Cruel, heartless mountains,
have turned their backs,
washing their hands off me.
And giving in to gravity
...I am a waterfall.

Your betrayal;
And my twisted heart
is carving giant grey rocks,
etching your name
on the ochre ribs of sand,
in a language known
not even to myself.

You let my anguish carry me.
And I could not
though I tried
remember why I wanted
to hold on to the slippery banks.

More tears from the sky.
I carried sticks and stones,
brown leaves, fallen long before yesterday.
And swallowing ashes of the dead
My heart, I filled with hate.
Suffocating. Silently choking,
the woman who was mother yesterday
is a child today.

Floods. More thirst, more pain.
And then,
Abused and tired and *****,
I could take no more.
Now a *******,
***** with your own hatred.
Not mercy, you just give me names.

Wrinkles at the meander
I'll met him at last,
He,who was born of the same soil far,far away.
Merging and kissing
softly at the confluence,
Then finally holding hands.
We'll promise never to part again.

White,naked,realizations.
A moment of breaking dawn.

Today
Two bright slits
of blinding light
pry open
these tired kohl-lined eyes
smudged black.
Javelin rays
trespass fences of barbed wire,
her mascara-ed lashes,
playing fortress to
teary lakes
of dreams and lullabies.

Though yesterday
She lay
so breakable in his marble arms.
her porcelain breast,
her delicate heart,
so fragile.
His breath on her neck, cold,
colder than December ice.
Alcoholic kisses
slow anesthesia in his eyes.

A cascade
of ebony curls
darker than the midnight sky
holds a constellation
of beauty spots.
But she
holds her universe,
his face
between her tiny palms.

A pair of snow white wrists.
His fingers,
long shards of glass.
A single teardrop on her cheek,
pale moon,
the consequence of a million scars.

One afternoon after
Two thousand years of unending strife
Three stubborn blades
of a forbidding ceiling fan
Orthodox curtains,
and the guarding yellow walls
were joined
by a mirror
too shy
to watch,
her indiscretion,
his blatant lie.

I realized, in Christian thought
If I prayed as much as I wrote
As much as I swore

If I read the Bible
As much as I make innuendos
Fake inappropriate with friends

If I spoke to God
As much as I speak to friends
As much as I spend time on the internet
As much as I listened to music
As much as I filled up every moment with noise...

I'd be a saint.

But I'm not.
I don't pursue.
I don't wake up saying,
"Lord Jesus, help me help others.
Help me be a better man."

Sure there are weeks
Then there are weaks

I'm left clutching a beer
Glass of ***
*****
Shots of Tequila

Wishing I was a better man.
Hoping I can be a better man.
Yet, when push comes to shove,
I do nothing.

I love You Father.

Exhausted
somewhat cold
thoughts fall to your toes,

lips and every part
in between
my small hands fit into yours,

spaces
make me gray
slipping into melodies,

of piano keys
slow dancing
away,

I float delicately
as smoke takes me to
another place,

our sun shines
only when
the stars gleam,

as do your eyes when
you sing my mind
to sleep.

It’s the morning after the last heart session
Eyes open but brain still crackling with static and white noise
When I try it again
Hoping to get pen to paper
Before consciousness can recover sufficiently to intervene
And proffer pretty syntax to the poem
Hold the mind blank
And stack the words in rows of green growth
Like garden beds
That only need time and attention to bear fruit
Let truth come from some other place
Than reason or left brain
Or the extensive vocabulary
Meticulously indexed in the cranial cavity
Somewhere near the brain stem
Or maybe in the DNA
As C, T, G, and A
Storing data like binary only twice as complex
The recall mechanism operating in the darkness of our comprehension
Apprehension of its failure threatening to leave the poem unfinished
Unillustrated
Uncalibrated
Un-fact checked
Like that matters somehow
Like the facts are important in art
Like the right brain has no sense of propriety
Just as surely as the heart tells lies in gibberish
A chattering maelstrom of syllables in a cyclonic vacuum
And yet somehow the heart speaks with perfect clarity
Uncluttered rhythm
Timing and flow
So you know there is more going on here than we fully understand
Lend a hand to help decipher the intentions of a part of yourself wayward from the rest of you
Leading to a collapse of the ego
And a blurring of the lines between you and I
Turning discrete data into continuous
On the fly
On the run
Under sun and and moon and sky
Until the day that even death fails to be discrete
Or even an event any more important than a fire
Converting energy from one form to another

A cigarette drips,
Between fingers and lip.
As the dark of December,

Hangs.