Nevada Smith

When you incised my ribs
to replace my heartbeat
with your eye-blinks, 

you forgot
to stitch them together with
your laughter. 

Now I bleed
pleas of forgiveness
dreams of redemption
with every labored breath.

I just want the oxygen of your kiss again-

I can’t stand this asphyxiation anymore. 

They were on the verge of screaming again. It never reached full-bore volume- he wished it would sometimes. It’s easier to fight something when you can wrestle it to the ground. When it’s more subtle, all you can do is run away from the sounds and the shadows- shadows seeking shadows in sound waves and foot-ground pieces of cemetery headstone flowers.  I was always a better wrestler than I was a runner. 

Who are we kidding? This is all semi-autobiographical. Anything anybody writes is. We’re all narcissists in some way or another.

Well he left before the bubbles boiled down to cysts deep within the walls and carpets. The house was brimming with distilled rage and slowly aging infidelities. He was amazed the surface tension had held all these years- it was against the laws of physics. Then again, so was what he and that girl had done all those months ago. 

The door slammed with a gasp and a hiss like something was already following him above, flitting through the clouds and maple trees behind his red beanie he’d got for a girl four years ago.

As I walked, I wondered just how much of my life I’d devoted to futile attempts at romance. I quickly forced myself to quit thinking in astronomical proportions, as numbers always hurt my brain. 

Three miles and a case of sore shins (He’d been stepping his mileage up lately and he was constantly sore) later, there was an empty- wait. No. There was a man there. An old man shuffling around a piece-of-shit track at 12 at night with awful form, a sideways kind of lean, and a footstrike that sounded more like a zombie’s half-hearted shuffle when it doesn’t smell brains.

What was this guy doing here?

I said my “howdy” as he trudged by, like some soldier of fortune in a losing war. His face was not clear but his surprisingly chipper “Hello there” spoke of sea-salt and sunnier time zones. To a manling in the mountains, he was positively as curious as George. 4 laps, 17 minutes, and me not having moved an inch later, I was in awe at what appeared to be a human perfectly content to trudge. What a tragedy. 

I trudged home, praying that one day I’d learn to run. 

He ran like his life depended on it, like Death was some up-and-coming kicker who was a 4:19 miler in high school and looking to bust some heels on his way by. 

it’s like you could shake diamond shattered with your breath- 

my chest never stood a chance. 

You were only as good as your best faked smile. 

One hell of an actress. 

there was that day when we were walking through the snow it felt like

i’d learned everything I wouldn’t need to know it seemed like

similes just weren’t enough for you and me and us and so I

caught you by the hand and kissed you reckless in the distilled sunlight

now and again it gets too cold and my truck don’t start and so we

make out with windows up and fog around our hearts and clothing

burning cigarettes like we could fight off death with love you looked like

some kind of movie star with rapture in the distilled sunlight

and someday I hope you or I will make it big and we’ll fly to our dreams

we will run around this little world like kids with untied shoestrings

I’ll grab your hand front row of ever scary movie and I

know that you’ll still shine in the dark with all your distilled sunlight

and I know

we can’t always go to where we wanna be

but I hope

that you know 

I wanna be everywhere as long as you’re there with me

there was that day when we were walking soft and slow it felt like

I’d found everything in you I’d need to know I felt like

similes and metaphors just don’t tell the story quite right 

I was singin loud as hope and drunk off all your distilled sunlight

dreams of knife-slashes and cold-cut kisses

oh anna linn, the dyin sun, 

singin round our skin

it’s got an easy way

let’s you and me

go singin too

nothin but voices to lose, 

hey hey hey…

somewhere between a bottle of wine and enough beer to knock out a horse

I rolled your memory into my cigarette and tried to blow your halo out of eye-shot-

smoke rings. 

I never could blow smoke rings, though,

so I’ll just keep drinking about you 

because somewhere between the way I was drunk off your lips

and the shots I took on my hands with your hips

I lost what it’s like to care again. 

Sean tells me I look like an actor from the 50’s, 

I tell him it’s the leather jacket, 

he says: “No, it’s the lonely. They did lonely better then.”

I guess I’m bringing back a trend. 

Let me stumble through the room to the outside, 

I meant it when I told you that meteor shower had me in 19 broken pieces, 

I broke over you the way a wine bottle would over a ship’s bow, 

thought it tasted something like victory. 

I’m drunk. 

It’s 4 in the morning here and as if begging begets redemption

I’ll give into the girls that fall in love with sad boys

and discard them like so many used toys, 

darlin’ we used to smoke like it was possible to inhale joy, 

now I’m just tryin’ to get cancer so I can feel something that doesn’t hurt. 

I think I have the prettiest feet in the world. 

I want to dance with them. 

Once we danced on my rug. 

The rug left the room like some sandstrorm flying carpet of lyrics, 

slow half-bearded voice twirling my hands through hips

to gruesome lockjaw lips

as we were dying to find something we meant to say with our bodies. 

Spin, step. Spin shuffle finger-dusting deserts of clothe

as you silence my look with a stare-

let me sing you to sleep with my eyebrows we’re in the mountains now. 

I grabbed a tree-branch and slid off while you kept twirling away through the shadows and leaves, 

I had twig-kindling to spit gasoline words on, and I didn’t want you to burn so I let you keep sanding your way through stars and suicides. 

When I burn the hillside with the frostbitten cotton-toed shoe-laces I wear round my neck, 

I hope you see a little glimmer in the valleys I never let you see. 

There are secrets in these foothills that would heal the blisters on your heart. 

Pity they’re burning. 

The sheets of the night were torn by cloudless ports where the voices of angels lost wine bottles poured through on the city below. He practically slept-walked through the small main street, where tiny-town debutantes pretended they were East Coast Royalty, tripping on sidewalk cracks and platform heels with skirts too short and eyes to long in the lash.

He watched them in awe. Such small creatures with such large, celebrous noises escaping them. Nothing like the windy and dusted state he’d find the same street corner in 4 hours later. 

“Hey hot stuff wanna take a shot with me? It’s my birthdaaaaaayyyyy!”

A drawl as long as his Saturday 14 milers pierced the small presence he’d been accruing in his hamstrings. He only gazed through breezy brown curls and shook his head on a neck that looked like it was held together with telephone cables.

If he kept walking, he thought, he’d make it to the cliffs by 5 in the morning for the sunrise. 

There was always another chance with the sunrise- provided he had his shoes on. He never took them off these days. 

we took a trip through the campus last night

dew-drop tears and high school fears followed us like fights

 found a box of cigarettes hiding ‘neath the trees

strike a match of memory and blow it to the breeze, 

singin’

just keep your shoes on you’ll be fine

walkin’ sober down every alcoholic line

you’ll find a place where the wind blows a little steadier

til then just don’t think about your head while it gets heavier

we strafed the street-lights bloomin’ black

with chips in our shoulders for every ounce of confidence we lack

catch-phrases work on weekend girls

don’t let her see your eyes as she runs her fingers through your curls 

kiss her goodnight before you go- 

her smile may be the last honest thing you know

just keep your shoes on you’ll be fine

walkin’ sober down every alcoholic line

you’ll find a place where the wind blows a little steadier

til then just don’t think about your head while it gets heavier

as you drive away too slow

don’t look back, put some country on the radio

forget your accomplishments and dreams

sometimes it’s best when we live inside the in-betweens

shake the wine from our hips, 

coffee and mixed with ash from last night’s burnt-down

cigarette soccer fields

reflections on the gravel give way to empty wine bottles and rug-burned knees;

she got a new leather jacket. 

this time, there’s no protecting you from it. 

just don’t look her in the eye. 

Sean says I’m a movie, 

but if Postal Service and sunrises really makes me film-worthy 

where the fuck is my retainer? 

Paid with shoe-shine and 9 AM flop-bedded hungover runs through our own bleeding glory, 

we’ll someday forget about the things that made us happen. 

we are the fading ashes of cigarettes and wet leather boots. 

Our tongues wail incessantly as we struggle to find meaning in pop music, 

and somewhere in the background some gorgeous girl in a leather jacket  is laughing at you- 

amy everheart how the fuck do I sink the boats? I want to sink them, make this battleship and my only weapon is my voice, 

but it’s cracking with ammonia the way my hands do when I wash the windows. 

Somebody grab my hamstring; tell my my flannels buttoned on top of each other are working, I just want to stay warm

but all I feel is the ice in her eyes and the frost on her lips, 

don’t let me go back to this. 

Who knew 17 miles was a lifetime? 

there are angels fucking in the soles of my shoes and you want me to stop running. 

If you read the lyrics to  ”Her Eyes Dart Round” by The Felice Brothers, there seems a natural crescendo, where you expect the guitar to grow in intensity, and the singer’s voice to change, to gain pitch, volume, density. The way it reads suggests this to me. 

However, when you hear it sung, Ian Felice just sounds tired. He’s not even 30. How can somebody in the 20’s sound so indellibly and uncategorically tired? You hear the echo of centuries in his voice. I’m not really one who believes in “old souls” and all that nonsense, but I dunno about him. 

He sounds so tired…

When I kiss you, when I really kiss you, 

I’ll use gravity; the constant of the force between our bodies 

will be measurable by the kilotons contained by the sun, multiplied by

the mass of paper leaves

and inkstains 

divided by the rapidly decreasing distance between us that could be measured by 

the armpit of a hydrogen atom.

Mouths containing binary black holes

will no longer circle in some facade of cosmic grace-

we’re all messy here. 

I’ll put iron on your eyelids 

and slash sinkholes with my two-ton teeth through your ribs

making bruises with my breathe

lips locked frictionless to slick skin

allow me to demonstrate the weight 

of the situation…

My arms pull like Jupiter’s atmosphere

my legs wrap the way Saturn’s rings encircle 

my lips are Sagittarious A, 

holding a diaphragm diameter of 3.7 million solar masses, 

when I kiss you, 

my fingertips will be 

meteors burning the atmosphere of your skin, 

when I kiss you, 

You’ll know. 

If I drank myself to stardust, 

would I get a Coke for a dollar still? I hate New York poetry 

but my room’s got three tea cups, two home-made, dressed in the nines, 

4 stuffed penguins nobody knows how to love anymore, 

and more stains of memory than alcohol, which is hard to manage 

because I’ve bled

beer

wine

and ink

on just about every surface in here. 

Good thing concrete looks so posh these days or I’d be fucked for fashion. 

At least the TV still works. 

Like would suck without Smash Bros.  

Is it possible to be enamoured over a girl you met once a year ago and have since spoken to three times in real life? 

Yes. Yes, apparently it is. 

You’re only going to get more sad poems out of this one, Nevada. 

Fuck it. Call her. 

I once read a quote that said something along the lines of “dreamers need realists because without them they’d never do anything of worth on this earth and realists need dreamers because without them they’d never fly”. They should both try runners: we use the earth to fly. 

I always thought you looked like Princess Zelda in Twilight Princess when her hair is straight and brown- now any time I see a girl with straight brown hair my hands start shaking and I have to remember there’s no pause button out here. I felt like Link for a while, riding my bike like Epona through sunset dreams and jumping walls holding your hand and singin the stars out, your voice was like the Sun’s Song the way it changed my mornings, 

but you never gave a shit about The Felice Brothers. 

This is not where I thought the poem was going to go, but I’m a little drunk right now and it’s the first time I’ve let myself think about you without doing pushups until my body shakes in three months, 

I don’t understand why you don’t like the Felice Brothers, but it’s been the one solace that you weren’t right for me. Maybe you don’t have the triforce of wisdom, or maybe you do and your ganon is off somewhere wielding some sick power on your heart but 

How the FUCK can you not like Radio Song? 

Ian Felice is singing about stars fallin from the sky inviting you to fall with him 

do you remember that time when we watched the stars fall? Something else fell too, and though I’ve ran that piece of shit hill enough times to earn back Lance Armstrong’s lost testicle I can’t fucking get back up, 

I can’t get back up. 

I lost the last key in the Water Temple so I’m just drowned in tears  

the metaphors are getting mixed, this is NOT where I imagined this poem going, 

but I have rugburns on the inside of my stomach from trying to forget you. 

My callouses fell off my feet the last time I tried to outrun your memory, 

that’s not even poetic it’s just the goddam truth. I couldn’t walk for three days. 

I’m sick of bleeding ink about you. 

Like that fucking XKCD comic I wish my heart would have given me a choice, 

I know 

it’s probably creepy that I’m still writing about you, 

I feel like my heart and my head are fighting about forgetting you but you see, 

my heart controls the blood that gets into my brain, 

so my head’s kinda boned on that one so logic is kinda thrown out the window at the end of the day. 

You remember how you said once that you think we only get one shot at love? 

I ran out of arrows for the Hero’s bow a while back, and I can’t find any more to save my goddam life. That, and the fact that I definitely don’t have the Triforce of Courage are definitely reminders that I’m not the hero who’s gonna save you. 

Then again, you never needed saving in the first place. 

I just wanted to feel like Link. 

when you fight cheat grass through the clouds, 

when you skate on broken wheels through the sand, 

when your fingernails 

grow faster than your ambition

you’ll find that sometimes the sun sets in reverse. 

it’s never lonely here ‘til You leave 

and all these people show up. 

Sometimes I wish I had a choice in loving you. 

Then I remember that the moon doesn’t have a choice, either. 

Gravity’s a bitch. 

I want a girl who kisses like glass coke bottles, 

somebody whose smile I can cut my lips on. 

stars are callouses on God’s fingertips

twentysix14:

but we were crossing the street, and you were going the wrong way.

“It’s beautiful”, she breathed, as the water from her breathe coloured the night. 

“Yeah, yeah it is” I told her. Apparently there were some shooting stars. 

I may have seen one reflected in her eyes, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but her. 

So much for that eclipse. 

That tightness in my jaw tells me I’m missing something beautiful. 

Are you smiling again? 

My jaw’s been awful sore lately. 

There’s a moon somewhere here-

hiding in between the ice chips and winded street signs

that watch like ushers- “stop for a bit here, enjoy the view”

as the children skate along on rust and wheel-wells, 

somewhere there is a moon that casts a tree of shadow 

on empty house lots where cigarette butts collect like 

so many… cigarette butts. 

Y’know, there’s a lot of ugly things out there, but they look better in the moonlight. Except for blushing girls. You can’t see the blush as well then. 

When I suck on caramel

with my mouth open

it sounds

like the way we used to kiss. 

I seem to have lost my sweet-tooth these days. 

do mirrors ever wonder what they look like?

Ellen is my guitar, five-stringed beast with affection for nobody, we might have what you call a drinking problem- that is, I drink too much and she laughs at me as I break my fingers on her fretboards. Well, we were drinking and singing one night when the window I’d so eloquently left open like some kind of cheap 60’s romance novel blew a gust of stale leaves and dust in and we about died choking on it.

Funny thing, choking with Ellen sounds a helluva lot more in tune than singing ever did with anybody else. 

occasionally, the scratches carved in your soul turn to watermark, 

the stench of bleach fades from your fingertips, 

and you remember what it’s like to smile

as if you didn’t know

how precious lips could be.