emote:

Envious of the prayers slipped from other lips, sleeplessness accompanied with headphones, 
wet streets and torn shoes, soaked yet undaunted, a life spent flowering amidst flakes
of industrial rust, the monuments of capitol whither to reveal their skeletons of dust, 
ignorance like a phoenix consumes all common sense. Advice offered as opinion, blindfolded
and side swiped, the shepherd of the resurrection refuses questions, these days so short 
it seems almost impossible to distinguish life from dream, so many types of sadness, 
grief like a headache, written like an email unsent, or some vacant alleyway that leads
from nowhere special to nothing you need, eschewing modern for romantic, as if by choice
swept up in the dim light that silently approaches, as if choice were something we ever
could afford.

Someday we will sing this, happiness is just another shade of sorrow, 
I give you the night and you hold onto to it till dawn, we are at odds
on the significance of a new century, another decade, another coat of flesh, 
mourning the willow and the stillness of water or else celebrating it by forgetting, 
I have walked myself through this, air tinted with guilt and coffee, 
tattooed arms and some slow way of talking, another son of Isaac, another offering.
Another season spent learning the patience it takes to quit dreaming or smoking, 
or caring about the gentrification of the ghetto, these streets are not yours, 
they will outlive you, and who cares, really, what kind of eyes stare 
at this sort of hollowness, come with me and I will show you where they sleep
and sing and fuck, I will guard you as you vomit, I will explain to them 
your ignorance, I will shield them from your best intentions, I will refuse to blush.

Goodbye April, if anything should linger let it crouch close to thistle to evaporate like last night's rain,
exhaulted by transcendence, though nothing is forever, let us rejoice in the sorrow we have stolen from others,
sown like patches on jackets or over torn knees, born to grieve, headstones like mounds of dead leaves.
April I sing you a sonnet as cruel as any and sharper to dull ears
content to debate road work and other forms of separation, I will have nothing to do with any of it.
April it's day I don't know of a war I never learned enough about to really remember, 
all the photographs seem like gun ads, all the talk of liberation has left me confined.
April when we meet again will you swoon like some greek chorus searching for the validity of flesh?
Will you tempt me like some strange mortal whose outgrown the village, bored at the alter
before the spectacle of the ritual of the rotting mind, sworn to his sword to dream of penetration, 
More like Achilles than Jesus, the ghosts of dead languages swelter in your passing.

Empty streets as cold as a morning pressed against light
familiar as a forgotten language, distant as a promise.
It took me twice, I forgot what I swore I would remember,
you and the summer both gone, importance is its own spectacle,
work is what others say is to be done, I am the water fading
into the sand, as empty as what you would expect
a house of windows to be, that kind of alone.

Stumbling winter, remember being scared of cities and other places,
we could count on each other then, what will you say after you've been
something somebody had seen, like exhaust against the lightening sky,
that kind of quick, that kind of goodbye.
Crisp breath, I know you will forget the names of those who lay here beaten.
You look like someone who once was here, you will love him as I did,
we have more in common than that, we are bound by air and restricted by time
and motion and blur and momentum until we are exhausted.