I can't define poetry.
I don't want to define it.
Let it remain obscure,
like the forest sounds
you hear at night.
Let it terrify you.
Let it crawl in the dark
as you walk by it.
Does it watch me from
behind the tree?
Perched on limb,
does it sneer?
Poetry defies the cage.
Let it.
Let it get the best of you,
running in circles
around the page.
Poetry is a creature,
wild, pure,
perfect by design,
desired and revered.
Let it escape you,
and then follow
as you will.

Look at your fathers.
            All dead men.
   And all you have in common
        is the blood.
      But, once that's spilled,
nothing.      
                      No truths.
  No lies.
                   Bury the thought.

Back to school tomorrow.
Back to the din of hallway talk
and chalk dust on my jeans.
Back to long walks from
parking lots to too-bright
classrooms chock-full of half-wits.
Back to the space where I contemplate
better men than I.
Back to stairwells crowded with
oblivious ****-type idiots.
Back to advisors
huffing and puffing when they hear
the phone ring.
Back-to-back weeks of solid hell.
Back to trying to fit my square brain into a round hole.
Back to gum stuck on my shoe.
Back to school.

and i wonder why tonight
my mind is screaming for silence
like a mockery of itself
shouting for a noiseless abyss
begging to be heard in the quiet
and i wonder why tonight
there are so many gaps
in my memory of past events
and i wonder if i lost those moments
or if i chose to throw them away
and i wonder why tonight
the world seems so much nastier
than it's ever been before.

I got me an all-night-girl,
keeps the door unlocked for me,
and even when my girl forgets,
she'll throw me down the key
sayin',
"come on up, down waste your time,
you're wanted in this room."
"Well that's fine with me,
but I've got time
to take my shoes off I assume?"
Yes, she's the one, the only one,
whose face floats in my dreams.
And she ain't like nobody else
'cause she's always as she seems.

Yes, she can take the paint right off
my Chevrolet Bel Air
with just a sweet little kiss
or one electric stare,
and
then she'll jump right in the back
and down the road we go
with the windows down
and the music loud,
she doesn't like to take it slow.
She's somethin' else, she surely is,
and she never leaves me wantin'.
This all-night-girl really rocks me.
Yes, she sure is somethin'.

All your false securities
will not protect you in any degree
when the Man descends from the sky to see
if he or she or them or we
will surrender to him finally
and gather all most nobly
beneath the sun, the Eden tree
and bid that man must bend the knee.
Will we cast aside our crowns, our pride
and recognize that what we idolize -
the dollar bill, the satyrized
faked-out phoney false franchise
that man has made as a disguise
to keep distracted the hungry eyes -
will not serve to get us by
but to keep us down and cold and empty?