I’m not working on new ways
for people to leave me,
believe me,
but I am meeting more and more people
who consider the funeral fringes of town
to be just too noisy for their tastes.

You have to manage your own ride
if you want to meet with those types.

Drink everything in their dining room cabinet,
get a tattoo by the light over the stove
or faint when the art-school models
remember your first name.

You have to lose absolutely everything
if you want to get to the place
where you can throw away your life in 48 hours.

That was a piece of advice
I picked up from a massage therapist,
with a police record that could travel around
Madison Square Garden forty-six times.

She was mean. She wanted friends like me
to pay with their lives. It’s just that she wasn’t very cunning.
Cops were always banging on her front door
with handcuffs and a dozen gin-soaked roses.

Even in her dreams,
she only ever cared about herself.

But I followed her everywhere.
I thought I was going to write forever in those days.
Play the junkyard game show on the weekend,
and win twenty-thousand dollars I would never make otherwise.

Way back whenever,
I thought at least half of my success story
would consist of things I didn’t deserve.

I thought I would always be brave enough
to steal a car from a museum in broad daylight.

When I went from age twenty-one to twenty-seven
the other day
I found that my slight touch of madness
was suddenly feeling the pressure
of knowing that it could breathe without machines.

It could spread its wings,
and bowl over a room full of laughing,
hard-working sociopaths.

Turn Manhattan into an elevator that trembles slightly.

My psychological arithmetic
ain’t what I hoped
it would eventually be.

What I’ve got are spirit guides made of steam and glass,
mistakes who wear long tongues and brilliant business attire
and not a single shred of hope
that I can tell you in ten words or less why life is worth living.

I can’t throw a basketball into an open window
of a burning building,
so don’t even bother asking me to get my life together.

What I can do is get so frustrated
that I go to bed early,
and run head-first
into a good fighting chance.

09/13/2012

Posted on 09/14/2012
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