(a) or (b) or (c) October 1992

God is a godsend, Beer
is a blessing, these shoes are a curse, oh
the coldness is catching, my eyes
are a witness, my eloquence [alt: my pussy is] bleeding,
it hurts to be stirring [alt: the kittens are purring], my heart
bottle-feeding on ketchup and venom,
a bitter religion, the suck still
recurring, a split indecision
of what it is --- me, or a gift for not
taking, your mother, she sleeps
and your wife, she is waking.

[alt ending] , the murder repeats,
mirrored words are for breaking.

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Back in the olden days, I used to spew out stuff like this constantly. 1985 to 1997, I have notebooks filled with this...what?... zippety-do-dah ways of saying pain?

I stopped the above sort of thing because it was too easy. I was always in emotional pain. There was always something awful to semi-rhyme about.

There was no transformation of the awful into the bearable other than the casual words. So I suppose they served their purpose at the time.

Since then, I've discovered that I have no truly serious words. I can't say it properly. Perhaps with middle age, I've lost the ability to either make light or to truly express. And so I have shut up in order to ride it out with as little pain as possible.