Shaved Car Rides (A collaboration between Max Hagen and Justin Limoli)

Too bad your pen was weighed down with silk-cut cigarette smoke and clouds heaving air that reeked of bruised banana peels.

It’s a staccato, the way you spin your pen like a juke box- thinking about sheets and crosses in the same sentence.

Combing through metaphors and “oh my God"s like a polytheistic whore searching through scrap metal in hopes of finding the still-beating heart of Jesus.

If you listen to the street lights clink like pennies in a dryer, you’ll forget about shaved car rides and remember how you want to bite hoses and golf grass.

But never attempt long division over my groin that whimpers of breaches of fourth walls and similes that fall like lint freshly sheared by the greens keeper you called in verse.

Regret is that singed trip across the street, like the lack of cigarette flavor in your teeth,
And remorse is the cigarette that tastes of your teeth instead of the vibrating serenity reached through your tongue.

And your throat is broken like a tennis ball, and a lack of sound from you will mean a lack of tongues.

But this story assembles broken Chinese proverbs and Latinized anagrams marking the paths of your pelvis and the ‘x’ on the page.

And you’ll see 3 a.m. again if you know they didn’t scrape past each other, cause clocks don’t skip like Spaghettios.