Getting loaded at 9 AM,
Is getting to be a habit with me.
Free & easy on a barstool,
Just like a Lost Generation loser.
Should be smoking ****, I suppose,
Everybody knows what a drag ***** is.
But I guess mind expansion is the last thing on my mind.
Just want to get stupid for a while,
With a smile smeared ‘cross my face,
Like a Salv’dor Dali clock.
And for every maharishi ,
Telling me how sweet it’s gonna be,
There’s ten thousand-thousand Nelson Algrens,
******* up my mind.
Getting loaded at 9 AM,
Is getting to be a habit with me.

That night was cold and dry as we gathered in the park.
Someone, I don’t know who, lit the first candle in the dark.
The dark mass of the Dakota was ever in our view,
as we joined to mourn John Lennon in small groups of ones and twos.

They kept us from the crime scene where John’s blood still stained the stones.
He was gunned down by some lunatic who’d acted all alone.
John was groaning, barely conscious, when Cops got him in their car
He died there in the back seat before they’d gone too far.

I heard somebody singing, in a strong clear baritone,
the lyrics of “Imagine”; John’s song that’s so well known.
Other voices swelled the chorus, singing loud and long.
What prayer could not accomplish we would try to do with song.

I went back to visit recently to show my children where
Their Dad stood vigil in the park back when he had long hair.
Strawberry Fields forever, the name they call this green,
where greying fans still gather to sing, to mourn, to dream.

You talk of killing yourself as one would of getting a glass of water:
normally,
casually.

You are sarcastic, and in this, too, there is sarcasm, but it's undertone is real. Honest.

So of course, you scare me.

It does not take long before you ask the question I dread:
Would you miss me if I were dead?

Because I want to know what the hell kind of question that is.

Stupid question, heartless question, yes I'd miss you if you were dead.

Stupid, because we're friends, because I know you, because I like you.

Heartless, because do you really think I care for you so little that I'd wish you away?

Nothing matters now, though.
It's been asked,
It's been answered.

So long as you do me a favor.
Just one - no more, no less.

And don't discount this, the way you always do,
saying everybody dies, not everybody dies by choice.

Stay alive, will you?
For as long as you possibly can?

Who am I to dictate, what you can and cannot do.
Who am I to force you, to live in a world you cannot stand.

But for me, for the others, for everyone who says we'll miss you, please,

*Hold out as long as you can stand.

I.
This is just another bad poem
Just vomited-thoughts-left-on-paper poem
This is a collection of grammatical errors
This would surely make my English teacher cringe
But no worries, I didn’t write this for her

II.
This bad poem is for you

May my subject and verb disagreement
remind you of all those misunderstandings that lead to raised voices
and nights where I cried myself to sleep

Sentence construction was never my strength, it still isn’t, maybe that’s why you never truly understood me—
called me difficult and bipolar
You said that I was too much

Did it ever occur to you that you might just misread me, like homonyms,
same words but with different meanings
misread my jealousy with accusations,
my concern for excessive affection

You said that I loved you too much
but darling, did you even love me at all?

Did I put too much meaning on your words,
turned them into similes and metaphors?
Turned your literal statements into figures of speech
You told me that you liked me,
so I blissfully interpreted it as a hyperbolic expression— called it love when obviously it wasn’t

III.
I was never good at using punctuations
I put too much commas,
unnecessary, misused, I kept trying to hold on
Afraid of the inevitable end,

Switched to semi-colons in an attempt to make it a few words longer

Because despite all our grammatical errors
no matter how shameful our piece of literature was to the English language

It was beautiful to the untrained eye,
To those who read poetry as it is
To those who don’t dig deep in search of true meaning behind the metaphors
It was beautiful to me

But I eventually learned that infinitives and infinities are different,
in spite of sharing infinite as the root word
Like our love,

started with something so promising
but unlike most novels,
there’s no happy ending

So I accepted defeat,
accepted the inevitable and bitter end
No more committing the same mistakes over and over again,
the same words over and over again,

Accepted the fact that synonyms existed,
words with the same meaning but also entirely different
new and unfamiliar, foreign and peculiar

IV.
I accepted defeat
No more commas or semi-colons
We have reached the couplet of our free formed sonnet—

I was never good with endings, I don’t think I’ll ever be,
So darling I hand you the pen, set us both free.

I heard he sang a song
One that would resonate
Fill our empty minds
With a little cheer
And I heard he was 10 feet tall
With thighs like dense boulders
Type of man
God himself would fear
Slowly the words
Became the truth
But they don't know
Who I knew
He was my father
But I wasn't his son
He used to make me feel
As a child like a man
He held me in his rough arms
and in that moment I found out
It didn't take blood to be a kin
But they still tell tales
Of the things he did
Who he did them for
And who he was
And the little that was said

When I found him he was
So close to gone
Hardly could chew the food I gave him
He was huddled in a corner
A blanket over his banging head
A man who I believed could trample
A stampede of Bulls
Let alone men.
But he was suffering and cold
They left that out in the stories
And the bottle beat his body
As well as his mind
And left him
But it was him
Still hard to comprehend
But I held him in my arms
Like he did for me
When I was young
I hope he's proud of the man I am
The man is gone
But he still wanders and hides
In the shadowed corners of my mind