Anytime I walk at dusk
I never raise my voice above
a whisper
for fear of betraying
the night's secret
to the world of man.

Rainbow danced across my face
as water nestled into my skin.
I wasn't the only screechingly happy child
that day.

It was a festival celebrating art.

But that's not why people came.
Cheap liquor
and a small band singing the blues,
that's what really drew the people in.

But I was young.
And I was drunk on rainbows and sprinklers;
far too juvenile to see the sadness.

People stumbled around me
it was early.

No one saw the art.

No one saw the beauty but the little children
playing in the sprinklers.
Too drunk on rainbows to know the difference.

Darling,
tell me of the times
you've watched the moon slip into the pavement.
Tell me how you cry every time spring rolls around.
Help me up this hill,
For I am tired of this teenage angsty poetry.

There is a place I
knew once.
With jazz music playing
and handwritten scriptures
on the windows.
Every wall was a tapestry,
but the floor was never clean.
Flowers bloomed from the cacti
and books read themselves.

"Cast your fate to the wind"

It didn't have to make sense,
it only had to be real.

Candlesticks never burned
evenly
but everything was in sync.
Low lighting made for easier sight,
but only when the sun was in late bloom.

"Buy new dishwasher
or get old one repaired"

It didn't have to make sense,
it only had to be real.

I took to dancing in the kitchen
when I knew everyone was busy
burying their seeds.

Patches of paint in her eye,
they changed shape every new moon.
Place your broken down dreams

behind the garage,
you don't need them
anymore.

Somedays I slip into the stars and
swim in their forbidden pool.
It is a secret we share, a love
affair far too scandalous for print.

Every morning the rooster crowed,
but never at the same time.

"Don't get too close dear, the oven burns"

It never made sense,
but ever was it real.

The quintessence of my loneliness can be summed up in the number of romantic comedies and books of poetry I own.

I've been trying to look at life through a stained glass window, but so far it's just blinding my vision.

The pottery scattered on my kitchen floor is more like bits of my heart
and less like art.

People have been spending their lives leaving footprints laced in my mind, but every time I turn my head trying to find some form of beauty in all of this, no one seems to notice I'm not looking.

I grew up with people insisting everyone would want to be my best friend because I'm kind and I would have so many boy problems because I'm pretty,
but so far I can count encounters like that on my left hand.

And I've been spending my whole life trying to find someone who thinks I'm worth understanding, but so far every time I think words aren't needed, when I finally do speak
there's no one there.
Every time I think the poetry lies not in words but in eyes, I sound
Too sad
Too mad
Too happy
I think too much
I talk too much
I don't talk enough
I need more flavor
I need less flavor
Too poised
Too craze
Am I the only one who's tired of being too much or not being enough?

What ever happened to being just right?

In a world tipped, on a scale that's out of proportion anyway I think
there's too much room for heartache and not enough room to learn how to spell it.
Too many mountain peaks,
and not enough tools to get there.
Too many girls taught how to be lonely,
and not enough lessons on how not to be afraid of the dark.

So from here on out I won't be saying "I'm sorry"
for trying to understand how the moon slips into the pavement like it's finally found something worth resting in.
From here on out any time I turn my head trying to find beauty's final resting place,
I promise
I won't be looking back.

Watching someone's heart die
tastes a lot more like dirt than rust.
It is fresh
and moist,
the taste of life
still lingering in its clutches.

Seeing something great sputter out does not leave a
chemical aftertaste,
for nothing has yet changed,
only dimmed.

As I watch your past
play before my eyes like an old silent film,
I wonder how easily I might guess what
words
you were mouthing.

But the film is over,
the negatives never produced
and all we're left with is a
man of little importance
and left behind potential.

On the phone tonight you told me of how you used to paint
using tie dye
and I guess it was the first time I realized
if I had been your age,
we would have been
good friends.

But what hurts more
than watching your life
pass before my eyes
is looking back on my own life and seeing
what you used to be.

I see you painting the sunset and blasting U2 while cooking dinner.

I see the well worn pages of your script for the latest play-
notes hastily scratched in,
scratched out,
and rewritten.

I see the way you used to speak
when talking to your church
and it hurts because
as hard as I try,
I can't FEEL it anymore.

It seems that now all I feel is the way you
hit
your breaks or
slam
your computer shut
almost as if your heart knows how much is going to waste
and there simply isn't any better way to communicate the pain
that comes from knowing
you've given up.




I remember the day you sold your first painting.
Your eyes were bright and they twinkled.
But now I look at your bedroom walls covered ceiling to floor with the paintings no one ever bought

and I wonder if they sing you to sleep

and I wonder if they haunt your dreams.

And I wonder,
watching you move slower than you used to,
if you gave up your potential without a fight.

I was going to write about the moon tonight,
but between Vanilla scented candles
and multicolored Christmas lights
I daresay I lost track
of time.
Stuck somewhere between
heavenly and surreal
I was reminded why so many people simply
don't open their eyes.
Existence such as this
doesn't happen everyday
and it seems we get caught
chasing the moon.
Desperate for a sip
of her honeycomb,
thinking we're too far to reach,
not knowing all the world's
a stage
and the moon's
the
only
one
watching.

"They keep calling him lucky" my mama
says
reading about a boy so desperate as to
climb
into the wheel well of an airplane
and fly to Hawaii.

They keep callin him lucky.

Temperatures of -80 degrees, almost completely depressurized.
Says only 18 people have ever survived.

They keep callin him lucky and I can't help but wonder if he passed out from lack of air, or simply lack of life.

Says he ran away from his family yet people keep callin him lucky.

I think of ever time I lift off
how many boys got their eyes on my plane
wishing they could be me?

He was desperate enough to
crawl into what he must have known to be
certain death.

Yet they keep callin him lucky.

I am no more a poet than anyone.

2. For years I never wrote a single pork about myself. I didn't think my life worthy of pen & paper.

3. I can't remember how it feels to be in love, but I dream of it as the sun dreams of meeting the moon.

4. I've flown back and forth to the same three airports for four years and I haven't met one person twice yet.

5. If I'm awake into the night 7.9 out of 8 times I'm fearful of ending up on a street corner begging for money I know I never earned.

6. I am skilled and will never end up on the street except by my own choosing.

7. If I am awake into the night, 7.9 out of 8 times I'm fearful of my own choosing.

8. For the past three years all I've seen is walls crumbling by the cries of the people I love falling apart around me.

I haven't fallen apart yet.

9. On the first day of the new year I pledged never to lose sight of the ones that I love.
The next day I found myself waving goodbye to the people I care for the most.

10. I did not break my resolution.

That day it was hard to differentiate the sea
from the sky,
and I thought that maybe
the sea WAS the sky.

And people have been
entrapped
by the sea for so long
because, without knowing it,
the ocean was our very own
taste of the sky.

In reckless abandon we found it
and in reckless abandon it will return.

Perhaps when the sun hits the seashore the air turns into the stars
and the sand seeps into our hearts
by utter necessity;
that being the only place uninvaded.

Maybe the day ends in an impossible paradox of
sky inside of sky
and that's why we find it so romantic.

Perhaps we are secretly yearning for this world to be the lie
and the sky to be the truth,
hoping that if the two can kiss then

two humans both too broken to see can fall in love despite the fears.

Downstairs
next to the
                   unprotected paintings
and stacked books

he kept
a pair of              reading glasses
              in case of
hard times.

There are a couple things
I've been missing in my
life before now.
1) Scenery,
and,
2) you