you're not used to your eyes
being starved of serif font words,
trying not to grab up the lost napkin
that tumbles like a library book page

you linger in the smirking midnight coffee and empty chairs
inebriated on dead poets and chemical highway headlights
hoarding misspellings in your lungs
rubbed pink with words
and wishing your name
was something worth remembering
but you've heard the razor's song
it's rhythmic
d r a g g i n g
and you've seen you no longer bleed ink

and you walk drunk
across the shadowed corners of your corneas
that are yellowing like the newsprint you want to forget about
but can't
like a terrible first kiss

you've fallen asleep inside
at the bottom of July
without believing this poem is any good,
but somehow still believing
while listening to siren chorus
that chest and
brain
are two separate injuries

you think about how
God
was relocated
to the corner of second avenue
while you trace the table edge –
metal like freezing bone,
and you wonder
if He'd like to count the knobs of your worn vertebrae
see your long-dead smile that floats
belly-up

you wonder what it must feel like
to
fall
with no one there to catch you.