Still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks. The poets around here don’t write much anymore, instead they clench handfuls of dollar bills and throw dice against the drugstore’s brick wall. A couple of blocks over there’s a girl I used to know real well. She used to bring me to tears with her written words. She would pass me folded pieces of notebook paper when I was on smoke breaks at work. The pages she passed me collected images I though she somehow scraped from the insides of my skullbone. The last time I spoke with her she had been out of work for about a year and half-smiled at me with a mouthful of off-white teeth through thick strands of hair she’d twisted into messy dreadlocks. She said she hadn’t written anything in forever. A few weeks earlier, she said, she’d started dating one of the guys who shot dice behind the drugstore and hadn’t thought about poetry until she came across something he’d done a long time ago on the internet. She told me his name, but I can’t recall it. It was something like Jon or Jimmy, but not Joey. Joey was an old drinking buddy who lived over on the Southside. He was and unsung artist, always up to his elbows in paint. Joe could throw a scene across canvas like no one I’d ever met. Between pieces he would shuffle through stacks of index cards I would write poems on. With tears in his eyes and paper cuts on the insides of his arms he never could understand why nobody around here really wrote anymore. The last time we talked it was early in the afternoon the day after my Ex dumped me; it was only a few hours before Joey went to sleep in his car with the garage door shut and the engine running. I was at home emptying pens and feeling bad over a broken heart. He went without a word and painted the world a different shade with his final act unsung. And here I am, on these nights when the sun goes down later on a town full of Ex girlfriends, paper cuts, twisted messy dreadlocks and poets who forgot how to write for the want of a worn out set of dice. So much blurring and shifting in a handful of years, so much being forgotten and falling asleep in cars. But still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks.

Still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks. The poets around here don’t write much anymore, instead they clench handfuls of dollar bills and throw dice against the drugstore’s brick wall. A couple of blocks over there’s a girl I used to know real well. She used to bring me to tears with her written words. She would pass me folded pieces of notebook paper when I was on smoke breaks at work. The pages she passed me collected images I though she somehow scraped from the insides of my skullbone. The last time I spoke with her she had been out of work for about a year and half-smiled at me with a mouthful of off-white teeth through thick strands of hair she’d twisted into messy dreadlocks. She said she hadn’t written anything in forever. A few weeks earlier, she said, she’d started dating one of the guys who shot dice behind the drugstore and hadn’t thought about poetry until she came across something he’d done a long time ago on the internet. She told me his name, but I can’t recall it. It was something like Jon or Jimmy, but not Joey. Joey was an old drinking buddy who lived over on the Southside. He was and unsung artist, always up to his elbows in paint. Joe could throw a scene across canvas like no one I’d ever met. Between pieces he would shuffle through stacks of index cards I would write poems on. With tears in his eyes and paper cuts on the insides of his arms he never could understand why nobody around here really wrote anymore. The last time we talked it was early in the afternoon the day after my Ex dumped me; it was only a few hours before Joey went to sleep in his car with the garage door shut and the engine running. I was at home emptying pens and feeling bad over a broken heart. He went without a word and painted the world a different shade with his final act unsung. And here I am, on these nights when the sun goes down later on a town full of Ex girlfriends, paper cuts, twisted messy dreadlocks and poets who forgot how to write for the want of a worn out set of dice. So much blurring and shifting in a handful of years, so much being forgotten and falling asleep in cars. But still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks.

Still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks. The poets around here don’t write much anymore, instead they clench handfuls of dollar bills and throw dice against the drugstore’s brick wall. A couple of blocks over there’s a girl I used to know real well. She used to bring me to tears with her written words. She would pass me folded pieces of notebook paper when I was on smoke breaks at work. The pages she passed me collected images I though she somehow scraped from the insides of my skullbone. The last time I spoke with her she had been out of work for about a year and half-smiled at me with a mouthful of off-white teeth through thick strands of hair she’d twisted into messy dreadlocks. She said she hadn’t written anything in forever. A few weeks earlier, she said, she’d started dating one of the guys who shot dice behind the drugstore and hadn’t thought about poetry until she came across something he’d done a long time ago on the internet. She told me his name, but I can’t recall it. It was something like Jon or Jimmy, but not Joey. Joey was an old drinking buddy who lived over on the Southside. He was and unsung artist, always up to his elbows in paint. Joe could throw a scene across canvas like no one I’d ever met. Between pieces he would shuffle through stacks of index cards I would write poems on. With tears in his eyes and paper cuts on the insides of his arms he never could understand why nobody around here really wrote anymore. The last time we talked it was early in the afternoon the day after my Ex dumped me; it was only a few hours before Joey went to sleep in his car with the garage door shut and the engine running. I was at home emptying pens and feeling bad over a broken heart. He went without a word and painted the world a different shade with his final act unsung. And here I am, on these nights when the sun goes down later on a town full of Ex girlfriends, paper cuts, twisted messy dreadlocks and poets who forgot how to write for the want of a worn out set of dice. So much blurring and shifting in a handful of years, so much being forgotten and falling asleep in cars. But still today, I bleed the same old color and cough up honest chunks of myself on the same old sidewalks.