Studies confirm that aspartame
may
be linked with cancer. This tells us:
never do anything
halfway.

10
Every person counts aloud.
9
Joyous laughter and continuous cheering
8
A thought of darkness creeps among
the collective consciousness
the crowd's heart pauses
7
The Boston Marathon creeps to mind,
as do other grand gatherings
6
The cheering grows louder
5
Children giggle while adults
clink sparkling glasses
4
Breath is held as the ball
makes its final descent
3
This could be one of those moments
where everyone
remembers where they were
2
Everyone screams, joy shining on their teeth
and fear creeping
behind their eyes
1
Only laughter this time,
only midnight kisses and new found hope.
Only love despite the public
gathering and two hundred million viewers and
the potential for destruction.
Only love because when the dust settles,
when the final glass is emptied, when only streamers line the streets, love is the only thing that will remain.

If you would lead me until death,
I'd give up my vision.
This sense only, so the others could strengthen.
I'd never see another sunset,
only to hear your heartbeat louder as you lay next to me.
I'd never read Bukowski or Cummings again,
only to hear you whisper the poetry of your day,
softly, perfectly.

To taste your lips on mine,
just a little sweeter- who am I kidding,
nothing
could be sweeter.
To inhale and be convinced of our togetherness,
despite the distance that is between us at times,
I could go without watching the hummingbirds
that float from flower to flower,
every spring.

To feel your hand in mine, fingers interlocked,
I would close my eyes forever.

In my seeing nothing, you would close one eye
because I am you, you are me,
together we would halfway see.

Love is finding
something you never knew
you lost

It's dark. The sun has long disappeared
and no new words will be spoken. I lay
beside  you, we  run  through  different
ways  to say the same things.  We  both
know sleep would be more productive,
but  these  nights   are  so  few  and  far between that I'll tell you a story for the
eleventh time, or read you a poem that
you've  read  before, talking just  to  fill
the  silence.  Even   when   you  beg  for
sleep,  I'm  slow  to  concede.  The  next
morning  is most often awful because  I
have  somewhere  to be, and so do  you,
which means  goodbyes  all around and three  weeks or more will pass  between
us  speaking  face   to   face,  which  isn't impossible  but  still  isn't  easy,  and I'm
sorry for keeping you awake. But I don't
think   you   totally   hate   my   senseless
eternal   whispers,  because  they   creep
through   the  silence   that  comes   with
distance. I just want you to know that I'll
run   out  of  time    before  I  run  out   of
words.  "Goodnight,"  I'll whisper,  before
feeling you roll your eyes in the darkness.
And  then  I'll  remember  a  story  I  don't
think I've told you...

I wade through the shockwaves,
Searching through lost toys and
Broken boards, old doors, a stuffed bear
And rotting memories.
They all slip by, my fingers
Reaching but never finding.
The noise is too great; the waves too
High. I can not
Search through all of this,
Surely tomorrow holds
The story I hope to
remember.

I’ve heard the footsteps,
following me everywhere
and whispering in my ear

“failure”
And I’ve ignored them for the most part,
but sometimes they cut me off
and I just want to crumble
into a heap on the floor.

Although I sometimes see it as a barrier,
I’ve realized that the doubting voices exist
mostly pushing me forward
to challenge me.
When they gain a little ground and cut me off,
I change directions,
or even push this invisible force to the side
because I love a challenge

and Fear drives me forward.

I sit high on my Mount Olympus,
a chair from Staples with an Executive
appearance (so the box said). I'm faced
with a vacant canvas, and the knowledge
that one day,                                                
I won't have time to fill it.
1A
I decide then to fill it with whatever
comes to mind. Stars sparkle from my
fingertips after painting the whole thing
mostly black. I place them in shapes
that could be confused for a belt, a warrior,
a goat, or a saucepan to those without
vision. I pause, placing large reptiles
on a green and blue dot that floats
around one of the smaller stars. It entertains
me for a short while, but I decide to
start anew with a smaller, weaker, but
smarter animal.                        
And then I observe.
I watch as first they stand upright,
their distant relatives still using sticks
to catch ants in their homes.                
They spark stones using friction, and
I'm delighted while feeling my first tinge
of fear, for I sprinkled my own intellect in them
like stars on a black canvas.

They thrive, expanding out in every direction
until they share air, exhaling while others
breathe in their exhaust.

I watch as they cut all the greens, take
clean and cover it with cement. They burn
the core, slowly, to power machines that
take them anywhere. They fight; oh how
they fight.
        The core dissipates and they fight over
it, and they fight over me and I don't
understand. All their ideas are the same,
other than those who assume that they
are in my favour . . . Location, as I've
grown to see, impacts culture; it can not create
hate.
They look to me, pray to me,
and I can hardly intervene. A new
world, it seems, is all that I could do . . .

1B
I think of my dad, who left a thousand
jokes yet to be told. Before I paint or print,
I think and think and nothing comes.
Then I paint the sky with tiny points
of white, wasting no more time on thinking.
A scene opens up before me, and it
consumes everything
that I am, or that I ever will be.

I paint my own light into the dark
abyss, bliss kissing my cheeks as
my working wrist grows weak.
I write, if only to last a second
longer than my body. I write
to continue (to matter).

we can question the nature of art,
what it means to be beautiful.
I see hopscotch in chalk on sidewalks,
                                          children laughing and playing while a political picture,
à-la-Banksy
stares blankly down at them from a brick wall.
I see that,

and around the corner is a
spraypainted
                          tag
that illuminates the area as existing through poverty
but it doesn't stop
              kids from playing. Even if the city pays a man to take down the
             tag
because adults are afraid.
While we decide what is worth keeping,
can we please remove that
                      hideous hopscotch?
Please, it's poorly drawn, and it leads to
young people
gathering.
And that's scary,

                                                                                                                    right?