Grunge

Is that biocide embedded in your lips? Are your arms constructed and put together with C4? I've been to this place a thousand times before. Deja Vu would be putting it lightly. No money to bribe my way out of this, no gifts to distract the berserkers, Nothing but dedication and it's not enough. You better run before you detonate. I am not good enough for you and we both know this. Don't feel guilty because I'll blame myself in the end regardless. The chain around the moon pulls it so close that I can taste the rock and hear the crows that call it home. They all say “don't follow.” I plan on nothing until this moment happens again. It never gets easier. Just a needle pumping more embalming fluid with each subsequent injection.

I Have Testicles

Pretty lady, lay your head on my lap. I'll tell you a story about a lovely girl and her romance with a .45. The sky flashed with crimson fireworks on their wedding night (her funeral) and she never saw happiness again. I am the steel in her grip and the claymore in your chest. The eternal man resides in violent flashbacks but you can see him right before your eyes right now. Feel honored, slut! Get down on your knees and open those jaws like you imprudently did with your heart. I'll make sure to sew your lips shut later. They only need open on nights I feel alone. Thank you but the prince is in another castle. You'll never find him in your new PTSD world where every man wears my face. Take the rejection and untruths with you to the crematorium. Some day you will burn but my chill will outlast the brightest stars and the hottest suns.

Insomnia

I am not alive, drifting through breathing and blinking motions. Autumn leaves and crisp soil fade to white nothingness leaving only the reaper hand of November. Distant cities are erected then demolished in a million spare thoughts. Armageddon behind closed eyelids. I just want serenity in the chaos, to throw a black sky over the burning world. But I'm reduced to jittering like a junkie waiting for his fix of pain. Sterilize the needle so angels can march through my veins. Let the harps whisk me into a thousand year coma where I can finally exist.

NO METAPHOR

The Boy took a quick gander at his naked room. White walls, beige carpet, and a solitary window accompanied only by a mirror, a wooden chair, and a dangling rope where the light bulb should be. His brown eyes looked over the slightly overweight and scarred body draped in a dirty metal t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans painted dirt brown. Outside The Boy's window the world is alive, something he could never relate to. Sounds of car horns and playing children led him to stand atop the chair. As the rope tightened around his neck he thought about money, women, time, and where all those things went (if he ever had them in the first place.) A chubby leg knocked the chair into the pearl wall with a loud crack. Remnants of two wasted decades poured through his cigarette stained teeth and faded away into nothing. He dangled there for weeks. The Boy finally lived!

Note From My Future Self

I hope by some unexplainable miracle that you get this and read it but I don't have high hopes. When you live in a gutter, the only elevated things are your mind from years of narcotics. I would simply tell you to give up on that stupid writer dream, throw a tarp over your mental scars, get a job, fall in with the plastic parade, conform, and plaster fake smiles on every wall. But I know you're too stubborn for that. So hear goes nothing: First, trust no one who uses the word “brother” as a term of endearment. They'll only use the blood to suffocate you. There will be pairs of beautiful eyes inviting you into forever. Don't follow. It's just where sanctuary and kindness go to die. Family ties may be strong but don't rely on them to hold you together. You may ask “what can?” but I honestly don't know out of artificial means. Don't let other's venom poison you. The only antidotes are apathy or inflated arrogance. Avoid parties. They're only filled with countless people you'll never relate to and the mornings after just paint you to look like a stunted clown. Kill your emotions and drag the corpse down High Street to show them all they'll never win. Oh, and for God's sake, don't listen to any notes claiming to be from the future!

Us

God have mercy on the High Street suckers and their liquid sorrows on tap. Yuppies exhausted from the endless prostitution of anxiety stumble on straight sidewalks, suicide bombers ignorant of their ultimate fate. We're already in Heaven. All our mistakes turned to angels when they inhaled the burning forest. They blessed us with blemishes and tainted minds. We once rode into the sunset with a rusted pick-up truck while the jury gave chase in sports cars. For a split second, life exploded into a mess of contradictions only to reappear in the shape of a flower on the their mass grave. We deserve no less. Life has lost its edge and the ghosts keep spiraling into futility.

The Brittle Dandelion's Last Vision Before Getting Trampled Underfoot

Fuck you all! I'm taking my cannonball and going to the deep end. You'll never stop me. The crows encircle a new moon and pieces of me are in each of their stomachs. Reality cracks to reveal two entities laughed out of Heaven, scarred and burned with stunted thoughts. Lord have mercy on the corner man playing marbles with his own bone marrow and the child who embraces nihilism. The bottle is pointless. The heart is pointless. The cross is pointless. Mr. Denton has broken his glasses on the front line of a personal apocalypse. I can't read the words on these walls with my cerebellum hogging the spotlight. Persistence is futile.

To No One In Particular

You have hands of gardens, voice of oceans. Eve contradicting the unwashed heathen at her feet. I know I have not been well but place me in that jacuzzi in your eyes and I'll be born again. Watch the scars peel from the flesh and down the drain to oblivion (where the ex lovers go) Let's ride high on a chariot through back roads while my esteem drags on the gravel below. The horses may cry into pure midnight but your skin flashes with miracles that put all the doctors and saints to shame. Take my discolored palm and lead me to your bed where I can dream wide awake of being a God instead of a beggar. You can give me your sorrow and foibles. I'll place them in the black hole within for you to stitch with your lips as the Mongol Empire burns in our embrace.

...But I'm Not Bitter

I could tear her down from that tightrope leading to the gator's belly or rip apart the curtains shielding gorgeous noon. Galaxies birth, die by minutes and the oceans have dried to featureless canyons. They seemed to have dissolved on those nights I never got to speak (countless words never uttered.) Friendship teeters like a snow globe balanced on a needle during an earthquake. Can she pinpoint when all the playful nudges and kisses become fatal domination and control? His love runs on sugar in the gas tank but all she can feel is the sweet taste before ignition. A million insomniac wars and suicide mornings could be avoided if I still gave a damn. It's not even worth an “I told you so!”

Glitz Pig

This game of strip poker has been drug to the morgue. Shed the skin that took you hours to process and toss it to the semen-soaked floor. Just dance! Show us your stuff, lady. They'll go gaga! Claim the snowflake and grab the sand grains. Pyramids have lost their tenets, mummies stripped down and bedecked in severed stuffed animal heads. Desert air tainted in cough syrup pushes the remedial army to some bad romance. You're not qualified to speak for a generation that's already wandering. Seas can't split if the leader is cracking graves of those who aren't even dead. Go ahead, show me your po-po-poker face. I'll call your fucking bluff

Pornography

Justice in blowtorches. Childhood sweethearts lose their virginity at the front line of a gang war. Bullets and semen shake your hand at the 5:30 traffic jam. Stuck just as planned! Every doomsday plot is hatched at a red light. Cubicle villains write a series of manifestos entitled Erotica for Fecalpheliacs. The pages line cribs of future strippers and street walkers, bred to imperfection. No sympathy shown to babies baptized at whorehouses. Place bullet casings in their rattles, tie a paper noose on the swing. Little boys make their first dollars with lemonade laundering. Little girls get their first kisses under a roofy's influence. This is our future. An orgy of lepers dehydrating under an exploding sun.