Be Still
Let the unease of quiet sink
our silhouettes into street gutters overflowing with
needles and bad hands from the dealer.
They say the house always wins but never the apartment
cramped and shivering with its own abuse
we huddle in the corner and quell our craving hearts.
Let it start today
or yesterday on the corner.
Keep us busy with the Devil’s playthings,
our idle hands gripping remotes in mothers basements
Fathers left, dead, dust in the whiplash.
Our new tradition is a basket-weaver for our lost selves,
bringing our erratic motions to the calm breathless
Water, below which we drown in the idea of our normal.
//
Burning smog cigarette racing through our freeway tunnels
$3.21 per fume we inhale and scorch for some sense.
Inhale benzedrine during my nose bleed for a sensory overload
Or for a normal and just feeling.
Life is an empty jar
Hard and frail on the outside with the hollow inside accentuating the contained
Lack of Substance.
Saturate, but not overly nostrils with the lack thereof
Fear coming over, as vision blurs in a wave goodbye
Feel again.
//
A burning sensation, our throats stay strong in the face
of drunken adversity. Average week then, now, and future.
A link between us and them that only grows more toxic the longer it
ferments in the toadstool rectum. Excess of liver failure,
down the hatch, revive my dulled semi-state of indulgence.
Make me whole, part of it, not self-reconstruction.
We are the self-righteous alcoholic,
bumbling down streets paved by long gone alumnus of Earth.
We are quivering under the weight of percentages and volume,
bigger is better, better to quell our bout of the shakes and
blabber incoherently in the incandescence of the streetlamp.
We are next in line at the booze vendor and next in line for the
warmth of trash cans ablaze in vacant alleyways.
We are drug-fueled fodder able-bodied for how long?
Let it settle into your system, hearts pounding like drums
faster and faster
till we burst into stardust at our apex
trickling down onto the heart.
To be still at last.
//
Where we wander is not your concern.
Long scattered to the wind as worm food,
you laugh at the comedy of fools as we take the stage.
Prescriptions under nameless kings
pin the skin wrapped tight
around our frail and crooked bones, smile
it's showtime. Lights flicker on through the smog,
sins race up our legs eager to dive down our lubed throats
ready for the sweet release of suffocating
potato muffler.
It’s going dark, dark, dark, bark
wood flooring catches our cascade as the world
opens the satin lined casket so we too may be relics looking
at the mess we were left, and we ourselves left.