Before, I wrote of Masks.
Mutilated stories of written flesh.
A carnal retelling of misfortune,
In the pages I wore upon my face.

Now, I am just another Mask.
A solo sonnet amongst scoreless faces
Beyond them, a broken boy
Hostage to disharmony.

Alliteral allure.
Boundaries bottomless.
Controlled cantor.
Deities demonize,
Ethereal epiphanies.
Future forfeits,
Gravity's grandiose.
Humility heckles,
Indignant ideologies.
Jealousy's jungle,
Karated killers.
Lunacy's lovers,
Maddened martyrs.
Noise, never,
Only omens.
Purgatory persuasion,
Quintessential qualms.
Revenge, revenge.
Sultans suffer.
Tyrants terror.
Unilateral understanding.
Violent venom,
Worn wonderfully.
Xenogogue's xenial,
Youthful yearlings.
Zombie zealots.

We shared stories as the hours passed by.
Each secret detail, leading to more intimate detail.
Hearing each others mistakes, failures, blunders..
It is an open invitation to share in the humility of the human condition.
We live within the tales of another, carefully refitting the pieces of each other.
So far from the picture we once held, but ever better, imperfect even.
The refined inadequacy is all the truth we ever needed.
For who would we be without them.

I flew, I flew
Back home.
To familiar roads
To familiar people

So ready to miss
All the things I left
Only to become bored
At what was once splendor

I saw the sights
I drank the liquors
Cheering my merry way
With friends and boulevards

I was happy, but the empty kind
Where you long for something
Not offered in the present moment
So quickly how things change.

I'm headed back now
To a new home
With new roads
With new friends

And that too, is okay.

I've got weeds
They slipped through!

My thick skin.
****.

I feel seeds
And they're  growing
Sprouting
Words of hate
Growing
In my chest

Beating, screaming
Ba da ba da ba da

I've gotta tend to
This garden of mine

Your opression
Will not
Leave hate
In my Sanctuary

There are no what ifs,
In the sea of the could haves.

For what should,
Certainly would.

Leaving only,
What is, to be.

Knowledge of Self, merely an assumption?
Better, or so I thought,
Failing hard, falling harder.

I burned brightly, burning through bridges,
Boundaries, and borders.

The path I walked was ashen,
In the wake of cinder,
The relics of the past.

Change, hubris aside, was shallow,
Was not the core of Flesh,
Just the Husk of Solitude.

I fell to the Rage, that desperate rage.
So eager and volatile.
Hidden in the shadows, in plain sight,
For the time I'd both welcomed and feared.
That explosion of otherness,
A disillusioned self.

Trauma lingers in a double edged blade,
Wounding the wielder and the wounded.
Neither in blood, thankfully so,
But battered pride, twist the ego.

Severed strings. I dangle free.
Master only to psychopathy.

Take it all. Every crutch.
Can’t manipulate,
What you cannot touch.

I travel from room to room
Searching through the Saturday rush,
the Downtown Bars.

A beautiful brunette, with a twinkle
In her eyes, held me, just a gaze,
Gentle, understanding, knowing.

It was all swell, we rejoiced,
In sugar words, with silver tongues
Though, now she's lost in the crowd.

My journey through sweat, lust and *****,
Takes me here and there
Places of eerie recollections, an ominous familiarity.

Some far different from the rest,
All the while feeling like home, but rotten
This is a dream, or a nightmare.

These are not doors, I walk within the past.
Searching for a girl, not wanting to be found.
So I lay her to rest, closing the door behind me.

Dawn breaks,
Wind rages,
The crow caws thrice.

Marvel at the poet's sin,
Bardic Rule of Law,
Inspiration at Death's Maw.

Deep pockets of space-time,
Treasured energies and auras.
Always looking outward, never within.

Universe, overture of divine sadness.
Humanity, limerick of contained madness.
Bound infinitely in harmonic chaos.

Rivers run rampant.
Time tinkers tides.
Vengeful voids vie.
Worlds wither woefully.

And yet, endless and forever,
The iridescence of written word,
Bends all things against discord.

I wrote a symphony once
in the dying light of my mind.
It was beautiful,
brought tears to my eyes.

The profoundness led me through corridors,
there I was lost in madness.
Enveloped in my experience
onward I traveled.

Tearing at my flesh, talons pierce me.
Darkness, my friend, always there
destroying mind and body.
Tainting my soul, its poison,
Slithers through my veins.

Halted at the edge of my journey
This evil holds my heart hostage
grasping harder and harder
light is clear, yet I am stone.

Pride destroyed, beaten
by fiendish devotions.
Door closes, pain paralyzes.
My humanity shatters like glass
Leaving reflections behind permanently.

The Clock strikes three days until Madness.
An itch of a Tick and every Toc.

The Question of old simmers in the Mind.
A Deviant is only half the Answer.

The Cursed Weapon is drawn at the Ready.
Words offer no Reason or Resolve.

The Golden Feather succumbs to the Crimson.
Yielding all Truth to die as Fiction.

Here we are again
You've fallen apart
Broken and in crumbles
But I am your answer

What is my name?

So long you have sat
On the sidelines, hated
For existing, when all you
Wanted was freedom

So what shall I be called?

You've cried out, screamed
Injustice! Silence and compliance
The only answer recieved
No more, for I have come

What voice shall be known as?

Retribution, vengeance or
Something inbetween?

I'm ready and willing
Give life, breathe despair
Into my flesh and I will
Liberate your suffering

But I ask again, what is my name?

I couldn't count the times
"I love you" rolled off my tongue
In a bold and wicked lie

The mountains of regret
Are forged with the same deciet
Because in Truth I hate you.

I could tell you a thousand times
But you are so **** foolish
You fail to see the only truth.

I'll play ball, this tired game
With showered materials gifts
In return for a failed fable

Let's talk time.
My time, it cannot be bought.
My time cannot be leveraged.
You cannot assert yourself,
Imposing your time, money or effort,
With the expectation I owe you a thing.

I'll respect your time,
But you best respect mine.

Though that's never been the case,
Power has been your tool, to buy the time,
Of those you could not even give a second.

So all these years later, when I've mastered time.
When I've learned to control, bide and enjoy, time.
You cannot, waste time, my precious time,
Nor can you come back and expect my time.

I'm living on borrowed time
Sleeping on tomorrow's time
Most days I'm very particular about sleep.
About six and a half hours does the trick.

This evening we decided to share wine, two bottles.
Spur of the moment decision, it was only Monday.

(Is this what it feels like, a real relationship)

We laugh, we talk, she holds me, I return the favor.
Later, we make love for the first time.

She's been waiting, but so have I, for the first time.
I'm mesmerized, I take it slow, I want it to last.

We are open, we are honest.
I feel safe, so very unlike me.

There is no anxiety about this,
There is no self destruction.

She stays awhile, we exist in each others comfort.
She leaves, I walk her out, we say our goodbyes.

And I'm left thinking, I'm happy.
I'm thinking, its been such a long time.

So I've forfeited some sleep, in the hour of the lover.
To bring forth and borrow more tomorrows.

I wash my demons down with the local brews

Looking out the window panes of dreary nights and days of rain.

A guy and his guitar sing soft beats and sets the evening mood.

His fingers strum the delicate strings, as the music calls to me.

The second round comes and I'm in despair,

As the words that flow leave me gasping for air

The truth in a strangers tune, run down into each stroke of my pen

Here I go again, setting the nightmares free.

She was dying
I was sent away
She died
I returned

Ay ma
I just don't get it
Always about them ma
They ain't never asked you huh,
Never asked you ma,
Never cared to see
What you had to tell us
About this white mans world
How we are afraid
They **** us ma,
They don't believe us,
Or they probably don't care
I saw my man get beat ma,
Right down the street
By the corner store
Had his hands up ma,
He was crying, afraid of dying
Ma, he was so scared
And if they don't **** us
Then they lock us ma,
For nothing, just like dad.
But they don't care ma,
Same old story.
They ain't never asked
They ain't never cared to see
Whats its been like for you and me.

She says, "Go on, tell me."

So I do, I talk about these devils.
That sudden swarm inside,
I speak of the paralyzing misbeat
Of a stressed out chest.

"That's your anxiety?"

It takes me over, controls me,
Helpless behind a steering wheel
Of a maniac's mania driven horror
But I'm stuck for the ride.

"And who is this other?"

Nameless. Just a foul thing.
There were others, masks
A sea of voices, drowning me out
High tide and its sink or swim

"Go on."

When I'm calm, its quiet.
But I know they slither on,
The engrainimg entrenching thoughts
Of cruelty thats not my own.

"You're afraid?"

I'm wandering about the darkness
With fiendish things in mind
A pitiful puppet of anxiety
Waiting for the end of times

Amber elixir divine,
Reach this heart of mine.

Teach these words to rthyme
Find refuge in time.

A pen, a paper, a thought.
A medium once sought.

But in the twilight of age,
A digital master is sage.

Collector of words and woe,
Self forever more the foe.

All too soon, often or not,
Write away to stop the rot.

The right side of my face is charred
Black scars replaced the vision I once obtained
Following down the burned flesh
Reveals the remains of what was once my arm
The mutilation leaving me half of what I was
Phantom limbs shatter reflections in my wake
As a rejection and refusal to see what I've become
This dark necropolis having taken me hostage
Peeling away my madness, years at a time
I've forgotten, why this Nightmare fights to be real
While this sickness walks with me, whispering.

It seems forever and a time ago.
Since I felt, this sinister darkness
Haunt my bones, insidiously ethereal.
Outgrown, and overshadowed but,
Only temporary was the night.

In a search for self, after voiceless screams
Bled their emptiness into any word muttered.
Perhaps, I was fooled into the harmony
That this evil muse had whispered.
Her hast soul shattering tune.

Forewarned in foreshadows, nightmare's gleam.
The stability of my present, was the demise
Of my former. And I fade into the black.
A pale silhouette in the story of character
Marionette to this mutineer.

I pour a cold one down my throat
To subdue the rage, or perhaps anxiety
Underlying and insidious.
Though more likely to swallow, with it
Regret. The small things, and the large.

I suppose it does not really matter,
Regarding to relevancy. But I drink,
I write and then I reminisce.
The past, her lips, and the discussions.
Yet, never quite feeling able enough
To be. Vulnerability, it escapes me.

And as one memory passes onto another,
Never does it become anything less
Than meaningful. Each moment
Shining as a star to define the
Indefiniteness which both calls to me,
And more accurately eludes all
That I wish to be.

I understand that hatred of my enemies
I have felt the creeping parasite in my veins
The boiling blood which erupts in chest
Due to the ill of men, and their ignorance

I know why they hate me so, evil as they are
Poisoned words overflowing into my tranquility
Heartbeats choking agianst the toxic aroma
Conflicted struggle between vengence and justice

I hold fast vindictive appetites, for patient truths
An enemy with many faces, carved from lies
Can only be slayed with a revolution of knowledge
This wealth of mind, is the preservation of peace

The wakeful crimson spiderwebs,
Creep slowly to the golden rim of irises.
Red gloom explodes into the rot of exhaustion.
Sights scream in twilight, baying for dark curtains,
To envelop them in a cocoon of nurturing rest.

Keep pushing on, the cracks began to cackle.
Thunderous youth begins to flicker with new age.
White hot spring of passion, curdles in purple toxicity.
To be a walking corpse, dancing the days ensemble,
But deep within the bones, finality screams 'enough.'

Sweet slumber, always on the edge of tomorrow.
Won't you whisper this dreadful soul a lullaby.
Soothe the aches of day & age, slay this disease,
Burn away time, and exist in ecstasy.

Golden Gates of freedom
The apple of my eye
So delicious and fruitful
But this dream has gone rotten
With worms festering
In chained up wounds
Looking to the horizon
Answers inch slowly away
Yet, ash and bones, remain
Monuments to the forgotten

Mania is like a wave,
High tide, and I'm drowning.
I take on water, feel it fill my lungs.
As the pressure builds, I fade into white.

I'm riding the wave, a ******* tsunami.
But no, that's not quite right,
I'm a part of the wave, this rage,
This powerful force of insanity.

And there lies the shore, closing in.
If I was of right mind, surely,
I would at least hope to cry pardon.
But I'm not, I see the imminent crash,
Only laughing, maniacally.

With thunderous approval the shoreline
Falls, within the vast ocean beneath me.

When the waves pick up,
When they come crashing down,
They ring with power, but mostly pain.

So I'm left in this basin of contamination.
The sewage of mind eats away the euphoria,
Leaving cancerous tumors of depression.
Now growing rampant, and lingering.

The tide in time recedes, the world grieves.
Sometimes there is healing, though often
There is only suffering and the waiting.
Knowing for any better or for worse,
The tug of war between the shores
Of mania and depression, goes on.

There existed a haunted cathedral
The eerie tune of the Grand piano
Resonated with deaths call for harvest
Bells echoed into the endless night

Running to escape into the darkness
The courtyard labyrinth is cruel
For no one can leave, when the bells toll
Creatures writher at the night mares moan

The keepers creep through desolate halls
Lanterns lit with soulless smiles
Eager to feast on the lost and hopeless
Ah, this monolith is hell, the end is here

I wish to own a magic quill
With magic ink and vibrating trill

Colorful calligraphy to map my mind
A revolving world to leave my sign

Short stories, thoughts and imagination
Floating allures of determination

Compose a sea of words to illustrate
Then pass the pen to facilitate

Artisitic culture and tangled rhymes
A healthy recipe to ease the times

I reach out and pound on the glass.
I scream to the world, fist bleeding,
Voice scratching into hoarse whispers.

Everyone. They all move...on.

The roads diverged. And I’m on every path.
But more importantly I’m on none.

Is it such a terrible dilema
To be torn between two
Roads in which opposing
Realities compete for existence

Should I be so common
Or with a key to the unknown
Do I open the lock of life
And achieve the unexcpected

Nostalgia has a deathgrip
A noose of fonder times
Chokes out the potential
In dreams which have yet to come

I dare to be unpredictable
To, with hesitation now passed,
Conquer the life unlived
Willingly, regretting nothing.

I've not lived a day, the same man
As the day before.

Nor do I live now, intending to be
Anything less than more.

I found a voice, for silent screams

They sang of yesterdays, prayed for todays
And died for tomorrows.

I found a voice, for silent screams

They sang of yesterdays, prayed for todays
And died for tomorrows.

Hush now, lay down to rest.
Haunt the Earth no more.
Your children, are my children
Your dreams, are my dreams

Sun rising, we March to Freedom

How much pressure before it breaks
Tempered glass, reflects the gaze
Of disgust, and anger, and love.
Empty eyes consume
Falling deeper into darkness
The muddled, tired soul.

I beg for attrition
The hate of each blow
Mirrored with regret.
Slowly giving way to
False freedoms.
Bound by the sins of father's.

A lineage of failed expectations
Cycle new objects of disappointment
Rising against patriarchal masters
Falling inevitably to new fruits
Of the poisoned family tree.

A label is the weapon of Hate
Written swiftly to defend those worthy
And quicker still to condemn the unworthy

A label is to confine within a spectrum
To be anything but it to be exceptional
To be anything but it to be forgotten

When two men of evil intent strike
But one is white, he is called by his trades
But one is black, he is called by his crime

When two men of good save the day
But one is white, he is a hero
But one is black, he is gone with the wind

This narrative of Hate's design
Sets in place a story void of fact
But a story which becomes fruition

This sinister tale becomes a holy book
For which people stake and claim lives
A fairy tale with real and cruel consequences

These labels, while beautiful in diversity
Simultaneously enforce the war of US vs. THEM
Compliance in such a story, is Ignorance's Finest Hour

Little Fire Dancer,
twirling about the night
These eyes mesmerized,
by the fiery performance

Exotic acrobatics
And a luminous soul
The danger in the motiob
Is transparent

Illusory beauty fades
Into flames of destruction
Footprints singe the ground
With elegant and tainted grace

This tango is a one way ride
Immersed in the fever
Step by step we burn
So brightly

Until this malevolent enchantress
Becomes one with a whisper
And I am left the only casualty,
Burned.

Where is everyone off to in a hurry..?
Why am I still waiting..?

Three steps
One! Two! Three!
I pushed off
Into the air
Shocked to find
A building or two
Falling beneath me
Momentum gaining
The world began to shrink
Clouds began to kiss my cheeks
I was gone,
                      and I never came back!

Being at fault
Makes matters worse

Knowing that
The crippling
Heart wrenching
**** this hurts
Kind of pain
Is the result
of your own doing

If you knew how I died
Everytime that I see you
Tearing apart at the fact
On one hand, you're beautiful
and I love you
And on the other
I allowed you to slip away
Through my inability
To see past my own decisions

My love, if you ever wonder
Into the land of the unknown
Know that I shall always remain

I'm dreaming
I wake up
I'm a phantom
I feel it all
I'm lucid
I breath existence

I'm dreaming
I see white
I'm flowing
I grow skywards
I'm humbled
I begin to wake

I'm dreaming
I see the sun
I'm trying
I can't hold on
I'm failing
I sleep no more

There is no equal to me.
I crave to be flesh
in your weakness, chains
break, as I leak into
deep chasms of your mind.

Suppressed, cynical isolation
True fears pervert
painful truths.
Embrace my existence
as it floods into your body

Every breathe you take in
I chill from the shadows.
Where we know this
sickness, taking over,
has no end.

Offer no escape
as Death makes way
only to accept this
fiendish and violent form.

I am walking, with my father.
To what he assumes will be a reconciliation.
I entertain the idea with insincerity.
I'll not walk down that fool's road again.

I see a group of women, a bachelorette party.
One approaches, she asks who will I be for the night.
She says she'll be someone or another.
I think about this, whats the harm in being lost in otherness.
But for the moment I must go, I'm off to a party.

I'm in a stadium, alone at first, then the rows fill.
Friends, loved ones, circled around the stage.
My friend, my brother is next to me, then is front and center.
He announces the celebration, gathering here for a friend.
Its happy, we reminiscence, I embrace it for the moment.
Sadness, I know is on the horizon.

I see it clearly, I know how a story goes.
Another friend, belly full of liquor stumbles home.
He draws a hot bath, as death prepares to takes its grips.
I feel this, I feel him slip, I feel him begin to drown.
I'm coming, but not fast enough, I'll arrive and he'll be dead.

But, there's a chance, through will, I become him.
With every ounce of drunken strength I pull us out of death.
We catch our breath, crawling for the bed, until I arrive in flesh.
There are dogs all over his place, and a hell hound, chained.
He wore a devil's mask and knew me to be a false man.
Just in time, I barge through the door and catch my friend in rest.
Spared for the time being, for doom is coming.

I leave him in his slumber, returning to the darkening skies.
I see a group of fallen youth, a loyal band of thieves.
They run and taunt the night, the disillusion of innocence.
I feel I must warn them, but time and words have escaped me.
Reality sets in, in the form a a car screeching, peeling away.
I know too well whats to come, instinctively, I run.
White light, red-orange fire, kaboom.

I come to, choking on the blackened ash filling the air.
I see charred bodies of those far less lucky than me.
I wonder how I am alive, but I know better, its rotten.
I crawl through the destruction, and try to regain myself.

Months go by, and again and again the bombers come.
At first, I feel they're hunting me, but they must know I live.
That such methods to thwart me are ineffective.
But that mustn't be the case, no it must not be at all.

And in truth I know this, the chase in this direction is obvious.
I realize it the reverse is true,  I am drawn to the chaos.
I go where death is sure to come, even in my undying.
I wake up, with that mystery in mind.
I hate the realism in such dreams.
I hate I will never know why.
I hate that this is the end.

Just outside the sea stained window,
An ocean swells into divine ascension.

Blue heaven.
Blue hell.

The impending crash will never come.

“A nail in the coffin, such a significant mark.”
Said the dead man walking,
with a hole in his heart.

But the nail was his weapon,
his sword, his pen.
Sheathed within his own body,
his life, his friend.

So day after day, as stress grew,
as life came.
He welled up all the words,
which sang.

All of this, blood, sweat and tears.
Until the fool realized all his lost years.

He yearned to draw the blade once more,
and so did it pour,
all the words and shame
he had to his name.

So the ink flowed, his life blood,
his prose.
Always to write again, his blooming
red rose.

I'm falling apart,
I'm living a lie
I'm dancing with a crooked smile
Feel the beat, taste the high
Drink your poison, embrace the night

Soft are your lips, buried in my chest
Fingers in your hair, tears break silence

We laugh, we cry, I tell you I'm dying
To confess my madness, or was it sadness

A typhoon, a thunderstorm, all hell breaks loose
I let go, I fall into a rude little slumber

Tired eyes flutter, night creeps into day
Ready to serve my desires once more

Do not be baited
Into the notion
That because
Things could be worse
That they are somehow better

Do not give into the idea
That we are somehow past
The mistakes of nations before us
We are always a moment away
From Ancient Rome, fickle and meek

Do not listen to such beliefs
That things will just get better
Hanging onto hope is a stagnant dream
True change is revolution
But they want monotony to be the game

The words slide through me.
Disconnected lacking comprehension
Old times rush forward, focused
Shattering into mirrors of memories

Disbelief overwhelms me.
Questioning my every action
Tears stream down my face.
Every moment holding more weight.

We are fragile,
The world dies around us.
We fade into a foolish fantasy
Until the crippling pain of lose
Comes crashing home.

R.I.P. PJ Cleary

The crescendo of my muse
Strikes swiftly on heavy eyelids
Vibrating the hypnotic frequency
I transmute into reality

Humming machines scream out
Calling me from an aquatic slumber
Preserved from a dying world
To become prisoner in a land of dreams

Delusions immobilize my captive body
Force feeding lies, an unwilling glutton
Heretics of day become prophets of night-
Mares, praying to awake the awoken