High Horse

DRIVEITALLOVERME

I’m thinking again, against soft amber static

AM radio feels like ghosts talking to each other

I get borderline concerning phone calls from my grandmother

Cockroaches have infiltrated the sunroom

I’m consumed by an idea you loaned me

one evening at Dirty Frank’s

Mucking around in milky bathwater

scrubbing every inch of my skin

Only for you to ask me

how a grown man doesn’t own cologne

Life moves in curves

My grief is a demolished forest

I take a big blue pill, and carry

a data center in my pocket

Thinking of all the ways

I could mix paints with words

Thought of the color orange

while questioning the authenticity of good faith

Why nostalgia feels like a disease

Why everyone is a DJ

and why ignorance is no longer bliss

It just means hiding your uncle’s heroin

While he tells you that he wishes you died of cancer

I’m thinking, in between digging

A spot for all my impatience

Carving away stoicism, cause you say I don’t smile like I mean it

I sip good dirt, two ribs away from sucking my own dick

I could listen to Robert Smith whine about seeing pictures of you

All day, but I won’t cause I have a job

Meeting you after work, storming a runaway

Crossing my eyes, we fuck in the KFN bathroom

As I brace the door with my boot.

“Take my breath for your breath”

All congested and hot-like

It’s not enough for me to be drunk and hungry

I have to choke too,

The idea you loaned me

BUNNYWASYOURNAME


The garden has bushes stretched out
forever; going nowhere
And everyone is posing for invisible cameras
Some wait their whole lives for a photo
And you sit effortlessly alive
always knowing what to do.
I think I get it.
There’s nothing more.

Some wisemen say it dies or never comes
But you never wait for anything (that’s real to me)
The songs call it a dangerous game
And you sit effortlessly alive
already knowing how to play.
I think I get it.
There’s nothing more.

The lawn is full of meekly flowers
softly parting the grass
And everyone wants to shrink them down
Some try their whole lives and never do
You, effortlessly alive
always knowing
what you’d do.

YEAH


All the men wear shoulder-padded jackets
down the lineup of growling Harleys
Gambling magic while Steely Dan plays
to the backdrop of sunrise and 52nd.

I bought a Shadow in my mind, 750cc
We rode to Atlantic City, dressed up like Paris
and the guys followed us with cans and strings.
You slept against my back, past the fleeting lights.

Every rest stop was a vacation,
My sonnets warm in my belly like grappa
from a flask; smooth for extra chest hair.
Licorice cigarette departing fresh braces
with no gap in speech or whimper
I could smile for miles..

There’s a Borgata church on the hill
and we make camp in a suit and wedding gown
You make a bible out of your journals
and cut my hair in the public bathroom.

I’ve grown into a man-child pretender
Always somewhere else, half-escaped
My daydreams taken out of context,
finding excuses in decade old bruises.

You know better than me (years to none)
not to live out as a victim to circumstance.
Running ahead of me, embarrassed to admit
of how lost I am.

James Milanesi is a Philadelphian poet who is retroactively late for work. He is the curator and founder of Poets Row. His chapbook, Momentary Sweetheart, is published with Bottlecap Press.