From the place I buried it, uncovered now but still a deep hole,
I shall pull up the cocaine and the late night breakfasts
that never stayed with me for longer than it took
to get in the car and get moving, drunk and wired,
toward whatever couch was that morning’s home;

pull up the little empty gun I got in trade
for all that acid, pull up the skinny tie
and the hospital scrubs, the songs I wrote
when bored, my awful awesome poetry I believed in
so hard I sprained my ego on it, even when there was

no evidence for its quality, no reason for it to exist at all.
Pull up the arrogant, the know it all, the callous junior playboy
up to screw whoever was up for it, and pull up as well
any scrap any of those partners left behind, that I might kiss
those remnants and recall a time when I was at least superficially

loveable. What’s left in there when all that’s come up to the light?
A boy, still a skinny boy though tending toward heft.  A stupid young man
with a bad car and a jammed tapedeck and damaged visions
of a swift escape from this earth.  A boiled, burned, wasted chump
of the suburbs…I pull them up, pull it all up, the way you’d yank a weed

that won’t die, frantically hoping I’ve got it all this time:
every bit of what keeps sprouting in my life
when I least desire it, now that it’s inconvenient
and no one thinks it’s cute or charming
or melancholy-artist-appropriate anymore.

I want it poisoned.  I want it gone.
I will pull it up and burn it all from the leftovers
to the memories to the new shoots that tell it all —
that what I was is what I am,
that no matter how I pull, I fail.