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Around you, the vivid shapes ebb;
recede and reduce to a wispy gossamer.
Look there! By the horizon:
glitter (or dust?) dissolving upwards,
a pirouette at the astronomical dawning
of consciousness.
This "hypnopompia": an intermission.
An interlude.
The in-between of inter-netted eternities.  

How long have you been here?
And have you been here before?  

You are nowhere. You are everywhere.
Perhaps it is time to wake up.

there is a thin
layer of grease
over everything
that i touch

yet the skin over
my knuckles is
dry and red
lips cracked

i try and try
and try but
never manage
to be enough

maybe they put hate
in the cleaner
i soak my retainer in
because i feel it
every time
my teeth clench

i know your name
your order your
lunchtime nuances
about your dogs
grandchildren
your job and house
little useless details
about what makes
everyone in this town
who they are

but you don't
know me
and neither
do i

You are a novel
gathering dust on my shelf
but not because I don’t want to read
but because I’m afraid
to turn the page,
afraid of how you’ll end

I love her.
No not ******* worldly,
But softly, purely , celestially.
Obsessively?
Not necessarily, just completely,
selfishly and I'm sorry.
I love her unconditionally, some say unconventionally.
But they don't understand me.
Yes...I love her.
Most spiritually, asexually, platonically and wholly.
I love her, truly, honestly, musically and poetically...
She doesn't have to love me.

In a midwinter night’s dream
  i found myself lost again,   
  or was it even this year ?
  It may even go back farther
  than yesterdays out of reach,  
  older than an ancient pyramid stone
 
Before the rebirth of past life deposits,
  unborn orphaned motherless sediment,
  flotsam of the ages adrift,
  unknown for more than a thousand years

... waiting for so long to see beyond the bounds

High atop a slippery edge-cliff
  i clung  ―            
Searching for a deeper understanding
  of who i am;

Roosting like a starving bird of prey
  with a broken wing
  born alone ... holding on
  With a fear in his eyes
that only i could comprehend
  
  Staring way down deep in the pith,       
into an internal pitch black abyss,
  just begging to see beyond ―
  Mindful it's so hard looking
  into the eye of a storm

Intimately parsing the recurrent source
  of reigning pain
Where the perpetual fog of isolation dwells;
an inversion,     preventing dispersion
  of the nimbus  cold  and  dark

In the darkness, there bides a suffocating
  emptiness,  
  A swelling silence what loudly knells,
  leeching through a perennial ache

An abating voice within hollers unheard,
  invisible as a bitter cold wind howling
  relentlessly through the hollow pang;
  Echoing the subsiding say
(squeezed out) ... of an orphaned soul
  deep beneath the light

Awakening to realize  ―  once i was alive
  and
i could feel me holding on to you



//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

It is the midnight
of another year
That stole so much
from so many
And tore like rabid dogs
At our skin
And will leave us bleeding
On the asphalt
As the earth completes its race
Around the sun,
But this year I learned
What it means to be a fighter
Sweat dribbling in my eyes
Muscles screaming from the effort
Even when I have fallen to my knees
I am still here
I am a fighter because of this year
A warrior
And as the sun rises on the first dawn
Of the new year
I will raise my fists and widen my stance
I am ready.