play, pause, replay

confessions in the margin of morning

You can always find birds arguing over a dead

cigarette butt at the end of a filthy bus stop.

It's the kind of scene that makes you roll your

eyes and sip the last drop of wine from the bottle.

The city veins pump the neon lies in the guts of the

dead night, the heat of a rented room, and her lips.

I was there with Annie, or maybe some Andy,

whose curves make you think of better days;

the language I read better than the bottle in my hand.

The blasphemy of curves and the red-painted lips

scream the wrong signs: we're all beggars here, 

clawing at each other's sepia-toned loneliness.

She tastes like stale coffee and cheap perfume.

Her kisses are laced with the burn of the cigar we had 

an hour before. Annie's mouth is pure lust, so fucking

beautiful that they're a promise in the wreckage.

We swap spit and sadness, 

like trading punches in the dark.

It's filthy blues from the gutter speaker,

some sax crying out what we're all thinking,

spilling into the street like the confessions

of a 2 AM soul folded into the doorway,

unread and unwanted.

We stumble into my rented room, a cobweb

of fucked-up li(v)es, and make love or something

like that, on the carpet.  It's another hasty clash

of burned skins, bodies grinding out each other's

pain, desperate to feel anything but empty.

And through the half-broken window,

the city watches the blue buses leaving,

but doesn't give another damn.

In the morning, the sun is just another bad idea,

and she's gone—just a smudge of lipstick on a 

used-up cup, the linger of her hips in my hands,

and the faintest scent of regret through the teapot.

The city didn't sleep last night, and this time,

it just blinks, momentarily blinded, as we dress

our wounds and call it survival. And it crackles, 

Honey, it crackles like a wild goddamn fire,

and we are just living to burn, searching for 

someone to misread us right.