Ten Years

ten years ago, summer died

like an acid sunrise

and all of the leaves faded

like the primary colors

on the petals of a cardboard flower

she gave to me then

ten years ago

which I have since taken

from its shoebox tomb

and put into a beer bottle I emptied

in that dim room where I looked out of the long window

which framed the cool, empty evening

Tom Waits played from the cheap stereo

on the mantel of a walled up fireplace:

a fireplace replaced by a broken t.v.

on a stack of tan encyclopedias five decades old

and the color of deserts in washed out photos

I drank bourbon

from a stolen stolen rocks glass

and chased it away with the pumpkin beer

with the orange and blue tiles

like the petals on her cardboard flower

I rolled and smoked cigarettes

with the window open

listening to the sound of A Grapefruit Moon

and the rustling of the branches of the trees

I drank down the bourbon-pumpkin-beered-loneliness

framed in my mind

by the black and white bathroom tiles

the black and white,

the hot and cold moments of myself

my 21 year old rages and devastations

framed in shadows and smoke

the green denim on my jacket with the brown collar

and the frayed sleeve cuffs with brass buttons

and my blue jeans and my blue eyes

like wet marbles

were proof that I lived too

as did the squirrels, or the rats, or the mice

who clawed in the walls

as the thoughts of my mind

clawed in the walls of their cheap rooms,

but I was lucky because the cool air

and the bourbon helped me

to go to sleep finally...

after the three months I had suffocated

in the hot haze madness:

an entire summer wherein I never slept

insomnia leaked in like beads of acid sweat

and burned the insulation on the wires in my brain:

one dead summer was finally buried

with the desperation of night

in the hideous soil of an acid sunrise

the humid ache of church bells ringing

the singing I listened to at the city recycling dump

where I swept broken glass off of the scorched asphalt

the broken pieces of the bourbon-pumpkin-beered-drunkeness

the glittering prayers of an entire city

swept into my dustpan

alone

in the hot circada sunset