Slouches Publicize Private Wounds

I hide beneath tattoos.
You embarrass me publicly, "get in the car".
The blues are a bruise.
"Why're your nails black?"
Depression's a scar.
I dress like a thief to be as seen as a star.
I mar my face with metal cleaner than my clogged pores.
Vampiric, I lick to taste the iron bolted through my tongue.
I could dress any way but you only think of your young son to worry if he's gay.
Awkward as they may be, at concerts I find my we.

Scaring Yourself Serious

In twig-split midnight sky I hear howls.
Pale yellow moon bathes the branches.
Yale campus soon dews and frost creeps across acorn, blade, and sidewalk.
Wind slides, turning shade light and back.
Students flip in layered sheets, chasing sleep in chill illumination.
Their souls jump the mind's track.
Scraps, hatred and sorrow leftover from murdered men.
They've lost their sense of name and when.
Spirits are dense as the swollen fog.
Quasi-voices scratch psyches enveloped in brows now moist.
Quality normality is sent far from foreheads soggy.
Squishy human anatomy feels the pressure.
Worlds, living and dead, press closer to amalgamation.
Wood moans and groans, beds send sleepwalkers to cool witching-hour-air.
Analog ambulation retraces the tread of folk long dead.
Fat faculty actively unearth locals' caskets.
Girls lose their maidenheads to a red-dressed hot mess of a man.
Youths' animus corrupt bodies through oils and allegiance to the oldest foe.
Robed men chant to bless el diablo.
Planets properly aligned, circles in wax and blood inscribed, pacts are made.
Powers of the fallen host toast the health of Anglos ignoring their better angels.
A cult carves shapes for sounds plain English can't produce.
Dug up embalmed puddles struggle to stand.
Slumbering mugs in local pajamas won't taste the morning's orange juice.
The cowled chanters and the powers reached a truce.
Vacant vessels are steered through waxblood circles for infernal use.
I wander, looking for my body, lost 'tween live and dead lands.