shot up from the highway into the stars, a kiss from a red haired girl with the sweetest melodies,
A place to run to, a place of our own, a place where we can know what freedom is and not just what it isn't
Our dead friends in the passenger seat for one more ride, alive and electric and singing loud enough to wake heaven and let 'em know what they're missing out on,
Our dying country stretched before us like a Norman Rockwell painting while we live like characters in a Springsteen song, wild and desperate and without a home to hold us back,
Our lovers waiting for us somewhere between the sunrise and the B side of the album, all open arms and 4th of July lips to kiss clean our worn and ***** souls and deliver us from our evils,
So on these nights where we suffocate under the tremendous weight of living,
We still have each other, and we still have the radio,
And we can still remember how to breathe a little easier

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

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

In the mythology we will one day weave of our lives, every night is either fable or cautionary tale
We trade stories of war across tables separated only by black coffee and the depth of understanding,
In a Waffle House in Florence, or in Clifton, or off the last exit we can bear to see because we can no longer take the motion and need a moment to rest, to breathe,
We talk, as if we are each others children, starry eyed and open mouthed to let all the possibilities sit on our tongues, wait, and then dissolve into dreams,
We all have different definitions of what it means to fight, but we appreciate others scars once they are made visible,
Like the night they took Jake to the psych ward, his heart a scientist burning  hypotheses in the street while Jess wiped tears and ashes from her face and resolved to battle this thing to the death,
Or the early morning we drove Sierra to Indianapolis, and we turned the radio in the old jeep up as loud as the one blown speaker would allow and tried to sing our way out from under the burden we carried to that dying city,
Or the night Jennifer's brother put a dent in my car and I drove my fist into a wall, again and again, trying to beat an answer out of it for why the summer had gone and left us ghosts in the dawn,
I am as of yet unsure what this tapestry will look like when it is completed,
I promise a great deal, but I wouldn't dare bet on destiny
All I can be sure of, is that at the end of any highway,
There is a Waffle House,
And there will always be those,
With poet souls and hungry mouths waiting,
To turn something ordinary in to legend

"You are my drug, I'm addicted to you"
Says the poet, immaculate, grinning his way through juvenile metaphors and picking his teeth with the bones of the dead horse he's been beating, Slick ******* on a stage locking eyes with every girl in the room, cocky enough that he thinks he can make every single one of them think that this poem is about them, and that they'll just -get it- , that it's just a -metaphor- of course he has no experience with drugs, he's never watched anybody wither away to nothing, he's never had an itch that took his body hostage at a cellular level,  he's a real -stand up guy- he's just -sensitive- he's a real ****** honest to god artist standing before them and from there it's all but too easy to ******* his way into some casual ***,

"It's always someone nice who gets killed, it's never some toothless ******"
Says the comedienne, immaculate, laughing into television cameras, and everyone gets the implication here,
The ****** is not human
The drug addict does not deserve life
If you made the choice you should pay the consequence
Stop breathing while people who actually deserve it are dying
Don't talk to me about the socioeconomic climate that breeds drug use
Don't give me statistics
Don't you dare send those rats to rehab, if they're going to live they should do it behind bars, locked in a cage like the vermin they are

"I thought I could stop this time"
Said my best friend as I wrapped a blanket around him,
He is weak, he is ice cold and still sweating, he is on three day withdrawal and he will relapse tomorrow once I have left, he will have been dead for nearly 4 years by the time you hear this poem, and the silence that follows will take shape, and it will whisper,
"Good"

The Magician, gifted deadbeat, listless designer of immortal destiny, tragic comedian of the purest order, locked and buried, chained to the weight of indecision,
Ordained by cancerous night, canonized in the manifestations of nightmare heart withdrawals, ascending the cigarette strewn steps to lost versions of heaven,
Eternal kindred lovers in mourning, trace the chemical pathways to a neural shutdown disaster, martyrs imprisoned by their own mission statements, murdered by the cosmic truths exposed in tape recorded suicide manifestos, played backwards for empty auditoriums in a requiem for their apathy
Endowed with brilliant catastrophe, with the wand double edged with creation balanced to destruction, with infinite purpose,
The Magician breaks as he parallels the Fall,
the all consuming detachment,
the disconnected realities viewed from shattered lenses,
From distilled terror, from magnificent prose, from the ashen pillars of kingdom rotted, gutted, broken
Holy and lost, wisdom wasted,
As a mother's rage moves 1000 eyes and 1000 hands to some unclear end that I doubt I will be around to see
The Magician smokes his way to an early grave
While flowers grow over the memorials of those unmoved
I'm not sure what any of this means or why it should matter
But listen
There is a story here, if you will have it

The night they shot Dr King, Stokely Carmichael  pulled the pin out from the grenade in his heart and made ******* sure the world knew he and his brothers would never be weak again,

The night they shot Malcolm X, the liberals shook their heads, clicking tongues about how "violence begets violence", and sometime later they put his face on a stamp, taught his corpse to dance, taught their children that this is the fate of a man who never gives up trying to change the world

The night that Missouri burned down they sent in the tanks, steel goliaths prowled small town streets looking for anybody black, or angry, or conscious, or any combination of the three, and every time their guns went off a new revolutionary was born in rage and desperation

Who are your comrades gonna be when the cops kick down the door?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the drug raids come?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the crowd control rounds turn to live ammunition?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the talking heads condemn the martyrs to hell on a twenty four hour newsreel?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the streets split open and the riot swallows everything in its wake?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the prisons crumble brick by brick?
Who are your comrades gonna be when it all burns down?
Who are your comrades gonna be when we rebuild this world from the ground up into something beautiful?

When they tell you, "Do not resist"
Resist
When they tell you, "Your methods are too extreme"
Tell them, "By any means necessary"
When they tell you, "This is the way things are"
Change. Everything.
When they tell you, "You can't change the world alone"
Tell them, "Solidarity, forever"

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

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

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

A crushed, half smoked pack of cigarettes
Three to four empty coffee cups converted to ash trays,
My grandmother's Bible, seams torn by the Great Depression and the backs of children's hands,
And maybe thirty dollars, some change,
All I have to my name,
I am 15 and I am setting fires, busting out the windows in abandoned houses with my skateboard, spray painting anarchy signs everywhere I think will send a message, growing my hair out, reading Ginsberg and Karl Marx in detention every afternoon, I am angry and I have fights to pick and a system to overthrow,
I am 16 and I am driving fast late nights down backroads with the headlights off, I believe I do not fear death, I believe I welcome oblivion, I believe every word in every song I howl the words to, I believe I will die a martyr and they will hold parades in my honor, I believe we are fighting a holy war, I believe that we can and we will overcome, I believe that I believe in nothing but my leather jacket and the switchblade in my pocket and whatever punk song is on the radio,
I am 17 and I am speeding out of my mind off razor blade lines on end tables, my bones ache to destroy, my veins pump gasoline to a nicotine heart, I shoot guns all night pretending each bottle is a cop and each round hits a politician right between the eyes, pretending that if I can do enough damage I can free us all from our chains,
I am 18 and I am voting as far to the left as I can and I am still bitter because it is nowhere near close enough, I am singing dying songs for friends and pouring my heart out to strangers, dancing around fires, making blood oaths to never surrender, telling fortunes for beer and dreaming of open warfare,
I am 19 and I am getting ****** in parking lots, tattoing my heroes visions into my arms, trying to save my city by shouting at it until it wakes up and takes to the streets, burning my home to the ground in hopes of a glorious revival, passing out before I can convince anybody of my beliefs, cursing my enemies from the porch and seeing how many puffs of smoke I can get out of a night before I become just as greedy as the rest of the *******,
I am 20 and I am drinking alone
I am tired and I have lost my voice,
The prophet of my folk punk day dreams slipped away, into the night with no explanation and no destination
Erik, I will honor your memory the best I can,
I will carry you into battle everyday until I can no longer clench a fist,
I will scream your words until there are holes in my throat,
I will build you a funeral pyre of my love and rage,
And from the ashes, I will rise again, and so will you

The Emperor watches
The Emperor judges with eyes of fire and diamond
The Emperor holds a grudge, hard
The Emperor holds nothing but contempt beneath his armor
The Emperor grasps the ankh in one hand and the globe in the other, signifying total ******* over life and land
The Emperor sits alone atop the mountain, adorned in gold and ram skulls
The Emperor takes no counsel
The Emperor speaks only in mandates
The Emperor doesn't need to be told he is divine he just believes
The Emperor passes the sentence and swings the sword
The Emperor guards the door to Heaven
The Emperor believes Heaven is beneath his boots
The Emperor cannot be bothered to check
The Emperor does not ask he takes
The Emperor cannot imagination rejection
The Emperor would destroy anyone who tried
The Emperor feels fear
The Emperor runs his fingers over the cracks in his throne
The Emperor knows that if they break out from his grip they will show him no mercy
The Emperor does not know if he can be broken but is not willing to risk it
The Emperor comes down harder and harder every time
The Emperor shatters under the weight of his arrogance
The Emperor is dragged through the streets
The Emperor dies knowing humility
The Emperor's armor rusts
The Emperor's throne breaks
The Emperor's sword is buried with him
In an unmarked grave, somewhere at the base of the mountain
The Emperor is forgotten, and the empire breathes easier every day

Kids on the brink,
We have all dangled our feet over the edge,
We know the appeal of falling like the backs of our fathers hands,
We flirt with oblivion, leaving our phone numbers on gravestones hoping the other side might call to tell us there is a bed waiting for us somewhere dark, and warm, and quiet
We long for the chance to rest, bones that have seen too many miles, fingers that have danced around calling the police to take us away
We are afraid of what's on the other end of the phone
We are also afraid of the police, but that should go without saying
Kids in urgency-
We become mad,
Mad to escape, to bail forever to some coast or some city street where the light will guide us along, to live under threat of eviction, to stay one step ahead of collapse, to light up a sky somewhere and to have a moment of love that echoes through decades
We become insatiable,
Never fast enough, never loud enough, never high enough, never enough, never enough
We take as much as we can from a night and leave the sun to sort through the wreckage
One more song, one more mile, one more poem, one more kiss, one more ****, one more fight, ond more hit, one more drink, one more revelation, one more flash of extrabrilliance, one more proclamation of fleeting existence from the superheated engine of our ****** heart in the middle of America with nothing to show for ourselves but the length of our hair and the grief we carry and the love of our comrades
Kids in the light-
We all end up home, most nights at least
We all end up alright, most nights at least
We hold each other up when we are strong enough, and never let a day go by without reminding ourselves we love us,
And most nights, that's enough to see us through till morning

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

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

Started using again,
Left my heart on a front porch just outside Louisville like a spare key, drove home 200 miles with powder burning in my head, igniting and torching the highway, the cliff faces, the forests and all
All of that wildlife with no place left to go,
I will return to this when I'm ready, I say
This just got to be too much, I say
I just need to sleep this off, I say
Started using again,
Built these lies into a jail cell, turned a key and dropped off like nothing was ever there
Built these words into a vehicle, turned a key and drove off without a word
Started using again,
Quarantined for the better, stenographed prophecies into the past so that I could realize them now and feel like I've achieved something
Started using again,
Forgot about it except in between sleep cycles, the details gone only the patterns manifest, trace the curvature and find a reason, fall asleep, forget again
Started using again,
Slow it down, take it all in by pieces,
Breathe in the fumes, feel the head rush
Don't get ****** up,
Take the edge off and don't **** yourself with it
Started using again,
It's all in the comedown, the clarity, the doom on the walls and the tar in the lungs,
It's out of my hands, I will seek no forgiveness, I only ask for understanding
Started using again,
Depart in the morning before everyone wakes up,
Have some coffee, a hot shower,
Do not be afraid of today,
Fear forever, fear your own head,
Then find your spine, unlock it and teach it to stand on two legs,
And walk out of here, and don't stop for anything

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

***** 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

Talking in code
Talking in rhyme
Sitting up summer nights on balconies high up enough to reach out and knock knock knock on heaven's door drunk on gin and chewing mint leaves trying to come to some kind of solution
There are problems here that need addressing but how much easier would it be to just ******* about it?
Piecing together alibis from the body counts of tragedies, picking up as many fragments as we can with the little strength we have left
We didn't do very much to deserve to feel this tired did we?
We could never figure out how to remove ourselves from the equation
Answers are a lot harder to come by when you've lost all personal interest
Where is this going?
Where does this progression end?
I wanna see what else is on
When I was a child I had recurring nightmares about televisions
When they shot Andy Warhol all he could say was that his entire life had been television all along
I don't know how to find comfort in familiarity
I am missing the connection here
I wanna see what else is on

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

Blank pages, sick thoughts, strange recollections on an overcast July sky,
America at war, fires set in Denver, Nazis dead in Sacramento, immortalized in the thoughts and prayers of talking heads, all those spineless liberals afraid to take the plunge, buy the ticket take the ******* ride, meanwhile Missouri looks like Belfast '75, Detroit like Dresden '45, Baltimore can't maintain, unsubstantiated claims of Providence, more sinister tidings out of Washington, they know the last American hero died 4 years ago now we're trying to keep up appearances, can't maintain, trouble carried in on all four winds, the Devil in the Southern sky, hysteria on the television, nothing but nostalgia on the radio, no progress, talking in circles about guns again, no clear endgame here just numbers thrown at the wall, something might stick, somethings gotta stick, somethings gotta stick,
A man clutches a newborn child to his chest, asks me if I think he should **** the thing, I say that's between you and your God leave me out of it,
A black boy blows his brains out on the statehouse steps, out of options, a final statement to pierce the veil of bureaucratic esoterica, blood of love and rage and hope staining concrete for generations,
Desperation, something on the rise, chaos in any direction
God hasn't returned the President's calls since '81, Jimmy Carter deserved better, we all deserve better,
Cold rain in summer, cigarettes, celebrations, weddings and funerals, uncertainty in all things,
Tomorrow the bombs will go up, and no one can be sure where they will land