I'm living in squalor.
It'll be summer again soon,
And I wish that I could call her,
But I've gone from prince to pauper.
With every silently warm night,
Her memory fades red,
Like a doppler.

I can't write poetry anymore.
I'm not much pride to swallow.
I'm a mended heart gone sour,
A paper maché shell, now hollow.

She can't really be blamed.
Lovelessly alone with my bones,
Blood long gone, long drained,
That fault is my own.

I can't really be blamed.
Now she's all alone,
With our bones.
That fault is her own.

Your constructive corruption,
Wrapped me in, like a soft cocoon.
And with every day without prosper,
Your memory grows blue,
Like a doppler.

Do the tiny footsteps of ants make a sound?
When we concave their hills I can’t hear a sound.

Hands, wrapped around your fingers. Eyes
closed. A baby’s first cry is a sound

Never forgotten. Like the silhouettes of bodies
burned. Does the bomb still make a sound?

Take two waves, equal in frequency, opposite
in amplitude. Silence can be created from a sound.

Sometimes I forget I’m speaking in another language.
To me, my thoughts always make the same sound.

Shuffling papers, typed words on pages
even when never spoken, they still make a sound.

In you, there must be empathy,
For my madness, I've become.
No other names to call me by,
I am Mr. Numb.
The pain of the daily tastelessness,
Seems to lose itself in obscurity.
In the abstraction of shape and form,
I care to question me.

In you there must be hope,
For my mirror, you've become.
You will be my clarity,
I will not be numb.
The moment that we met,
Was ingrained within my mind,
But as the hours turned to days,
In the darkness, I now find...

Abstractions, you and tastelessness,
I'm found, obscured in loss.
My mind is the universe you reside within,
And emotion remains the boss,
As hours, weeks and years pass,
A moment becomes them all.
In the way a seed becomes a tree,
As we watch it slowly fall.

It's half past four and the Red Rose
is Doppler dashing across
bullying slow fourth class hikers bikers
who dare to share the bridge walkway.

Puffing pumping its steam sweat smoke
straining through the shielding lattice
smogging choking foot folk
who snort its sulphur scented smuts.

Now, there's no reason these nights can't
   dissemble our daytime woes.
With bottles uncorked, we'll paint
   friendly faces on daylight foes.

                     The ground's not shaking.
                     Your breath's just ragged.
                     Faces shine and cities glow...

but, come sunrise, we're flying blind,
            while keeping our heads low.

Still I remember the time that
   we chucked that radio
from that rooftop sinking to
   street level, speakers played Manilow

                     Transistors scattered
                     Our footsteps clattered
                     Down the fire escape we'd go

laughing hard, police up in arms
          alleyways lead us home

                        We wanted
                         to up and ******* leave

                         But we're tethered
                         to this place by our heartstrings

                         So we're always
                         celebrating our defeats

                         We wanted
                          to up and ******* leave

I'm off and running in circles
   around my own lasting fears
You're off the wagon and just
   rolling dice hung on rearview mirrors

                           We're contemplating
                            on relocating
                            back to those familiar years

but sunrise comes, we're twiddling thumbs
   and hoping stormclouds clear.

The back up with
A crooked neck bent
   Towards Hell
While his lips tightened sternly
   as a Victorian urn.

His face barely recognizeable
   ever since the penny-doppler showered
A wandering click
   that skipped
      no birds on his fence.

In a glass paned massacre, forever fossilized
between childhood bullies and prom-night feel-ups,
there was a consciousness that feigned
once a week, cockled in creationism and the Eucharist.

His passions -- clam shells flanked by the ripping tide.
His intellect -- a solitary warble amid ***** blue notes.

I remember that first taste
of that first sweet college poetry class,
how much I wanted to learn,
how much I learned,
how much I didn't learn.
I remember that moment
when I realized that
    drone
is an onomatopoeia too,
not a comforting
blatting
wah-wah-waaah
of Sally Brown's first grade teacher,
or the baritone perfumed bath
of the religion teacher I hadn't yet had,
but the droning
in slow motion
or a drone
in slow motion,
buzzing, humming, droning by
in slow motion
too slow for the doppler effect
to dopple effectively.
I remember that first smell
of fear hanging in the air,
sharing in that cabaret of pain,
wearing hearts on ripped and bloodied sleeves,
baring our souls to demons who ate them for snacks,
understanding that the stacks of bodies
and broken minds
littering the halls
were the real lessons,
not the importance of breathing
or knowing Linklater from Viewpoints from
Organic Synergy from
how to get up when
a fat rock and a catwalk
in slow motion
pin you
in slow motion
to the north lawn
in slow motion
too slow for the doppler effect
to dopple effectively.