The curse of a great, well-known or (at least) culturally interesting family.
Heralded at birth to mimic similar (or even, surpassing) social feats of achievement/wealth/renown.
Instead manages to underpasses even  mundane non-impressivenesses of second-generation parentals.

I
See them, smirk or folly with time, silently.
....which they seem to quite often.
Biding weekend with multitudes of varying categories of "friends"
and sweethearts who never seem to stick around too long
All aware, of course, of the famous family lineage
Themselves, instead
after lifetimes where first words, senior infants homework,
cheerful accusations of mischief and certificates of age-appropriate health
were lauded as signifiers of a future onslaught of fulfilled capabilities
emerge as providence's lackeys– and meekly, to be
Written out of History
One by One by One.

II
Talent is frequently a despairing life-cycle
for people who witness
and go without.

III
But what price success?
Is it to be counted in public
or left behind in wreaths?
Stern evidence
of favour, fought for and won
or shaky good fortune
One life's profitable fluke

IV
Does the cost of success itself
admit backstories of other kinds of loss
that children
without the chance of ever knowing
or changing their inheritances of fate
are powerless to cease the flow
of their own anonymity
all for the insistences of the unarguable
and for merely treading the average?

Your eyes touch the back of my mouth. Make it so hard to swallow.
I never breathed so evenly, my stomach feels so hallow.
I'll bury my face in your neck. Allow me to sink my tongue, and
Drown my teeth into your arms. Your breath fills my lungs.

Everything is easy now, since we simply let it be.
This is anything but sarcastic, the way our colors bleed.
I love your golden irises, I love your sepia skin.
Wrap yourself around my bones and melt into my ribs.

I feel like our arms glide through each other,
Like dancing lovers, after years of familiarization
Predictability in every step, but for once
Comforting to know what's going to come next.

Your hands hieroglyph the language of my fingernails
Decoding a sensation that belongs to something bigger than us,
And finally understanding that it's okay to touch that.

Contentment for war. Trading pity for empathy.
Trading sympathy for care.
You were always in the confines of my aching head,
Your name is in all my search-bars.

If I had the right fingers, I would create you in marble
I would design a statue and have it be gilded
In your honor. And if there was a temple for us,
It would be in the shape of a man, aimed at the earth.
He would be bowing to a large evergreen tree.
And our initials would be carved on the side.

Let's finally spraypaint our faces in underpasses
Eyes like this deserve to be gazed into.
Eyes like yours.
Deep breathing, my face in your chest.

Breastbone meeting skull
Dripping my lips onto your skin
Like candlewax.
If you kiss me with finality,
"I promise, darling, I'll kiss you back."

you are the cigarette i pull out of the box every other evening
after fourty-six and five thousand strides, three underpasses
and one last pedestrian crossing

as with the cigarette, i look forward to you, look forward to
the high derived from the very presence of you
of your enigmatic entity misting through my lungs like
a sick, heady liaison akin to that of beer and smoke

but as with it which stubs out before the junction of bartley
relinquishes within me a curt perspiration, a heightened vision
you ravel my walk, desiccate my lips, augment a melancholy
that after muddy fields and an overhead bridge
initiates yet another discretion away from blurry headlights

as with the two sticks, tuesday and friday
five~, but only in selected amity
you leave traces of tobacco and filter paper
grinding between my newly dentalised set
as the zephyrs of the monsoon season **** against the spark
the bitter aftertaste of something so wrong, accompanied by
the warmth in cold of something so right

Yes! Yes! It's a great "Barry Hodges" memories poem involving *** and degredation!*

O Croydon, dormitory town of happy memories
With your delightfully sixties-style Ashcroft Theatre
And your many enchanting concrete underpasses!
O delightful borough so deservedly renowned
As one of the major English centres of wife-swapping,
That quintessentially bourgeous weekend pastime
And surefire antidote to inevitable marital ennui!
O gracious queen of the central south London suburbs
And gay paradise of semi-detached commutersville
O I cannot sing your praises ******* loudly enough
Nor can I deny the charms of your public toilets,
Where I have oft times enjoyed a **** with a gayish stranger!

The threshold, a kink in the continuum. A static line, 7" thick. An inch a mile, a million high-ways through low-days. Between freezing underpasses, mirrored in ice. Stray dogs passing, paying no mind, for there is none. Dying mice; too white for the whiteness.

Give me a road and I'll follow
across our fallow fields.
At either end, a somewhere an anywhere;
yielding, if anything, a brief love of the vastness of our expanses.
In such terms, humans and roads
are inseparable.

Give me legs and itchy feet, and I will carry this filthy deed.
"To go," for nothing
but the words alone
Like a redneck with his whiskey and his 12-gauge
we rage
full on.

Give me recklessness, give me godlessness, give me symbolitude & contemplacency. Give me thoughtlessness, or better yet, leave me with instinct, and I will carry the rifle for the enigma-insignia
of the Great Nation of Motion.

And I endure
to procure
myself
in two places
at once.

Look, I just want to be childish and sunshine
running through underpasses playing with paper planes
dragging you into the snow because
life is something to celebrate

A long time ago
I found myself there, with you
me being me
you being you
The cold night warmed my rusty insides
It wasn't so bad

But the world wasn't all that, love
We can't stay so sheltered forever
This last storm rocked a city cold-
colder than can be considered warm, I mean-
and while I want to read your words and remember your breath and bones
and fall into you I'd really just be
falling
nothing romanticized about it.
No one wants to leave all of their solid ground forever.
some of it, yes, but not all of it.

I've always been an all-or-nothing kind of person, in some ways
but life is about letting parts of yourself go
so you can grow
and I can grow

We're just two plants, you and I
not in the same pea pod, or even the same planter
but we both miss summer's glow and are jealous that our neighbors are sprouting flowers.

And at the end of it all, we'll both be fine.

So I've been a little hermit lately. Kind of a homebody. Sociophobic.
I have been missing you so much.
I remember we used to be attached at the hip, the soul. Our faces on underpasses.
We had all we could do. It was only you.

Now you act almost like we're different. You act like we just passed each other by.

My acquaintance.
I remember how you smell. Exactly how you smell.
I can never look at a person who shares your name and think of them
"The Usual Way,"
How I Am Supposed To Look At Them.
How I Am Supposed To Look At You.

You don't understand my anguish anymore, do you?
I guess not, but I forgive you. Your life is big, too.
But avoiding the truth won't make it untrue.
We may be young but we've both lost our youth.
This trend is not old, this love is not new.

I miss you. I hate to repeat myself, but...
I really do.

Do you still think of me, too?
I hope so.

Because these signals will never go out.
Those Everlasting moments
Memorized always.

transcendent it was the first time
when it was of faint memory to touch

but voluminously told, exacting itself
like the pretense of the heaviest pages

the curve of your face the entry of light
through momentary indulgence

nerves their city buoys and the pedestrians
salt of skin in intense heat begging for details,

ways to sewerage of mind and previous blunders
and the purest landscapes of feeling,

the underpasses of eyelids where glances hit
first, stalk swiftly – to wait underneath their

shade in the fleeting Maytime sun
coming back with renewed fervor, remembering

that from there, waiting in that margin,
there are things that may only strike a potential

but never learned, memorized, collapsed into
the absolute, and that lostness is imperative

to the finding –
the river of eyes where pilgrims are in transit,

well-constructed like the mausoleum that
keeps its secret of hills and cathedrals

kept unmarred in the silence of your refusal,
pulled out to be nailed taut into origin

the blankness of your face taken as mechanism
of marvel – to whoever god drew lines on your face

and to whoever foolish wanderer would dare traverse
your collapsible bridges, the sonorous depth

of your being when back against the dash
of beating back to senseless origins,

your name similar to the prepared countenance
of Manila, passers-by in awe of your slow Moon

unraveling behind curtains for showerheads,
humming behind, a conversant tune

where not one being ignored and it was true
to the form of first whispers

this whole new world mapped out
made naked to the twisted augur of shadow

reared by light through innocence,
a whole city I know but cannot touch.

driving through wet canyons
searching for meaning
and chocolate cake
howling and snapping
the fog rolls in
too specific to be a dream
too absurd to be real
a contained hysteria
forged through loneliness
and exasperation

everything is red and blue and yellow
and the diner closes early on sundays
underpasses and trashbags
gritty and ugly
conversations bombastic
short lived
while the rain drips lazy
and the fog sinks lower
racing across town lines
clamoring for cheap fills because
one was not enough
my eyes cannot focus

and she soon leaves
but we have to come back
and we come back to
creep through the hills
and the fog descends
choking the empty spaces
and i sit grinning
terrified as the
night ends with these
fake
houses on a solitary
hill and the fog
still rolling
rolling
down

Begging you
My knees scarred and raw
Purple
Bleeding profusely

Skin falling off
Stare at these eyes
Can you see the gold?
A frequent memory of lawns
And sheets among dawn
Thankful to simply be a pawn
Apologies unneeded
Warnings unheeded
Don't you utter a careless word
Is this all we have with which to work?

You may carry the aroma of harmony,
But your twisted psychiatric cacophony
Is a melody to the sad symphony
That I wish I could sing you
I would put you to sleep
Every single dark evening
By feel, under star-shine

If my songs were moving enough to make you stop crying inside,
Would you finally carve our initials into trees
And spray-paint our faces into underpasses, please?

as we play through these
gray underpasses
drinking the night away
on these cold city streets
share your cigarette with me
and we’ll share our love
in my compact’s back seat
kisses mapping paths to
our hearts as we taste
our souls in the salty tears
of our goodbyes
(spoken)
ashes to ashes we danced
under the moon with the
trees to our backs
fall with the leaves as you
fell into my arms
inseparable i loved you more
than i could never know

Wake, adolescent angels.
Your eyes are ice storms,
Your irises are tidal like the cold North Sea,
Your pupils are moonwashed and mad
Like howling western winds.

You look at your horizon,
You inhale stardust and nebulas like cigarette smoke,
Snort powdered mountain snows
Like ******* in the idle breezes of April or May.

Weep, shriek, sob yourselves hysterical
In the darkness of subways,
Beneath underpasses of ***** and spray paint
And endless neon lights.
Jump, leap, drop like stones from melancholy rooftops
Clutching burning cigarettes and *****.
Spin, dance, laugh drunkenly in stairwells,
Assault your forearms with syringes and needles and broken glass.

Cry melancholy saltwater in public toilets,
Kiss the mirrors with fight-split lips
And pick at the broken wall tiles with chipped fingernails.
Tear at the moss on empty high-rise balconies,
Stand high on the railings without hands
And contemplate life and death and redemption and eternity.

Stab, slice, tenderise your thighs with pencil sharpeners,
Fall, graze your backs ****** on concrete,
On gravel, on rough tarmac and asphalt,
Trip, split open your knees in parking lots at 2:45 in the morning
When you’re high and drunk and giddy,
And dreaming of poetry and existentialism and cities.

Sleep, juvenile metaphysicists;
Your mouths are dimming campfire flames,
Your minds are like caves of amethyst and quartz,
But time will go on,
Much as it has since the morning of everything.
Earth will spin;
Faster than your head when you’re high
And your brain is addled by infinity.
Space and time and God
Will remain eternal.
But you
(But we)
Will not.

The only emotion I feel
Is melancholy.
I dig tunnels in my memory
And carve my mistakes into the walls
I lay there for hours at a time
In these miserable underpasses
And drown them
And myself
With the mixture of
Lyzomes, oils, water, and regret
That falls from my eyes.
I sit and scream silently
About the things that I have done wrong
The places I have ruined with just my presence
And the people that have been cursed
With my well
And not-so-well
Being.
I bite my tongue
So hard
That the blood that fills my mouth
Begins to wash away my existence.

In the brief blink of a sneeze
underpasses of gloom could
be our permanent mausoleums.

So too can depression, the
overwhelming anxiety leaves
an indelible mark in its wake.

Irreparable damage after the
hurricane passed (while one was
in the foetal position, blinkered).

“ Light at the end of a tunnel
     can be just as blinding as
   the experience in darkness “