between your empty wallet

Nostalgia like a clean hanky,
By days end is bloodied
And green.

Long gone damp cloth
Left to clam up the space in your pocket
Between your empty wallet
And the key you still think is there.

What will you let me remember?

Maybe the smell of dank
Olive oil,
Or any such provision
Allocated by drunks at
4am for
Use in frantic
Acts of naked lunacy,
Bent double out window,
Across floor,
In front of TV,
Or not at all!
And in
My mind,
Uncovered,
Shallow,
Honest
And Implicated,
I find everyone
I ever met
And ever knew,
Eclipsing and betraying them all,
In this act
To recount,
So to
Forget once more,
All the things
We once
Lay living to.

Nostalgia swells,
Revealing
The cause of
My Love,
Reminding
Me of
The silent Longings
And private battles,
Of
Darling Hope
And the
Shroud of Melancholy,
The leaves long
Ground under foot,
The clouds since
Blown overhead.

and otherwise

True rain automatic
And the vessel
Passes through
And by,
Wind,
Instant cool
On shaven cheeks,
I won’t tell you
What you want me to
And you won’t say
What I need you to

Boxcar cinematic
And the world
An arbitrary
Device
That lets
Us build and birth
All manner of silly
Creations,
Human
And otherwise.

lies and fixes

And now we come
With blood on our knuckles
And semen in our hair,
As minstrels
And murderers,
With teeth that won’t fit our mouths
And torsos that won’t belly our guilt,
We are hapless gritty friends,
And voyeuristic strangers,
Bludgeoned by dollars we never had
And children we never knew,
We are strewn across countryside and city alike,
With an idea of what we’d prefer,
But without a lifetime to comprehend it,
We are loveless, afflicted,
Romancing our degradation with lies
And fixes,
A shimmering dissatisfaction
Revealing a pale hope,
And then in a wall of sound
Or a cowardly chord
We look for the power-up
But just as often ride the numb-out.