I am coming home with my palms upturned,
The knife missing from my boot,
Initiative wasted on disarmament.

and
We can throw the midnight oil into the street.

And I will do anything it takes.
Even if it means staying drunk, alone,
Squandering my natural advantage,

Anything it takes.

I am coming home in earnest.

The books are written in dead languages,
and, if they so happened to revive,
the verse would be awful.
Many claim to understand,
few admit they cannot, and all
assume that someone, truly,
someone must know.
How can it be that something so primal is unknown?
How can the instincts of humanity
dissipate like an autumn storm?

I do not believe in angels,
for I have not seen an angel, but
I do believe in sea anemones,
lurking in the coldest,
dampest darkness.
It is easy to believe in
something dumb and vicious,
easy to believe
that something exists only to eat and sting,
with no thoughts of trumpets,
and no hidden meaning.

Our hearts are cold and heavy things
dropped to crushing depths, they
keep us from drifting.

After the bomb falls,
flames race the moorings
faster than they can be undone.
It seems we’ll be together,
forever,
another pair of hulks
buried at sea.

There are moments that we know –
A girl on a bed, telling you she loves you –
a friend in the moonlight on a snowy street-
the third bite of a forty-dollar meal-
moments we know to savor, moments we
try to hold on to for a little longer, moments where
for all the joy obvious on their face, the grief is
hidden, a grain of salt in the sugar,
the fear that
this too will pass.

I murmur my evening prayer for the tired, the dying, and the cruel,
With my thoughts barrelling towards you.
And when I meet you in my dreams I wake up,
because your face isn’t what I remember,
and you are acting much too sweet,
and there’s no point searching for something
that I know is long, long lost.

I’ll be a little better when I wake up,
Treat my family like the bible says I should.
I’ll eat clean, work out four times a week,
try to get my mind back somewhere good.
I’ll wake up as a new and bright-eyed boy,
three days in the Mahoning county jail,
I’ll finally learn from my mistakes,
I’ll save up enough to pay the bail.