Because where we come from, you understand, things like kindness and concern are award-worthy acts of humanitarianism. It takes us a lot effort to feel and emote anything real and sympathetic because we are dead. We are pissed off poltergeists in our skeletal world of tour buses and dingy amplifiers; we are ghosts, haunting the busy venues and ( Read more... )

Maybe you are quiet on the outside but screaming underneath.

Imagine you're older and you're building walls around yourself to keep out any impending heartbreak. You're eighteen and you're becoming attractive; some girls even call you handsome. You've learned to play guitar and you're surprisingly good at it. The females are coming around now and ( Read more... )

With careful effort, I kneel down next to him and hold his head in my lap.  Gently, I pet his wet, sticky hair and try to wipe the blood off his pallid cheek with my trembling fingers.  One dark eye rolls up to look at me vacantly and then rolls back up in his head.  My body is taught and prickly with the adrenaline that's beginning to course ( Read more... )

All these stupid rituals. The images we try to put across of ourselves, trying so hard and then complaining when nobody wants to love us for who we are.  I laugh out loud to myself thinking of the audacity of it all.  I'm enjoying my buzz tonight.  I'm riding high on the cherry bomb train ( Read more... )

The holes in my heart, filled up like so many footprints briefly left behind in the beach's sand ( Read more... )

I'm struggling to eat breakfast ( Read more... )

In Savannah, Georgia, the trees are always in mourning. They lean and swoon towards the ground, their sadness a heaviness that beckons them back towards the dirt from which they've grown. The sky is crying and it's tears drip from the rich green leaves of the weeping willows ( Read more... )

At around four in the morning, our tour bus trundling southbound along interstate Route 16, I wake up with an overwhelming urge to pee ( Read more... )

I caress my cheap bottle of champagne while watching desperate girls in torn fishnets chase after the musicians. Their faces are fixed in empty, sexual stares as they hike their skirts up for anything with a backstage laminate around it's neck. I feel like I am watching apes in a zoo and I wonder what the missing link is, what evolution has had to ( Read more... )

In Atlanta, Georgia, I draw a giant circle around me, the size of a dinner table, and inside the circle I draw all the seven continents. I color them in with bright greens; lime hills, emerald coasts, viridian fields. I scribble on them with yellow and I blend it with my fingers to make giant caramel mountains and tapering, flaxen fields of wheat.

( Read more... )