Friends Don't Let Friends

You said something about how
disappointment is just aspiration
leaving the body

but I'm pretty sure
that was just an idle sigh
asking you if my yawn
said where it planned on being an hour from now.
I really am excited to be here
if you are.

You mentioned tomorrow is another day,

but that's alright.  I forgot
tonight is Saturday too.

Put It Back to Pieces

In this halfway weather

and bad company, mapped out

with aluminum cans like push pins

left as equal parts warning

signs and forensic chalk,

it's easy to mislay 

the markers where

tiny ambitions wait

to die and wheeze still like

rats ankle deep in glue and cardboard,

but tuning an imagined acoustic guitar

and halfway tucked with

pen and paper lurking like

stop signs on a downhill blind sweep

along the head first 

uphill road to sleep,

there is a quiet 

to the air wrestling through the space heater

and a pleasure to the unrealized

cramps and rages of

navigating so many

parts and pieces

with hands already whipped 

and fumbling and labor sore

and any single one

a crystalline choking hazard

waiting for the touch of tongue and gum

to come painfully undone.

I'm Sorry You're Gone

I'm sorry you're gone and

I'm sorry I can't pay you a decent tribute

without sounding

selfish and small and

misguided.

You were better than that

as far as I know

as far as I've been able to see

from the center of my self destroying radius

through the distance I've kept up toward most

out of necessity

and unaware that you were probably made

out of tougher, lighter, stuff

that wouldn't mind a perpetual meltdown's heat.

I'm sorry you're gone and

I'm sorry I can't pay you a decent tribute

without sounding

selfish and small and

misguided.

I am selfish and small and

bent and the times we didn't have are

screaming in my ears and 

I hate you

for leaving so soon and

I hate me

for not knowing

if I should have come closer or

if I was, to your nearest friends, more than close enough