love poem

i chain-smoked
your wrists
& didn't hack

i put your
eyeballs out
on my palms
& didn't
blister

i swung
from a
noose
of your
thick hair
& my neck
stayed intact

i wore
a bag of
your skin
around my
whole head
& i didn't
turn blue

i dropped
shots of
your bile
into pint
glasses
of your blood
& didn't get
the spins

my heart is an overflowing ashtray

my heart
is an
overflowing
ashtray

beneath
buckled
half-smoked
butts
&
a mound
of
soot

an
un-extinguishable
ember
enough
to start
a
five alarm
fire

the mysterious bard that made suburbia disappear for a few moments

once i was driving
& a song came
on the radio

& i had to
pull into a lot

& throw the
car in park
& just listen

it was just
a scraped
voice & an
acoustic guitar

but the words
along w/the
backdrop of
strumming
had sent me
off the road

my hands on
steering wheel,
shaking

the landscape
around me
in ruins

beneath winter stars drinking jack daniels w/apple strudel chaser

when i was fifteen we used
to hang out in the parking lot
behind a movie theater
that showed 'rocky horror picture show'
at midnight every saturday

some of us never went in
never had the money to

i was in the band of underprivileged kids
waiting for our friends
to get out of the show at 2 am

one of us always stole liquor
from our parent's cabinet
& we always stole donuts
or cake from 7-eleven

once i remember it was 10 degrees
& we were drinking jack daniel's
straight from the bottle
& chasing it with handfuls
of stolen apple strudel

& our fifteen year-old bodies shook
& we rubbed our wind bitten ears
our teeth chattering in our jaws
until our tongues burned w/liquor
& then were momentarily relieved
by big bites of sweet apples
wrapped in the thin phyllo
as delicate as our young skin

a touch of the warden

i live next to a middle school field
i hear the coach ordering kids around
reprimanding them mostly
it's sad that their young thin
legs run over green spring grass
in such a regimented fashion
the coach barks more directions
his whistle is annoying and obnoxious
there is something so different in the way
a child blows a whistle and the way
an adult does
one sounds erratic and chain-less
and the other ordered and tethered
there's more than a touch of warden
in the chambers of the adult heart

2:38 a.m.

sirens cut the air
more often where i live now
the train tracks just beyond the yard
the airport 1 mile away
the industrial park 1/4 away
this is the last house on a dead end
a chain-link fence between us
& a middle school
where weeknights at 2 a.m.
teenagers do 360's
in the parking lot
the squealing of rubber
on empty blacktop
ripping through the mesh
on fully open windowed summer nights
careless kids shaving hundreds
of miles off tires
while mine will be bald
by winter
& i wake from one nightmare
into the next
stumble into the shower
at 2:38 a.m.
the cool water hitting the salty
film on my skin
afterward i stand in towel
in front of box fan that is
propped on an old chair
my arms above my head like at gunpoint
the whirling blades
finally doing their job right