Schizophrenic,
the way we love.
your love and my love bind my hands,
a straightjacket ,inside rage is trapped,
a pent up swirling vortex futile against tender restraints.

Yours is the voice in my ear,
at war with the angry noise in my head.
‘Love’ you whisper across the space and dark between us,
reassuring the buzz and hum of desperate uncertainty.

Your hand slips into mine, rescue in torrid waters
Anger surrenders, too tired to howl and rage.
‘Love’ I breathe back, and the noise becomes distant

I wonder how one who lives by the sea
can ever truly believe that love doesn’t exist.
Do you not see the desperation in the way
the waves pound endlessly to the shore?
They crash deliriously on the rocks,
and it reminds me of how I want you:
infintely, eternally, like the stars.

I am so tired of this sick, dysphoric feeling I get in the pit of me,
a dull ache in my bones.
I keep going:
I purse my lips and choke on my flowery words.
I won’t pretend to be a poet anymore.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to just love me ironically,
or kiss me sarcastically,
or undress me metaphorically.
I want this to be honest and pure.

I don’t need a love song sung at dawn,
or towers built in my honor.
Sunsets and moonlight are not for you, I understand.
I just want to feel you breathe against me in timed rhythms.
Rise, peak, fall.
I need this.

I find cannibalism intriguing
2. Bee stings
3. I haven't heard that speech that every boy needs
           to hear to be a man

4. The love that bottlenecks in your throat when someone dies
5. I have to be heavily medicated
                to enjoy my life
       and it feels like cheating

6. A tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out
7. Raising a second generation in my hometown
                It's this place
         That keeps me down

8. Jack the Ripper shows
               when I'm home alone
9. I've read every Sherlock Holmes
           and I am jones-
       ing for another
                   story to make me think

10. Same God, different names
11. Is language to blame
                  for misunderstandings
           or is it just human failings
Faith is a frail
       old woman
              feeding her 1,000 cats
     1,000 separate bowls of milk

12. The class of 2009
13. When I drive home at night
            I pretend to be someone else
       singing along with the radio

14. Ghosts of friends that walk right through you
15. Maybe the past never really happened?
     Maybe I was someone else back then?
16. Men
            Who leave me and fly off to
             Never never land
      Boys, not men
            Who don't want to grow up yet
            and probably never will

17. Ladybugs

No paints and not one canvas
Nothing sellable at all
But, an artist is an artist
With art to share with all

No profit in creations
No way to sell his works
But he creates pieces of magic
With lots of different quirks

His tools are nothing special
Pastels and pieces of old chalk
His canvasses are static
They're the place that people walk

He's a sidewalk chalk pastel artist
With only digital designs
His work goes with the weather
Cracked pavement creates lines

No matter where he travels
He can work when the muse strikes
But, he has to watch out for street walkers
And folks riding through on bikes

His pictures are amazing
Where real life ends you can not tell
But, because there is no canvas
He has nothing to sell

He creates from chalk and pastels
He is an artist just the same
As those with paint and easels
He just plays a different game

Donations are his lifesblood
An empty cup beside him lies
Stand back and be awed by
His artwork before it dies.

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

coated in black tar
a rat by the tail
pull it out from your throat
it's too weak to scurry
pried from it's home
let it go
pick your poison

drown it

in a stream of ethanol
the ghost of a rat

No.

clean the little creature
feed it some crumbs
watch it not grow
make it yours
house it in affection
watch as it tames, no longer craving black tar
let it go