Final descent into the city
in the middle of night.

Out on the horizon,
at the right distance,
there is no difference

between the streetlights
and the
stars.

It is love bug season again in Florida,
where they flock to the windshields
of the world to die by the dozens.
I wince at each small pop,
cringe at the light going out
as life comes and goes
so quickly, again again again...

Love like life is fickle,
love like life is cold--
even here in warm Florida summers--
Even here, where the bugs flock
at ninety miles an hour
down this dark stretch of I-75.
Coming to love, coming to live,
sweeping out into the street,
pop, pop, pop.
wrong place, wrong time.
again again again...

The house was perfect for us.
I always wanted stairs like these
because I only had
one floor growing up.
Moving in with all these nice things
and that hopeful excitement
of things to come.

After a few weeks of settling in,
finally got that dog
you talked about,
the white retriever you saw
at the shelter,
such a little pup with soft, big eyes.
He loved to climb around your bed
and sleep curled next to you
almost to the point that I was jealous,
but at first he couldn't get up
on the bed at all,
so he would whine timidly
till you grabbed him up and
buried him in your arms.

Once he knocked over
that photo of us from the wedding
off the bedside table
but the glass didn't crack.
What a treasure that frame contained!
A smile like the one you held
with white teeth in white dress.
The most valuable treasure in the world.

I remember you crying
the night you told me
you were pregnant.
I think I might've cried too,
we were so excited.
Finally starting a family,
finally living out our dreams together,
the two of us
there in that wonderful home
with two stories,
and with that wonderful dog,
with a child on the way,
and those invaluable
treasures of love and hope and family,
vaulted forever in our hearts.

I write fiction because I realized
from a young age that
I was a splendid liar,
with these pretty little lies
I ******* all nice and tight.
Slowly they became bigger
as I became bigger
and they became ugly
as I became ugly,
and still they came,
with more momentum now.
They grew thorns, hurting the
people who believed them.
I put them on the paper
so they could look beautiful
again.
Still they were false.
Still they sat in my gut
like an unwanted child,
a weight I couldn't help
but carry.
So here, another lie
for me to tie.
See, see how pretty it is?

I taste the bitterness
like salt on your lips—
the sadness in your sweat
a single bead that slips with care
down the crescent of your cheek.
The small of your back
is arched and tight
and I read the tension in the
subtle protrusions of your vertebrate
as I climb them with a finger.

You are full of your own miseries,
you sad  and beautiful devil.
You are full of your loves
and your hates.
Your good deeds
and the shadow cast over
them by your mistakes.
I taste them each individually.
I read them in each notch of your spine.
I learn them in every movement and touch
of our solitary dance.

I fear I will be another
for someone else
to understand one day.

Your hands were always cold,
even when you were mad–
even when they were
entwined in my oafish hands.
Oh, and how you would get mad!
I remember how those thin, delicate fingers
would tense up,
long and slender as they were,
and you would press the nail
of your index finger into the
side of your thumb.
You didn’t even notice you would do it.
It got to a point that we fought so often
you had cuts from your own nails.
The most beautiful fingers,
graceful and untouched,
except for those little stress-cuts
dug into the side of the thumbs.
And always cold,
even when you were mad–
even when they were
entwined in my oafish hands.

I am sorry we fought.
I always thought
if I could just keep those hands
warm a little longer,
we would make it through alright.
The fighting and the winters
and the coldness of it all
proved a little too much.
For that, I am sorry.
I hope you found yourself a
warmer hand to hold.

I drink in order to write
and, often times,
I write to be able to to drink
without the fallout
that surely would
accompany it
otherwise.

There is a madness,
an itch in the back of the throat,
hoarse from screaming,
broken now and caught
on the knowledge
that no one has heard,
let alone understood,
again and again and…

If you are not dead
you are far from me.
If you are not dead
you are knocking on
some other sucker’s
door. Perhaps he is
in debt and in love,
cursed in similar
afflictions. Perhaps he is
up to the eyes in hedge funds
and stock investments,
his symmetric face smiling
down his checkbook at you,
attracting you in ways
mine never could.

If you are not dead
than perhaps you
are happy.
If you are not dead
than perhaps
you are sad. I certainly
will never know.
Do wedding bells ring already?
Do the long nights of love
break bones in bitter morning?

For a long time this imagination
proved worse than any reality
could have possibly been;
I lay in fevered dreams,
praying for answers,
only hoping to find
where love had been lain to rest.
Now, it is just nice to be rid
of the whole deal.

The universe makes
a lot more sense
without you.

There are times that
it gets so bad around you
that it fills you with it,
like sea-filled
lungs, like that
last breath of water
before darkness.
There are times that
it sinks in your chest
and your arms and that space
right behind your eyes,
that dull ache.
Death comes slow
amidst the wreckage;
in the chest and
the arms and the
toilet seat, gripped
white knuckles and the
stale, thick burn of acid
in the throat.

There are times that
it gets so bad around you
that it fills you with it.
Death comes slow,
persistent in its march,
and you look upward,
bleary-eyed and shook
to the bone, into its
balanced gaze
knowing, but never truly
able to understand,
how close it really is.

There is an incredible sadness
that sits upon the city like
a dense fog,
if you look close enough to see it.
It tastes sweet in coughed breath
and in the early, endless night
you can see it there, stagnant
through the windows and
the trees.
There is an incredible sadness
that sits in this city,
corrupting slowly and fully
and without mistake.
The people sometimes know it
and can do nothing,
others embrace it,
most do not know it as it
leans and sits about them.
An old man leans his dark
head against the railing
of the Wanamaker building
steps, coughs twice, a
gloved hand covering cracked lips.
Walk past, breathe in
the sweet stagnation of a
fire that no longer has any
wick to uphold it.
There is a sadness here,
If you look close enough.

Another drink;
spit in the sink shows
red against porcelain,
fleeting concern.

Another drink;
what is there ever
to worry about?
I could make an
argument for nothing
and everything both
alongside one another.

Another drink;
taste the iron alongside
the bitter burn of alcohol,
the body goes more often
than not before the mind does.
It is unfortunate to have it
the other way around.

Another drink;
spit red again,

I am fighting myself
to keep the pace.

I was comfortable in bed,
Sunday morning’s as a kid
in the blooming heat
of a late Spring morning.
I could hear the phone ring
and my mother move slowly
to answer.
Muffled conversation beget
an anguished cry and
hustled words of consolation.
I couldn’t make it out from the noise.

I didn’t quite care because of
the hangover aches that
wracked the young limbs in
atrophy of the body and of the soul,
instead keeping eyes closed from
the light in the window and rolled
into a drifting sleep.
It wasn’t until I re-awoke
and staggered to the kitchen
that I saw her shaking her head,
crying slightly atop the kitchen counter.
A quick glance upwards with
tears renewed in strength.

Death need only come in quick,
effortless seconds upon a blackout night.
Hell need only come in a phone call
and a mother’s terrified explanation.

They swore it would rain,
overcast and cold, the grey
permeating every dead blade
of grass, every bare bough,
staggering in the wind,
and every soul beneath,
staggering for other reason
toward some unknown eternity.

The forecast told of rain,
but it is only the terrible,
everywhere grey and the
cold of low clouds and
wind that blows in deprecation
through and above everything,
those buildings leaning in the mist
weighed down by their steel frames,
and myself, inundated beneath it all.

They swore on rain
but there is nothing.
Nothing but the grey
and the cold and
the hangover death
of the soul that exists in
this Spring pre-bloom morning

The young women show up
at this old man's door
with their legs ripe
and long and their
skirts short, so short,
and framed against
those forever legs with
the bronze, sun-kissed
amber of skin that tastes
of the sweet, clean salt of sweat
in Summer warmth.

They knock a few times in
quiet, tentative rap with
slender, thin knuckles
before moving quickly
away toward the stairs
--No, this was a bad idea,
I should have never came--
Blushing furiously as I crack
open the door with a slight ****.

I am ugly in crazed eyes and
stained shorts and no shirt
and broken air conditioner
leaves me standing in thick sweat,
but it is the old dirt-sweat
of an old dirt man,
and it tastes stale and sour
as it drips downward
from my temples.
She smiles,
shy and honest enough
for me to want her right
there where she stands,
asks if she can come in.

My place is a wreck and
she doesn't mind
as I apologize for it,
but I feel terribly for it
and wish she was gone,
the wine is almost
finished but we drink it down
even though it is warm
and the glasses sweating
within our hands.

Copulation comes easier
than conversation and
so she is silent atop my lap
except for the nothing whisper
of *** in my ear, the breathed
moan of lust in the dark rooms.
--Baby, you're beautiful,
oh, oh, you're beautiful--
and I don't much have the heart
to correct her but it
appalls me that
she could think so
knowing myself as I do,
most likely she is
only acting anyway,
so I don't think much of it
except to nod and flip her
over and she is all
legs and *** and ****
but she is self conscious
and won't let them
out of her black-lace bra
and I let her have her insecurities.
Instead, I'm with those endless legs
like golden honey and so sweet
and smooth and burning
with that inner heat of womanhood
and Lord, doesn't it
just feel good to be
young again?

If only for a second
within those eyes
and arms and
legs
legs
legs.

In Spring, it is possible
to find God with only
slight attention to detail.
There is a park tucked
between the city blocks
and the green of the grass
breaks the slate pavement
and the jawline skyscrapers
like teeth, serrated edges
up against the blue.

In Winter, He can be found as well,
but it is not the same, he is not beautiful
in his pallid forms as he is across those
verdant leaves hanging.
It is much harder to notice,
and one must look closely
at the frost alongside the branch
shining in grim reflection atop the walk.
—if one can manage the cold and
the wind and the everything frozen
without hurrying too muchalong—
I find that Hell may indeed
be a cold, cruel place.

Perhaps they are both in tandem
with one another. Winter begets
Spring and back again.
I step back from both and let
them play their tug-of-war.
Build and destroy and build again.

So I sit in Spring,
and God is there dancing,
out in the wisps of light
that brim amongst the
petals and the great
wonderful things and
I laugh, feigning hope,
knowing so quickly how it will
freeze again.

I had been in recluse for a time.
First due to sickness of the body,
then the inevitable sickness of spirit that tends to follow.
I wanted to see no one.
I was happy to be alone
in silent isolation.
For days I lay, refusing call
from friend and foe alike,
the latter mostly being the women.
They were the ones who
pulled at me the most,
but the sickness was strong
and I remained apart from them.
When it was over I found
the friends gone and
the women gone and
the loneliness dragged in me
where it been freeing before.

What is one to do?

I walked to the park
and saw a man and his dog,
running with clutched
frisbee in mouth.
I saw a young couple
walking hand in hand
in that sacred paradise of two.
I saw pigeons peck at
scattered seed and
trees looming in dark shade
over various occupants of
the shadow,
and the sun above peering,
like me,
through wide-eyed gaze
at the all of it.
I had not known how cruelly
I had missed it,
and atop that,
I had not known how cruelly
I had not been missed.

How curious that life continues.

Although I know that you
are not as sad as I am
--I hesitate to call it
sadness so simply, it seems
to be more of a perspective
than an emotion--

Although I know that
you are not as eager
to embrace this sadness,
--Though some of it does
live in you, it is what attracted
me to you so fully--

Although I know that
you are striving away
from all of the nonsense
and sadness that has
welled up between us
these past years,
--That beautiful and
maddening sadness--

I hope that there are times,
you are alone,
--Sprawled across
you bed as I remember you--
or perhaps sitting in that
chair with your laptop ahead
of you, the one you used
--Oh, how many eternities
past now!-- to call me when
I was away from you.

I hope that there are times,
regardless of where you are,
that you stop and you think
and you dwell on that
ever-numbing sadness that
I see and you see, piling up
like glaciers of ice upon
your eager heart.

I hope you embrace that
sadness like an old friend,
and can listen to some of
the sad music we once
listened to, eternities past,
and perhaps find a way to
enjoy some of
our maddening sadness
yet again.

Like the snow and the cold and the everything
piled upwards atop bare shoulders.
The absence of love buried deeper
in the chest than the hatred.
Hatred at least meant that
there was something to feel.

Leaning against the steps,
an early morning in January
as the snow and the cold
and the everything piled upwards,
I watched as you looked through me
and walked right on by.

She had a boyfriend
back in Miami,
she said,
and she would love
to have me,
she said,
but she just
couldn't do that,
she said,
she loved him and
she would just feel
awfully terrible about
it if she did,
she said.

I told her if she didn't
want to then it seemed
logical that she shouldn't.

Oh, but darling how
I would love to,
she said,
and I'm so drunk
it would be easy,
she said,
but I love him
I promise I do,
she said.

We were in bed
and she lay atop me
saying these things
and the devils the
both of us fought had us
up against the ropes.

I ****** her then,
and once more in the morning
before I dropped her off
at the airport to fly home
to that wonderful and
terribly ignorant boyfriend,
the one she loved so much,
quite obviously a better
man than me.

And that is what
it was, wasn’t it?
Your heart for a year
of bad times.
you got the short end
of the stick on
that one it seems,
kiddo.
I didn’t mean it.
I walked in thinking
it would be a pretty
even trade;
your soul for mine.
I’m sorry it didn’t
work out so smoothly
for either of us.

The neighbors are having a party.
Young women are seduced by young men
and the cycle of life has evolved into this
degradation of humanity in the 21st century.
I have taken a large part myself.
Now, however, I sit a room away
with this keyboard, a case of beer
and this pack of cigarettes,
bullying this keyboard as I
punch words out of thin air.

I would take my party over theirs any day.

The women often leave quietly
and without a fuss.
They have a right to
come and go at their leisure.
There are times, however,
that they leave and
they are loud.
They are louder than
a man can imagine,
or possibly stand,
and they throw their
shoes or their bottles
or their broken hearts
with reckless abandon
towards you.

Those of the last sort
are what hurt
the most, it seems
—although the other objects
do damage, quite the same—
I only smile, smile
with a terrible sadness,
What else is there to do?

The door slams and
the curses echo off
of the thin, plaster
walls of this emptied
apartment, and I am
left to pick up the shards
of glass, broken picture frames,
and pieces of the love
they carelessly
left behind,
smiling, always smiling.
What else is there to do?

You were drawn to me
because I was a writer.
You didn't understand
that I write well
simply because I lie well.
Such is the art of storytelling.
I'm honestly sorry you had
to realize that
The hard way.

I sat there, on the balcony in the middle of winter,
worried about where you were, if you were ok.
I was worried about where I was, if I was ok.
I had no answers. You were gone
and I was in Hell
All of this has become a brutal mutilation of love.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep, anymore.
It was all tightened in my chest like a vice,
like a hand around the throat.
A brutal mutilation of love.
The poorest *******, you and I.
Entangled in a feeling we couldn't feel anymore.

I sat there, on the balcony,
worried about the sky falling down,
about the finality and futility of everything.
You were gone and I was in Hell.
I looked up, it was snowing.
I laughed at the irony and agony of it all.

It is OK to hurt over things lost,
or things time has changed and
separated from what it was
you once knew.
In fact, it is productive to do so.
It is wrong– detrimental, even,
to believe one must run from
hurt such as this.
Memory and mistake often come
one wrapped within the other,
thus to grow and learn
one must take them both in hand
and embrace them as old friends.

Throughout life, the list of memories
and the list of mistakes grow.
Acquaint yourself with them.
Look backwards and wave fondly
at each as you strive further and
further up the path
away from them.

Love is merely walking around
and feeling good about everything
and everywhere that you happen on.
The rest is façade and embellishment,
meant to blush the cheeks of young children.
If you’ve found one to sit with you
on the park benches, silent and smiling,
then there is love there. If you have found
it then there is love in the branches
and the grass and the sun and the
quiet looks you share as you
experience it all in your togetherness.

I sit on park benches late at night,
under streetlights,
seeing ghosts of that love,
passing about through the
branches and the trees and
between the legs of the young couple
striding past me,
walking their dog back home.

All the memories feel so detached.
The time slips by and the things
you did to pass it feel as unreal as the
dreams that burn against the inside
of your skull when you awake.
It’s another day.
It’s another passing afternoon.
The reasons for everything you do
and everything you did blur and
dissipate and the emotion of it all
fades to background noise.
The hope of the future has become
the consequences of the past and
the context of the present.
Where have you been all of this time?
Where have you been while you were living?
Memory is as real as a good movie, captured
in pictures, or written down like a book
That you remember but can’t quite
recall the theme.
Time is unforgiving in its perseverance,

I talked to you last night for the first time in a long time.
It felt good to hear you again.
When we go so long without contact,
my imagination grows awry with
conceptions of you.
A flurry of ideas that burn
through me like gasoline.
All this time apart, I forget that I know you.
I forget there was a time when the walls
between us crashed down and we lay
amongst the wreckage like lovers at the
end of the world.

It felt good to hear you again.
I could feel your beautiful pride in every word.
You phrase each sentence carefully,
never letting me forget who the culprit here is.
I broke your heart.
A full year of suffering, you told me,
after that first break.
I remember the unreachable highs
that came between the inescapable lows
better than you, but that is to be expected.
You burn with that unbreakable anger.

It felt good to hear you again.
It grounded me against all of the
delusions going on around us.
I was scared to think your apathy
had grown from a wish into reality.
You never said you still cared,
you would never allow it,
but I know the way you phrase your
words so that the true meanings can pass by
your pride without causing offense to it.

I talked to you last night for the first time in a long time.
It felt good to hear you again.
Over a year now since that first strike,
and here we are still,
trading blows in the trenches.

It felt good to remember
what I was fighting for again.

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
Two pillows underneath your blanket
of soft brown hair.
Your hair is what I admired
most of you.
The way it would waterfall
about your frame,
silhouetting your features in
chocolate cascades.

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
With your newest RM Drake,
and his short sweet eurekas.
You loved to read him aloud to me.
You would smile slightly in a
smile saved for when you
read one that particularly
struck you the way that
only good literature can.

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
Even though you never could
stomach what I read.
And I would get angry
because of the world's that
I wanted to show you
but knew that I couldn't.
You never shook hands with
Hem or Buk the way I wished
and wished that you would.
Sometimes your reading
was more honest.
Sometimes your emotion
was more true.

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
I would sit across from you,
analyze and seek to
emulate every word
while you would read
and only feel it,
in a way I never could.

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
Now that I have lost you
it helps me to do it.
I still have the word and
I still have books and the
world's I was left to travel alone

I like to imagine you reading.
There in white sheets.
I only hope one day
you may read this and
smile slightly in that way
that only you do.

You forget how lonely it is.
You forget that you’re only any good
when it’s all bad around you.
You forget about the bitterness
and the anger
pitted in your stomach like a weight.
The drink helps best.
The ****** try.
The door swings open and shut
and it looks like it is nice and
it looks like it is fine and
you forget for a moment how lonely it is.

Then all the sudden, like a car crash
or a bullet wound, all of the sudden
you feel it, and it all comes down
and hits you in the gut.
It hits you in the gut and
it hits you in the heart
and sometimes you feel it and
it hits you in the throat.

The drink helps best.
It is cool and burns you as you try
to forget again.
The women try.
They are cool and never more beautiful
then when you try to forget again.

In the end, it is there,
all wrenched up in your gut.
The sweet, terrible, unending
emptiness of
being alive.

There she was.
Anger etched in
her silhouette,
framed by the doorway.
You see, women get all
upset at once,
like the crashing of a dam,
like the pulling of a trigger.
And there you are;
half-asleep in bed,
drunk in the back of the cab.
The pin’s been pulled and
there she goes.

Anger has always
been a source of
amazement for me,
especially in the women
I have known.
You never know what
will be the final strike.
She deals with you.
She deals with your drugs
and your drunkenness,
all the fits of highs and lows,
all the impossible arguments.
There she is; that beautiful women
that will still pet
your head and hold your hair
late at night after you’re sick
from the drug or the drink,
or some other, unspoken demon.

Until, in one beautiful moment,
that incredible anger
bursts out like New Years fireworks.
You’re taking blows
to the chin and to the
heart and to the soul.
Her eyes blaze with a
hatred, mouth tight and
cheeks reddened from the yelling,
her hair falls into her face
and she angrily swats it back
behind her ear.
She’s a terrible monstrosity.
A beautiful, terrible monstrosity.
And all you can do is watch in awe
as the culmination of everything
you will never be is spelled
out before you.

There you are; in the back of a cab,
half-asleep on the bed,
drunk on the edge of the bathtub,
and you can do nothing but watch,
slack-jawed and scared,
as that almighty anger,
spilling forth from that
almighty woman,
breaks every single bone.

When the war fell, it fell with no warning.
Machine gun fire cut through the schoolyards
and the shopping malls, the graveyards
filling up like the churches.

When the bombs fell, they burnt out the buildings
and the shells of old homes stood like jagged
testaments toward human fallibility.
Centuries of labor reduced to dust.

When the silence fell, it was full and complete
like a thick fog atop the cityscape.
The world, a museum of history,
burnt and scarred, forever in its silent fury.

When the war fell, it fell with no warning.
I took you in my arms and locked the window,
turning into you while the night fell around us,
waiting out the end of existence.

When the world awoke, like a sigh,
we were there, breathing it in.
The smoke and the dust and the ash
bursting in our lungs, sweet scented survival.

The visions blur like thick fog,
memories break into strobe-lit flashes.
The whole world exists in a flat line.
Troubled curiosity sits high in the throat
like a bad taste or a
hand around the neck.
You are ****** on the side of the road,
or the back of the bus on that
long ride home,
while the sunlight plays
judge/jury/executioner up on its
condescending throne, levying its light,
like punishment, upon you.

The world is a cruel place when
the late nights face the
early mornings eye to eye.

On the sidewalk you watch
cars pass, people pass,
the whole world moves in
that straight line forwards.
You bob your head in calm defeat.
On the bus the people don’t move,
but they appear to.
Mouths and lips and eyes and feet,
all containing no direction
except as the tires go.
You look at it all in quiet wonder.

There, with flash bang remembrance
and an intangible machine gun burst
drumming off your eyelids,
you lay on the pavement,
or against the window of the bus,
with memory a black din of noise and
half-formed images,
and wonder what it’s like to
be nothing at all.

My mother brings in the paper
every morning while my father sleeps.
They are in their late fifties now.
When he awakes she is gone.
She goes to the church.
My father never attends although
She begs him every Easter.
My mother doesn’t work any longer since
the money started coming in.
He drinks a cup of coffee and
has two pieces of toast and
goes to work in a tucked in
polo and dry cleaned slacks.

They live terribly happy lives.

My mother spends all her time
at the church now. He works from
eleven to seven before driving home.
They each have their fix.
My father complains about how much
money my mother gives to the church
but does nothing about it because
he enjoys having a consistent topic
to complain about.
My mother complains that my father
works too much but does nothing about it
because she enjoys having the money to spend.

They live terribly consistent lives.

They have worked out the kinks of life.
They have alleviated all inconsistencies
and potential threats. It is all downhill
for them moving forward.
The kids are gone.
The house is paid for.
The hair is graying.

They live terribly faded lives.

I no longer come home to visit.
It makes me sick to see them rotting there.
I love them very much.
I am happy they are happy.
I excite for their desired complacency,
But I refuse to partake in it.

If that is what is to become of me,
I will not make it there.

Memory tilts the senses,
like a bad night, or a good drink.
The places we go change around us,
forming consistently thickening walls
of cognitive remembrance.
At the bar there is the table where
I sat the first time, with people I just met,
and faces I soon forgot. They are there still,
at the bar, as am I, painted in landscape,
watercolors across canvas.

I danced with you there, same bar,
and you looked up at me with wet,
sparkling eyes and laughed as I made a fool
out of myself for you. We are there as real
as I feel anything, still tainted with the emotion
of that moment.

Drunk, we fought, and the cold taste of that
***** water as it cascaded down my face
is as painful then as it is laughable now.
My friends were shocked and they clowned
me as you stormed off. I didn’t chase you
though I should have.

Memory tilts the senses.
Altering the perception and
introducing bias to the most
casual of environments.
I cannot walk the town in which
I have lived without seeing you.
It cannot be good for the soul to
live in one place too long.
Inevitably, experiences blur together
until there is no place safe from recognition.
It isn’t good. The walls of memory close in and the
prison cell shrinks around us, suffocating us,
forcing us to walk the long way home just to
avoid the restaurant where we went on
our first date.

Dawn is breaking like bones
against the clenched fist horizon
and the thrill recedes backwards,
thwarted and cornered
by the coming light.

It is the curse of those who
walk the alleys barefoot and
bruised to see such beauty while
in the thralls of unseen demons.

Hues of blood red and ochre
bleed through the vision as tangible
warmth creeps upwards across the
city, sick with its secrets.

I walk amongst them like a
minefield, choosing wisely
as often as not.
I watch the sun rise
over the anarchy of the night
and am confused by it.

People awake, conformed
by the coming morning.
I see a man with a shiner
walk in his suit towards the
bus stop. Those that let
control slide from tenuous
grips as the dark encircles quickly
reemerge as the professionals
they promised they would
never become.

It saddens me to see them.
Needing anything and anyone
to forget the lives they carved
out from the canvas we have
created. It saddens me
to see them, with the dawn
burning upwards and the
fevers of the evening dwindle
and smolder into the cold,
calculated face of the day.

I stare into the sky and
wonder why it is
so hard to truly
become crazy.

It is the flaw of humankind to feel love.
Once upon a time I didn’t
believe in it. Once upon a time
I was safe from it. Escape has
proven to be difficult, however,
our programming is wire tight.

It is the flaw of humankind to feel love.
Oh, how our arguments screamed
into the coming morning
as I barred you from your own doorway,
incapacitated with an irrational passion.
You rolled your eyes as your
roommate let you in.

It is the flaw of humankind to feel love.
I remember your flaws well.
I could paint them beautiful across canvas
from only details in my mind.
I remember you:
from the freckles dotting your cheeks
to the horse shaped birthmark,
galloping across your inner thigh.

It is the flaw of humankind to feel love.
It is a flaw of my own to have lost it.

Do you remember
the days when you used to
believe in things that were
deeper than the surface?
Days that would hold you
in eager, edge-of-seat anticipation
as you awaited their arrival?
Do you remember?

Hell, you barely even
remember yesterday anymore.
The lines have crossed and
twisted in so many ways you’re
pulling strings just to sort yourself out.
Think about it, there on that pier,
overlooking the ocean in
all of it’s eternity.

You were 15.
Meeting a young girl with
cigarettes in her mouth but still
kissed with a taste of evergreen.
It was one o’clock in the morning
and that Tybee breeze held you
rigid even in the warmth
of a July summer night.

Think about the glory in those days.
Think about the love.
The love that filled those
dreaming eyes, praying,
for someone to come
and to know you as their own.
I think you forgot those nights,
those days, those dreams.
Please,
find them once again.

It pains me to know that
you don’t read these anymore.
It is hard for me to write
them to anyone but you,
but they feel fake,
without purpose,
when the only eyes
that will read
are the ones I don’t
care about seeing them.

These come out by the dozen,
such is my disease,
but they come and fall
to ash on the page
like small bits of cigarette,
burning off and away
unto the endlessness of night.
These poems drift
and are lost like letters,
unaddressed and
left at the post,
between the cracks
and forgotten.

You wake up every morning,
at 6:30, to go to the hospital
where you work with people
who deserve miracles but
sometimes don’t receive them.

I would sit on the steps of the
apartment complex across from
yours and watch as the light
in your bedroom would flicker on
and count the moments until you
emerged from that front door.

What a love is a love like that!

To imagine your movements there
as you fixed your coffee with
a slight amount of sugar,
in order to go about your day.

Oh, how I could smell it, how
I could feel the warmth as you
would smile up, over the mug
and upwards at me.

What a love is a love like that!

Weeks later I sit here.
I am on the same stoop,
looking upwards at your window.
It is almost time for your alarm to
go off. I remember it well.

I stand, turn the corner quickly
before temptation grabs me
and forces me to your door.
My newfound irrelevance has remained
a source of consternation for me.

As I walk home I wonder whether
someone else will walk you to the bus.
Perhaps, you are smiling at that
someone now, over the top of your
slightly sugared coffee.

I open the door to my house.
I can't think of anything else,
only stop and pray that one day
you will perform a miracle
for someone who doesn't
quite deserve it.

It was Tucson in the endless dog
days of an endless summer.
The heat was inescapable,
pooling in the window frames
and the air as it coughed from the vents:
A fever that would never break.

Two weeks we lay there, knee deep in the throws
of a heat that would never subdue, a summer
that would never end. You would knock on my door,
laying there on the bed, staring holes into the
dripped and melting ceiling.
You held a paper bag of cheap wine between
your ****** and tarnished fingers,
clinking against the rings you wore like
trophies. I don’t know where I found you,
golden brown and beautiful out amongst
an vast eternity of ugliness.

We took mescaline we had gotten from
your cousin living back out on the reservation.
Laying there passing back the wine
you told me how the desert was alive,
how it had been swallowing you your whole life.
You told me that the dryness and the heat
had consumed you, burnt you through until
you couldn’t bear to be yourself anymore.
The scorching heat overcame you and you told me
there had been no choice but to become the desert.
I had only been in the southwest two months,
but I saw it, although I was untouched.
You had grown here, you said,
wilting to ash together with the desert.

The mescaline had me by the throat and
I saw you from dust to dust.
I saw you at one with the desert.
You were beautiful amongst the
red and ochre blood of the sand
and at once I wanted to melt to ash
and burn into the desert alongside you.
I told you and you laughed and I laughed
and we made love to the heat
and to the sweat driven
out from underneath our pores,
inflamed by the drugs and
the inescapable heat.
The room was aflame and
the great desert was alive
and ripping at us
through the open window
with claws of heat that
slashed at our backs.

I awoke and you were tying your shoes.
Just like that, the fever had broken,
and already you could feel
autumn coming in with its swathes
of chilled air sweeping across the plains.
I had been in love those two weeks.
With the sun and the dust and the ash
and the desert and all of it being one
with you. As it all collapsed around me
I felt saddened at its loss.
You were out the door
and the summer was over.
I moved back east where the
winter came faster and colder
and the desert was
of a different kind.

I have this vision.
It is of myself, pretentious enough,
in a lone clay-brick mesa out amongst
the red, plateaued deserts of Babylon.
The air is burnt and stale with heat,
and there is a nonexistent breeze that
barely cuts through that
open wound of a window upon which
hangs from itself one white, translucent curtain.

There is a typewriter in the corner,
by the window. Also a chair.
Upon this of which I sit, looking outwards.
The scalding oppression of the heat,
the smacking taste of dust in the
dregs of late summer,
burning holes in my senses as they
numb themselves from the climate.
One cannot think of anything else
when the body is under such complete
submission by the force of nature.

So I write, in that chair there by the window,
with its lone, white shade almost
shimmering in the air.
I write about the dust,
and the heat,
and the endless plains of ochre,
simply because nothing else can
exist amongst the total
subjugation of the senses.

There is a vague
sense of clarity in
the feeling that
one can be sad at the
passing of something
while simultaneously
sighing in relief
for the silence that
comes in it's absence.

In my apartment it is dark,
but even then it isn’t really;
the blink of the smoke alarm,
the light from the screen, illuminating
my desk as I type.
I see a bug crawl into a corner
and out of sight under this
synthetic brightness.

I am alone without him there,
but even then I am not really;
outside, cars pass by, encasing their inhabitants
in spheres of aluminum and cheap metal,
seven billion of us out there, all encased in little boxes.
The cars honk but I cannot hear them
through the walls.

In my apartment it is silent,
but even then it isn’t really;
I hear the whir of the air vent, coughing
out from underneath the table,
and the couple in the apartment above me,
yelling, fighting, always fighting.

They are in love,
but even then it isn’t really;
he beats her and she cooks breakfast,
each facing demons that they twist
and contort and call something it's not.
I see her as she comes down the steps
while I step out for a smoke.
I think she should leave him
but she doesn’t and I don't say.

In the flickering light of the stairwell
I see the results of love, I see the results of
her, too scared to be alone. It saddens me
to see her, although I do not know her.

She passes without a word, and
as I come back inside I close the door,
shutting out the everything behind me.
I don’t think I mind so much
my fake darkness, my fake silence.
I don’t think I mind so much
being alone.

I never wanted it to go this way,
though it was my actions
that catalyzed the death and
the following internment of our love.

I never meant for it to be like this.
We have our prides and our
angers and our unbearable
emotions.

My finger still won’t bend from
that parking kiosk. I was so mad.
I don’t know if I would’ve jumped but
*******, it was a toss up.

I am sorry you saw that side of me.

The demons that normally vent out
through the line breaks of the poems
as they line the walls of my computer
numbering the thousands.

You should read them
all some day. Perhaps gain
a little perspective into
how I am who I am.

I never meant for it to be like this.
This broken record of arguments
and excuses and tears that never
seem to fully stop.

You’ve put your guard up.
Distance is a distinct enemy
of love, so is pride/anger/regret.
—Insert the adjective you wish—

I hate myself for you.
Most likely more than you do,
though you would tell me that
it isn’t possible.

Your anger is beautiful
to me, even though it
is the loaded gun barrel
lodged between my teeth.

Your passion for us was
something I have grown to
envy, even seek to emulate,
now that I understand it.

I never showed you how
I felt, never let myself believe it.
Now I am begging for a
second/third/fourth, chance.

Perhaps the boy has cried
wolf one too many times,
and now must face the inevitable
jaws of a love now lost.

I never meant for it to be like this.
Stuck in this terrible place,
this awkward stalemate
between loving and letting go.

War is necessary every
other decade or so.
In order to avoid the jails
from filling up
with murderers.
In order to keep them
killing others in holy justification.
War is necessary
every other decade or so,
more than ever.
Used to be, once
or twice a century would do.
The world is filling up with
murderers more and more,
these days. I believe it is
genetics.
Breeding of those
who win the wars
over those who die
losing them.

Most of you
don’t even know it
until that barrel points at you
and they are seeing red
in the heat of every wiring
they have been programmed
with. You don’t know what
they are doing, or what you
are doing, or what anyone
is doing, but it is quick,
so fast you barely remember,
and the blood clouds and
slinks lazily through your
callouses and simian crease
and drips unhurriedly
to the tile floor.

You are human
like the rest of us,
even him, there on
the ground in
front of you.

I don't know if you ever are awake
late enough to hear it:
the world before it opens it eyes.
If you are able to catch the yawning
echoes of the crickets from
the windowsill where you listen.
There, it is serenity laying in wait.
The silence of nature is never
truly silent.
It hums with the burn
of the not yet risen sun,
shy behind her clouded vision.

I don't know if you ever are awake
late enough to taste it:
the world before it opens its mouth.
Before the morning showers.
That delicate smell, just before rain.
That scent of grass alive in the
shimmer of the morning dew,
alight with the purity of creation.

I don't know if you have
ever witnessed these things.
This beautiful magnificence
creeping in before the
alarm clocks.
I don't believe so,
or else there might be
understanding between us.

That sound of morning.
That smell of rain.
The taste and touch
and sight of a world
we don't know, in the
moment untampered by
the one that we do.

Burn it all.

To allow me sleep one more
morning with your hair
careless on my cheek
and the covers handily
in your possession
as I wrap my arm
around you,

burn it all.

I create poetry
by the car crashed juxtaposition
of thought and language.

I create poetry via metaphor,
metonymy, a slight wit.

I create poetry by the
beating and bastardization
of word until the line
breaks just right.
It never truly does.

You create poetry
in your every movement.

You create poetry in the
interaction and absolution
you carry within every waking
moment.

You create poetry only
by opening your beautiful
eyes each morning as
the sun rises eagerly
to see you.

You create poetry.

This, my pale
imitation.

Living in one place for
a long time tends to
complicate the memory.
Flashes and visions intervene
and overlap in the conscious.

There is the corner where
I first told you I loved you,
imitations of that anxiety flood
the nervous system and I am
that stumbling little boy again.
That time I left for the summer
and you cried, right there,
begging me to stay.
I look away now because I
remember how hard it was to leave.

Look back and there we are again,
a year later. You’re crying for
another reason.

And there you are,
yelling in that auditorium as
you hit me in the chest, tears streaming
down both of our cheeks.
I had class in that room all year,
replaying that hatred in your eyes,
over and over.

The bar we went on a date to.
I loved you there,
elegant in black, and I
hadn’t shaved and I knew
and you knew and everyone knew
I was the lucky one to
have been there at all.
Later, the same bar you threw
a drink in my face.

The same bar I watched
you with another man.

Memory is a curse when
stabilized by the tangibility
of location.
I am stuck in winding loops
of memories that will never
be made again.
Like walking the ruins
of a great civilization,
knowing something beautiful
and magnificent once took place
but now is nothing but
twisted remains and
dusted fragments of a life
that may have been
but no longer is
anymore.

The fire was stolen.
It was never truly meant
to be ours, though we relished
in the flame. We sat close as
heat rippled off into our chests
and into our souls. You sat
closer than I. The fire was never
meant to be stolen. I couldn’t hide
my inability to contain it. Soon forests
were ablaze with such ferocity you could
barely even cry. I never wanted it.
I thought it would secure us energy
for an eternity of life. It managed us
a cross to bear.

Once caught, I stood awaiting trial
as Jesus of Nazareth,
quiet, unyielding. I apologized to you
but I never can take back what I have
wrought, be it this life or another.
There is little apology to be found here.
There is only guilt, for a flaw that
has held me here, trapped against
the rocks, for centuries. The vulture
pulls at my flesh, night after night
as I strain against the chains.
I thought you might be the
one to break them.
I thought, perhaps love is all that is
necessary. I was proven wrong.
The vultures feed at my flesh
even now, as we squabble over
who shall be
burnt under the fires yet.

I am done with the vulture
eating at insides every night.
I am done with the vulture
casting blame on good intention,
like spilled blood on clean sheets.

This is Prometheus broken free.
Chains cast a hold no longer,
and the flame that once brought
freedom now stifles and chokes
deep within my throat.