Sun's been gone now
three or four days.
I know it's out there
buried deep atop the greys.
Not bothered much
by bouts of lite rain,
intermittent,
just like my wipers.

Sun's been hidden
again and again and
I just want my eyes
to be filled with rays.
I just want it tangled
in my hair,
warming my heart.

January.
Deep December,
don't bury me
in your naked boughs.
Carry me through you,
on skewed wings
of your damp fallen leaves.

February awaits,
looming.
Buried in the greys,
patiently peering at me
with it's sunless gaze.

Turning into ashes,
burying themselves,
people been really
making that decision
more and more
these days.

Guess it don't make
a great argument
for the state of things.

People'd rather live in hell
than deal with living here
for one more day.

Maybe they're renovating down there.
Maybe it's nicer these days.
I'm sure I'll see it too one day,
one way or another,
but till then I'm just praying
we all stop preying
on ourselves.

There's a car behind me
on the stretch of old interstate
between Artistes and Centralia.
Barren road besides us.
Rub my eyes, check the mirror,
and just like that
they're gone.
Relief, I can slow down a bit.
Hate holding folk up
in this old Peterbilt.

They never play sad songs
on the radio anymore.
DJs are emotional doctors
prescribing me how to feel.
I miss the radio,
seems it don't miss me.

Still trucking,
but basking
in that ringing gold.

Lone open road,
I'll get there and
there ain't nothing
wrong with that.
Though, tomorrow I'll wake
and not want to start again.

Every morning.

Never want to start any more.

But once I get going,
well, it's not so bad.

Flip the radio on
and just be begrudgingly happy.

My suspension of disbelief
is riding on leaf springs,
and trying to enjoy any ******* thing
is a bumpy ride for me.

I just don't know
what I believe.

For being comprised of 60% water
bodies sure do burn real nice.

Sure he always walks around
with his head hanging down,
but I'll be ****** if
he doesn't find the best stones.

Gentlemen.
Ladies.
May I implore you;
where is it?

Where is it.

Where is the meaning
that was promised?

Where is our Great War?

Are we not deserved of
an all-encompassing evil?
Have we not earned the right
to glory, to kinship?

This paltry existence
is riddled with mediocre evils,
made up plights,
self imposed moral ambiguities.
I want more. I want to face more.
I want to watch something bleed.
My mouth waters.

Put me in coach,
put us all in.
We're ready.
The bench has been warmed
for my entire life.
An entire generation,
lost to modern ease
and simplistic complexities,
all just yearning for Hell.
Craving the hundred-yard gaze
granted only to the survivors.
**** your PTSD and fill us with shell shock.
Give us nightmares, memories.
Give us stories that we dare not tell.
Give us our great war.
Give us an ultimate evil to face.

Give us something to ****.
Put me in front of an insurmountable enemy.
Put me beside the righteous, the keen,
put aside the drones and ICBMs
and let us lead a modern blitzkrieg.
I want to be riled by my general
into a primal scream.
I want to watch my brothers die,
I want to weep for something.
Something bigger than me.
I want to be found in pieces
strewn across blood soaked earth.
I want a government *****
knocking on my mother's door
to give her my dog tags.
She would mourn, and grieve,
but she would be ******* proud of me.

Give me that release,
grant us all the relief
from this endless monotony.

The dawn of digital doorbells came,
but I just keep knocking away
because if you're not even home then
what's the ******* point anyway?

I don't want to be seen
through your ******* phone screen.
I want a greeting, a smile,
I want personality.

Now these glass eyes
peer all over me,
like drones in the skies
over foreign countries.
Reminding me
I'm a stranger.

I'm not meeting that gaze.
They can watch my back
as I turn and walk
away.

Even the sunrise.

A party's
not a party
if it happens every night.

Catching a buzz
a bit too much,
it ends up catching you.

Cotton candy skies
every morning,
even the sunrise turns against you.

Days come
and come
and come.

Relentless battering of time
Against my skin,
beating us all
to death.

Even the sunrise gets old.

Even the sunrise.

Happy birthday Mom.

Tangled up in.

The corners of your soul
are growing cobwebs
and I'm caught.
Lightless, sightless.

Tangled up in your sacred flame.
Fingers stretching towards the sun.
Blind eyes searching for warmth.

Free me from these cold shadows
sprouting in the corners of your soul.

These hidden battles,
quiet fights.

Turn it inside out
and
flood with light.

Don't have dreams, aspirations.
Dreams are just another banal experience,
only not yet realized.

Better yet, have dreams but leave them be.
Let them be dreams,
let them stay a golden land of idealism
to which you mentally flee when
caught in the midst of your current
mundanity.

Don't chase them,
don't turn your dreams
into your routines.

Place them upon a shelf
and marvel at them with
an enormous and writhing sense of
what if.

Enjoy that feeling,
revel in the wander-thought
for that is the truest form
in which dreams exist.

Annoyed and whiny little fools.
All led astray with their keen writing tools.
Moan and ***** enough and you'll see
that my poetry isn't for you, it's for me.

So *******, **** your talent and charm.
Go write your feelings out and drown
amidst this ocean of mediocrity.

******* all.
Worthless people.
Spew your trite.
I'll spew mine.
Let's ignore each other
for the rest of time.

He thought she'll be sad a long time,
regardless of the beautiful sunrise.

Light broke over them and she sighed,
the warm touch of the morning rays
felt good on her closed eyes.

He saw her smile and he knew why
yet he still thought she'll be sad
a long time.

Sometimes moments like these
can last an entire lifetime.
Memory, always tangled up in
idealistic webs of rose-colored light.

Perfect as that morning was,
she was sad a long time.

Hey Candy and Chris
can't you see that this
ain't no way to spend the day?
The slots' bright lighting
make the light inside her
fade, fade away.

J-J-J-Jenny and the bets.

Hey! Don't waste it away
the years come and don't stay
when you're spinning that roulette.
Still she sits down beside them
filling up on the tidal
feelings that she gets.

J-J-Jenny

Jenny

Jenny

Jenny Jenny Jenny Jenny

Jenny and the bets.

Whether on an evening dinner date
or out for a long walk in the afternoon
I see them glare vapidly
at little rectangles of doom.

Time accelerated.
Everything will be gone so soon
yet still I see their eyes glued
to little rectangles of doom.

In joy and despair
love and contempt
the feelings are there
and they feel so true.
When black rectangles of doom
gaze right back into you.

Become abyss.

Remember when
I was me
and you were you.

Now we're just
the things we've watched,
rectangles of doom.

God I want to *******
quit.

I think about it
all the time.

For what?



...This?
I don't think so.

Either pass this mindset.
or die in the cab of a
...

I pray for the pain of
this mindset passing.

This?




Either combustionless
or insane.

The easiest way to quit smoking
is to keep looking forward to
the nicotine headrush you'll get
when you start smoking again.

Every day, every hour and minute
that you manage to hold off
will make that euphoric feeling
hit you that much stronger.

Lips pinched tight around
a cylinder of paper and fiberglass,
the sound of a Bic striking,
dipping the tip into the flame.

An inhale, a deep sigh through smiling teeth.
Slight spinning and just going limp,
letting your head hit the back of the chair.

Eyes closed.

Quitting feels...

...so

****

good.

When, at night, I'm alone with
chapped dryness on my lips
I close my eyes and just imagine
you giving me a Vaseline kiss.

Who's here
when I'm not?

Can they read this
as I write it,
does it carry across?

There's something
here
with me,
something that's
not me.

Together but not whole,
just a bifurcated hull
held together with flex tape.

We don't sink.

Is anyone here?

Lies and deceit are a heavy spritzing of perfume,
truth and honesty are a rotting carcass in the ditch.


Both are bitter and sickly-sweet to my nose,
and if my eyes are going to water either way
then what does it even ******* matter.

She uses her tongue
to write her name
on my skin,
and I can smell autumn
in the firey tapestry
of her auburn hair.

I can taste the moon on her breath,
and it reminds me of home.

Polaris is reflected on her eyes
like slumbering summer nights
spent inside
with a distant chorus of crickets
coming in through my bedroom window.

She's water in the creek
babbling beside my childhood memories
where I would play the days away.


I'm too old to feel so young.
Don't stop.

Plunged into the tides of your mind
swimming along just to find
a little space to breathe.

Crowds choke the throat of the streets
where they all came to meet
someone else to squeeze.

Now there's a sign up in the sky.
Cursive smoke spells out the end of time,
in bitter stuntplane strokes.

A brush the size of our collective hearts
comes crashing down in the dark
to paint us all anew.

I love me
for what I am.

I hate me
for what I'm not.

I've grown so
envious
of taller men

because I'm sick and tired
of standing on my tiptoes
to **** in the kitchen sink.

I can sleep in jeans.
I can sleep
anywhere.
I just close my eyes
and
I'm gone.

I wear jeans to the moon
and to the mall.
I put jeans on my legs
and on my arms.
Jean socks and jean hats,
I'm a blue fellow.

Some people get upset
when I'm a bit too honest.

Sometimes my grandfather
(known to me as my Pap)
will ask me
if I want to go to a toy train convention
at 8:00 AM on a Sunday,
and I'll say
"I don't want to, but I definitely will"
and he'll tell me
to just
forget it.

It's like this for other things too,
with other people.
Usually loved ones.

My cousin Jake
is sometimes late
for a birthday dinner,
and I'll say
"If you don't want to come, then don't."
Then I'll smile
because I'm hearing my Pap's words
coming out of my own mouth.

Pap.

He doesn't want someone to tag along
just because it's the right thing to do,
he wants someone to be as excited as he is.
He wants someone to want what he wants.

What do I want? How does anyone figure that out?
I feel like I've lived a life
wanting the wrong things.
Not wanting what others
have wanted for me.
Throwing away opportunities
to make others proud,
people like my mother.
She wanted me to be a man,
but I've lived these wandering years
as but a man-child who squanders
the days away with menial hobbies.
Lazy and unfocused I am,
I've been.
Always wanting the wrong things.

...
If I had a grandson
what would I want him
to tag along with me for?

What would I want my child
to want?

I don't know.

Do you?

The color of the slow sand
dribbling through this hourglass
is every shade of pure.

A second-hand secondhand
ticks away, rhythm eroding,
yet building tenure.

Treacle treat,
tricks are neat.
Show me your glimmering memoir.

Brightly pale
Hunter's moon
turn midnight
into noon.

Beseech beset
beside myself
put upon you
up on the shelf.

Talks and tales
told not too soon
sunder underneath
our Hunter's moon.

Sticking a tre-flip off of that three stair behind the bowling alley.

A suicide bomber strapped with C4 running into a crowded building.

Carving up the powder, bombing down the mountain on a freshly waxed snowboard.

Shooting up a movie theater with a 3D printed, fully-automatic 9mm sub machine gun.

Catching a gnarly ten foot wave off the coast of Hawaii and ramping off the lip to catch some air.

Indoctrination of uneducated children and young men to serve as soldiers for an unending holy war.

Landing a backflip on a Haro BMX bike while a crowd of onlookers chants and cheers.

Subversion and subterfuge within a foreign government in order to topple the current president.

Dropping in to a half pipe at the same time as someone else and hitting a high-five in the air.

Starting fires across a city nightscape to purge the neighborhood of vacant buildings and houses.

A quite quiet little tapping.
A tapping on the window.
Glass shivering and shaking.
Brittle bones are breaking.
Wishful whispers in the dusk.
Distant voices muffled and hushed.
Tapping, time is ticking away.
Tangled tongues clicking in pain.
Furled fingers forced inside.
Shattered shards all pushed aside.
Hangers strewn across the room.
A shadow, a hymn hummed true.

Tapping. Tapping. Tapping. Fright.
Unknown noises in the night.

Stood up again by sleep.
A sickly fickle friend, indeed.
Should the dawn ever come,
then let it ******* come
like a blessed loaded gun.

The waffle god never taught me to swim
through his crashing waves of authentic maple syrup,
and my butter pad hat slowly begins to melt
and blind my eyes
as my thoughts run fiery hot
with pulsing liquid rage
for the contempt I have
about this futile trial.

I'm happier dead and drowned
afloat face down
atop the vast, vacuous,
and viscous liquid sugar
that has thoroughly coated
my lungs and my throat.

Sure I scream
for ice cream,
but custard is
******* delicious.

****.

Sometimes I pop my shoulder out
in defiance of the pain.

Can't wait to set foot
on that electric scooter again.

Being that I was raised Catholic
and knowing what I know now,
if Heaven truly is a real place then
they must **** a lot of kids up there.

"Whomever I was in my past life
must've been a complete and total ******."


                                          - Me in my next life.

That bitter brass crash
punctuating every beat
is jarringly unsettling,
just a toy monkey indeed.

Tell me what it really means.
Tell me what it stands for,
why was such a thing created?
Wound up tightly, set it free.

The zombies will all chase it,
relentless and ever mindlessly.
Just a toy monkey?
More like a bomb, indeed.

This road of indecision
I often find myself on
is paved with countless carcasses
of squirrels and deer aplenty.

They all watch me make my way,
their eyes still brimming
with high beams and headlights.

I can hear the faint echoes
of a thousand car horns
resonating within me.

Pizza?
Wings?
Left?
Right?
I don't know.
You decide.

This bottle's been pressed
from two separate halfs.

As is much in life.

Love.

Teamwork.

We're all just as bound together
as this bitter vessel of liquor.

Just gotta pay less attention
to the seam,

and focus more on
what's inside.