Bourbon tears burn
You will spill your medicine
on the wounds you’ve inflicted
Crying and begging
Killing and fucking
complaining and weeping
writing and drinking
smoking and coughing.
You have never reflected on
these minds and their importance
You’ve studied and understood the shapes,
the curves, the soft meat, the wet and warm
interior since your adolescent years,
but never have you truly reflected over the innards.
You’ve read about it under oaks with bloody knees
and wet hair. You’ve tried and failed with an anxious
mind not understanding what it is you’re missing.
You’ve kissed your mother, hugged your father,
disappointed your teachers, comforted your sister
and laughed with companions. You’ve soaked up warm
grease with bread out of cast iron pans and sung
songs about brotherhood with ethanol stained breath.
Your clothes have absorbed the smoke from various
burning plants and you’ve shared bottles, food
and cigarettes with dirty, shaky hands.
But still you do not understand the mind
of the creatures. The left side of Atlas' brain is
impenetrable to you.
As you romanticize the spirit and play with
the body, you do not even reflect on the mind and
it’s deepest desires.
You understand you're not the best. You understand
you aren’t her favourite and that you,
like the boys in your mind, do not claim to own her.
This makes you morally superior.
Still you see shadows of these women next to
heads hanging on your wall. Vaguely, slightly.
Ghosts and spirits puking and crying, laughing
and moaning, haunting the sweat drenched sheets.
And even though you talk and laugh and listen,
it is never with the respect humans have for eachother.
Bragging and boasting about killing an animal you cared for.
You tell yourself it isn’t only for your pleasure
You flaunt your insecurities and use it against her.
But as she’s kneeling and crawling naked over
your toilet seat, filling it with bile and Zinfandel
while you, stuck in bed, see a man in his thirties falling
from the fifth floor, kissing the concrete.
You laugh, you tell her to come, and you say;
“This is for the art, and only the art.
Art transcends human suffering”
You sound really fucking stupid.