my life has become an abandoned camp ground, when i explore it seems i’m always traveling past tents, in the past tense, by fires that raged but left blackened circles of stone and half whittled confessions

if you close your eyes you can hear camp songs echo over the trees, which is funny because i’ve never been camping, never sang songs or learned to shoot bows, but i’ve been a frequent target, a straw man filled with itchy stalks of subversive humor, humming along and barely moving my lips

the mess hall, the messy halls of cluttered thoughts, there are meal works in the oatmeal but if you close your eyes the crunch is similar to a raisin, i’m dried out like a grape on the vine, the sweetness lost in baking sun, left to dry out and suffer, the ulcerated remains of remaining ever vigilant and applying sun block to protect myself from you

there are ninety nine empty bottles of beer on the wall, a can pyramid, fifths of whiskey set like bowling pins on a lane i’ll throw myself repeatedly down only to strike myself from the equation, the rules of this game seem purposefully vague but i at along like everyone else because if we don’t smile and show team spirit the spirits distilled and bottled will pickle us in inebriated catharsis

arthritic critics reading along, lips moving as if they speak the things i scribble and it applies to them, but they are based off of the book of me she wrote with a knife down my inner thigh, and as her tongue licked the blood and her mouth took me whole her eyes told the other side of the tragic tale of buyer’s remorse

so i run past the moth eaten tents of the tense and ignoble moments of past tense, to the cabin where dreams go to die at the hands of another faceless killer who was just another victim that lives off of the second chance ponderance of maybe next year the check clears and this nickel and dime existence will fade from view

another fleeting memory in the rear view as i drive in reverse down one way streets in an attempt to find the spot i lost the plot and maybe you’ll be there with a sign that shows the way, a pretty smile painted on and torn stockings from the fall before the rise of fall, backwards tumbling out of view