The In-Between

Nails coaxed in deranged notions

                                                          of how to speak

absent of excuse

                            their perception of the strange

Minds and eye holes open alike

yet still portrayed a cavity

                                              ugly to be avoided

line the threshold of porcelain teeth.

     How to sleep between

                                            Polished plato clones,

whose gutter mouths spit up stars stolen

                                            and Cigarette finger puppets,

whose nooses hang high in eye polluted skies

      when shows skin marble,

but boils blood nicotine

      Just stuck in someone else's sticky

                                                                 fossilized in the concrete.

      What to say when and where

                                                         words scribble

                                                                                   scrape cranium walls

or decapitate mid-sentence

                                               and eardrums only but ashtrays

for those stars burned too faint

to illuminate their hollow head sockets.

      Why speak anything at all

if voice serves solely to floss

                                                 between the royal and rotten.