the skull, the feet, the palms of her hands

 

cold in july and the sound of

dead air moving in through open windows

 

sound of twilight

 

ghost of man ray

 

and all objects that exist

exist without end and all objects that

fade fade without memory and so

take comfort in failure

 

be locked up for your views, or be

shot and left in a field for the crows

 

be exiled

 

don’t believe for a second

that you’re not an island

 

don’t build prisons from the

bones of your children

 

allow yourself small amounts of space,

all blossom and decay, all fingers and

longing and soft, warm flesh

 

dig deeper down to sunlight

 

moist earth

 

moss and vines, the shapes of your life

distorted by a slow consuming, the sound

of your voice from a distance, five

miles and then ten, one hundred

and then a thousand,

and stop saying i love you

 

stop believing your own lies

 

consider what it is you still

have when there’s nothing left

 

open the wound just to

make a little more room

THE FUTURE IS COMING TO BEAT YOUR ASS

 

a cage in the forest

 

tell the blind man there's

nothing to see

 

let the politicians

fuck your daughters

 

don't settle for the facts when

the truth is what really matters

 

don't worry about man ray

 

dead now for 30 years in

paris, and i still keep waiting

for his call

 

i stand on the edge of the

porch roof, next to the

hole in my house where the

light pours out

 

look

 

the days are shorter now

and all of my fears that much

closer to the surface

 

no amount of poetry will

ever cure cancer

 

no man who would ask for

your vote would

ever give you his in return

 

these are things to think about

while you watch dorothea

undress, and when she asks if

you love her, you should smile

without answering

 

you should

kiss her breasts

 

words aren't the enemy,

of course, but it's always

best to act as if they are

[i get this feeling, it’s such a bitch]

 

or all of the suicides out

freezing in the sun, or all of the rest of

us laughing in empty rooms

 

drowning behind closed doors with

severed hands and crippled hearts and

are you here to apologize to the junkies or

are you here to wipe the earth clean?

 

are you in love with

the idea of being in love?

 

it happens all the time

 

the age of unwanted children

                             never ends

 

truth, supplanted by the

idea of truth

 

j christ and all his crippled sycophants

looking for a fix, looking for

the asshole who owes them $50,

looking for teenage pussy while me &

st. amanita are out drowning in the sunlight,

out crawling through the desert,

alive in this year of dying but

worried about the future

 

junkies and suicides and the

always-rising cost of freedom

 

the tyrants and their whoreboys

 

and you gotta fight, guns or no guns,

and you gotta be ready to bleed

because every age is the age of fear

 

every forgotten song is

the one that should’ve gone to #1

 

and we know the words to all of them,

me & amanita,

and we choose life over

life spent on our knees

 

we drive through

ghost town after ghost town with

the radio up and our windows down

 

with our tongues cut out

 

no one hears the truth if all they’ve

ever known how to do is talk

dali, drunk on the eastern bank of the tioughnioga river in the year of my birth

 

this quiet knowledge, this

unspoken admission, this stupid goddamn truth

that all of your great adventures

are in the past

 

that nothing can be touched without the

ever-present threat of doing it harm

 

not by you, of course, but by 100,000,000

others just like you, which is just a

prettier way of saying by you

 

listen

 

a desert is a desert

 

what we were has nothing to do with

who we are

but maybe we can forget this

 

maybe our truths no longer hold any pleasure

 

we never get tired of fucking

just of fucking each other

 

windows left open on early summer afternoons,

you naked on the floor with dying

flowers spilling from your open mouth

 

sunlight and cold wind and

dreams of escape

 

that exact moment where i finally stopped

growing up and just started growing old