Best Gutters Poems
The fall to the abyss is incendiary by design,
Burning out and plummeting toward
The bottom of a fjord or the shaft of a mine,
To impale upon a metaphoric sword.
The climbing from the dark is instinctive by default,
Implanted in the root of human soul,
With each progressive step to scrabble from the vault,
Victorious emerging from the hole.
Regeneration spreads it’s slowly beating wings
To raise the heart and mind against the night,
And even in the depths of all the blackest things
Draws us once again into the light.
Just as Oscar Wilde was clearly heard to utter
In defiance of the fates and prison bars,
I may have sometimes lain in a pretty dismal gutter
But my eyes were always fixed upon the stars.
Those roses hungry
for beauty and life live
alone in gutters.
icicles on gutters
glisten in light
of early morning
reflections of sun
when sitting alone
my dreams of spring
Between the black gutters and the painted ceilings,
Dogs teach dolls how to die.
Study the rot in my bicuspids, file down the calluses and watch the heartbeat
Shake the skin like strychnine shivers.
Whispers fill the space between the curtains, hanging from the scaffolds
Hushed against the legs, porcelain and fractured,
Broken down the middle.
Kintsugi can’t restore the signs of the break, and red mouths
Can’t look anything other than bitten once they have been.
Sing for me, redlight lover,
Sing the words that the angels won’t touch, and watch: hymns gather in our corners.
Conversations with the ceiling are painted mock-ups
Of what lives and crawls in blindspot gutters blackened.
The highways surrounding the heart, rushing with red ruin
Sanguine and torpid with low breaths between backseats and
Cocaine gloveboxes—
Will it steady your nerves to partake?
Move for me, bunny, and leech my loneliness; can’t you see it’s flooding out my neck?
Draw the door and punch the lights,
Bruise the knuckles on the deed and sigh,
Baying over the carcass, oh hound with its kill,
Trot between the cradle and the grave with canines dripping hunger’s ache.
Here’s where we go to die, doll, the both of us;
I will bite you open, and they will put me down, sheets to palls, buried side by side.
Wrench the cork from the bottle like the head from its neck and drink;
Raise a glass to the dolls,
To the dogs and to the dashboard lines,
To the desperation of black gutters and painted ceilings,
And to the highway blood that never finds its way home.
When the glass breaks, they’re going to teach us all how to die.
I came from the cracked earth,
where sirens sang lullabies
and gunshots kept rhythm
like a mother’s heart—
fast, then gone.
We ate what we stole,
slept where we fell,
and called rusted chain-link fences
the edge of the world.
The old man left,
the old lady broke,
and love was a rumor
we didn’t believe in.
I bled young.
Learned young.
Fists before forgiveness,
pain before prayer.
But I built.
One scar at a time,
I stacked mistakes like bricks,
cut my teeth on truth,
and spit out the lies.
Didn’t ask to be saved—
just wanted a shot to stand.
Not clean, not perfect—
just honest.
Now I walk with a limp,
but it’s mine.
I speak with weight,
’cause I carried hell on my back
and still came out
looking like a man.
What I would call the street today,
As kids, we’d say the gutter.
It was a place to play for some
And moms would often mutter,
“If you’re not home on time, then I
Will see you, in my mind,
Lying dead out in the gutter
And your body they will find.”
The gutter also was the place
You took your dog to go,
For pooping on the sidewalk
Definitely was a no!
I never knew about the gutters
Meant to channel rain.
I have those on my roof right now
And cleaning them’s a pain.
But yesterday, I did just that
And as I scooped out goop,
I heard my mother’s voice call out,
Like she was on the stoop:
“Be careful near the gutter!”
Yet this time, my fear instead,
Was that I’d fall down while cleaning them
And crack my foolish head.