all ghosts sighing

it’s the punchline where you

can’t stop bleeding and he says he
forgets the joke but offers you $50 for
a night with your sister

gets you a tank of gas maybe or

enough beer for the weekend and you just
gotta finally feel these chromium days
deep down in your veins,
                           you know?

you gotta run to the edge of the highway

before the crows find the body

listen

i have yet to find a god i would

get down on my knees for

i keep talking the pills

but the pain won’t go away

and i am not the man offering money

and i am not the man receiving it
but i’ve met the sister

was driving to work when I

heard about cobain’s suicide

was sitting in my apartment thinking

about getting high when my mother called
to tell me about my father and i kept
waiting for the punchline

kept hearing small stones hit the

window next to my head

this fifteen year old kid down in the

drive who said
he’d seen the face of god

said his sister was on her way over and

this is how we end up lost

this is the year of election in a land

where the starving
are devoured by the obese

where your children spend slow afternoons

torturing and killing dogs in the
muddy stand of trees down by the river,
and someone asks how it ever came
to this, of course,
because willful blindness is a gift

because we have always been fond of

the taste of someone else’s blood

and the superheroes are dead in this

age of inevitable despair and
the politicians all just want
to fuck you hard

they don’t get the joke but they

know that you’re the punchline

they know how deep

the knife has gone in

easiest thing in the world,

laughing at someone else’s pain