Some of us are too stubborn to acknowledge when we've got it all figured out.

Knowing what's best for you doesn't always mean you know what the next best thing to do is.

Some of us know too many words and not enough meaning,
and we get all tripped up on the semantics.

If I could, I'd stop writing stanzas that begin with ******* like,
"If I could,"
or
"Truth be told,"
or,
"Truth is."

Because **** me dude.
Seriously, I'm the worst.

When the stars fall down on top of flipped cars,
there's always some guy thinking it's just some molotov.

That's the thing about gravity;
It's so easy to take for granted.

If you know how a spell is cast,
all the magic words to incant it and such,
does it have less of an effect when it's cast on you?
Does is matter much?

Mysterious poet with the obscene pun as a name, what is your game?

Sensitive artist at odds with her own sense of shame, are you doing okay?

Drop me a line or remind me that sometimes a stranger can be less than strange.

I'm struggling with change.

Or just hold it down and reach out to the void of your favorite stage.

I'm willing to pay.

These days are so crazy but we're getting too lazy to process the pain.

It's only making it worse.

Gonzo girl with her absurdly relatable way of reading the world,
let's hear a new verse.

The mundane has become the new strange while the old strange is just a page ripped out of a journal burned years ago;
The ashes of which trace lines in a face it's taken years of one-sided mirror conversations to come to recognize as your own.
The past is a blanket that's been ripped off its clothespins by winds that blow across some place you can't remember living in.

It was never all that comfortable to begin with anyway.

Misspoken broken half-truths and lies;
Classic.
The dump button glows nearby;
ten second delay.
Let 'er rip and kiss it goodbye.

The lifetime spent before it writhing in sheets,
hastily erected schemata with guts knotted up;
misjudged calculations and justifications -
not so easily dumped.

Tripped over admissions and half-felt surprise;
Classic.
The eject button lights up nearby,
hovered over with shaky digits.
Hit it quick and let 'er rip.
No time for goodbyes.

Count the secrets that you keep.
Fingers crossed the roof won't leak.
Took a chance and caught a peak.
Count your blessings and be careful what you seek.
Test the waters.
Talk is cheap.

Stolen dance with mistaken feet.
A lit up button to admit defeat.
Hesitate until it's too late to get away.
Classic.

The tide reels back from the shore,
as the water reflects the setting sun.
Grab what treasure while you can.
We've been here before but will never again,
for I am not the one.

Take it all in stride,
and run your hardest til the end.
Accept the ribbon but see no trophy.
At least we can still be friends.

Grind the gears until they quit.
One last trip before we're done.
I apologize for however many tears might be shed once you realize
that I am not the one.

Go forth into the future with dry eyes and a hardened heart;
Nipping love in the bud before it ever starts.
Steering clear of everything that even remotely resembles the foundations of a building that can one day be blown apart.
Living beneath a glass ceiling reinforced with steel beams that encase you in a state of untouchable mental well-being,
with only the moon and stars to console you and the occasional confused bird to keep you company;
To rot in a graveyard of memories filled with lovers still alive but dead to you, dead like the eyes that were once so full of hope and promise. Eyes that met their demise once upon a time on a beach long since gone.

Fate is the cruelest of beliefs.
I am not the one.

Here's the thing about balancing between two stings that burn the same:
You can give it up or pass it on or choose not to play the game,
but no matter what the stakes involved only double as they lessen,
yet here you are concerned to hell with the one soul you're addressing.

Climb to fall or roll to save the face you made up in the first place.
The true one only shows itself after the disaster's dust has cleared away.

But who's to say of what is what and where or when it falls apart.

There will always be someone around to mop up your broken heart.

Walked to the bar through the snow.
There's too much on the ground to take my car.
With weather like this,
there's only one place to go.
Luckily, it ain't too far.

Broken shards of pottery falling down a chasm.

Forgive my lack of segue,
I think I'm having a brain spasm.

Ceramic rain on a day like this,
and now I'm missing my umbrella.

The funky fact remains that I'm still one fragile kind of fella.

Come all ye married, all seasoned and old.
Come all you fearless, you young and too bold.
Come all your summers and winters and falls.
Come all who've no clue and those who know all.

Come along now, let's go.
Yes, you come too.
We've got assignments, and so much to do.

Come all you old haunts and come all you new.
Come all you Christians and heathens and Jews.
Come all your falsehoods and half-lies and truths.

Everyone's waiting, there's space for you.
Scrape up your courage and lather in glue.
Roll around the table, we'll eat what sticks.

Come all you ******* and come all you *****.
Kick off your trappings and get down with this.
Cinnamon scented candles and ****.
Nutmeg caramel melted down to the wick.

A year's worth of longing come to an end.

Can't have a party without ******' ****.

The minutes of the hour, day, week, year, decade, lifetime . . .  
grains of sand slipping too quickly through a hand trying desperately to hold on.

For what purpose?
To fling into the eyes of our enemy?
To add to a castle that will wash away in the tides?
To feel like we've got some semblance of a grip on this intangible thing called life?

We're all just holding on to a fistful of nothing,
and we're holding on too tight.

Twisted guts while trying to pretend to be someone that I'm not.
Excusing myself after a Freudian flub.
Retreating to the bathroom to throw my guts up.
Hoping no one will notice me lying in the tub.

Draw the curtains and close myself off.
I'm not the person I wanted you to believe I was.
Now I can't leave because I've overcommitted to the cause.

Sleep in porcelain and dream of what I've lost.

The dreamers still dream while their dreams are still there.
All bold and naive - few nightmares to interfere - with a dream that compels and compulses, persuades and convulses the veins of a dreamer to never slow down; to never slacken the pace.
Running after their dreams as if in a race.

The dreamers still dream while their dreams are still there.
All young and naive and bold enough to dare
to chase after their dreams at a breakneck pace
through insult and injury and shame and disgrace.

The dream shines on like a finish line in the mind of a dreamer.
Transforming the intangible into solid, graspable things.
Transforming fear and doubt into fuel to propel themselves towards achieving something thought impossible by all the non-dreamers, the non-believers, the bad teachers and ex-dreamers who've crossed their fingers in hope that the dreamer will fail.

Because why should they succeed when they've already bailed?
They gave up on that dream. It's impossible, you see.
That ship has sailed.

But the dreamer knows better.

Through sheer persistence and force of will,
the dreamer dreams still,
and finds a way to **** the naysayers' doubts and come out on top.
Staying true to themselves and belief in that grand thought:
that they can make their dreams a reality.

And when they do, the doubters will drop their jaws,
stand up and applause,
shed tears at the fact that their long abandoned dreams are now staring back at them,
intact.

And they'll realize that what they saw before as foolishness and naivete,
was really just the courage they lacked.

I used to spend so much of my time
thinking of clever things to say (and in rhyme)
So that I could await the day when I'd find
someone who understands my kind.

They'd come along and say,
"You're fine,
I totally get it - we're of the same mind."

We'd hold hands and frolic in the sunshine,
but I'm exaggerating - a habit of mine.

Certainly that's all a bit idealized,
but when I think about it,
I begin to realize
that this has already happened.
In fact, several times.

And it makes me happy,
and reminds me, besides,
that I have wonderful friends
and we'll be alright.

Sand sticks to me and you, like little pieces of memories we can't be certain of ever being true.

Like something half-remembered from a dream.
The way your body glows in the sunlight reminds me of a dream I once had of you.
The way our bodies press against each other while the waves wash away the fragments of what we've tried to forget for so long,
it's just like a scene from a dream I haven't dreamt of in so long.

Back on the shore, we're drinking beer and rehashing the past.
Reliving things we swore we'd never think about anymore.
The kinds of things that never last but show up unexpectedly at our door,
right around midnight.

One last moor before this ship sails for foreign harbors.
One last meal before we shed our shells.
One last dance with the ghosts of our former selves before we drown forever beneath the swell of the ocean.

The distant waves beat down on the beach like the dreaded mundanity of tomorrow's realities.

The moon's glow slowly steals the spaces where the sun once shone down.

The persistent ocean eats away at the land until it's all gone.

Maybe it was never even there at all.

You can't rebuild schemas without breaking them first.

My feelings are so stupid.
It's like they don't think at all.

If my life were less interesting,
would you be less interested in it?
Or me?

After all of the personal development has been developed,
and every epiphany has been epiphanized,
what's left?

When every version of yourself has been talked out of the driver seat, only to eventually realize that your life is the road and not the vehicle,
which exit do you then take?

What does it even matter now that you understand the stakes?

After all of those personal demons have been defeated,
(resurrected once or twice, then re-beaten,)
what comes next?

What question is left unanswered at this point?
I suppose it must be:
what are we eating?

Disillusioned youth all drunk on ideas of change,
passing around their ideals until we all felt the same,
or felt better about not feeling the same,
or felt normal by being surrounded by people even farther from normal than we'd ever claim to be ourselves,
or felt like we were in a safe space for the first time in our lives,
a space in which we could actually be ourselves,
or felt as if the weight of the world thrusted on our shoulders by our parents was no longer a burden we had to bear alone,
or felt sane enough for the first time in awhile to recognize how much we'd actually grown,
to have sorted out all of the ******* from the things we'd always claimed to have known.

God bless 'em, every one.

Oh, how we've grown.

Use context clues.

Paint with red creation,
white skin tightened grip.
She's grown too sharp with patience;
a ***** to let it in.

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
(I'll say the rest is due.)

The good men all are taken,
they've taken 'til it's gone.
Sordid imagination,
is this the man you want?

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
I'll say the rest is due.

Even some of the darkest things can shine differently in the rose-tinted hue of the rearview mirror.

Especially when it reflects the roads that aren't even there to drive down anymore.

I've sworn before, that I'll never venture those paths again.
But sometimes I find myself wandering aimlessly and then,
lo and behold,
here I am,
parked in front of that same old oak and thinking about only God knows when.

Random tidbits of ragged laundry hung out to dry a century ago.
And forgotten about,
until just now.

But it's hard not to say, that I miss the way those old threads clung to my body. The sway they held over me when I wore them. Way back then, when I slid through them everyday.

Everyday, just spent sliding away.

And now I've come back.

Far up
Far out
Dive in
Jump out
Win-win
No doubt

I can taste the wind in my mouth

I'm this
You're that
He what?
That's wack
I'm good
They're bad

Tell me I'm the best you've had

Who's vain?
Not I
You'll jump
I'll dive
They're dead
we're alive

And we'll do it again sometime

I know a man who says the phrase,
"Just one more,"
every time he orders another drink.
And he always gives me a smoke, if I think to ask.

I have a friend who I once called a coward.
I can't remember the context,
but it seemed warranted at the time,
and it must have stung him deep.
Because now every chance he gets, he throws the insult back at me.

Maybe I should've apologized.

(I've recently admitted to him that I can be a difficult person to be friends with at times.)

I know a woman
who seems to think I'm the greatest thing on two legs,
and I keep finding excuses to keep her away.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say,
but lately I've been feeling crushed beneath some immense, vague weight.

So here I am.
Reminiscing again.
Drink in hand.
Writing.

Attempting to understand.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder,
and proximity can make you wonder how you ever built it up so be some kind of cure-all universal life-problem-solver.
But when reality falls short of fantasy,
that's where all of the life-lessons are found.

The majority of them seem to be along the lines of:

There are people suffering in the world,
(You could call me a *******,)
but there are people protesting it.
(I'd totally be into it.)
With socio-political religious divides,
(I'm into negging.)
driving confirmation bias.
(Choke me, beat me, bruise me, please.)
Everybody is just people,
(I like that you don't like me.)
and everybody deserves to live.
(Tell me again how worthless I am.)
Let's stop weaponizing our hatred,
(I just came when you hit me.)
and embrace each other as brethren.
(Death excites me.)

His words are pretty.
His words contain worlds of swirling color and sound that swell up to drown out doubt and uncertainty in those who hear them;
sweet to the point of toothache.

His words are performance.
His tongue —a contortionist—
bending unnatural ways to produce sounds that soothe and calm and placate.

But don't be deceived by such pretty things,
for his words are poison.

A day full of retail therapy
punctuated by anti-capitalism posts on facebook propogated by a person I've known since kindergarten.

Life can be funny in a way that doesn't make you laugh,
but at least it tries.
Isn't that enough?

I got mean-mugged by a stranger's bulldog through a window-front while folding my laundry on top of a surfboard that'd been repurposed as a table.

Purposes can be rearranged.
Full moons can rise over days that were strange, only to turn them into stranger nights.
But the strange can make things interesting sometimes.
That's got to count for something, right?

First day off after a month and a half of long days at sea.
I blew off every single plan I'd half-heartedly committed to on the smoke deck without feeling the least bit guilty.

Feelings can be unfriendly sometimes.
Sometimes you just have to choose "Me."

Not gonna write a poem tonight.
No how man, no way.
It's been a long night already,
and I got **** to do tomorrow.

Crap, I mean today.

Staying up all night looking up lyrics to songs I'd heard and liked.

Stealing beers from my parents and drinking them as fast as I could while sitting in the bed of my dad's white pick-up truck. (With my nose running and thinking it was so gross but doing it anyway for the fuzzy fluid feeling it gave me.)

Walking around the neighborhood at night with headphones on, listening to songs whose lyrics I had recently learned. (Sometimes singing along depending on how well I remembered the lyrics/how many beers I'd drank.)

Giving a knowing wink to the houses whose windows glowed blue from television screens. (A habit I started after having read a certain Ray Bradbury short story that I'd liked.)

Making weird images in MS Paint (always with the slanted-line brush tool) after coming back home from a late-night, music-infused stroll.

Like trying to find where you'd put all your ****
days after cleaning up the place
while you were drunk,
I've been attempting to relocate
the various pieces of my forgotten heart.

I warned her at the start.

"Let's take it slow,
because I don't even know
if I can still do this,
after being alone for so long."

Lately, I've been stressed.
Hard-pressed to convey how I feel,
because all I feel is immense pressure to suddenly perform this boyfriend role.

Even though,
for the first time in what feels like forever,
I'm the one in control.
The scales are finally tipped in my favor.

But I take no solace in the fact
that the shoe is on the other foot,
because the longer this goes on,
the harder it is to ignore,
that when it comes to this kind of thing,
someone always gets hurt.

I read amateur poetry,
while drinking cheap port
and listening to Chopin
(accidentally; Youtube algorithm took a strange turn,)
but still, I fancy myself classy.

Some schlub in sweatpants on a Friday night, drinking alone,
critiquing a long dead artform with wild scrutiny,
thinking I know better just because I've been here a thousand times before.

Just know, if I say anything that offends you,
that this is where I'm coming from.
And I hope that will incentivize you to let it go ignored.

He wears a cloak of invisible voices,
wove from the frequency of silent screams.
Ruler of the space between waking and dreams;
He is the Yellow King.

Fear not what you can't remember,
though His kingdom is obscene:
A place of waste and decadence
trapped beneath perception,
sewn with hidden seams.  

He takes his toll,
unbeknownst,
at the liminal space between asleep and awake;
collecting your soul,
bit by bit,
inch by inch,
until there's nothing left to take.

I thought I was halfway through writing this one,
and yet I hadn't even begun.
The beginning is always the worst (most challenging, thrilling, adventurous) part.
The rest just comes undone.

I found out my thoughts can be sung to the key of C# Minor.
It wasn't exactly a life-changing revelation or anything,
it just made me feel better about owning a keyboard.

The waves of a forlorn ocean lap against an apathetic shore.
Some lonely guy stands there, still waiting to be transformed.

I dreamt last night that I'd write something like this before too long,
but I knew I'd be drunk when I wrote it and it'd come out all wrong.
The thought of what it could have been is standing on a log somewhere out on the ocean being serenaded by mermaids.
The song they sing is in C# Minor.

This is no place to find the answers.
The answers are hidden somewhere inside of us.

This is just a desert of people digging for them.

Yep, they're drinking again.
Hardly a surprise.
If I were a gambling man, I'd have placed the odds at 1:9.
I bet they'd pay no mind if one or two of their Budweisers went missing tonight.

Red and white can tightly gripped in each hand. Slide a couple up from the back on the off-chance they notice.

Awkwardly climb into the bed of my dad's F-250 (this was back before it got stolen.) Drink the first one as quickly as I can while the second one is losing its cool. (They taste even worse when they're warm.)

Nose running two-thirds of the way through. Cold-ish beer on a hot Florida night.  Gassing myself up for another hike. (Can you still call it a hike when you live in a place with no elevation?)

I put my wired headphones on (was it still CDs back then?) No, wait. I had an Ipod. First gen. Bought second-hand. Thing was a brick. Twice as thick as a present-day cell phone is.

Arrogant Sons of *******; that was my go-to. Them, and Radiohead. Sometimes, I'd even belt out the lyrics. (Some half-drunk kid stumbling through the neighborhood, singing like an idiot.)

But the music was only half of it. The rest was - well, aside from putting actual physical distance between me and the place that I lived - to work on my stride. An attempt at swagger. Finding some kind of rhythm to carry over into the next day.

So that I may face my peers without shying away. Without staring at the ground. So that I could stare back at those mysterious, vapid, judging eyes while screaming internally: You Don't Know What It's Like!

In the beginning, there was a sense of adventure. Strolling down unknown roads, trying out the names of novel streets on my tongue (they were all named after Mexican cities: Guaymas, Toluca, Mexicali.) Several dozen times later, it was less of an adventure and more of a pastime. Still, I wouldn't call it asinine. I had my favorites, predicated on how certain trees would break the glow of the streetlight, peculiar lawn or car hood ornaments, the scent of jasmine and oranges.

Now, two decades later, I'm still indulging in this old habit. Only, half the world away from where it started. The landscape, the houses, down to the sounds of the birds and insects, even the characters that make up the street names, all so strange. These walks feel like an adventure again.

But the reason behind them, perhaps, still very much the same.

The pilot's off the wagon and on the sauce,
leading his pod to rot on the rocks.

She said I'll see you later and I said why not.
Steak dinner, body massage, whatever gets you off.

Short of breath and out of my depth.
Low on cash and I don't want what's next.

Wrung out, tapped dry, limped ****, heavy sigh.
Asking Gungan questions like, "are we gonna die?"

When you get into the mindset of
"I'm going to write some poetry tonight,"
you start thinking in lines,
and,
if you're corny like me,
you end them all in rhymes.

But then, while you're doing some innocuous thing,
like peeing,
you find yourself thinking of something
that you think might sound pretty great.

Then you sit down to type it out,
but they've all gone away.

Like a flock of birds,
as soon as you sprint to catch one,
they all dissipate.

You're left there empty-handed,
wondering how you're no longer comprehending
some amazing string of thoughts that had flown through your head just moments ago,
now so far beyond your understanding.

All I want for Christmas is something to start the grill with.

When they say vulnerability is ****,
I always feel awkward about wanting to argue the contrary.

I tell people I'm a hipster before I'll ever admit to being a poet.
Seems like a less pretentious compromise.

I can handle being disliked for my personality-type better than being loathed for my hobbies.

Self-centered hedonism is a good defense mechanism against social awkwardness.

The people who are always so adamant about not giving a **** always trip me up.

If you really didn't, why are you trying so hard to project that narrative?

The people who really don't give a **** are so preoccupied with escapism to even recognize the social consequences.

Those are my people.

Poked and prodded
'til brokenhearted.
Now the game's *******.
The stomachs knotted.

Pushed and pulled;
Together, alone.
The game's not over . . .

(Pick up the phone.)