Remember those city nights we spent
inhaling the marijuana and halal truck tinted air that fills the space
between the skyscrapers?

Glowing storefronts illuminated
both the skies with their stars glistening quietly under coats of dust
and the streets, dense under ***** and ***** spilled by boys
who yell obscenities to girls
who hang their heads low,
ashamed to be happy to have their push up bras appreciated.

It was the summer we read Catcher in the Rye religiously.
We were overflowing with privilege and hating privilege.
Oh god, how we thought we hated privilege back then.

In June we graduated from middle school,
and you found out your father was cheating on the woman
he cheated on your mother with.
In July you kissed a boy for the first time,
even let him feel you up a little.
I couldn't help getting uneasy,
even though you said it was nothing.

Most nights we couldn’t contain ourselves, shouting ideas
fast as the taxi cabs who'd nearly run our still-growing bodies to the ground,
always in a hurry to get home to their own sleeping children.
We raged rebellion against the red lights.
There was no time to wait around for things as unimportant
as people who weren't us.

In August, I took a klonopin pill from my mom’s drawer
because I couldn’t stop the dread beneath my skull.
It made me sleepy.

We were so filled with poems and wine copped at art galleries
where we’d feigned intellectuality,
that we'd see a *** on a subway train
and call him a vagabond.

Back then we thought we knew how life worked
like the palms of each others hands.
By September, albeit, our fingers were calloused
from the time we climbed a playground's wire fence,
twisted the caps off beer bottles,
and swung from the Monkey Bars.

Carried by the noxious scent of unbridled wretchedness,
The thoughts of the masses corrode, upon impact, the ill-prepared,
Summoning the martyrdom of a thousand misguided sheep.

Inside that womb of madness, the absolutes rule,
And the governing law is Us vs Them.

Enlightenment unravels ... piece by ethereal piece,
And the true victims emerge as civility and patience.
In a moment of revelation, laws become clear,
As we meek and meager exchange freedom for protection.

A hive-mind of revolutionaries under the influence, perhaps.
And I can only wonder ...
Where is the queen amid these hapless drones?

A man standing tall; a madman in leather shoes.
With a wave of an unseen hand, with the aid of a pen,
The thoughts and minds of a species are forged.

The beasts teach by doing. The evolved teach by writing.
Yet a word only contains the truth one assigns to it.

So where does honor reside?
Where does that unconquerable and objective
Nobility rest its tired limbs?

Is it found in the ****** of lawlessness?
Or in the temperance of our betters?

Is all certainty lost to them?
With abandoned streets and crowded fears,
The evolved, so different from the beasts,
Look nervously for that that unseen hand.
That hand aided with a pen.

And still,
Safe amid the outer rim,
The beasts look on.
And the proud and evolved accept their blindfolds.
An existence where truth and falsehood ...
Where good and evil ...
Where freedom and imprisonment ...

... Are all just words written by an unseen hand.

Oh what hopeful prayer i send to thee,
In this my hour of misery.
A belligerent death has done so wrong,
A wind has blown with brothers gone.
A face not mine in reflection i see,
and mirrors now they frighten me.
A voice of better times sowing mines,
and my eyes kept missing the growing signs.
The sight of razors such a heavy weight
this stretch of rope and a growing fate
It takes fifteen feet or five minutes of blood
the thoughts come on like a raging flood
so I raise my sword to fight this more,
though one day life will lose this war.

I came across this house
with all four walls still intact,
in a lost town, a forgotten state,
in a country without conversation;

and I went inside.

It’s kind of silly,
but at first I had knocked.
I almost expected someone to answer.

But of course no one did;
no one ever does.

There was no food inside,
or anything else of use;
all scavenged long ago
by those most likely dead.

There was this marker;
black, permanent …
Sharpie …
a reminder of life
before it had ended.

I went to the cleanest wall
and etched my soul;
I wrote you a message
in case you ever stumbled upon
the same house.

It said
             I LOVE YOU
and I signed it
                              YOURS

At least I know,
if you never come here
someone else might;
they’ll find this message
and rediscover just a single grain

of
hope

that’d previously blown away
with the rest of the world.

Today I found a phone
half-buried in ashes.
I casually picked it up
and dialed your cell.

You answered on the first ring;
a faint wink from lady luck.
Your voice caressed my ears
and I burst out into tears.

I inquired about your day
and you told me all about it,
that you were on your way home,
and asked me to lay out hamburger.

I told you of course I would,
and that I couldn’t wait until
you pulled up in the drive;
I would kiss you forever.

I begged you to please hurry
and you reassured my worries;
you were just around the corner,
and soon we would be together.

I sobbed and told you I loved you
and you told me you loved me, too.
And I believed your every word,
even if the phone had no battery.

The King of the World is on his way now,
he always shows up when the chips are down.
Everyone just loves The King of the World,
he always arrives with his banners unfurled.

The King can be a loud chap,
or The King can be quite a quiet mime,
he even puts his pants on
one royal leg at a time!

The King might eat breakfast,
or The King just might not,
he is everything you are,
yet is is all that you forgot.

He's a musician of sorts,
with a very big band,
his arrival is in herald,
throughout every land
-with brass trumpets a-blare,
and snare-drums rat-a-tat,
he makes everyone aware,
that he's now where you're at!

The King marches his forces
through the cities and fields,
assure of his courses,
lying flat beneath his heel.

He revels at the sight of deterioration,
fills his belly with the joy of nations in extinction.
The King grounds everything down to things he scrapes off his boots,
he topples the governs and poisons the cultural roots.

The King's fixations are splashed with spatters of blood,
turning kingdoms into crumbles of ashes and mud.
He bulldozes the bodies into toxic pits of ****,
contaminates by obscenity, wringing his hands at the wit.
Lionized by his minions in the empty empires he wrought,
The King's elite ruling class is dictated with rot.

In the aftermath of the bile
of his genocidal, sweet plight,
The King celebrates with great style,
turning the daylight into night.

With bonfires a-blaze on the wicked, windy wasteland,
The King of the World strikes up his big band,
and once marching again will torch and ravish the land,
dropping massive, beautiful bombs for the sake of the thrill,
melting the people and villages and eroding the hills.

The time for The King
always is nigh,
for he is surrounded by
the conjurations of lies.

Some say he is evil,
(but, he's not the Devil, you see)
-He's The King of the World,
he is you, he is *me.

The desert land
Stretches on like an endless sea
A vast chasm of nothingness and emptiness
And all that exists
Is the hot sanded wind

Crouched down in a ball
Loneliness is the only companion
To the desolation that has become life

Peering at the setting sun
Knowing the terrors of the night to come
The knife holding promises of peace
And it beckons for the warm flesh of serenity
And the blood of tranquility

Limbs stretched, vision ablaze;
home in the dust like a statue
idolized in the center of town
where all of the villagers
have turned to ash
on my behalf.

Leaving me to bathe
in the leftover turmoil
of yesteryear’s quarrel,
refusing to shut my eyes
and allowing their genocide
to penetrate any sanity
craven enough to flee.

Warrior scream in a world
where no one is around to hear,
climaxing until lungs explode,
discharging a cancerous mist
of the forlorn’s plague.

Pleading to the sun,
that ******* sun,
pleading to these spirits
******* with my head,
the ones surrounding me
like a city without tongues,
I can still hear their despair.

Pleading to God,
if He isn’t lost
like the rest;

pleading to whoever
still cares enough
to listen:

*Take me.

They were running out of water,
while we still possessed plenty,
stored in bottles, jugs, cups, toilets,
stored in the gutters and backyards;
a supply large enough to quench
billions of parched throats.

But before their claws could scratch,
we defeated them through sacrifice,
through patriotic self-destruction.

Now our supply is just as low,
desiccated by mushroom sighs;
wasted by hereditary wastelanders
cashing in on an apropos wasteland.

Like history predicted,
we destroyed it all.

Can’t recall the last night I slept
without awaking multiple times
under the serpent’s cataract eye,
mistaking a midnight whisper
caressing my defense systems
as the shiver-inducing slither
of a mercenary’s lucid blade.

Hours afterward, eyes stretched
in fear of invisible shadows,
as the sun rises to meet my gaze,
I can’t help but wonder
when the night will arrive
where imagination
isn’t the villain.

There was once a time when my wife
would have made a fuss over my nails,
nagged me to scrape the dirt underneath
until I was presentable to guests.

But that was a long time ago,
back when my wife was still in my life,
and not a memory distorting mindwaves.

Now the only guests I am able to endure
are the vultures impersonating Death’s halo;
enhanced in a game of waiting the other out,
determined to last until the other cracks.

The dirt under my fingernails worry me;
ponderings of how long they will remain,
and if I will ever clean them at all,
actions depending solely on
the annoyances of a lost void.

Where are you?