I was made to believe it was safety
That porch
The books and highliters
Removed thought
Of some higher enlightenment
Used to avoid more failures
Called a coward
So I left the porch
To find something
I never missed
Met people still living
Saw sights present time
Shared conversations
Until bravery gave me
A consolation prize
I didn't even want
One of a deep crowded loneliness
Turns out it wasn't safety
Or fear that kept me on that porch
It was preference
It is what my soul requires
And delights in
That is where my love lives
My soul grows
My heart beats
In those highlighted pages
**** the world
For ever making me think otherwise
Stealing my precious time.

When the enemy fights back harder
Than you ever expected them to
Because it turns out they were smarter
And way more cunning than you
Just run fast and hide a bit farther
Yeah..that's the best that you can do.

The cure you seek for narrow mind
Is not held by credential three
No. The anecdote you must find
Is held by only me.
That poison's making you go blind
The one you took so eagerly
Has one remedy of its kind
That's held by only me.

Does it get lonely there,
In your head?
Or do regrets visit?
With old pictures to keep you company.
Does imagination ever stop by to take you somewhere new?
I came by on a few occasions and knocked
You didn't answer
But I knew you were there.
I left a note on your porch.
But that was a long time ago.

There was always a veil between us.

I peered through and saw what I WANTED.

Light
Joy
Hope
Ectasy
Truth
Tomorrow

You peered through and saw what you EXPECTED.

Darkness
Pain
Futility
Revulsion
Fallacy
Yesterday

It­ will lift, this veil, whether in this lifetime, or our next.

Then we will both see clearly.

Ah. Finally met your match
Can' take me, can't leave me
We call that caught between
A rock and hard place
No difference what you do now
Blue on black
One step behind

I love you now as I loved you then.

How badly you hurt me.

How completely wrong you were.

That not an hour passes without me thinking of you.

I still feel you, just as if I touched you yesterday.

That I no longer grieve the what if's, I accept what is.

Longing...like I know longing.

That I still harbor hope for the future.

That I will spend the rest of my life waiting for you.

That my very last conscious vision will be of your face.

That you were my once in a lifetime love.

How thankful I am to have known you.

As the shade of night slowly drops
And the birds whistle a "goodnight"
The atmosphere starts to settle
The city sounds go with the light
The crickets buzz to hush the world
In a melodic wave-like way
Nature conducts its orchestra
And puts to sleep another day.

You are just a coward really.
Just sitting there next to your fear
So complacent to lose again
The very thing you hold most dear.
The battle is all yours to wage
Yet you'll retreat inside your head
You could fight for the sake of love
But you will let it die instead.
Sacrifice the only true thing
No. There will be no final stand.
So quickly you just wave your flag
And I will never understand.

The crickets chirp for me tonight
Trees darker than the sky
The only other sound is that
Of the traffic passing by
At will my mind can block that out
Until just those crickets be
But the thoughts! T'would be mercy
If heaven did the same of thee.

It was the voices they were fighting
Not you
The ones that kept them on the front line
Always poised; armed; for an attack
Once you understand
Just how irrelevant "you" really were
That you could have said and done a million different things
That wouldn't have mattered,
That their demons weren't yours to fight
Once you understand
It wasn't ever your responsibility
To make them feel worthy of love
To change their mind; change their heart
That their promises were always meant to betray
Despite you
Despite your effort
That you were just another figurine
Placed on some overfilled shelf
That held their every failed opportunity
To overcome; break free; win
Once you understand
That to them you were an enemy
That you signified future pain
That must be pre-empted,
That you could never shine enough light
To light their way
And that they never wanted you to
That you were just collateral damage
Once you truly understand those things
Your heart begins too heal.
Your soul finds forgiveness.
You find a way to keep loving them,
While you let them go.
Yes, you will hurt
You will cry; bargain; beg.
But in the end
You will be "you" again.
And that is a beautiful thing.

The bindings.
The encasements.
Tendons twisting
The tight slipknots
As we squirm
And entrap us all
In miniscule minds
Minuscule thoughts
Until the sickle
sets us free.

The little innuendos life drops like sand
When you venture out in space.

Just small simple reminders, slaps on the hand
To stay in that ordained place.

Keep peace on an empty porch, feet upon the floor
With no tears upon thy face.

Spend time with well worn pages, just like before,
Call it sad, but know it's grace.

The apple rising always higher
Proportionate to the desire
Not a mountain cliff
Or an eagles drift
Ever will or can conspire.....
The height to which a man will go
In pouring rain or lashing snow
No distance of sky
No bar set too high
To fuel a hearts true fire.

When the coffee turned into tea
And she was faced with that real-i-ty
Her world suddenly stopped spinning.
The walls rushed in... not one by one
The ceiling fell in to shut out the sun
And she called this the beginning.
Of life without truth and reason
Over and over...no change of season
Would ever breech the tomb within.
And over time she did go blind
Left with only the echoes of her mind
And she was never seen again.

In the midst of grey
It feels safe
Within the gloom
There is calm
Time passes differently here
Silently like a phantom
Slow enough to touch
And hold the moment

Knuckles white...
I held on
As long as I could
Sweaty palms
Gripping the corpse
Of our love
As if I could squeeze
Life back into it.
I tried my best.
Failed.
Then let go.

I knew the exact moment
That I died.
Watching 14 palm fronds sway in the wind of dusk
Peering through a 5 inch opening
Of black and gold
Striped curtains
From the 3rd floor window of a motel shared with someone who would never know me.
In that moment I hated you.

All along my heart did love thee
And thougb I never did thee wrong
Thy mind was resigned to hate me
And still I loved thee all along.

When I see your face my heart twists
And wrings the tears out of my eyes.

I still feel the tug of the fibers on my heart
The ones that grew us together and kept us close
Despite everything.
I can't seem to detach myself from you.
It doesn't feel even partly good when I try.
Why would I want to anyway?
I still have conversations with you in my head.
Still imagine your eyes looking over your readers at me.
Still replay everytime you felt vulnerable enough to cry.
The love I feel is one of greatness.,
That once in a lifetime love few find.
I will be forever grateful I had it with you, if even for a short time.
With those fibers I will keep you forever close.
With those fibers I will still feel your love and send you mine.

How is it that the days get longer
Yet shorter be the years?
Just how does a very old memory
Bring about brand new tears?
Why do some things never dissipate;
Others? .....always vapor be?
How do we blindly move along,
And yet stall when we can see?
How dare the moon eclipse the sun,
When it's the sun that outs the moon?
Why does some sadness stay so long,
While joy always leaves too soon?

He had a way of turning white to black
And contaminating the pure
A smile up front, a stab to the back
Making certainty so unsure

He could turn the future into the past
Find coincidence out of fate
Promise a forever that would not last
And turn a great love into hate

With him there were no losers or winners
There was only the weak and strong
Saw his sins as less than sinners
Was always right and never wrong.

I learned the meaning of "absolute,"
An early morning in December.
It's carved right into my very soul;
So there's no effort to remember.

It is scarred and crusted over now
And yet, it still seems to hurt no less,
Than the day I had to just give up
And give up all hope to hopelessness.

Some hearts just will never be altered
But mine is not what it used to be
The day I learned what "absolute" was,
Made me a sadder version of me.

The sun drained a little more out
Of me today
Exchanged for the dim lit space

How good it was to return
With salt swept eyes
Into the cold to sleep

Tossing crazy thoughts all about
I cannot say
Enough about this safe place

Where we go,  fog-ged to learn
What holds the skies
Also what makes them weep

How a dream can take the subtlest things
We dont register in the day
And make them play like a movie
In the most fantastical way

Strange creatures that sing Sinatra
And fuzzy slippers in the snow
A camp party with beer gardens
Faces we know but do not know

Always looking for the bathroom
Where the gay men pray for me
And everyone there is naked
Yet while I know this I don't see

Upstairs to get left-over food
"Will you get in the picture too?"
"Oh no," I say, "I don't belong."
And there's just so much to do.

A lawn mower that's finally fixed
But is barricaded just so
It takes a very funny man
Knocking down everything to go

And he plops me in the bucket
While my love walks along beside
Saying I'm not pretty enough
He'd rather a mail order bride

A pickup truck....the color red
Which being sober I must drive
After admiring the city cats
That keep the handicapped alive

Right after the hall of xmas trees
That even Satan would admire
Filled with all the chattering squirrels
That stare at me as they conspire

I keep watch over my shoulder
Certain someone is there behind
I wake and make perfect sense of
All the oddities of my mind.

When all the stars are in their proper place
And the dead ones have given up their space
When equality and equity are one and the same
And goodness is sought for in place of fame
When we are able to redact our every mistake
And truly learn lessons from every heartbreak
It will be the day when the immortals die
And their souls rise up to embrace the sky

The atmosphere has always pulled on me
Like a single sparkle in tall grass at night
To discover the flight of soul
It whispers of great things in the wind
Tugging always against my gravity, the
world, and what is called reality.
I must learn to fly.

It is a sacred place
Where statues of memories stand
And familiar voices echo from wells
Where the wind blows the dandelions
To grow the falling stars
That I wish upon

If we could take all the tiny impressions
And all the memory shards
Of the overlooked insignificant moments
And put them altogether
With the great ones
Perhaps a full soul could be made.

The pulse is thready now
What once fed life is gone
The eyes and mind flit away
While the change is sown
And nature knows just how
To make all else carry on
As if it were just a day
As if it were never known

A mere millisecond
Is all that lies between
Good and bad, life and death
What is and what has been.

The time I have left with you
Will not be marred by hope
But rather acceptance.
Our final days will become
Snapshots inside my head
I will memorize your voice
But most importantly
I will treat your pain
And tell you that I love you.
I will hold your feeble hands
Within the warmth of my own
My face will be fearless
And my eyes will be dry
It is the least that I can do.

I'll help you take the pictures down
Pack away the years
Read to you the letters she wrote
Wipe away the tears
You say that she would have liked me
That I would have liked her too
And I pledge I will do my very best
To take such privileged care of you.

I lose a bit more of you every day
Relax my grip and you slip away
Each day a single sacred tear
Rations the loss of you, my dear.

I shared
A billion pieces of what they call me
A million times 'cause I was lonely
Hoping for a bit of madness
To match my own without the sadness
I took
A black and white of every memory
Knowing loss is all we foresee
Tucking them into their own space
Every word away with their face
I formed
Beauty out of a delusion
Lost myself in the confusion
Made a bed out of every mistake
Formed an idea that I could not shake
I found
That life is only what we make it
If we aren't then we should fake it
The time will come and it will fly by
Some things we loose the day we die.

I was the collateral you used to buy something you had no intention of paying for.

It is the fickleness of man
That I hate the most.
No one cultivates anymore.
They just give up because it's easy.
No one ever becomes too valuable to lose.
We just keep starting over
And moving on and on
Complaining the whole way
How we never got what we wanted.
Shameful,  that as human beings
With the greatest ability to truly love,
That we rarely do.

And he said. "I'm afraid that one day you will wake up and realize that you are wasting your time on me."

And I thought to myself, he doesn't even know that I knew that from day one.

But I have always loved wasted time.

Hell, the best times that I remember are the ones where I was wasted.  

Wasted with people who didn't know me at all.

To know the subject of the words
Makes no difference don't you see
Be it river, lover, universe
All be but the same to me.

'Tis nothing but a chasm now
Much easier to melon ball out the rest
Than try to refill it.

It is the purest form of love,
The type that I have found with you.
The color of you engulfs me;
Makes my own a different hue.

You accept me just as I am,
A task that not many can do.
You chisel cracks into my heart
To let the light shine right on through.

We used to climb trees.
Scramble up them with our friends
There wasn't anything in those trees we needed
Nothing waiting to be claimed on the highest branch
It was just a tree
And we climbed it for fun's sake
Coming home with splinters,
Scraped knees and embedded dirt.
And the next day, guess what we did?
We climbed the ******* tree again.
Until the world taught us fear
And the tree wasn't fun anymore.
And so it goes on and on really.
Until simple seems so difficult
That we no longer have the courage
To truly live.

I must sit while in my chest

An infinite realm there be

More, oh more, within the breast

Than awkward mortality

Minūte in its east to west

Too narrow a soul to free

Just how far from trough to crest

And here to eternity?