on ecstasy

Platinum and peroxide-ridden,
wisps of smoke
on ecstasy, almost like film sprinkled with acid,
acrid and smoking in the dark somewhere,
under a flickering streetlight by a bar teeming with bodies,
pupils dilated to the point where
her eyes are black and reflective,
a neon cat drawing words with
light,
a flame weak enough to put out with your thumb and index finger. But she’s
laughing, laughing
coy enough with all her slits and holes, and
she’s the insides of glow sticks,
electric thrumming, a bass solo
a Jackson Pollock in the blacklight
but sometimes she remembers what it’s like when you play the acoustic
something about how acid eats film like the mind forgets memories
she keeps trying to hold onto the smoke you exhale,
as if she’s foolish enough to think this will preserve her, make her
ageless,
a time with fancy cigarette holders and fringe,
garters and thigh highs,
bright flashes and puffs of smoke mingling in the air with men’s aftershave.

Drag her close by her long pearls or you might lose her,
all her coy slits and holes and dents and marks,
all her laughter dying down to a serious silence
when she grabs your hand and asks you what it’s like
how it feels to lose someone
and you say that it starts out as a tiny little hole that someone drilled into your head
in your sleep and it grows larger,
slow and cancerous and it’s like swallowing glass
like you’re cut to pieces and there’s only one person to fix it but that person’s in
a coma,
under the influence of lights and sound
vibrating apart like guitar feedback
ageless like Jimi Hendrix
but as nontraditional as seven nation army
and her lungs are bruised leather
worn like a permanent hospital bracelet.

Maybe this is how she remembers it,
in smoke filled basements and conversations with old friends about
substandard living as a student and roach fingers
and how you wish you could forget what sleep was again
and come alive, every coy slit and hole, every imperfection,
revolve slow on the spot like a singer’s closing note,
waver towards the finish and then stagger slowly,
as if that could reconcile the tiny hole that started all of this.

from the outside looking in, the skin over your veins looks papery thin.

I.

The watermelon seeds of doubt
tell me what I really need to know.
You can have me pitted and split open
on a Styrofoam plate, because the pink
insides always seem to be appealing
after a few drinks at a barbeque on
Independence Day.

Pitted, gutted. It’s all the same
when you’re splayed and incriminating yourself
without even understanding your own chalk outline.

II.

They said you were beautiful once
when you reminded them of Original Sin.
No compulsion. You were a wildfire
set ablaze and eating everything alive
with your flames.

Your eyes were bottomless
black as charred homes and swollen rivers.

III.

I wanted to write this for you
and for your blue veins like tree branches
growing on your arms and raised like a bas relief –
you were once beautiful but now you are dust.

What is left of you is preserved
in old photographs but they could never
quite capture the bottomless pits of your eyes
as dark as watermelon seeds on a summer day.

Your Catholic guilt was a camera
and your veins were a timeline.

hello stranger

hello stranger
you're a cloudy and unforgiving mist
that never leaves my brain
i'm waiting for the crack and peel of my
skin to shed so that you may see something
more recognizable in me.

hello stranger
i'm quite sure
we have the same burns and itches
so would you mind
not being too careful with me?

hello stranger,
hello stranger
i'm not quite sure where you're taking me.

nothing can break me nothing can bend me nothing can save me

all these sounds in my head rasp and sound too simple
and maybe i am truly losing my grip on everything.
the tang in my mouth is acidic, coppery.
i'm looking for blood in exchange for those months
because nothing can erase the cruel grip of
broken uncertainty.

nothing can break my bones and cause me pain
like the disappearance of an old friend to an old
soul. so i was close to self flagellation
those sins no easy task to crack, a shell of skin
not easily shed.

then you came back.

you clutched me in the red light district i'm surprised you didn't miss it

i've gone and done it again
vacated the inside of my head
so don't look at me
don't try to tell me
"i won't do that to you again"
god said it was one in every ten
from where i'm standing
it seems to be everyone
i put my fist through a mirror today
i don't want to see the vacancies
the cheap neon inconsistencies
but you still put your hand inside of me
thinking it will start me
no, no it won't
i am not here
i haven't been here for awhile
but i should assume you missed that
with your gaping absence
not something you can fix with insistent pleas
i feel like a flea bag
itching and itching
skin red and angry and torn
i will remember shame
i will remember that you're no different
just looking for an opening
with a line cut and grafted like bone
my body rejects it
because that line isn't your own

01.05.07

I.

We were five days late.
You died on the fifth,
the old year’s skin peeled back
to expose itself to the new times.

What a harsh climate,
cold so bitter it chaps and scales our skin.
While there are remedies, it never fully
disappears. It is a constant ubiquitous itch;
the fascination with white flakes when
skin becomes reminiscent of snow.
You didn’t have to worry about the
superficialities of the outsides anymore.

We drove down the road to buy flowers
at a little stand, and it occurred to me that
even death was a scam. Nine dollars for
a stone engraved with a generic saying to
put on top of a loved one’s headstone.

There is even a hierarchy in death –
this is the poor people’s section and
this is the section for the people so rich
they shit mausoleums out of their asses.

II.

It was hot and humid and raining.
I walked to get lunch anyway,
reasoning that it wasn’t far.
I ran into you and you chided me
for going out in the rain. You would’ve
given me a ride if I asked.

I didn’t want to impose.
You told me I was just like my father,
stubborn through and through.
You then drove me back to the office.
Your voice blended
with the beating
of the rain
against the van.

III.

My father and I got lost looking for your grave.
We were positive you were watching us and
laughing at the fact that we are both directionally
challenged.

I commented offhandedly that the cemetery
was a nice one. My father shot back that
it would be nicer if you weren’t buried in it.

one day

I
was cut loose
a balloon eaten by the clouds.

I looked down.

The urban sprawl spawned
unimaginable things and the

helium bit at me,
insides gnawing away at the lining,
the viscous separation from

connection to everything.

You and I are unborn thoughts
inside each other’s heads.

Soon enough air pressure will
pop me and my skin will float down

to be embraced by the ocean,

a bed of cold needles
one day

we may happily share.

words

There is grandeur in this life
this broken machine that
squeaks and whines
in the back of my mind
while I try to sleep.

There is hope
in these old bones
reincarnated karma
shot straight through
my soul.

While you were sitting
and watching I was right
in the middle of the thick,
rich drama a little like coffee
grounds on my tongue but more
like the same shit in my mouth.

We are spitting words,
regurgitating hypocrisies.
Horns beep and millions of people
yell every second
every minute every hour
every day every week
every month every year
and I die a little death to be consumed
by this city for a month or two and live
wearily in the valves of this old town

opening and closing with the tide,
run over by grit and sand, eroded
just to be built back up again on a
shaky foundation of words. But in

this city
I see the pavement sparkle and shine
and I know all the souls that lived here
were cemented in the ground so that we
can remember them and never be without
another story.

I get tired of the influx of words,
the steady stream of morality and
immorality because what’s the point
of crowding such a short time
with hours of words and no accomplishments?

But we need to talk talk talk.
I need to hear your reasons and
the red river of lies travels faster than
the twittering birds determined to tear you down
with their beaks. If there’s one thing I learned
it’s that no one is safe from the sharp little claws of
insecurity that scrabble at the insides of our skulls

but we’ll keep talk talk talking
until we’ve exhausted ourselves into graves
way far away on the Island, so close that
we can smell the freshly churned earth and
fulfill a dead man’s dream. There is grandeur
in this life but now I must take a sleep much
longer than any other I may ever know.