Great Expectations

Hiatus, year of, purgatory writing enclave into books

Away from poems into the mustard gas

I do not want to be me

The coughing activist into protest of having to be a person

Hazy fuzz vision detachment to identity

Tethered animal sexuality and the vehicle nature of a body

To evacuate the cab for a few years

The hustle intellectualization into other people’s libraries

Finding body parts in my breakfast cereal

Slipping teeth and bones

Blood tests for diseases there is no way I could have

Sponge-like to the emotions of yoga mats and barrooms

Sequester and wrestle with the alienation

Parents aging into who is going to wipe the fecal matter lottery

Closet John Prine large size t-shirt father insisted on purchasing for me

Told him I wear a medium and he said, “No you don’t.” Corner pile. Never worn

All these great expectations

“And I saw tail lights last night in a dream about my first wife

Everybody leaves and I’d expect as much from you”

Tumbleset language and that pregnant look in her eye

When you know you want to be excited but that blood is a bomb

“Everybody leaves, so why wouldn’t you?”

Misunderstandings in the street, switchblade versus a glass of water

Shatters and slits and the quiet spits out chalky incisors

Dumb mouth, filed down fingernails and nothing to touch for another year

Learn it again love's natural end is a waterboard drink 

Silence draining from a temple, absence like a ballpein hammer  

Mailbox name changes, looking at the dirt in nailbeds

Flooded city streets and yellow one a.m. post bar lights

Kiss on a public road and the white mire of a Toyota Corolla

Crumble loose-leaf scribble into a trash bin

Whiskey and a morning shave cut it off and see what remains

Drop of blood trying to remember the last lucky thing I ever did 

All these great expectations

“And I saw tail lights last night in a dream about my old life”

“Everybody leaves, so why wouldn’t you?”

Love myself, but I don’t. Trust a friend, but I don’t

Unroll breathe and rip off this naked skin

Timeframe mind games and I swear I want to let you in

Stand with key clockwise to open and watch you run

Games I never learned at fifteen

Coming back again in the meat market

Trinkets and lamps lit up implants

Like a cyborg I was supposed to be

Drill in the metal and mine out the blood

Say the old stories until the tongue blots out the sum

Wake up, shake up, drive out and walk down the strip

Stare into a boutique window and wash the glare over me

Reflections, mentions, and what was never there to be

Television on as bar couples laugh at Kevin Hart

Ed Sheeran playing overhead

Keep walking home to an empty desk with Pablo Neruda and Anaïs Nin

Keyboards and hiatus, deleting accounts, unemployed

Time to figure out, why did I bother

Orwell’s rules and pretentious diction into insular books

No one will read like a script

Years ticking an underfunded pension

Use up the reserve to write and celebrate bankruptcy with a gunshot

Considerations of puzzles I don’t care much to solve

Dead kids and silence lives in that spot over hills

Countdown and mowed sounds of what I had to give

Best was never quite good enough to keep that look for long

Drawn back, drawn down into midnight’s siren song

Baby, there is a darkness, an infinite, and this sparkly fizz never made much sense to me

Not that you wanted, but if you had I imagine I’d have fucked it up  

Waiting for you to get bored with me

Car gone, word blood, rambling into empty sheets

That side of the bed is an unlined horizon

Chest wound stitched up with solo trips to the grocery

Two a.m. typing and C.I.A. whistleblowing

To find something else to give a damn about

The liquid of waiting for what never heals

Love the whole damn thing, just try to love the whole damn thing  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMZ-jdPGPBc