FIRE ESCAPE

Poetry by:
PETER COLE FRIEDMAN

Dirty sky. The gravity of the symbol. Walking into a
room with complicated feelings, fumes. Sometimes
the audience throws roses, sometimes knives. I
wobble between terror and boredom. A little
haunted ferris wheel. I put a condom on my mirror,
try to muffle the feedback loop. My life is the butter
churn of the attention economy. I’m tired!
Membership auto renewed out of spite. Spider
slowly eats the light out with its silk. The inevitable
melts me back to childhood. Celluloid void
(flammable). I smell nail polish, struggle to say Lilly.
I chew on the strange feeling night once gave me.
Grieve old grief, the act of it. What’s the success rate
of a fire escape? In this fairytale, I simply simmer in
my own stew. More nostalgia monster than
cottagecore. Still in love with snow. I want to go 
outside and devour particles. Wound infected to the
point of purple, a violet bud. I’ve been dying to tell
you things. Smell your neck. The sky, still there,
lowers like a hand flattening dough. I should just do
the things stuck inside of me, opines the cage. Let
this hummingbird go flashing through time. A child
looks down to admire their angels. How soon
they’ll melt.