the award for 'best sense'
goes to Touch.
let me prove it to you:
I can survive without
/seeing
/hearing
/smelling
/tasting
and though I'd love to see your eyes spark with passion
and though I'd love to hear your happiness when you succeed
and though I'd love to smell your aftershave in the morning
and though I'd love to taste your kisses created for me
I would rather cut off my tongue or gouge out an eye,
than live a day on this earth with no hands of yours in mine.

The heat of the mornings are
slowly being replaced by autumn's approaching coolness
It looks like another summer for the books
It is harder to make memories now

Those forever days
Hours spent at the pool
Surviving off of Goldfish and cookie sleeves
While hair went blonde and skin went brown
The paradoxical AC freezing the skin off of your bones
But you can't retreat to your blanket without preparing yourself
for dinner

Those endless hours spent alone or with company
Doing everything and nothing
A place where Kokapeli's pizza still exists
Or experiencing that fender ****** as a witness
The girl gets out to check the damage
She is wearing only a bikini
I felt like I was in an Updike story
Only in the summer

Out of body, out of touch
If I feel at all, then I feel too much
This poem is as shallow as my grave

But I'm still digging

If I want a God then I'll misbehave
If I want to be sad then I'll entertain
Just because I'm found
doesn't mean I'm around
Just because I'm growing up
Doesn't mean I can't be down

I'm sorry, mom and dad,
but if I want to be happy then I'll have to be sad
I'll write until my fingers bleed
Until my words are the blood that the readers need

I am at home
in my heart
as love bursts forth
like contagious laughter

stoic, solid
stolid and bolder
made colder the soldier-
death's hand on his shoulder
and eyes the color
of green flies.

r ~ 8/19/14

most of my life I have tried to keep
appearances and show the world
that I was a strong confidant young man

I smiled my polite smile as I was dying inside,
so afraid to share with any other human being
all the shame and guilt I kep buried deep inside

I have a fellowship of people today,
where our common weakness unites us
and we find strength in mutual vulnerability

when I embrace my weakness,
I allow God to enter into me
through my wounds

how easily I forget along with the rest of the world
that God chose to meet us face to face in weakness,
in a flesh like mine

Confessions of a Goody Two Shoes
At least that's what I had always considered myself
But like a pair of sneakers tied together and thrown over a telephone wire
I'm sure it's only the innocent eyes that see the image without subtext
Strung up by knotted laces tied around the tongues
Hanging just above the mist and missing the point
Because these shoes were made for walking
And there's just no way of knowing how far someone is going to go
As muddy soles beat the ground with every stride as we run from our problems
But can't always outrun the bullets
Trying on everyone else's lives to see if we can finally complete the mile
I've been starting to doubt the label assigned
Associating me with footwear and being walked on
I can feel my arches aching with the pressure of walking in time with the crowd
Of walking to a beat I haven't chosen
Of walking heel-toe-heel-toe left-right-left
Down a straight path
Down a narrow path
There's smoke in the sky from the road less traveled
There's gravel in my shoes from stepping off to peer into the distance
I'm not sure why I want to run away but there's just something about the unknown
Chasing butterflies down aisles of pitcher plants and Venus flytraps
There's something alluring about losing my only pair of shoes in the dust and just running
If I'm not making good choices
I'll make bad choices with conviction
I need to learn to stand on my own two feet but for now
I've been learning to walk barefoot
Because goody two shoes just don't quite fit any more
But I can't seem to break in anything new

There's a poem about you that's waiting to be written
There are words that circle your lips
Falling, slipping, spilling from my fingertips
Into late night confusion and moments of nothingness
You're a page in the center of a book with a prologue that I haven't read
But I'm still imagining the way the ink stained paragraphs would lend themselves to film
Because every story can be told through so many mediums
There's a poem about you that is waiting for the right words
I wouldn't call it attraction
I would call it an admission that having you at my side is oddly comfortable
I would call it a confession that I wanted to reach for your hand a few times
I wouldn't call it more
I haven't been lost in the starlight of your eyes
I haven't scattered butterflies from my chest
I haven't longed for lipstick stains and inside jokes, sharing, and falling apart to rebuild each other, listening, loving, forgetting the past
I don't think you and I are a would be could be should be
But I do think that you deserve something different and that I want to be someone new
Funny how those match
I think that even though you haven't sparked music in my soul
You have poems about you that are waiting to come to light
Because you have ink in your veins to tattoo words on your bones
And you're a table of contents out of context pointing to a chapter left untitled
You're a hardcover book, but not one to bother with the slipcovers
And you've got a spine that's been bent but is not easily broken
You're a story I want to read, not one I'd want to live
But I do want to write poetry about you
Because you're spilled ink that might as well be a Rorschach test
You're paper pages that act like kindling
You're words that shy away from being spoken
Or written
And there's poetry floating through the air that is sure to rest on your shoulders
Because I'm sure that your heart is shelter to thousands of words left unspoken
And your pulse is sewing together the phrases that you never said
But I'll never really know why my hands warmed up at the touch of yours
Because some poems just aren't meant to be written by me
But they're still out there waiting for you

the yellow glow of the rising sun
gives me the gift of renewed hope
and gratitude for my breath and life
today