***** 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

And I’ll be,
Sober,
By the time I reach heaven, I’ll be,
Humbled and on my knees,
Father can you,
Will you absolve me,
One last time

Fading out,
Awash in red,
And blue lights and a,
Car crash outside and a,
Language I don’t understand,
But I understand the divide,
I understand what it is,
To be awed by the velocity,
To bow out, and be passed by

Quiet lightning on an overload trip,
Wasted on electricity and the potency of memory,
And I think about how I got this way,
Spark without flame,
Unsustainable energy,
I study my veins, and I know,
This too will fail me, someday

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

The party has been over, but there will always be those who cannot stop,
Not until the very last body hits the floor,
Not until the lights go down on cities we used to love people in, when the ash tray overflows out onto sidewalks that long for disease, to die, to be reborn, made clean, only to be soiled again by our fascination with them
We should have learned by now how to not ruin something by loving it
But where there is emotion there must always be casualties
I reconcile this with myself in the dark nights I spend painting landscapes of the street from the porch
I watch the summer wilt and fall apart, piece by piece, and my hands cannot dig a hole deep enough to escape the fallout
When I leave this place, all I will take with me are words,
And when winter comes I will burn as many of them as I have to to keep warm

I could never bring myself to judge anyone for what they do to survive

It has been a century and some change, since five rivers opened their mouths wide as heaven on a crisp late winter morning and swallowed a city whole,
and ‘round the campfires of my uncertain boyhood they used to tell stories about how the bones still rattle under the floorboards, how you can sometimes catch the ghosts of mothers swimming down the sidewalks calling out for a child,

but what they never told me is, how six months ago I would catch up with an old friend and he’d be coughing up water,

how when the rain started coming, it would never stop,

how every time a storm rolls in I’d have to name it after whoever got swept away and didn’t come back,

they never tell you that there’s only so much in the way of higher ground,

eventually there is just too many bodies and not enough salvation,
and it will always be us in the undertow,

they don’t write histories about it anymore,
like revelations already came through here and the believers returned to the sky,
like I didn’t meet a boy last year who disappeared before he finished writing down his phone number,
like we didn’t all come from an entire genealogy of vanishing,
like the morgue ain’t all full up and spilling into the street and nobody knows how to be surprised anymore,

sometimes death is biblical and sometimes it is quiet

walking the block past midnight and all I see are bodies floating, twenty feet in the air, weightless and anticipating,

the moment when the moon will call the tide back to claim them

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This poem is dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have struggled across generations in pursuit of the timeless ideals of freedom, justice, and equality)

When they try to tell you that the act of protest is un-American,
Dig in your heels, square your shoulders, spit in their face, and remind them where you come from
You come from Samuel Adams, spilled tea and muskets over Massachusetts, people who believed a revolution could not be honest if it did believe in its own declarations,
From John Brown and Nat Turner, broken chains and dead masters, people who believed slavery could not be destroyed without taking up the gun,
From Sojourner Truth and Susan B Anthony, ballots cast in handcuffs, people who refused to back down until democracy lived up to its promises,
From Eugene Victor Debs, shut down railroads and prison sentences, people who would risk everything so that every worker had the right to a fair wage and a livable condition,
From Mother Jones and Big Bill Haywood, general strikes and marching mill children, people who believed we could never be free unless we owned what we produced,
From Emma Goldman, anarchy and cries for liberty, people who believed that every institution which dominated the human spirit had to smashed by force,
From Malcolm X and Huey Newton, shotguns and free breakfasts, people who believed the government would not protect us so we must protect ourselves,
From Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, shootouts on the turnpike and crumbling prison walls, people who believed true emancipation was a struggle that would last forever,
From The Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, midnight break ins and burning draft cards, people who believed the true enemy was not on foreign soil but in Washington
From Chief Seattle and Black Elk, wounded knee and fast receding tides, people who fought to carve their ancestors legacy out from the rubble of a stolen nation,
From Cesar Chavez and Robert Bullard, people who believed to save ourselves we must also save the Earth we live on,
From the Gay Liberation Front, police raids resisted and throwing bricks in dresses, people who fought like hell so that in the future people wouldn't have to fight like hell to love who they wished

Yours is but the next stage in evolution in a line centuries in the making,
You will carry that brilliant torch, and you will burn everything down with it
You will stand on the shoulders of giants climbing to a utopia that was promised,
They will try to break you down, they will try to **** your dream in its cradle,
But you will always have strength they do not,
History will remember you and them alike,
You as the hero, and them as the villain,
Remember this, keep this close to you,
For it will always be your greatest weapon

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

The cold welcomes you home,
Like eviction notices and ghosts in the attic,
Something is crying all night long
Something is turning this place hollow
Something nobody wants to admit is here
The valley is buried and the Shepards **** the flock one by one to spare them the pain of transition,
No act of mercy goes unpunished,
In every act of mercy there is a promise,
For Jeremiah, the doom of Jerusalem carried with it a promise of cleansing, so he opened his mouth and raised his arms to the sky and let the word travel through him, but when he had had enough, he shut his mouth and locked the prophesy inside his chest where it burned his heart so viciously he weeps still to this day in his tomb
For Alexander, the sword held a promise of unity, so the old king rode among his men as a lion with pride, resplendent in gold and the light of divine purpose, but when the light went out, those cruel gods sank their teeth into the kings stomach and cursed him to fade forever into marble and history
For the Bolsheviks, the rifle and the pamphlet bore promise of utopia, so they armed the masses to the teeth and let hell claim the tsar, but when the long winter came, they stared down the barrel of their own guns and wondered, what good can come of this world after all?
For me, the snow brings with it a promise of remembrance, so I dig in, light a fire, and let it consume me slowly, as it has always done

Durch Geld , wird die Demokratie ihre eigenen Zerstöre

The decline of the west plays back and forth in newsroom warzones across the America that Samuel Adams died believing in, the promise of a gold lined path to a bygone peace the immigrants can now only dream of, while the sons of the sons of the sons of the sons of their sons close their doors and arm their security systems, there are racks of guns lining every wall and everybody looks ready to go to war, so I might as well join them, the possibility of compromise lies with dozens of boys and girls in dozens of pools of blood across dozens of states and the people cry out enough is enough, and if the decaying capital will not hear us then they must be made to listen, a united front of iron forged from the fires that burned down Missouri, that burned down Los Angeles, that burned down D.C after the soothing voice of the raging masses was shot dead, if my rhetoric is too strong it is because not only are things not moving fast enough they are moving backwards,
When men, leatherbound and arrogant would consider every moment in the spotlight a coronation, the options become clear:
These kings must die so that the country may live

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

The fight is how we express divinity in a way that is comprehensible:
Steady, heel pivot, throw your shoulder into a punch, laugh in the face of a Hell that was never frightening enough to hold you back, bail down the alley, run to the edge of the world, spit in the face of a Heaven that was never there to catch your friends who didn't make it, catch your breath somewhere warm and safe with the ones who did,
All we got is each other, after all
And in the middle of it all, in this America, in these ****** sinister times,
That will take us farther than any president ever could
And so we fight to get by,
We jump in cars and hit the highway with home at our backs and a promise to never go back,
We lock hands and sing one loud for the dead, and another even louder for the living
We love what we can, because we can
Our words will burn, our cities will freeze,
And we will take as many of the ******* down with us as we can

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?

The uninitiated pandering to the lowest common denominator,
the clean cut ******* in sophomoric rhetoric,
"Sick" he says,
"Addicted" he says,
Like,
"I haven't seen the girl I have a crush on in almost 24 hours and I feel.......like......
Withdrawing.
Itchy,
Nauseous,
Angry,
Vomiti­ng,
Like I've got insects EVERYWHERE,
MY BODY IS THE ENEMY,
OPEN REVOLT OF THE AFFECTED CELLS,
(THEY'RE ALL AFFECTED BY NOW)
There is no escape there is no relief there is nothing to be done but wait it out,
One day clean,
Two days clean,
Three days clean,
Maybe, this will pass,
NO IT WILL NOT
Four days later, a glimpse, relapse, progress undone, back to 0, the sickness is inevitable, I'm going to die like this"
When was the last time you looked into the ravenous ****** eyes of the masses, and what did you learn from this?
Not enough
Grow up.

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

3 score and ten, late winter hanging on like the bitter kiss of lovers not ready to die, there isn't much I could tell you about the morning sky or dying alone you haven't already figured out on your own, in a car bruised and cracked, the skin of knuckles after too many fights to stay inspired, while patterns take shape above my visions: the still living ghosts of the cars we crashed, the kisses we forgot to photograph, the photographs we forgot to kiss, the wolves we kept at bay only to find them sitting across our dinner tables asking about the weather, next week the same as this one, and for at least five more weeks after that one, if you believe in that sort of thing, I still don't know how to talk to people about what matters to them, and I wake up hearing my grandfathers last few coughs every few hours, I once thought I could burn solutions into my hands for all the problems they were not willing to recognize, now I wonder if I just didn't believe hard enough in the healing process, my dead eyes watching the turn of conspiracies between a pale girls shoulder blades as she sleeps and thinking about the exceptions to all rules, except this one:
If I wake you up, there will be hell to pay

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

The Hierophant stands stoic and looming at the alter,
He is Father, Patriarch, Divine Daddy,
Secondary mouth of God and arbiter of his will,
His hands are twin bridges offering you two choices:
Walk the path of obedience and you will be clean and holy eternal, golden armored against the beasts of this world, promised heir to the ever burning horizon of an infinite kingdom, you will be chosen and righteous, you will walk the verdant fields of bountiful harvest and reap your rewards from this life to the next,
Walk the path of strife, however, and you will become the heretic, pariah, enemy and other, outcast and tied to the stakes of the pious, scapegoat for the evil that dwells within, you will die a thousand martyred deaths before they lay your restless spirit to damnation,
As he stands before me, his face is at once reassuring and mocking,
He is my father, he is the president, he is the unknowable face of creator and absolute authority,
He says, boy, take the easy way out, it is the only chance you'll ever have
I don't know what it was that pushed me over the edge then,
Whether it was the midnights spent crossing myself in the Lord's Prayer out of sublime terror,
The smell of formaldehyde as the most pious woman I've ever known was returned to the dirt under a benediction,
Bruised knees, ****** knuckles, diagnosis or spite:
Regardless, I made my choice there,
I choose strife,
I choose the unending chaos,
I will walk this path to its end,
And when I meet my maker there,
I will tell him that it was worth it

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

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

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

Beat, *******, beat,
Down and out, curbstomped destiny, infinite wasted conviction, licking at the heels of straightjacket giants,
Dying by,
Dying by,
Dying by
inches
It all happens in the mind but good ******* luck trying to convince anyone else,
Have you tried, maybe you should, why don't you just, you don't really, it's not so bad, what about,
YES,
I know how it looks,
I just need you to trust me,
You aren't helping,
But what about,
all lives,
what about,
your privilege,
what about,
asking for it,
what about,
WHAT ABOUT US
This,
Is not,
About,
You

He says,
Boy, you fill that page until everything inside of you is gone, gut yourself for the poem and the poem will grant you a swift death, you will be fast asleep by the time you know you are gone, you will dream of the summers of childhood, when you buried your face in fields of flowers and they held you like you always wanted somebody to, you will live forever here, you will wake at the center of everything, a black hole ******* in all light and keeping it in your chest, you will be the angel wheel in gods chariot, you will blaze across the sky in streaks of revolutionary red, you will be the harvest of promises made to the soil, you will come home wreathed in the laurels of glorious victory on the shoulders of your friends,
He says,
Boy, this may be killing you, but it's holding the whole **** world together
Boy, let them drink of your blood and be sated,
Boy, let them eat the contents of your soul and grow stronger for it
Boy, let them remember you in marble and gold
Boy, let the flowers grow over your grave
And when they hold you, don't ever let them go

And we're driving through the suburbs outside Dayton two ticks past the minute the witches woke up and abracadabra'd some life into this place, caught up in the magic of watching streetlights reflect off the face you were too scared to kiss in the dark, searching those streets for a sign that tonight's the night, you know, the one we've been waiting for all those years,
For something to happen, for something to split the sky and the street and swallow us up inside of a greater purpose, we've been longing to be devoured ever since we learned what it's like to be alone,
But, there's a lot of dead ends around here, too many rooms and not enough exits, hallways and picture frames and backyards and driveways and messes that somebody is gonna have a hell of a time cleaning up one of these days,
I guess we can't get caught up in all that now, all that doubt, but when my shadow catches up to me on that long drive home he tells me,
When you stop moving, it'll all be over,
So I'll hang on past that exit and the next, waste another sunrise on some eyes too tired to appreciate anything beautiful, keep hell in my pocket till morning when I can let it go just long enough, just long enough to drift off on the promise of a day,  the day that all these candles blow out and we close our eyes and say this, this is enough, and someday you'll thank me for it

And the record ends on a ballad, the long slow unwinding of a spiral, the needle calls out to be reset, the silence begs to be filled,

And one by one, we step outside our bodies and slow dance around empty rooms, our skin the last temple to be desecrated and abandoned, and yet we knew this day would come,

And I think that,
If I knew how to write about anything other than dying, and the dead,
I would’ve left here by now,

But here I am, idling in the remains,
Becoming attached to smoke and,
Leaving memorials everywhere I go,
What I need you to understand is,
The light here is so polluted,
That there are only so many visible stars I can name after the dead,

And if we can’t find what we’ve lost in the sky,
It’s only natural that sometimes the ground opens up,
And swallows us whole,

And by the time anyone thinks to ask,
Where we’ve gone, or why,
There is nothing left to bury but needles,
Ashes, and those dreams that came in the night,
And were gone come morning

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

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

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

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

Omens,
Warning signs and aching bones,
Dark clouds and distant thunder,
The house will fall tonight and take me with it,
Spill me into the street to wash away come rain,
I sit at the table, watching cracks form in the ceiling over bowed heads and quiet contemplation,
I feel myself lifted from the floor,
I am formless in the living room, transcribing conversations to my skin in dead languages, my body a desecrated temple of hieroglyphics nobody can read,
I am breathless in the bedroom, feeling the heat of passion on my skin and absorbing none of it, fault lines manifesting under my fingernails as I sink into someone else's tragedy,
I am weightless on the porch, dreaming of one day being swallowed by something monstrous enough to have me, swallowed by something monstrous enough to profane the sky with its arrogance and come out the other side steel, unbreakable, sharp and remorseless,
When I return to my body I am deathless - I am the unwelcome traveler of worlds, a ghost haunting my own life, these friends and lovers have been host to a parasite, a restless thing of no shape and no blood of its own,
I resolve to surrender to the coming storm,
As I rise, they fall one by one,
My brothers to their pride,
My friends to their rage,
My lovers to their desperation,
And as I walk out into the street, I am caught by flashes of lightning and moonlight, and I turn back to watch the house crumble, brick by brick, into the lonesome fog of forgetting

XIII-II. Death: The Sound and the Fury

I remember vividly losing the faith of my grandmother, I was standing holy as you like over my great grandmothers grave as they returned her to the Kentucky dirt that raised her, and my grandmother, one wrinkled hand clutching mine as if I were the reaper himself, the other wrapped so tightly around a bible I didn't know whose skin might split open first, hers or gods, and then I walked to the edge of the world and looked down, into a canopy of tree tops so dense no light could break through, so strong and so intertwined that neither man nor machine could pierce within, and when it began to rain there I lifted my scarred veins to heaven and I begged for absolution, I begged to be washed clean of sin and diagnosis and become pure, later, when my best friend plunged a needle into his veins for the first time I couldn't watch, I looked instead to that same Kentucky sky, I thought about how maybe God goes by a different name to everybody, I thought about how that sky must have looked to my grandfather as he charged across this land with horse and pistol and saber, and if he thought God meant freedom or a new empire of chains, when I look around here I think about all those people marching towards death all thinking they might be the one, the one to conquer time and become greater than, to live out eternity as the archetypal hero, the one who brings sunrise to an endless night and lifts the world up off its knees, I think about what the air must feel like to them as they die, thin and sharp and nostalgic, with the hint of a promise broken the last taste on their lips, and I want to visit each of their graves and ask them if it was worth it, if they had won or lost or if victory was an illusion made for fools and politicians, men of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and by the time I at last turn back towards my friend and open my mouth to tell him this, he is already gone, he is gone now and the land desolate - the sky holds no more hope than the soil here, and so I wonder when he started digging the grave they put him in, and I wonder too if I've begun digging yet, where they will lay me to rest, and when, but here I am with no one to ask so I wonder, I go on and I wonder

I am the truth,
The way,
The light,
One day I will prove this to you,
I will weave this world into mythology, watching from high as the golden strands of my hair reach down and wrap around everything, bringing it within me and me within it, I will grow brighter this way, I will grow so bright that I will blind you when you try to come close, I will rise unstoppable through the ceiling into the sky, I will float to that place in heaven where all my memories are and I will lather my body in them, I will be a mural depicting the greatest triumph this world has ever seen, stretching from Olympus to Venus, daring the sun to set on me, daring you to turn the page and move on to another story of vanity and power, and you, inevitably, do,
We all know what happens to Icarus in this one, we always know that at the end of this there is fire, then water, and then nothing,
There is a tragedy in all of us,
The one in which we die a thousand deaths, and one, before we know for sure whether or not we were worth it all along,
The one in which we never get any closure,
The one in which we grow so big,
So vast and untamable,
So bright and so holy,
That when something bigger, and crueler, comes along to crush us back into the Earth,
We forget how to teach ourselves to burn again,
So when I bury my pride,
I will ask you, voice shaking,
For a light,
For the way,
For the truth,
And when you give it to me, I will know what it means to be grateful, to be nothing, in the arms of eternity where I am small, and human, and alive, and imperfect, and in those faults I will at last know myself, and when we meet properly for the first time I will tell him,
"The fall is beautiful,
But down here,
You can see everything so much clearer"

Blessed are we who have fallen from The Tower
Blessed are we
Scraping fingernails ****** on the glass ceiling,
Licking at the heels of heroes with broken knuckles who tried to bust through to heaven,
Burning sage for the sake of all the dead spirits waiting around to come alive,
Contemplating reality through thick rimmed glasses wreathed in flame,
Counting credit card taps on tables while buzzing out of fragile bones for the next high,
Sleeping half awake in dreams of red wine and brighter futures,
Hallucinating city lights on balconies in a gin soaked haze of grandeur,
Holding out for wayward outcast brothers and sisters to come by and hear us preach revolution,
Selling burdens in parking lots for the price of a pack of cigarettes and a ride home,
Sobbing on strangers shoulders on Greyhound bus rides to ruin,
Offering confessions at the feet of angels we couldn't begin to understand but loved regardless,
Zigzagging through tree lines on another half drunk run from the police,
Shooting for the stars from the hip and blowing violent holes in the roofs of the places we called home instead,
Living indefinitely in the crawl spaces between endless Purgatory cycles of rise and relapse,
Blessed are we sleeping restless in the suburbs,
Testifying to the suffering in Dayton,
Swimming strung out through the Cincinnati streets,
Robbed blind in Columbus,
Praying the South  might take us back if we just said we were sorry
Blessed are we who have fallen from The Tower,
Blessed are we who still have so much farther to fall

Blessed are we who have fallen from The Tower
Blessed are we
Scraping fingernails ****** on the glass ceiling,
Licking at the heels of heroes with broken knuckles who tried to bust through to heaven,
Burning sage for the sake of all the dead spirits waiting around to come alive,
Contemplating reality through thick rimmed glasses wreathed in flame,
Counting credit card taps on tables while buzzing out of fragile bones for the next high,
Sleeping half awake in dreams of red wine and brighter futures,
Hallucinating city lights on balconies in a gin soaked haze of grandeur,
Holding out for wayward outcast brothers and sisters to come by and hear us preach revolution,
Selling burdens in parking lots for the price of a pack of cigarettes and a ride home,
Sobbing on strangers shoulders on Greyhound bus rides to ruin,
Offering confessions at the feet of angels we couldn't begin to understand but loved regardless,
Zigzagging through tree lines on another half drunk run from the police,
Searching for Thomas Wolfe's spirit in boxcars and jazz records and visions of once romantic America,
Cutting deep in to the veins of holy purpose to stain canvasses until they resemble dreams,
Climbing bridges to taste the salt in the air and violent change on the wind,
Breaking into cars to search for an escape from our fathers' rage,
Painting nails black as we pick poems from every strand of young girls hair, trying to remember to feel blessed to have the privilege of so much feeling,
Coming home wreathed in the laurels of our stories, to be met with roared laughter from friends and vacant stares from our parents,
Picking flowers to sweeten the smiles of lovers with the only beautiful things that do not come from our own hearts,
Talking all night in circles until the cops come by to remind us of the world we live in,
Smoking *** on nights we want nothing more than to recapture the feelings we lost, and drift away in a fog of some old glory
Falling in love with rivers and the people we associate with our memories, working up the nerve to kiss them under streetlights in driveways where birds sing too early,
Forgetting the phone numbers of the people we used to call every full moon,
Leaving messages on the walls hoping someday someone will come by and comprehend the nature of the disease,
Tasting death on our birthdays and throwing up the sins of years past, comforted by the sins of years to come,
Shooting for the stars from the hip and blowing violent holes in the roofs of the places we called home instead,
Living indefinitely in the crawl spaces between endless Purgatory cycles of rise and relapse,
Blessed are we sleeping restless in the suburbs,
Testifying to the suffering in Dayton,
Swimming strung out through the Cincinnati streets,
Robbed blind in Columbus,
Hoping to leave Louisville fast enough before our ghosts drag us home,
Erasing memories of Lexington by way of moonshine and therapy,
Praying the South  might take us back if we just said we were sorry
Blessed are we who have fallen from The Tower,
Blessed are we who still have so much farther to fall

The Devil lives in all things
In my skin, tattooing sins down my neck so bold I had to grow my hair to hide them all under it
In my grandmothers voice as she drifted back and forth across decades of indecision and compromise in a haze of narcotics and brutal nostalgia
In my best friends veins, always waiting until the lights went out before putting on a shadow puppet show of The Fall on his bedroom walls
In my fathers fists, clenched tight around anything that reminded him of an almost could have been,
In my older brothers brain, filling the holes that pride and drugs left there with a manic depressive war that can only be won through surrender
In my younger brothers heart, weaving together his arteries until he had grown too cold to speak through no fault of his own
In my sisters pen, scribbling out music notes to a melody that would remind her forever of where she had come from and the ghosts she could not escape
In my lovers tears, tasting only separation and the bitterness of memory and the pollution of rivers once pure,
I cross myself, once, twice, thrice
I speak the words
I exorcise the Devil
I show him a card trick
He seems impressed
He lights my cigarette
We keep each other company
We both have a long way to go,
The night is too dark to be alone
And we both know we won't keep till morning

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

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

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