and I saw you.
And yes, you were good.
And yes, you can sing.
The paper hearts fluttered down
from somewhere,
snaffled by hands
before you sank from view.
Young things in shorts
wielding rainbow sticks
seats in front and I doubt
my indie record
is cooler than yours
but I saw the sparks,
circus tricks,
dancers popping
along the stage.
But now it is Wednesday,
a four-hour memory
that is sleepily blending
into delicious red.

In regard to my considerer, my reader, my councelor:

I voice a tongue few can fathom.

A tongue of coalition, kinship, synthesis.

A tongue of cigarettes, fire, ash; perishing by the flick of the inhaler.

A tongue of resonance, expression, silence.

A tongue of nostalgia, exuberance, regret.

I voice a tongue few can fathom.

I voice a tongue of the former, future, but not present.

I voice a language few can understand; this language, few can understand.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school.
The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool.
A crumb of cake would be a feast
And last you seven days at least,
A flea would be a frightening beast
If you were one inch tall.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door,
And it would take about a month to get down to the store.
A bit of fluff would be your bed,
You'd swing upon a spider's thread,
And wear a thimble on your head
If you were one inch tall.

You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum.
You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb.
You'd run from people's feet in fright,
To move a pen would take all night,
(This poem took fourteen years to write--
'Cause I'm just one inch tall).

How many million galaxies there are
Who knows? and each has countless stars in it,
And each rolls through eternities afar
Beneath the threshold of the Infinite.

How is it that will all that space to roam
I should have found this mote that spins and leaps
In what unutterable sunlight, foam
Of what unfathomable starry deeps

Who knows!? And how this thousand million souls
And half a thousand million souls of earth
That swarm, all bound for unimagined goals,
All pioneers of death enrolled at birth,

How were they swept away before my sight,
That I might stand upon the single *****
Of infinite space and time as infinite,
Who knows? Yet here I stand, climacteric,

Having found you. Was it by fall of chance?
Then what a stake against what odds I have won!
Was it determined in God's ordinance?
Then wondrous love and pity for His son!

Or was it part of an eternal law?
Then how ineffably beneficent!
Each thought excites an ecstasy of awe,
A rapture rending the mind's firmament.

Infinity -yet you and I have met.
Eternity -yet hand in hand we run.
All odds that I should lose you or forget,
But, soul and spirit and body, we are one.

Is this the child of Chance, or Law, or Will?
Is None or All or One to thank for this?
It will not matter if thanksgiving fill
The endless empyrean with a kiss.

“You’re beautiful,” he says,
his voice a gin-soaked amalgamation of every
listlessly aging boss,
lonely husband in the shoe department,
loveless 3a.m.-hard-cocked stranger.

“Why don’t you smile?”

I widened my eyes
in an attempt to appear likable,
yet felt my mouth
straightening,
my upper lip sealing
the bottom like
a Tupperware lid.

I willed them to curl
upwards, unassumingly;
I wanted to smile the way
women seem to smile
while masking
ill-fitting intentions.

My mouth remained
firmly rooted,
obstinate railroad tracks running
the shortest distance
between the two plotted points of
left cheek and right cheek.

Behind these pretty lips lay
two rows of crooked teeth,
a cigarette-stained skyline
against the starless horizon of
tongue and epithelial tissue, ugly
and wholly my own.

To smile
would be a betrayal
of my own trust,
and if any man
were worth that
it certainly wasn’t
this one.

They say to play with words.
I see each page is a slide and we
smile
          while
                    we're
                              going
                                        down.

We're make-shift,
Doctor Frankenstein,
            piecing               together
words                  that
             would             lay lifeless
without our spark.

We're other people, dress-up,
with our lens-less glasses,
pens in hands
that can't quite reach the tallest shelf.


Through our words we rebel,
show the world we are more than naïve.
Just because we don’t think
in refunds and rebates and 401k plans...
Doesn’t mean our futures won’t be bright if


we only hope to gain
a sense of ourselves, in that
moment when the tire-swing
goes so high, you try
to touch the sun.

I am not a liar but I will lie to protect what I love. In the end I am a liar.

This winter air is keen and cold,
And keen and cold this winter sun,
But round my chair the children run
Like little things of dancing gold.

Sometimes about the painted kiosk
The mimic soldiers strut and stride,
Sometimes the blue-eyed brigands hide
In the bleak tangles of the bosk.

And sometimes, while the old nurse cons
Her book, they steal across the square,
And launch their paper navies where
Huge Triton writhes in greenish bronze.

And now in mimic flight they flee,
And now they rush, a boisterous band—
And, tiny hand on tiny hand,
Climb up the black and leafless tree.

Ah! cruel tree! if I were you,
And children climbed me, for their sake
Though it be winter I would break
Into spring blossoms white and blue!

In this day and age
It's 2014
That's fourteen years
Past 2000
Yes
Count them
F o u r t e e n
Years into the twenty first century
The century of space
According to film and literature
The century of progress
And the century of new ideas

Keeping this in mind
It's a wonder that everyone
And everything, by association
Seems to still be hypnotized
In my country at least
I love where I live
And I believe it's one of the greatest places
To grow and to learn and to teach
But I think more people ought to start thinking
And thinking about old ideas
And the concept of materialism
And the ideas of progress and prosperity

Hate only creates more hate
No?
Just look at any hate filled person
To ever exist
They hated
And then people hated them
For, in turn, hating them in the first place
It's a never ending cycle
Of persecution
And devastation
And extermination

On the other hand
We have love
Love plus love
Equal?
More love
That's right
And the only thing
The only power
In this world
That we all have in equal measure
Is the propensity
To love
And with love comes progress
And with love and progress
Comes
More love and progress
And things we can't even imagine

Because the whole world seems to be
Hypnotized
By this age old idea of hating
And limiting their own beliefs
To the point of catatonia
And never ending
Nonstop
Progress-halting
Dead ends

So I'm just saying
And that's all I'm really doing
Writing this right now
For nothing more than to perhaps get someone to read it
And say
Hey
Maybe this is the truth
Maybe this is he way
Maybe if I do something good
I'll start to feel a little better?
Maybe
If I try to do the best I can
Every day
Breaking free of whatever gains may lay in wait for me
And just embracing the power of whatever it is that guides us
That keeps us spinning on that mysteries axis
Floating through space at blinding speeds
Will help us out in the end
Because
In the end
At the last breath
And the last drop
And the last time we close our eyes
All we'll have
Is love

If that's what we choose