Poets and punk rockers age worse than gov't cheese and Thunderbird And I'm both So, fuck it sour grapes and shitty macaroni it is. Some friend's tell me they wish they had my job or at least the hours and I give praise to the Great Sky Conductor for every day I've never had to origami myself into a cube but the clock I punch jabs back below the belt This occupation consists of constantly putting your heart and balls in front of the world's swinging knuckles But I can't quit it because there's not much else you can do when your inner child is a spitting brat and your power animal is Joan Jett My resume might as well read: Jack Off of All trades Master of jack shit I can think of a lot of worse things to be like World War referee or fluffer but glory glory this kind of living is killing me Hallelujah These days, my sex drive takes the corners like a spastic Datsun Which is perfect 'cause I got game like Pong. Worse yet, Colecovision outdated, dusty, and with a shit load of useless buttons All my get up and go must of done jetted and stuck me with the check. Maybe, if I shook the devil horns out my mouth, took out all the fuck you's put just one back in wrapped up in dumb down I could touch what my mother might call success Maybe, just maybe if I stopped shouting to, from, for, and at all the fringe's reflections of me, I could be happy I've seen friends hit it so big, it has splattered my clothes like John F Kennedy's brains, back and to the left out, pity party army of one again But I'm not bitter You can ask any of my guts dead butterflies, but all their brittle little skeletons will tell you is: At least we died for a reason I love my job, aching balls and all of it If I didn't, I would've gone full trip twiggy up a clock tower after the millionth missed meal ago I may have less than some, 3 hots, a cot, and the alarm clock's static reassurance that this day will have no more or less challenges than the next but I got a lot more than a lot, like the music screaming that it will not stay my creaking jaw's secret for one second longer and shares itself full throttle, damn the honesty or the hour When a cigarette is all that's keeping me going and 5 twine rope thrown over a crossbeam is the only thing that could hold my head up, I just gotta giggle, step down off the chair and remember I am Hope's biggest bitch

GRAY IS TOO DULL A COLOR FOR MY ANATOMY I am not made of limbs just a loose arrangement of musicians They have no discipline so my bones are all intuition and elbows knees knocking an awkward rhythm and a face that only my mother could call classical The only note they can agree on comes from my spine When bowed slowly in the key of remorse its tiny vibrations are barely enough to keep my head up but when struck with purpose it resonates up through my eyes in a tone that is anything but minor This is the same chord that echoes through the empty opera house of our insides plucks our tongues and choirs our teeth to powder We are gap mouthed whistle kids keening off time and outta key to form the most disjointed smiling chorus this side of rapture singing out every dissonant ghos until all that is left is the most cracked note ever uttered that we pray at least one person thinks is beautiful

You died 2 days this side of Caesar and the first thought anyone had was how the Replacements sang not of you but a childish interpretation of your idea I'd like to think that your last thought held the same circuitry that lit your neurons in the shape of your band’s name BIG STAR convinced that it was an echo of fate and not a talisman shaken at the specter of obscurity Does it burn you, even now that most of these people despite every eulogy, tribute, and cover still don’t even know your name? That your headstone casts its shadow so much further than any of the shattered 12 watt sparks you bothered to leave behind? Most of us, as artists will never be Orion but forgotten constellations, sought out only by a few who know what they are looking for Brilliant victims of a callous astronomy No millions of children will ever sing emperor unto us No arenas The empty seats screaming Brutus into our backs hunching shoulders into humble influence Unwilling muses forced into the modesty of inspiration We, have a choice Either we see the way fame has gnawed away the sinew of every Caesar before us leaving only bones to be crushed underfoot, and run or we welcome the feast all too eager to charge 10 times Judas' price to Christ to eat of our body, refusing to be ripped screaming from the spotlight scared that the halo it gives us will be the only one we will ever wear I fear that I might be asking this all too late like a regretful son, begging forgiveness of his father's casket but before you sleep Alex, answer me this: As your circuits flipped tilt would you have traded your last 30 years to finally overthrow Orion and scrawl your legacy into the ink of night or are you happy with the tiny corner of sky granted all of us simply for surviving? I’ve never been suited for royalty My head hangs heavy enough without a crown My needs are simple food, clothing, shelter, and the breath it takes to keep their threads spinning, simply from my throats spun stories As long as I got mind, heart, a gut, and a mouth I will keeping shouting them out and if even a fraction of these people can recite them back after my passing that will be my legacy and if I shuffle off this coil with less than dust lining my pockets and my name stopped just short of celestial I will still call myself a success

John Lennon I am sorry You told us to imagine and now all we do is day dream Not of a better or united world but one of separate countries, heavens, and religions. The only time we come together now is wrapped in the safety of internet’s distance. I am sorry We never listened, twisted your lyrics into a hollow karaoke The only words we can recite with any conviction now is your eulogy You laid out the difference between need and want Love is all and war is over and we ain’t done a god damn thing to bring about any of them Mind Games that’s the only one we ever got right Karma moves a lot slower than you thought Jai Guru Dev Om “I give thanks to heavenly teacher” Heaven is the cruelest burden to lay on anyone’s shoulders We were so quick to tack the cross to your back Christ you know it ain’t easy We are followers selfish and scared We couldn’t hear you over our screaming and tearing at your robes We couldn’t care less for your marriage and children We needed a father I’m sorry we are so small Forgiveness is only begged of gods with hands clasped and heads bowed Apologies are what people ask of each other looking them straight in the eye I’m sorry that even in death we couldn’t just let you be a man We were too jealous of the balance you’d found between fame, art, and family If you refused to be our messiah we could just as easily make you a martyr Our envy cracked the sky seven times over Manhattan leaving 2 sons fatherless, a wife a widow and the rest of us with nothing Our karma cannot come quick enough Mercy is the only thing left to plead for You gave us so much but your songs are only half finished if all we ever do is listen Until we all understand and sing back with even half the love you put into them only then will we be forgiven We can finally be more than an audience We can be human and decent It’s the very least we can do I apologize that this is all I have to give back to you heavenly teacher I know I can call you that now because even though you hoped that there was only sky above us I pray that if there is a Heaven you are there now Jai Guru Dev Om

My husband’s first mistress was neither woman or man, but Allah and for that I am grateful I introduced them In a dusty Detroit basement I presented my husband to our only god and when their eyes met I felt myself shift from the warm center of his heart to an icy field whose only residents are the wives of prophets and their children I became a widow of prophecy and a mother to all Allah saw fit to bless us with a brood of 8 and a fold into the thousands While men spread The Teachings, my holy charge was to educate our children Humility Discipline Knowledge Purity Determination Morality In the final days even those who walked this earth slouched in sin, will be stood upright and made ready for Judgment I am faithful but not even the holy mathematics can explain why I only have 8 children but my husband has twice that many and 3 mothers between them O Great Benevolence I have taken so many steps toward you so please allow me this moment of blasphemy: How is this divine? How is this honorable? I would beg you to forsake me and watch over these women show them that their children are not merely the bastards of history that you are their father that you still love them I had it easy I only lost a husband They lost their belief As we lay here and wait for Judgement I can only think of all our children Emmanuel Nathaniel Ethel Lottie Herbert Junior Wallace Akbar and the thousands brought to us a garden grown flush in the service of Allah and we divorced from earthly emotion and laws of possession betrothed only to God and for that I am grateful

I molded with my fumbling art, a young child’s soft and yielding heart –Lynetta Jones I never had much use for the bible I never saw God in there just a dog eared relic that my husband clung to by the dead light of our radio I witnessed the Lord and his works nowhere but in our boy God gave us the clay but I carved his heart No one ever bothered to notice the soft, kind sculpture in his chest just pointed to the dark corners, blackened by kiln fire You try to tell me that Jesus was free of soot after his 3 days in the pit and I will laugh and envy you your ignorance Jim may have groveled in the sins of this life but, like Solomon his great deeds far outweigh his trespasses my son gathered unto him the animals, children, criminal, and infirmed and led us, eyes open into Paradise Scripture is sifted from the ash of martyrs The only things we left behind were our bodies, this unforgiving world and a fist sized piece of clay Inscribed on its husk, our final testament and from its black, kiln fired cracks Eden has bloomed

When I was 13 my father shut his mouth so hard his last word to me was the hissing breeze through the delicate bayonets of his teeth After that he would only part his lips to grin flint at me like a spiked redwood tree Its only relief was my mother all willow wispy limbs nowhere as strong but forgiving enough to let the light through. The few neighbors I’ve met call me Ms. Fromme Nobody calls me Squeaky anymore except for the reporters I like it here There are more trees than people I’ve stood in the long, cold shadows of 3 redwoods but only one let me be his daughter His family more loving than the one I shared a name with and there is far more blood between us He was soil and sky brush fired me back to nothing and then truly raised me shaped us into the sirens for His Divine Armageddon We would fell Jericho again I have lived almost 2 of Christ’s lifetimes and wish I had his sense of purpose The last redwood was as indifferent as the first All I wanted was to tell him that he and the rest of his kind were tipped on the brink of extinction If I had learned anything it was that laying blood at their feet would not even stir the leaves of these ancient leviathans but the menace of death will bleed their rings into surrender So I stood at the very roots of him and gave him the barest glimpse of the axe I am 60 years old My only husband, the forest I am a weathered sapling, grown crooked in the shadow of 2 fathers long left to mulch and the third, a preserved oddity for the tourists My mother’s weakened branches long withered and returned to dirt I am not a murderer I’ve only ever loved one I am a parolee I am a ward of the state I am now no one’s daughter but yours

Charles Manson would envy my distance to you Five feet and one minute between you and divine alchemy wine to blood lead into scythe Bigger than Jesus? Your fame is equal, gospel as misunderstood though your martyrdom, is better publicized I had only one question but what came out was all exclamations: Lord! Give! Us! This! Day! All I wanted to know is where the ducks go in Winter I know now I’m already there I’m just waiting for you to join me

UNFORTUNATE SON (a persona poem) There’d be no use in skinning ya ‘cuz I wouldn’t have your hide for my boots Your pinched face seem to form the same old fucking questions How? Why? So, I’ll take 2 minutes to explain myself but then, you’d better run ,because my .38 ain’t as fussy as a knife There ain’t no one reason for the way I am Mommy never beat me, Daddy didn’t soothe me to sleep with Mein Kampf and I ain't never had no burning cross for a night light That’s something those tin shit psychiatrists can't seem to rap their precious Ph.D.’s around They always mistake me for one of Hitler’s bitter little bastards, ‘cept my folks are American, god damn it I am born of an honesty that we as a country have abandoned Don’t Tread On Me clenched between our teeth, knowing that atrocity is acceptable, if paradise is the reward This honesty is inside every one of you , ‘cept I got the balls to walk it and talk it in the daylight My hate is not a precise Charles Whitman hollow point, but as widespread as founding father buckshot I am a rattler, coiled in the heart of the American Dream But my birth certificate is as false as the president’s Those 2 names at the bottom are no more my parents than the stars and stripes are yours My family is the truest of trinities I am the dirty hate fuck of Bedford Forrest , Byron De La Beckwith, and the holiest of holies I am made in my fathers’ image Righteous, wrathful, and avenging the Old Testament made into skin Jesus fucked it up with all that love talk Why you think it is Daddy put him up on that spit? I am the child that God got right and need no army or apostles to carry out his judgment Y’all aint nothing but monkeys with thumbs unworthy of God’s green earth and He has deemed you all damned That is why he has sent me but unlike the last Armageddon go around He will hold the floods until I have made crosses of every telephone pole and nooses of every power line and all the billions of sinners of every color are hangin’ high, then he will let slip the sea and finally wash this world clean I will not mind the quiet It’s the only reward that I have ever asked of Him

Humorist MarkTwain said that there is no humor in Heaven Comedian Bill Hicks replied that Hell will always have the best musicians The only difference between a comedian and a humorist is that a comedian is more damaged Bill, they called you angry You were always in good company Even Jesus embraced rage's jagged blossom as he evicted every thief squatting in his father's house Anger is a gift The cracked glass spark that bursts in the chest of every great leader doomed to the enlightenment that we as humans, are capable of so much more but we run from every opportunity to realize it Love is the fact that they never stop trying to tell us Laughterand Happiness are two jilted lovers at best Bill It's been 16 years since Cancer's soft ravage devoured your voice Your mantle has grown dust and your every heir apparent knows only bitter, cynical indifference mistaken for righteous Anger Love for gullibility I counted myself among them but there was no heart to our hands only dull, blustering thunder inarticulate and too clumsy for incision It tookyour sharp fingers to slice through my sternum and choke throttle my heart back into lightning again destructive but illuminating damaged and hopeful They call me angry I am in good company

Sorry, Big Guy but due to your rigid criteria and lengthy application process, sometimes we just have to make our own saints We slapdash them in stained glass paint mixed with our daily frustration, wind and whimsy Horace protector of blown tires Philomena, champion of cracked back, side walk mothers Chester the patron of broken harmonicas Zevo custodian of sad melody Others are stamped in ink blood wrapped in the merchandise necessary for modern day martyrs Che of Rosario Martin of Atlanta Ian of Manchester and John of Liverpool But mine still walks singing golden whiskey razors cloaked in thrift torn shroud, swaggering unrepentantly spider woven windshields carnivals blown out Chevy’s drunken pianos box car jumping and late night heart break These are all his province St. Thomas of Pomona His anointment is black coal and greasepaint His altar, a Bally tent No one speaks side show anymore We are too timid to walk the back alleys of our own deformities Our hearts have ceased to story imaginations gone hard ‘round the edges leaving us nothing but cold analysis, banishing all of the shadows Our sin is all evil and no lesson when dragged back to the guilty light of noon We congregation, are ready to leave the rough hewn repentance of this boxcar confessional and be reborn, bathed in the night flare of Alabama 3 am High priest of Pork Pie Hat We have come to sit in the flicker of your trackside tire fire Cast your crooked light into the black boogie dark and report back to us Regale us with song and watch over us in this, our time of conformity Protect us the true freaks, on the wrong side of the geek’s cage Amen 

I have a statue’s sense of grace late afternoon light paints me heroic If forced to move, my stoicism is reduced to a stilted two step of cobwebs and marble dust I hope you like random dance parties The art on the walls is all still life and could use a little more…push These floorboards deserve different echoes less ballroom and bayonet and more joyously fist thrown bossa nova Leave me on the mantle I’ll watch from here If your feet need more lift than my clucking tongue and drill bit teeth can whistle I’ve still got records, wax straining against the dust of their crates Don’t let all the Joy Division scare you That’s only one side of it Take solace in the Stax 45’s Stevie Wonder, Bare Naked Ladies, Sesame Street, and all the musicals Spin them across your fingernails let the vibrations bypass your tongue and scream Glory I won’t stop you Half the time, I want to tie up the wind chimes outside my window and strangle their beautiful, random song just so I can sleep The other half of the clock is caught up between tip toes and pounding out anti-mute rhythms on my chest with all its sunken fingerprints If I happen to check out early you’ll at least have a short list of suspects This is not a place you want to vacation yet these walls could use some more bend and bow your 3 pm shadow, cast into thousands of dancers a thud rumble and damn the neighbors Throw the curtains into a surprised smile of early afternoon, sing and spin the room taut into a single bass note, tremoring seismic and delicate, until I fall off the mantle and shatter immaculate Please Leave me smashed and wonderful don’t bend your exquisite knees and disappear me into structure Leave me to the waltz of the open window and in this one movement, momentarily achieve grace

I dug out my old leather jacket Its gleaming grin of epaulets and buckles smiled to me from behind too few reminders of battles, waged righteous and infantile I tore through the pockets searching for scraps of all the late nights, screaming my uninformed philosophies into the moon face of God and the Ghetto Bird but found only rawhide, lint, and an address: West of Refinement Up the block from Anxious Forever past 2 in the morning and always 1 month shy of 25 My eyes couldn’t recall the direction but these worn feet and 34 years of slumped shoulders knew the way back to this place strictly from muscle memory This is where I found him A simple studio, white walls bare to better reflect himself A futon bed post, notched into splinters from every one night stand, propped up by pride and eyes too free of experience, but he doesn’t look surprised to see me That’s my jacket, old man You look kinda stupid in it I don’t where you found it and I don’t have much, but I’ll trade you What do you want for it? All right First I’ll take that middle finger out your tongue It ain’t nothing but a limp digit if fear is the only reason it ever flies and while you’re at it, pull that curled lip back over your canines they’re nowhere near long enough to bite with yet Next I want that anthem in your throat and every notebook you shout it into It reads like a ransom demand, all faded edges and stolen letters wringing the ink from headlines to fill your vulgar pen and pockets You can keep the Neverland in your irises the dilated Lost Boys of aborted brain cells the whole Morrison/Nietzche/Fellini mystical death trip I know where that leads I’ve seen that road tread free of gravel by every shock haired, steel booted, leather clad, jack booted jerkwad this side of fuck all and back Death is boring until you’ve lived some Gimme the lust in your guts the cauldron in your chest the bellow of your lungs I finally know how to use them They’re going to waste while you sit here and bullshit the universe the way we always did I didn’t come here to trade I came to lay this time and place to casket I am leaving you buried between these walls bereft of blood boil and balls stripped shivering Armor is meant to protect the living not adorn the dead And this jacket Well this motherfucker is coming with me