so you're disappointed
that you're disappointed
and maybe that's to be expected
some folks make beds
out of their catharsis
differently than others
it's this list
of things you lost in the fire
or how jealous you are
of people
who never came back up for air
you're crying
so the faucets leak out of solidarity
& someone asks you
why the floor is wet
so you tell them
"we've been weeping here forever"
then they want to give you
a mouth full of presupposition
by saying
"are you going down with the ship?"
& you look them in the mouth
like Leo is handcuffed to a pipe
five decks down
you look at them
like you just woke up
from that dream everyone has
where all their teeth fall out
maybe it's an intervention
a hearse vs station wagon origin story
a clearance sale
& everything's gotta go
or maybe it's the dream
where you're at the docks
from your childhood
and there's a little girl
unmooring all the ships
because she thinks
they'll float away
but every time
she unties them
they just sink




                                          they just sink

Dark-eyed poet
in the long night
come and burn
your time with me
let's set our whole lives
on fire tonight
and breathe each other's
smoking dreams..

We never found each other
amongst the traffic of our lives,
though I waited for you
in a pauper's tomb;
overgrown with pre-existing grass
and violent rosebush.

What is left after old sentiment?
After the nights spent hoping
for your uncertainty,
for any kind of sadness
that may bring you back to me.
I have not found the answer yet

and I have stopped asking the question.
I just work the day,
collecting free moments
as ash mounts the incense burner,
over-thinking each word exchanged
across the pillow of my mind.

The television news keeps rolling,
the world keeps turning.
Despite atrophy in routine
and the absence of you;
that deficit I cannot absolve
when left alone in its entirety.

Love arrived once I wrote it off
as a folly of forsaken selves;
freedom reduced to paranoid glances
at inactive screens.
I am ready for pain again,
if you are the one delivering it.

I have been singing for forgotten things,
beer bottles hidden in the hedgerows.
The opera singer, the strangled vibrato,
ash-filled cokes cans; the afterparty sunrise.

This recovery has been long, fickle.
Reckless optimism and the science of failure
collide into the colour
of a Daniel Johnston cartoon,
or a songwriter's sense of humour.

Disused pencils stand as monuments
to old dreams of grass-roots art,
the fragility of neurotic *******
drawn with innumerable straight lines
that composite a woman's naked body.

I have been drawing on memories
and hoping for a brand-new image;
dissolution of old borders - a strangled voice
in a room full of opened tongues.

The Hawaiian shirt made light of depression
in darkened hours and wax smiles.
Plastic cocktails, the pending brides;
desperate men - the post-work demise.
I have learned a lie ever since.

This recovery has been imperfect, a fraud.
Swollen truths to satisfy the concerned,
only myself left to fool.
I have found the early morning
but cannot reach a sober conclusion.

Redundant habits mildew my mind
with the backwater of yesterday,
familiar street names to mourn
those who became strangers,
the negative bias of my mind's eye.

I have been writing words of action
from the safety of my desk;
all that the desk-lamp can illuminate,
all of which words can make sense.

This half-lived recovery is bunk, irretrievable.
Working poverty and untied knots
are co-morbid in meaninglessness;
chains to hold me in Plato's Cave
whilst her skin freckles in the sun.

Disused and living outside of love,
morning curtains open to a sheet of light
that obliterates loneliness
in the presence of shared heat,
only for it to return again, come night.

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.