The Hipster Summer

Every night tastes like piss

in a forty ounce bottle, smells

like sweat and the staleness of our cluttered,

knick-knacky bedrooms, closing us

in with their picture-book

walls, sounds outside like hello's and good

bye's and high-fives, inside

jokes, heavy breathing and little moans, sights

like dim lights, the watery wandering

of his eyes, headlights and lighters, the wide

grins of friends and the pretty red

buds at the ends of our American Spirits.

Every night's air is thick

with smoke and laughter. Often we feel

like we could evaporate, disappear

in the thin folds of a moment, be tucked

away in arms soft and salty in the sweat

we bleed, blink and exist only in the past.

The hipster hates the hip and loves

only that which has been discarded,

the naïve, forgotten remnants of our mothers' decades

which seem somehow more genuine, and this

is the inevitable conundrum, the wounded hole

in the heart of the hipster: the authenticity parade

is inherently inauthentic.

And so we dance away the disillusionment,

melt into each costumed other, our identities lost

in the crush of a pill or the bottom of a PBR, knowing

sadly that the tortured artist ceases to be

the moment we stand next to another.