i don't want to set this world on fire

by Leeroy Berlin

the world bursts at the seams
with hookers and blow:
it sings
like brunhilde in a whalebone corset
leading us to dash our minds on rocky shores
chasing the second hand banality
of our borrowed thoughts and rented lives.

we walk through streets turning grey with dawn
losing every shade that haunts our past
and gaining nothing in the deal.

desperate men fuck desperate women
because it's all they can get from each other
with the mountains leveled and the villains assassinated
there's nothing left for sigfried
except to feed himself to tigers twice a night and
three times on saturdays.

the ivory tower is built of innocents.
their bones form buttresses and their ignorance
of the mud and the blood and the beer
holds the whole thing up.

because those of us who have assaulted the memories of our fathers
and given them their due
paid them back three-fold for the names they left us with:
taker-not-maker-whoreson-fool-classwarrior-onepercenter-sue
have found the truth far from your platonic realm
your clean smelling ideals have no home and no meaning in this dungeon
of blood and piss and sweat and jizz.

i am drooling with your lyssaphobia.
the poison that fills my blood colors me insensate
and its fever cooks my soul
until it's ready to serve, medium-well.

i don't want to set this world on fire, besides
it's too late for the little matches i keep in my hat
to mean anything to anyone.

love is just a taste test away

by Leeroy Berlin

if you’d have read the manual you’d have
known you could find it writ in the fingers
or the cells that hold past, present, and the
future in acid and vitriol poured
out to the sands; and a kiss might tell you
all that science could of erections and
chemicals and the lifespan of offspring;
her attraction a reaction to measures

teased by tongue, reduced where oxidized
where rust is lubricant, love circean
illusion cast by a lingual wand waved
tonsils to teeth to waive quaint notions of
quaint honor and gawain’s too nevermind
soulmates, but taste and you’ll know where love starts.

billie run

by Leeroy Berlin

william reginald henderson iii, esquire:
we called him billie.
he hated it
running from switching lights
a grim threat
to cut our time
over the unfenced earth
with scythes electric arched
across the street from side to walk
chasing us back
into the safety of verdant bulwarks that
stood between
endless
enveloping
wastes
and stucco temples to
silent sorrows
we feared would never let us free
from the suzerainty
of bars over our windows
and our parents' fear
of what else came on in the dark.

if peter wasn't a welch, paul wouldn't have hired those goons

by Leeroy Berlin

strange that they still build these out of wood,
with all the candles i would have thought the fire marshall would object.

forgive me father for i have sinned.
it has been ten years since my last confession.

i've fornicated in unspeakable ways with an indeterminate number of women,
it's hard to keep count on those nights fueled by—
oh yeah, the drugs—a few joints, a few downers, a few opiates.

there's the petty theft,
nothing serious: candy bars off seven-eleven shelves, the occasional dine-and-dash,
pills from parties in strangers’ bathrooms—the pills not the party—
a weekly bottle of liquor from the store around the corner. you know,
the one that sells fetish porn out of the back room.

i've seen your eyes on Sunday morning and
i know it's not just the altar boys that keep you up.

you should get comfortable in that position.
this is going to take a while.
that was only the last six months.

let's get back to the lies: every christmas, every easter i lie to my dear mother
god bless her soul in nomine patri et filii et spiritu sancti.

i make an excuse and keep myself from blaspheming the mass,
you've got to give me credit for that,
it's the one thing i've got over you.

five years ago my girlfriend got an abortion—
how many excommunications is that?
she's not a Catholic.
she didn't tell me about it until months later.
how many?
how many if i say i'm glad she didn't tell me?

there's the lying again—
i wear apostasy to keep people from knowing that
i believe what i'm saying to you now—
how many is that?
how many our fathers for denying my communion with you?

and about the theft—
the duct tape, the matches, the gasoline.
I didn't buy them.
Paper trails.

how many indulgences will ransom my soul?
how many pieces of silver will pull me from purgatory?

let me take that tape off.
don't mind the smell, you'll get used to the fires too.

ancient irish traveling secret

by Leeroy Berlin

my neighbor eyes me warily on the plane
either because i haven’t shaved in a week
and i still have blood-shot eyes from the night before
or because i’m pouring grain alcohol out of one of those
clear plastic toiletry bottles
the tsa lets us carry-on
into my free coke without explanation.
sláinte, i say and smile as
i down what for all he knows is a
cocktail
of coca-cola and shampoo.

the correct order

by Leeroy Berlin

first we kiss
she said
for which i could fathom
no objection
so we did
but she stopped
and then we must rescue her, she said
to which
pinned to the mattress
while she ground herself against me
i simply assented
knowing fully
how little control
i would ever have
in this relationship.

over the moon, two by two

by Leeroy Berlin

be
unafraid to close your eyes
like simians swinging cypress trees
in an atavistic ballet
kids on tire swings
or catapults hurling tom cats
over the moon
listening to
the long howl good bye.