What dew so sweet
On the morning willow grows
And the blood runs true deep
Alas the body overthrows
Pray thee to gaze
Lay waste to the east
Upon western glades
Resounds, the bay of the beast
In mortal coil
On cracked earth resign
The body transform
Lay return to the mind
And in provincial mist
Walk thee twixt the cold
Eyes upon skin
And tattered remnants of clothes
And speaketh no name
But pray eat and sleep
And rest now anon
A fortnight defeat
For liketh the moonrise
Three days a month full
Give rise, hounds of hell
Ne're the sunrise to cull

The words I seek just escape me
The meaning so unclear
I try to say the right words
But the words just disappear

So I speak to you in riddles
Cause my words get in the way
I  grasp them for a moment
But they always slip away

I scream because I cant trust myself
And I don't know how to speak
My breath is gone my voice ripped out
And left bleeding at my feet

And the thoughts they rise like water
They crest and come crashing down
So lets just sit here silently so
I don't have to drown

I am nothing more than just
Imprisoned in my mind
Betrayed by a voice once reliable
Now determined to stay inside

So you sit there frozen carved in stone
While we drift farther away
This shattered home is just a shallow hole
The words left ruin in their wake

Some men fight for charity
Some to save their youth
Some men fight for pride
Against an evil brood
Some men wish for safety
Far from foreign shores
While some men live and die
By the blade of their own sword

And while we waste the days at sea
Alone and unafraid
And long times from our lives and homes
We often tend to stay

The claim is always righteous
The innocent to save
And while men stand on walls at night
Some sleep in the shadows wake.

And Neptune mighty, king alas
Send fair winds and following seas
And guide onto familiar shores
Those that choose to ride with me.

I dont mean to deceive you, men
I aim to misbehave
Those who stand, I indtend
To place you in harm's way.

So make your peace to the deep
And Davy Jones be kind
Let your waters run swift and true
Leave no man left behind

I know what love is.
Love is a feeling of falling,
A loss of control.
Love is an obsession.

People think the opposite of love is hate,
Its not.
Hate and love are polar sides of the same experience
Their mutual opposite is indifference.

Ive taken to walking around my apartment
With the belt of my bathrobe tied around my head
And calling myself
Geronimo.

Like jumping out of an airplane
Its what I yell
On my way down to rock bottom
And I've been digging a very long time

When you get caught so much in the digging
That the piles of dirt all around you obscure your view,
You climb to the highest point
Just to see if you've hit rock bottom.
And when you've actually hit rock bottom...
You'd be surprised that you don't even know it.

So on the highest point
Overlooking the shadows that loom from your own
Aspect of construction,
You reach a point of realization that you are at your pinnacle
Standing at the highest point,
Watching the lowest depths.
And you dive.

You never dive for yourself,
And certainly never to be so prosaic as to...
Die for a cause...
Martyrdom is last year's fad...

You dive for someone,
Sometimes, someone you dont even know.
But still you dive for love....
And on the way down,
You yell.

For heroism,
For honor,
For love...

You call out my name.

Geronimo.

I feel sometimes
That I am standing on a ledge
High enough
That when the clouds clear
And the seas are calm
I can glean a moment
Of the lost Atlantis
And far above the city lights
I can touch the stars
And capture a breath
Of the human soul

If you could for a moment
Experience this elation
This exileration
Than you would come to realize
That at most you know nothing
And that simple fact
Is the greatest truth to know

On the edge of this precipice
Made jagged by fire escapes
The world below seems small
And falls away to nothing
The grand canyon cannot reach such depths

It is here that I find a segmented
Illusion of peace
And a serenity
That escapes me so completely
When I look away
That I become empty
A vessel without a captain
A being without purpose
On this ledge
I have more strength
Than the bitter moments that
Fill the space between these interactions
Here I can know God
And I am not a believer

In these breaths of
Simple
Honest truths
Where I can finally be alone
And in that loneliness
Finally find a path
That allows me to stumble
My way back to myself

So why
When I am on the verge
Of all that I am
Of all I could be
At this point of decision...


Is someone trying to talk me down

Your interest seemed so sincere
I thought I ought pretend these words have purpose
But as you read
You will see
That these words are worthless

Where I grew up
We didn't celebrate celebrity
And weren't slaves
to the cattle-drivers of the masses

Where I grew up,
We were just young

And free

We toiled on train-tracks
Inventing troubles requiring
A daring escape.

With our stick-strapped-satchels
We foolishly mocked the local bums

Jealous of their freedom.
Ignorant of their pain.

Imitation is the hallmark of love
And yes, we loved the bums
And we were thorough through it

Where I grew up
The incandescence of the late afternoon
And early morning suns
Drew in a vibrant orange
Cast as paint on pale walls

The apartment... and eventually... the house
Shone brighter for it;
Though it seemed to struggle less in a house
That was considerably more empty

Especially around the holidays.

Where I grew up
We were taught racial and radical equality
Exacted with extreme prejudice
At every pep rally and presumably PTA meeting.

And while neighboring towns held race riots
We were racing our bikes, well...
I do miss my rollerblades

Where I grew up
Every girl was pretty as a movie star
And chased the bad boys
Like in every story I'd ever heard

And those boys won by popularity and power of presence
Girls they never deserved

Where I grew up
In winter we built massive palaces
From the winter's teardrops that huddled together
For warmth after the plow

Where I grew up...

I grew up too soon.
A little more than a little at a time
And it became clear
I had to move.

I am cursed
To long for a kind of life
That doesn't exist in the real world
A life lived intentionally
In 30 minute segments
Or immortalized on the page
Even for all its mistakes

I can kill my idols
With the scope of my incredulity
And my disbelief
In the lessons learned by them
Or their applications to events
That don't wrap up nicely
With at the worst the words
"to be continued"
As a bump in that road

The struggle to grow up
Expands beyond hoping to be raised well
With respect and dignity
To develop an individuality
Not master crafted by wordsmiths
Or Hollywood's cleverest writers
Is an existential threat
And an endless pursuit of self

What are these words
Except those I wish I had the tongue to speak
And the clarity to write
And who are these characters
I willingly welcome into my life
Except those who I wished near me
And were... at times
More real than the characters of my encounters
Even if they exist only as archetypes

But the reality is this
I didn't run off to New York City when I was 12
Chasing liquor and prostitutes
I didn't have a teacher live next door
Or have the gift of life long friends
To accompany me as I
Got acquainted with the universe

No, I hedge my bets on a fortune
In friends who I hope will be along for the ride
Of the rest of my life
Who will keep me out of New York when I'm feeling frisky
And as I quietly tip-toe through each hazard
Sometimes at great distance
From loving arms and helping hands
I hope they are doing better than me

I have found knowledge and forgot to be happy
Because I was poisoned by the fairy tales
Of J.D. Salinger and 1990's TV.

I run
Away from good fortune
and into the fray
Fortuna favet fortibus
Or so someone once said

I run from the city skies poisoned
by the blinding lights of frivolity
Desperate for blackouts
Rolling and unpredicatble
I hope they last months
So I can fill a mason jar with fire flys

I run from the pretty faces
Claiming exasperatedly that mine is just
Unconventional
And that pretty faces are often
If not always
Attached to liars

I run from the honesty
The unyielding truth that I
have ceased to be me
And have been replaced
by an imposter
Who laughs when I look in the mirror

I run until my lungs gasp
For the air between two stars
And until the blood flowing
In the sinew of my thigh
Begins to burn and clot

I run
Until my legs fall off

Just to crawl across the finish
And pretend that I
am a martyr
For a purpose that kept me running
And I forget now

Somewhere there is a bee
Excellent at pollination
If a little aggressive.
Someday this bee will sting
And will find out the irony
That he is allergic to me.

Some nights I cant remember
All the things that happened
But I never will get over
All the mornings after

How many loves of a lifetime
Walked right out my front door
While I lie awake hopelessly
Waiting for more

Each notch in my bedpost
Another scar on my heart
Of the ten-thousand maybes
That turned out to be not

They march right through me
In an endless parade
An insufficient remedy
For something I cant replace

And my pulse is the drum beat
Our love is the war
And their harmonies choke me
As I hang by my
Guitar chords

I keep on playing you
A song written for her
It has a different title now
But the contents are undisturbed

The violins whisper of
A dull aching pain
And in a hundred "I love you"s
I whispered her name

Each moment of ecstasy
That rips you away
Leaves me feeling empty
Searching for an escape

But her song keeps playing
A phantom theme in my head
While you reach your crescendo
Im just here in my bed

My pulse is the drum beat
Our love is the war
And our harmony chokes me
As I hang myself by my

Emptiness chokes me
As I hang myself and I

Suffocate
As I hang by my
Guitar chords

Its a damn shame that she had such a pretty picture
Cause when we finally met she was such a bitch - Her
Mouth kept running round the clock
She bitched about her life non-stop
I said "girl, I don't care about your shit"
Stuck up privileged little rich girl

Its a shame that shes such a beautiful disaster
Cause her pretty smile wont let anyone walk past her
Pay attention and you'll see
She thinks she's Jackie Kennedy
That stuck-up little bitch-girl

Dont waste my time
I dont want to hear it anymore
You hate your dad
And your sick of being bored
Maybe that means something
To somebody else
You think that you're the only one
Looking for a way out

Some day she'll wake up and she'll look in to the mirror
And she will find out that theres no one near her
What do you expect
When all you care about's yourself
But there are some nights that I still miss her...
My privileged little bitch-girl.

The bees of the tree of knowledge
Produce a honey so sweet
And so protected in the tree's mortal coils
That any who drink from it
Get diabetes
And scrapes on their knees.

I am not what you expected
A paradox in locomotion
A pendulum marking out its own time
An uninspired
Overachiever
Who refuses to write in words that sound similiar
And I too will leave you wanting

On the streets of Baghdad
Stood a man begging for peace
And honesty
And quiet on the sabbath
And in the wreckage
Of Sunnis and Shiites
And deaf from the bomb blasts
He was finally allowed to have it.

In our haunted houses
Are ghosts just wrapped in sheets
And the vampires and werewolves
Havent been seen in weeks
We diagnosed the children
Who heard voices in their rooms
Now all they do is paint the walls
In crayola crayon hues
And the monsters under our stairs and beds
Seek refuge in our closets
As we boiled imagination down
To vibrations in quartz deposits

You were in the mezzanine
By the dugout of your favorite team
And when you tore your dress
They got it on the mega screen
Well, even the next day
After the attention went away
Your picture found its way
Into a girly magazine

Well, you did your walk of shame
And it became your name
But at least you got your 15 minutes
Of televison fame
On that summer day
Where your crotch was on display
And bad luck for the home team
Cause no one could watch the game

The policeman stood and faced his God,
Which must always come to pass.
He hoped his shoes were shining.
...Just as brightly as his brass.

"Step forward now, policeman.
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My church have you been true?"

The policeman squared his shoulders and said,
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't,
Because those of us who carry badges
can't always be a saint.

I've had to work most Sundays,
and at times my talk was rough,
and sometimes I've been violent,
Because the streets are awfully tough.

But I never took a penny,
That wasn't mine to keep....
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep.

And I never passed a cry for help,
Though at times I shook with fear.
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.

I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fear.

If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand.
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't.....I'll understand.

There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod.
As the policeman waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.

"Step forward now, policeman,
You've borne your burdens well.
Come walk a beat on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in hell."