Selections – Atticus Davis

June 8, 2015

(from the upcoming collection Your Aeon; cover sketch by Courtney Min)

CHET BAKER HUFFING A GAS RAG
Born to feed
Born to thrive
Born to breed
Born to die
II.
Who’s going to love without asking you to drink their Kool-
Aid?
III.
Ask me what it means.
Like you could ever forget your purpose.
The scent of your breath on my skin:
it all rushes back to me, like Chet Baker huffing a gas rag.
IV.
Fuck your abusive parents.
You’re perfect.

CONQUEST URGE
the unenlisted
drop outs in drag
half-faggot deserters
need a place to put my conquest urge
apparently it is not gay sex.
here I am
after his cunt is gone
and you could bottom out here
all sanity like a shanty child
in some back alley miracle
my life has brought me to my cradle
to be lulled, finally, into the warm
blanketing hands of flawed self-love
eyes wide open
screaming to see
blind as a bat
a vampiric youth in
your old friends glow
a makeup fuck w no makeup
an apology to the ones you buried
in justifications. Mirrored in intellectualized drug use.
II.
Because, yeah, of course
you fucking miss me and
I missed me too.
I’m holding my hand now, wailing,
like that wounded animal I was
but bleeding bleats
and untamed
whild
savaghe
the animal you want to poach but
whose beauty haunts you
like some ragged angel
bite my heels and try to drag
me out.
We’ll talk but you can’t keep me.