hurry up

i'm disoriented driving the wrong way
down the street
with some girl unconscious in the back seat
there's duct tape over her mouth
i can't even scream
the passing lights slide slowly off my windshield
like waves on the beach
my hands are bound behind me
wait wait here they are. the sirens
here come
the police

i was wrong to take him on
i used to be a pretty smart guy
(for a private eye)
but there are somethings you can't fight

(like drugs and duct tape binding
your hands behind your back)
i'll be dead before i even hit the ground

god, you have no idea how much i want to get my ass kicked

times change and people change with 'em

for once you surprised me
when you showed up on my doorstep.
you told me i didn't have any answers
but then you asked for them anyway.
with your hands outstretched.

i almost told you to stop being
a vain and destructive false idol
before you turned your adoring fans
into nothing but the pavement under our feet
but you don't get it.

you're an empty bottle.
you're a shotgun shell.
you're a stormy day.
you're a summer clothing catalog.
you're the bike i had when i was ten years old.
you're a candle stub.
you're the ties that used to bind me to this place.


look, just go home, okay?
i don't want you.

sic transit gloria

once you were the lamb
and i can vouch for that but then you stopped
watching out and you didn't even care
when you turned yourself into the slaughterhouse

it stuns me sometimes how much you care
about yourself, every little detail
in syzygy: your venomous egotism, your careful persona,
and your mascara — not a lash out of place

on my back; you placed them in the
shape of a tic-tac-toe grid (in the spirit of fun)
and everyone's playing
but you win every time

is it all clear for you now
is it all clear for you now

i cannot bend my arms to look like wings

in the morning i always think, i could stay
right here and forget how the human voice sounds but today
is not the day i throw my thoughts in reverse
and when i step outside i start coughing from the cold

passive hallways make me wish i was a wolf
but when i bare my teeth, everyone assumes
the flash of white is just a shiny patch of wool
sometimes i feel like a fucking sedan

but sometimes i feel like a kid sitting in the sand
making castles that no one lives in
the slippery grains make it hard to stand
back up but it's okay, i'm in my own little world down here

it is not friday yet

you wrote me
in ten short days
without the aid of pen and paper
you wrote me without color
you anagrammed my face
and made acronyms out of my emotions

you left out letters
and used words whose meanings
you did not know
you wrote me on the last page of your notebook
and closed it for good and put it
on the shelf
beneath the cigar you're saving
for your twenty-first birthday

you wrote me
you wrote me

are we fools and cowards all?

sometimes i think of writing something called
"this one's for you" but i always
stay my hand at the last moment because
it is becoming less and less common for me
to have something to say

at least something that would raise you from
your fifteen-minute descent into the incongruous sunshine
or raise me from my intermittent immersion
in sweat-drenched t-shirts and sheets that no longer scare me
(though i have a feeling they should)

sometimes i ask myself when
all of this
will matter less than you

tomorrow i am going to wish you
happy birthday
one hundred times

o androgen

every so often i wonder if
six to twelve months might really mean
four and a half, because, you'll see, in
four and a half months i will be

on my way to doctor class and
people will be looking at me so
i would like some degree of certainty
which is, as they tell me

impossible

(apparently it all depends on genetics
but did all this shit come from genetics
in the first place? at the dinner table i don't see it
so maybe i'm just the unlucky one in ten thousand)

(yes
ten
thousand)

(unlucky is a big fucking understatement)

every so often i stop believing in anything