Sit close
Listen with your soul
not just your ears
No book gets it right

You ask me,
Were you one of the good ones?
There are no good ones
Only those who bled slower

They’ll call it justice
A stand
A reckoning
A cleansing
Our last shot at salvation

They’ll dress it in slogans,
wrap it in flags
They’ll give us names
Patriots, Rebels,
Loyalists, Traitors
But all of them fall apart
when the guns begin to sing

Your uncle...
the one you never met...
he looked at me
eyes wide, afraid
But I didn’t care
He wore the wrong color
And that was that

Remember your grandfather
remember these hands,
how they shook,
how they never stopped shaking.

Don’t let them hand you a weapon
and call it purpose
Don’t swallow lies
and call it reason

There is nothing civil
about a civil war
Nothing brave
in killing your own
No valor
in tearing your country in two

a cat, they say
both dead and alive, in a sway
trapped in the box
become a metaphysical paradox

a flask of death, a trigger tick
a game of chance, so cold, so sick
they call me life, they call me death
but no one asks to hear my breath

a man, I say
become the halfway
let his atoms hum and twitch
become the theorist’s broken glitch

see how you like the in-between
will you then be so keen
maybe then you’ll see the cost,
see the life lost

seal the box, install the locks
put a man in that box

people see me as
a million different people
but I am not them
I am me

To be loved is not a virtue
To be hated is not a sin

A thing is a thing, isn’t a thing
What makes a thing, a thing?
Is a thing, a thing because
We call it
A thing?

What then of things that
Haven’t found a name?
Does discovery make
A thing?
Then who made us
A thing
Can a thing
Make a thing a thing?

Light is a thing
I see it
Fragrance is a thing
I smell it
Music is a thing
I hear it

Dark is a thing
No thing
Is not having a thing make
A thing?
is a no thing, a thing?

Is
Love
A thing?

“stranger”
that’s a curious word
new people
aren’t really strange
they sparkle
unblemished by memory

soon enough
a faint falter
a clink in the armor
A speck of brown in
your ocean blue eyes

slowly at first
the cracks began to grow
rust rose to the surface
like the way age paints the sea

there was no breaking moment
just gentle tapping
once pristine edges
smooth from rust

before me
no longer was
a shiny person
uncovered was
a beautiful rusty person

Asleep and
quite untouched
A breath soft
But a cloth
My contribution
to the loft