Walking back barefoot
through summer's empty barracks
on the outer, upper edge
of my homework home.
Feeling the freedom of my feet
beneath a damp and gentle breeze,
the moon reveals the room
through which I let them roam.

With solitary silence,
I can pause and light a fire,
watch the ember enter in,
setting thoughts ablaze.
Holding a holy ounce of hope
below this tightly guarded soul
that there appears a stair
between our summer days.

The dancing dewdrops
sparkle and coat my feet anew,
and splash my every other over
with the starry skies.
Taper the tales where I'm detained,
creating paths to doors and gates,
to find a place to shine
like glitter in your eyes

a million little mirrors that flash and blink
and capture my imagination
as it floats on the clouds of a single flutter
and flies away through the river breeze
bringing all at once a peace and a fervor
and a reason to believe in the feeling
for this beacon before me

we frolic through flocks of freaks
to find a vacant space between them
and create our own vibrations
between the mad machine music
alive with beats and fidgets and dripping sound
bravely bouncing to blips and whirrs
to find our bliss within the instant

you stand there bopping smiling glowing
shining brimming sparkling flowing
rattle my heart like the limb of a tree
the ******* the rope swing attached underneath
and as witness to your swaying grace
it just can't help but palpitate

one by one i count the miracles
you
here
beautiful
and beside me
i am with you
my pocket's treasures are intact
and you're enjoying them
the music is masterful
the weather is wonderful
and there's a smile pasted on your face
and everything comes easily
and nobody's ruining our fun
and there is nothing that stands between me
and my hope
that someday
you will see as i see
our paths intertwining
like strands of dna
encoded through our souls
a beautiful future
worth risking a thousand lives
just to brush my fingertips against
worth the worst hurt in the world
just to try and climb for the summit
and even if i collapse en route
and even if you shoot me down
and even if a landslide unites me with the ground
i will rest in peace
because this time
i *******
tried.

I'm not in love.
But I am in love
with the idea
of being
in love.

With hands weathered
and soul tethered
Jazz Man plays a sorrowful tune.
The flash of fingers
guide pain that lingers
visible as a shrouded moon.
Speedy knuckles
let loose chuckles
of the tired and weary loon.
The band surrounds him,
memory hounds him,
like bugs croaking long days in June.

Inspiration
and narration
drip sharply from familiar breaks.
His solo, it swings
from so many strings,
each attached to enduring aches.
Final phrases
briskly pace his
calls across lucid and lonely lakes.
And though what he plays
could be stretched for days,
New York minutes are all he takes.

You,
there,
with your stripes so delicately traced.
Me
here
with a mess of ink scattered randomly
with patterns of unknown angles
and eloquence of unseen form.

My abundance is your emptiness,
my decisions are your mysteries,
but, as naked before me you stand,
little seems unsolved.
Your blankness stares me down
intimidating my activity,
preventing me from breaching the silence,
and so I stare back at you, thinking.

My thoughts will adorn your garment
and knowing this is menacing..
it roars back against my marks
and keeps your pinstripes perfect.

Oh yes, those stripes,
languishing in stupid blue,
amongst the white cascades
that aren’t quite white.
To me they dance
with shadows of brilliance
flowing against them.
They give way to great paths,
intricately traced,
intimately felt,
that take you and make you art.
But those are just shadows
my imagination cannot cast.

My eye is blank and blue.

But wait..
a siren shrieks from deep beneath
and steeps subconscious thoughts to breach
the border between ink and speech
and decorate your fair stripes.
My inspired eye sees these wild designs
that divide, and unite, and indeed multiply
into winding and time-binding styles inscribed
but how
in the hell
do I start?


****.

You still stare
blankly
boldly
as I still stall
fumbling
folding..
but slow to lose hold to my shadowy flashes
that fought against waterfalls
to reach peaks of genius
and fell short
but fell well above thoughts before.

So with pen of black,
I faintly refract
the light that has shown me the door.

The horizon is the impossible goal.

* It is the goal of trying to catch up with the sun, trying to surpass the infinite boundary that exists only from the limitations of the eye.

* It is the goal that takes years of labor and toil, and when it seems like it will soon be over, it always sets itself further out of reach.

* It is the goal, simple and straightforward at present, but winding and demanding the further along the path one goes.

* It is the goal that must be undertaken alone, regardless of how many are on the path with you.

* It is the goal that is always present, even in times of rest, the one that looms over you, stalking you like prey, hunting you when you aren't hunting it.

* It is the goal whose journey many have taken, but none have returned from.

* It is the goal which, after having been attained, is rumored to reward you in ways that will continue to manifest far into the future.


It is the goal that you can never attain, and yet you must cross the horizon.
It is the goal that you must attain, and yet you can never cross the horizon.

* You can never cross the horizon, only perpetuate the hunt for what lies over it.

* You can never cross the horizon, and you constantly remind yourself of this when you insanely continue to run through the toil of the process.

* You can never cross the horizon, but in the quest for it, you are forced to make alliances, work with others to catapult yourselves across the same goal.

* You can never cross the horizon, but the effort to do so leaves you with a stronger sense of self, knowing how you react in the face of adversity, and understanding how the journey shapes you.

* You can never cross the horizon, yet you refuse to quit when each trial bends the bones of your back, when every step shreds the skin on your feet, when the heat cooks and boils your brain, when all the nerves in your being direct your heart to stop, except that one, that lonely one, that one which refuses to quit.

* You can never cross the horizon, and as the sun shrinks deeper, the hunt becomes more and more desperate with every step.

* You can never cross the horizon; in trying, you will only exhaust all of the resources and time that is given to you, all of the energy and strength that was left in you, and all of the creativity and ingenuity that was built in you.


You can never cross the horizon.

Until you do.

And when you cross the horizon...

*The rest is up to you to write...

Sitting staring at the swirls gently engraved upon the ceiling,
feeling faintly pessimistic that my hateful heart is healing.
Take apart the grace and art,
reveal my dated darkened past,
to harken back on wasted hours casting plaster for this mask.

It's cloudy colors cover up my crowded stream of conscience,
these teeming constants split between omitted and accomplished,
Scenes of trips and speeding fits
replaced by cleaner blips in truth
gleaning pictures of achievement, disconstruing youth uncouth.

Tall tales tinker with the crawling skin wherein my twin is toweled,
howling, hinting with appalling twitches, calling crying foul!
Small disguise in sprawling lies,
ensheathed, forestalling prying guests,
deflects the scrutinizing eyes of stressing restless wrecks.

My cranium co-ordinates claims stripped of contradiction,
wont to stitch the hidden patch on flaunted fabric fiction.
A daunting task, avaunt, at last,
concealed from haunting static force,
hiding flaws in paths of virtue drawn in divorced source and course.

Holding heaving out a haze, a cloud of extravented high,
sighs surrendered to the evening see my gracious ember die.
Praise condemns these sacred friends
with whom I stray from rendered paths,
preventing brash impatience from detaching this black mask.

I have ye to thank,
all ye actors and poets and marvels
(and DCs and everything in between)
for I have lived with ye, and amongst ye,
and ye have gently inspired genuine genius
in all ye holes in the wall
and all ye pens and strings and voices.

I thank you for the endless memories
of conversations of unnecessary furor and consuming hysteria
of brilliant surprises from elegant unknown talents
of tossed salad people and places and history and interaction
of a night lost in glowsticks but preserved in pictures
of a time my time in between periods of blank walls
of a blinding bolt forward in presence of mind.

For was it you
who told me about your grandfather
a man so brilliant that a mere conversation with the dean
at sixteen granted him admission to Columbia?
who told me of Canadian interlocutors
intimately engaged, only after your party had left?
who told me of amazing cliffside adventures
in education and nature's nomenclatures abound?
who discussed my heritage against that of a concrete world
of exploding dreams and collapsing stars at once,
where you take a bite but might get the proverbial worm?
or you, against that of a simple hicktown
where tractors run tandem with buicks in school lots?

Might it have been you
who watched with me psychedelic documentaries
and named canaries after variations of drug store medications?
who gallantly tolerated my most obnoxious outrageous disgusting
interesting unaffected out-of-their-mind friends?
who took me to absurd spots at absurd hours to breathe absurdity,
then churted we'd go, back the building we'd known?
who brought me in groups to feast on uncomfortable meats,
but between the awkward and networked gossip pipelines,
were enjoying the food and friends and flattery?
who drunk on dreams, droned on into darkness,
and dripped into ears of a man in his cave,
a man playfully perplexing you by pondering preposterous?

It must have been you
whose beautifully woven music reached my ears,
enveloped my being, seldom alone, and even when solo,
scattered brains with banter and brilliance combined...
who, with an open door and wide smile,
welcomed me to the mind's great opera house,
and gave audience to my own logical saga...
who in the weekend's weak end became crazy dazed amazings,
lazing in listless lack of activity, or senselessly celebrating
sins and kinship, all ways seeking erasure...
who gave me so many names against the grain,
jrosay or nerp or j or jackattack or just plain jack,
your classmate hallmate roommate or just plain friend...
who sat and sang and slew, dragons myths, moods,
and hit and clicked and ripped and spilt, toxins, guilt,
and hurt and failed and walked with me...


at least i hope it was you
you who paved platforms and bridges to raze amazing
and left vast caches of spectacular aptitude
or you who spread brilliance like plagues defined loosely,
grossly self-aware in great stares of embarrassed arrogance
and defeated demons crying freedom and bleeding love
you gave worlds great engravings, new meaning
to be me in new worlds new dreams new things
nooses spread shredded across mind fields
you lovingly led leaders over languid anguish
dangled carrotsticks and heritage bringing peace
you found you finding a place in space in winding time
under universal roofing aloof of stinking sewage
found a truth around music and beauty

shopping cart hearts that gather dust and poetry
blissful obituary tears splashing across my memory
loco rangers of brilliant oblivion armed with toothy news
slaying my molded upbringings refreshing genius

fair chance soul trade and daylong flatlines
double barreled shotgun roulette
blank charge buckshot
noisemakers both

that trigger
firing
you
?