(smote savants)

My brain is the hair on the back of her neck after she learned this was the last time she'd ever get to live the lie before time found it's own special line on catching up and spread her face along the nightly.

But even then. even still it didn't matter. life went right on as it fucking should even when the feedback level was rising to critical mass and all we could do was choke back the idea that we'd left truth for a cheap thrill. safe as anything that'd killed us before but so much, so fucking much more permament in fulfilling the adequacy of living.

And so we gave up again.

Just to sleep like babes in the empty arms of forgetting.

(shaking semaphore)

My brain is a tin hooker holding back the bedroom door waiting for our hero to sift out the perils of his sentence. this fucking breakdown again.

There is a spiral in my head. a loop that hasn't ended since i first remember taking a breath. words stumbling. gasping for the right sound and sequence. itching to scream along my fingertips and into the ether that is this...

Half the time i can't make sense of them. they whir so loud i can't tell which way to get up and at the chance again. they drive me fucking crazy. leave my face blank and hopeless when it comes to recognizing a goddamn thing beyond the basic function of my half-failed skin.

Late at night they shiver so deep i'd scream if i thought it would kill the sound. the notes. the phonemes. i forget this place i'm in. the people i've seen. the name of my sweetest kiss.

Everything.

Lost in the manic charge of words that will never make it to my lips. that'll die by the time i focus my eyes on the terrified spectre of a page.

And every morning they leave me thirsty that just one thing will be the same.

(harping debutantes)

My brain is a hardy fool toiling his subterfuge along as a lifestyle he so gladly raised in place of true respectability. when he whispers in the bathroom mirror, wine stains still puckering his lips, 'fuck that' and returns to unwielding dreams of success in bed and on record for all the world that might want to give a damn and soak him in before he turns again to ignoble pursuits.

Or just decides we aren't worth his time (even though he might just be right).

Because in soaking grey days i really couldn't give a shit either. wouldn't dare condescend to care what the outsiders have to say about the art world for the price of eighteen ice cold silver bullets (not my first choice, but across the borough). would rather rot my time than chase an idea i had two years ago even if that means i isolate myself three more days this week.

Fucking sundays.

Never once been worth their weight in salt peter even when there was the threat of god looming large enough over my family to get me in a pew on early mornings to eat the body of a man scripture says i'll probably never meet because i enjoy the pleasure of living far too much to apologize again.

And why should i?

I'm versed enough in my glaring regrets. i know the guilt i can't forget. why the fuck should i say a prayer for all the time that i spend drinking? smoking? eating meat on fridays? jerking off or fucking when the fates offer me the chance?

If i were a man as corrupt as i fear sometimes i just might throw myself in the arms of the word. i might seek solace from the coming fire in daily rosaries and enough penance to salvage bukowski from the bottom of the dead sea.

But then i'd just be cheating.

And i could never live such an unfounded life.

(then as armor)

My brain is a remedy in wait.

And all it takes is a kiss.

All it takes is a smile.

A sweet count on remembering those times when you loved so wildly each moment it still astounds you to think you didn't burst into waves of the most perfect oblivion and scatter out along smoldering stars.

But, then, it was easer to be invincible those days. to sit back and just be indestructable.

Sometimes i believe it still is. other times it's so fucking hard just to breathe enough hope in these arms i'd be damned if i didn't just sink into bed and waste my last thoughts on regretting not being the best goddamn son of a bitch i could have every day.

And i wonder if i'll ever be that madman again. i wonder if i'll just give up his ghost for the cheap allure of comfort and security. a fence. a home. a bank account worth checking just to see the interest accumulate in more than tangible things that keep my idiot grin on at 2am again.

Because it would be so easy. so fucking simple just to get on line with the idea that money makes the man a more formidable voice in the world of specious things and that my time would be so much better served in it.

I could give all this angst up and just fret about the little things that give the world its notion of economy. i could be a cog. a drone. a rung holding up the puppet head i could believe because those are his words coming out of my mouth when i revert to casual conversation over grim happy hours with the bees.

Then i see an old friend. i hold her hand. and i know that for the rest of my fucking life i will be who i am.

And i'm grateful.

(coal marker)

My brain is a lump in the back of his throat. a word. a hope. a breath lost under the waves of inevitability his life has turned out time and again even when he did his goddamn schoolyard best to make a change for the better. to make something of the rest.

But tonight there's just a broken ear and a crumbling ashtray to attet to another day spent hobbling back from the brink of extinction.

(...)

I cried that day.

(sleepless weather)

My brain is an endgame played to the last breath in the lines of strange promises i seem to remember when...

There are so many promises that sift through the cracks. that find themselves lost in the half-drunken broken social when men like me remember the times they spent fleeting from one dream of endlessness to the next.

But it's been a goddamn long fucking time since the miscreant of forever made its way through my livelihood.

Bullshit line...

My life.

Because i remember staring her straight in the eyes and saying that word after so many tears that should've just poured from my face into the cheap friendly's coffee we sipped hard and hopeless knowing that at that one precious moment we might never have the chance to kiss again. i closed my eyes. i held her hand. i knew all my mistakes and i wished i'd never seen her again because if it hadn't been for me then none of this would have happened.

There wouldn't have been this tortured goodbye.

She would've been...i might've...fuck...i don't know for goddamn certain but it sure as shit wouldn't have ended in such a tender array.

It certainly wouldn't still haunt me.

That's bullshit.

Honest, but nonsense.

Because i never would have known the true meaning of love if i hadn't held her trembling hand. if i hadn't told her that stupid story. if i hadn't looked in her eyes and known that there was something so certain in my heart i could've torn down the seemingly fearless walls of the world we'd called our own for so long even the notion of freedom hurt.

I would have never known beauty. i would have never known loss. i would have never known the true meaning of a broken heart if i hadn't seen it drifting from her young and beautiful face as i made a hundred promises i did every goddamn thing in my power to live up to...

But i failed.

Not in those months, but in later years.

And my horrors still linger in sleep.

(still end kicks)

My brain is a broken drop of stone held on in anxious hands.

And each night it's getting a little harder to believe...

In who i am and what i'm saying. what the fuck all i'm doing in this place where so many seem fulfilled (if not simply busy-bodied in the twitching light of a better life).

More than now it's what i was that's in question. all these stories i used to tell. so many characters that've grown foreign to me over the years. best friends saved now just for their anecdotal value. true loves. false pretences. so many things that seemed so real for so many years are breaching their final twilight goodbyes.

Or did they ever?

Was i just convincing myself of so much madness to ensure myself a place in my own pantheon of self-destruction? or did i live so much, so young that my time might fall in line with precisely the sort of thing that no one ever believes?

I used to joke that i didn't really think i existed before the age of thirteen. despite the fact that there was photographic evidence to the contrary. all a ruse, i assured. the crass cover up of shadow governments working in conjunction with my family to dissuade me from ever getting to the real truth of my inner workings. my life's struggle through childhood.

Now i wonder if i haven't simply fabricated the rest.

There are things i know for certain. i remember maisie. kevin. megan. justin. chuck. swann. jaimie. doug. smoking cigarettes. uncertain scars. i remember rob crying. i remember olivier coming out. i remember kisses and breaking julie's heart. the relentless joys in the simple convictions we carried in the face of a cold dark region i happened in by choice because...

I can't ever say for certain again.

I have my story. i know and i tend to stick to it. but did that whole chapter of my life really form out of spite or was i just walking caulfield?

Was i just the cheap imitation of literary predestination?

Was i, am i just a fucking parody of myself?

At this moment i have no idea. there's so much in question. so much askew. so much nonsense i carry in the day to fucking day fucking dimly contained trainwreck of a mind i'd be remissed if i believed a single fucking word of it.

But, yet, there has to be something. some purpose to all of this. some force that pulled me from the fat boy sweating his impotent rage in l.a. to the tattooed, chain-smoking, half-drunk i am today. more than cheap will. more than spite. more than happenstance rolled up in a great existential goldberg device.

I am someone, something that's come undone, ran away and hunched back from great distances to rat-a-tap my way again.

I just can't say for sure these days what made me up somewhere in between.

Still, even if my life is just a half-truth, there must me some great stories yet to fucking believe.

(on fractured lips)

My brain is a tomcat howl lost in the long alley behind the house where i was born again.

Into what?

At this moment i remember nothing. even when beer and vomit linger on the tip of my tongue and smoke soaks the last remnants of a day spent nowhere really worth mentioning at all. there's not a fucking thing i can cling. nowhere to glom and pray and imagine myself young and blind. old and tired. hapless and hoping some day might prove better.

At this moment i'm nowhere.

I'm no one.

Just this man too long a boy singifying...

(one short breath)

My brain is the fork is the neck in a young man's neck when he goes back to where he's been so many times it sickens him to count the number of mentions certain names have made. the fucking places. the tired events that shaped him with just enough hollow inside to hide from another pile of dirt and dozen goddamn laments.

Biding his time through the winter. through what should've been snow but wound up fog and rainy streets of brooklyn where he raised the better parts of his head (in spite of himself it still seems) in the company of a king.

But that old man's gone now. forever, at least. surrendered to the trappings of his own maddening age while his wife learns to cry again for the first time in so many years as a young man can remember between his vices and own life's obligations.

Twenty, at least. maybe more.

And now we all choose the path to forgetting. because it keeps us when we don't know which way to turn for love. for guidance. for the biggest smile you've ever seen in your life if even muddled by time.

And that holds us with him somehow, along the tortured line we'll all just have to walk alone until we have to watch him die.

And then...

(then on)

My brain is a call to the old city lights that always held me for a home.

(from discorporated)

My brain is that sparked shred in the rubble of sense memory, still creeping it's way along the back of my throat...

And i remember.

Fuckin' a right i do.

Those days when we thought we were incredible. when each word was laced with such fortitude it still stuns me we never made it quite as perfect as we ever wanted to (not that perfection was ever a choice. we spoke well, but we knew better. we knew these days of swine and poses would try and steal the thunder of our eyes but still we believed in ourselves and every fucking cheap thing we were doing to save our lives through a time that we all might have survived just as well [if not better] had we not met the dubious privilege of being our fucking selves). as glorious. as painfully pristine in the young of eyes of our dilettante years.

Who were we then?

Just kids. lost in the suffering of our age just like we should have been but i still can't help but imagine that we were different. that we made a difference. if just for the time we spent raising a screaming hell among those sandstone houses that we never called a home no matter how much we miss them now.

If only to know that we were remembered.

And sometimes that's something enough to keep me going. even if i'm fuller now. rattier. stranger in my own simple ways.

Because we weren't marked, then, by our mistakes (though they were so fucking plenty) but for being...

Fuck.

Just for being bold enough to survive the brunt of the profane.

(a break in ales)

My brain is the wonder in the dawn of our eyes where old men tremble and the youth still wrestles with the torturous crutch of innocence.

It's a new day coming. new year. new chance at living a life without the lies that mark us for cheap metaphors, running the grounds of self-parody with our daily swan song of self-destruction.

Do i think this year will be different? do i think there's a chance that this time i might just stand as tall as i think i have in the past? can i trascend myself? rise up out of hiding and burn down the house of cards i pretend is a chance at making and indelible stain on the face of humanity?

I fucking hope so.

Because the last thing i fucking need is to let this life get away from me again. the last thing i want is to miss out on every fucking thing i could possibly be just to dwell in the bonds of safety i wear so fucking regularly.

And it's time for me to get my head on again and start to living impossibly.