during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
******
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

It's never quite right, he said, the way people look,
the way the music sounds, the way the words are
written.
It's never quite right, he said, all the things we are
taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we
die, all the lives we live,
they are never quite right,
they are hardly close to right,
these lives we live
one after the other,
piled there as history,
the waste of the species,
the crushing of the light and the way,
it's not quite right,
it's hardly right at all
he said.

don't I know it? I
answered.

I walked away from the mirror.
it was morning, it was afternoon, it was
night

nothing changed
it was locked in place.
something flashed, something broke, something
remained.

I walked down the stairway and
into it.

I smile whenever you smile
and feel the clenching
pain in my chest
whenever you feel low.
                 But you are not a burden.
    Love cannot be true
    without every ounce of
    you.
And just as beautiful as you are;
the scars on your heart
will not go in vein.

yesterday's pain
could be tomorrow's
grace.

You just have to
wake up and find-out
for yourself.

For the past couple of months, I have been staying-up way too late and have been sleeping-in way too much.
      My days have been consistent of waking up just to wish that I could go back to bed.
          How ridiculous is that?

At one point in time,
I could've sworn that things would be different right now...

But not too much has changed...

       Just my attitude.
           And the long list of failure's that continues to grow.