Poison dripping off my chin
Little did I know when the words
Slipped off my lips
Little did I mean or maybe I did
In the darkness of unintentionality
My thoughts flow mixed with feelings
Unexpressed
The anger swallowed by compassion
Is a slow poison
And it overflows

LS:   This place is desolate
Where darkness ***** at your pupils
And infuses your lungs with a cocktail
Of cold and despair
Amongst the mistletoe and bells ringing
You hear a quiet echo of
Isolation that has no shape
Unexplained, ever mysterious
Fearesome lack of a vital link
To hold your feet down on the plane
Familiar to countless faceless strangers
And familiar faces alike
Where willingly you could join
In a silly dance around the circle
Outlined many spiraling ages ago
And feel at ease and ONE

And to the sound of choral
I could fly up with crows
And see it all from
Unattainable
High
Up there in the milky clouds
But
Nature is so uniformally ordered and
Strange as it is no law contains
This spirit so eager to escape

WW: I hear the darkening silence echo
And drone in the northwood stillness.
The forest treetops lurching south
Into the memory of sunlight
Crowns bending unbroken,
Grasping unspoken,
To behold the waning daylight

While the spell of darkness cast deprives,
It opens up the craving soul

This is the naked truth,
This is the light
Oozing from graying monotone
Spilling from cracks between the pause,
Betwixt the shapeless lines of poetry’s refrain …

For life is not a work of art,
The colour a fleeting moment cannot last
And the paradise of going somewhere else
Still so far away

wildish

Is it my priestly duty
to be denied?
love—time and all else, at all cost!
while he went home alone to watch a movie?

Another victim  
sacrificed
having squandered all my pieces in his game?
Trudging home
along the river
slow, in snow
I parse my losses

At the outskirts of a homeless camp
I pause below a viaduct
hauling passion by a leash
warming hands
avoiding hovel-eyes
Flames flicker on our faces
receiving absolution over embers
of a burning embrace

There trace
in glowing holocaust of skids
in human bleatings and crumblings
our smoke rises— pure   obscure
Appease with *****-blur
the icy, stinging God of winter stars...

G’nights inaudible as blessing

Am I derelict enough to be worthy?
Fallen far enough?
from the porches of prosperity?
to escape it all?
That wedding white
the newborn’s head
that numbing denial of decay?

Am I depraved enough to make it?
to the pages of your tragedy— minus poetry?

But the angel said
“The poetry’s more!”

Than leaving me—beyond you

...in the shambles of my words

Ode to "I knew him enough to know he's a cool guy."

When a child dies, everyone feels the ripple. But, I wonder if the dog in his Instagram profile picture will miss him. I wonder if he will run to whichever monotone voice calls him again.

How life rattles on, moonlight just barely bursting through cold winter mornings, sunlight touching grass like mother's hug, flowers blushing like first grade first date, favorite songs eaten and reeaten like taffy, how laughter bubbles and pops through gapped teeth, life moves before it sinks into the ground, under the calla lilies. Everything goes quiet under the red sun. It moves silently like ghost footprint. It is gone like bone chips in fingertips.  

Cherokee rose, tell me what you know. Will he be buried with a cast on his wrist just like I remember him?

Its 11:30 at night. You, lovely you, talking about killing yourself while all I picture are your loose fitting shirts and dimples.

If dying was simple, everybody would have done it.

Nobody talks about the truth of overdosing. You'll be on the floor, puddle of ***** underneath your cheek, the last meal you ever ate stuck to your face, you'll never have felt so weak in your life, even when downing a bottle of downers. Hallucinate until you suffocate on bile. Or your heart stops beating. Or your lungs breathe themselves backwards, inside out. Your brain will be alive for 3 minutes, just enough time to regret it, 100 times, outside your own cold, twitching body. Mom will find you, fall to her knees, call dad from downstairs, and black out in grief.

It's not pretty. Your funeral will be messy. People you barely remember (a girl who had a crush on you in kindergarten, the person you told you were depressed that couldn't bring themselves to listen, didn't want to believe it, the girl who taught you to cut your wrists like that) will cry over your body like it was their own. They'll feel tears soak shirt, after shirt, after skin, after shirt. They'll feel your voice on the back of their neck in cold spells and hot flashes for years. Mom will wake up from nightmares, call dad, he's drinking.

And here you are, thinking it wouldn't matter.

I picture your loose shirts and dimples and how simple it would have been to say nothing, never let you brand my heart with anything but a weeks worth of deep regret in a month or two, maybe three, however much longer you can stand heartbreak. But it's not like that, I'm stronger than that. And you are too, you are too.

I remember how the blood
on the tip of each blade
of grass in the sun
where it had splashed
made them look
like tiny swords you see
in picture books
when my friend placed
his hand on a stone
and took a knife to his finger
right through the bone
for pointing out the faults
of his father to his face
who later hung himself
in disgrace and the son
with the stump
by his right thumb
felt the pain
one thousand times
as he flung his father's shame
all around praying for
a cleansing rain to come
water the flowers by the grave
and wash the sheen of his sin
away to make everything
all clean and green once again.

I  hated the scent  of Old Spice and Vick’s
VapoRub in the old couple’s home,
and the stench of ****** diapers

in poverty’s  bedroom, and the stink of
*** and bacon grease in my friend’s
house;  when I remember these

smells I want to throw steel
at glass and cry into
the sun.

I'm locked in a cage.
Half my body spilling out through the bars;
Arms bent, snapped bones piercing through skin,
Stretched out, reaching for the key that gets further away.
Other half still held captive, hidden in the darkness
Of the secret that never wants to be paroled.
I want to escape, but the jagged limbs have formed a knot
And I can neither be pulled out through the gaps of the bars,
Nor back into the depths of repression.
I'm half free and half trapped,
And those two states of being cancel each other out.
I am nothing.