Dead Man

Dead Man, Dead Man, Dead Man
Shuffle your feet across dirty linoleum and through murky visions of past and future
Carry yourself from room to room like a wounded and frightened solider who doesn't know why He's out here dying so far from home
Dead Man. Dead Man. Dead Man.
Have you no last words?
Silent and dumbstruck
Thinking a million miles a minute and producing no thoughts
Any wisdom is lost without words
Dead. Man. Dead. Man. Dead. Man.
Your lifeless eyes see only death and horrors
Dead Man,
Your soul is a candle freshly snuffed out
Leaving only smoke to linger

Animalistic

Crimson life glistens in the night on lunar white teeth
A hunter's eyes reflect beauty and destruction fixed over his prey
Praying for a release
A Wolf with blood soaked jaws and writhing body beneath
Spread eagle beneath a full moon in time for her moons blood
Animalistic cries and movements
Then

Nothing

Stillness in the dark
Rapid change
Hard to soft dark to light
Death to life
Heaving chests and the drip drip drip
Blood running down a savage chin
Rain running down a limestone lord

Desolation

The Illinois countryside passes by outside the window slightly faster than the posted speed limit. Cornfields stretch farther than you’d care to look, oceans of green stalks with small towns nestled in them like their own Atlantis sunken in poverty and ignorance. It’s warm outside and I sit in the passenger seat chain-smoking cheap red cigarettes while my friend drives. He gingerly packs a glass pipe with ground up plant matter while keeping a watchful eye on the road. We have no destination in mind, just a course plotted for happiness and we’re not pulling over until we find it.

“Do you want to hit this?” He asks.

“No thanks, I can’t. You mind if I have some of these beers though?”

“They’re warm, but go for it Man.”

"Thanks."

Drinking with a purpose that isn’t enjoyment while spouting poetry from books and crumpled paper scattered about the floor of the car and throwing empty cans out the window.

The demands of  “Another drink!” yelled above the sound of The Gaslight Anthem on the radio are matched only by the requests of “Another poem!” and the literary litterers drive on until dusk and until other minimum wage workers with minimum wage jobs and expensive tastes finish their shifts.

They join them on their journey, a search for anything that isn’t what’s right in front of them.

Walking through the streets of suburbia after dusk, it’s springtime in America and flags fly proudly outside of houses with floodlights illuminating them to keep their fear at bay. Carrying Styrofoam cups of gas station soda mixed with cheap whiskey, we put one foot in front of the other on yellow and white lines with no planned destination besides a state of separation of mind and body.

We are the children of a post-nuclear family (Sure my parents are happily married, but not to each other) wandering in a capitalist wasteland. The darkness covers our sins from watchful eyes and absent Gods. Tail lights and stop signs. Just try to act natural for one minute, because everyone’s attention is on us (Just like it fucking should be).

A “No thanks, I’m just looking around” attitude coupled with wandering and glazed eyes.

Finally our cheap Styrofoam reservoirs weigh next to nothing and laughter fills the empty streets. No longer adults with responsibilities or tomorrow to worry about but children racing the midnight train down by the tracks, knowing we’ll never win this battle but still trying our damndest.

An amphetamine heart will never rest and a whiskey soul will always thirst.

Providence

Trapped in a thoughtless night, I drag my body ablaze through empty streets and alleys past packed bars and clubs. Window shopping for a good time in the 21st century. The streets may have been paved with gold but they're littered with used condoms and empty beer bottles like bread crumbs to foreign beds in apartments rented by people with no names.
Fingernails diggining into the cracks in the sidewalk, pulling yourself up a drunken cliff wall.

Or staring into a mirror made of polished steel and bolted to the concrete, going over every event leading up to being in this bathroom with the shower on hot hot hot and a towel shoved into the gaps of the door. Breathe your life away into the hospital ventilation system like it's your last breath. A final word is never screamed but always mumbled or choked on. Let me out.

Muscle Memory

Nights like these don't make us who we are, so much as dismantle who we were.


Unsteady hands palm to palm with complete strangers "Thank you for your service."
The smell of cheap black coffee and cowboy killing cigarettes hover freshly over me.

A filthy mouth paired with a clean white uniform never balance the Fuck out.
The sun doesn't rise when you're at thirty thousand feet, you're just meeting it half way from home.

Your golden Messiah is nailed and hanging perfectly centered between two tanned breasts.
Plead insanity if you dare speak at all.

I could talk philosophy with any number of you or I could speak at a rock.
It's always only taken one to dance.


Hail To The Chief plays for the final time as the hand carved wooden box is lowered into the ground, a slow macabre rendition, and the First Lady made widow weeps tears of American pride. Outdated railroad tie stitching keeps a nation from just barely bursting at it's seams.
Muscle memory and dead tourists. The deceased and victimized jockey for position, using our heart strings as the reins.

"It takes more muscles to smile than it does to pull the trigger.", Said the broken Warrior to me. The broken Warrior who also said he hates his wife, but couldn't help but to SMILE as he accounted acts of killing to Me.

You may be able to soak up and release knowledge like a sponge, but I'd rather be a spring and let it trickle from me endlessly and effortlessly.

No stars. No hope.

Black sand paper like shingles scratch up my back as I lay two stories tall with cigarette in hand. The consistent list is on my mind once more. You, Her, that other one, boot camp, the remainder of my cigarette, the length of my intoxication, but the thing that strikes me most is the lack of stars on my horizon. Are they coming out for you tonight? Do they sparkle, dance, and dazzle you? Perhaps. They say what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, I can certainly attest to that. Once able to drown my sorrow with whiskey until his dreadful moans lessened and became nothing but joyful gurgles. But now a bottle and a half down, I only see strangers in arm's length.
Admiration only means anything if you agree with your soothsayers.  The one joy I've gotten from a stranger's observation was fleeting. "You have 'don't Fuck with me eyes'" I was told by a dominatrix while I was losing my mind at a crowded sex party in Chicago. She had eyes that told me Her Father hadn't given Her enough attention. After being locked up, running free sounds desirable. Boring sex. Palatable tastes are no longer regarded as valid.
I want nothing more than to be happy. What I need to be happy makes me miserable at the thought.

Past the Iris

Hunched over the green felt like a sniper, taking aim.

Stripes, Solids. Good or Evil.

It makes no difference. 

Calculated stares behind steel rimmed glasses and a handle bar mustache. 

The kind of mustache you'd picture God having. 

Pull, Push, and Release. Sunk. 

Another game, another drink.

Banter back and forth, wooden weapons in hand used to occasionally steady one's self. 

An amphetamine soul, chugging cigarette after cigarette.

Enamel grinds against enamel. 

Thousand. Yard. Stare. 

Sure, He's got the Girl.

But you've got.

You've got..

You've.. Got...

You've got something special. Man.

No, I mean it. 

Ten thousand drooping eye conversations into the morning regarding the secrets of the Universe

Cold and warm hands held until their temperatures match

Staring past the iris, into the soul

Claims of Love. Of heartbreak. Of Truth and Intention.

Anyone who has noticed my smile was definitely looking for it.

Demoralization

A generation that no longer watches pornography due to boredom

While video footage of car crashes,
Played over and over and once more in slow motion
(Twisted  metal. Pools of mixing auto and bodily fluids. Blood stained air bags. Silent onlookers.)
,Only satisfies through the teenage years

Hiding under the covers while under the influence
Running fingers over whiskey thin ribs
A prisoner idly playing with the bars on his cell

Tricks, Games, and Trains

The kids play games
Clack......Clack......Clack.
The kids get bored of suburbia and comfort and safety
Clack.....Clack.....Clack.
The kids in groups of four or five or six gather and hide behind false courage and grins
Clack....Clack....Clack.
The kids place their necks on the train tracks all together
Clack...Clack...Clack.
The kids see who can hold their skinny neck against the cold vibrating steel the longest
Clack..Clack..Clack.
The kids watch the light of the steady locomotive approach
Clack.Clack.Clack.
The kids follow the leader
ClackClackClack.
Young Men have died for less.

Memory

Under the radar is where it's most comfortable
Trouble differentiating between you making me sick
      or giving me butterflies
No true validation
Nothing behind the Money
No Justice behind the sentencing
In God we trust you'll fucking pay us back
Circulation in my body is poor, leaving my hands perpetually cold
The perfect excuse for "Hey, feel my hands. Aren't they freezing?"
Tricking my way into getting a glimpse of another's warmth

Memories are solidified by emotion
Episodes come back like getting the chills

Standing barefoot, grabbing pieces of grass with my tattooed toes, weeping gently to myself, trying to say goodbye to my Mother on that comfortable June day.

Moving back in time.

....Disbelief. Quickly followed by rage I'd not known I contained as I pounded on the steering wheel, yelling pleas and demands of Love in Your general direction. Hot tears ran down while the smell of a clove cigarette traveled out the window, A frigid newborn Winter traveling in.

Packing up and running away instead of post-coitus talk of admittance of guilt and forgiveness.

Emotion solidifies memory and my inability to cry these days assure me I'll remember and regret nothing.

Thin Air

Irony often lost on the majority while coincidence is mislabeled. Language, this tool we've created out of thin air, is constantly warping on it's own accord. Nothing is set in stone as the Mother's tears that fall on us all have shown us. Cleansing and resettling It all back to zero.

My Mistress, Spring.

The first moments of Spring waking from slumber start with her shaking the cold from her Womanly figure. Watch the bare branches quiver post-orgasm in the wind from the temperature/paradigm/pressure change. Still early in the morning, She and those with lesser eyes feel She isn't ready until her makeups on and leaves are on branches but I see her beauty regardless of circumstance and outfit. Spring is stirring from Her sleep. I kiss her eyelids, welcoming her to the light of a new day.

Sins of the Flesh

Drunk in a bar or Insane in an asylum
Passively be pacified
Systematic fellatio

Who determines what's greater or what's good for that fucking matter?

Brown eyes looking skyward, connecting with brown eyes that read nothing but pleasure
Lost in the moment if it wasn't for that muffled sound of needing air and a moment above the surface
A spasm before carnal death with eyes opened to those past sins of the flesh

Aesthetics

Whiskey stained whiskers.
The iron taste of blood sensed before opening eyes.
Cracked lips, the proof of dying from slow dehydration.

Obviously vascular with skin stretched over hard muscle.
It redeems all other sins of the flesh.

Ghost

The only patron sitting at a bar
A Ghost in a pre-neon city

Ghosts exist
I know because I am one
Shying away from the light of day
Silently occupying my space in a house of the living, while the others mill about
The sounds of talk and laughter and marital sex and television keeping me at bay

However
When the house resembles that of the dead;
I dance around merrily
Taking in the fruits of the living
Misplacing things purposely, leaving objects unspoken for

I am a Ghost
I go unseen, for I fear the judgement of living eyes

I grind my teeth and talk in my sleep,
But every other Woman in this town could tell you that.

Growing

Learning the land like a Lover's body.
Paved trails through the woods are museums to nature
Stand silent, surrounded by branches and all that which claims them and you'll see what Grand Central Station was modeled after

I often mistake that hollow feeling for a sense of Zen
Being empty is important
Being empty is being open

A cup must be filled up though so you can transfer that liquid
Water/Gold/Thought/Idea/Knowledge
Quench Someone's ill thirst

Empty has never been synonymous with serenity.
Constant transitioning along the paths we've chosen and continue to choose.

Backs to the Female, facing the Male

Zen for the price of a cab ride
When it's not an open bar but it's free to all with currency
Getting Women more drunk than they truly think
Plan B is in the back of my nicotine obsessed mind
A to B to C only makes sense
But what exactly is that?
The vibrations of humanity and disorder
Resonant frequencies
The drums beat into existence
Always walking a fine line between Zen and being numb

Pain and Pleasure

Female voices carry in a newborn spring breeze
They pass by me with briefness, like leaves continuing their journey to nowhere
A Woman with a voice that sounds like She's given a blow job or two in a movie theatre before

Our existence is a series of brief and fleeting moments
Episodes of coming and going
Leaving is easy but returning proves to be the more difficult action

A lot of people waste their time and life concerned and worrying about juvenile questions like:
"Is there a God?"
"Am I a good person?"
"Will I be happy twenty, thirty, forty years from today?"
These people don't see or know themselves, let alone what passes through their senses

There is no Right or Wrong
No Good and Bad
All that exists is Input and Output
Only Pain and Pleasure

Full Moon

On any night where the moon hangs low and full, there is an urge that pulls at some Men's hearts. Especially after a few drinks. A desire to leave society, run naked through the woods screaming for no other reason than being alive. An appetite to destroy themselves and anyone within arms reach. Figuratively or literally. The transformation is not physical, but still leaves one completely unrecognizable.  On any of these nights, look for the man with his gaze fixed upon the sky.
The next day in the shower the hot water hits the back of my head, where my neck and skull meet, soothing the remains of any primal intentions left over from the previous night. That "day after phlegm fueled cough" only a smoker knows begins and I discharge tar and mucus. Probably the most satisfying thing that I'll do all day. The hot water runs down my body, making me feel somewhat human again, while outside the bathroom window birds can be heard. Winter is coming to an end, listen to those birds. Washing my face, the stubble feels rough on my hands and reminds me that I'm no longer a boy but a grown Man. "Goddamnit act like it." I think to myself while trying to remember if I wronged anyone last night. I don't think so. Probably just took advantage of a sympathetic ear at the worst. Outside, the cigarette smoke travels through the air quickly as I puff away some of the headache. Listen to those birds. Watching some teenage kid deliver newspapers to the houses surrounding this one reminds me of doing the exact same thing as Her at that age. Walking through this neighborhood, delivering newspapers, listening to sad songs on my Ipod, thinking sad thoughts. I was damned from the beginning, but listen to those birds. Winter is coming to an end.

Within Arm's Reach

Let us toast to whoever's closest
Drink to our identical desolation
A centrifuge
Holding onto each other while the room spins around us
Exhale me from your mind's body when you can no longer take the suffocation