Whisper You Love Me Boy
I want everything I want before I die winter’s a
tooth eating away at us so how core do you feel
now now that there’s little shit everywhere like
music petting us behind the ears under the chin
can you believe these neon winds this religion of
incurable sadness this lottery ticket of meaning I
really just hope we break it’s the fissures of this
world that allow for coalescence and it’s not that
I doubt the dark it’s just that I don’t like feeling
my way through everything
____________________
Blue Moon
I’ve got weird itchy feelings moats and amethyst the
fucking sound of ice cream pouring all over this
rising hundred degree neighborhood you think you
know shit but then you know shit the pipes in this
house speak like bruises the blonde girl is all
i have this time with suicide fuck the birds the grapefruits
rotting out all the beauty in this city just one more pill
and I might just knock out the sorrow before it doubles
for everything my last words are the same as my first so
what god’s a cage the sky’s a monkey painting self-immolation
is how we put enough holes in this world to see where we
are going but STOP and listen that’s the rain filling in
____________________
I’m Losing You (I Know)
eating French fries after someone died nature
is a feeling I’m ruining for myself sympathy for
the neighborhood gunfire rules the night
we make blood and nobody
knows how they’re always sad shopping carts
brimming with a dangerous glitter we are meaningless
without sex tired of spending our time drinking
water two guys beating the shit out of each other
outside the sorrowful smell of mustard fisting bricks
of electricity in the air everything I know is bullshit
____________________
Keep An Eye
I’m not good I’m winter now let me explain to
you how drugs work either you want to know or
you don’t want to know how you’re fucking up your life
that guy’s an icicle and that guy’s an icicle and that
job money position and power all icicles shit dripping
away the fucking surprise ending is everything is exactly
how you thought it would be even the snowflakes even
the creep and then sometimes you are driving a car
and really looking for a goddamn EXIT
____________________
Hey Jude
after Amiri Baraka
we are doomed time traveling in the labyrinth
of grief and we ended up here at this corner
store slurping red or blue ice into our stupid
broken heads I think the art of this world is in
not dying unless you are really good at something
and I’m really good at saying it how it is like this
tree is so fucking gold you can actually feel how
fucking gold it is
____________________
Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)
day or night what’s more desolate one car
or no cars in this wide smoking parking lot
a couple of fucking dudes dying hard around
here is a WASTELAND it’s really a massive
3 a.m. it’s really a haircut with an expensive
vacuum cleaner it’s really a small horse-fence in
the heart how many motherfuckers have I known
that have just said fuck it and kept on everyone’s
skull has the potential to mean something in a
living sweating palm but don’t look death in the
eyes it has none
____________________
Back In My Arms Again
sad shit is happening funny is how we duck
disaster even with the black rivers of bad heroin
swaddling Philly this December it’s only when I think
that I’m myself I reach for a glass of water yes or
no do you care that Philip Seymour Hoffman died
today what you say about things is how you will live
your life on my way to the corner store I wrote my
name 2014 in the wet asphalt this is me forever
____________________
____________________
Jon-Michael Frank has work published or forthcoming in Anti-, Banango Lit, Inter/rupture, Sink Review and Sixth Finch, among others. A chapbook of poems is forthcoming from Birds LLC, and another chapbook, of comics, is being released by El Aleph Press in 2014. Jon-Michael is also an assistant editor for the small press BIRDS, LLC, helps run a reading series in Austin, TX called Fun Party, and sells illustrations about life, or the lack of it, on etsy.