You Were My Bruised And Broken Fence

[news: Ryan Sheffield & The Highhills have an album by the same name of this blog, and it is superb.]

These days I don't get so nervous. I type with my eyes closed. I sweat most of the time. That's not true. I hardly sweat. I feel like dancing, I feel like telling you something you don't know, but you know everything, you knew everything, you, you feminine you.

You'd love me to believe that everything's going to be alright. I'll tell you this about hard work: it doesn't always pay off. Brewing a pot of coffee, though, that always pays off. Stop breaking down. Stop breaking off. Stop coupling with those who'd prefer you dead.

There are those who are bad for the world and perhaps they are alive because it's inappropriate to kill them.

a scientist can't just say because.

you had no way of knowing how incredibly drunk i was or was capable of being and still standing on my own two feet. you hadn't seen me in two years or talked to me in three. i was free for the evening a total runaway and you could see me and speak aloud instead of just a wink across the produce section at walmart. i fucking hate walmart but bargain shopping is all i can ever afford.

sounds crazy sure but by the time we picked you up to scout for a bag i had downed at least eight beers and that was just the past hour and a half. back then my consumption started at lunch, even at work, a miniature collection of rumplemintz in my bottom back filing cabinet. it was normally sometime between six and seven that everything would go blank. a normal weekday i would make dinner feed the kid put him to bed and wake up surrounded by ripped loose leaf scribblings and broken cassette tapes in the all too sick morning having no memory of anything other than getting behind the wheel to pick him up from daycare around five. i wonder still how no one ever smelled the drunk, called me out, called the cops. guess i have inane powers of concealing total dependence.

i vaguely recall sitting on your lap in the back of a mutual friend's corsica trying to chew back the vomit from breathing in stale cigarette from fifteen year old upholstery. you were running your nicotine stained fingers up and down my thigh saying you're so cold get warm and me thinking for fucks sake i'm about to die of heat exposure spare me your worn game. but drunk turns your mind round quick and your pitiful play made me want you to run your fingers higher and hang around that's my downfall rooting underdog at my own expense.

we scored a seedy dime bag and you hid me home not mine but yours and i was happy to balance the drunk swirl with a smooth high plain i wanted desperately to be more on top of my obvious misplaced lust chance. did you lead me to the bathroom or was i already there? or you knocked on the door like can i join you me like let me wipe first? how did you kiss me there leaning up against your rusted sink complete with crusted toothpaste spat or did i totally switch on the whore and invite you in as i took a long drunk leak non aware. and just before i realized the mix of weed and st. ides had fucked me for you i felt you yank at my belt loops. tugging down. i always hated that nasty shit. st. ides/drunk fucking your call.  i hate both but i take what i'm offered.

nomatter you were there and he was somewhere else and lord knows i had waited so long to be free and here i was straight getting fucked over a toilet. no idea where exactly except that i was ghetto somewhere i was never supposed to be and hoping helpless that i would be graced with total lack of memory of this fake fuck moment. 

i woke up drooling on the bathroom floor some five hours later smelling the yellowed piss film that circled your commode. you offered me toast or coffee which was hospitable considering it was the twentieth and food stamps are hard to make last. you said you'd call me a cab you couldn't pay for but the only thought in my head was that sparks tastes kind of like orange juice and that would do for breakfast how long would it take me to stumble to seven eleven i had to get home by lunch time make pigs in a blanket for the kid.

I Wore You Like A Sweater

The day of the Valentinean hordes nears. Candles burn in the corners of a thousand rooms, patchouli oil burning and haze of lust quenching everything looming rooming -- broken hearts and bitter pills. We don't, we don't, we don't. We find ourselves in bars the country wide, coast to coast, fairly madly scanning the horizon for something, anything, nothing. The darkness brings in that kid Tony. He only comes out at night. I'll smoke another cigarette in memory of his map of the world. He figured on something new. He figured on this and he threw away all of that.

You would love me to believe that diet soda is now bad for me. The soda companies are just trying to see if this will increase sales of non-diet soda or not. I still mix my whiskey with it.

Pretzels and trail mix and pringles and pizza and boxes thereupon. All of it gone last gone; you think I don't know you, you think I don't know what I'm writing about any longer.

Evenings in February
when the weather nerves me up
& I think of little besides the past
when the bottles empty themselves
& I bury the dead again (at last)

this radio doesn't catch your wave
I lost your signal doll & I don't
anymore know how to apologize
and plus nobody wants to try too hard

I stand hunched over the dresser
wishing you were alive again
to forgive me (again)

we broke down every one of their lies
we knew these moments were precious
we metastasized everything in sepia

they forbade you from me
we forbade it all with lit cigarettes
& flash in the pan madness

I still think that lipstick wasn't your shade
I still wish you had worn the aqua green

let's not pretend for even a second
that I'll ever have that house in the country
or that I'll ever be a sculptor long enough
to build a statue in your memory

I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it

I tried to drown myself several months later
& lied about it when they found me
my grandmother gave me some pain medication
"to try and get back the feeling"