Arrogance

Pity the young man who,
As he grows older,
Loses his arrogance.
Confidence? He never 
Owned any.
His insolence,
Once interesting,
Is now merely crankiness:
His resolve stubbornness.
His desires fantasies.
All he owned,
Once so indelibly carved
Into his heart and his words
Was shown to be illusion.
He considered the palpable
Tangible.
He knows better now.

Pity the man whose words were once braver,
His eyes alive with the clarity
Of the zealot.
He rarely saw choices –
He just acted.
He doubted himself
But not his beliefs that were
Imbued by the books he read
And the feelings he felt
When he would lie in bed at night,
Alone but
Just knowing things should be a certain way
And that if he were true to himself,
They would be.

Pity the young man who,
As the skin of his trust and belief
Was peeled away,
Left him just tendons and bones,
Dressed in a costume
As to appear like the rest of them
Who never believed but still cried
During the romantic movies
When the movie heroine
(her hair done, her makeup in place)
Nobly died of cancer
Holding the hand of a man
(Who appeared to spend five hours a day in the gym
And the balance of his waking hours
Staring in the mirror practicing looking handsome
Yet also caring, empathetic and concerned.)

Pity the young man, who,
As he grows older
Loses his arrogance,
Displaying, his anger in helpless rants
Read by no one
Accomplishing nothing.
He is stabbed over and over
And bleeds and bleeds
But never seems to die.
Why won’t he die?
He is jealous of the convivially vapid
And the blissfully unaware.
He hopes to join them in their blank dull reveries
Someday.
In the dark he closes his eyes
To make it darker.

Pity the young man now older,
His arrogance replaced by acceptance.
He is in agony.
It takes him longer to finish pissing
And his body aches all the time.
He sees a tired old man looking back at him
In the mirror
And he never believes a thing anyone says.
He has never owned anything
But the difference between yesterday
And today is that
Now he knows it.

It is the only thing
Which he is certain.

Fucked Up

I don’t  have to pretend to be healthy 
when I fuck you — that I like everything 
you expect me to do.  Brutality 
is something I crave — so sick of smiling, 
mimicking girls, behaved, who just to want to cum. Wandered
towards the summer camp boys for distraction 
and fun until I could run to the thunder,
your theater again, where satisfaction
includes suffering and requires my childish
tears (I should have outgrown a decade 
of years past but fear I never will). Wish
for a dangerous man to invade 
my windowsill, disrupt my buttercup
bed who could corrupt a girl foregone, fucked up.

Cough Syrup

Bad medicine 
going down,
doled out in loving spoonfuls,
still leaves burns
your sugar can’t temper.
What cruel apothecary —this chemical romance—
that blisters wanting lips
and scalds the tongue,
makes flush the palest cheek—
red hot—
with a heat, synthetic and caustic, 
making me hollow—this playground for echoes—
and smoke-choked.
What to do with this melted skin
that blurs the line between
you and me,
this addictive crash 
of candied pain 
that boils and bubbles 
like black tar heroin in a dirty spoon, 
leaving nothing 
but pitch in its witchery’s wake,
except wait…
…for that next opiate kiss.

***

Originally published at Fugitives & Futurists

Traffic

Do you remember the time I slipped myself into the lobby of your building early in the morning, without buzzing you first, when the UPS man arrived with his dolly full of packages, and then exhausted and traumatized, but relieved at how easy that was, I climbed the four flights to ding your bell and surprise you and you let me in because you knew you had to because it was the morning after I found out you were cheating on me with a woman you had been with for close to four years and even though I had suspicions, which you gaslit out of my silly-willy head, I had nothing concrete on you until precisely 7:02 pm the evening before when you finally called me back after I texted you those two photos showing the smoking gun stuff and you said in a voice I hear over and over in my head yes it’s true I’m so ashamed and my stomach mutinied and my stomach said I am going to pull some seasick queasiness on you for maybe six months and I tried to go to sleep that night when Brenda gave me three sleeping pills and said better living through chemistry and I had never in my life taken sleeping pills before and didn’t realize they were so small and that amused me somehow and I lay down in her master bedroom which she gave up for me but I just tossed and turned for hours until I finally decided to get up shivering, throw on unflattering sweats and drive my betrayed self to Manhattan and I found parking near your street and waiting until after 8 am so your son would have left for school I snuck in with the UPS guy and dinged your door and you had to let me in and I sauntered angrily into the living room and craning my head to peek around corners and down the hall I said oh I see you slept alone last night all sarcastic and you just stood there wringing your hands with your eyeballs peering left to right back and forth left to right and your mouth stretched into this lame grin like maybe the cavalry would come or something and I guess just feeling like shit and not knowing what to do or say to this woman whom of course you loved madly but mostly you just fucked pretty hard and intense and squish was a word you used to describe the sex we had once and I thought that was a bit unsettling but that was before I knew you were cheating on me for the entire length of our relationship and I sat down on your couch and you came over just standing in front of me like a derp with nothing to say so I got up and grabbed a Pretty Lady apple from your kitchen like I always used to do and you tried to make a joke and say oh you only like to come here for the apples I bet heh-heh and I didn’t think it was too funny and I didn’t even eat it in the cute way I used to do which was to bite it all the way around the middle and make a little trench belt but this time I just took bites like some hungry wounded ferret and then I said did you tell her you love her and you squeezed your eyes shut, tilted your head back and shook it to mean yes and then I said did you tell her you wanted to marry her like you told me and you shook your head no with eyes still shut and that seemed to ease my stomach a bit and then you said look I have a lot of work to do today and interviews too and I think you said you had to tape your podcast and I said go ahead I’m gonna take a bath and I proceeded to take off my clothes and take a bath because I was shivering from waiting outside for 8 o clock to come and my stomach hurt from that Egg McMuffin I bought at 6 am from the McDonalds across the street and so I turned on the hot water in that tub that I had been in so many times and looked to see if the paint was still chipping off the tub walls and it was and I wondered if sometimes she ever peeled that paint too and after I warmed my bones I hopped into your bed and tried to close my eyes because I’d been up all night and the tiny sleeping pills were taking effect but first I called Mimi and told her I was in your apartment and she screamed, I mean literally screamed into the phone get the hell out of there right now what is wrong with you bitch because I was crying to her on my way into the city that night telling her how you had admitted you cheated on me and I guess she thought I was going to go into the city to kick you in the balls or something so anyway she did not approve of me telling her I was in your bed all naked but I didn’t listen to her but I figured I should at least put my clothes back on so I did and then I jumped back under the covers and dozed a little and then about an hour later you came in and said you had to go soon but I should stay while you took a shower and maybe I wish I had gone into the shower to fuck you hard now in retrospect but I am writing this three months later and I am not sure if that would have been a good idea or not and so I just kept my eyes closed and then after the shower you came into the bedroom in your ass-tight boxer briefs with your wet hair slicked and combed back which was a look that always got me hot and you sat next to me on the edge of the bed and kissed me on the forehead and cheeks and then you said thank you for catching me and I took my hands and ran them over your slicked and combed backed hair because you were hot when your hair was like that and you had and still have an amazing head and we kissed on the mouth I think in a gentle way and you had a big smile on your face and then you said come on we have to go and I got up and with hands on hips I said what were you thinking to lie for thirteen months and you said hell I am terrified of women and I am even terrified of you and that surprised me and then you said women always end up leaving me and that made me think that you couldn’t be evil just really fucked up but it only served to upset my seasick stomach big time and then you said come I’ll walk you to your car and we held hands and the city seemed silent for some strange reason even though it was bustling with traffic and you asked me where I parked and it was up on Amsterdam and we walked hand in hand and then there was a ticket on my car because I was not in a position to read parking rule signs that morning and you said oh you have a ticket and I laughed and said oh no you have a ticket and you said that’s right and you took it and put it in one of the pockets of your black skinny jeans and then you said I am going to change you’ll see and you said I can assure you that you will never see this behavior from me again and please don’t tell your brother and you said cats can learn since you had a habit of calling yourself Cat as if referring to a third person and this was another weird thing about you but I liked it and it always made me hot when you would do the meow thing and when I got into my car and shut the door you crouched your six foot two frame down to see me sitting bewildered behind the wheel and your face was grinning like a little kid who didn’t have a care in the world and I drove home and the world through the car window seemed silent for some strange reason even though it was bustling with traffic?

The Unlucky

I smoke my last one, 
“the lucky” as they call it, 
in St. Louis or Louisville,
these Midwest towns that share names, 
landscape in between unchanging,
cornstalks as tight as a fresh pack, 
plastic ripped off. 

Rivers converge, widen. 
Oceanless, no coast even close,
they don’t know which way to flow. 

You lit my cigarette in 
the back of Chez Charlie’s 
on a Wednesday like 
the start of any good romance. 
Why did you have to quit?
We played a game- 
I’d hide it from you, I’d lie. 
You’d notice me ashing 
my pen at my desk, 
say you knew I missed it.

Blow smoke up my ass, 
I blow smoke in your face, 
and so on.

I snuck out of the house.
From inside you read 
the messages written in cinder, 
a wayward drill across metallic night. 
We doused it all in lighter fluid,
watched it fume across the moon. 

Now I’m heading back east,
these final few drags like 
you’re hitting the good spot,
cherry to filter like you come too fast.

Resurrection

Heavy rain,
mudslide
at the cemetery,
many coffins exposed,
cracked open,
Uncle Henry, Aunt Madge,
tipped out,
spilled on the sidewalk,
where religion failed,
weather succeeded

I’ve Lost My Head and Gained Sight

he thought the head he gave 
would have me razzle-dazzled
like the others
he thought the head he gave
would make my mind frazzled
when he ghosted
he thought the head he gave
would be all he needed to kill
my spirit one day
let’s hope someone comes
and changes that bulb of his,
that dull, dull light

Homesick

there’s no kids left in the parking lot
no hidden porn in the woods
no stolen kisses beneath the wooden roof
of the playgrounds lonely slide

there’s no mistakes which need to be lived with
no gum to drown out old cigarettes
no pretend friends sleepovers
covering up for dangerous nights

there’s no circus to run away with
no vans waiting at the gates
no threats to the spaces of safety
where the playing is played for free

there’s no chance of getting lost here
no judgement, no curses,
no questions left to ask,
no unknown facts

there’s no fuck ups, no fights
nothing much left to hide
from past generations,
whose ugliness is seen through ironic eyes

there’s no dirty floors left on the high street
no art left on the walls
no home made bombs to wow whispering parents
from their easy chairs

there’s no sex
there’s no hate
there’s no fire
there’s no pain
there’s no need for excuses
when nothing’s left out
in the rain

Skyscraper Soul

This boy is six feet tall
feelin’ like a runt
in front of the drug store
tall, thin pretty black girls
putting the touch
putting the bite on me
for their high school basketball team

I love statue chicks
so my heart 
nearly burst
out of my sunken chest

Pulled out pieces of eight
from my sunken chest
I’m just a pirate primate
for a tall, skinny girl
Statue of Libertines
they need to dribble
need to free throw

Beautiful ostrich ladies
you stole my heart
and my buried treasure
here’s five dollars
and they leaped like
Birds of Paradise
only twice as nice

Georgia On His Mind

Georgia simmers in the heat,
snakeskins swirling at her feet.
Georgia loves the desert sand,
listening to her favourite band.
Georgia, sultry as the sun
was not born to be a nun.
Georgia lies upon her back,
leering men admire her rack.
Georgia turns to one and smiles,
as she displays her female wiles,
opening her legs out wide,
an open invite for a ride.

The rancher wakes up with a start
from his dream, with pounding heart.
He sits there feeling full of guilt.
Not just his spirits seem to wilt.
“What would the preacher have to say?
or my dear wife, sweet Lily May?
That cook’s too hot to have around
or my marriage will run aground
I’d best dismiss the temptress Georgia,
before I become another Borgia!”