We'll start with the trees,
and work our way down,
to the sound of knees
slamming into the ground.

I was ten, and a half
and certainly full of myself,
The floor felt like a bath
but it was not good for my health.

my legs still ache sometimes,
and I never ever asked for it,
but I taunted the God of gravity,
and in the state of disarray I was,

I stood up.

The soft grass where I had landed had a bit of blood, in between
the blades I could see the dirt a darker brown than the heavy sky.

There is no pattern to this poem,
I just remember being so careless I didn't
care what would happen if I hit the ground,
I could only see to the stars over my head,
not to the tall grass and years of self loathing ahead.

how cruel it is,
to see beauty, but not make it.
It's like looking in the mirror and only
sadly seeing cracked teeth and matted hair.
I guess it's the days I falter and don't pay attention
to the things around me I fall the hardest,
and leave the biggest trails of aggression and
sadness in my waking despair. If only I could trace my fingers
across it, like the model cars on my grandpa's shelf, I could wipe the dust from the window and see the meticulously callous
bright colors peeking out of the evening; hoping to string
together the proverbial tie of the clouds to the blue, awfully blue
sky. It seems a decade has passed since I've seen it. and I fear I have
nowhere left to go, nowhere left to turn to paint out my thoughts. I
miss it all.

but no worth is it to fret,
even red and white clouds
flicker away to someplace better,
more serene or calming.
Like crowd surfing the
line between life and death.
Leaning one way for too long will result in your fall, but at the in-between, where does life start? Where does death begin?

Could the clouds tell us, warn us of it?

Do they feel me slipping through the crowd and sinking into
the cold dirt?

Maybe it's better here, the world is certainly colder when you dare to dream.

Shattered ties,
lying on the floor.

Like little birds,
that sing in the sky,
their necks wrung,
they sing no more.

Famous lies that we all sell like:
Life is swell,
love is good,
the world is blue,
the cross is stood.

They all rectify the appearance of a beautiful world
that has been hidden behind a maze of deep and
unsettling clouds.

A writer's mind, should be fine
if he takes the time to go outside,
but what difference is there,
in sitting in here to listen to
the world cry?

I think that I should look in a mirror,
longer than I have been,
and see myself as the liar, the cheat, the *******, that
I know I am.

Maybe then those famous lies will start to show a bit of truth.

I am not a good singer,
I am not a good artist,
I did this for fame for so long,
I've become a martyr,
and now life is even harder.

The more I think about the girl,
the more she becomes everything,
yet also,
the more I'm reminded she may
think of me too.

I really hope she remembers the same moments,
like her car at night, all the windows down with the red and white dash flickering across her pretty face.
Or the time we stopped at Walmart at near midnight to buy food we never even ate, just to have an excuse to talk more to each other.

Oh, so dearly close I hold those memories to my heart, but how long until I will forget them?

How long it will be before I forget her, and the silent moments where all was loud for everyone but me, where time would stop and I would see, just beautiful, everything about her, the quant passion and quiet pain.

But the more I wander, the more I realize my love for her is like a broken lighthouse on an island at sea.

He is forty-six

He walks into the diner, with his hands up, excited to share the news.

He's turning forty-seven!

He looks all around, licking the eyes of all in the room, minding their own business. Then he looks at me.

And I look at him.

And he smiles the biggest smile I have ever seen.

He emanates the happiness that left so many Monday's ago.

I wonder if he's gotten used to the thoughts, that he's going to be alone forever. Or perhaps he has decided that they never mattered.

Well, wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
Or to know rather that the same snake that strangles me
has gently wrapped around this man's neck as a companion, not as a rival?

It's perplexing to me that I find it funny that he looks at me funny.

Entertaining people with my feigned stupidity has become funny
even to myself, and to the sparrow that died years ago.

The sparrow dove out of the nest to slam into the concrete sidewalk of Parker Avenue. Right next to Wrigley.

Or at least as close as I allow myself to get to Wrigley knowing that I killed myself there and many people have also killed themselves in similar places.

He asks me, "Isn't it great? Nearly another fifty years!".

I can't talk, my mouth is cotton; doesn't he know everything about me though? Don't they all? Wouldn't it be easier to pass me by rather than pity me?

I reply, "That's awesome, here's to another fifty".