One Day
We're going to stand
Under that one bright red arch
In the desert.
When the sun sets, we
Will roar away into the night.
You will take pictures of stars.
One day
We're going to drive
To the coast
And fight over food and the radio.
We're going to take our clothes off,
Run through the surf,
Because they told us not to.
One day
We're going to save up and fly
To an old green island
Where you'll show me art and alcohol.
Maybe I'm "settled,"
Maybe you aren't sad anymore.
Come on, let's be tourists.
One day
We're going to stand
Together at the altar as
You marry the loveliest girl.
I, your best man who isn't one,
Will hand you the ring
And remind myself that it's not the end.

One day
We're going to rise
Above that American Dream
Because we're the better ones.

I shan’t be yours to keep for all the days,
Yet we will not allow this fact to hold
Us back from nights of dang’rous run-aways
To rivers making feeble young feel bold.
None knows these moments though they are our best,
For journals are for those with shameless lives;
I tire of passing-halfway wicked tests
That won’t allow mistakes like love to thrive.
Now I begin to question all I’ve heard
About your kind and how we’re not the same,
To disregard the tales of hearts like birds
Caged under books of ancient writ and shame.
So time still has to tell who remains free
And who is here in youth’s captivity.

Wednesday’s child is full of woe;
Poised on the week’s ****,
Am I stop or go?

Sky and seas and ice
And wind and heartache;
Blue soothes, tingles, and bites.

For a time associated with dying and death,
Fall is a brilliant swan song
Of deep blue sky and blazing red.

The National’s “England” keeps me sane:
“You must be somewhere in London;
You must be loving your life in the rain.”

No useful information or parables
Holds the coffee table, but instead
Decoration and stories that make life more bearable.

This is my decoration.
No seriously.

A picture in paper,
Ink, graphite, rubber--
This is me

An introvert
With compelling words
Becomes an open book

The ruler-rigid lines
Do not hinder or confine
But support

That mere scratches upon a page
Can create a new galaxy of  understanding
Is a neverending wonder

Over the vast horizon
of a blank page,
One can watch a universe unfold

With a blank page,
One receives the ultimate gift
Of a liberated mind

These are my words
This is my passion
This is me

Taking flight

If you raise a knuckle to your eye
And draw away one salty circle,
Perfectly symmetrical,
Then why have a tear at all?

If crying inconveniences you
No more than a sniffly nose,
No make-up smears,
Then your tears did not water the world.

If you can sob an ocean into your pillow
But pull away when thinking of the mess you made
Instead of just crying harder,
Then I hope for you to be forever cursed

By that one person who holds a mirror
In front of your unrecognizable face.

The bareness of Winter,
Skeletal branches,
Black and silver,
Chimes like a music box,
Like a melody stripped
Of frivolities, so the weightless
Chill in the air is life
At her most pure.

Summer's tension mounts,
Cacophonous nature
Or threatening silence,
And shanghais children,
The truly perceptive ones,
Into a game of tag,
Running like dervishes till lungs
Feel like burning.

When one walks in the night
As I do,
There is nothing for it
But to switch on your torch
And pray that the batteries don’t quit on you.

If anyone tells you they know this town,
Well, that is a cocksure lie.
If anyone tells you that the alleyways call to him
Then he is simply running from the bridge
Stretched over the river;
It’s that long drop into black that’s inviting him.

I had a friend once,
Claimed nothing was alive
Till that one clanging clock,
But he saw the dawn too early
And stepped out like it was daytime already but—

Let’s not talk about him.

No, I’m not saying
No one has business on the night streets.
That’s my own call out there,
Business.

I like thinking I protect the town,
Like any other man on the force,
But I know what the real danger is.
No man should step outside his house at night
Dressed up and looking out like the sun’s high in the sky.
Fun, yeah, sure,

But the potholes will rob you
And the little rats will trip you up as well,
So it’s really for the best that when I see you
Rambling the dark
And not skulking like any proper man would
I shake my truncheon at you
And point your drunk **** back home.

Smog at this hour?

The rising sun alone
Can turn the heavy mass
Into something visceral,
The veil that lies
Between two Irish-American hearts.

Train tracks and wooden shacks.
Houses.
The smoke is there,
Too,
Rolling off the ends of our fathers’ cigars.

I swam through it last night at the jazz bar
As it rose higher and higher,
Turning the lights as blue
As the singer’s voice.
My brother’s piano sounded the real melody,
Driving,
Like trains waking up in the morning
And chugging through back courts,
Under windows,
And out into the country.

Cat, how does it feel
To know that no matter
If your eyes are of steel
And your heart like the latter
You will be received with love?

When humans copy your style
They are met with rejection
As if heaped with the bile
Of society's reflection.
You're the worst role model.

But they too spurn emotion
With a life almost sadistic;
I believe they repent with devotion
To the life of an artistic.
But what have you done?

You lie and lick and paw
And pretend to have a master
To whom you give the bird in your maw,
****** with the night's disaster.
Beauty must excuse everything.

No music, no friends,
Just a notebook,
Myself, and a pen
Under the purple sky.

Never again did I beg
For the sake of watching love
Run on white legs
Under the purple sky.

I traded distortion for reverb
With one gas tank
And earrings with birds
Under the purple sky.

I brushed aside wrong answers
In favor of questions
To watch a team like dancers
Under the purple sky.

I don't regret the ocean,
But standing by that pond
Was both devotion and demotion
Under the purple sky.

For all the smoke we put up, I’ll admit it was never much,
Not the flames it should have been, just a small, coveted spark
And for all my fanning, blowing, tending, it was yet too hot to touch,
But I swear this was never meant to be such a farce.
What’s oh-so-hilarious is that you’ve never realized the game
That I played like a mean-spirited child with a false set of voodoo dolls
And how high the stakes were for me, but you can no longer claim
To be the one Joshua who crumbles my dark stony walls.
Still, I promise to never blame you for this, my dear,
Because for all of your unmeasurable, ineffable strength and charms,
Qualities beyond compare, I review my praises to you and sense nothing but fear.
You deserve much higher elegies than I can lift with these weakened arms.
But I digress; it appears that an “Aromantic Asexual” is nothing you’d choose;
Yet I’ll never renounce the time I was given to love my Muse.

I was so caught
And not in the way I planned
I could have simply looked like an idiot
Or maybe I was truly caught
If read, that fantasy could reveal so much
And it was as if she knew
Drawn to the discovery
By the magic I weave into her name
I mean, that is the truth of it
Can I have any other fate
If it was first in you
That I was truly caught?

Over eight
Under eight
I'm leaving home
Yeah I could wait

Between a friend I love
And a love that hurts.
My name is mud
My tongue is dirt
When I'm with you
And cannot say
Either you I want
Or go away.
Sometimes I hide
Behind my mirth;
Erase my pride,
Give me new birth.

You deserve better.
I cannot **** a monster.
You shouldn't have to.

No understanding,
But she sees more than the rest,
So I just cower.

It comes to this?

Painting my eyes black
Blindly mucking up my face
It is disgusting

I feel each day pass me by
Without a word, without a cry;
Desire wells up at the gentle tease
Of the fresh and alive, god-child sea breeze.
The food I eat is damp and stale,
Stolen from the life I cannot exhale.
And worst of all, the people, real,
Going about their business still
Ignorant to the one that hides
Beneath their feet, breathing lies.

A welcome relief
Fresh air
Innocence and longing
In the same breath
Soon to be crushed in a crowd of well-wishers
It's a shame that it will be the only song we know

I'll tell you my plans, wandering trouble
You lend an ear because you know the truth
You see what I can't
I'm just voicing to the wind
Because you'll know all about me
But the connection was just anothing piece
of High School Talk

Leave me here.
Your lovely face
Is more terrible
To me in its compassion
Than it ever was in its wrath.

I can't survive your punishment
Any more than
The fetters of your mercy,
So let me feel
Your pity
One last time...

And leave me here.

Walking through the haze of life
Too often numb to feel the strife
Until the Jester's parting shot,
Culmination of misery that you begot

As usual the joke begins as cruel
But the shift occurs; you're breaking rules
Of existence set since birth of time
For this feels bigger than any life

A river of senses rushing through
And realization of not what, but who,
Brings you closer as if to drink the sky.
The blood is gone, it's time to fly.

O siren-song!  No more I long
For breeze-brushed hills and golden halls
But for wind-tossed hair and salt-licked lips
Yes my life I would trade for your call

Am yours
Was yours
Still yours
Just say -
His?
Not his
Don't tell
Never his
Inevitable.
Impossible.
Ineffable.
In you
Always
Whenever
Broken hearts -
Who cares?
Yes.
Yes yes yes

Shoegazing.  The first time I heard of it, I understood it immediately.  Some may be hard-pressed to find the attraction in the stillness of the spotlight, but any modern romantic envisions with ease the dust on the tops of well-worn Converse, scraped from the warped wooden floors of the old warehouse/depot/theater/other artifact of urban decay turned venue.  Such mighty inwardness may produce confidence in the "performer," but true faith, as such a focused person must know, comes from truly knowing thyself.  From these fragmented origins spring the music, the serene meditation of one lifting higher the soul of the watchers.  He does not know that he has watchers.  All is as it should be.
Stargazing.  It's been many a year since my earnest forays into the night, trying to capture the clean green-dusk scent that also unaccountably exists in the ugly, fragrant shelves of the public library.  Who of those that take the time to look does not appreciate the night sky?  It is an open mysticism, inviting, to some calling, with less of the hypnotic tricks like incense and smoky air but more compelling draughts of equal parts mystery and light.  Light, for our nature; only the sort of dark mystery that alludes to more of the nature of ourselves, more essence.  Future.  But to open myself to the sky is to become sensitive, seemingly undesirable to the warm, smoky fragrance of an always inward and reflecting (stagnating) heart, which is why recollection caught me unprepared when she referred to the relation of my posture to the drably speckled slabs of ceiling as perfect stargazing.  With the recollection of such charged memories, I was more surprised when she leaned awkwardly back against my knees and called it
Stargazing.

It may seem peculiar indeed
To have not paid homage
To this Nightguard of Poetry
But claim me for society's victim
For upon gazing at her ether-omniscient--
White curves encase the infertile desert
As, if you'll recall, her ancient patroness
Her consorts are of far greater interest
(A weak word hiding unspoken depth)
Unique in their millions
And, I find, quite indescribable
Except appropriate to represent that mystery
(It resides among the ugly, fragrant shelves)
Unworded but for breezes and shadows and eternity-swirls
Her mysteries were long drained from that pale, gaping face
And of no great interest.
And somehow I am writing.

The rain stops, light breaks
A smile so bare but just such
As to slay his dark

It was life once,
Hissing in its transformation
Through a writhing, twisting dance,
Once pure,
And giving, giving, and giving.
Now it floats,
A sort of mist over your legs
That beat the ground like my heartbeat
Let me be your mist
For as long as I can form the ring in your sky;
Caught up with white skin and sunsets;
When was this ever not literal?

The jolt is what wakes me
In the air, in my stomach
With chills running up my legs
Fingers so cold...
Breath of the sky spatters down
In rain drops; I'm surrounded
I relax into it
I want to fight it
I want to live it
Eye-born lightning strikes me,
The same place twice
And finally when the thunder rolls
I am washed clean
So new