(less list)

My brain is the imperfect curse.

(stumble and lisp)

My brain is a train crashing through the frozen city streets leaving behind a hundred accidents. a hundred heart attacks. a hundred glaring marks of beauty to keep reminding me why it is i stay so fucking alive in this place after all these years unsure of just who the hell it is i was doing my damndest to be.

I have the tendency to forget, sometimes.

And when i do i end up crawling around in those unkept spaces where i keep all those dark moments i don't, for a precious fucking moment, feel like mentioning because tonight my hair is clean. my heart is healthy and my blood isn't boiling with the seventh wonder of my new world here in sunny queens.

I'm also, peculiarly, sober.

There's a correlation to be made there, i'm fucking sure but right now i don't give a damn about connecting the commonplace excess of vice with the unwravelling of my headspace.

I want to feel good. i want to smoke well listening to the rocket boys who i've known as long as any of new york's drunken alleys.

And when i wake up, i want to feel the same.

(inches shy)

My brain is a dream lost at sea.

And i just need to be typing something. writing. spilling out the last decent bits of myself so when i lay my head to rest this morning there won't be a goddamn thing to keep me staring at the ceiling. longing for the world outside. the time in her arms. the penance of letting loose the thin guise of control to wake up late for work fully clothed and wonder just what the fuck it was i was thinking...

Perhaps i just needed to remember gg.

Smash my head with whiskey and sing tunelessly into the night.

No scars this time, though. no bruises to speak of. just the lamenting of hungover days with nothing to show but aches and stains.

Fuck it.

I'm tired of thinking. tired of laying bright and sleepless in the fresh light of another day without question.

It could be worse, i know. i could break up and roll over the cold ignorance of bliss just like those poor patsies who live their lives without the slightest mark of regret.

Not that i have so much to feel sorry for. my most grandiose failures are far fucking enough behind me they hardly ever creep up at night. its just the simple inner turmoil that's keeping me alert enough to waste my time.

And i'm trying to make sense of myself with all these words words words fucking words that don't mean as much as fucking action which would all be well and fine to take up as an answer if i knew just what i could do to set my life back right up where it needs to be.

But right now i'm bleary. i'm broke and my heart fucking hurts.

I want to be happy.

I want to be in love.

And i don't want to wonder why.

(shiver alacrity)

My brain is the match in a wax museum, doused in gasoline and tired of questioning the tight-lipped tenor of the crowd (the same ones standing, staring again and again at the dead rendered population).

And the question remains, do i burn it all to the ground?

Do i light myself and burn out in the grey morning of another thursday knowing there's a world out there with more to lose and a woman who'd call me incredible in the soft terror of accusation?

Or do i hold fast to my sulphurous light? do i keep my threat a secret until i'm ready to face my time clean-shaven and unafraid of the consequences of my inevitable acts?

We're not talking finality today. nothing grim in these swollen skies. we're talking the potential i can remember sometimes when my head clears and i rise tall and ready to eat the fucking air.

(with softer lips)

My brain is a last chance at the end of our song.

(quel)

My brain is sixty days away...

(blind run the southern lights)

My brain is the triumph of a thousand miles lost to laughter and cigarettes, new friends and ice cold beer. to the carolinas. to virginia. to maryland and the terrifying old woman inclined to peek through her window in the dead of a sunday night to watch us scramle with our bags to the murder motel's last available bed (though she belonged to alexandria).

To stale fireworks. to stained mementos. to the risque cafe and the long coming out that i am, sometimes, a fucking pussy when faced with a strange naked ass and a black cup of trucker coffee.

To the suck of disco. to the steve miller band. to rocking out at the right time with my flask held tight in my right hand and not a fucking car in sight for an hour except, of course, for the jesus truck that loomed close enough on our rearview to make us wonder if it was time to forge a hot ticket to salvation.

To horror shows we could call heart-wrenching even if the bloody snowday all but broke our backs with guffaws.

To warren. to michelle. to heather. to ira. to nina and the girl who wouldn't earn her tip (as greg put it).

To poppers and cheese sausage soup with killian's red for breakfast. to krispie kreme. to the q shack and all the waffle houses we passed on our way back to the inner harbor.

To cartoon memories, the lurid sigh over cherry pie and ice cream that drove poor rushin mad.

To occaquan. to twenty minute naps. to rest stops founded on frigid air and scatological revelry.

To the knowing that even though i'd come home broke, at the very least, we could say we made a frantic dash one more fucking time before we lose our lunatic to a picket fence on the other side of the earth (as far as we're concerned).

Fuckin' a right we did.

(quarter left)

My brain is a toast to letting the past go for a night.

And i'll let it slip simply. for now, at least. i'll coat my heart in whiskey and let it sleep at least two hours longer in the morning. i'll let myself not give a shit because all the self-pitying late night rhetoric, sometimes, just isn't fucking worth it.

Tonight i'll think of beautiful women. i'll think about forgotten music. i'll sing louder that i should considering the stumbled state i'm in (or would it be just perfect?).

I'll let my life happen, unabated, one more cigarette in my hand just to know that i can.

Words will fail me. my eyes will fall. i'll shiver in half-winters and i'll wish nothing more than to say goodnight on crystal shores left alone in the moonlight.

Love, unaware.

Unfettered.

Unafraid.

(carve the wall eye)

My brain is an adage scraped off the old stall. a trash vision. art once, perhaps, by the drunks but in the end just a line. just a foolish fucking line to kill the voice once and for all.

I met it once with fascination. with vigor that shook harder each day. rattled my bones and revelled in the pain of pronouncing each fucking moment again and again like it was really happening. like i had been there. seen it. known the depths with which dead men would sink to discover they'd lost it all before they could remember first opening their eyes.

And i might have.

I certainly tried.

But i've never known what it is to kill a man. to watch a young girl die and walk away unscathed for the cheap stumbling hours between the last goodnight and the time before the hangover decides to rear its screaming head and kick your fucking heart in one more time for the measure.

And again just for fuck's sake.

I only knew that i was rotting and all i could do to escape my own witless decay was mark it in the pages that only ever see the light of day when i feel inclined to mention that, 'yeah i wrote a book once. someday i'll finish the screenplay.'

And i just might if i could find a valid reason why.

Because i don't really give a shit about the prospect of money (though i think, sometimes, it might be nice to bear a pair of new jeans). i certainly never thought one bit about fame.

I just wanted to make a difference. to leave the slightest dent in any day other than my own. my mother's. my...

I wanted to grip a dying nerve and squeeze an earnest scream from those people who live day to day content enough in their own enterprises to not a give a damn that they're fucking killing the only precious piece of themselves.

To have some fucker read me and want to love recklessly even if, in the end, all they had to count on was their suffering indignities.

But now i worry that i'm too weak.

I'm tired. i'm uninspired. i'm my own self fucking parody.

And there's only so much more i can take before i grab the old straight razor and carve myself a new identity.

(even heaven)

My brain is a year long before the movie ends, when there were young lovers still dreaming inside us. when there was a smile on her face every morning waking up, long as always, in his arms and all she wanted was to watch him sleep and breathe five minutes more.

She was his, then and he would have given it all up in heartbeat just to know he would always be hers.

They never used forever, though. they didn't need the words.

Perhaps they should have. perhaps it would have made all the difference that cold december, barely standing, drunk on broken knees and all he should have wept if he'd only remembered how.

But he couldn't then and he still can't now and the idea we'd ever have a happy ending is as foreign to me as that fucking eternity i once held in these scrawling hands before she knew i'd never be the one and it might take me a life to believe her.

(cheap thunder)

My brain is a cat shot taken on the chin.

And there's still no hope of sleeping. not on a sunday. not when there's a fresh morning to face. new week. new slurs and pipe dreams.

And i'm grinning without reason. thinking about my time as an idiot kid and all there's left for me to see. a girl. some life. the revelries of forgetting, forgiving and friendships i'll never come to expect.

Just 2am and fine with me.

(half lightning)

My brain is the rot on the turkey neck, soaked in whiskey and wasting away in the corner of the old room we fell into for parties before this fever fucking set in and now...now its just a fucking place to wait until its time to sober up long past that last cigarette and anecdote you've heard a thousand times before.

The one about the love lost. the one about the song. the one about the headwounds and close encounters with the cops. the guns drawn. the california sun. the moments we pulled off so long before our prime. the moments we cheated death. the times we wished we'd died.

Am i tired of this all? do i wish i had some more than a stomach full of rich food and another gallon of alcohol?

I suppose.

It might be nice to have a fucking thing to call my unflinching own, but i don't. not that vice is so much better but at least with them i blend. wrap up in intoxicants and run rampant away from what screams in my head every time i try and find some rest.

Escapims, babeez. stale death at its best.

Sometimes i love it. raise the glass high in the dream that this pleasure could last for fucking ever. other days its just a cheap course for running from every heartache until its just too goddamn late to sober up.

And then we're fucked.

(cull disparate)

My brain is an escape plan hatched on stolen fingerprints.

And in a rare display of objectivity, between the bemoans and the fuzz of a day better spent sleeping alone in the cold, i am reminded again that there is always solace to be found in the familiar nooks of an archway cookie.

Rocky road, these days.

(turn density)

My brain is the train of dead light on an autumn day when time knows better than to ask us for a single goddamn thing but patience that, soon enough, we'll wake up in the warmth of spring and find ourselves again.

(coarse prospect)

My brain is the trail of an upstart frantically writing himself in black and white.

(raze interlude)

My brain is a mouth at the edge of the line murmuring the sweet nonsense that keeps us thinking in the days to come we'll all be fine just so long as the sublime end of the new hereafter comes in time to keep us from realizing that what we swallowed was a poisoned pen at best.

And so i keep my eye on the swords sitting idly in the corner of this smoke-filled room. i trace their shadows by my flickering light and wonder if there were ever i time i would pick them up in defense of my ends.

Not that would make so much of a difference. the goddamn things are dull as a nub and weighted all wrong (or so my hapkido queen once told me over meat and ales by a dying fire).

Besides if i've got anything like a fight left in me once these words have fallen, finally, flat then it's in these arms. these short scarred fists. this tattooed, battered pale fucking frame.

Its held it's own, i suppose, before. its taken a beating or two and made it ten years on.

Still, these days, it'd take a hell of a lot more than the end of the world to get me to raise my hands and fight like a man when i can hide much better inside a cowardly tongue.