you took away my childhood, for what?
wanting to get a fix, is that it mom?
open your door, you tell me keep it shut.
i wanted your love, not a ticking bomb.
i had to suffer because you were an addict,
raised by my sister until i was twelve.
no matter what, there was always conflict.
but look mom, you're holding the helve.
your childrens lives were in your hands.
for our father was gone and you loved your pills,
i cant tell anyone about it because no one understands
that our own mother couldnt even pay our bills.
so tell me mom, was it worth it?
your children hate you and you're alone.
were the pills and other drugs worth our childhood
and your happiness?

one cut
two cut
three cut
four
cut until i am no more

five cut
six cut
seven cut
eight
starve until it looks like i never ate

nine cut
ten cut
eleven cut
twelve
grab the gun and turn to helve

thirteen cut
fourteen cut
fifteen cut
sixteen
i'm starting to forget all that i've seen

seventeen cut
eighteen cut
nineteen cut
twenty
i believe i have lived plenty

twenty-one cut
twenty-two cut
twenty-three cut
twenty-four
i am no more

(a.b)

With a hint of death
mingling in the air,
the nocturnal snapdragon is
digging wells,
not just for water,
but also as final resting
places for friends back home,
in the garden,
deep within the soil.

Callous hands and feet
speak of insufficiency
and misery under the sun,
the one lone solace comes
with night,
and the partaking of
her body's delicacies,
bringing her innumerably
to the helve,
as she sings heavenly things
about the architecture
we creatures fall
so easily from.

some August, July, or September. Some ordinary bliss, a magic. Your annual short-fall. An epitome, that overcomes, the hate in register octave. Time to rearrange the furniture. By now you should have found things to do at night, or Jesus. In the bedrooms where the moon men climb and claw. You are frazzled by sheets and pillow cases. The river rooks, your yellow shirt and blue jeans too. Them too. So many months have passed, so far as I could count, those moments when we grew so farther apart, or those moments, when we so closely grew together. That either, our choice of ice cream flavor became the same, or by a standard we resented the same kind of person, or on some eve not.

That it could make me shake, and sometimes even in the advesperating light I could see bits of your face in the wood paneling of my basement bedroom, or in the dissipating smoke of a cigarette I could make out a part of your cheeks and chin and nose. The small nose that I picked every chance I got. Lovely hatred, the glaring eyes you rattled me with or the sad letters and phone calls and your voice singing on my answering machine but then asking, inquiring to me. It's four in the morning and you're asking questions and I'm not speaking, my back arched and my legs and arms wrapped into my gut in the corner of the room, at the corner of my bed- that I could not April the 4th name the songs that you worshipped, if any, for tonight I could mention the acutely impossible grief, calls from the miserably disappointed. And ***** the rooms, those chairs of annoying, repetitive do-gooders, all of you, babbling buffoons in the pews and in the basements. The sides of your triangle softening into a mush, that you can't even keep your jawlines in focus. I hate you. That you could not even bare the inscription of an honesty so pronounced that it would unlock you from your tyranny of the eyes trailing off into space and nothingness, or follow the lines from the heft of your baited breaths, cold, hard *******.

There is good reason I am not god. I would spite the self-smitten, and helve the world inside out of your glory hole opus and irresistibleness. But should our letters over shine our bits, that we have lived our great adventures over, it would not be enough for me. And had you been shown the lives of our shadows, or could you not seize the light which has found you. I never forgave you, and instead, peeled my eyes back into my dry estate. Something more than every chance that was shucked from your pallid, mortal form. You were the life inside me and the words that ebbed from my infernal sores

I just wanted to make an art house out of popsicle sticks, a room out of acorns and limes. That maybe when you made your fashion dreams announced and I believed, that I could say ha-ha. An abundant melancholy shaped to a disparate creature shagged by a monster toiled in his rag and repugnance. I could have been alone in New England shaping the world on cobblestone streets, or say, kissing an hour in an airport parking garage gleefully strapped with excite and eagerness. Maybe I was just alone. Out of every postcard that I ever sent, giant quaffs of pink sugar, a clutch of headless penguins, the Newport Coast tide, that I could never be your prize and climb out to escape with you from your pain.

1,2,3,4
We're already in a war
5,6,7,8
In the world it seems there's too much hate
9,10,11,12
It looks like most people have a helve
13,14,15,16
I guess they're right when they say the world is mean
17,18,19,20
Most people are worried about what's trendy
At the same time they're walking dead, left bruised and empty
21,22,23,24
People hide behind their stage door
While thinking we're all done for
25,26,27,28
I honestly don't think that's our fate
On our generation, let me give you an update

Yes, a lot of us are ******* up, but you have to understand that a lot of us would go out of our way to make sure no one else will feel that way.
Yeah, some of us are bullying and getting in fights, but some of us are fighting for what we believe.
Some of us are so ready to give.
We have our hearts in God, our minds sharpened for a fight if need be, and our eyes on real goals.
So please stop saying we're doomed, because I don't think we are.

The past holds me by the ankles,
Dragging me across the floor
Through the wreckage
Of my desperate decisions.

There is no destination,
Nowhere to drop me,
Or leave me to bleed
After the debris of memory
Has pierced me
Like a nail through a tire.

The fixed,
Glass eyes of the past
Stay locked into the dark distance behind us,
Retreating into reminiscence.

In the moments when I am strong enough,
I twist to face forward,
In search of the present
And something sturdy to hold onto,
Lest time immemorial flay me
On the rubble of my insatiability.

Just yesterday,
The tearing of skin
And willful deterioration into anamnesis
Came to me as effortlessly,
As sweetly as wine on my tongue
Washing down an ambrosial pill.

But today,
Though it would be easier to concede
To times' torment,
I aspire to want a grounding in actuality.
Praying I find that now
Fills me with a more substantive contentment
Than then.

But everything I grip
Rips from its roots
And disintegrates like a forgotten semblance
In my frenzied hands.

For how am I to know
What lies beneath the dirt?
How can I anticipate the integrity
Of his assurance
And avoid shallowly entrenched
Semi-permanence?

There is nothing but eternity
To continue falling into.
So with tepid hope
And resigning repetition
I keep looking
And I keep grasping
At tethers showing tenable-enough sincerity.

The hours will pass anyway
And, for now,
I retain the belief
That my languid attempts
At thwarting history's absconding of my contemporaneity
May eventually prevail
In standing me upright,
Existant in currency.

Then I may turn
And face remembrance as I please,
With ankles rubbed raw
And stationary feet.

I can visit the displays
Of bygone horror
Without becoming part of the atrocity
Again.

Clutching fast
To the most invariable helve
I've yet found,
I only fear that the past
May rip me in two.

Leaving me halved
And but a fragment
Of the entirety that I was
Before recollection animated
With retribution against me.

I beg to heaven
That he possess me
With the same fervor that I cling to him
And that his coherence
Stays material enough to
Wrap my despairing fingers around.