he had low-grade
tattoos on his neck
and his clothes
wore transparency.
beneath his eyes
held a dying sun.
he spoke in thanks
and respect, the cuts
upon his wrists called
reached a finger out
and called my eyes
to say hello,
he spoke in gratitude
for the smoke i gave him.
he smelled like cigarette
stained couch cushions
he spoke a respectable
ebonic intellect.
his fingernails
were unswept
floor trim
and his teeth
were smashed
dinner plates
at his mother house.
departing he said
thank you
and i offered him
a cigarette for the road
and he refused and said
“for talking to me”

If each and every grain were a
Year,
Than every knock would be an
Episode,
So came the story that is my
Door.

And,

One – was the loudest pound,
“Authority,”
When the P.D.’d nearly warped
Hinge,
So came my first night in the
Clink.

Two, three, and four – Love, only
Love,
And one of two later;
SLAM!
Or one silent escape, fled and
Sundered.

Five – was the knock that never came.

Six – “tap, tap, tap,”
Mom,
It must have been my mom, or rather,
Obligation
And she’d swear to my sisters, “he’s
Ok.”

Seven, eight, and nine – Deliveries,
Disguise,
Pizza, Chinese, pizza and not so
Famished
Anymore; fuel for the guts, guzzle for the
Words.

Ten – came a' “gamechanger,”
Tear-smeared-mascara,
And two hands atop your
Abdomen;
I knew atop the water your freckles,
You’d never need knock again.

So if each and every grain were a
Year,
Than every knock would be an
Episode,
And this would be the story, that’d ever
Be our door.

I commit myself to the homicide
of my thought-flowers.
I indulge in the **** -
Killing my darlings
for the sake of art and sanity.
What a paradox.
I have bloodied my hands
with it even so.

No more love-lite poetry!
No more adolescent chinks of the
pseudo-heart!
No more infantile fork-stabs
at the plate of kid-intellectualism!
No more Wikipedia pages
on thoughts
that can swallow computers
whole!

I'm killing my darlings
for the sake of art,
for the sake of sanity -
what a paradox.
Blood is flowing.

I'm a murderer of ideas tonight -
today I will write
about many of life's very few truths.
Like trees.
Like soil.
These are the only constants in mathematics.
These are the identities.

In my garden, I reach out
to crush an
almost-crimson hibiscus.
Petals squelching with skin and nectar -
no perfume.
The hibiscus roils, unliving.

Red pulpy mess;
heart out of chest.

Morality isolates and fenders bend.
Circumference learns, “half-way” but fails to take the name
“Radius,”
And when she lay a meter nigh
With child, my child;
I still and will feel horribly alone.

Curse my iron fist and rusts the middle knuckle,
When another weeps, not for I, not for you but the gods assumed,
“Heaven,”
And 3 floors above my own;
Tucked lies the pain, regret fills fetal;
I still and will feel horribly alone.

So comes the autumn, the fire prior, “Styx,”
Upon borders that could only separate, “fatherhood,” so partitioned,
“Winter,”
And 3 floors below her own –
A pillar wrought persistence and abandoned, my hedonism;
I still and will feel horribly alone.

The world ended last night.

I’m sure it did.

And while I squeezed souls
From pillows,
Soiled stars
Wrought one tip of my brow
And bled every last liter,
For tomorrow’s star.
Atop melody,
I imagined a piano,
The nail-less fingers a’rapping,’
Opposed my battered knuckles,
Awry atop ivory
And concluding chorus,
A not so sad one, a not so bad one
But the last one;
Certitude and
Without encore in earshot.

The world ended last night;

I know now, beyond doubt, it really did.