All Ten

Walk further... Further still. No move back slightly.... Yes. That's where I love you. I love you right there. Don't move.

Look down at all the glitter you're wearing!
Look back at all the alcohol you swallowed.
When you float silently into the gym tomorrow,
Recognize that you are simultaneously playing villain and hero,
Burning yourself up every night
And watering yourself back to life every morning,
A scorched earth puppet show with a GPA.
Half an appetite for success,
Half a hunger for rock bottom.

Fucking think about this.

Rewind your VHS tape mind until you start making the whirring sound that you hear when you're not letting any other sounds in. We all think you can do better but none of us care enough to keep watching.

"It's ok. Cry. It's ok if you do," they hurried me into a rushed kind of emotion; I was struggling to choke it back.

"You have a lot of holes."
"So...?"
"So people with holes rarely hold water."

When I met you, I was spending time staying together for the sake of my parents. And now you're still my "something for the pain".

And now everyone I've ever met is crouched in a closet at home waiting for me to enter so they can jump out and yell "surprise". I'm taking each stair like a newborn takes a breath, step, step, finish line, step, (fidget). Chasing something, but can only see the back of its head. Effort for little, liquor is quicker. If I wanted to try hard and then have nothing at the end I'd get myself a kid. I'd get ourselves a kid. All ten fingers, all ten toes.

Parents learn together that "me too" is simultaneously the most empathetic yet self-indulgent phrase in all of language.

Vibrations and Dead Birds

And at last, muscle memory consumes. The act of reaching for the car radio yanks his eyeballs back in time and focuses them on the television in his parents' living room. He can see his small, pudgy, outstretched fingers, grasping for the dials of the brightly colored box. The flickering lights filtered through his eyes in waves. Eighteen months of neural development has taught him well, and his left arm obeys eagerly. He is all at once lifted away from his goal by his mother, cooing in what he would come to know as discipline. He, on the other hand, had none of this. Control was a foreign language to him. Now, in the car, the stereo wailing, he finally stops himself from pressing buttons. Instead he fidgets.

He was a terrible student. Class didn't agree with him. Physically. The metal chair held him like a straitjacket. His legs hollered at him for hours, his elbows buzzed, his entire anatomy hummed for attention. His fingers complained and whined, begged to be moving - combing through the grass under his front porch or poking into the soft, feathered belly of his little brother's parrot Big Moss. Only texture would cease this throbbing. He could recognize it. Compulsive fidgeting gave way to scratching behind his neck and pressing his teeth into his tongue and forcing his toes to move past each other inside their Keds.

Music was always played as loud as it could be. Lungs were perpetually filled to capacity. Everything was always either one hundred or zero - either sprinting or dead. His hands groped for each other like lovers for sleep. As a rule, muscles were sore unless they could stretch. Hair was meant to be pulled. He knew this and had always known it.

So he grew like this. Like a weed. He drove his car endlessly, longing to push 90, 100, 110 mph. Oh, his car was killer. 1989 Porsche 944 S3 model, red of course, like everything else in his world. It thrummed prehistorically when he turned the key. It made the same sound his body always had. He planted one foot in Kurt Cobain and the other in the Bible, even though he knew that neither rock and roll nor Jesus would save him had he sailed off the road on those foggy nights. The highway runs out at a point. The strum of an electric guitar string fades eventually. Big Moss only lives for so long.

Chanel No. 4

I wish you a life of mild inconvenience -
I pray for that bug on the windshield,
Never-ending mildly runny nose,
Keys locked in the car kind of life for you.
I pray nothing that bad happens to you and nothing that good happens either. Like
I hope you only meet guys who wanna fuck you, not fix you.
I hope you buy a faulty phone charger;
I hope your favorite shirt gets larger;
I hope you see all the others chasing dreams while you wait for Friday each week and
I hope you resent your ugly, selfish children for what they did to your body.
I hope you end up on your death bed with the most mediocre look on your face, the most uninteresting last words spilling from your mouth, an insignificant life behind you and a forgettable death before you, I hope you realize this as it's happening.
I hope there's always one more step than you expect I hope
You take enough pain to make you cringe but not enough to learn from I hope you think
Inside that box. I wish you your own foot in your own mouth in public too many times to count.
And perhaps your life time of inconvenience,
Stretched out way too long like a piece of pink bubblegum
In a 4th grader's mouth,
Might just equal out to the amount of direct, immediate, live, in-color pain I felt in that one moment on the porch last summer.

Twenty-four Carat

"Just be honest," she says "Just be honest with me." As if I can be anything with her while my heart is playing catch-up and my mind is a mine shaft of harrowed thoughts and forgotten projects and while she thinks I've got things locked away from her in my brain, I'm struggling to find the words to explain that I lost my key a long time ago. Trust me on this one, facts are fleeting. The truth has never set me free because the truth runs like a rat from a flashlight and has more of a hood on than Trayvon did - the truth is a dick. Believe me when I say that my perception is built on lies and all too often I'm telling them to myself. I promise you: I can't be trusted but I'm in here somewhere, trying to label things with a white crayon. Truth is a con-man. Truth is a terrorist to reliability, collapsing a fortress of preconceived notions that took 20 years, 4 months, and 5 days to build. I try and map out how I feel and then the slot machine whirs again. Cha-ching, a brand new reality. I can't confirm shit. There aren't enough eraser shavings in the world to try and fix what I thought was indisputable. I knew it. I knew it - words speak much louder than actions.