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.

Sprawl

You wake up slowly, as if trying to hang on to something slipping back into the darkness. You roll uncomfortably of bed (and out of that notion) and begin layering yourself with old spice and fabric and fabric and fabric and mint flavored toothpaste in that order. Time passes. Not a cloud in the sky because they're all in your head. Rivers of caffeine and epinephrine and indignation wind through the Grand Canyon of your cortex and you can't tell which ones you put there yourself and which ones have been there since your birth. But it doesn't matter because that girl in your biology lecture has worn flannel for a week and a half and you're starting to believe she's doing it to you personally.

Traffic moves along in tectonic rifts and you don't notice it. Half a world away, masses perish and you don't notice it. Day melts into night melts into day melts into night and you do not notice it. It's fine; life is a single, springy question mark and you live in a fucking city built for drunk teenagers.

But surely the number of time-zones that exist inside your eyes is the equal to the number of goosebumps I feel raise on my arms when I see you, because this feeling could only be derived from such perfect symmetry. A goddamn three piece band plays in my head as the elevator swallows you up. It reminds me of the first time I saw light back in early October of '94.

For a Good Time:

Call me.
Getting better, biting bigger,
Being bitter, fire starter,
Call me game changer.
Call me close shave, close call.
Leaps and bounds, call my bluff.
Put me on a shelf,
Put me in the zoo,
Put me to sleep,
Put me down,
Call the shots.
Call me.
I answer to sleepless nights and ringworm days,
Toothpaste kisses and  2 am power plays.
Lofty rivers of sweat.
Call me when I least expect it.
When I'll most regret it.
Call me.

On the Inflation of Fulfillment

My life got full so much quicker when I was small. It took a lot less. My day felt heavy when I was learning that a peninsula was a stretch of land with water on three sides of it and choosing to sit near my male classmates in hopes that one of them might bring up the rarely exhaustible topic of boobs.

It might be greed... or boredom, I don't know. Maybe it's just that my body is physically larger now, but it takes a lot longer to fill. Days melt together and are smeared with other distractions. It's a lot of pressure to have a good time before life fires stress-missiles up all of our defenseless assholes.

We all desire to be the sole survivor of a crippling shitstorm of commercialism. We all desire to be the martyr of this Applebees. But beyond the moral high-grounds of the mozzarella sticks is an exceedingly minimalist realization: that you have all you need simply because it's all that you have. While some may chalk this one up to confirmation bias, strive to experience the moment where what you have is enough. And focus on your work ethic and your attitude and your fucking daily water intake. I mean shit, in the grand scheme of things, $8.75 an hour is devoid of glamour but enshrined in importance. So what? So what. If you can no longer stand writing about depression or sobriety or... um, the seemingly cyclical nature of family secrets, than write about a dog you saw that day. Worldly significance is an illusion because the only mind through which you can interpret it is your own. So make it matter to yourself... that's it. You're all you have.

And then, when it's over, thirst again. For boobs. Or mozzarella sticks.