there’s something funny about people nowadays

oh how I long for a renaissance 

do you remember the days when art was beautiful?
and we never heard of butterflies devouring flesh

we worshiped fickle gods with funny names
and courted beautiful women 

we knew the sound of death at a young age
(but I suppose that part hasn’t really changed)

men sang of young maids 
surrounded by flowers

never mentioning those soft
but sharp butterfly kisses

sweet roses around each neck
to mask the stench of death 

oh how I long for a renaissance

of men?
of art?
of love?
of suffering?
of life?
ah-
fuck it

for now I guess I’ll just finish my whiskey

and dream of the days of warm mead
and maidens with flowers in their hair
(butterflies in tow)

Lay Me Down

Yeah, well, fuck this shit!
I’ve had my fill of this crap.
Lost the job, money gone,
Can’t get no damn credit.
Title Loan was happy to
End up with my car.
Makes life hard on the feet.
The bar’s full of losers, but
They’re doin’ better than me.
Bitch kicked me out the house.
Sometimes the magic shaft
Ain’t enough to please her.
She found some new peter
With a steady income.
Got a damn future as bright
As that of a back yard dog
On a ten-foot chain in a
Nine-foot flood.  Jesus!
Jesus, baby, show me the way.
Gi’me a plan outta this mess.
Take that last long drink,
Empty the bottle, toss it away.
Lay me down on wood and iron.
In the night, the distant blast 
Of the horn hails the approach
Of the ‘midnight special’ and
End-game salvation.

In America, the good ol’ U.S. of A.,
Over two hundred people a year
Commit suicide by train.
I will not be one of them.

A Lion in the Reading Room

Nobody bothers to look when I crack open a beer.
They should. It is, after all,
a student library. 
I’m here to gain some knowledge,
a celebratory feeling
better than fretting because
I’ve already flunked out 
and tasted walking in straight lines.
Beer though, that’s a source
of inspiration abused
outside of academia;
the DNA to the pillars of libraries.

It takes courage to do what you love.
And so I do.

Empty is the New Black

The day crumbles and fails
and we’re half-assed Christs
nailed to the cross 
of whatever’s left of things.

We drink beer in the Tenderloin 
grimace beneath the sun.

The Great American Loneliness
drips from the walls of the sad hotels 
where the poets fuck and die

and the latest thing 
we thought would save us 

we burnt through it in a day.

There’s a guy with a boombox 
strapped to his bicycle playing 
music from another world

where you could still imagine 
something other than 
the dreariness at hand.

There’s a man on a corner 
leaning on the liquor store

he’s got enough losing tickets
scattered at his feet

to build some kind of kite or boat
and get the hell away from here.

Awake to Nightmares

the severed head of medusa flies through spheres
copy and pasted endlessly as screens show raped
words for fame
lick the hands of Dr. Mengele an iron taste
of human shame
the ratline ties a noose around my hopes
they suffocate but won’t die the invisible hand feeds it
substance for conscience
caged in by bones and teeth and scalps
resembling markets
in an absolute darkness the interior is superior
but the doors are shut
the lizard king drowns in the blood on the street
graveyards in Paris buried the best men
a shotgun blast through the mouth leaves a
generation dead what followed was trauma
art as dissociation a line was erased
irrational emotion and obligation
Eichmann reserved claiming innocence
as teenage girls sell sex for the prude
taste sweat and tears the salt of our wounds
I am a wound in Limbo the philosophers
have disappeared
evangelist radicals scream the truth the left ears
of listeners sown shut
a gaping fire pit of hate mistaken for a mouth
that doesn’t close
ants crawl on skin the cliche withdrawal the ants
are norms not created by fiending brains
my toes on acid they dig into the ground unable
to move as fish fly through the sky carrying
moral travelers
hyperbolic adjectives smack my brain
I cannot sleep
I awake to nightmares

Autoflagellation

HARD 2GET huffs up my neck, sharp 
as the knife of the scribe who scrawledon the wall of Gomorrah, which he 
smuggled to Avignon for Pope John 
XXII (so smooth he could’ve 
had him, in sissified Buddha-arm 
sleeves), then headed to Southern 
California to meet sex-addicted 
hookers and their clients at the Lost 
Oasis where he must’ve got his 
knuckles tattooed like that.

“I’ll make you squirm like a 
pig on the grill,” he said. Like a 
girl on the pill, you heard—as much as 
you’d like to have gone back in time,
just to say you won.

After-dinner swig. Krack. The bloody 
edge of a black eye. You never knew 
what you would learn, what you 
must decide upon.

Your tears smell salty on his breath, 
and his foul taste from the last over-
lubricated orgy will make 
you cry even more. “I’ll take you 
to the beach, where the brown sea and thrashed 
sands’ll remind you of your insatiability.” 
He says something to you about tanning 
beds and cancer. You can’t concentrate. 
Everything comes back to you: sprawling
naked on a barstool with your heart 
hammering on your bladder as you tried 
to remember what you’d been 
researching at the library.

“…you want it in your fat beautiful
mouth before I put it in your fat ugly 
broken heart? I’ll knock that whoreface out 
of you with the force of a yellow firehose. 
You’re fucked, now and forever. And if you ever 
see me again, you’ll know exactly why. No 
more advertising—it’s fucking time.
You’re gonna have to suck the 
foaming top off of mine.”

On and on he went, little chains of 
explosions and gallons and gallons of 
concentrated fillips. When you’re fucking 
that high, you can’t take pleasure in
just pleasure. You want to…you want…
to punish yourself. So you give 
yourself to his manic jabber.

“You gotta give it all 
to me. It’ll feel too good 
to be true. But it will. 
You don’t know much, but you 
know that. A hooded creature with 
keel-like teeth has taken your 
heart away. Yeah—I can feel your 
nova vigor ebbing. I see all your 
wounds. You don’t know 
who you are.”

It’s too much. The cracks in your 
timeline start forming all over again. 
Shadows strain to give birth to 
the unknown in front of you from 
the should-have-known 
behind you.

Misery is a Blue Mountain

Misery is a blue mountain
And black water runs putrid
Along her sides.
The birds who nest along her walls
Smack their smudged wings together
And their birdsong is derisive laughter
And the word No.

The sun never appears.
The rain never arrives.
Her body is weeds and mud.
You will not smile
And you will not cry.
You will stare into her face
And she will not acknowledge you.

Helpless and immobile
Before this impossible blue mountain
With putrid black water
Gargling down always
Along her sick sides

at the hotel california

you’re the one 
that put the dead 
head sticker on 
a cadillac
 
ironic at best as 
you always hated 
don henley and 
never cared to 
stay at the hotel 
california
 
of all the assholes 
in this town
 
you only wanted 
to be the coolest 
one
 
the kind of guy 
that peaked in 
high school and 
missed that stage 
of life where an 
early death creates 
a legend
 
now, only a footnote
 
a funeral that can’t 
be made to on a 
tuesday night

ghosted

I stumble through 
luminescences of rain:

awake at dawn, sweetened 
with salt, 

palms crusted like 
my knees, 

whiter than white. when 
river redgum roots snake 

and tickle my 
unsandaled toes, I gasp 

apologies and soak the sludge 
with my own blood. 

moth-haunted and fly-
haloed like some pale 

swamp-goddess of 
degenerate creation, 

I spit dew from my 
rosebud mouth and curse 

them more for taking the canoe
than what they 

(falsely) 

thought was my
virginity.