in the soft, weightless beauty of
de chirico sunlight
in the silence of his shadows
we are not quite ghosts here,
and we were never really lovers
is this right?
and freedom, anymore, is a
bottomless lake filled with corpses
it’s the necessity of taking sides
and how did this come to be?
who do we have to kill to
turn our own beliefs into law?
figure this out
and the future is yours
pinned down in the upstate desert,
all the same old dreams of suffocation,
of being lost,
of the house falling apart like
wet cardboard
this woman i knew who hated herself
yet swore she loved me
twenty years of silence and then
a letter from her husband
telling me exactly how i was going to die
thirty years of driving down
unpaved roads past nameless trailer parks
where only suicides waited
and you call what you’ve lived
a life
but maybe you’re a liar
maybe we all are
point the gun wherever you want
i guess
and just pull the trigger
there’s always time
to apologize later
wake
up after the rain in
the same place you’ve always known
and wait to feel clean
time is not your friend here
you are only loved by those
who get something in return
think about your father here
and then think about
the emptiness he left behind
is it smaller than you expected?
can it be cupped gently
in bleeding hands?
listen
fear is a given in
any equation
the next storm is already forming
just over the horizon
doesn’t take a genius to see
we’re all fucked,
but it feels so good sometimes
to just sit back and
close your eyes
with
soft rain in the afternoon and
an
abundance of green
with
the dogs all hungry but
none
of them starving yet and the
simple
fact that this is one way to live
this
is only the blind man’s dream
of
the western ocean
st
maria in those last pale grey
centuries
before her ascension
told
her i loved her but
it
was more like need
was
cerulean blue and
darker
than addiction
the
highway into the desert
uncorrupted
by religion
littered
with bones and the fragile
skulls
of missing children and
i
am not a believer in the
age
of reason
i
am a different whore
than
the one you remember
found
new and better
ways
to hate myself
stood
naked beneath the smothering
heat
of august afternoons in a
neighborhood
of absence
of
locked doors and flatness in all directions
no
trees
no
birdsong
just
anemic shadows nailed to dead lawns
and
i knock on every door
but
no one answers
i
close my eyes but get
no
sense of waiting
no
sense of hope or potential
a
week’s worth of rain on the way and
then
the loss of everything we’ve
spent
the last twenty years amassing
the
simple joy of despair
a
small gift to give to my
sons
for when ordinary miracles
are
no longer enough
in the crush of
early morning fog
in this country of
missing fathers i am
waiting for myself
the dead have
all been born as
birdsong here and the
god of starving dogs
paces my street with a
young girl's blood
staining his
smile
i let the curtain
fall back quietly
let the light
of the poem flicker
and gutter out
but always a half-beat
too late
the house is on fire
without warning
the baby is awake and
screaming
and all the doors are
locked from the
other side
this is the story i
remember
you telling
the final psalm in the
book of rusted chrome
and i never asked
to sing it
never asked to
have it sung
to me
there is still
so much silence i
am hoping to hear
Stars,
no stars, no
story
without the need for
atonement,
no alleyways without the
drunken
fathers of sleeping
children.
No
grace.
No
forgiveness.
The
song of empty fields, and of
jawbones. Animals brought to ground,
covered
in blood, blanketed in snow.
Mythology.
The
continents raised up from the
ocean
floor, the oceans on fire. Filled
with
garbage, with poison , with the
bodies
of the last dozen holy wars.
You win
or you lose.
Your
God ascends or is devoured.
All
stories end with the
smell
of burning flesh.
says he
feels like shit even
with the pills,
even
with the booze,
and so
a little more of each and then
a
little more again
and he
says he’s got this
leaky
heart, okay?
subtle
pains and
dreams
of death and
what
about the children?
what
about the days
of
immortality?
turned
away for just a second and
they
were gone forever, and
so fuck
‘em
and
don’t talk to me about
cobain
at 65,
or sid,
or the
late great j christ
don’t
tell me how your sister
had morrison’s
baby
i
missed the summer of love but
was
around for the summer
of
manson, and that should
explain
a few things
i grew
up in the
age of
malevolent apathy and
i
thrived, and she laughs when i
tell
her this
says i remember you naked and
crying and
being led out
into the woods, and i know
for
a fact
that i’ve forgotten
how
this story ends
i
remember the boy’s voice and
i
remember the girl’s hands,
and
then nothing
the
absolute goddamn
boredom
of drugs, right?
the
fear of
surviving
youth
the
despair of growing old
says he
feels like shit and all he
can
think about is
feeling
nothing at all
