So when my five year old son asked me, what did you want to be when you grew up? I was immediately shifted to a time in middle school when teachers were asked is very saying daring question. Now ever since I was eight years old, I've always wanted to grow up to become a cigarette because it was the only thing that my father could never abandon. As long as I can remember, I've always felt like a man constantly in reverse, like the backwash of a dream, like Carmen's favorite craft test dummy constantly begging someone for all the love that they've already given me, so I started drinking and being with women in order to fill up all of the potholes inside of my spirit, but drinking more absolute only made me more obsolete now. I'm just a soul made out of 50% recycled plastic that hugs so tight because it makes pretending that letting go is never an option easier and assembly of a man that loves like a runaway locomotive. My tears still tending to the broken lacerous pieces of women buried in my collarbone as I treated having their bodies like mirrors to try and convince myself that I was beautiful, and I was 13. I first started building train tracks on my stomach, some on thighs, to all the parts of me that I wish I could forget, but that only made me more of a swollen dirty pile of remorse, a shotgun shell inside a waiting room of catastrophe with a fiendish appetite for earthquakes at the dripping enjabment of a woman the earth shifts between my teeth and usually never returns the same mischaping planets have always tasted better to me, and there's no gravity to my will, only cadence from poetry and a vulgar smile, stitched to a sense of humor, hiding the boy with the skin of a scarecrow because it's the only way that his corny heart can ward off the birds and the bees, the only thing that my father ever passed me. It's this uncanny ability to hurt the people that we love the most in a split second. I lost a woman that I thought I loved more than my third decreased scars, the very next year at a random doctor's visit, I found out that I was alcohol intolerant, that I've drunk so much over the years that liquor has become poisonous to my blood, to my very next shot can very well be my last, you know, God. Yeah, it's a funny sense of humor, to go away to two things that I harbored on the most, to teach me a real love and that women and liquor are not a cure to my loneliness, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, honestly, I've always wanted to be a pediatrician, one that helped save and heal children, starting with a one within myself, but who would have known in the 15 years it took to write this poem that I will grow up to become a pediatrician making a stethoscope out of a microphone, writing poems out like daily prescriptions, and turning the stage into a patient room for the healing of me to start within, because when you are in the search for the divine inside of yourself, you're often led to the heart realization that you've been more rich James than first James, who built in fire escapes inside of your bones, for all the times that you wanted to run away from the blaze inside of yourself, what kind of legacy will I pass on to my son? Like give him a legacy of ash, a legacy of burnt out men, will I give him hands like ash trays for him to inherit the butts of my mistakes, yeah I use to want to grow up to become a cigarette made sense, because I'm a cancer, but there's no chemotherapy to my astronomy, yet I still radiate like a son that's unable to shine, but always willing to give all of his light to save anyone's sunset, which is all with the excruciating reality, but I do not want to die alone but sun, you can be anything that you want, just make sure that you do not ever become nothing but a small escape inside of a slow burning pulse, kind of like a cigarette.