Im envious of Bermuda.
Her triangle is so deeply recognized.
I am caught in the "this is me now" in the face of who I should've been, and who I thought I'd be.
Cathedrals stacked to the stars
Like for Margaret.
And that you don't know this reference is the perfect epithet.
But how can I place my weight against the scale?
Imperial? Metric? Metaphysical?
What is the search for a sense of self
If not a desperate notion to understand our gravity?
I'm grave, for the far too many I've buried and the far more whom found a mausoleum in me, secure in my secrets.
In theory buried with me, but buried within me, and that is far too great a weight to put on dirt and rock and mantle.
I won't be buried.
Not because I could not keep them but because of kindness in grief, and in the ground isn't safe for these stories to rest, lest, and list - oh list... they die with me never to be uninterred by graverobbers or corporate land barons seeking to build a new golf course.
If the earth had to bear the gravity of conscious existence, she would implode like a fledgling star.
I doubt humans are alone in the universe, but I'd honestly get it - such a mistake...
For evolutionary crafted monkees to dare say this is Me and bend the world and rules around us, mostly by seeking an understanding of those rules...
And then turning them to profit. How human.
Fools, all of us.
Slaves, indentured to the tide of society.
I thought the progression of civilization was to move forward.
The things we'd learned from the dark ages - foolish and desperate attempts to cling to what we thought of as power.
But what happens when power evolves?
It certainly has exceeded us by the boundless laws of physics.
We relent and release in deference to the "please lead me" through questionable times
No one questioning that we brought this unto ourselves
A marooned ship a mile from paradise but destined it it's ignorance to sink.
Nothing, spirit or body, would intelligently design this.
At the very least if the concept of God was not just metaphorical but an ecumenical argument that we should be better...
Why the need to argue at all?
We are perfect imperfections of random chance and about 4 pounds
Of mostly wet pretty much bacon
Electrified like an sophomoric Frankenstein
And most of us haven't even read Mary Shelley
We are a species so magnetic to ourselves.
Watch what we can do.
Even if we shouldn't do it.
Maybe I'll just do it to see what my neighbor does.
And so the echelons grow.
To a maximum order of magnitude 13.
If everyone tells two friends
And those two can only tell two others
With no repeats
Only 13 times can a story be shared before it exceeds the maximal population of our planet.
Only 13 times can a paper be folded in half until you breach space.
Life...
It's a poorly dreamed up pyramid scheme.

I hit the ground running
What else was I supposed to do
When I fell
Every thought in me
All that I believed
Said
I should have seen this coming.

But where were you
Who were you
Who was it I thought you would be
What did I expect you to do
Who were you...
Who was this "you" in my memory
A perfect stranger
Or maybe me

What did I expect
Was myself not enough to survive the storm
When I asked you and you held me up
Did I expect that you had some deeper knowledge
-- did you know me
-- did you see me for who I am... not who you thought I should be

Give it up, Ive had enough,
I drink too much to believe in belief
I am my worst enemy above even your worst
Criticality
So take a breath and walk away...
Maybe just let me breathe.

There is a work of words, clumsily compiled, that I may eventually build with enough confidence to post or at least speak publicly - about my grandmother. She was the last of my grandparents to pass, but not even the last of my parents. We ideologically disagreed virulently... but I am starting to see that maybe my father's legacy of doing good and getting ******* around every corner but persevering anyway... may be a gift from both sides of my family. 93, I think she was 93. Two careers, 3 children, 5 grand children, 2 great grandkids.

It may be that her loss is so recent, or that the last 8 years through trauma, surgery, and recovery - being with her was more difficult, and I was also so far away. After losing my father, and never having been afforded the opportunity to decide for myself  how I wanted to remember him, I reflect that maybe I could've spent more time with her - a conscious regret calcified by how difficult it became to talk to her more than a few minutes when I did. Those brief moments of recognition were like trying to watch someone using a fly-swatter in a hurricane of history - desperate to maybe, if lucky, remember me.

Those moments were so different from the hundreds of hours of conversation. When we would have lunch, just she and I - and SHE insisted that any words expressed between us remained only hers and mine... an honor I have always kept sacred.

I said at her funeral that she was a constant source of council, regardless our inability to find common ground on things like faith and "right".

It's weird that I may only be handling this now, but I think I understand her better than I did. To live that long, to experience so much... I am not sure I will ever have the clarity of spirit or the bravery of self to suffer so much for so long and still inspire so many. It was no accident that she was everyone's grandma - she did that on purpose, and we had better give her credit for that.

In all the apologies I could put in a letter
The thought that keeps clawing at me
Is you should've known better
I used to wear my heart on my sleeve
You knew what to expect of me
Until the day you chose to leave

I thought I left you buried
Beneath barrels of ***
Hundreds in sums
Meters of shame and grief
But you keep visiting me when I sleep
I cant even bear to dream
Soaked in sweat beneath my sheets

And now you're the spectre I see in the mirror
A poltergeist waiting for me to fear her
But I knew who you were all along
And I'm left with your memory
Someone you quite never were
But what I've made you to be
Who I wanted you to be

I used to think I was clever
Blowing out candles before the shadows
Could make me face forever
I knew how to bleed
In lines of poetry
Scattered on the floor in front of me

And each one of you is a wraith
Endlessly screaming your name
Speaking tounges in my brain
Ruining my headspace
But I cant usher you out
My body's become your haunted house

And you wont leave me
Or leave me be
Some apparition in between who you were
And someone I imagined
The walls keep moving
And the shutters keep the lights out
You've become the ghosts
In my haunted house

I kept my skeleton in my closet
But you had the master key and unlocked it
And when you bailed on me you let the monsters out
Left me to be alone in my haunted house
A ghost stuck in a meat machine
With perfect imperfect memory
Of how the victim must have been me
But like Amityville I drove you out
To justify the things I feel right now
They may have been creeping on for far too long
Saying let me haunt my ******* house

Its been far too long
Since I was left to learn to love myself
What did you expect
If I cant love anyone else
You never once told me love is like a song
That if I whistle or hum
It doesn't matter if I woodwind or drum
Someone will play along
I played to my heartbeat
But the arrhythmia was wrong

But Im a rogue line stuck in the refrain
Coda
Im a rogue line stuck in the refrain
Coda, Coda? [Jim, take out the bottom and reverb]
And I feel it in my pulse
I know that I'm alone
Stuck between my teeth
Its no wonder I cant speak.

In every block you hit,
You turned me into coin
When I burn it down, every pitfall
Couldn't catch that vine
The 8-bit ******* was meant to die

Put up with every danger
Too many times to be clean
I bleached blood off my sheets
From our injuries
I invited "you" to inflict on me

And for all my knowledge
Brought by books and bruises
"You" unrequited me... why?
Justify an existence when no one should be this..
In every "the end" you leave me...
Lady Chatterly...
My conscience cant decide
Who suffered more in this

I can not convince you
I'm the one you're looking for
You will always look me over
Like the Ducky you must ignore
You cant be persuaded
I was better left for dead
But you still find me
Dig-dug me up to bind me
In our "pet" semmatary
I cannot imagine
The suffering you've survived
To be patient enough
To surprise me.

One day when the photographs start to fade
We'll look on the patina
And reflect
"At least we made them"
"Maybe they'll be better than us"
We'll say, to the Polaroids and our progeny
And they will be our legacy
Reflections of you and me
Tattered negatives of wishes
Viewfinder images of the kids
I wont live long enough to leave

Stained curtains and ruined sheets
Stained curtains and ruined sheets
Stained curtains and ruined sheets

Only because
Only when
You could love me.

The snow falls like gossamer
All over the ground
A white winter landscape
With joy all around
Be merry and gleeful
With you and your kin
I'll be inciting mayhem
With my agents of sin

You can keep your young Jesus
and his ol' deadbeat dad
Keep your fat, jolly santa
and his red, leath'ry ol' bag
My sleigh's an old buick
Tricked out with such kit
It makes Captain Kirk's warp drive
An old *******

Merry metal christmas
And a ****** new year

Gather yon virgins
Round the lit evergreen
A more perfect self-sacrifice
I never have seen
Like roasting chestnuts
Their bodies will burst
Smelling of bacon and pine
A potpurrie in a hearse

And sing in the madness
Bring in the new year
A rage of songs and of fury
A purge Christmas's cheer

Merry metal Christmas
And a ****** new year

Kids asleep in their beds
Dreaming of sugarplums
They asked for an xbox
But I brought them guns
Spiked milk and *** cookies
Are fuel for the trip
Huffing tinsel to forget
How fast amazon ships

So beckon your best angels
With your red-ribbon-ed wreathes
While your racist old uncles
Drink, curse, and deceive
My iron reindeer
Care not for north poles
My midgets care not dig
F'r the kids deserving of coal

Merry metal Christmas
And a ****** new year

Wrap yourself in warm blankets
Watch old family films
Drink chocolate and eggnog
Until you've had your fill
When by embers of chimneys
And stockings carefully hung
Muddy footprints by presents
Are proof that someone had come

Fire and burgl'r alarms
Sound out through the night
Telling to one and to all
Have a ******* good night

Merry metal Christmas
I'll see you next year.

This is a show off off-broadway
Filled with prose and cause
Complicated expositions
Stranger than fiction ever was

I've auditioned a cast of characters
And never made the lead
Odd for that on these footboards
Are where they were conceived

I know this part by heart
Hell, I wrote the lines
Seeking my Euridice, my Juliet
Cursed to never find

I have no faith in critics
They rarely get the point
And in all the marvelous performances
I am still not "right"

It's gone dark inside my theater now
The cast and audience have all gone
The curtains took their final bow
I'll seek you from the balconies

I've kept the ghostlight on

I had heart surgery when I was 38, OK
I was actually 37 but somehow 38 sounds better
As if those few extra months arent walking me to my demise
I didnt expect to live past 20 so I've been on borrowed time
For the last 10 years I've been an alcoholic
Misanthropic, and full of vitriol
Sometimes you made me laugh but I get why you dont call
Some days I can forget you, sometimes I cant at all
Its been two years since you ghosted and somedays I still wake up and wonder why
Then I look in the mirror and I know that you were right
For all the pain and how much I bury the dark
You saw right through me and knew that I was lost
And things arent good now but they're getting better
I keep searching for a new you and a way to be put together
You were the glue that stuck the little pieces
Im a ******* humpty dumpty and all the kingsmen cannot retrieve me
So I keep moving forward because I dont know what else to do
I have sleepless nights soaked in sweat and I'm askew
Its hard to go to work buried in anxiety and depression
If I believed in god I'd be asking what's the lesson
6 more years until I return to the last place I was happy
I hope somebody wants to join that adventure
I spend too much time in my feels and know I'm sappy
I'm too pragmatic and know I'm a bad investment
Im a middle aged angry alcoholic
I stay up late hoping somebody will call
But I wont answer my phone, I dont deserve to feel alright
I've stolen hours from too many others and I am on borrowed time

I scream every night
Sometimes out loud
To the shadows and whispers
To strangers and passers by
Sometimes its Shakespeare or Poe
Yelling into the darkness
In the desperate attempt to claim
This life is mine
And you will witness me
I scream every night
Every night
Even when my own muffled voice
Quieted by reluctance
Anxiety
Sometimes its in my sleep
I wake up regularly
In pools of sweat
And my own salty leavings
However much I do my laundry
My sheets are always damp
With "this is me"

Oppenheimer knelt before death as the destroyer of worlds.
As only Ozymandius stood previously.
He was anointed, and found guilty
The curse to challenge and defy Death's wisdom and mercy...
To usurp "the bringer"
Required only a more certain demise
Several had met the challenge to arrive on the Black Dais,
But death himself remained triumphant
Asbestos, mesothelioma, lawyers,
Each took their place but never challenged Perdition directly
Until one so overtook him
Hell shook Oppenheimer from it's shoulders
The place itself defying it's judges.
Discarding death with him
Oppenheimer - prime acolyte of the light
Who could best even death at being the inevitable and unenviable end
Except life and light herself
Vitae stood guilty in her own judgement
Dismissing the darkness into half-forgotten memory
A shade now unchallenged, an undeniable answer
Her frail form untethered, and expanding into decay.
Vitae cleft her left arm
Forming it into an inkwell
And shaping her right into a quill
She began to write her story again...
"Let there be light"



We must go on

I am not who I thought I'd be
Sure I look a little like John McClane now
If he'd birthed Gary Busey.
An unrelenting action hero
That finds "action" an unlikely filter too far from reality, and "hero" a notion so freely given that societally we have reduced what it was meant to mean.
Heroes used to be subjects of admiration
That which inspired aspiration in our youths (utes- some of you get it)
But the title of "hero" was an impermanent...

(Character) is a hero (timeline) for doing (x)

Yet it becomes their lifelong nomination to the firmament of history.
How many of our "heroes" died on crosses only to reveal skeletons (a lot) or journal pages of moments?
How many times have "heroes" been exposed as nearly inexplicable excellence deposed by the consequence of inconvenient fact?

{This guy did a super awesome thing... but oh, wait - no... don't Google, he's really a *******}

That achievement, as laudable as it should be, is no replacement for an expectation to be human.. to be in spite of being.

Athletes, actors, poets, and songwriters, producers, investors, and attorneys who all say "you're going to do great kid", who support you right up until the moment you aren't doing great... or in reality: they're about to get "me too"-ed. {I desperately want to call it moo-ed}

It's not an accident that every movie is familiar and every song sounds the same except the few artists who stake their own vulnerability - it's a badly written matinee.

[Like trying to make those words rhyme]

If we sound or seem mundane, it's because you, the sheeple, conditioned to show contrition at the steeple, believe it to be a reflection of your pain.
We've crafted a carefully cultivated currency of resistance in the constant contentious, captivating and  licensious, breeding and ever feeding, consumers of today... to tell you all to stop listening to us.

And stop smoking cigarettes <wink>.

Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and a genuinely talented songwriter keeps writing songs about why you should stop listening to her. And that none of you get "it" is probably why I never will.

It's more subtle now. The punk and post punk movements of the pixies and velvet underground refaced the pavements surreptitious to what "adults" then thought was "a wall of sound".
But what is punk now except an exposition of 30 somethings trying to find the after hours after party, even literally underground? Or just go to bed?

We cannot even have an open discussion without being so hurt we have to find private corners to complain about anyone who disagrees with "me"
Never giving credence or understanding of what "me" means...

It's nothing. History will forget you as I hope it forgets me. The only thing I hope is that a few people read my lines, I might help shape a few minds, and I might live forever in the national archives - the pages of memory.

Terrible people are capable of great things
Just as every person history records as great...
Just as all "Great people" have all done horrific things.
No exceptions.

I may have been seeking
A perfect disaster
Thats where I found you
Poring through the files in the evidence room

Swipe right, its like a mirror
You're my reflection
In the beautiful fractals of broken stained glass
A composite of missed memories and failing to act

But I
Keep callin you "lady",
But thats a stretch like calling me a "gentleman"
I am a perfect *******
That's what you're after
Baby I'd be your "*****" if only you'd let me in

The epics and opus
The ouvre and the frey
The bastille and the bastion
The adept and ashamed

But who are we
In the frames of history we felt
How can we judge our present or past selves
When our weakness has always been information
Who we are now
What we believe
What we should be
Who we become
Come tomorrow
No longer valid
And relent
The past creeps up on us
And sometimes we were wrong
We were wrong
That you'd learn with us

Once in a generation
A poison is brewed
So deep with temptation
By the brewers
That the sweet deeps of sleep
That it promised
Could question our own moral bonds
And yet we will continue to pay
Humanity comes with a tax
Those with the knowing
Owe to the ignorant
And to take profit is worth reticence

In times of trial,
Its true to remain neutral and
To seek to redeem each side
When the use of that very trial
Is weaponized
You must revolt
You must revolutionize

Im tired of standing and watchin
Sam Vimes,
I know you're here with me.
I have not much left in my life to fight
But they can take it from me.

How do they rise
How do they rise
All of your angels,
How do they rise
They lift their heads up
They lift their heads up
And they rise
See how they rise.

Simple songs were always the most defeating -
And they said bard magic was silly.

Im sorry I've forgotten you
When you brought to me so much meaning
I cannot recall your name
But hear your words like breathing
A few vacant phrases
Punctuated by lines imprinted still
Each chord caught in a whistled melody
The gaps I cant fill

I cannot forgive you
For not forgetting me
Settled, a consistent reminder
Of a once promised harmony

But the drum beats echo like tip toes
On a "Fosse" glossed frame
Slipping and sliding
Never to be with me whole again
And maybe this is the first look
At a future that destines me

A plaintive consideration for what's left of my memory
Or a record more broken by forcing the needle to read it

But I apologize to you
And to those which made you to be
For how much you've shaped me
Your details escape my memory

Assured I will find them
Or replace them with what I thought they were
You can bet as a guarantee
I'll only miss or be off a few words.

Someday you'll remember me
And it will have felt like mistaught chemistry
But when you struggle to not forget my name
Know that I'll be doing us the same
And the Once Upon a Time that could've been ours
With hookers, blackjack, and cigars
Disappeared instead into fractured memory
A faded name you just cant quite see

I wrote you love songs before we met
And you don't really even know me yet
But before too long you'll bail on me
A tryst turned joke I don't find funny
But for all the times you rose and fall
And I changed my sheets
You'll forget them all
A memory just left with me...
Amnesia is my jealousy

You always said I talk too much
I cared too much for it to be not enough
I'd never be your goth girlfriend
Wrong equipment
And too out of trend
But despite your flaws
I was willing to fall
I bared my own and offered a few more...

But you fall, I fall, we all fail
We fall apart, we want and hail
We want different things
The age and all... it didn't need to look like this.

And someday you might remember me
I could've been your next catastrophe
Or left me be to my bitter cynical destiny.

Did you ever make a choice
Well intentioned
Did you ever give violence a voice
That set things in motion
Did you ever watch when
I lit the sparks
Did you ever see
Look deep
Was it a candle?
Was it a sparkler?
How long did we watch it burn?
Look in the flame
Watch it burn a little longer
Search for the blame
Watch the wick release.
And once the fuse starts to ignite
Casting new shadows
I never wrote a song long enough to survive
Dynamite.
Once a flicker in the dark
A shimmer scared of the spark
The flame runs away
And it chases her through her veins
Out of pure devotion
The fire says
You set this in motion
No forest can ever breathe
Without my last breath
To crack the strongest seed
Somewhere within every cigarette
You ask for me
And you will blame me
In this I grieve.
Fire made wild by a passion
To turn away our eyes
When we'd prefer to be blind
Keep in mind
My embers are all that I leave behind
"Wildfire" is what you'll call me
When your lives are in commotion
Remember just once that life that was mine
You set in motion.

I think we have a different sort of problem now...
One which has probably always plagued us,
Sometimes its embrace has held hold of us for so long
Realities were changed
The concept of "the other"
A simple idea, that you are not like me
A mechanism of the smallest
Most unevolved parts of our brains
Yet without which we could not "be"
The sense that
I am
The sense that
you are not what I call "me"
The basest recognition that we are different
How simple an idea - independent consciousness
That even genetically identical twins
Can recognize themselves from each other
"The other"
We've weaponized this basic perceptual function
Since the very dawn of our species
And through complexities of
Environment
Genetic bottlenecks
Genocides
We are all "I" now
Nearly 9 billion "I"s
All seeking an ability to be "we"
That is the basic function of civilization
To define "me" among the "we" and split our burden of work
For the greater survival of the "us"
But "us" is so much weaker than "we"
"Us" desperate in our divisions still seeking to be "I"
In a complex infrastructure that "me" can be a part of "we"...
This is how humanity is gas-lit and misled
Told to always be seeking, and never to be sought,
And if the "I" of a "me" is charismatic enough...
"We" let them lead "we" and in doing so
define an "us"
For now
Civilization must be governed
but "we" continue to give away all of our "I"s
to be "me" among the "we"
In theory to push "us" to progress
It's why terrorism has the wrong name
Each ruling faction in history
Was a "terrorist" to someone else
- to have made someone afraid
"Terrorism" seems to declare that the objective
Is nothing more than fear - so reductive
A sentiment to dehumanize their "us"
and label their "we" - "them"
To make their "we" less than our "us"
I prefer Organized Non-Unified State Actors (ONUS)
"Terrorism" sounds like an individual act
Coordinated by a conspiracy of individual acts
Robbing "their" identities of recognition
- which is probably what it all is ultimately about to begin with
"They" do not fit the fold of the agreements of the many civilized "we"s and want to be their own "us"
But there is no room, resource,
There is no time
Food
Water
"We" have already identified, occupied, and commodified
Every resource for an unaligned "us"
"You" must be "we" for your share and to survive
"Their" methods are poorly rationalized, but very intelligent
Bad intellect and severe commitment
"We" dream of conspiracy to make "our" "us" look capable
But their "us" is organized and capable
If "we" ever want to end terrorism
"we" need to call it what it is
Revolution with no vacancy
Organized groups of disuinified elements taking action
It doesnt matter that the "they" may not reach "their" goals
- "they" dont have enough "we"s on their team
"They" make "we" hurt
And shame "them" for it, ignorant to their "us"'s hurt
I am not making excuse or any compassion
for those among the universal "us"
Humanity, sapiens,
Who cannot get on board with "we"
because the most of the "we"s decided this is how it will be
And it is broken
And it is wrong
And there are many hurt
But "us" lives in a universe
finite in 'isms confined to our limited time
So as much as I or any "me" tries to recognize an ONUS
in the attempt of just being seen by "we"
It is always "the other", how are "they" unlike "me"
Not what do both "we"s share.
The world's greatest collection of "we"
Wrote arbitrary rules rules of "us" in this time
That "they" isn't yet a "we" for all
"we" are not yet "us"... too many "we"
too many poisoned by "me"
and worse
entitled by "I"
When "we" do we dont need lables anymore
Race, theology, gender - ways to describe "the other"
That will be a beautiful day
When the sun rises on a dead rock
Condemned to death by fire in unyeilding climate change
And then further pushed to annihilation by nuclear winter
Robert Frost was right
The world will end in Fire and Ice

The kids were singing
Jesus Saves
But I must have missed him when he came
I probably passed out on alcohol
Or hit my head and had a fall
But what was left when I woke
Doesnt feel like love at all

I just cant get around it in my mind
Those winged cowards left us behind
If this is whats left of life now
I hope that heaven keeps me out

Have a tap dance party on my grave
**** it, do some drugs, throw a rave
So sing along as I scream and shout
The world's gone deaf
And we're gonna drown

And I dont want hell to let me in
Not that Im above or better than sin
But ash to ash and dust to dust
Best better bet to let my body rust

The kids were singing
Jesus Saves
I'd rather gamble with the devil
If he comes my way
Im no angel to rise or fall
I dont want anything at all

Let divinity take me
Dispose of me and lead into
The nothing that I seek
Just count me out

Die not
And sleepest thou assuredly
That unto death
Still vigil willst I keep
Mighty and deadly
Whispered or strong
When before he comes to you
It is I he will meet
Poor death
Cannot come to you without
taking me
Let him come
I invite his chill breath and
Steel of sythce
On my watch no harm
Willst come to you this night