Corbin Louis
and we were the first to shoot the clock
no doubt it was us 13-yr-olds sitting
stone cold on the guardrails
i saw an opportunity to sneak out
and toy with the gods some fortune
faded the whole circus was lit up
and danny boy knew a thing or two
about stealing cars and showing off
his mom’s crack pipe
what a house party that left so many
throats stripped bare all about just
cans on cans and the strongest of us
on both feet with the last drop
poured onto morning a pirate’s life
no one knew which way the train
was coming but we knew it was coming
all those tracks lined with pennies and
lighters the flash of butane bright red
like a marigold smashed into planets
and even though the wasteland
even though the deadline missed
and even though the odds were rain
on those nights we screamed such
black eyes punched out walls the size of
katherine’s worst day so massive
in a petri dish of red bulls and nicotine
my god what an inhale
perhaps best describes as
nitrous mouth or twenty cans
of aerosol that each one
would breach the education
and leave us soft as a baby skull
in a pile of slush thirty days spent
melting on the driveway but someone
always called a rally to the back lot
to the mall into bonfires a stack
of boxes burned by the coming
of our last ditch
however tired those gatherings
documented only by chipped paint
danny had a bone to pick and the room
ended up being a wishbone but mike
broke up the whole thing and just
laughter in the fields just a bell
yet a dozen more times
charcoals burned i made excuses
like clockwork and forgot the loose
ends of a lie about taking it all
of poison of cheers of dying
no matter the time or backstreet
we had to get there to a basement
or a front yard especially on friday
we had to arrive at some point
just to pull off our jaws and taste
the laughing gas just to break
into the storefront of a good time
and we did
no doubt just about all of it
including the long night
or a noise complaint
and the coyote on fire
including the sky sliced in two
the dreadnaught of noon
yeah we did
***
A recent Jack Straw Writer’s Resident and MFA graduate at the University of Washington, Corbin Louis is a Seattle native making work out of a legacy of grunge and rain and illness. Each piece serves as a form of sublimation, transforming dysfunction into arrangements of self-reflection and cultural critique. Corbin’s goal as an artist is to garner awareness and support around mental illness by creating pieces that shriek for understanding, and he has been published by Best American Experimental Writing, Random Sample Review, Visible Poetry Project and others.