half a dead pigeon
has indented itself in the gravel lot next door
and every day at dusk, when i run my sacred shower,
(with the lights off and windows open
and otis redding echoing through the empty house)
i have to watch the black static tide of flies
swim around one of it's upward bent wings.

the first time i saw it my jaw dropped and repulsion choked my throat closed-
disturbed by it's total disgrace,
i slammed the window shut
and preferred to gaze at tile grime to pass the time.
but from the days that followed,
i managed to muster up respect
and acknowledged that this
battered half of a bird
was now a variable in my scenery
(praise be to impermanence)

and now
the sunset drowns everything in it's hazy blood orange
and the wind floods the trees and fills the underside of the bridge with sound,
and i stand naked in the warmth,
singing boldly out of key, twisting hot water out of my hair,
as the summer breeze politely invades my privacy.

so i salute the pigeon, say i wish you the best.
and embrace the weight and fullness of my happiness,
and know well i am more than body and voice,
and watch it sink further into the arms of the earth each night.
grateful to know that death doesn't end life.

You will have a moon-faced child who is good at keeping secrets. She will be a piece of the the sea, ruled by the sun, and afraid of the dark. She will start to explore and never stop. More than anything, she will be frightened of being settled, getting stuck. She will say, "No, I will not", but at what cost? 

I have terrible nightmares. I dream that I am running, trying to defend my truths against immoral powers. In my sleep, systems corrupted by the complexity of control try to steal my simplicity, try to make me dirty and compliant, things I will never be. In my dreams I am persecuted time and again for things that make no sense to me. It is a feeling of choking claustrophobia, worse than any coffin. The injustice insults my soul, and I wake with heaving lungs and an aching heart.

I am obsessed with knowing myself. Maybe if I can understand that much, the rest of this will start to make sense. We'll see.

I worry. I worry about dentists. Pharmacists. Business marketing majors. The dispassionate masses. People content to do things for money. For little bits of green paper that aren't particularly attached to anything but false notions of power. I have no religion to reassure me that it will all even out on some other plane. I have here, I have now. I will not fritter and waste the hours that make up the dull day, I will not be made to be afraid.

It hurts my heart to see how easily my brothers and sisters accept the notion that we are destined to spend most of the precious hours of our existences working at jobs we don't care about just to stay afloat in a drowning economy, and how easily judgments are cast upon those who don't conform to such broken logic. It's easier to judge than it is to think. Thinking is so uncomfortable.

It makes me want to scream, to rant. Don't they see? We pave the way for each other to be lazy. We have created technology that we use to save time so that we have more time to spend on the important things, like trying to figure out how to get our hands on more money, so that we can buy more things. We aren't paid to create, repair, discover or teach. We are paid to entertain, not question. We survive by serving. And that's a little too close to indentured servitude, wouldn't you say? Planned obsolescence. Wage slavery. Stockholm syndrome. Electoral College. War on poverty. From the makers of Agent Orange, corn! And no, you can't heat up your burrito, you think you're fucking royalty? That's right baby, keep voting. You have a voice. You are free.

Our entire system is obsolete if the air we breath, the water we drink, and the food we eat are killing us because we've been so busy saving time that we forgot to remember not to poison ourselves. We create disease, and then spend lots of time and money "treating" it. Treating and treating and treating, fixing things by breaking things. Quality of life be damned, we want to live forever! It increases our GDP, don't you see?? When it's my time to go, plug me into a wall for a few years and then bury me in a big fucking box to make sure that the nutrients in my body won't feed the earth. Spend a lot of money on all of that. I will look down on you lovingly from my cloud, stroke my chin and proudly ponder my legacy. The end goal, it seems, is to die old and rich and fat, surrounded by things. To leave no mark of love on anything, not even our own hearts. It hurts my heart to see my people so removed from their selves and their truths that they think they are right.

So much of what I see around me hurts my heart.

i am wearing a kimono,
this sheer, garish, floral shred of fabric that wafts about my frame.
the cafe people snip at it with their eyes full of sharp edges.

ive been here all day
the view is terrible,
the music
is like the sound of a snail in seasalt.
little
crackles
of wet flesh hot and retreating, no, burning.
but i am so tired I cant move.
maybe it isn't so bad,
maybe I am just being difficult...
everything,
even the kiss colored leaves that
toss themselves down the boulevard,
seem shrill to me.

all i can
think about
is what you said to me last night

"a pretty face is a loaded gun"
tearing holes into me with your angry eyes.
you know
the line itself is crap,
a splinter in this thigh,
it is snapping, that line, under all the meaning
i gave it  in my drunken storm.

i walk along that line,
as though it is stretched between sky scrapers,
high above like a tightrope.
today all the great buildings that surround, give me perspective on my size,
and they hiss
as great, hollow objects seem to do sometimes.

now that iam awake
i see that it doesn't make sense
when you said it
you were swimming in a gin bath and
playing the poet with a shredded heart
but iam trying to give you credit
and find something other then an image
-image of my body
with a heavy, black barrel protruding from my throat
and a tantalizing trigger, curling like a tongue taunting you
to pull it
and blow your fucking skull apart-
you were just trying to offend me thats what i see.
dont blame this face, you are just angry.

goddamm the music here sounds like nails!
that man over there with the sloppylips looks like he might disintegrate
in worse shape then me I think,
I hope.

anyways i was saying dont blame this face
thats right i say iam beautiful,
you said it first though.
though you only said it, in search of the trigger.

christ,
we all need to get up and go,
this place is like a horse's mouth
lets all get up and walk out together in a thread of gorgeous bodies who just
wont take it anymore. lets go.
forget it. wait
what was i saying?

So you're saying you're proud and
Grateful to have so much freedom, opportunity and wealth
Well, I'm not.
Sociocentrism is an ugly, unnatural state
Everything we have takes away from someone else
We try to pretend there's no connection, that the plight of others is cause by their own failing
That we are deserving
Convinced that this is all here for us
We take and take and take
But every terror we inflict on anything "else" is a terror upon the self
We protect our so called civil liberties with wage slavery, chemical abuse, and ecological terrorism
Profit baby, profit über ales
Well congratulations to us
This is nationalism at its finest
No, I'm not fucking proud of it
If you want to take credit, be my guest
Just ask India about policies of profit over regulations, about denim and dye and death
Ask Mexico about farming, their take on the "Fair Trade Act"
Ask the rainforest if it remembers what it was like to have trees
Try to find an Arawak to ask anything
Ask 63 countries what it feels like to have a US military base keeping watch
And what would happen if another country tried to build a base on this soil
Or maybe ask why you never learned shit about any other country
Much less about your own
Back in History class
Survival of the fittest, you say?
A dog eat dog world?
Alright, let's play
This country is overrun by dogs, that's true
But honey, we're not eating any other dogs
We're eating poison and calling it food
While our leaders give Monsanto handjobs under the table
We are "the world's leading nation" and we're dropping like flies
No, not dead
Just into hospital beds and prison cells
Our country is filled with poverty, racism, violence, and terror
Not to mention obesity heart disease depression anxiety and PTSD
We're over-medicated malnourished and spiritually starved
We're pissed off at a whole lot of bullshit
That means nothing in the scheme of anything
Fully engaged in the myth of a two-party system
Even though most of what we see and hear is merely distraction
Thank you, media, all 6 of you big beautiful monoliths
I'm so lucky I have the opportunity to be informed!
We're a nation divided by details
While our leaders run in circles pouting fat fingers at each other
Engrossed in this thing we call "politics"
Highly effective
I'm really glad you're proud
They say ignorance is bliss
But I think it's more like a shiny polyester suit
Holding together a parasite infested mess
Sitting in a recliner after a hard days work of trying to stay afloat on a mountain of debt in a drowning economy
Bottles of medication on the table, GMOs in the fridge
Quietly doing what they're told
Never wondering why
Falling asleep to the glow of the TV whispering fear and terror, us and them, buy and buy and buy
The sweet purr of "freedom"

one of those mornings
where I am thinking of you baby (scoffs)
where I want to lay on the floor with my legs in the air
where I want to smoke cigarettes as skinny as teenage legs
where I want to wear dark sunglasses that spell out

C-O-O-L C-A-T

and these shades would allow me to be callous
and my apathy and I could make snide remarks

about you,
you fucker

Boy, I hope you can smell my contempt over there.
You deserve it.

I don't dislike many people, but if I could do it,
I would tell you that I look upon your character
with the same adoration that I would hold for a
parasite-infested rotting mountain of rat feces.

Which is to say not a lot.
Which is to say I dislike you, immensely.

Still
I'm retaining some dignity here,
somewhat,
by not wasting my time caring about a little rat like you.

It's just one of those mornings,
where I want to stop knowing you, and wish you wouldn't know me
where I want to take Xanax until a stabbing wouldn't hurt me, physically.
where I want to cry or something, but you see, I can't feel a thing, for you.

You don't deserve my crocodile tears.

I have nothing for you, I am fresh out of fucks to give.

I don't regret anything since I learned a great deal.
I wouldn't say I was heartbroken, just exasperated
by your contrived and un-authentic dumbass-ery.

I am better than you, you stupid infantile rat,
I laugh when I remember that every morning.

A deep breath, at least an attempt
Drawing air into my lungs; painful to say the least
Short shallow breaths relieving the horrible pain

That last kick, missing the block, threw myself off balance
My own damn fault

Deserving of the next kick, left side of my open rib cage
Stupidity is always punished

A sickening crack, an intense pain
Constant reminder to keep my guard up

Fight the urge to vomit
Left arm numb from pain
If I stopped, stayed down too long; he would end it

“Told you to watch that kick Johnny Johnny”

Shook myself hard, working up the urge to keep going
Hell, I’d done this many times before

Eyes swollen shut and ringed with dried blood
His nose, broken; the unnatural angle it tilted, granted mine was too.

My left arm hung limp by my side
I swung again, hard right, for the widening cut above his eye
But so did he
Same hard right, sent me back into the dirt
He fell too.

Blur in my left eye, mere pooling blood
One person among the crowd
A girl
My age, dark hair
It was brown or black?
A tank top and jean shorts
Stood watching the fight shaking her head
Her coy smile
“Boys will be boys”

Only to muster a smile back
A toothy stupid grin
My mouth and teeth rather bloody and red


I wanted to just look at her
But time would not allow
Staggering forward again

Wanted this to end
Wanted to wash my face
Fix the pain that was tearing my ribs,
Most importantly
I wanted to know who she was.

Both fists back up
Swung slow, left hook
Left my ribs wide open
Brought his leg around again
Harder than the first
Grunting in pain and barring my teeth
Anger kept me on my feet

Left arm down fast a
Trapping his leg against my side
My right fist onto his knee
A satisfying crack
A blood curdling yell

He sobbed
Gasping for breath
Through tears he put his fists back up

My shoulder then planted hard into his stomach
Slammed into hard concrete below
He grasped my back until his met concrete
Only good fist ready to finish the fight
Last punch down I stopped.
Anything more would have been cruel


“Damn John you look like hell!”

“Hey man,” I stopped him grabbing his arm, “who was that girl in the tank top, behind you earlier?”

He started to laugh. “Don’t concern yourself with that my friend, she’s too high class company for a guy like you.”

As a small girl your words used to lighten up my day.
As a small girl and boy we followed our parents and did as they say

As a small girl we jokes and played around.
As a small girl and boy we were innocent to the harshness of the sounds.

As an elementary girl I opened my eyes.
As an elementary boy you grew tall and spoke lies.

As an elementary girl I dealt with the words.
As an elementary boy, you were busy shooting rocks at birds.

As a middle school girl I was shy and closed.
As a middle school boy you followed the boy code.

As a middle school girl I was beaten and belittled.
As a middle school boy, you were oblivious I even crippled.

As a freshman girl I bleed and cried
As a freshman boy you were busy and never even sighed.

As a freshman girl I hid my scars at gym
As a freshman girl all the girls never even thought to help. or had even a whim

As a Junior boy you were popular and handsome.
As a Junior girl, girls knew we were old friends and for you, threw tantrums.

As a Junior girl I was taunted, and forced to tell you what they wanted.
As a junior boy Talking to me as to be beaten and to have friend that only taunted..

As a Senior girl I had long since stopped talking
As a senior girl I had long since dealt with the mocking.

As a senior girl I gave up and left tattoos on my skin for you to see.
As a senior girl It was all too much and I could no longer plea

As a Lonely broken girl I slit my wrists and soon died.
As a Oblivious boy you without a thought cried

As a girl strangely obsessed with macabre tales.
As a Saddened boy you were given my journal hued in grey.

As a  Heart-Hardened Girl it became a weakness. The tears stains on those dog-eared pages.
As a Shocked boy once in love with me in middle school. You never though in all the ages.

That the Gorgeous, womanly, Middle school girl was beaten.
That the Picture perfect, Middle school girl All her anger had deepened.

That you the once self-conscience middle school boy had not seen her cry.
That If only---
The Elementary boy
The Middle school boy
The Freshman Boy
The Junior Boy
The Senior Boy

The Oblivious boy Had seen any of her scaring.
Then the Oblivious, boy senior year would have had a diamond ring

But he never saw her cry .
And now her will never see her happily in his arms with solely a sigh.

So what if I am crazy, like I would need to know.
People say The words I write and cry are cursed.
How would they know that? They don't even know me....
Maybe they are right. I only write for the loss of love and peace.
I have done things that the two lords of the world would not approve of.
The lies, the tears and the lost hope for a brighter day.
I just want it to end.
I am called crazy from my own mother, she says i'm a sinner.

Thats all for now ( I think )