Shout the battle cry for freedom - Adam Gnade

F**k your deadlines
F**k your editors
F**k friends
F**k responsibility
F**k living long
F**k getting up in the morning
F**k writing the big things
The wine bottle is rising from between your legs
Like a dark glassed lighthouse and you laugh
Your teeth slop red black of wine and crooked smile
With late winter comes spiders in your synapses
Skittering down brain tubes to eat at happiness
Ideas
S*x drive
Energy
Ambition
Passion youth gone shriveled and frozen
Like rock gravel crunching beneath your sneakers and you're walking to that mine that killed your great grandfather
Black lunged Pennsylvania coal mine
Its mouth empty and fanged
And its throat runs straight down
Shadowed reapers crouch on wheelbarrowed mine tracks or lie lurking in mine cars
Phantom great grandfathers
Black eyed
Slavic
Square faced
Gray haired
Beckoning with crook of finger saying
"Have a drink with me
Kid
What's taken you so long
"
She goes distant in January
"You haven't been happy in months
"she says
"I don't know what's wrong with me
"you say
"I feel like a bird in a cage
"she says
"Nothing I once loved makes me happy anymore
"you say
"You need to go to the doctor
"she says
"I feel like I'm losing it
"you say
"We need to get out of this city
"she says
"I feel like I've got a demon in my head
"you say
"What do you need me for anymore
"she says
"I feel like I'm already dead
"you say
"You're so selfish
"she says
"Don't leave me
"you say
"I feel like getting in a car and driving away
"she says
Don't leave me
Don't leave me
You don't leave me
Don't you leave me
Don't leave
At night
At clubs and bars
You drink with friends
They buy you drinks because your name is in the magazines they read
But she's off with the older kids across the club
In the back of the bar
The ones who've figured it out
While you seek the dark spots and rotting
Doomed faces destined to grow old and sit in hospital beds
Connected to tubes and wires
Yellow piss bags
Sludged s**t
Coughing a paint can rattle
Wondering if it was worth it and whether they could've done better
You go home and drink more
Drink 'til everything goes muffled
And warm and good and you sing to yourself and rock happy
And alone on the couch
Then comes chill of dawn with light over purple hills
To the east and you pull the covers back up
Your face is a swollen mess
With spring comes a thaw of her heart
She's driving you to go wild
To be good and be crazy
You're fighting it though
Eating the pills Dr
Chang gave you
But faking happy every night
She knows it's not working
And you read religious text the Bible
Koran or fictionalized tales of End Times
Thich Nhat Hanh
Giddy Buddhist koans
Krishna
Book of Mormon
The Torah
You look for something to lead you from the dark
You wear the pants and sweaters and shirts of an old man
You shake your pill bottle and toss it in your jacket pocket
Your muscles fade and flesh falls off the bone
Drops like fruit gone to rot
She tries one last time
Singing the old songs
Singing
"Come away with me
I've already quit that job
We'll finish off the bottle and the agaves too
Take a look around
Everybody is sad as you
All we need are Dos Gusanos this afternoon"
And you're fading fast
You hold her hand as you walk past 7 11 and say
"Okay
Okay sorry
So selfish
Let's go
Okay let's go
Let's just go
Okay
Okay
"