weight.
that’s all I feel now.

the weight of silence.
absence.  
thoughts like boots
stuck in mud up to my knees.

thirteen thousand nights
pounding out of my chest like a riot mob
choking on my life
and staring down twenty thousand more.
****.

the searing void
of an ancient sugared kiss
sends tears down my face
like tiny iron weights—
a silent guillotine.
you’re so far away now.
or maybe I am.

dusting off dreams
like they’re old pictures
and setting them back on the shelf
in this violet desert.
mirage or memory?
who knows.

I’ve become a warm corpse
mumbling “no”
to the tired lives that want to ride me
like an old horse
one limp away from being glue.

who is there to tell?
who the hell would listen?
who’d step foot
onto the interstate of my heart
dodging semis
and roadkill potpourri?

doesn’t matter.
the dreams look clean again.
and that’s enough
to keep the lights on in the cell
for another thousand nights.

so keep that duster handy.
go back to sleep.

these nights are hungry.
and they’re not going to eat themselves.

another wasted battlefield.
ground smoking,
haze-choked.
bright afternoon zenith
crowning the only victor—
war.

sunlight skates
across the maze of bodies,
dried blood,
dreams ripped open like unsent letters.
it glints from the angle of death
and dances a shuffle
to music from a silent plane.

what am I to you
now that the wind
carries this stench?

a promise wrapped in vengeance.
a rotten kiss
pressed to your lips
passed down the bloodline.

the crowd roars with laughter.
ghosts foot the bill.

the water table rises
to meet the candle flame—
a younger sibling
finally getting their growth spurt.

I am weightless in the flooding,
drowning in fire,
burning in the afterglow
of a thousand dying engines
cooling to the rhythm
of hell-soaked hearts
spent on passion.

I am you
in the longest shadow
of the face you hide.

I am the violence of survival
strutting its stuff,
proud as the blood-soaked mane
of a lion.

I am the beast
that preys.

ahh,  men.

a hot summer night.
the world was a kiln
and we were clay,
hardening, sweating,
baking in it.

I walked by his door
and saw him—
left wide open like an invitation.
he was sleeping.
my father.

curled up in the fetal position,
no blankets,
just underwear.
the room dark
except for the faint
glow his iphone
lighting the back of his head
like a halo with low battery.
his iPad in front of him,
casting a pale blue wash
across his gut.
he looked like he was
plugged in.
dreams streaming through
a USB cord.

he looked so tired.
vulnerable.
like a deadweight puppet
left on stage
after the curtain’s dropped.

like he wouldn’t survive
whatever was coming next.

like he was still
just a kid
from small-town North Dakota
who wanted to fall in love
and did
but that mother left
years ago—
quiet as a predator
cutting his strings on the way out.  

and now he doesn’t
know how to move
without someone
controlling him.

so he just lies there—
the man
after the werewolf’s gone,
sleeping off the transformation.

breathing hard
in the electric glow
of a humming digital womb.