Live On The Celebrated Life

Tonight I chew gum to spare my tongue

and swallow the hours that feel so wrong,

like a new year's kiss, wet and bereft.

There are eight empty cans on my desk:

one for every month I lost my sight,

one for every month we have left.

I feel like sleeping in my best suit

and glittering the stage with soot,

dragging myself through bus floor mud

and kicking the 22 year-old stud

for giving up the most gilded

years of his life to piercings,

coercings and the brunette

that slowly drinks his blood.

And I want to do a pirouette.

And I want to smoke a cigarette.

And I want eight private jets

to take eight private parts of me

to Stillwater, Medford, Tangier,

where the pages stretch for miles

and the ink all disappears.

Someplace where there is time

to grieve.

Someplace that we do not have

to leave.

Not even for the future,

which is nothing but a word

that corrals the herd

of the moon-eyed hopeful,

the burned out life-sick,

the evergreen romantic.