I cut my pennies in half to toss them down the wishing well,
It only takes half a wish to get me started.

Sometimes I am a table.
A flat surface on which people pile their extra ****.

Today I came home,
If that word still means anything.

I reassemble,
The wind flows backwards to your hands,
I am returning from whatever version of “beyond” you choose to believe,
Each particle caring a manifest blessing back with it.
Perhaps tears flow up your face, retracing the progression of grief down your cheek.
Or maybe I was an awful at the end and in rewind you whisper “dead is ***** old that god thank.”
But either way that is the past… or the future,
It isn’t prudent to examine such distinctions now
It’s movement not direction that matters.
My form is re-forged by fire,
My bones smoothing in the heat
My flesh hardens from liquid to coalesce around my uncooking muscles,
And still I rewind,
Personality and character drifting through the cobweb wrinkles of my skin,
Till somewhere in the dynamo of my body my heart finally beats its last “*** ba”… and then it’s second to last.
How strange is a life lived backwards?
Would words taste different in my mouth, have new meaning in rewind,
Would I find satanic messages in my everyday phrases or just speak in nonsense, a string of “a-blah-blah” that takes too long to be made sense of.
How different would my actions be?
My hands could peel away bruises,  unbreak eggs, and **** insults out of the air
Yet who would be responsible for these miracles,
Some dreadful foreword version of myself.

In the glass each day,
I meet myself waking,
Together we watch,
Both I and my mirror self.
Till one of us turns to leave.

Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.

Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.
9/11/11
Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.

Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.

I will leave,
You will close your eyes and I will vanish.
Call me Houdini,
I will escape from this,
Snap the manacles of your ignorance,
Unwind each sentence of apathy you’ve wrapped around me.
I will take the gag of society out of my mouth
And I will speak the words you are so afraid of hearing.
You thought they were too heavy for me to bear,
But I will make my tongue a wrecking ball
Smash through your delusions
And not even turn to see if you’ve escaped the wreckage.
Call me a monster,
I am one
Now.

Each morning as I brush my teeth I crack open my skull and allow the world to gorge on my brain.
I lay my thoughts on a table and watch as people dawning forks and knives pick through the vittles of my mind.
They dive in with the blind enthusiasm of a fat man near lunch time passing a McDonalds,
With no care to the actual contents of their mouths just the meaningless relief of being full again.
And each day they devour my ideas with the entitled right a kid feels towards cake on his birthday,
Not grateful just sure that by being born he deserves this.
And the soup **** in me wonders,
Maybe if they crawled to me in defeat, an anorexic succumbing to the lure of chocolate,
Or with genuine interest, a food critic sampling the gourmet fare,
I would be happy…
Or feel a little less used.
I mean most days I just want to feed myself and I don’t know how my brain turned into a free soup kitchen.
And I guess I just have to choose whether or not to hand my ideas out like bagged lunches or can them up with preserves.
But I cannot decide because it doesn’t make sense.
They resent the hand that feeds them,
But feel robbed of human rights if denied a meal.
And no one really cares about the cook anyway.
Yet each morning I brush my teeth and crack open my skull, wondering if today it will make me feel a little more full.

I remember when I use to have sunflowers instead of hair and butterflies were always landing on my head as if I was their own mobile home.
I never went to the barber but our landscaper would take his shears out whenever he came over and prune me, and I would sell the sunflowers at the end of our driveway out of a cardboard box stand. One buck a bunch.
Instead of shampoo I used fertilizer mixed in with the water I would sprinkle on my head each night from the tin watering can I kept under the sink.
In the summer I would lay in the sun to photosynthesize,
And I would leave home with a crown jungle of green stem and yellow peddle,
My personalized jungle.
In the winter I went bald,
Except maybe some brown droopy stems with wilting flowers that would shed their peddles whenever I got flustered, or laughed too hard, or cried.
When I was 14 I got tired of boys pulling out my hair to ask a girl to prom.
So one night I plucked out each blossom, one by one,
Until my arms were full and my head was bare.
I sat down and picked out each peddle, one by  one,
“He loves me” “He loves me not.”
The sunflowers never grew back after that,
Whatever part of me made them grow was gone,
I no longer have the seeds.
And now I sometimes sit in gardens,
And wonder if the bees recognize me.