Your favorite song
On repeat
For eternity
Will eventually be
Hell.

I’m writing this poem
Almost in silence.
Silent besides the chaos on Lincoln.
But this is as close to silence
As I have access to.
How desperate this world has been.
How desperate this world has become.
So many humans,
Full blood,
Real human beings,
With infinite complexity,
Holding on by a hang nail.
Holding on to anything that’s left.
What’s left?
The only thing left
is everything worth our breath.
Cry desperation,
Answered by nothing but love and hope.
These broken sidewalks
Can be repaired.
These broken sidewalks,
Are ladders to the stars.

If a firework exploding
In an endless black sky
Can be painfully gorgeous,
Can a glass bottle
Exploding on a broken sidewalk
Be a poem written by the cosmos?
To what extent is a mess,
really just art?
I’m dying every day,
But if I died enough,
And I let all the things
I hold onto with white knuckles
Die along with me,
Could I find myself
Naked like I was
The moment of my birth?
Would I clean up that sidewalk,
Or find a more broken one,
Just to smash another bottle on?
If I am to make art,
I must make a mess.
If I am to live,
I must die over and over again.
And I must find something worth anything,
To get through this evening.

The key characteristic
Of our species
Is that we have the most insatiable appetite,
And we will eat until we die.
We all amount to
More or less the same.
Ask me how much
Of a ****
I give about Alexander the Great.
A human is the punchline
To a joke told billions of times over
By a universe that laughs
Every time we think we aren’t enough.
In a world so grim,
We need a jester,
Now more than ever.
So laugh yourself to the stars.

I found a fly in my shower
This Saturday afternoon.
She was on the floor, crawling slowly.
I tried to catch her,
So that I could set her free out the window.
But she had just enough energy to escape me.
And she flew around the living room.
it was just the two of us.
Buzzing about each other.
Trapped inside this apartment.
I must admit,
I felt less lonely with her buzzing about.
I considered opening the window,
To give her a chance at her freedom.
But I got scared about the idea
Of another fly coming in.
Then there would be three of us
Trapped here.
I’d be less lonely,
At their expense.
Didn’t seem right to me.
so I kept the window shut.
And we’ll both probably die here.
But we have beer and tomorrow,
For better or for worse.
We both need to get out of here.
Now the window
Is wide ******* open.
I’m stuck here with this fly,
Wondering how it got in here.
I live on the 10th floor on Lincoln street.
If that fly could fly all the way up here,
I wonder where I could fly to.
Now the window
Is wide ******* open.

I had no idea where the ground was.
I had plans with the ground
But I flaked like a bad friend.
I found myself in the stratosphere.
Bad friend.
The ground missed me,
I would miss it later.
She drew a bath
Of gasoline just for me
And then she smoked a cigarette on Broadway
Right next to me
What the **** did she expect?
And now I’m at reconciliation
Trying to pardon both of us.
The priest told me I couldn’t smoke in the church.
This is my incense,
And I don’t get why it’s worse than yours.
I got angry falling back to earth
At terminal velocity.
Thank god the ground was soft,
That god the ground is a better friend to me
Than I am to it.

Leave romance to the poems you read.
Let art be art.
It’s our escape
From a life full of sharp corners.
But let a mess be a mess.
Let black be black.
If had a nickel
For every single
ephemeral nuke ive kissed,
I’d have enough money
To buy a pack of gum
That takes their flavor out of my mouth.
Love inherently has motion.
It can be redirected,
But it can’t be stopped.
I was discombobulated,
But now I’m walking home
To a strong man with scars over his pupils.
He has survived every day of his life.
The quality of my conversations with myself
Makes her look
Like some rusty Farris wheel
On the forth of July
In some small town that’s asleep
That will never wake up
That I can’t wait to leave.
Forgive my lack of gentleness
My heart has become a broken place
With sharp corners.