Fire Tire Psalm and Other Poems
By Elizabeth Nardo


Dedication

For Val,
who shared the haze, the flannel, and the fight to keep the cruel voices quiet.


Table of Contents

1. Reagan Sings
2. The Diner, Circa 1993
3. Up-Stairs Second Door on the Left
4. Cigarette Psalm
5. The Ritual
6. A Tire Fire of a World
7. Footnote for Tire Fire Psalm
8. Other Poems
   - December 31, 1989
   - Grunge
   - Lithium and Lucky Strikes
   - Gen X Love Song
   - The Day the Lover Left
   - A Generation’s Song
   - Retread
   - Worn
   - Aging Ungracefully
   - By Apollo’s Flame


Reagan Sings

Reagan sings of morning in America, and all that.
He takes whiteout to the code,
chops at the interest rate like a lumberjack.
The yuppies live their greed-life,
with coke-fueled parties.
The champagne flows like water,
and they engorge themselves
on oysters and caviar.
From the corner office and yachts,
they say they get theirs—fuck the common man—
empty, nude bodies, caring more for labels they wear,
with their hollow souls.
The American Dream let loose a feral beast,
eating the corpse of America’s rusting cities.
A Black Monday indigestion,
a fucked-up world of greed,
the American way—
it’s the world like a burnt cigarette,
crushed and handed to us.

The Diner, Circa 1993

Packs of cigarettes, tossed on the tables.
The coffee, warmed by time, lingered.
Someone might mindlessly play tricks with a spoon.

Each booth, a little tribe,
in this sacred space.
Social butterflies fluttered,
pollinating conversations and plans.

Each person lived a drama:
fights, laughs, breakups, hookups—
it all happened here.

Coffee, like wine,
cigarettes, like wafers,
consumed in this holy church
of the lost.

Up-Stairs Second Door on the Left

They stream up and down the narrow stairs,
past the mailboxes on the wall,
with their Manic Panic hair and peasant skirts.
They smelled of sweat amid herbal-perfumed air.
They knocked on the door of Apartment 214.

There, among the grand place—
a land of gentlemen and their ladies,
of pearls and fur,
now made squalor by time,
a product of the cancer that ate America’s cities—
gathered a new tribe: hippies, punks, and the flannel-clad.

Misfits reading their Naked Lunch,
listening to Henry Rollins.
The sink overflowing with coffee cups;
the ashtrays, full, empty pill bottles litter the floor.
A one-hitter, loaded and waiting—
a communal wafer in this church.

Here, they talk, laugh, cry, fight, and fuck
in infinite combinations, for minutes or days,
all through a haze of weed and poppies,
under the year-round light of a string of blue Christmas lights.

Cigarette Psalm

It’s a slide blues tune on an old guitar.
The scene of mud and death lies just out my window,
the last remains of a dying winter.

No one’s coming up the drive with Manic Panic hair.
The air is silent, no distorted rage.
No one’s bringing Lortab to eat like Tic Tacs.
No lovers come to my bed; it’s quiet now.

I stare at the mud and death,
like it’s a hospice death watch,
just a slow-burn ache
for my lost, flannel-clad tribe.

I find it in an old teapot—my sacred stash—
light a joint and take in the past,
waiting for the man to come from the drugstore.
Today’s pills, a tax on my age,
not the god-fuck euphoria of my youth.

The Ritual

The incense glows,
filling the air with a scent I know—
the cigarette sits, awaiting in the ashtray,
a little thing to suck, a burning desire.

I reach for my coffee,
the hot lover,
familiar as my own clit,
embraces my lips
and fills me.

A Tire Fire of a World

It was a shot that came in the morning.
Kurt had eaten Hemingway’s breakfast,
and we awoke from our haze—
meaningless sex, weed, and poppies—
and listened to the wind cry.

The ladies rushed the stage,
ink dripping from their knives,
and poured words into the wounds.
They shared the fresh air as they subverted every goddamn thing.

I woke from a nothing job for nothing wages, slinging burgers,
for another nothing job with nothing wages.
I slipped into a dress,
entered pointless numbers for unread reports, complete with cover sheets,
stolen moments with cigarettes in frozen basement garages,
dreaming of a meaningful fuck.

We grew, wed, and bred as we were supposed to,
a life with houses built on sand.
Then we lost everything in the
fucking so-called Great Recession.

We fought the virus,
scared for grown kids hanging
onto our worn apron strings,
old parents broken and bruised by time.

We looked at the tire fire of shit
that was the world,
and said, “Fuck this,”
and lit a joint.

Footnote for Tire Fire Psalm

The world is a wired lie,
A photoshopped fiction.
Hollow souls showing lies,
Virtue-signaling revolutionaries,
For their fifteen minutes.
Grifts, cons, shitposters,
Yelling in their bubble,
What the algorithm says.
No saints among them;
It's just racing for a dopamine fix,
Like a junkie in the street.

Other Poems

December 31, 1989

The night had been long,
The last night of a decade.
A yacht tied up at the bar,
Full of all the "Greed is Good" shit.
It was oysters and champagne.
We partied its passing.
We thought we knew what the future held:
College, a corner office,
And our own yacht tied to the bar.

The next day, hungover,
In my leather jacket,
I walked along the Gulf shore.
The sky was grey,
The winter waves lapped the shore.
Shoes in my hand,
A picture taken by my best friend
Captured the moment
Along the Emerald Coast.

Little did we know
Of the troubles ahead
And the road we would take.
If we had bothered to listen,
My future's heart
Was beating on the west wind,
Carried along by distorted guitars.

Grunge

The days were filled with mindless, nothing jobs for nothing wages.
For our nights, we gathered at this or that show,
Greeting the orange-streaked sky of morning
After spending the night at a greasy spoon diner.
Our apartments were an old and grand places,
The place to be decades ago,
Now run down like America.
But we made them ours with our art and Christmas lights,
Candles and overflowing ashtrays on every flat surface.
Our flannels, armor like medieval knights,
Living day to day on coffee and cigarettes.
We filled the air with distorted guitars
And angst-filled voices.
The girls in their peasant skirts scribbled poetry
And painted the world dark and gray.
And everyone was Mary Jane's friend;
Incense burned an eternal flame.
Everyone seemed to be on some happy pills;
The poppy made the day bearable in all different ways.
We loved in new ways and fought;
Everyone loved one another now and then.
We all held on to each other tight;
There seemed no tomorrow.
Then one day in April, he died.
It all went quiet.
And we finally heard the women sing.
And a girl from Alaska asked,
"Who will save your soul?"

Lithium and Lucky Strikes

Love tasted like lithium and lucky strikes
Ashtray kisses
Bodies twisted into one, scrunchies on the night stand
Sleep in the wet a lovers burden
This too shall pass like the ring said
She no one's manic pixie dream girl
To brighten the day

Gen X Love Song

Our tongues met and touched,
Lovers tasting one another.
Our bodies aching,
Mouths full of Prozac,
Praying for meaning
That never comes.

The Day the Lover Left

An old Volkswagen by the river
Phish tape in the radio
A hippy chick full of drama
The world loves her
Cuts at her wrist with a gold rose
A gift from a love now gone
Her freinds would gather around
Hold her and tell her it would be okay
Share and joint and some pills
The little drama queen and her court

A Generation’s Song

Bender and Claire group, with no counselor.
Line them all up, a generation against the wall.
Shoot the Prozac like Pez.
We rebel and self-medicate,
A generation broken, despite Mr. Rogers' best.
We kiss and look for love, a mouthful of Prozac,
Hollow like a jack-o'-lantern.
Struggle to find therapy,
Escape the hospital's grip.
Broken like a lover with a busted lip,
Chemical zombies march on.
It’s the song of a generation.
Signed,
X

Retread

My love listens to another one of my poem.
I am told all my poems are just
stories on repeat,
but they don’t see
the punk rock muse,
an Olympia Press book of Beat ladies,
sitting on the page.
“Write it again,
this time right,
you weak-ass bitch,”
so I revise and rewrite,
polish to make the edges jagged,
and write my lived truth
with bloody hands,
muse’s dagger at my throat.

Worn

I stand here after five and a half decades.
Coffee and cigarettes,
My dearest friends,
My hands, wrinkled, tremble.
They quip,
“It’s not the years; it’s the miles.”
My miles are scars unseen,
A lived life, a lived truth.
It’s all night with a crying baby in the emergency room,
A death watch in a hospice room.
It’s a bounced check or three,
Pennies in a jar, ramen on the stove,
One pill too many, one too many a drink.
It’s a lover who tossed me aside like a cigarette.
It’s a mad fuck in a dead bed, lover half out the door.
It’s a breakdown,
A panic attack, a pink slip,
An eviction, a foreclosure notice,
Roe v. Wade overturned,
Electing them,
Blood in the streets, the world ablaze.
It’s surviving this sea of shit.

Aging Ungracefully

The floor is cold, but in this old house, it always is.
My calf tinges with an aching pain.
My arthritis-filled hips hurt.
My tummy is filled with a bubble gut,
And my shoulders and neck are nonfunctional centers of pain.
My heart beats heavy.

I type with my wrinkled hand
Upon my phone, the latest and greatest,
And stream Nevermind.
I am suddenly in my 20s,
Dancing in a peasant skirt,
A flannel tied about my waist.
"Fuck this aging shit!"

And I begin to wonder,
Where the hell would I find a joint these days?

By Apollo’s Flame

I am but one of many children of Apollo, born under its light.
You may know us as GenX, but in truth, we are the children of Apollo,
Born in a time of big dreams.

Before I was born, it was a horrid year:
Assassinations,
Riots, and war—
A world falling apart at the seams,
Saved on Christmas Eve
By three astronauts and a picture.

I was a baby, not yet a year old,
When they rode a flame
From the Earth to the Moon.
The patch on their shoulder bears no name;
They are but three, representing all humankind.
And gently, that eagle landed
Upon the Sea of Tranquility.
When that contact light lit,
We lived in a world forever changed.
Luna had marked the time,
But now we had trodden on her face.
It was a mighty leap for the human race.

We would go back,
Have a successful failure,
And find the Genesis rock,
That precious little stone.
But then, we lost our way.

I hope we return someday,
Maybe under Artemis's flame,
Watched from a chair in retirement,
So I can die in peace as I was born.


Afterword

Writing Fire Tire Psalm and Other Poems was like clawing through the noise in my head, where cruel voices whispered doubt and despair. These poems are my fight back, born in the haze of Gen X—coffee as lifeblood, cigarettes as communion, flannel as armor against a world on fire. I went to college chasing dreams, but the 90s hit like a distorted guitar riff. I said “fuck it” to lecture halls and the 9-to-5 grind, dropping out to live among misfits, scribbling poetry that silenced the venom in my mind. This chapbook is for the tribe that danced in that chaos, scribbling verses under blue Christmas lights, and for anyone still carrying the scars of a tire fire world. These jagged words are my truth, written to keep the cruel voices quiet and the fire burning.

— Elizabeth Nardo
June 2025


About the Author

Elizabeth Nardo is a Gen X poet, forged in the haze of coffee, cigarettes, and flannel-wrapped rebellion. She writes to quiet the cruel voices in her head and keep sane, channeling the chaos of a tire fire world into jagged verse. College promised the American Dream, but the 90s called louder—grunge riffs, diner nights, and misfit poetry under blue Christmas lights. Saying “fuck it” to lecture halls and the 9-to-5 grind, she dropped out to live and write among the broken. Her poems have appeared on platforms like All Poetry, and Fire Tire Psalm and Other Poems is her fierce debut.