I have thirteen bruises on my right leg
but none of them hurt as the one
you left on the left side of my heart.

there's a photograph on my bedside table
you thought the sun will shine
whenever I'd look at it,
now you have gone,
the sky in the picture has turned to something dark
no room for sun,
and there's dust on the photograph and you
you are just a shadow
on the sidewalk I fall on letting all the rain pour down on my soul,
and the sun is just a memory
and you are just an excuse to turn my smiles into tears
and I am just the dust
falling on your lungs.

and we were just a glimpse of happiness,
an illusion
a dream,
a lie I listen to
before my eyes close,
before the darkness comes in.

i've been trying to explain this
my whole life
and one day
i will finally find
the right words

i am not going to stay

i will always find a way to fly
always find a way

i am sunlight
but never the sun

i will never be something
you can hold
always finding a way
to let go

my roots need air
not earth

to be held above water
is to drown

something in my heart
tells me
i will never belong

to anyone

one day
i am a flower
and at night
i will close my petals
opening the next sunrise
to have my clocks
float away

i will always
grow in the meadow
wild
where i can live
and die
on the summer breeze

i am not going to stay
i will always
want to be free

I remember the days when we were two stupid kids,
we were eating blackberries grown on tombs
and the moon was just a big stone
the sun was leaving its last breath on.

Now I am looking for you on the Wood street
where you last time smiled at me,
on the Wood street where people eat with their hands
the remains  of those burned by unhappiness,
while fools sing about love and dreams and the holes in their hearts.

I am looking for you
and I don't know whether you are a human or a dream
or the ash
that slips through my frozen fingers.

Maybe you are just the hole in my soul,
maybe the moon is more than a big stone,
maybe I loved you
maybe
you are still there somewhere
in the Sun's last breath.
Maybe it's just your smile
that has burned
covering my soul
my hands.

A day in the life of an alley cat, struck dead on the least busy street in the smallest town in Nebraska.
1 am: Druggy, *** you money, ******, don't deserve love, not easy to tell mom. I think of you. Your lungs are begging for my scold. Control is the word you use when no other fits the sentence. You occupy my mind when I am restless, testing the limits of kindness and low voices.
4 am: Your smile, the warmest hot chocolate of your eyes, your knuckles, the baby fat that melted from you, it haunts me. It's like I caught of a glimpse of the wrong angel, the half rotten, beyond gone, but still glowing angel. I killed you with a .45 and a gallon of mouthwash. You dripped into the Earth as a puddle beneath my toes. Gracious Lord, do not forgive me. I know I don't.
8 am: Insomnia without poetry. Tired without body. Maggots without mouths. Catholic priest, without sympathy. God without mercy. Drug abuse, without the realization of undignified addiction. Suicide without the comfort of killing, certainty.
3 pm: Sentiment, true and real, above annoyance and protectiveness. I am now a ghost above a body, finally weightless, finally free of His hands.
6 pm: Joy breaks open like a candy, soft center.
10 pm: Life tears my fingers open, unwraps the flesh from bone like Christmas. I feel my tongue fall out. Dusty antique radios are cleaned, losing authenticity. Their songs scream, sounding a lot like Billy Joel, after the catgut snaps. I feel my mind crawl out of the china cabinet.
11 pm: Nothing. There's really nothing to say at all.

roasting asphalt oven
sweat and petroleum pungent
a festival in the truest sense
diversity beyond societal bland
tolerance arches over rainbow
colored heads banging to the beat
the great goddess smiles as we dance
she knows true love when she sees it

sing to the dying sun
draping white shoulders afire
above lahar fields green again
successions of ash and germination
evidence of universal rotation
barren to blessed
sway to the eternal rhythm
bass heartbeat in our chests