You wake up early already feeling an itch behind your eyes and at the base of your spine.
behind your throat. Sweating but **** - it's November and you had the window open. Four cups of coffee and seven cigarettes to start the day. A tip: if you put your hands in your pockets then nobody can see them shaking.
"You look hungry. Eat something."
force down a McMuffin or two at noon and a ham sandwich before work. Drive the car.
that night work is noise.  The shift ends with a paycheck.
Go withdraw thirty bucks. Find some *****.
"A guy's gotta cut loose."
a guy's gotta be cut off.
***** this ***** that
twisted up so tight. wound around the bend. coffee and the dashboard lights. Radiation.
three AM fumbling with the keys - alone under a street light at the bus stop
wake up to the tv playing infomercials. Shower. Now repeat.

you don't
know me anymore
just as sure as I am someone
I'm a stranger
you don't know me
and the fact feels
almost certain
like a stone wall
iron curtain
pretty sure that
I don't know you anymore.

the last time
that I saw you
least it seemed I thought I knew you
thought that I could see right through you
and I thought that you could see right through me too  

but the truth is you can't see me
you replace me with your memories
golden moments overshadowed
by embarrassment and shame
and the fun we thought we had
crushed by an elephant whose name
we'd rather not be speaking of
call it madness, never love
it truly seems like you don't know me anymore.

you don't owe me anything
you don't owe me
morning sunshine
I remember
burning embers
not a good time
or a late night
but a bad a fight
you don't owe me morning coffee
or a homemade egg mcmuffin
you don't owe me...
owe me anything at all.

and since we're left with little
but a memory fading fast  
it's like a cold and distant
dark and dreary
rainy lonely evening
somewhat comfortable in knowing  
we don't owe each other anything
not a word, no not a thing I think,
at all.

you don't own me anymore
and maybe onetime
I was someone
just a person
who meant something
maybe one thing or another
just to fill your empty nothing
never less my little something
more than what you had had before
but now I'm just another someone
someone lurking at your door
you don't owe me anything
like you never did before
since you certainly don't know me
not so sure you ever did
you don't own and you don't owe me
anymore.

the end.

Is present once again
in his blackened room,
hears songs in the trees.
The window glows: the sun
reaches all, and doesn’t care
about your comb-over.

Darkness leaves the world,
life refills the street:
cars commuting, bodies shifting
across concrete, passing
familiar others. Emil enters.

He watches the girl
over there: greasy black hair,
paled skin. She is pretty
in her damaged way.
Emil shoves away
Those thoughts, bites
into his McMuffin:
these are getting better.

Slow through the park,
Emil lingers. Joggers in their routes,
a Frisbee keeping itself in the air
until sputtering in the trim grass–
Emil overlooks everything.

He sees the marks glow
underneath his secretary’s
sleeves. He staggers over,
smiling, “I heard what you said,
that your girlfriend broke-in
and bit you in the arm.
If you need to, you can
stay at my place
for a while.” She smiles
a smile Emil’s been aware of
since middle school,
when girls wouldn’t even look
at him and his acne-scars twice.

He opens his door, and walks
within the black, only outlines
of things show. He flips the light
switch. Only he can alter this world.

The landlord told us never to go on the roof.
We take to borrowing others, tiptoes clanging on steel and iron
My knees rubbing gravel and asphalt.
We finish the wine and **** three stories up.

Most days we sit curled on broken patio chairs
Cigarette to split
No, I want my own.
Unspoken fourth neighbor snoresputtercoughsnortsneezes from the corner.
*******, Chaz.
We didn't come, by pick up truck and bicycle, to live above crackheads again.
I could smell it, those May mornings.
Misha, always sick, he said.
He was.

You were always the Junction.
Where
drunken promises
sober **** ups
idle hope
came and met ****** up ugly only to straighten out again.
Destined Final Resting Place of my last drops of liquor.
In a way it could never amount to more than that.
A wasteland we did nothing but lay waste to.

Avery taught me how to french inhale sitting on the hood of her 74' Ford something or other.
Fishnets Valu Village miniskirt, lakeside cold
Her zippo lighter roman candle flash bright.

Didn't I steal that?
Didn't I, one winter darkened morning, rifle through your jeans for TTC fare and a fiver for an Egg McMuffin?

Who can remember.

ask me the part where marxism doesn't make more sense than darwinism, or when marxism ≠ darwinism... in england? ≠ = a train network, you ******* mcmuffin! the whole point of a "social" darwinism is that, unlike marx's "effort": we're anti-socially biased, competing... but that's not the point... what's with the desire for rekindling a community equivalent to having a village to grit root? extracting an individual from the horde is one thing, but having to craft a horde from an individual abstractrum ego, is another! add to that the whole pronoun "affair" and you have, what some poets claim: wasn't journalism the shitpile some preferred a j.r.r. tolkien to become? the presuposition of self, hyphen, well, with that, what's there to be collectivist about? what's there to actually gain from working? a ******* poststage stamp collection? there's no point to adhere to a cohesion that lacks an adhesive argument... bust-stop or bus-stop? i'm at the stage of faking a demand to watch the olympics... you know the one lesson poles were taught in school? cheating in a school ergonomic is one thing... cheating in a reality of owning the uniform of responsibility is another.*

most people has conceive
both "fat shaming" -
   without a fat - philia -
as most can gag out
a cat walk with an anorexic
model...
                doctors can
be manhndled socially as
autistic...
       while the rest of us...
hide...
              and to have made
an appearance,
  to have gratified
   human existence via cameo...
this...
             an ideologue?
             a charging bull...
if red's it's honing device?
                  this juggling act
of norma-marxism without
a normy-darwinism?
when, did it ever occur
to not compare Marx with Darwin?
when was colonel gaddafi
  the one:
                 with a mortgage
but not a burial rite?
a maxim, but no epitaph?
   i guess, compared to Marx,
Darwin *******
  the proclivity of looking
at an ape...
       unlike Marx:
    condensing it to a poor man...
but sure...
            you can have
Crimean "revision"...
   you *******
              ... wait... what tree did
we climb off?
        you call them what,
pine chimps and birch gutans?
i said: come what may,
an African phallus will
   become a mongol ***** **** will;
imagine having to be
drunk in order to say it,
without being savvy...
    just, plain, dumb, Bristol... aware;
but **** me did i enjoy
                                    it.

     oh i am responsible...
for the notion that there's a void,
that needs to be occupied
  by mere thought,
      or finger cracking akin
to the sound
of deep frying chicken...
                   fizzes,
    and fizzes,
        and then becomes a
                        Mormon nighmare...
finger, *******, licking, good.
     o.k. o.k.: sizzles...
           pouts bubbles
   but certainly doesn't fry...

   church hostile gorillas that climbed
off an oak!

     makes sense...
         but darwin is the antithesis
of marx, whether you like it,
                                            or not.