WOMAN

Workdays become work months but your friends are still jobless
Talented but so broke, freaking out on coke
Snorting raw, nostrils snarped afire and oh, and red chapped skin
Sitting in bare apartment rooms in North Park
Shooting smack and screwing each other unwashed
Cumming into sad loins and bent-toothed mouths and asses
Bleeding into each other's bleeding holes
And bleeding together with shudder of hep C tested at 5pm
Planned Parenthood, though they thought it was something worse
They are cutting rough acned skin with green Heineken bottle jars

And shaking with withdrawals, with DTs, with laughter
Because it's so absurd because you can still laugh
No matter how sad you are
Placing pills into each other's blue lips and packing cigarette packs
Cock against bare thighs
A tangle and curl of dark black hair and white bone leg like Auschwitz
Nineteen years old, slipping into the void

Your parents are getting older
You see it over the dinner table on weekend visits
More like hospital visits than family time
Your woman is needing more than you've got
She's okay, what's your problem?
The last thing you did happy was your last record
And even that didn't last
Doesn't make sense anymore, what's the hassle? What's the use?
You used to write and record

But who wants to write and record when
You're gonna die sooner than later anyway?
The city has gone frozen and your ship has been iceberg

Songs of prayer
Eat the barrel of your old shotgun
410-22 Over-and-under Savage Stevens
Your grandfather gave you when you were ten
And in love with the Vietnam War and guns and being a hero
Pull back the trigger and spackle yourself across the wall
Slump forward, your eyes stunned like a fish
The back of your head gone and hanging open like a surprised mouth

Do it before she gets home, no one will notice this time
No one will stop you this time
But God, you have options

Lie still, wine drunk in the bathtub and sink down low
Your nose bubbling out lungs' last breath
Too drunk to fight back
Run razors down wrists and bleed out
Alone and naked on the bathroom tiles
Shaking in a cold morning
Overdose, hang yourself, eat muffler smoke like Jackie did
Drive your car off the cliffs at Black's Beach
Glory in twisted metal wreck and white sand

Starve yourself, eat pills 'til your stomach swells
And swims like aquarium rocks and you fade 'til gone-eyed
But you're a coward and you know that

You turn on the TV, M-A-S-H reruns again and sink into the couch