From youth, not unlike the love
I received from my family, I surmised,
that extended love might be everywhere.
With artless, open arms and heart,
I embraced this simple notion.
In time, sadly this childish wish
was honed to a hard truth by maturation.

Friends and loves come
and go, fleeting in heart,
and committed soul.
Unreliably, flowing in and ebbing out,
like deep undulations of an ocean,
all too often with sneaker waves
that pull us under. Breakers pushing
our ship onto the rocks, in a sea
of shallow unfulfilled expectations.
Encounters becoming disappointment,
with too many frogs kissed.

My educated suspicion is,
beyond our family of blood kin,
Faithful canine love is the only
other "truly committed devotion"
we are likely to get.

In the end, that may well be enough.
Perspective wisdom can be a bitter lesson.

I am not armed with a heart
unbreakable. Floating above
are the names of the lovers
that went wrong and with those
the questions of uncertainty.
Those feelings are dead and
those feelings are gone and
still my heart beats, searching
for the vulnerability of being
broken again.

Take my heart because
it still pumps, it still bleeds
and I am not yet dead;
our love is very much alive.

I guzzled liquid courage
a lot
& found out it wasn't real
'till I felt
the concussion of a grenade
and heard the whizzing of small arms fire
above my head
& medevacs.

Pictures of dead people I know
are smiling and are so full of life
hanging on my wall
reminding me
to seize this day,
because it's not cliche,
and it won't come again.

The dreams I dreamt,
The tears I spent,
The sorrows I have,
The love I gave,
It was all meant for him.

His love,
His hate,
His laughter,
His sorrow,
I wish I could accept it all.

Our time,
Our thought,
Our laugh,
Our smile,
It’s now in the past.

My wishes,
My dreams,
My kisses,
My gleams,
I give it all to him.

There, amongst the northern skies,
Tears driven by ghostly squalls to
Fall on the blackened, bleak rooftops
Of this northern town, forgotten.
Left to a grey Victorian rot
Decaying factory ceilings collapsing on,
Litter strewn floors, newspapers decompose
With triumphs from yester year
Industrial dust stained brickwork
Grimy reminder, of the grim past
Haunted dim gaslight probing the fog
Days, nights only separated by murky light
A ghostly silence, hangs like a grimy fog
Cloaking lost sounds of dull beating on metal,
Boots tramping over cobbled stones,
The sounds of clocking on, clocking off, no more

Stuck in the catacombs
   of surreality  
dragons breathing fire
      in my brain stem
scripted as previews'
     diabolical graffiti
of cancerous breath's
      gray radioactivation
written on the walls of
   mindless chatter's rancor