Crayons in the Dark

Apple for milk

apple for milk

a place where they throw literature

instead of the book, the good book,

all night bookie, begging

solitaire refinement

mindfulness is next to emptiness

it isn’t pretty, but it’s a way to cleanliness

resisted arrest, resisted the breast

tazered, forever oral fixating

lactose intolerant toddler abandonment

but I can’t breathe this shit you’re speaking

the yellow light of my birth haunts me

like what I think about when I masturbate

hardness limping upriver

the only metaphor left ain’t right

cope with it, rope and switchblades

my mother or your mother once screamed

“what the fuck did you write on the walls?”

I held that dog-dick-orange crayon like a microphone

“read it, bitch”

still shaving my head thirty-three years after

hair pulling tears from

my idea of heaven, a perfect

world, a moon mother, orbiting

I, her cub, her Mowgli

left to foster homes

and wolves with funny names

and I have no idea

what my name is anymore, once was

a crooked doctor, a hospital

near a waterfall, on a hill in winter

it’s a boy, it may have

brain damage, no telling

crooked face fortune cookie

coat hanger dodge-ball

the day after the beginning

inner-tube caught on rocks

shafts of Ra in cedar locks

car-bombs have yet to be real

cold wars and silent treatments

repeat offenders means redundant punishments

selling details, telling tall tales

go ahead and tell them taller than before

below poverty and average

muzzled by a poor vocabulary,

what does it mean to not know how to spell oppression?

broke, I open a dictionary at a library by a cemetery

and the only things between dog and God,

are EAT and FUCK,

and I am dreaming of a white trash Christmas

that was just as magical as yours

I will evolve without you, if I must

monkey of Man,

son of stars and moon-landings,

destined finite,

we all share a trajectory,

a final tragedy

that money and words cannot deflect