In Fredonia, NY

In Fredonia NY, the townies sit in clans in Barker Commons, watching the rest of us stumble in broken-heel stupors down Temple. Leather jackets quilted with crowns, running down in breeding grounds of filth and the sub-political bullshit that tells them to spit at spics and colors. I watch them watch me, hate them hate me, in the spiral of friday nights.

I Fredonia NY, I take mornings up slope streets, shifting in my jeans with the skinny pursed-lipped girls, who judged themselves for their sex and sex, more than I ever cared for. You see it in the mother's faces, walking their all-american dogs at dawn, assuming our sins for us. The criss crossed fire that breaks our faces roars in valleys beneath or skins and beneath our belts, and when they hate themselves for thinking I hate them, I smile and say it's never been more ok.

In Fredonia NY, I run in circles on wired wheels, through this town, dunkirk, and back onto brocton and erie, carrying understanding that the separation, beautiful in it's bastard light, is only a figment of imagination. There is not place like this, because that would imply there was ever a difference to begin with.

In Fredonia NY, I can count days in leaves and snowdrift and tumultuous weather patterns, trudging through cigarette ash and the magnificent miscommunication between nature and life, lived from Bennet to Forest.

In Fredonia NY, I celebrate my life, the ones before it, and the ones birthed every year, bathed in creekwater and gin.

Abecedarian

Abecedarian for Silver Hammers

Brevity is not the most
cautious thing you carry.
Deep beneath your wool coat,
eaten by moths and the mayhem we wreck,
fucked up in blizzards from beer we found in your
garage, you carry the lyrics you cut out of your
heated skin.
I warn you that we're
just like we always said we'd be,
kept up during the night, because
lack of sleep and an aversion to the
morning remind us we were
never cut
out for this world.
Probably for the best that we
quit our dreams, let our callouses
recede, and forget that
sounds and songs were supposed to
take us everywhere
under the earth and stone. Now, we
vomit in bathtubs, pick and break at
wicker strings, break the
xylophone we swore we'd use in our last album.
You look at me and say, the
zest for this we once had, man, where the fuck did it go?

Halloween, 2005

1.
 I wore jeans and a green flannel.
It was the only flannel I ever owned
and I wore the shit out of it,
beating it down to bare threads.
I sat on my front steps
with two baskets of candy.
One for me,
one for everyone else,
god forbid they showed up.
At school, people asked what I was supposed to be,
smirks and smart ass comments crossing their lips,
like sticky taffy between teeth.
I wore my jacket through the day,
the only day I was afforded that minor luxury.
One kid, Joe something-Italian,
in his third attempt to start a fight with me,
asked if I was playing a retard for Halloween.
I was pretending to be his real father,
but felt bad that my costume was too close to the truth,
was my response.

2.
 I expected my father to be home.
Birthdays actually mean something when you're that age.
I think he said he would be so as to not upset me,
prior to the day's revelations.
He wasn't good at that.
My mother bought me a bag of skittles,
my own personal meth at the time,
so I had something to do,
while kids much younger and older than I,
ran across with the sheets and plastic taped to their cavity killed bodies.  

break this on my back, tell me i'm still a man

I used to keep cold salamanders
in the breast pockets of my wool coat,
leave them there to sleep
beside my waning lungs.
I could feel them, turn, twist,
dance inside their dreams,
like tops on the surface of the ocean.
They never spoke & never woke,
not to stir or speak,
save to say,       goodnight.

At night, when I walked
down empty streets, skipping
between lamplight, I felt
the cold they did.
The fog at my feet
became the fog in my eyes,
and I would drive myself mad.

See I wanted to squirm
& dance like the salamanders
against my chest.
I wanted to see what they saw,
in the cavernous home of my coat,
get lost in darkness,
lose the ability to speak,
save a repetition,
like a frozen & cracking record.

But, one morning, I woke up,
threw the coat over my shoulders,
and knew.
I spoke nothing of nothing,
saw darkness of dark,
straining, praying, to still
feel the cold they felt.
But, no fog crept to my feet,
no haze bled to my eyes,
and no cold salamander
danced against my lungs.

Cavity.

Hello again.
Here I am,
sword in hand,
trying desperately to destroy your coated world.
I want to watch you crumble.
Or at least,
in vain,
I want to watch you surrender.
See, I've grown weary,
of childish endeavors,
and adult shame.
I've grown weary of words spoken,
unwilling to hear a reply.
And in truth,
you hear these words as I do,
and I too refuse to speak.
But, it makes no difference.
I want to you to spit back what you took in.
I want to cut you out,
sword and comb in hand.

You court strangeness,
and spread it across your floor.
Mixed in with your newspaper clippings,
scraps of paper,
tidings of a past,
it has little room to breathe.

And yet,
you court your strangeness,
only to pass the time,
when your terrible,
beautiful,
and reckless sadness,
might return.

At one point,

I was a basin,

carved from stone and molten steel,

covered in ash.

And rain slipped in,

mixing in with the soot and dirt,

all over my cracking skin.

I became a canvas.

And then you came along.

With your brushes and pens.

Writing it all off,

like it maybe meant something.

But you spoke in softer syllables

than all the storms before.

Your quiet little whispers

fired off like gunshots in my ears.

Cataclysmic events,

that cracked the basin in half,

rattled inside my skull,

like trench fire.

Somewhere between the end,

the hollow bullets that conclude,

and the falsified beginnings,

the ones I wrote about in dreams,

you slipped in,

and spilt your paint all over me,

running away the soot and ash,

the stones and molten steel.