I had no idea where the ground was.
I had plans with the ground
But I flaked like a bad friend.
I found myself in the stratosphere.
Bad friend.
The ground missed me,
I would miss it later.
She drew a bath
Of gasoline just for me
And then she smoked a cigarette on Broadway
Right next to me
What the **** did she expect?
And now I’m at reconciliation
Trying to pardon both of us.
The priest told me I couldn’t smoke in the church.
This is my incense,
And I don’t get why it’s worse than yours.
I got angry falling back to earth
At terminal velocity.
Thank god the ground was soft,
That god the ground is a better friend to me
Than I am to it.

Leave romance to the poems you read.
Let art be art.
It’s our escape
From a life full of sharp corners.
But let a mess be a mess.
Let black be black.
If had a nickel
For every single
ephemeral nuke ive kissed,
I’d have enough money
To buy a pack of gum
That takes their flavor out of my mouth.
Love inherently has motion.
It can be redirected,
But it can’t be stopped.
I was discombobulated,
But now I’m walking home
To a strong man with scars over his pupils.
He has survived every day of his life.
The quality of my conversations with myself
Makes her look
Like some rusty Farris wheel
On the forth of July
In some small town that’s asleep
That will never wake up
That I can’t wait to leave.
Forgive my lack of gentleness
My heart has become a broken place
With sharp corners.

We can let the sun kiss us,
But we can’t eat the sun.
That’s what I’ve learned about love.

As far as I’m concerned,
there was nothing before
and there will be nothing after.
This is your one precious sip
of the ocean of existence.
No pressure,
but this is the only chance
you’ll ever get.
And I think you should buy
an obnoxious button up shirt,
and you should tell people
what you believe to be the truth.
You should skinny dip
with a gorgeous girl
in an alpine lake
so far away from all of this.
If you are brave enough to love,
you should tell your angels
how you feel about them.
And we should quit
everything that distracts us from that.
Be gasoline.
Be rain in the Utah desert.
Offer them a vacation from their suffering,
and you might just become free of yours.
Be a poem dressed up
as a brutally beautiful imperfect primate.
Be minuscule and gargantuan
and make enough mistakes
to know when to be either.
Bleed all over everything.
Acquire scars for the sake of reminding yourself.
Sip your one glass of champagne,
do it until you don’t know
if you are living or dying.
Cry out for it all,
Scream because you cant keep it in.
And struggle to be the funnel
that the universe is trying to fit through.
We will be distracted most of the time,
but there will be moments that come and go
where we are blanketed in galaxies
of forgiveness
and mercy,
and righteousness.
This is the one shot you have,
to let anything and everything bulldoze everything you are.
Don’t forget to remind yourself.

Rushing to fall in love
is like rushing to fall asleep.
Young man,
this universe moves on it's own time.
Maybe it's less like shooting a deer,
and more like casting a line into the river,
thee river.
The Fox River.
The murky slow moving Fox River.
It flows through Wisconsin's heart
and my own.
I used to not be able
to differentiate it from my aorta.
That river doesn't need my permission to move.
And the paper company
run by greedy heartless men,
almost ruined it.
But it couldn't.
And the fish still swim there,
and so will I.
And sometimes I relate more
to the dam that blocks it,
the one just east of Memorial Bridge.
And on my best days,
I feel like that dam if it were to break.
Like a window,
caught wide open in a theatrical July storm.
And the outside comes inside.
And the storm passes,
the way everything does.
And I think about the beautiful women I've left.
And I don't rush to fall asleep.
I cast my line out into the Fox.
And I'm appalled at the driftwood blessings
that pass me by.
Waiting doesn't feel like waiting
if you want what you already have.

I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy fighting in my own.
You make sacrifices
That aren’t yours to make,
A heavy bill you don’t foot.  
there are white roses that have grown
In a field you turned into a battle ground,
They are red now,
Stained by blood that is not your own.
And it drips onto the grass,
Into the soil,
and from the soil,
Into me.
Into all of us.
Into you, but you don’t know that.
I’ve been growing white roses lately,
That’s my war.
And they grow towards the sky,
Despite the fact they sprout
From the rubble you’ve left behind.
And unlike you I don’t pick their petals.
Their thorns don’t scare me because
They belong to them, not me.
They don’t mean to harm you,
They are just protecting themselves from you.
Though certainly
You have been harmed by others.  
A bullet.
A bomb.
A bombardment.
A breath of fire.
A bulletin board of things
That don’t need to happen.
I come to find it’s better
not to point the finger at white roses
Or their thorns.
Or myself.
This one falls on you.
So no,
I won’t fight in your war,
I’m too busy.
I’m just way too ******* busy,
Fighting my own.

If I were a card in the deck,
I don’t know what one I’d be.
And I don’t know of those cards,
Which ones sit in my back pocket.
I’m not sure I’m any of them,
And I don’t think any of the 52
Were made for me.
A card feels like a weapon,
I can’t help but wonder
If weapons were initially made to hurt others,
Or to protect ourselves from them.
But it seems for most of us,
We play a lot of
Aces against ourselves.
And in the face of seconds,
We understand very little.
Like how many seconds it took
To make a bouquet,
A bridge,
A bomb,
A person,
A picture of people,
Of me,
Of her,
Of you.
I question how many more seconds,
This glass will have champagne in it.
Well, it’s Prosecco, actually.
The seconds don’t care if it came from
California or France,
And apparently tonight I could give a ****.
That glass is my one companion,
This cold evening on Lincoln street.
It plays no cards against me.
We decided, very mutually,
to put down our weapons for a night.
Or for at least a second.
Just so we could shuffle the deck.