I wish i could open up a bottle
and bring myself right back into the times
when i saw you as God, and myself a prophet,
and crawled to your house on the broken glass
of the bottles I'd had, so often, before.

It's such a novelty -
not dragging my bleeding self across the floor,
not seeing, in that trail of red, the springing stems
of hemlock breaking ground, to prove my loyalty
to yet another God who has abandoned men.

/in the jacket of evening mist
i hear vagabonds eating rats.
I remember when being missed
felt like getting a dose of crack./

When choosing to live loved or be dismissed,
i now think that i should have picked the latter,

/there's no misfortune when it comes to fate/

for love is just another form of cancer
that you would only find when it's too late.

There is nothing to gain, nothing to lose. Nothing.

As the smell of oil and tar has soaked all realms,
God gave men free will, but they knew he was bluffing.
All men got was a heart as a battlefield for themselves.

All heart’s matters are individual, and therefore can be disputed,
and are private, and them staying that way is vital.

I am walking a marathon to the wall where I will be executed
on the black path of a repeating Radiohead vinyl.

In the naphthalene on your lungs, in your teapot filled with cold water,
in your cupboard behind the cups, in the endless line to your doctor,
in the smell of your favourite flowers and the dust of your favourite venue,
there is a lit candle bleeding wax on the poems I’ve never read you.

I wish i was here, still,
i wish i was here.
I wish that this thrilling film
had lasted for more years.
The minutes and hours spun,
your palm was in mine, warm,
It was always the second hand
i wish i had held on.

The quiet is now loud,
a life has been muffed, well,
i hear in this dead sound
a crippling church bell.
I see it, the golden domes,
white walls and the old fence,
with my lips as the closest for
the silence to speak itself.

Oh, like gaffed dice in street craps
are the seconds, how they fly,
and only a picture traps
her in a moment of time.
But the mirrors are covered now,
the chambers of heart - locked.
Isn't it strange how
life constantly gets mocked?

Yes, life constantly gets mocked,
with its loves and its hot teas.

I wish i was here, still,
i wish death has mocked me.

As the gramophone in the corner spins Stravinsky
i lie wake in a puddle of my own *****.
I can wash off the smell of pubs and whiskey
but can never run away from it.

As the devil drags me again by my hand
to the tear-stained paper at my old table,
i could tell you that I'm keeping my mouth dry
but you wouldn't believe this fable.

It'd be just not to trust it, there is reason, for
a man who had tried drinking away pain
is a man who'd succumbed to a bottle before
and a man who will do it again.

one eye so nearsighted that i can't see tomorrow/
the other so farsighted i can't see today.

As i am writing this i am drinking my poison cold,
counting on gray hair all the years that are gone

liquor and love are the poor man's gold
and a man's wealth - dying loving or dying loved.

I don't remember if it was happiness
or of thereof lack
but the jack in the box looks
now like a box of jack

i'd seen it burning, it was me
the one who'd set it up.
i'd never tell, never be seen,
but always be around.
there was some beauty to it that
i couldn't really share.
The flame and i were different, but
both always gasped for air.
i've seen it taking, felt the fear
it's gotten me before.
yet somehow it would lure me in
and ask to feed it more.
it's made itself known on my skin,
gently dabbing my hands.
i always knew that we were kin,
i knew it understands.
a rapsody of life and death, a fable
so intriguing, you couldn't
picture warmth so fatal,
or love so unforgiving.
it didn't leave no silver scars,
no petty, goudy patches,
i'm just a never dying spark
trapped in a box of matches.

I was there twice. Two times I'd walked in thinking it’s home.
Second-guessing it both times as I stood in the hall.
These abandoned places that taught to abandon hope
handed me more ropes than there are in our old depot.

It is all a cycle – the shoulder you once leaned on
won’t be there this time, leaving you on your own,
either pointlessly leaning onto something resembling its sort
or forcing you into becoming your own support.

/it is all a cycle – the illness, the ambulance call,
as a body lies lifeless a back turns cold,
and a voice keeps saying it is his own fault
for not living and growing enough to grow old/

I was there twice, both times I got on my knees and prayed
to Our Lord, to be at the right time, in the right place.
In the inanimate bodies along my new way
I recognised all the mes that were once left strays.

But as God washed his hands in warm milk with honey
I moved in on a mountain of myselfs dying.

The sun is broad above the forests,
intoxicating, blinding bright.
A moment of perfection, flawless,
a quiet place, almost a rite

of passage for transcending all
the measly binds of blood and flesh.

I lie beneath the sun, I crawl
the veins of this subastral trench.

I gaze upon how far I've come,
I weep upon what's left to creep,
whoever hikes a mountain lone
will feel it's hillside twice as steep.

Alone with thoughts there's nothing better
than doubting your way to the peak.
Sometimes I wonder, would I ever
walk paths, not knowing where they lead.