it's too cold to sit here outside
but I pretend the street lights is really sunshine
- and who are you to tell me that I'm wrong?
that the flowers are really strip club flyers
and that it's just the traffic, not city birds' song

it's too cold to sit here in the park
but I pretend it's summer to warm my heart
- and who are you to tell me that I don't belong?
that the park is really the city graveyard
and the bench is some poor bastard's tomb?

This is where inspiration goes to die
we all perform the last rites
in between the mingling crowd
and the many glasses of wine

This is a cemetery for creativity
and the slow death of ideas.
We mold ourself into black shirts and converse
to prove we are rebellious enough to fit in

This is where our ambition
slaughters our inspiration.
This is what we hate to love
and where we strive to belong.


---


We struggle along
this path we claim chose us
when really we stumbled upontin
and claim to have chosen

We huff and we puff
to appear almost capable
we huff and we puff
and pretend we're not exchangable


--

Fuck all Art
(with a capital A)
snaring me
(and I let it)
to contempt myself
(while still proud if fitting in)
Fuck the fact
(and I guess that's Fuck and Fact
with a capital F)
that I still love T. S. Eliot

I sit alone here in this room for the socially stigmatized. The modern lepers. The left over smokers. Here, the cigarette burns have drawn their patterns on the heavy wooden surface. The wallpapers are faded and yellow from age, tear and smoke. What life does a gleaming surface have? Only the used have personality - only the abused have integrity. And so I tenderly offer my ashes, my lipstick stained cigarette buds, to the room and leave to join the others.

I built this altar
- it isn't very pretty
from scraps of wood
and the slaughtered coffee table.
With nails and screws and duct tape,
I put together the pieces of my beliefs

No candles will be lit here
- no inscent will be burnt.
Only the buds of cigarettes
and the rings of coffee cups.
Only the empty beer bottles
and the illegible scribbled notes.

Because this is my religion
- it is as unorganized as me -
and the gods come and go
through Monday morning coffee to go
and Friday nights drunken thoughts.

My altar holds no idols,
no hidden truths
No virgins, no heaven,
- no garden of Eden.
Because this is my religion
and I worship only inspiration.

smile at your brother
yes, go ahead, smile at one another
and now your jaw aches
and you won't get that polite smile off
with noting less than a chisel

the clothes make the man
and Korean children probably made these clothes
just so that I can fake status and style
fake my way through these get-togethers
of people sizing up one another

Jesus turned water to wine in high glasses
did he make these hors d'oeuvre from dust
or was that was god made us of?
it must be seeping through because we've become
strangely see-through

someone put a magician on the guestlist
and he's been pulling some neat tricks
because people keep disappearing
off peoples phone books, as two new names
miraculously show up

so smile at your brother,
he could mean another step up the ladder
ihis back could be a step up of the staircase
so reorganize your polite phrases
and smile at one another