My Sunset Year

I want to forget you so bad; I want to have never met you

When I look in the mirror of the ending of this year I know

Hopefulness for me has been like drinking gasoline

Meeting you felt like I could fuel two thousand miles 

If I could get just one tear out of you 

Before you got one out of me

The hope split the tank for a parallel parked fireball

I am just not a body meant for hope

Hope is old slow food from a disintegrated scroll recipe; 

It’s like a man out of A.A. having god hand him a drink at the track

All your horses won today; just listen to Billie sing “All of Me”

Take my lips I want to lose them, take my arms I’ll never use them

Pick up the Scotch, slip the ice cube and savor the sunset 

They’ll be more

Thinking he saw god surface 

Like a blue whale for five minutes during the year 

And it was the most beautiful damn sight he’s seen in his life 

And he can’t forget it, just won’t shake him like a flower garden on a back 

But she never turns, and her face, and her chest and her heart fade 

Because she makes him feel like time just stopped and the year from that moment 

Just sank like she took the heavens with her, just breathed it all in and rooms went flat 

No clouds, soil just plateaued three sixty nothing to see 

Irony in the path of St. Claude in the Marigny of not wanting loud 

She has history and he is making his in bar theaters behind a microphone

On the same stages she spoke of dancing and he feels her spirit 

In the Shadowbox, the Allways, Istanbul, and Siberia when Dan P came back 

I want the ghost of you to fuck up and be plain

Obliterate illusions with something trite, common, and obnoxiously plastic 

To zap the art like a mosquito drawn to the light like one of millions floating 

Annoying for skin not so soft and would cease to bring comfortable in a bottle 

No spray, no alcohol, no ice chest, no cucumber, no Italian folktales 

No effort to offer comfort, just Scotch and a sunset of forget 

Washing me in like an old fashioned orange spit out before it hits the horizon 

Because hope is the elixir of madmen seeing things that are not there 

Acting like all people do

Wanting that which we think is that just bit better than we deserve, just out of reach 

Leaves the whole world grasping, empty handed and heartbroken

Staring at the sky for fireworks 

Thinking that sizzling flash just might jump in my eye and set me ablaze 

I might be on fire tonight 

I might explode; this, this feeling right here 

That’s a decade of detours explained sipping soul music on a freshly painted porch 

And the mosquitoes are not out in New Orleans

No machines, no lotions, no chemicals, just natural 

And the breath is just 

Sheer gravity of thought smoked eons out skin

Is just whoosh

Into the scratching film around a body 

Motioning through a cinematic divide of iterated respiration 

Is just 

Individualistic devils occupying and exiting upon in and exhalation 

The world seems to want men to be so hopeful 

All it takes is the courage to breathe

And this year I did, I sucked up a courage I never thought I had 

Hopefulness that hard when the world tells a man

The fireworks are already gone by the time you see them

The mosquito is just biding time before draining blood

The tank will run out before you find a station to refuel

You’ll just get yourself lost with all that poetic nonsense 

Like a labyrinth until forgetfulness becomes the fleece you’re searching 

And intimacy dies in a shadow of a corner of a man talking himself to sleep