I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

I’m afraid I will be stupidly brave.

I will love someone that you will never meet.

See, our job was simple:keep on living.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings.

brutal disaster born out of so much greed.

Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment

Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?

I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears.

What is it to go to a We from an I?

This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.

I grieved my deaths.

I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

Below the grave, a cold spring runs.Clear, like a conscience.

Now, I’m alone.

I loved them: my own bright dead things.

I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.

I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark.

I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die.

That tree, that one willowy thing over there, can save a life, you know?

I’m afraid I will be stupidly brave.

IN A MEXICAN RESTAURANT I RECALL HOW MUCH YOU UPSET ME

In one sentence, in a Mexican restaurant, you were alive, and then dead again, and then we had a margarita.

you left me when I was 15, you sent my dog to the pound, you hung up on my brother.

I let death in, learn to prospect the between-dreams of the dying,

I will love someone that you will never meet.

You are crying in the shower. I am crying near the shower.

How strange this silent longing for death.

she wants to die of heart failure or to drown in her own fluids.

See, our job was simple:keep on living.

Is it weird to say that I could hear you dying like that?

Once, she asked to just be thrown into the river where we used to go, still alive, but not living anymore.

After it was done, I couldn’t go back to my life.

I couldn’t tell if I loved myself more or less.

I am full of love. I am dying.

Someday, son, none of this will be yours.

the tempting, the taking, the apple, the fall,

every one of us guilty, the story of us all.

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to die.

Before now, I don’t know if I have ever loved anyone, or if I have ever been loved.

the neon glow was a real star,

gleaming in its dying, like us all, like us all.

She’s in the window crying because the city is too big, and also because we are at war.

so many dolorous selves in each of us dissolving into fog.

I never wanted to see him come to harm, or watch it.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings.

I love the way men love.

we stare long enough into nothing.

my guitar has been frozen for days, the heated song gone out of the instrument.

If we could light up the room with pain, we’d be such a glorious fire.

If I can have a child. If I cannot have a child. If you do not care.

I am gleaming. Promise you’ll see me gleam.

brutal disaster born out of so much greed.