Days of Vagrant Youth  

We sit around drinking poison 
that’ll give half of us  
cancer  
             and the other, madness, 
mistaking ill euphoria for 
wisdom of the moment.  

We’re

Your soul, yes, bright as a star in a blackened sea-sky. Something to admire from a cliff,
impossible to hold. 

look at me and how I just / sit around and fucking pout

Spirals in the / Sky spray out eight billion cassette tapes / So anyone on any other planet might wit / Just how thin earthly love has withered.

I am trying to love the crook in my back.

I have developed an awareness / Of my need to perform this fervor  / And what I thought was fear / Turned out to be excitement.  

The house’s cracked smile
hides behind spines of oak trees.

i tell them of the violences endured / & how i began working here at 17. / five days later: no longer able to speak, / nor walk, frozen in stillness.

burrowed in my
fear like I was making a home of it.

Open Windows
A Contrapuntal

The heat                                                                 here in Texas
is such to close                                     the heart and the rain; let

She was meditating with me / And eventually she was gone licked up by the surf / On a personal level, expressed in a fiction / That was the breadth of my loving and no thing more 

These untamed wild horses galloping inside these Trojan hearts / Like that beach that one summer / This one summer, it is all we get  
/ Slipping through our fingers like the sands of Ios where Homer lay in dust 

I loved you better as a vague notion. Better / as an uncountable thing. Better /
as an assembly of dog treats.

I grass-skied down the camp hill in my non-specialist shoes, drifted into the icy endzone with the kids,

When a bikini-clad granny cracks aces / At Virtual Poker  / The Avatar Dealer, / A flickering PAWG, / Winces or winks  

I'll say the metformin must be working. You'll tell me to message my doctor, ask about upping the dose.

ration the rest of the smoke, / spend hours tracing maps / to find the pub marquee 

You are new ink that will not dry.

But there, hand gripping faucet / It spoke in a language held only in the body

Why am I being so transactional?
Why am I being so weak?     
Why am I talking to strange men online?

I keep my teeth sharp / cus plush is still abundant // it’s a good reason to keep going, / biting the seam off jackets // biting the states off one by one

I am motion-sick with / a divination-death glimpse / of a carnival Earth

Fearless, sweet boy, / your courage is not lost. / I am uncontainable / ​​​​by nature too. 

good afternoon, passengers. this is your captain speaking. first of all, i would like to welcome everyone to my midlife crisis.

The knife turns, but blood in your teeth isn't poetic, even when I almost enjoy it