Sometimes I feel like those who
Aren’t overwhelmed
Aren’t tired and broken down
Aren’t hunched and encumbered
Those who can breathe without
Feeling a tightness that strangles
An immensity that fills the heart
With shadowy, sorrowful tangles

They must not be listening
Must have sheathed their eyes
Within the blackest, sight-denying blinders
Or else resigned to a myopic gaze
Yes, they must have made
Some unconscious decision to don
The enduring armor of ignorance
Deftly designed to repel the obvious
Forged in the fires of whimsied romance
Of furtive fairy tales in which
The protagonist, hero, heroine, the revered
The beautiful, the admired,
And all their supporting characters
Are agents of nothing

Sometimes I feel that in the stories of the free
In the mythology of respiting privilege
There is only one antagonist
Against which said armor does protect
He is truth
He is compassion
She is courage and love
She is feeling and thought
He is meaning and substance and matter itself

So, take heart, my armored many
For, it seems to me, your villain
Is nearly dead

I have the utmost faith
That each of you will do your parts
Will walk with your heads down
To your dramatic destinations
Will ignore the journey, the repercussions,
And every longing bystander
Yes, you will merrily spend, and sell,
And buy, and sell and sell
You will straightforwardly tread
Over the downtrodden with your feeling-less feet
Your blind eyes will roll about
Inside their numbing sockets
Your deafened ears will placidly bypass
The rhythms of opportunity and intuition
Your made-up mouths and raised noses
Will vivaciously avoid
The fruits of feeling, the pains of principle,
And the arduous trials of belief
In one’s fellow man

Upon the hour of final victory
I will write of epitaph and eulogy.

If life could be so unfair
As to bestow upon one man
A heart that begs love enough to swell
To fill each beating basin over-welled
Love enough to breach a boundless sea
That man is me.

And, if having felt such love
A man could grow to then forget
If fate could shape such a callous fool
Toward the self uncommon-cruel
Could the right hand to the left belie
That pain is mine.

No pride can go long sustained
To stand is but halfway to kneel
To the cosmos, rigid wills we bring
What with Saturn deems to bend a ring
Wise to curve and carve our humbling scars
So sit the stars.

The night and moon live in peace
In same, life is a neutral friend
Only a home where the mind is kept
No rug under which our dreams are swept
Nor grand antagonist to evade
So hope is made.

If you let the magic flow
And loose the clutches of control
You will come to learn the sun is wise
On his stoic clock, he yearns to rise
And when it’s too hard to be alone
Then we walk home.

If ever there were a man
So stubborn as to forge shackles
Made heavy laden with his own hand
And break, in time, these same burden-bands
So to know the debt of being freed
Then this is he.

If I could but learn to discard a wounded piece of self
If I could part with the beautiful symmetry
Of the cogs, driving forth the machinations,
Churning with their white noise, that
Turn to shape maiming thoughts
Then I might one night close my eyes,
Not to images of words bound by self-deriding connotation,
Comprised of typos and back-strokes
But to a peaceful blackness

Yes, I might lie down, close my eyes
Out of a will for rest, not contrived
But organic and my own
And so I know this as my waking dream
Relegated to wake for the night has been
Deemed the world of painful perfection
A place where protection is offered
With a backward hand, carefully made
Patron to the lovely polished mental instruments
Used to bludgeon simplicity and idiosyncrasy
Used to leverage pressure on the scales of the heart
So to tip downward the side of known cyclic indifference
And lift upward toward heightened neglect
The side of pleasure, the side of silenced retrospect

I grow, each sleepless evening, more fearful
That the ugly, backward hand might never forgo its leverage
And, if life is a wellspring of knowledge
Feeding into a stream of lessons
Then my strife stems from reading of the
Same page in the same chapter of the same textbook
A book filled with words bound by self-deriding connotation,
Comprised of typos and back-strokes

On this page, one learns a fundamental formula
It derives the relative weights of who we are
And the happiness we might find
Through some convoluted tale of misfortune
My page was written by an ugly, backward man
So, through unsagely studies, I’ve concluded
That the art of well defined reprimanding thought
Does outweigh in its beauty, the unseen hope
Of a future left to whim and bliss, or perhaps
The simple elegance of chance, goodness unsought

So, for the first time in my life, I seek to unlearn
I seek to roll back the defining lines that once flowed
From the pen in a backward hand that yearned to sow structure
But the vaulted walls that hold the scales of one’s will
Are so dauntingly difficult to unbuild or puncture

This, truly, is the weight that each sleepless night
Bares down upon my sleepless heart, so heavy
If I cannot pull exacting, formulaic pages from my sight
I fear the only peaceful blackness I will find
Is one against no patron hand can levy.

Juxt

Easy bucks
Market flux
The democratic peace
Imperial caprice
Praise be to lord and Savior
Sacrament, scandal-flavored
Legion of dissenting voice
Treason in the use of choice
Give me your teeming tired, your huddled poor
Bones with to festoon the corporate door

And if you could turn to me, adoring
I’ll check my busted magic billiard ball
All signs point toward what I’m ignoring
Burnt the bridge to your heart, land, deed and all

When time is right, we secretly confide
What should have lain bare in our first report
Our ideal homes of mental cards collide
Seems, in comparison, we all fall short

Glory in history contiguous
Gory details, a bit ambiguous
The equality of man
Neo-****, Ku Klux ****
Only with the best intent
Rubber bullet malcontents
Perpetual motion
Toward backward notions
Money flows
Deathly throes

Oppose

Life knew it would be hard
So it hard-wired its many children
With a self-serving fondness
Life was well aware of the darkness
And for fear of objectivity
Man was subjected to instinct

Life knew of loneliness
So it made us laugh down
Through our bellies and slap our knees
Life was well aware of heartache
So it drove us toward pleasure
And made us forgetful

Life made us forgiving
Resilient, blissful
Life, the narcissist
Knew of limits
And made us to imagine

Life watched me balk its efforts
And gave me to you

I’m in too deep
To pretend that I can survive
When the walls start falling
There is no more room
The smallest shift
Will tear me in two
And a greater shift
Will leave nothing of me

If you say it
I will open my ribs
So that you might learn
Of my heart more perfectly
It was always yours to know

If you want it
I will spill out my head
So that you might inspect
Each thread of my intent
Rummage through each loving thought
They were always meant for you

If you need it
I will cease to be as I am now
I will discard and scorn my flesh
So that you might see
Past the dilettante efforts of the body
And into me
I was always waiting for you

We look past meaning, still blinded and dreaming of riches,
Which leads us toward track homes and condos, cruel chapels
While the hapless live in the world’s mansion: the most open convent
And what we don’t see is sometimes the crux of our content

The streets offer a morose array of the discarded
They, the wise and most wretched, who humbly suffer
Are perhaps the truest, comely Christian-hearted men and women

They bless the day as they pray to the ground
Where cracks become twisted crucifixes upon which
The most selfless are displayed for public derision.

Ironic is the formula written with precision on the tome of our existence
Iconic moments of pain bloom into the banks that loan out inspiration

Each electron is one thousand eight hundred thirty-sixth of its proton
And this proportion, though grandly and numbingly unimpressive
Is the basis upon which we live and whir and spin as matter does
Coincidence is a lie in the face of the certainties within what we cannot see

For, though one decade separated the births of Crockett and Bowie
And, though their names might conjure knives larger than pockets
And hats, stolen from conquered bandit-faced creatures’ tail ends
It was on the same 1836 day that they evolved from flesh into legend.

Joy is a strange element that seems to come and go without a plot
Yet some know how to wield their emotions with little thought
As if joy and love were as a hammer worn neatly at the belt

So, I yearn for one day to grasp a handle in a hand that has never felt
The shape of certainties, once discerned as chance and circumstance
And when the hammer falls, I hope it breaks a twisted crack into my heart

I hope to, from my reflections, thus bereft,
Find some perfection hidden deep in death
As one might decipher, through foreign language,
A light that warms within a sonnet

In a way, I think my life depends upon it.