36 - 40

36.  Chess is a hard game to master,

A misplaced bishop on plated wood

Ends in nothing less than a disaster.

Night air of failure, the morning after,

The knight cackles on steed, so misunderstood,

My faltering  under stress, blessed disaster.

37. Three years ago, in May Emilee (For the love of her God remember the two e’s) Ann Burroughs first kissed me, so unpracticed, on that cracked tennis court. She wept the night I ended the strife, September 28^th will forever be a holiday of freedom and self-loathing.

She is now obsessive compulsive, trying to count how often the devil speaks to her in multiples of seven. I talk to her when I can relive myself of apathy, but her struggle makes me feel less tangible. She is a second hand author who can barely knit her way back into sanity, why couldn’t I love her?

38. [Published Before]

39. Oh brother,

How you have sent me

to the edge of insanity

on the John Deere boot strapped

West end of Georgia college life.

You sent me away to an academy to learn

How to be a better you.

I only learned to hate Italian major.

Such a foreign told for such a pasty boy.

Your judgment still hand in my head

To the rhyme of your potent

Tsk, tsk, tsk

A waltz of verdicts.

40. Thunderbolt had been dead for a few hours,

But our modest back yard told us nothing,

Until we pulled into its jagged drive.

I just a fence to greet the husky, but he greeted no one.

My eyes now shut to the image of my mutt,

Old, loud, and now in a trash bag.

I still have the callouses on my palms

From where I dug that grave.

I made you a sharpie plywood grave marker,

And asked in Donnie Darko’s voice,

Why did you want to be alone in the end?