Faith Is Spent One Night After Another

let nightfall extinguish the lights lining your Hollywood Boulevard dreams
where the streets are paved with honey and risen & fallen screen angels
have marked their short stay in footprints that have walked through the
gritty reality of beautiful would-have been starlets turned hookers
before submitting to a needle chockfull of their longed-for stardom
like cheap construction paper cut out copies of marilyn monroe
shredded into confetti

back home they suck you in with vacuum speed,
gripping tight to the thick plastic cord
because you must conform
because you're a disillusioned idiot drop-out sweeping up the remains of your
childhood fantasies at the corner Deli where you're making your honest &
lousy $6.50 an hour, because your faith is spent
while there is no room for poetry in your cramped up studio apartment
stashed with those piles upon piles of celebrity magazines,
vacations are unaffordable and L.A. is still 3,000 miles away
rebeling is exhausting after an 8 hour day
the outlines aren't silver anymore, but a dimmed gray and
you were born into the cult and in the cult you shall stay
because there's an expensive and shortning supply of
happiness & gasoline
and they don't believe in you anyway,
faith got drunk and got laid, got knocked up & abandoned
she's strangling herself in her gilded cage
because dreams can quickly turn against you and suicide is such a
retarded contemplation in the end
you struggle like the rest of us and accept it for how it is
because you were destined for stardom but stardom's drowning in a haze,
in a cesspool of suburban trash and advice,
and while what comes up must come down, you're dueling gravity's
lack of luster when you're on top, a prize so unobtainable
celebrating living-room aspiring rock stardom in the light of day
sprinting with a fistful of roses down the long
intersecting
highway