Society is plain
Society is black,
Society is what you forcefully swallow for a midnight snack
Society is blood that drips down your eyes
blinding you, keeping everything in disguise.

Society is a swollen throat trying to breathe.
It imprisons your mind when your mind tries to leave.
Society tells you:
“You can’t.”
“You won’t.”
“You never will.”

Society is the voice in your head
telling you life isn’t a thrill.
it kills, hurts and tries
to feed you lies as you pitifully cry.

Society tells you that smoking the green,
kills more brain cells then staring at the television screen.

Society takes the color out of the sky,
and lights up your twitter.

It is never shy and never ever a quitter.

Society is a spy that no government can catch
because society is the government, waiting with a watchful eye.

Society is also dead trees, wilted leafs
and smoggy factory smoke passing by.

But most importantly society is you
and I.

Ride Red Tricycle
ride soft and slow,
through cool breeze
and bloodied knees,
through the sun
and the snow.

Ride Red Tricycle
even when the sweat
glistens your face,
you are whole
you are pure,
you are in
first place.

Ride Red Tricycle
your time is slowly running out,
your tires are deflated
your innocence,
degraded
you almost can hear
your mothers shouts.

Ride Red Tricycle
far away from those shouts,
and never doubt those pedals,
while simplicity is still alive
because once your tricycle is gone
life feels like a lie.

Ride Red Tricycle
because that crimson complexion
never lasts,
soon it will be ghostly white
and all that will be left
is rusted memories
of the past

Emotion
is a barbed wire fence
and I am an inmate of hostile commotion
and you
are visitation hours
opening up from 3 to 4
and always leaving me wanting more
hung in a noose of suspense
behind that barbed wire fence

I tried to sing you a song
a ballad of love,
I use ballad loosely, of course,
For my voice was hoarse
and my pitch was squeaky,
"I think you're tone death" you proclaimed,
with a cute, little, laugh.
"You must be blind" I said,
"I just kicked that song's ***!"  
Yet deep down I know the only *** kicked today was mine,
those chords ran me over,
and didn't even ask for the time.
But still as I was becoming great friends with the ground,
you picked me up,
you brushed the dirt off my shoulder
and washed the blood off my knees,
I must say, I was very pleased.
I guess what we learned from today is that my singing ability may need improvement,
and this rhyme, in all its amusement, may be a little cheesy,
But baby, we make this real life ballad of love
look oh so easy.

She tells you she’s going to sleep,
She doesn’t.
Instead she cries,
Not the soft somber kind of crying,
The heavy kind of crying,
The kind of crying that puts you in a whirlwind of emotion,
People say crying helps, this kind just puts you farther down under.

She cries because her dad, who was recently let go,
Stumbles through the door every night reeking of whiskey and tobacco,
And then goes on to bruise her,
As bad as he bruised his wallet gambling just a couple hours before.

She cries because her mom,
Struggling with a crystal **** addiction,
Abandoned the family,
And with it abandoned her heart.

She cries because she caught her boyfriend,
The only pure thing in her life,
With her old best friend,
Who’s probably the farthest thing from pure.

That night the clouds cry too,
It rains all night,
‘They understand me’ she thinks,
Tonight,
Maybe she will join them.

Everyone always said she was a sharp girl,
they don't know the meaning of sharp
the paper that her ink soaked emotions slice through every night?
knows the meaning of sharp.
the red, dicey, paintings on her arms, thighs and stomach?
they know the meaning of sharp.
Even the hands on the clock cut like knifes as she starts her fifth hour of tears,
They too are most definitely sharp.

Let us run where the clouds call out our names,
like a wife looking for her lost soldier,

Where the sand bites at our toes,
and the sun ignites our face
letting us know we are, in fact, alive.

Alive,
not just living.

A simple mind puts one in front of the mirror,
and ignorantly see's the other.
Completely ignoring their differences.

Everyone lives,
everyone follows the lunch line,
in and out, everyday,
Mindlessly shoveling the newest trend down their throats.

You're never truly alive,
until you throw out what society gives you,
and create something for yourself.

Something new,
Something beautiful,
Something that is,
you.

Youth is a ****** up place.
We walk around with the blind fold of adolescence covering our eyes.
Nine times out of ten you'll step the wrong way and fall of the edge.
The most ****** up thing about youth,
Is the labels.
People judge you,
You judge them,
Creating an instant stand still of insecurity and intimidation.
A lot of stress can come from the labels you but on other people,
But sometimes we forget to look at the labels we are putting on ourselves.
We try so hard to fit in,
To be something we aren't.
We want to have the same label that everyone else has,
And society accepts it.
But why not be different,
Why not stand out,
Why not stand up for something you believe in,
Something that you can call your own,
Why not,
Be yourself.

From his balcony above a man watches down on a little town in Missouri,  
he pinpoints a bleak silver container as it slingshots into the darkening shadows above.

It yells to him,
"help, get me out of this awful place."
A trial of slate grey smoke follows the container as if it were it's overly attached mother and within a second pulls it back down into the atmosphere.
After descending the container skids across a schoolyard, rolls off the sidewalk and crakes into minuscule pieces.
From the cracks tear gas spills out in all directions covering the once quiet little down in terror, relinquishing it of any tranquility that remained.

The man on the balcony sits and observes the events that have unfolded.
From his perch he can not tell black from white.
He can not tell man from women.
Turban from top hat,
child from elder.
he can not see if interlocked hands declaring their love and denouncing death that blares from police megaphones, are hetero
or ****.
He can not see who's pride is enflamed by blue uniforms
or who's mouth's are covered by dew rags to prevent themselves from speaking a death sentence.

The gas covers it all.

He can only hear footsteps running away,
guns shots following the footsteps,
and unfinished prayers as bodies stain the side walk.

In this moment,
the chess game of life becomes not black versus white
but human versus human.
And the man wonders, from his balcony above,
why it must take weapons that destroy equality,
to make us see each other as equal.

You stare through her broken window, with peaceful, pondering eyes.
You realize the window is not the only broken thing, in the distance, you hear a lonely lover's cry.  You move a little closer to see where her shadowy figure lies. In one hand you see smoke, as a pair of lips go in for a ****, in the other an empty bottle. The devil has no doubt played a malevolent joke. You want to yell out "No!" as she goes to cut her wrist, but your voice is over powered by a strong, thundering hissssss. From there it gets a little crazy as you stumble and tumble, things start to get hazy. Next thing you know, you wake up in bed, "where did the girl go? It feels like I've hit my head." But as you get up and look into the mirror your face turns white, filled with fear. As you look at your red wrists and the broken bottle on the ground, you find the girl you stared at through the window, is staring right back at you now.

I was going to write
But the words got caught in my throat on their way to paper,
I choked
And vomited them across the floor.
I tried to pick up the pieces,
As I did, words scrambled around each other,
What was meant to say evil
Turned Into love when I accidentally picked up an O , instead of an I.
Deviltry and liar  got lost in the mess and all I got out of both was alive.
I guess all I'm trying to say is, everyone is going to collapse.
When you do collapse, picking up the pieces is only half the battle.
Sometimes you have to pick up the right pieces.
Sometimes you have to leave your deviltries and the liars out of your life,
So you can finally love being alive.
Sometimes you have to choke on the wrong words,
In order to pick up the right letters.

I've always loved watching the sunset.
I suppose the same way I love watching your eyes close,
as we dive in for a long, velvet like kiss.
They're almost synonyms of each other,
They possess the same beautiful waves of bright, torrid, purple and pink,
exploding in the sky,
and through out my mind
and then one final, soft crescendo of descending darkness.

I've always loved watching the moon rise,
I suppose you are the moon,
my radiant flame guiding me through the dark,
always there,
as our hands embrace one another and intertwine
like two shooting stars, crossing the same night sky,
never worrying about where they may end up next.

But as much as I love the sunset,
and I love the moon,
neither compares to the beautiful princess I see in front of me,
when the sun rises,
and our eyes creak open,
like the flash of day through that dreary window.

How beautiful it is to lock your self inside
to turn the volume all the way up
and let the words of your favorite artist,
your most compatible soul, paint the bathroom walls,
with tranquil melodies.

How free it feels to let each note fill the recesses of your mind,
until you are hollow no more

How rebellious it must be stand in the spot where you and him made love, and let the warm shower water cover your icy veins and open wounds with embrace and dignity

How badly you want to scream and shout and declare your anger unto the world,
how badly you want to shatter mirrors and forget the memories,

Well darling, shatter away,
Graffiti the walls with words that make you cringe,
rip the doors off their hinges,
ignite the memories in flames till your mind is burning,
not for the past,
but for something new
something grand.

Throw the ashes in the ground and let them cultivate and grow,
into something they were never capable of being.
break down the barriers.
defy the odds of what this cookie cutter universe of fallen stars and broken dreams has to offer.

You're not like them.
you're not a fallen star,
your edges are never stagnant
you're like the sun,
you rise
you fall
you have your lows
but even when the shadows off the night lurk in,
we still see your glow.

If we consider ourselves equal, all on the same playing field, man next to man, women next to women, women next to man. Not one higher then the other I guarantee you half the conflict in the world becomes scared and runs away. Conflict is mischievous. Conflict is corrupt and the only way conflict succeeds is by using our own ignorant selfs against each other. Our ego's do half of conflict's work. If we fight against each other we become easy targets for things like conflict, evil and harm. They simply line us up on our respective pedestals, however high they may be, and shoot. One by one we give ourselves up and become victims. Conflict's job becomes a little harder when we become one. If we all stand on the same pedestal, blindly knocking us over doesn't work anymore, we have become stronger, and leave ourself more open to things like peace, happiness and love. The only challenge becomes convincing our greed and narcissism that they need to sit down and take a nap. Their time is over and our time is now.

She fell in love with November,
for the way the sun shined down on
decaying leafs
and chilling temperatures danced upon the tips of her fingers,
providing her with a perfect balance between life and death.

She presented herself to the world in this manner,
always happy and bright, but never content,
as days carried on cracks in her skin led to trails of pieces on the ground.
Her eyes often flickered between a beautiful orange and a sickly brown.
Her heart, as much as it wanted to be warm was deafly cold.

She was a mystery.

And as December rolled in and the world froze over in darkness,
so did she.
The only light in her life was the moon.
how badly I wish she could've loved a month like June.

There's is a rusty orange clad brick building
perched upon a mossy green hill
everyday day we sit in the same seats
and look out the same glass that locks us in
and gaze down upon the hill
hoping,
searching for something more out of this life
something that fits our desires,
something we will never know.
Because they say the more we are sedentary,
the more our intelligence will grow.
Surely they have it all figured out all wrong
what they have created is  
a cold hearted machine.
A machine of memorization,
A machine of 'the right way'
the 'only way'
of 'yes please's'
and never of 'no's.'
They say if one morning we decided to turn around
and never look back we would drop dead.
But what happens when my house forecloses,
because no one taught me how to handle money?
What happens when I turn to pills to keep me alive
because no one told me the basic skills of survival?
What happens when I am out on the street,
frigid and alone,
with a cardboard box and a bottle of liquor as my only two friends?
Will algebra help me?
What about Chemistry?
Will those pain staking hours of note taking
help me pick up the pieces of my life?
No.
Surely then I will be dead.
Gone.
Along with my intelligence
and my creativity.
Six feet under
that mossy green hill.

I’m dangling off the balcony, my sweaty palms and quivering knee’s make it that much harder to hold on. I look up and I see her begging me to come back, I’m so far gone that I can barely hear her cries, offering safety and love. The way moon light shines on her is almost enough, but then I look down, just for a second. It blurs the line between what’s real and what’s not. A take a second look into the dark pit of bad memories and new beginnings, it’s almost like whatever’s down there is mocking me. Small gust’s of wind feel like faint whispers in my ear, telling me to let go. Let go of friends, let go of family, let go of life all together. The voices in my head sounds so pleasing, so euphoric. So I drop, and at first it’s incredible, some of the best feelings and greatest highs I've ever achieved. As time goes on sometimes I look up at the balcony. I wish for my old life back, the voices are never ending though, always calling me to them. They need me. I need them too.

Chained,
To walls of a white board,
As 1+2=3 narcissistically nibbles at the slowly decaying thing,
That was once called my dignity,
Because you see the school dreams of a hundreds,
Crisp red check marks, pressed on paper like a machine,
So when the teacher asks Does any one need scissors?
We all get up, slowly and solemnly as she cuts our dreams,
of circles, squares, diamonds and octagons into a...
Crisp..Red..Check mark.
And what was my dream?
for my son to look into his ****** cup of coffee one day,
and say "I'm different, and that's okay"

If I were to paint my body a certain color I think I'd choose blue
I wouldn't choose black, it would be too telling
And any bright color just wouldn't be true.

Blue would be a median.
A wave in the sea of many, passing by swiftly. Undetected.

A tear on the cheek of your most loved friend. Falling down with no exact path in mind. Melting into the kitchen floor, alive one second, gone the next

Blue,
Would hide the true shadows. The cobwebs in the corner of the attic that incase old photo albums we haven't opened in years  

But Blue would also be honest,
Blue would not be the sun that paints circles of joy on your face,
Or sand castles on a summer day.
It wouldn't be fire, destroying everything it's tips grazed, there would be no flame.

There wouldn't be any point to Blue,
It would just be.

It wouldn't see
Or feel
Or speak

With blue there would be no emotion, I'd just be a rolling sea of bleak.

Every time he looks in the mirror
he sees the devil staring back
with a malevolent sneer
he sees death in his eyes,
all the lies he's ever told
everything he's not supposed to be
and everything he will never know
he sees a kid, supposedly filled with glee
but he knows all he really is,
is a poisoned **** just trying to grow.
A ****,
trying to blossom in a world filled with trees
everyone knows that bees never pollinate weeds.

It's like cooking something for the first time,
burning your hand and never wanting to cook again.
Even though you know what you would cook deserves to be on the menu of some five star restaurant. One that lovers go to, to sip fine wine and stare off at the sunset as they learn how to fall in love all over again. You still can't bring yourself to do it. You can't turn on the stove because every time you do that same fiery sensation rushes through your veins, reminding you what it's like to burn. You shutter, trying to think what life would be like if you never turned the stove on in first place.

One warm, peaceful, night at a bar down the street,
I ran into an elderly man
who's uncountable wrinkles and scars,
told the stories of one thousand men.
some of sorrow and some of joy
As I took to the creaky stool next to him,
he blew out a puff of smoke from his cigarette.
his fingers curled around the smoke,
almost like he was trying to grasp it
like he had let go of too many things in his long past,
and letting go of one more, even something as meaningless as cigarette smoke,
may have pushed him over the edge.

Next his eyes caught mine,
he leaned over and handed me a rose,
"deliver this to my wife." he whispered
"she's ill and I do not travel well"
"I have not admired her beauty in quite some time."

He was different and mysterious,
but that only intrigued me more,
I nodded and took the rose,
attached was a address and a room number:
Saint Anne's Hospital

Upon arriving at the room,
to my shock there was no one there!
just thousands of thousands of roses
and a note that read:
R.I.P to my beloved 1920-1963

Fifty years later and some how this crazy old man had never given up hope.
Not once.
Not on his wife,
or the love he had for her.
We all could use a little of him in our lives.

He was chilling.
He carried himself with a frozen solidarity,
something that Robert frost himself would be proud of.
Every candle that tried to melt the ice around him only melted any hope he had,
farther into the ground.

She was not just any candle though,
she was a blazing inferno.  
Something that cause's even the most blinded eyes to turn and stare in awe.
The gleam,
burned his stubbornness,
his fear
and his sarrow.
Now his hope and love, along with her, were the only things that stood solid.
So they burned brightly together,
Into the night,
through the morning
and above in the stars.
A beautiful blaze.

Time moves like a wounded solider tip toeing on shattered glass
Each hour is a new bullet hole in the delicately paper-mache'd memories that cloud his withered psyche.
Each minute he's forced to watch indifferently as hope and craving rush out of the freshly open wounds, leaving his body in the form of thick crimson blood.
Each second brings a new broken bone
scattered pieces of you along the bathroom floor.
They find their home next to the empty bottle of whiskey,
another lost cause,
another part of the puzzle,
that will never be found.

I believe when we are born we start with nothing,
A blank canvas, in a less then colorful world.
As we go through life we meet people, friends, family and enemies.
Who ever they may be,
They all take turns painting on it.

How each person paints on our canvas ultimately,
Turns us into who we are.
These colors shine bright and bold
In our actions, personality and finally our legacy.

Embrace the beauty in it,
Let it define you,
And don’t be afraid to paint your own strokes,
Because nobody else can tell the story of your canvas,
Except you.

She will not remember your love as glorified free will, never ending oceans of purity, rolling meadows of green flowing grass covering her memories in hope and security.  She will not remember your love as vintage lip stick stained romance, framed in uneven Polaroid photos pinned upon her wall.

She will remember your love as religion, in the sense that it was absolute and ever present, but even she couldn't prove it actually existed.
Religion, because every sunday she got down on her knees and lowered her head, worshiping your love, worshiping you.

You were her God. Piecing together her shattered bones, sewing layers of her skin into a work of art, and then tearing them apart day after day in search for perfection.

You built her heart into an everlasting church of fortitude and self confidence, and then left out stain glassed windows so every once in a while you could peak in, just to make sure you were the one being worshiped.

Inside the church you placed preachers and priest to tell tales of loyalty, to make her recite her vows of your love before bed, to comfort and denounce her fears, whenever questions of doubt began to arise.

Finally, you cursed her, falsely called her out for her infidelity, put her upon a wooden stake and set it a blaze.

"Go to Hell" you told her,
and even though this is all a metaphor,
when she wakes up every morning to the sight of shadows and cracks in the walls,
when every step feels like she's walking on endless burning coals,

She actually believes, that in fact she is in hell.

Dear Grandpa,
Its's Alex, I know It's been a while since we last talked. I just wanted to tell you how much I miss the sound of your voice around the table, how much I yearn to sit down and eat your home cooked food that I used to practically run away from, how badly a want to take that somber walked through those cornfields again. Yes I know the months leading up to our final words were tough on our family to say the least. I was young, too young to fully grasp what was going on. I was also immature, I Just wish I gave you the respect you deserved. I still remember my father telling me the story of how you pulled that couple out from their burning car, you saved their life. You truly could do no wrong, could you? I hope you know that I am building my life around the way you lived. I want a lot of things in life, success, money, maybe even a great family. I could go on...I want you too at least open one of my letters, even though I know It's useless. What I want the most though? for you to look down on me proudly from where ever the man upstairs puts people these days and say See that guy right there? That's my grandson, isn't he something.
I guess that's all I have to say for now, see you soon Grandpa

Pain,
Is not something to mess around with.

Pain can be compared to a knife,
That dangles from the ceiling, every night while you sleep,
The only thing that’s stoping it from piercing your insides?
A simple thin thread.

It does not take much for the thread to
Snap,
Along with it snapping every little bit of strength you had left,
Don’t mess with pain.

Then there is,
Love

Love can be compared to the blanket on your bed,
It wants to project you from the knife,
It tries its best to cover you from the pain,
But it is only a blanket.

As much as it wants to help,
To reach out,
To be there,
It simply is not strong enough.

Though sometimes,
If you give love a chance,
It can be steel,
So don’t mess with love.

I am a puzzle,
When completed I am a masterpiece,
But now I sit here unfinished at the hands of a five year old.
I am the half bitten cookie,
That the five year old left out on the table to be tossed in the garbage.
I am an ice cube,
That unfortunately missed the cup and now lays on the floor,
Still strong and solid but partially puddled in sorrow.
I am an old bridge,
A few years ago I was glowing with beauty,
Now I sit here broken, unusable and instead of glowing,
All I cast is a dark and lonely gloom.
I am our love,
Something that could be magical,
But instead is a chess game of emotions never to be finished.
You are that five year old,
Leaving me in the dust unfinished and broken.

There is something tragically intangible about space that makes it so beautiful,
infinite light years of nothing
out there to be explored.
it's terrifyingly real,
many have been there,
but I will never go.
Space is something of the subconscious,
you can only create and appreciate it's essence
in the prison of grey matter a top your head.

And though I've never been there I know
if I ever collided with a passing star,
I'd caress it's sides and combust into it's center.
melting,
blending,
becoming one.

how badly I want to sacrifice my soul into a black hole,
how sad it is that I'll never get the chance.

how incredibly similar space is to you
how beautifully intangible you are.

how badly I want to love you,
how sad it is I'll never get the chance.

I'm sorry that the pores that litter my untouched skin don't drip normalcy on everything my shaking hand tries, and fails, to grasp at.

I'm sorry that I'm not the mirror that you wished me to be.
when you looked into my eyes you hoped to see yourself,
but all you saw was broken pieces and sharp edges.

I'm sorry that you asked for galaxies and stars and I provided you with a black hole,
consuming my being in on itself,
leaving you cold and lifeless.

I'm sorry that I don't fit the mold that you've sculpted everyone else into,
I guess I'll remain a lump of clay,
unique not like the rest but also cold and quiet.

Maybe one day,
I'll stop being so sorry.

His life is an air plane:
confined, cluttered and utterly boring,
inches away from him is euphoric beauty, but all he can do is stare at it blankly, watch it go by and wish he were on the other side.
It's not palpable beauty, it's as real as his dreams (non existent)
and as obtainable as the first class seats of life he so badly desires (hopeless)
If he were insane, the glass that keeps him from it may even laugh at him.
but maybe he is insane, because on his loneliest days he gulps down his disgusting cup of coffee and caresses the side walls of the plane,
cursing every little gritty bump and groove,
because they are everything that has ever held him back.
Even on his best days he prays and weeps, yelling out to no one in particular.
begging for the walls to melt away so he can fall.
Fall into the beauty he has envied his whole life,
where he can choke on the clouds and grasp at the sky as the plane slowly fades out of view,
where he can experience joy and peace, if only for a second, until he comes barreling down into a crater of land.
and if he dies on his final descent, at least he died happily.

12:15 on a Saturday night:
Oh how I do love when your eyes shine so bright,
and I wish you could be here,
so I could hold you tight,
I'd mold the curves in your lips,
and straighten the crack in your spine,
I'd lay you down, love you and whisper
*Everything is going to be fine

lonely eyes fall on deaf ears

-a six word story

On a night when fireworks go off as fast as the thoughts in my head,
High wasted shorts toy with the eyes of over confident males,
And new home cooked memories fill the air,
I'd feel a lot more "free" if I was spending it with you.

You said once  you'd sew my uneven edges back together,

You tried, but the stitches popped like over worked violin strings that you still tried to play

The audience filed out as the procession of broken music danced through their conscious and out their ears.

They did not applaud.

But I did.  

My hands rediscovered each other over your failure to compose  

You were remiss to the horrible noises that covered the auditorium but I gave you a standing ovation.

And if my uneven edges became broken violin strings than your soul become the worn down ebony that let the strings go.