I am no longer screaming

To portend the inevitable anymore.

All the gas station rum

flowing through my blood,

Is twisting my stomach into knots.

Misled by the M8,

Taking the wrong turns, and

Into an alcoholic summer.

Synapse to synapse,

The roads ahead thin out.

Again, I find myself at an impasse.

Where I get off

And build myself a television receiver,

That only plays the middle fifteen minutes

Of Pierrot le Fou.

If I never again make it back to this freeway

Wearing my best shoes

Or if I die wearing a dress shirt and silver cufflinks,

In an insalubrious apartment

Or on a beach in Montenegro.

I would never get to reframe my negative experiences

On the side of the freeway.

If all life is a series of rooms we get stuck in

The room I currently find myself in

Has a painting my mother made that she loathes

I am wearing a double-breasted

Persian Green jacket

Dressed up to the eyes.

I know my brother is on his way,

He is standing in the doorway with his eyes closed.

He is here to rescue me from my head being

Ablaze with the flames of penance.

A flame as nebulous

As the effigy

I have spent the entire poem burning.

This is the last dream I ever want to have

Between the splintered Bombay Sapphires,

a summer spanning multiple years passed by.

And Befittingly

When autumn did come,

It came inside of an ambulance.

The impossible view of a foreign autumn

from the ambulance window

Did make me want to stay alive.

Do anything with my life,

Ruin it again, but never end it for good.

Even so,

There is a pull towards the end

That no one can deny.

Forever does not last

because the end is far stronger.

And over the years,

As the Sydney evening sun

cascades on my face,

I look at my friends leaving

a little slant,

Away from me and further into the years.

From a third-storied Spanish balcony,

The faces of my old friends

From every possible angle

Except for the one in my memory.

While I keep walking the narrow line

between sentimental and suicidal.

Regardless of which line

I’m walking in,

both probably lead to

an early grave.