So said the sinner to the saint:
“do you ever wish that the dealer
shuffled your cards a different way?”

Inside of an inebriated city,
the gutters sang from under our feet
in the form of steam that made it’s way up through the manholes,
split into lines drawn in the sand by steel bars beneath the beat.

You are built of water,
just the same as concrete,
and most of the time, I tow the line,
but tonight I fell off of it completely.
Said the saint to the sinner,
“Yeah, these streets defeat me.”

We all wrote our songs on all of our hearts before we poured them into yours,
and they made their way from
ink on a page to
words uninhibited by lips on a stage to
ink beneath your pores.

Well my great-grandfather would have never bothered to ask
what my arms mean,
but he’d have been damned before he’d have ever been seen publicly the way that
he
died
privately.