If you're still mine in the morning
kiss me twice before you go,
I won't ask you to lie back
down.

Leave me naked in the sheetscape
sex-drunk morning sunlight through the panes
scents of you on my pillows and arms
green on grass
blue on sky.

Coffee and breakfast hot
tree limbs asway
colors fully colored
feet inches from the ground.

The walls know it.

The ceilings saw it.

The heavens rejoice:
you were
here.

I arrive home and undress in the dark
take off yesterday
take off today.

Life as
a carry on,
a one paragraph manifesto,
a party of one.

All past is poison
make peace and move on.
Never forget to
never remember
you never had it like you think.

I forgive them all,
I forgive myself,
I won't always be recalled
but I'll be forever
felt.

Look down at your hands
they held me once.

Its quiet up here as
the city burns
my past on fire behind me.

Don't look for me
I'm gone.
Don't call me
I won't answer.

Every day I'll be forgetting you
you never made me better.

I will not be there
to see any of
your futures.

I was a mirage
a stranger
a shadow.

You ruined me (took everything)
now you can keep it all.

I don't love your skies
I don't love your streets
I don't love you
anymore.

I don't love your skies
I don't love your streets
I don't love you
anymore.

Why ever should you know me?

Today is unlike yesterday,
I am something new.

Similar in skin and bone
yet
differing in hue.

Whatever it was is
wherever it went and
whomever was there has
gone.

The things I thought I wanted once
were demons all along.

As born we are,
so in death we'll be.
Likewise,
so the length
between.

A fleeting glance
a stolen kiss
none does this moment
mean.

So on our race toward epitaphs
a moment's mark is all we're given.

As our brevity,
weighs heavily,
on our tragic souls
imprisoned.

Each decade brings death.

The decay of all foundation of identity -
one minute prince,
next,
pauper.

Through a medicated haze I find
that another death has come to me,
everything I thought I knew was mostly
false,
lost in a swell of
well wishes and
the pavement of
good,
albeit misguided,
intentions.

So there stands our hero,
see him in my hands
and feel him in my stomach
his heart,
mirroring mine,
both breaks and beats
with the clarity of this consuming revelation:

I have finally become
totally and irrevocably
alone.

So let us march toward heaven
or the mouth of hell
whatever awaits the wounded
after breath becomes breeze
and body
embers.


There is nothing to mourn
just a lingering sense of loss
that suffocates my nostalgic
soul and
leaves me defeated
in an almost blanket of sadistic
satisfaction.

"Of course" I say to myself,
as this is obviously how it is for man
doomed to suffer under his own aspirations
and to inevitably drown in his crippling limitation
for the bonds of flesh are finite,
a prison for the breath of
God.

The farce of our free will is
that even though we may increase our situation
through self aggrandizement or financial gain
we
as one accord
are yoked together by the laws of inevitability
to mourn all passing
of our history,
our children,
ourselves.

For know this:
none if it is ours
and we belong to something higher
that supersedes us
and as agents we are sent
to fulfill our hidden purpose
pawn-like more than powerful
always living in the similarity that

sometimes we are in the midst of,

or simply in between

tragedy.

Never,
despite our best efforts
are we really
ever on sure footing.

We will never
ever see
solid
ground.

I think that if I hit it big I'd
live it all over again.
The same empty rooms in the same empty southern towns
out of place and pitiful,
head full of spirits,
window shopping graves.

Lying fetal,
cheek pressed to the floorboards
death running up the walls
death running up my spine
playing chess with anguish
delaying endless days of
inconsolable
sobbing.

I'd bury my face in THAT blood bathed grass
searching for a final taste of you,
eyeing remnant shards and metals
darkly willing the same evisceration.

Its been the same grey sky since
that day in May. I'll find where they laid you to
feel my fingers worm in the dirt
that swallows you like a serpent
routine and callous.

This is my penance for survival,
driving needles into my eyes and
fire into my mouth,
my guts in flames
shouting the devil
no one remembers
but I do,
I do,
I
do.

There's always so much mundanity
and somehow you slowly begin to long for it.

Leather jacket in a coffee shop,
earth tone carpet and candlelight,
gratitude of morning, cold brewed coffee
in a porcelain mug -
robin's egg
blue.

It doesn't dull but it deepens,
the jagged edge of longing
recedes into a panoramic vision
revealing God
at work in all the
corners.

Wrought iron love,
a mahogany nerve
giving into suffering
and pouring as smelted silver
into each and every
wounded
soul.

An erstwhile brush fire
now a searing, albeit
setting,
sun.

In retrospect

I made a mistake with you.
I should have let you love me
instead of chasing fireflies and fairy tales
when,
just like so many of us,
I just needed a good woman to straighten
me
out.

That demon may not have entered you
if I had acquiesced and sheltered you
or
seen you for the beautiful and fragile whisper that
you were in the full-throated shout of the city.

They found you pirouetting on the razor's edge of your walk up,
hearing whatever voices had come to you. I wonder
what they said that made you shut your ears?

That was the last I heard of you.

Now I sit in the bone yellow lamplight
looking for the pieces of you,
the shards of should-haves,
breadcrumbs of better times to
lead me back toward you.

But you deserve so much better than
that.

So tonight with
whatever surrounds you,
be it spouse, sorrow, or straightjacket,
wish on the brightest star in the sky
that you never
see me
again.

Stress writing in your anonymous online diary is the new black.

I used to call places home but they weren't.

Wherever one finds himself is mostly gravity mixed with circumstance.

Roots grow weakly in the shallows of where you plant them, you

don't belong anywhere because anywhere is

everywhere.

That being said...

North Carolina in April is as good a place as any
to be and the streets there
remember me so I
might as well form a reunion tour:

same old stage and
same old band.

I don't know how to feel.

I just wish I was still ignorant and innocent and
I didn't know anything about broken hearts or
bones.

I wonder if they'll call me forthcoming.

For a moment I fell for
a hawk-nosed vixen
named "whatever"
with skin and nails and eyes and
opinions.

I was blind drunk on the music and
getting high on her figure which
I could easily discern under her striped
long sleeve
crew neck.

Apparently we were a sold out crowd.

All those desperate faces,
clinging together and
terrified of being alone
yet wanting to give off
cool, nonchalant, and
artistic
vibes.

But I thought, "you know

there is no shame in finding yourself
or trying to" so
I didn't hate them -
but they sure aren't my tribe
anymore.

I do believe that I've transcended.

I'm not afraid of the grit and the
dirt of this thing and
I've got a taste for real rest so
let the next ones have
the
night.

But it was pretty nice to see Conor Oberst after all these gin-soaked
years.