Grips

You seem to be falling out,

like fading away, playing

fool /goof/ phantom/drunken joke

to grown up little boys and girls

across sad broken south Philly homes

that chug and churn like the machines

of the past regurgitating old

memories onto old faces and wrinkles

of the mourning night too

close to sunrise to remember—

too locked in twisted horns

with dead things, meaningless things

that need to be let go— a drowning

universal truth slugging its way

at your temple—a a a—

just to let you down and you brood about

these things that can’t change

next to open window and open veins,

when you’re supposed to be the one

that lives and blazes and burns—

Incoherently I’m incoherent

137 miles in hell and away

like fading rivers pulled under heavy roads

of gray dawns—I’m connecting these thoughts

drying out— 

Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia dreaming of the endless road ahead, carrying the idea of the fabled West in his heart. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. His chapbooks Trapped in the Night, Shave and A Magical Mistake are forthcoming in 2013.