I am no longer screaming
To portend the inevitable anymore.
All the gas station rum
Flowing through my blood,
is twisting my stomach into knots.

Misled by the M8,
Taking the wrong turns and
into an alcoholic summer.
Synapse to synapse,
The roads ahead thin out.

​

Again, I find myself at an impasse.
Where I get off
And build myself a television receiver,
That only plays the middle fifteen minutes
of Pierrot le Fou.

​

If I never again make it back to this freeway
Wearing my best shoes
or if I die wearing a dress shirt and silver cufflinks,
in an insalubrious apartment
or on a beach in Montenegro.
I would never get to reframe my negative experiences
on the side of the freeway.

If all life is a series of rooms we get stuck in
The room I currently find myself in
Has a painting my mother made that she loathes
I am wearing a double-breasted
Persian Green jacket
Dressed up to the eyes.

​

I know my brother is on his way,
He is standing in the doorway with his eyes closed.
He is here to rescue me from my head being
Ablaze with the flames of penance.
A flame as nebulous

​

As the effigy
I have spent the entire poem burning.

​

This is the last dream I ever want to have

Between the splintered Bombay Sapphires,
A summer spanning multiple years passed by.
And Befittingly
When autumn did come,
it came inside of an ambulance.
The impossible view of a foreign autumn
From the ambulance window
Did make me want to stay alive.
Do anything with my life,
Ruin it again, but never end it for good.

​

Even so,
There is a pull towards the end
That no one can deny.
Forever does not last
Because the end is far stronger.

​

Over the years,
As the Sydney evening sun
Cascades on my face,
I look at my friends leaving
A little slant,
Away from me and further into the years.
From a third-storied Spanish balcony,
The faces of my old friends
From every possible angle
Except for the one in my memory.

​

While I keep walking the narrow line
Between sentimental and suicidal.
Regardless of which line
I am walking in,
Both probably lead to
An early grave.