A time of hollow silence
A time of tranquility
A time of hope and dreams
A time for hushed pleas
When elders wake to a cup of tea
A time for you
A time for me

I tried to sing you a song
a ballad of love,
I use ballad loosely, of course,
For my voice was hoarse
and my pitch was squeaky,
"I think you're tone death" you proclaimed,
with a cute, little, laugh.
"You must be blind" I said,
"I just kicked that song's ***!"  
Yet deep down I know the only *** kicked today was mine,
those chords ran me over,
and didn't even ask for the time.
But still as I was becoming great friends with the ground,
you picked me up,
you brushed the dirt off my shoulder
and washed the blood off my knees,
I must say, I was very pleased.
I guess what we learned from today is that my singing ability may need improvement,
and this rhyme, in all its amusement, may be a little cheesy,
But baby, we make this real life ballad of love
look oh so easy.

He was chilling.
He carried himself with a frozen solidarity,
something that Robert frost himself would be proud of.
Every candle that tried to melt the ice around him only melted any hope he had,
farther into the ground.

She was not just any candle though,
she was a blazing inferno.  
Something that cause's even the most blinded eyes to turn and stare in awe.
The gleam,
burned his stubbornness,
his fear
and his sarrow.
Now his hope and love, along with her, were the only things that stood solid.
So they burned brightly together,
Into the night,
through the morning
and above in the stars.
A beautiful blaze.

Exactly a year ago my life was in a horrible place. You can't even call it a horrible place though, because horrible places have big, fat warning signs reading: "DO NOT ENTER, YOU MAY BE EATEN ALIVE" everyone already knows they're horrible. This place I was in was more of a place of darkness, of lonely shadows shouting out for help, even though no one was there. This place not only ate me alive, it chewed me up, spit me out and burned my remains to ashes, right along with any hope I had left. Everyone said I just needed a flashlight to get me out of the shadows, I laughed, thinking they'd never understand.

But then I rediscovered hope, in the form of beautiful brown eyes and playful giggles that reached out and pulled me into a safer, warmer place. She not only has given me hope. But much more than that, she's also given me reassurance, she's given me fortitude, she's given me light in the darkest times. Now I finally understand, life can be dark sometimes, but there's always a light to get you out if you look hard enough.

Dear Grandpa,
Its's Alex, I know It's been a while since we last talked. I just wanted to tell you how much I miss the sound of your voice around the table, how much I yearn to sit down and eat your home cooked food that I used to practically run away from, how badly a want to take that somber walked through those cornfields again. Yes I know the months leading up to our final words were tough on our family to say the least. I was young, too young to fully grasp what was going on. I was also immature, I Just wish I gave you the respect you deserved. I still remember my father telling me the story of how you pulled that couple out from their burning car, you saved their life. You truly could do no wrong, could you? I hope you know that I am building my life around the way you lived. I want a lot of things in life, success, money, maybe even a great family. I could go on...I want you too at least open one of my letters, even though I know It's useless. What I want the most though? for you to look down on me proudly from where ever the man upstairs puts people these days and say See that guy right there? That's my grandson, isn't he something.
I guess that's all I have to say for now, see you soon Grandpa

Everyone always said she was a sharp girl,
they don't know the meaning of sharp
the paper that her ink soaked emotions slice through every night?
knows the meaning of sharp.
the red, dicey, paintings on her arms, thighs and stomach?
they know the meaning of sharp.
Even the hands on the clock cut like knifes as she starts her fifth hour of tears,
They too are most definitely sharp.

I was going to write
But the words got caught in my throat on their way to paper,
I choked
And vomited them across the floor.
I tried to pick up the pieces,
As I did, words scrambled around each other,
What was meant to say evil
Turned Into love when I accidentally picked up an O , instead of an I.
Deviltry and liar  got lost in the mess and all I got out of both was alive.
I guess all I'm trying to say is, everyone is going to collapse.
When you do collapse, picking up the pieces is only half the battle.
Sometimes you have to pick up the right pieces.
Sometimes you have to leave your deviltries and the liars out of your life,
So you can finally love being alive.
Sometimes you have to choke on the wrong words,
In order to pick up the right letters.

If our love affair was a popular place for family vacations, You would be an ocean and I would be the beach. You would embrace me and kiss my outer edges every morning. Just enough for me to fall in love with your waves and your curves,  before the sun would awake and you would drift away so it wouldn't catch you fooling around.

and now,
the sun is asleep,
it's dark,
i'm lonely,
and there certainly isn't any families running around.
(Children don't like being teased)

Adults tell us that we are doomed as a society. That we spend to much time on our bright little screens. They say our minds will never be that bright, colorful or innovative because we are all so twisted in the black wasteland of materialism.
Materialism, that's where it all starts right? They act like we rolled out of bed one day and decided we'd add it to the dictionary, like no one had ever heard of it before. Do they forget that they rolled into bed one night and created us. Then naturally nurtured us, filling our undeveloped brains with everything we never knew. Do they remember what it's like to be a teenager? To be right in center of the horribly repulsive world of want. Because that's what being a teenager is; going insane over the fact that you can finally make this world what you want it to be and obsessively hoping and begging for it all by the simple age of seventeen.
Seventeen? Most seventeen year olds are incapable of loving simple things, like early morning rain showers or the smell of spring on freshly cut blades of grass. But to our own fault, we want to be in love with the most complex thing this world has to offer; another teenager. Most adults are probably brainwashed by their cookie cutter work schedule any way, so surely they do not remember what it is like to want. If they don't understand being a teenager how can we explain to them the obsession of technology. They bash us for never taking our eyes off of things like twitter and always having a friend to reply to. A lot of the time we even bash ourselves. I believe we don't give ourselves enough credit. Always wanting to see what's new or whats next is not an empty action. The desire to scroll is, even though we may not realize it, a desire for intelligence. We can never seem to leave our brains empty. The obsession with technology is actually an obsession with information. We can, if we choose, channel this into amazing things and maybe end up rescuing the world, not dooming it like our parents, teachers and guardians stubbornly believe we will.

From his balcony above a man watches down on a little town in Missouri,  
he pinpoints a bleak silver container as it slingshots into the darkening shadows above.

It yells to him,
"help, get me out of this awful place."
A trial of slate grey smoke follows the container as if it were it's overly attached mother and within a second pulls it back down into the atmosphere.
After descending the container skids across a schoolyard, rolls off the sidewalk and crakes into minuscule pieces.
From the cracks tear gas spills out in all directions covering the once quiet little down in terror, relinquishing it of any tranquility that remained.

The man on the balcony sits and observes the events that have unfolded.
From his perch he can not tell black from white.
He can not tell man from women.
Turban from top hat,
child from elder.
he can not see if interlocked hands declaring their love and denouncing death that blares from police megaphones, are hetero
or ****.
He can not see who's pride is enflamed by blue uniforms
or who's mouth's are covered by dew rags to prevent themselves from speaking a death sentence.

The gas covers it all.

He can only hear footsteps running away,
guns shots following the footsteps,
and unfinished prayers as bodies stain the side walk.

In this moment,
the chess game of life becomes not black versus white
but human versus human.
And the man wonders, from his balcony above,
why it must take weapons that destroy equality,
to make us see each other as equal.

Emotion
is a barbed wire fence
and I am an inmate of hostile commotion
and you
are visitation hours
opening up from 3 to 4
and always leaving me wanting more
hung in a noose of suspense
behind that barbed wire fence

If I were to paint my body a certain color I think I'd choose blue
I wouldn't choose black, it would be too telling
And any bright color just wouldn't be true.

Blue would be a median.
A wave in the sea of many, passing by swiftly. Undetected.

A tear on the cheek of your most loved friend. Falling down with no exact path in mind. Melting into the kitchen floor, alive one second, gone the next

Blue,
Would hide the true shadows. The cobwebs in the corner of the attic that incase old photo albums we haven't opened in years  

But Blue would also be honest,
Blue would not be the sun that paints circles of joy on your face,
Or sand castles on a summer day.
It wouldn't be fire, destroying everything it's tips grazed, there would be no flame.

There wouldn't be any point to Blue,
It would just be.

It wouldn't see
Or feel
Or speak

With blue there would be no emotion, I'd just be a rolling sea of bleak.

I could write about how the stars in sky,
reflect like the gleam in your eyes and connect us,
even though we are thousands of miles apart.

I could compare the curve of the moon,
to the glossy, upward bend in my lips,
when ever a thought of you passes by.

I could say you are like a working man's morning cup of Joe,
warm and uplifting,
something that always keeps him going.

But all of that seems way to complicated right now,
right now I need simple,
I need you,
to lay down with me,
and forget what this world is even here for.
Forget about the stars and the moon,
forget about work and ****** cups of coffee.
Because you in my arms is a big enough world for me.

Maybe he thought you were special
because of your silence,
How your aura came of as depressingly shy to him.

To him you were his puzzle,
He wanted to twist and scramble around in your mind with the joy and innocent wonder of a five year old.

A discovery,
That's what you were you him.
Something untouched.
And when he touched you,
You were his world.

As he traced his finger down the curves of your hips they become beautiful grass laden hills  

When he kissed your lips he felt like Adam taking a bite from an apple in the garden of Eden.

Until then you were undiscovered,
A beauty shut out from the world,
like most beauties are.

So he made the voyage
Made his home in your heart
Cultivated a civilization of nurturing care. You thought he was something like Jesus but when you look at it now he was more like Colombus

A lot more damage. A lot less to remember.

She will not remember your love as glorified free will, never ending oceans of purity, rolling meadows of green flowing grass covering her memories in hope and security.  She will not remember your love as vintage lip stick stained romance, framed in uneven Polaroid photos pinned upon her wall.

She will remember your love as religion, in the sense that it was absolute and ever present, but even she couldn't prove it actually existed.
Religion, because every sunday she got down on her knees and lowered her head, worshiping your love, worshiping you.

You were her God. Piecing together her shattered bones, sewing layers of her skin into a work of art, and then tearing them apart day after day in search for perfection.

You built her heart into an everlasting church of fortitude and self confidence, and then left out stain glassed windows so every once in a while you could peak in, just to make sure you were the one being worshiped.

Inside the church you placed preachers and priest to tell tales of loyalty, to make her recite her vows of your love before bed, to comfort and denounce her fears, whenever questions of doubt began to arise.

Finally, you cursed her, falsely called her out for her infidelity, put her upon a wooden stake and set it a blaze.

"Go to Hell" you told her,
and even though this is all a metaphor,
when she wakes up every morning to the sight of shadows and cracks in the walls,
when every step feels like she's walking on endless burning coals,

She actually believes, that in fact she is in hell.

If we consider ourselves equal, all on the same playing field, man next to man, women next to women, women next to man. Not one higher then the other I guarantee you half the conflict in the world becomes scared and runs away. Conflict is mischievous. Conflict is corrupt and the only way conflict succeeds is by using our own ignorant selfs against each other. Our ego's do half of conflict's work. If we fight against each other we become easy targets for things like conflict, evil and harm. They simply line us up on our respective pedestals, however high they may be, and shoot. One by one we give ourselves up and become victims. Conflict's job becomes a little harder when we become one. If we all stand on the same pedestal, blindly knocking us over doesn't work anymore, we have become stronger, and leave ourself more open to things like peace, happiness and love. The only challenge becomes convincing our greed and narcissism that they need to sit down and take a nap. Their time is over and our time is now.

If you were fire.
you would ignite from the tip of a cigarette,
your blaze would dance and flicker,
drawing my lips in.
I would inhale every single bit of your addictive being,
you would fill my lungs with thick, deadly smoke,
enough to make me sick.
I would exhale quickly,
blowing the smoke screen that is your lies,
back into the world for a true addict to find.
because smoking you would be a hobby,
not something I'd be truly invested in
right?  
I would cough and gag
promising my self to never come back to the poison that is you.
but my eyes would always wander and catch a glimpse of you, the fire..
dancing..
flickering...
and regrettably, I would inhale once again.
The funniest part is you're not fire, nor a cigarette,
you're a human being.
Yet you're still more beautiful, addictive and toxic then that flame will ever be, and just like the cigarette I always end up coming back for more. Always inhaling more then my flimsy lungs can hold.

12:15 on a Saturday night:
Oh how I do love when your eyes shine so bright,
and I wish you could be here,
so I could hold you tight,
I'd mold the curves in your lips,
and straighten the crack in your spine,
I'd lay you down, love you and whisper
*Everything is going to be fine

How we are so scared of the darkness covering the night sky,
That we never stop to count the stars.

What is beauty?
Would you even know if it slapped you in the face,
turned around,
and backed over you?

No. You probably wouldn't.
You'd be too busy trying to dip your feet in the water of the next social trend,
You would run right by it on your way to pick up your pumpkin spiced whatcha-ma-call-it,
Do those even taste good?
As far as i'm concerned there's too much tobacco smoke in everyones lungs to know what real fresh air is like.

So take some time out of your life,
lay down in an open field with some one you love,
and just think.
think about what it is like to look down on the world from a star,
or look up at the night sky form the bottom of the ocean.

Take some time to realize that you're probably rushing through life,
and you're missing out on how truly beautiful this world is.

Youth is a ****** up place.
We walk around with the blind fold of adolescence covering our eyes.
Nine times out of ten you'll step the wrong way and fall of the edge.
The most ****** up thing about youth,
Is the labels.
People judge you,
You judge them,
Creating an instant stand still of insecurity and intimidation.
A lot of stress can come from the labels you but on other people,
But sometimes we forget to look at the labels we are putting on ourselves.
We try so hard to fit in,
To be something we aren't.
We want to have the same label that everyone else has,
And society accepts it.
But why not be different,
Why not stand out,
Why not stand up for something you believe in,
Something that you can call your own,
Why not,
Be yourself.

Her broken heart cries out to me,
If only you could see,
That ingesting those pills,
From the devils plea
Hurt more than you,
It hurt her,
And involuntarily
Me....

Here's to the writers,
The hopeless romantics,
The dreamers who create their stories with cuts of a knife in paper made of everyone who has ever told them they can't.
Here's to the people who said they can,
The ladies who have smudged enough of their mascara with tears, to create ink on paper.
The men who go against society and say "I love poetry."
Here's to the thinkers,
The achievers,
The good doers.
Here's to you,
May your romance be hopeful instead of hopeless,
Something I can finally say.

She fell in love with November,
for the way the sun shined down on
decaying leafs
and chilling temperatures danced upon the tips of her fingers,
providing her with a perfect balance between life and death.

She presented herself to the world in this manner,
always happy and bright, but never content,
as days carried on cracks in her skin led to trails of pieces on the ground.
Her eyes often flickered between a beautiful orange and a sickly brown.
Her heart, as much as it wanted to be warm was deafly cold.

She was a mystery.

And as December rolled in and the world froze over in darkness,
so did she.
The only light in her life was the moon.
how badly I wish she could've loved a month like June.

You said once  you'd sew my uneven edges back together,

You tried, but the stitches popped like over worked violin strings that you still tried to play

The audience filed out as the procession of broken music danced through their conscious and out their ears.

They did not applaud.

But I did.  

My hands rediscovered each other over your failure to compose  

You were remiss to the horrible noises that covered the auditorium but I gave you a standing ovation.

And if my uneven edges became broken violin strings than your soul become the worn down ebony that let the strings go.

Pain,
Is not something to mess around with.

Pain can be compared to a knife,
That dangles from the ceiling, every night while you sleep,
The only thing that’s stoping it from piercing your insides?
A simple thin thread.

It does not take much for the thread to
Snap,
Along with it snapping every little bit of strength you had left,
Don’t mess with pain.

Then there is,
Love

Love can be compared to the blanket on your bed,
It wants to project you from the knife,
It tries its best to cover you from the pain,
But it is only a blanket.

As much as it wants to help,
To reach out,
To be there,
It simply is not strong enough.

Though sometimes,
If you give love a chance,
It can be steel,
So don’t mess with love.

Once there was a man who looked out his city apartment down at society and never liked what he saw,
so he left and moved away from it all, where the trees grow tall and the grass spreads out wide.
Taller and wider than the skyscrapers he one stared at in awe.
He grew his beard long and kept his worries short.
Vines grew around his thighs and dirt filled is eyes,
but the only darkness in his life was the star crossed night time sky.
Back in society
everyone continued to shower and shave as fast as they found new friends.
Even though there was no vines around there legs they sulked through streets dragging the heavy weight of their ego with them.
Even though there was no dirt in their eyes they were blind
to the truth.
Their life's were dark and dreary even when the sun shined bright.
Yet they always felt bad for the man who left them and their amazing life.

Down in Beverly Hills
Drowning in high end champagne
And pure white *******.
Getting high under palm trees
With Benjamin Franklin on his knees
Praising every little success and every little achievement.
Nobody believes it when you say you have life on string.
That you tell jokes for a living,
All the critics say you're the next big thing.
Yet the hardest thing to comprehend is when your mother comes to lend you a hand one day,
and to her dismay finds that what you told her was the other way around.
Your grip on life turned out to be loose,
and now life has the string around you, tied into a perfectly tight noose.
The fame was too much
Smiles came not nearly enough.
Even for the rich and famous,
Life can be tough.

I've always loved watching the sunset.
I suppose the same way I love watching your eyes close,
as we dive in for a long, velvet like kiss.
They're almost synonyms of each other,
They possess the same beautiful waves of bright, torrid, purple and pink,
exploding in the sky,
and through out my mind
and then one final, soft crescendo of descending darkness.

I've always loved watching the moon rise,
I suppose you are the moon,
my radiant flame guiding me through the dark,
always there,
as our hands embrace one another and intertwine
like two shooting stars, crossing the same night sky,
never worrying about where they may end up next.

But as much as I love the sunset,
and I love the moon,
neither compares to the beautiful princess I see in front of me,
when the sun rises,
and our eyes creak open,
like the flash of day through that dreary window.

Reality throws him through the wind shield,
Every glass shard that pierces his body is like a slap in the face, a stab in back,
Theft of his dignity.
As blood begins to rush out,
So do the memories.
Distant memories,
But just as fresh and painful,
As they were just a few years ago.
He wants to get up,
He needs to move on,
He dreams of picking himself off the pavement,
Covering all the wounds,
Forgetting everything.
But as he lays on the side of the road,
Drowning himself in the pool of cold  regret that has formed around him,
He looks up,
And all he can see,
Is red..

Ride Red Tricycle
ride soft and slow,
through cool breeze
and bloodied knees,
through the sun
and the snow.

Ride Red Tricycle
even when the sweat
glistens your face,
you are whole
you are pure,
you are in
first place.

Ride Red Tricycle
your time is slowly running out,
your tires are deflated
your innocence,
degraded
you almost can hear
your mothers shouts.

Ride Red Tricycle
far away from those shouts,
and never doubt those pedals,
while simplicity is still alive
because once your tricycle is gone
life feels like a lie.

Ride Red Tricycle
because that crimson complexion
never lasts,
soon it will be ghostly white
and all that will be left
is rusted memories
of the past

The blood spattered streets paint the fire trucks red as they speed by following screams for help that will never arrive.
Tears,
from citizens, loved ones, from children waiting cluelessly for their father's return,
paint the early morning sky blue. The sky shines bright in contrast to dark, suffocating shadows of smoke that haunt the city streets.
On that day memories and buildings alike collapse in front of white ghostly faces.
People come to rest, motionless in a city that never sleeps.

But tomorrow,
there is no red blood or gore
no blue tears or sorrow
no pale white faces stricken with fear,
because when the smoke clears
and America's lungs can finally take a breathe,
all that's left is a flag standing alone and swaying freely,
possessing the same three colors,
that had haunted a nation just a day before,
but meaning so much more,
red, white and blue.

It's like cooking something for the first time,
burning your hand and never wanting to cook again.
Even though you know what you would cook deserves to be on the menu of some five star restaurant. One that lovers go to, to sip fine wine and stare off at the sunset as they learn how to fall in love all over again. You still can't bring yourself to do it. You can't turn on the stove because every time you do that same fiery sensation rushes through your veins, reminding you what it's like to burn. You shutter, trying to think what life would be like if you never turned the stove on in first place.

Chained,
To walls of a white board,
As 1+2=3 narcissistically nibbles at the slowly decaying thing,
That was once called my dignity,
Because you see the school dreams of a hundreds,
Crisp red check marks, pressed on paper like a machine,
So when the teacher asks Does any one need scissors?
We all get up, slowly and solemnly as she cuts our dreams,
of circles, squares, diamonds and octagons into a...
Crisp..Red..Check mark.
And what was my dream?
for my son to look into his ****** cup of coffee one day,
and say "I'm different, and that's okay"

Everyone seems to need that one gateway to another land,
A better place,
where you can see the unseen,
grasp the untouched,
swallow your sweet sorrow.
This normally comes through a puff of smoke,
or lines of coke.
Yet I run from the idea of being thrown of the pedestal.
My life is perfect why would I want to diminish that?
For the first time I want to keep my feet on the ground,
and leave my dreams for clouds.
Because even on the ground their is an incredible view,
and the only drug I need,
Is you.

Society is plain
Society is black,
Society is what you forcefully swallow for a midnight snack
Society is blood that drips down your eyes
blinding you, keeping everything in disguise.

Society is a swollen throat trying to breathe.
It imprisons your mind when your mind tries to leave.
Society tells you:
“You can’t.”
“You won’t.”
“You never will.”

Society is the voice in your head
telling you life isn’t a thrill.
it kills, hurts and tries
to feed you lies as you pitifully cry.

Society tells you that smoking the green,
kills more brain cells then staring at the television screen.

Society takes the color out of the sky,
and lights up your twitter.

It is never shy and never ever a quitter.

Society is a spy that no government can catch
because society is the government, waiting with a watchful eye.

Society is also dead trees, wilted leafs
and smoggy factory smoke passing by.

But most importantly society is you
and I.

I'm sorry that the pores that litter my untouched skin don't drip normalcy on everything my shaking hand tries, and fails, to grasp at.

I'm sorry that I'm not the mirror that you wished me to be.
when you looked into my eyes you hoped to see yourself,
but all you saw was broken pieces and sharp edges.

I'm sorry that you asked for galaxies and stars and I provided you with a black hole,
consuming my being in on itself,
leaving you cold and lifeless.

I'm sorry that I don't fit the mold that you've sculpted everyone else into,
I guess I'll remain a lump of clay,
unique not like the rest but also cold and quiet.

Maybe one day,
I'll stop being so sorry.