All the good saint names were taken.
Love isn’t some epic anthem.
It’s a hymn,
hummed just loud enough to echo
off the plaster walls and
secondhand altar of this,
our Church of Uncertainty and
the Resurrected Saint of
being okay with that.
degenerates.
Mine is a generation of taboo.
We are tribal tattoos and cheap motel room honeymoons.
We are slander,
and slang,
and brittle teeth.
We are born-agains and suicides.
We are podium preachers and cracked-pavement prayers.
We are melted plastic and oxidized metal-
sometimes we gleam with the Liberty Green of corroded copper,
sometimes we crumble with rust and stain calloused hands.
We are the last stand of Art.
We are the manifestations of forbidden bloodlines
and insanity.
We are just as much our mothers
as we are our fathers,
and we are everything that they are not.
We are stigmata.
We are red paint on white canvas.
We are fast food coffee.
We were born to the sweet smell of formaldehyde
in rooms dressed in florescent white
that share plumbing with the morgues
beneath the linoleum floors.
We are the mix of vodka and innocence that lingers
in the kiss of a dimly lit basement.
We show and we tell but always only for the right price,
the wrong reasons,
or the promise of an exchange equaling to the feeling that
this is a mistake.
We are rosary beads counted between gnarled knuckles
and dragged across smooth palms that long
to sweep tear salt from flushed cheeks.
We are Heaven's lonely singles.
We are skin stretched out too thin over skeletons.
We are the complexities that machines can't calculate
much less imitate.
We are the futile cries that once tried to keep towers from falling
when the sky came crashing down.
We are the pardoned and the withered.
We are the hardened faces of those that have
worked too long
and been loved too little.
We have been told that the safest place for your soul
is in the hole of your chest,
but only if it's reinforced by
four inches of concrete and steel,
and strapped tight with a Kevlar vest,
because they said people,
at best,
are manslaughter.
But we have never been great listeners either;
when we were growing up
we pressed our hands to hot stoves
even though our mothers said not to,
because we couldn't just be told what it was to burn
we had to feel it for ourselves.
So every now and then we will crack open
our rib cages in the hopes that someone will come,
light a fire,
and decide to stay.
We hopelessly spray paint things like wings
On decrepit brick buildings
So that, at the very lest, we can feed the
Hollow-eyed passerby the belief
That these streets still have guardians,
Even when we, ourselves,
Abandoned such ideologies in
backroad dumpsters
along with our deities’ infidelities.
We are the period at the end of the sentence.
(Or maybe we are the ellipses...)
We have redefined the American family
and proven that even Christianity knows how to hate.
We were raised by sixty-percent divorce rates,
yet we still believe that we are soul mates.
We are the jokers of the deck:
either smiling fools or wild cards.
We are cocked heads with smoke billowing from throats
coated with blisters and cough syrup.
We are back alley scavengers crawling on all fours.
We are the era of the Auto-Tuned voice,
proof that with a pretty enough face anyone can sing.
We are foggy mirrors with smiles drawn on them
by print-less fingertips.
We slip up the thighs of our lovers
and swirl down the drains of sinks with chipped paint.
We are the hearts in your hands-
Crush us into powder and brush us across your face like Indian war paint,
Give us up to the sky so that we can be revived by lightning,
Dance to the rhythm that we beat,
Squeeze us and watch as we seep through the cracks of your fist,
Conceal us in your pocket and only ever speak to us in a whisper,
Or,
with all your natural voice,
sing to us
songs about thunderstorms
to wet the dusty desert dirt around our rooted toes
in the hopes that we will blossom in the most vivid colors.
Just do something with us.
Don't sacrifice us to the tops of lost bookshelves
to collect dust
or rust in the rain with everything else you once loved
but grew too old for.
Open letters home.
Dear Mom,
Hey! How’re things?
So, LA is weird. It’s all sticks and stones and billion dollar homes. Last week on the Metro I forgot my headphones, but it all worked out because there was a homeless man who was naked from the waist down except for a pair of Spiderman underwear with the tag still attached who was singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of his lungs.
Everyone here is someone important. They live the philosophy of Descartes like scripture.
I think therefore I am... exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping because my mind has taken up running, which means it’s acclimating to the culture here quicker than my body because everyone in this town fuckin’ loves running almost as much as they love vintage shoes and car horns.
It’s strange though, I can’t shake this feeling that I’ve lost something.
Anyway, I love you.
Dear Mom,
Thank you for the eyes.
Last afternoon a stranger told me they were beautiful, and on a day where every mirror seemed to be of the funhouse variety, it was a welcome compliment. I’m sorry I haven’t called in a few weeks, please don’t think it’s because I don’t miss you. It’s just, lately, I’ve been feeling a bit like a marionette whose had his strings clipped. Slumped and crumpled. Small. Collapsed and sprawled cracked in some forgotten corner — the hollow knock of wood bouncing across the walls of this mezzanine dressed in finer things than me that have been fostered by Father Time and his Mistress Stillness.
And I know how you worry.
You worry ‘til bones bruise and still your skeleton aches to shoulder my melancholy yourself, so I can’t bear to bridge this distance with crestfallen phone calls where the past year locks fully loaded on six-shooter lips — the way heels cling to cliffs edge — before finally, reluctantly, free falling; firing off each round. Six words aimed with eyes closed as if it were up to God to decide where they’d hit:
“I wish I could come home...”
Then your silent, empty-cartridge, catacomb sigh would just teach this telephone how cavernously a mother’s heart aches for her children.
Dear Dad,
I know it goes without saying, but thank you for the check and the note attached to it.
It’s hard to describe how much home I find in the deft curves of your surgeon’s cursive. I hope you’re doing well. Last time I saw you, you seemed a bit like a lit cigarette filter tip watching the singe approach. Maybe it was just the embers of your eyes glazed over by one too many heavy handed nightcaps.
And this isn’t to say the Superman who stayed up late nights holding me through fits of anxiety has up and flown away, this is just to say you seem to be flickering.
This is just to say I hope you still laugh at bad movies with the thunderous bass of July fourth fireworks.
This is just to say I’ve been staying up late nights holding on to yesterday.
Dear Mom,
The care package was unnecessary.
I now have more Skittles than any one human should ever consider consuming in a lifetime. So thanks. I know I told you, at some point, years ago, that they were my favorite… but holy shit.
Really though, waking up to that box on my doorstep choked me up quicker than a swift kick to the nuts. You have a way of weaving through this heartland like a Middle-American interstate and I love you so much for that. It’s just next time, maybe try something that doesn’t have the nutritional value of flash-fried butter sticks. But not too healthy. Maybe fruit leathers?
P.S. Keep the homemade fudge coming.
Dear Dad,
Forgive the handwriting of an earthquake.
My hands are shaking again like when I was young. I’ve been finding stillness, though, in between sips of five dollar coffee and midnight cigarette drags beneath and incandescent moon that seems to use breeze hands to play cat’s cradle with strings of smoke.
Life is fast here. It’s all gas pedal and touch-and-go breaks.
P.S. If you see mom, don’t mention the cigarettes.
Dear Mom,
I got your e-mail about smoking and the ensuing health issues it leads to. Graphic stuff. That was super informative and totally unprompted. Thanks for that.
Dear Dad,
...
Dear Mom,
Stop worrying so much, you’re making my bones ache.
Dear Dad,
In my dreams I am a lighthouse with an unfocused beam. I’m searching for something, I just don’t know what.
At least I’m sleeping right?
Dear Mom,
These days blur together with the fading speed of a half-life hardly lived to its fullest. Was it different for you when you were my age? I shift between a drifting stick stuck in a current and desert stone.
Dear Dad,
In my dreams I’m a lighthouse.
There’s a fog horn distant.
I’m still searching for I don’t know what I’m searching for something and there’s a fog horn far off like it’s from someone elses dream but at least I’m sleeping.
Dear Mom,
Do you believe that streams take sticks where they need to be?
Dear Dad,
Have you dreamt of fog horns lately?
I am a lighthouse looking for a nameless something in fog so thick I should be choking.
But I’m not.
At my feet there are rocks and they’re jagged but I’m not anxious because they stay up late nights holding me.
And in the distance there’s a fog horn that seems to be saying “All is not lost.”
Dear Mom,
Do you think that desert stones are waiting for something?
Dear Dad,
In my dreams a lighthouse is built upon jagged rocks that are shaped like your hands. I’m searching for something and even though my lamplit electric torch eyes can’t touch the sky through this fucking fog, I keep them burning because I should be choking but I’m not, I’m finding stillness in the way breeze plays with smoke strings and far off there’s a fog horn distant promising “All is not lost.”
Dear Mom,
This town is all sticks and stones and broken home drifters.
Dear Dad,
All is not lost.
They Never Leave the Way They Came In.
It always started with a kiss.
A kiss that shocked her from her lips to her hips and sent her reeling down rabbit holes searching for something that sings like hallelujah. But by the time Gloria regained consciousness to the sound of a needle riding an empty groove, all she found was the window he'd left open. And a bone. A marrow-filled keepsake abandoned on the sill. She wrapped it in ripped gossamer from her grandmother's wedding veil and placed it neatly in the closet with all the others. As she reapplied the crimson lipstick, brushed too much blush over sunken cheeks, and outlined her eyes in waterproof mascara, she felt the draft more than ever before. "A home can be an awfully lonely place for love..." she murmured to her autumn tree self, then she stepped out of the door, lips puckered and trimmed of every proof that she was anything but a virgin.
One tube of lipstick, a femur, two collarbones and half a jaws worth of teeth later, she sat sprucing up to that same skipping scratch of a static-air record and pushing the thought of how her grandmother died alone to the back of her mind, as she tied perfect bows with the ribbons of veil. "A bed can be an awfully lonely place for love..." she whispered to her bare-finger self. Then once more, she slipped into a city whose slogan read: Take it easy, it's hard being human these days.
After each season changed in a dozen different ways, her summer Marilyn blonde had withered winter-newspaper grey — her knuckles and joints baptized in arthritis — she could hardly bring the religion of her hands to raise up the ribcage, fresh enough to still smell of morning breath. But this time she did not retire to the closet turned mausoleum, instead, she emptied the tomb of all these ex-lovers' left overs, all the bare-bones of the best parts of these midnight escape artists who never fully got away, and Gloria made for herself a makeshift man. One that would never keep her warm, but would never leave her frozen by an open window sill either. One with an empty chest that offered no treasures, but didn't have the guts to chase the morning afters.
"A heart can be an awfully lonely place for love..." she mouthed to her silent-breasted self, as she bent down for one last electric-less, dusty kiss.
Eight steps to sleeping in.
I.
Well you know that I sip on my sadness, my dear,
filthy palms filled to the brim.
And I know that you watch trains passing by,
dizzy eyed, still drunk with sin.
Your teeth reek of reality lately,
You smile facts, figures and cracked calcium.
Now, once more with cupped hands leaking, shaking
delirium up to your chin.
Well I know that I’ve missed the point, honey
I should get it tattooed on my wrists,
but you know you talk like firecrackers
so flinching gets awful hard to resist.
I make believe that I’m right
like craters make moons believe. So I’ll comment on comets
and ignore truths popping between parentheses.
My delusion has your lips liquored up, but I notice your tongue...
II.
You say,
It’s fiction we live in.
You play in pastels and fake hollywood rhythms and I’m tired, staring up at your screen.
You're addicted to this diction.
My voice is lost, screaming these words you keep stealing and twist for yourself what they mean.
III.
Your lips liquored up, but I notice your tongue's not numb.
Drink deep, Love. Inoculate.
IV.
And you say,
It’s fiction we live in.
It’s intended for men like you, bottled, up-ended, but I've watched you drain out in my palm.
It's this clothing, from bedpost to box-spring.
It's all wax-coats and smoke screens; living lit-candle lasting.
When did skin begin to fit wrong?
V.
So they say, one day, or, one day, they say, we’ll find ghosts sewed to the seams of fringe-wolf bones picked clean, who waltz wicked and crooked a foxtrot to show that sometimes loss is beautiful. And when I ask for your hand you’ll look tragic like, this dance, it was only ever for me and my feet always fall off beat like I beat off any discreet romancing to pretend that this dancing was anything more than masturbatory. Though I guess I do dance the way I drink: Heavy handed and troglodytic and a little listless, but you know I always fight it. So while you walk away, I’m drowning drunk in cinderblock boots. Toe-tapping a slurred S.O.S. like some song you kept whispering. You keep whispers like keepsakes. You speak so soft but, baby, your voice sticks with me
like sickness.
VI.
And you say,
It’s fiction we live in.
It’s intended for men like you, bottled, up-ended, but I've watched you drain out in my palm.
Alright!
It's fiction that we live in, intended for men like me, bottled, up-ended,
but at best I just seeped through your teeth.
VII.
I stitched script to my chest like a scarlet letter vest that attests there's no soul here worth saving but fucking come save me anyway. Your voice sticks to my ghost-sewn, sea-floor bound foot steps like sickness.
Tread lightly, Love. Inoculate.
VIII.
When they ask for me at the after party
With neon eyes and harlot tongues,
You can tell them I traded this stale air in
For forest fires and tornado lungs.
Because I’ve been reading up in matchbooks
how to dance with disastrous fate,
and I'm finding my rhythm so wake silent
or sleep long, Love. Inoculate.
The Letdown.
Call me by another name.
Call me waspish,
or boyish, or
fountain-mouthed.
Prate about the crooked, curved curls of my red-ribbon tongue.
Whisper myths down spidered-ice hallways
about the melted wax love games
fixed between dust-dressed candlesticks,
and the unfaithful rumors of wine-stained table cloths.
Call me by another name.
Call me button-eyed,
and hollow, and
dried-garden crucified;
Bind my face with burlap.
Replace my spine with a wood-splintering post.
Dry my veins gold
so that my flannel fetters in the tornado-dry breath
of fraying hay.
I'll fight off autumn winds and the gossip of crows.
Don't fuse my footsteps to the echoes
of Lightning Bearers and Stilt-legged Shadows;
Fasten my shoelaces to the anchor dreams of drowning cannonballs
where I will only spell stories with the sharp skin of coral reefs.
Call me by another name.
Call me typewriter-toothed,
or backwash, or
eight-legged.
Just give it a name that I can live up to.
the wolf.
Your sheep skin drapes
Far too loosely, boy.
You're much too starved
to be taken seriously.
You've spent too much time
Grinding your teeth against the wind—
Howling through cracked pitch
at moonless nights—
And too little whittling
Courtship with your claws.
They're all going to laugh at you, kid.
Your wool-woven fool's crown
Couldn’t fool the town clown
For a sweaty twist, much less something
Worthwhile.
Oh, boy.
They're all going to laugh at you.
Faustus.
I found a hand written letter
From the Devil, left under my
Crushed feather filled pillowcase
The morning after I sacrificed my silhouette
to sleep Underneath
Vintage angel wings, which see more dust than wind these days.
It read:
“The gates of Hell have finally frozen over, so don’t sweat it so much up there.
You’re making me anxious.”
And it got me thinking…
Maybe I do take this place way too seriously.
After all, why should I struggle with cursive
When the Devil writes in what looks like Comic Sans.
THE SAINT AND THE CYNIC.
Just loosen your grip a little,
Fiddling fingers say to me
Quite condescendingly,
If you hold on to something
Too tight for too long
One day you’ll open your fist
And realize you’ve crushed it.
The breath that carries his words
Buries this stone heart like a seed
And parts the rising steam of the
Teacup he raises up to steady lips,
Of which my quivering jaw grows
Envious.
“That’s Bullshit.”
I spit the venom back at him,
Proving my limited vocabulary
And badly developed comeback skills.
It makes me ill how much he tries to pretend that
Everything is fine.
Everything is going to be
Fine
He says,
Everything has a reason.
And I hate him for it.
Still, I can’t hide the upright curves of a smile
When he tells me that
We all make an impact.
We all buckle at our knees in the rain,
Fists full with parts of our soul
That we wish to add to this the world.
It’s why we leave behind fingerprints
On everything we touch.
It’s proof of our existence
And a reminder that once,
We cared enough to reach out and
Make an exchange with the things we love.
But I counter it with
“Fingerprints can be washed away
In the time it takes a snowflake
To melt in your palm.
In the split second of a gunshot.”
It’s too risky to wear our hearts on our sleeves
These day
So instead we push it down
Our solar plexus
And compress it like coal.
We fill the hole in our chest
With carcinogen-filled cigarettes
And nicotine best guesses
We doorbell-ditch the addresses
Of our Demons in Disguise
With makeshift wings and sky blue eyes.
Taunting them with kid tricks
But always running
Because we’re too afraid
To strip them of their masquerade.
Naive to the fact that it might be more
Than just child’s play.
So I tell him it’s okay
To admit that he’s still afraid of the dark.
That we need to strap ourselves
With something harder than skin.
Because this world is hazardous.
I learned it the first time I saw my father cry.
That’s why I sit here with
White-knuckled hands clutching to
Everything that I can call my own
And not opening my eyes
Because I dream better with them closed.
So I won’t loosen this grip
Because it seems so simple to slip
Through these fingertips.
And so he sits.
And so I shake.
And he sits, and I shake
And we take that deafening silence of a symphony
Right before the orchestra strikes the first chord
And we make honesty with it.
We make honesty
Like, Honestly, the next sounds
To escape our mouths
Are going to be the most important words I’ve ever heard
So let’s make them worth it.
We make honesty
Like concentration camp lovemaking—
It makes us still feel alive,
And a way to say, Fuck the world
I’ve still got something it can’t take.
And while I can’t shake this moment of vulnerability
He draws a hand up to my chest,
Pulls out a breath
And dissects the swollen God-Complex.
He filters the air
I hinder to bear upon my heavy shoulders
And slips it back, past cracked crimson lips
To ignite this sarcophagus with life.
Everything is going to be
Fine.
He says,
Everything has a reason,
So explore the world with both hands before of you,
Feet making a rhythmic beat on the
Black paved street
As you follow broken yellow lines,
Racing headlights to the horizon.
And leave behind a trail of fingerprints, so that—
Even though you may forget where you’ve been—
Where you’ve been will never forget you.