Slug life

One time in the middle of the shit I played Venus in Furs so many times in a row I forgot my own name I ordered Jimmy Johns after I’d been slicing the shit out of my chest with a razor and the scars are still here five years later and I answered the door with blood dripping down my chest and the delivery girl didn’t really understand what was going on and asked “that’s not real is it” and I said no of course not and also, where is that you’re from?

She went back to Italy, gave away all her paintings, equipment, books and what nots. She went back to that restaurant on the hill in Naples and sat there for endless hours for a week, looking at Vesuvius, Capri, the bay, the sky, trying, with the desperation of the dying, to reawaken those old feelings, trying with jewels of sparkling wine to rekindle the flame that half fired her imagination just a short lifetime ago, and though the wine sparkled in the sunlight, and the moonlight, the once blazing fire was extinguished and Marion finally succumbed to the stone coldness within her.

-Hubert Selby Jr.

Requiem for a Dream

Drugs and death and girls are the only parts of the song

Cinder blocks stacked on yesterdays tile

Dirty leaves scattered into a cold breath of Fall

Yet all that I seem to think is wrong is not

The times that have seared to my soul

Bring a smile

A small damp cotton of sorrow

Through which I draw up thoughts of tomorrow

The Portrait of Dorian Gray is waking up unchanged

While your true self stares from a canvas

None of the guilt, depravity, or shame leaves a line on your face

Your soul resides in paint

The storm you sow on your loves

The pain you cut into tar and plunge into depths through scars

Reaps nothing but snow in their hearts

Cold flakes that breed like doves and take flight in their minds

Until you finally succeed in granting the wish of their departure

Your loves

And you remain unchanged while your stained soul and inked face

stare back from canvas

Suicide unchained

on your loves

The pumped and fruited smell of insomnia raises from the skin above one thousand knotted muscle fibers, distilled, soaking down to the bone that wishes it could unsnap itself back into the sweat wrung from the cloth night wove when stars broke up enough to spell out hormone signatures. In this body that betrays me, i drink beer in calculating mug swallows, gagging, coughing at the foam which dried up along the gray plaque of the lungs, this breath called “more,” sucking the bitten ego of waiting for love to begin again, i sing the faggot songs of 2004, my dick is the ultimate celebrity.

-Gabriel Prado (The closest relative I’ve met)

An apron while my arm bleeds

from the grease bouncing off the griddle

A disguise at best

The steps are obnoxiously loud and anything that goes

to twelve

is bound to bring me back to the confirmation

of infinite nothing

Sentiments breed

Loathing

I’ll break out in needles

from an allergy?

I’ll break out a shell into my head

from solution

You know me

The phantom shotgun

Under my chin

is Shiny

She smells like dried blood

That lady behind me in line

Staring

Better pray that

the next shell

is for me