Camilla Urso

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It’s 34 degrees out
The murder rate spikes in response
Exiting the history department after a failed bid at bringing a grade back from the brink
Waiting for the car to warm up from its boiling interior, sweat running down each pit.

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I witnessed a group of boys yelling, screaming at a Muscovy Duck yesterday
Something inside felt close to snapping, breaking
Desiring to run at them, scream, wield a switch-blade, gut somebody
But I didn’t. I walked by frowning with a pressure in my nerves.

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I’m getting sick these days
Every morning unbalanced and nauseous
Having so much trouble kicking every habit that's making me feel worse
All I can see in the mirror is the face first perspective of a downward spiral.

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No one’s hiring, our group just keeps covering meals or joints for each other, running into money whenever luck bumps into us
The mall crawls with cops equipped with Automag pistols and hollow point rounds
Body armour so heavy you can hear their steps in every store
In my dreams I escape this plasticine neo-Disney hell and wander; but it never lasts.

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Sweat, sweat, never fucking ends never fucking stops just drench myself in it till I drown
All we do is wander the same damn stores, never buying anything, just taking up space
We carry switch-blades and hope someday we get stabbed or stab someone else
Watching the helicopters carry banners of destruction as they fly over the beaches, proclaiming
the end of days.

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Terror, terror, 12 hours a day inside not including sleep when I’m not wandering in a stupor among the outside; communicating to someone 100 miles south of me over a glorified telegram
Walking into a convenience store and hearing the workers shout “officer on deck!” at 4AM as a
cop walked in, I knew I was close to hell
feeling those flames licking through the earth, melting the soles off my shoes
Feel them in the way you seem to run into all the people you want to avoid; the earth itself
pushes you together for the sake of more sparks.

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Hearing whispers at night from the swamp a few miles upwind of my house
Those deer eyeing me even more when I walk at night
My room’s windows will break under their slightest advance 
They say when I’m in a medicated haze one night on a mixture of illicit and prescribed
substances, they’re gonna break in and bash my skull in, bash it till it leaks everywhere, bash it
against the corner of my stiff wooden night-stand, cut it open on my cassette deck, that I’m
gonna die right there, and I won’t know that I’ve died.

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The graduates from your high school theatre program are long gone in New York or some other shit state, a few months ago someone you’ve known for roughly six years died in a hydroplane
At night the only social contact, the only hand reaching out across a void of spiritual poverty, a
ceaseless dream of darkness, is a leather skinned diner waitress
When dawn walks the earth, cranes dot the estuaries as the leviathanic trucks drive on two lane
roads less than a hundred feet parallel
Early morning fog replaced by choking humidity, my dreams fading, the city deteriorates; bars
have mould growing in the drinks, stores no longer sell anything but flesh, for lack of bridges the cars drive into the putrid rivers drowning in silence, too dignified to even make a noise as they hit the water.