clean up the clutter of echoes...
swim
you keep telling me i'm beautiful but i feel a little less so each time your love is so colorful it flashes like a neon sign but i finally drove out where the sky is dark enuf to see stars and i found i missed no one just listening to the swishing of distant cars i hope i never see the ocean again pushing and pulling at me as i go deeper and deeper in til i'm so far from my shore so far from what i came here for i let you surround me i let you drown me out with your din and then i learned how to swim i was floating above myself watching her do just what you wanted poor little friendly ghost wondering why her whole house feels haunted i told myself i was strong enuf that i had plenty of blood to give and each elbow cradled a needle but listless and faint ain't no way to live so i hope i never see the ocean again pushing and pulling at me as i go deeper and deeper in til i'm so far from my shore so far from what i came here for i let you surround me i let you drown me out with your din and then i learned how to swim you keep telling me i'm beautiful but i feel a little less so each time your love is so colorful it flashes like a neon sign but i finally drove out where the sky is dark enuf to see stars and i found i missed no one just listening to the swishing of distant cars
slide
she was hungry so hungry and she was trying to think clear but she kept opening the fridge door and looking at the mustard and the beer and then finally she went out into the rain carrying her bicycle chain and her feet worked the pedals while her appetite steered and after that she just followed her nose cuz fate is not just whose cooking smells good but which way the wind blows she laid down in her party dress and never got up needless to say she missed the party she just got sad then she got stuck she was wincing like something brittle trying hard to bend she was numb with the terror of losing her best friend but she never sees things changing she only sees them ending and some vicious whispering voice keeps saying you have no choice cuz when i look at you i squint you are that beautiful and my pussy is a tractor and this is a tractor pull i'm haunted by my illicit, explicit dreams and i can't really wake up so i just drift in between thinking the glass is half empty and thinking it's not quite full the pouring rain is no place for a bicycle ride try to hit the breaks and you slide and you slide and you slide
the true story of what was
the light blue flickering rhythm of the neighbor's big console t.v. is basking on the ceiling of another insomniatic spree and outside sleep's open window between the drops of rain history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain oh to clean up the clutter of echoes coming in and out of focus words spoken like locusts sing and sing in my head and thing is they often seem in my memory's long dream to be superfluous to the true story of what was cuz real is real regardless of what you try to say or say away real is real relentless while words distract and dismay words that change their tune though the story remains the same words that fill me quickly and then are slow to drain dialogues that dither down reminiscent of the way it likes to rain every screen a smoke screen oh to dream just for a moment the picture outside the frame then in a flash the light blue horizon spanning a sudden black is sucked into the vanishing point and quiet rushes back to search for the downbeat in a tabla symphony to search in the darkness for someone who looks like me (though i'm not really who i said i was or who i thought i'd be) just a collection of recollections conversations consisting of the kind of marks we make when we're trying to get a pen to work again a lifetime of them. i say to me now here listening i say to the locusts that sing and sing to me sitting now here on the front porch swing of my eyes: i hereby amend whatever i've ever said with this sigh