#alex bonner

I didn’t meet you then. And I couldn’t remember when we were what

But I fell off my bike looking at you that time. I kissed you in a blizzard.

Rock and roll is here to stay. I stole that from a dead guy we both miss.

And I’ve always been an outlaw for your love. But happy is an adam sandler character.

Once I walked home from a party missing my gloves. In the wind there was an echo,

“what have you come for” and I screamed at the sky

I’ve done this before. And suddenly I could smell your shampoo, and there was a bridge,

and I looked down into the dark and there was a teddy bear floating

in the river of my ancestors. I smiled. I am only going as far as my mind can take me

but the wind keeps picking up and the whispers are getting louder. I wish you

were there to listen. You were always good at hearing their bullshit. But you

got your own path and there aint no one going to turn me around.

The new fantasy is that the people are gone. 

That I walk alone in the gray skulls of skyscrapers, 

taking beautiful things from museums to use to casual destruction,

finding cans of food, and taking gorgeous houses along the river. 

Maybe there are a few others left in this dawn age. We might fight. 

We might kiss. We might never run across the other just like now.

I tell myself that I don’t really want this in the parking lot;

the engine running, the groceries shifting themselves in the plastic,

and the air conditioning roiling in the steam. 

I say you don’t really want that. But this fantasy is harder to shake

than the others. It lives somewhere closer to my soul, its entwined in bone,

and jeweled with longing. 

"I'll make you feel like glitter inside." They say. 

They have smart, damaged eyes, that water like girls in childhood, 

over at the sequined bar with a metal band called Blind Locus, 

from a town called Panther Lake. 

"Have I met you before?" I ask them. I have stumbled around,

my arms out from the vales of assorted emotional states:

madness, sadness, rage, delirium, ecstasy, and sheer boredom. 

"We are just toys come back to life" One shouts over the DJ hymn. 

"Everything comes back to you three times" Another one said

at Liar's club or maybe it was Dreamerz or Lounge Ax 

or the Cults of Eva in the birth of time. 

"Don't you remember us?" They ask. 

When people say there are events in calenders

they forget that the meteor strikes that the fused the dinosaurs

into the apes and then back again in reverse pull 

were time shifting like liquid. Shifting like a baby in a womb,

waking from a wonderful dream into the darkness of fluid. 

Then the baby reaches full term, waterslides out, and they can swim but they

can't walk,

because we are amphibians. We don't know what do with land.

You know what we do with land? We fucking come up with calenders

made of laminated dead trees with pictures of dogs in fireman hats,

and then are impressed when every so often the calenders have silly numbers

match up with silly words that we came up with using our diminishing brains.

Sometimes when you realize how perfect the time whirl pool is, you just tip