feeling alive feels like
yellow flowers growing in my bones
and blooming on my skin
it feels like the sun rises
not in the east
but from within me

I am a terrible human being. **** storming, anger machine that spits hateful things in poetry.
My memory is a landfill, of abuses, and poorly remembered happier times. I struggle to find the truth behind my anger, sadness, and regret. Is it what I remember, forget, or can’t forget that has ****** me up? Her face causes the familiar rage to rise. Voice spewing lies, or what I think is lies. I spent most of my life trying to figure out how it was my fault. I am still trying to figure how it might be my fault. Hyper kid, tired and lonely mother, the formula does not mix. I cannot calculate the value of her violence minus what I did to deserve it. Did I earn it? People aren’t all bad? I can remember going to the movies a couple of times, traveling and listening to music, holidays and presents, but in the present all that is shaded. I am jaded by being locked in an unlocked room, cut off in solitary confinement, because she got busted for the violence. I remember how she had to know what I told the counselor. So I stopped telling them anything.
A smart man knows that human memory is not perfect, so I keep trying to figure out how I deserved to get hit, why I deserved to be isolated, verbally degraded. Part of it had to be my fault, cause people just don’t lash out. I struggle to find out what it was all about because I am scared. If I can’t figure out the reason, if there was no good reason, could I become her?

Ha! Hahahaha! Ha!
Silence
Everybody stared
A few asked what was funny
I told them and then...
They looked at me funny

Judging eyes, Disgusted eyes
Even Angry eyes one time
I see them a lot

But when I see Laughing Eyes...
A Kindred Spirit!
Jokes exchanged and
Laughter Shared

A New Friend
With the same sense of
Weird Humor

Why is it that feet smell and noses run?
Ha Hahahaha! Ha!

I felt sick going in
I feel sick coming out

I cough up the dust that found a place in my lungs
As my eyes are drawn to the horizon
It's flat, dark

And a lone star desperately shines against the night sky
I'm not given a clear answer on what I feel anymore
I don't think that Home means what it used to

But all I can do is wipe my nose and my tears as we cross the border searching for a third way out of
Texas.

Poetry carries the weight of
ten thoughts,
     nine feelings,
        eight emotions,
                seven sins,
                     six thoughts,
                         five complaints,
                            four heartaches,
                                three joys,
                                  two heavy eyes,
                                       one pouring soul.

Poetry fights her way
through layers
and layers of jargon,
through depths
of useless words just floating,
skimming the surface of nothing.
she claws her way
through overgrown shambles
and tangles
of unnecessary parts of speech.

Poetry slashes her way
through tumbling creepers
falling from broken terraces.
she drives away unimportant thoughts
from fertile fields of words.

i see Poetry survive against all odds -
against joy - that sweet, sweet burden.
against rationale - a double edged sword
against doubt - a ghoulish green monster

i see Poetry survive.
no, rejuvenate.

and then i know
why poetry takes a feminine pronoun.

I smelled
the sweetness
of the flower,
and asked
the gardener, what
Is the name of this
beautiful one?
he says to me
"love
has no
name"

I timidly try to engage those whom I find have intriguing minds. Perhaps it better to forgo the human clutter, observe, absorb, and project the qualities of humanity that I value the most. So, I will walk my weary heart back into the cave that holds the reflecting pool. I will traverse that shadows, detach from that which bonds me to you, and seek only art and truth.