I can’t really tell you how I’ve managed to go so long
living out the lyrics to all those really dark love tunes
from the years of steady earthquakes.

I don’t even know where those masked teenage avengers
in my neighborhood get all those pipe bombs from.

I’m an idiot. I can even forget the name of the friend
who needs me to talk him out of proving
that a suicide case can enjoy skydiving like anyone else.

When I run into someone claiming to be the reincarnation
of Emperor Norton, I can never think of something funny to say.

Laughing with all the other lifetime visitors
to these ongoing, slow-roast gallows is easier than it used to be.

Liberating, in a selfish sort of way,
because you suddenly have a lot of things to discuss
with the cab drivers who live in the clouds. Made of a quicksand
that infuriatingly never gets past your neck.

Every strung-out marriage proposal from an aging concept
of Miss Popularity is a bright light of bright boy hope
for the next twenty years of this awful fucking century.

Every Mexican grocery store is haunted by the star-crossed lovers
who couldn’t stay a fraction of a step ahead of the law forever.

And you dig it. You smile every time you cross a freeway,
where the gunfights and lunch hour traffic at 11 PM
exist side-by-side and without ever acknowledging one another.

You sing even when it’s raining car batteries and motorcycle wheels.

I don’t even cringe anymore. Not even when I hear that one familiar
voice calling me, stripping the color from every other building,
on a street with fifteen and a half variations of installations
of what a dead end is really like.

It’s easy. It’s a breeze that leaves holy water moisture
in all the weird places around here where tall grass grows.

The day I started to forget every other thing,
some of it good, some of it bad,
was the day I became so fearless
that it’s borderline obnoxious sometimes.

12/07/2012

Posted on 12/08/2012
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