I’m stuck.
Caught up in the hard times.

Peace arrives, and there it goes:
My meter, prose
And rhymes.

Is this setting with awful emotions,
The only place I can be bothered to feel?

It's the same familiar road,
Dark and slightly paved,
Toward which my soul drifts at nighttime,
Pulled by nearly broken chains.
Sleepwalking to find some danger
Where, among the chaos, it can feel
A little less like a stranger;
Around the blind side of a curve.

While I sleep, it finds a way
To - despite my slumber - travel.
Lying down, and replaying how
Life and death, seemed to briefly
                    Stop their battle . . .
And rest so soundly,
Sprawled out, side-by-side,
Strewn 'cross the roadway's gravel.

           - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Each morning I awake
And to the same spot I've returned,
Lying next to my soul, in wait,
For a lucky car to make its turn.
I stand up, and spark a cigarette
-- click --
Just to watch the orange light burn.

        I inhale the noxious gases,
        As a car skids, and passes.
        I start back home with a shrug,
        And flick the ashes to the masses,
        Burn some bibles, and break some glasses.
        And as the rain soaks to my skin,
        It corrodes the memory like acid.

The overture sounds a muffled thud,
       And scraping flesh against macadam.
Un-rosined bows screech across nerves,
                     Dividing molecules to atoms.
Each neuron fires off, splicing into three
The soul from the body,
          and something indescribably between.

Catching fire, he ascends -
            "This is what it truly means to be!"
Each piece, each side
Breaking away in-finitely
To somehow become more whole
Through division, and in balance.
                  Like a reunion, of holy trinity,
                       Caught ablaze in fissile symphony.

                   -  -  -

And like a cork popped from Prosecco,
Rewound, and played reversed,
       He careens with a whining pitch
       And
                 f
                    a
                  ­     l
                          l
                            s
   ­                           From orbit,
                                  Back to earth.

Glimpsing God
Only to be clawed back
To the pains and pleasures of Samsara,
        To taste the bitterness of my own blood,
        Transposed
        From the ecstasy of Nirvana.

This is how I came to know the realm,
     In which our feeble bodies lurch.
'Ere I was born as a phoenix
                       from the ashes.
      In the rear cabin of a hearse.

A net sum of years,
            and romanticized numerals,
Built up by birthdays,
            to be torn apart by funerals.

Frayed ends of friendships,
            pulled until they popped.
A holy mess
            in the wake of a difference,
Between what said
            and what was thought.

My tides move in waves
Of reactive oscillation.
Bound to your momentum
By threads of gravitation.

Gravity, like rainfall . . .
I, never yours,
And you, never mine.

Each day I etch a tally,
And try to act surprised
That another day
Has come and gone
In which the sun forgot to shine.

I've lived the kind of pain they write about
In the tales of heroes,
                       who came and went without
Salvation or celebration; and,
      instead, became close friends of doubt.

When luck leaves your side,
And there's no one left watching . . .
               There is no martyrdom.
No heaven to fall from. No damnation.
                Just nothing.
                Nothing and no one.

But I won't let myself succumb
To the temptation
             of self-righteous certainty,
             false justifications, or
             egotistical self-mutilation -
Just to bleed on those who lay
             Below my lowly elevation.

                     Not like you.
                     I am not made like you.

No longer, will I distort my own view
To lie to the few, who stand with me in the fire.

               It's true.

               I am a worthless *******,
               and even I can hardly stand it
               when I speak about myself.
But this time . . .
It's about more than me.
And, for once, I'm going to spend well the wealth,
That I was given and didn't earn,
On those who showed me how to learn
               And to never become like you.

Yes -
I am judgmental and self-loathing.
I am selfish and I am wrong.
I am naive, and strung out and strung along.

                                But I
                                  am not made
                                             like you.

                                             I am strong.

I think I've always been alone . . .
At least, as long as I can remember.

But there's a part of me,
                       that still feels so connected --
To something near the source,
                        At the core of somewhere true.

Where we exist without our existence's limitations.
Where duality, begins to mean overlap,
                         And both fiction and fact,
                         One and yet another,
                         Things like "this" and "that"
                         Are the same, still . . .
Innocently unseparated,
                         In this place near to creation.

Maybe it's just my brain . . .
                        I do have a habit of creating dualities.
"Together, or apart? No," I think.
                       More like doubting infallibility.

                        --------------------------

So when I say I've always been alone,
I have to ask myself:

                                              "Have you really?"

"Of course you haven't been.
But who you are right now,
is no longer that you . . .
At least . . . not fully."

                                      "So, if I was alone then,
                                       Does that mean that I
                                       might not be any longer?"

"Oh, no."
I explained back to myself,
"I think you misunderstood me.
It's just . . .
That you'll never truly know,
Until there's nothing and nobody."

                        --------------------------

That's a haunting truth to tell yourself,
            When you're off in your own head.
At least I won't be alone in my regret,
                         When I'm among the dead.
I'll find community in that.  
Surely,  that's the place to which I feel so connected!
The place where maybe two of myself is enough
                      to make just one of me feel,
Like I'm worth something more, than more or less,
                      In a place that's neither there, nor here . . .
At least, there, if I don't feel connected,
                     To myself, I may feel near.