learned behaviour

we come from spunk,
those five minutes your daddy paid attention
to your mommy.

we live here
in the now,
just a collection of images
passing through one another on the street
like
it's only air,

a blur.

you go this way.
i'll go that way,
and maybe we'll meet up
one day
if we both slow down.

i'll light your cigarette.
we sit down where the curb meets
the street.

and by this time,
i swear to god,
one of us will have something to say
like grown ups,
just how we used to imagine.

the confusion of a gathering

i'm pretty sure i draw awesome birds,
but none of this matters right now.

what really matters is that everybody
drinks too much,
and at the same time not enough
at all.

i even saw my dad drunk this weekend,
more hammered than i can ever remember.
the sad thing,
or funny thing,
is that i was too drunk
to even remember.

then chris was kicked out
for flinging meatballs at the ceiling.
this made lauren cry.

i never witnessed a thing
because
i was somewhere on the backporch
smoking cigarettes with steve.

and whats really weird
is that i haven't smoked a cigarette
with anyone
in six months
and twentyone days.

postpartum

you just don't know where to begin,
each thought is stronger than metal
and these thoughts are threaded
into larger chains of being.

most of the time
we sit here,
stunned,
waiting for the daze to end,

unable to think,
unable to vacuum the fuzz
from our brains,

we are nothing more than microbial intentions
lost
in a wilderness of eventual endings.

a ship in a bottle

there's too much plum
in
the four dollar bottle
of malbec
i bought tonight.

and at this point,
i just don't care anymore.

lately,
we have had the conistency
of strangers.
where everything just drips
until one of us goes to bed,
with
neither one of us
saying our prayers.

but the only difference is,
is that i am here
and
you are there,
and
this bottle we sit in
is certainly not a church.

before it gets louder

in the deepest part of the night,
when you think
that everybody in this entire city
is asleep,

you just know better.
the quiet
leads to thinking
and the thinking leads
to a tiny siren roaming
far enough off in the distance
where you categorize it
as just another example of background noise.

it's not cool anymore

the puerto ricans
have been lighting fireworks
since
a little before
the first of the month.

tomorrow
will be the fourth of july,
the 7th straight day
of 90 degree plus heat.

someone opened the firehydrant
behind the elementary school
on kedzie,
and now
children wade in gutters.

you try to cut the sky
just to relieve the haze

but the knife melts,
and
nobody thinks any of this
is funny.

post haste

hi.

i want to fuck you.

i love you.
let's move in together.

i have dreams
that could fit the size
of
one of your hands.

and just before i give you the first one,
you will have decided upon a wall
in which you want to slap.