Seventy eight cents accelerated into a slapped palm
A nod between us to prepare this nickle dime handoff
Passenger in this body behind a wheel
Slave to yellow white blurs on blacktop
Can't stop thinking I should drive up all the roads I drove down,
Manic around town, sporting a frown
Like a clown with mismatched shoes
Filling blank space with blues and *****
No cruise control to pull me down this road
Foot bears the load, frame bent Ford
By the grace of the Lord still breathing
No longer careening down unfamiliar paths  
Not the last laugh
But close

Voices overlapping
Drinks spilling
Cigarettes smoked
Eyes cast down
Looking into nothing
Bottom of a glass speaking in tongues
Words cut rough on broken glass
Plastic cups melting on your lips
Pop the filter, **** the poison
Repeat
They're mixing up the bones
I hear them clacking between cracking old fingers
Sitting on the edge of joy
Trying to **** up some piece of it like a campfires warmth
Lost on the edges of this cold light,
spectating skotototrophically
Digesting this dark light into a cancerous liver
A dying heart
A screaming spleen
A voice alienated by foolish freewill
Selfish and final
Silent and screaming
Wind and ice breaking all the cedars, bowing their souls into the creek
Cracked limestone coffin, burning away our limbs and bodies
The bones keep spinning, the lies keep blending into begonias and bar tabs

Crown Royal in a Coke can, warm rain fills the midnight blackness
Sitting on the flight deck among the tie-downs, staring into the wake
Something inside me says to jump, blind and mindless, deep into this Indian ocean


Rifles in a pile, triple canopy and palm groves
A beach made of trash
I stand in this screaming greenery, something inside me says to walk
Lose myself in this impenetrable, howling green


I wake to myself walking and talking, who was here in this body before me?
People speaking to a flipped mask
Words hollow as reeds in the snow
Something inside me writhes at this restlessness, beckons my head beneath the waves

The night they killed Osama bin Laden,
we drank the bottles down to the shards
We screamed
We pushed all the sand off the third deck
We racked every bolt in our soul
We shed every piece of body armor
We spat into the face of this childhood stupidity
War movies and old men talking
Watching the whole world fall down
Why did I find myself such a fool,
to carry a rifle for nothing

This whiskey is washing it all away
All the night and day, all that spit and say
All that broken clay, pots in the garden growing weeds

She likes cabbage in her soup
I like whiskey in my belly
I hate to lay it out like that
But it will work out better
in the long haul

Place that stone for me old friend
Place that stone at my head
Bury me down where the grubs and weevils live
Stake down four corners of my soul
Fly me taut like a kite

The way it works out ain't work 'tall
Just a bunch of laying, smoking, drinking
Spelling tall tales out the back of a burlap sack
Cutting onions fine, fine
Cutting garlic rough, rough

Pick all those tomatoes little girl
Get that basket full
We'll be walking back to my little shack
Cut em up with salt, on my tomatoes
On my **** watermelon

These broken eyed blues are blue
They look at me like I looked at you
Left me knowing I knew not what to do
A fool for you, a fool for anyone you knew
Two plus two is two **** few
What's a poor man to do

Whiskey when I'm thirsty, whiskey when I'm dry
Whiskey in the morning, whiskey till I cry
Me and this old whiskey, in the same place by and by
This whiskey cannot hurt me, this whiskey makes me die

Paddle this old river, the banks go sliding by
Polish this old trigger, wipe carbon from your eye
Put down that amber liquor, it's eating your insides
Go and find that river, it is deep and it is wide

How many individual cups of grief sit on this counter alone 
holding pictures of their sons and daughters
The distant sounds of shelling 
Dreadful walk of a slumbering, evil giant 
drunk and wheeling
A galvanizing hate, one that grinds teeth to gum
drives all tears from their spring eternal
dries one's soul into shriveled reeds 
dry, crumbling thistles