Good-Bye Philadelphia

Good-Bye Philadelphia

The most acute observations

Deliriously board,

Growing tired and fat

Stroking the mind at full length,

(by counting the speaks on my wall).

Onslaught of visions before I am even awake,

This silent repetition,

I am a mammal seeking missile.

It is best to swallow words

Before the mind turns its’ filter on.

It is best to view with the eyes of 22 years,

Or confusion and solitude,

The great wait of liberation.

It is best not to suffer too much

For the sin of idle time,

It is what makes the breath and

Body poetic.

What do you want to hear…

About inspiration?

I have a slight headache

& a tendency to despair.

But I also have silence & the runny egg

Of thought before dawn.

I curl my foot into a ball

The stillness of 6am begins to get to me.

I think of letters I need to write,

Watching the snake of aspirations devour itself.

Suffering in the protracted peach palace,

To recreate.

Distant from the moving frames,

Blowing and bowing,

Boiling the thought down to a pearl,

Exiting the asshole, anxious and seeking love

On the beautiful frozen steps,

By the ubiquitous neon signs,

This cradled child,

Product of glue & promise & paranoia &

Pillows & loathing,

Burnt televised tubes seeking

Sanity in reflections,

Hollowed crack of electric guitars

Burning traces of class and unity.

A photograph of uselessness,

Borrowing points to practice

Uncertainty with an eye

Towards progress.

So we begin with this:

The insanity of notion,

Locked and reached,

Desirous and delirious seeking angels

To accept my worn shadow and cigarettes.

Quit the job, pushing baskets of bright cans &

Mad with love drove boxes and cynicism

To Philadelphia.

Spent money on books & food & wine,

Adjusted to hysteria, locked gentle trees

In great glass vials,

And rubbed my fingers in the spit of her streets.

Today is my good-bye.

Good-bye strange jobs, unions,

Hand rolled cigarettes and blues.

Good-bye crazy angels who washed

Their assholes for the common good of the world.

Good-bye theologians who got drunk

And tried to convince me Christ

Was just a sad-eyed sexy soul.

Good-bye shelves of wine and cigarette ash.

Good-bye steps where I talked to angels

Over invisible, innumerable nights.

Good-bye electric play of the proletariat,

& hoagies stuffed with knowledge.

Good-bye muffled conversations of drunken loneliness,

Heard through these empty walls.

Good-bye saintly uncles who perfected chess in

Their chain smoke longing.

Good-bye countless books,

Passed between bed sheets,

Killing time or expanding it.

Good-bye first poems of public

Old bookstores & bearded bards of adoption.

Good-bye final cigarette stomped out

In dental office parking lot.

Good-bye country bars where I belted

In smoke, songs for the ageless.

Good-bye Bed where we laid

Exhausted in our arms,

Building heavens’ with

Conversations, sex, and laughter.

Good-bye faces who burnt their essence

Into my skull.

Good-bye first candles towards eternity

And the loss of God.

Good-bye terror of repeating the past,

Realizing this is; of coarse, absurd.

Good-bye long highways of blight,

Followed by wilderness,

Golub mountain peaks, valleys,

And the soft fog of mourning.

Good-bye every breath or thought or song or moment.

I return you in the grateful

Understanding that I am

Born with each new moment.

I acknowledge the greatness

Of all your quirky perfection,

And gassho to the great heart

Of

Philadelphia.