When the city lights are too bright
Does it leave any room for the sun to rise?
Feed your fields from the fluorescent lamp.

I sit at my desk,
do only as I’m told.
The teachers drone
And it would seem I have no future
Because I take interest in nothing
I don’t like to read and math is just too hard.
My mind moves too quick for my eyes, for my fingers to move across the lines of text,
but my lips and hands say anything and everything that needs to be said.
I don’t know that knowledge they preach

Pick up your pencils, read the prompt quickly but carefully, and you may begin.
Tell me of you future
What are your dreams
Dream big! The sky is the limit but remember the sky is only just above your head...
You may grow you may flourish, be all that you can be but know that you can only be you and you are not so big so tall so brilliant as those that walk above you.

I want to be a firemen, an astronaut, a police officer, and a cowboy.
She wants to be a nurse, a weather reporter, a vet, and a gold medalist.
But they say these are a fools dreams.
That I can only go as far as my legs will stretch and will never make it past the threshold of achievable,
and my hands can only hold onto what my fingers are long enough to wrap around.

There are shackles in that school.
They teach me that I can do anything and everything that my heart desires...
As long as I desire what they’ve placed in front of me.
Pay no mind to that other shade of green.
Follow suit, fall in line
Put your pencils down
Your time is up
Hand your papers to the person sitting in front of you and remain silent for the remainder of the class.

I'm sorry. Almost embarrassing that everytime I have something to say is some where near 4 am. This time is just sober can't sleep. It's not a messed up introspective, once the bolts have loosened up the oil will leak, kind of thoughts. And I've had a lot of leaks lately. I feel a lot. And I become a stranger even to myself. I don't reach far incase I might need my hands to hold it all together. So I let go of of everything I had before, just to try to plug the wholes. I might struggle more than I let myself see.  I see that now. It's hard to see myself where I am because I was there before. Left someone, felt so terrible it stained. Fell into anything that didn't let you feel or atleast made it a little less memorable to feel. Rode that emptiness until it broke me. And walked away. Made something of nothing, moved my hands, created and provided, I built myself again. Then I met another.  She breathed into the self I had rebuilt. Showed me how to move again. But each wave always breaks and leaves it all in a scatter. Felt so bad it stained. Trying to clean it up.

One more 6 o'clock sunrise
A night of drinking turned to another
I've given myself to my habits
To just one more smoke
To just one more drink
One more good ****
Then its time to straighten out

Then the sun rises again
Through another cloud of smoke
A night of heavy drinking turned to another
That was months ago

If I learned anything from the first time I loved
I love you means I'm sorry
So I love you for all the promises I ever broke
I love you for the way you broke my heart
I love you for giving up
I love you for letting you down when I loved you last and had to walk away

It broke
Before it cracked,
you fell in two

Fill my ears up from the dirt
Engraved a stone within a curse
In a field by the old black shed

Some scribbles inside my hand
Left behind from when I grabbed
The last words ever you wrote

Matted hair and shaky hands
Have a drink, my last amends

I felt the dirt in my finger. It was still damp from the rain. It must  have rained for weeks. lord knows the last time I felt the sun. Pale white and over run.

For what its worth,
and it sure as hell ain’t worth a ****.

I felt, the hit.
When it fell it broke, pieces never mean ****.

Left nothing but a scratch on a wooden floor,
but it was treated as a sore in my mouth that I bore.
Tongued and picked until I bled it out.

Packed and labeled as misunderstood.
You hit the ground and you never mistook.
The cracks and frays that wouldn’t let you be.

You spend nights in the cold.
Kept out by unwelcomes and deadbolts.
Hit the bottle harder than it could ever hit back.

We **** and scream till the day dreams freeze.
Fleeing but clinging, we pray for the memories.
We get, we just get on with it

Broken heads, lay as they seem.
To never mend but wait for what comes to be.

Don’t pity the dead, they’ve done their bit.
Clocked out of a world that we never come to fit.

Afraid of the hours just before sleep,
and the thoughts that tend to seep.

You never saw it coming but you’re **** glad it’s here

At night,
Just before the world sleeps,
The sun paints the sky in blood
In remorse for those that wont see it rise

I’m afraid of the hours before sleep
Those hours unearth the deepest parts
They whisper the reaching hands,
That the daylight keeps at bay.
When my eyes shut all I can do is fall inside myself
And see how sorry I am

Those hours before sleep
Are the slowest and most unsettling hours of my life
And just like that, I never had a problem with leaving

If you do not question everything,
then it’s likely that you know next to nothing.

Remember that this place was and still is a creation
and it moves and shapes with every turn,
every gesture, smile, and bottle broken.

I can know all of these things but never understand my thoughts until I try to explain them to you.

My records come close to singing for my heart but it only gives me just a taste,
a brush against the hand of the girl I so desperately, so longingly wish to hold.

Speak on every instant that shakes your nerves, but speak carefully so that you won’t need to black out the words you did not mean to write so heavily that no one will ever see them again.

This place was created. Know that,
And know that there is a definition to every who and what that is and will be.
Nothing simply is

Find your bearing and follow it.
In this way, if there is a home, you will find it.
There are no paths that can lead you blindly.
Explore this world with a wild heart
as you did as a child under the clothes racks of department stores while trying to escape your mother’s hand.
Because somehow back then you knew that while walking the isles would get you to where you were going, it left so much unseen.
In between those racks you found treasures.
A golden button with four holes and an anchor molded into its face,
a small blue and green ball that had been lost and surely forgotten by explorers that ventured between the lines before you.

Collect your treasures, know that they are there, and hold them close.

I pulled the moon from my pocket
and dropped it into the sky, eager eyed,
like the coin slot of a gum ball machine.

It gave me one star
but that wasn’t enough.
My hands are much bigger these days.
So I stood and waited,
for that moment when the rise of the sun would come to meet the fall of moon,
but that never happened.

I was told that the deepest truths,
could only be poems,
could only be tasted.

And the truth in truth,
is that words have no truth.

So I curled my tongue
around the fingers of a pen
and wrote out every lie I’ve ever heard.

I drew my own words.
Straight from the wrench of my own mouth.

I drew your face.
I wrote on it all the words that betrayed it.

This was the first time
I could recall my feet reaching the floor
from high up on the pews,
and I stood,
and I walked right out of that church.

Because the truth in truth,
is that all words are lies
and you hold a book full of them.

So I tied knots around my wrists
to know what chains were like.

And I licked a bathroom floor once
and it didn’t taste so good,
but it tasted exactly how I knew it would

Unlike the taste of saying thank you,
when someone hands you that gift,
You... Never wanted.

Or the taste of that gagging
l-l-l-l-love,
To someone who cut all the ribbons from your hair.

I lost sight of the moon for what seemed like a second and it was gone.
Turns out I hadn't seen that face for months.
That somehow made it a little easier to sleep that night.
Knowing it was gone before I knew it.
A crutch is a crutch but it kept me moving the best I could.

It took a moment
but none too many
to realize
these words don't carry weight
everything said
all that's been written
hang in the air
most leave untouched and untouching
some scarred and scarring
but by daybreak
after they've found the gaps in minds
to nest and fester

these words leave no trace
and break all the same

This is my blank page.
I look at it and think I'm glad I have nothing bad to say.

Then there was you.

Not so clean anymore.

Separation
Let go again
Got far too close
Break it off again
Lost yourself
Just be alone again
Loneliness creeps
Wash it down again
What happened last night
It's better not to know
Busted lip and head split open
Last nights over
Let's do it all again

After it all stopped
When the lights stopped flickering
The air turned cold
The tanks ran dry
Nothing changed
Carry those stones to graves
Will to will
For another second

Yea you lose a little feeling along the way. Old wounds lose their sting.  The nasty **** you never thought yourself capable of turns to reflex. What comes natural is a sin in your past eyes. But you hold on to the best version of humanity you know.

Howl
An immense cry
A cage

Instinct
Bite and claw
A need to be free

Inside you
Scratches at the door
Pacing back and forth

Fur raised
Teeth shown
Hold me fast or let me go

Never lie down with a wolf

It might be strange that I feel most on two wheels.
The same wheels I might die on.
What's strange is it doesn't scare me.
I've had a taste of what life on a paved back means.
Knowing I could lose it, that is everything I carry on my back and my life.
That is freedom.
Carried by spokes and throttle my only care is where do I fill my next tank.
Meeting faces I could fall in love with, but morning comes and I know I have to leave....
I just have to leave.
There's miles I haven't ridden and pasts I haven't rid myself of.
It's always that next town, the what's to come, and the thought of someday I might find that town and that one I can't ride away from.

I am a man of few words.
I speak infrequently and with great intent if my mind is right.
I often think that if you cannot say what needs said in a few lines then you have not taken care to your thoughts and have wasted breath and time otherwise spent seeing and hearing what is often missed.

"You're killing yourself" she cried as if watching him wrench open another bottle was as painful as if he had taken that same grip around her own throat. And he, as he always did, kept moving as though he hadn't heard anything, silently and solemnly, but felt those words dragging across his heart like a fork across an empty plate. He knew it was true. All the same he didn't care. He knew what death was. Tasted the emptiness before and it felt natural. Her pain quickly turned into anger and his... Just one more empty plate that he filled with cigarette ash to attempt to making it seem full. As kept as he was he felt like a stray dog, knowing that he belonged to someone but waded through tall buildings and empty ally ways trying to find some corner to hold up in. While he wasted his breathe on smoke and gut stained from drowning the inability to cope with things he would never speak of, she lay in bed clinging to the memories of the best parts of him. She remembered the kind hearted man that she fell for. Back then he was a mystery, part of the reason she loved him in the first place. Then with a soft heart and hard hands he pulled her close and silently, as he was, seemed to vow to never let go. Oaths are made by blood and in blood they can be broken. So it came quickly and startling when his blood was poisoned by the bottle. She could not figure out when things went wrong. So did he. In his solitude he tried to justify his willingness to forfeit life and love. In a brief moment of transparency through the self abuse he remembered.... She was no longer there. The moment when she left played through his mind on a loop. He could hear the sobs and the careful words picked as to not send him over the edge. He remembered how empty the room felt without her clothes sprawled across the bedroom floor like a testament to how freeing passion is. He prayed to a god he knew didn't exist apologetically saying, "if I had one more chance to do it all again..." Fate and destiny aside, some souls are simply lost as was he.

I don't keep a four leaf clover
No rabbits foot in my pocket
Ain't never dropped a coin in a well more over

Yeah I once held onto a horse shoe just in case
Though it Never did me any good
But that night i fell in love I saw you in your lace

Right then I was close to giving up
Because the only trouble was
I knew I'd be gone by the time the sun come up

While I tried to and wondered how to stay
I didn't sleep much that night
Trouble is and always was, had to be on my way

These last hundreds of miles I rode lost
As I saw you playing games on my soul never mind my heart
Thought If I could I would come back at all costs

But my passing light in night
I'm ****** to move along
Just in hopes I will not ruin something that could be right

Months of long days and hours I've worked just to move on
But my girl in lace, please know I never did

I never moved on

You walked through those big church doors
Stuffed your hands in your pockets and shed your skin
Drove away peddle to the floor
And Picked up the bottle and crawled right in

Claimed whole again
But never came clean
You want to start anew but don't know how to begin
Found to many crutches so used to that lean

You loved your girl but never enough
To break the curse of what you've become

Stumbled in to the liquor store
The good in you never had a chance
To pick up another bottle of self remorse
The good in you never had a chance

Drink up my friends we'll dull our pains
Left past lovers behind and daughters the same
So we drink up to forget and cover our shame
But in the morning we know we'll remember their names

don't know why but we seem to find
Fighting and cursing all in our soul
that rocky road that bends our spine
One that all my lonesome brothers know

So drink up my friends we'll cover our shame
But in the morning we know we'll remember their names
Drink up my friends we'll hide our shame
In the morning we know we'll remember their names

Lovers and daughters they'll carry our shame
And in the morning they'll wake and expect the same

What I deserve
I'll never really know
Always seemed like less than I got
Until it turned
You left me with no choice
These are the things I wish I could have said
You mean more than a moment of freedom
Than peace of mind and a good nights sleep.
I never wanted a way out
I wanted you more than my own right to live
More than the choice to find a better life
Never wanted to walk away
But you went and ****** it all up
And my feet are well ahead of my heart
I don't know if it will ever catch up
If ignorance is bliss then I wish I had never met you
But I'd rather suffer through your smile than take it away
It's funny how meant to be could be so wrong