i used to

think i was slightly original until i relapsed, totally relapsed into this complete worthless and utterly typical lifestyle of being afraid submissive making all the wrong decisions--

and the gravel, the broken pieces of used-to-be-sidewalk crunching awkwardly below his jordans and that shitty job waiting to be wham!toasted, bam!served to the enforcers that won't enforce because they want our sandwiches and

i am your sky, i am your fucking sunny day sundown and i'll shine on you until you flee to the shadows, the oscuro and let's ride all day long i want to lose myself and lose you so badly on these bullshit roads that will never end they will just change and dead-end and turn into bigger better BOULEVARDS! santa monica, hollywood rodeo drive oh please i will be anything you want if you just let me go down on you like i've been doing this all my life

fuck those compulsions to buy little stuffed toys that i can clutch and pretend into friends for myself when i'm alone-- and wrap those appendages (not arms if they can't support) about me why yes there's a bit of weight to be regained BUT FUCK IT REALLY darling because when i looooook in the mirror these bones are so much bigger like you when you're tangling me up in the sheets and i won't let you have me. she's so heavy.

and there is this nagging irrational feeling that i had a quarter in 1992 and when i least expect it, that quarter is going to be in my pocket again and there's nothing i can do but spendspendspend it.

i am so nervous i shake and coat myself in flour.

it

it's hitting me.

warbling

memphis is playing a cacophony for us tonight, baby
of cicadas screaming for a somebody,
of boxcars wishing for the past.
and one day,
this will course through everything,
a weak circulation from better days, too
veinous and steely to render a mistake

i can feel how still the trees are
now
even with the living things moving inside of them:

"I was in love once."

the crickets drown all my miss-yous
in this siren-dirtied air,
with my neurons forever synaptic between evolution and
how you always
felt.

things

are most evasive when needed.

simplicity

is the people that walk in-and-out of those misted glass doors,
drowning their slightly overpriced food in vats of reduced sodium soy sauce. always asking for a little more drink than can be drunk up.

a heroin-ruled lady barely existing in her marred skin, splayed across the hood of my car. never too unreasonable, so long as no one pointed out that she is really speaking to entities no one else can see. or perhaps we just don't care to see.

the cigarette she asked for that I do not have. that little cylinder of cancerous destruction that I will not hold carefully between my lips. I will not leave lipsticked stains on its filter. I will not tongue out careless smoke rings with its burning tobacco. I will not do any of these things because I do not have a cigarette. and that is simple.

what is not simple, not finite is currently in washington, fresh from oregon, still fresh in my mind. it steams there, hot and undisturbed as if it is still. and I feel every fat lip, every stolen breath on my dry lips and my now-clear lungs. a shadow of the pain they feel, but a shadow that is as familiar, relative and empathetic as pain can be.