Thumbs
anxiously poised
slightly above the qwerty
like little frustrated court stenographers
with other places they’d rather be.

Head
full with more memory than words
worlds away
dancing naturally
in the synchronized but broken
rhythm they used to call love
in a time before they took away its name
and comforting rules.

With broken glasses,
thumbs stumble
frameless
into awkward silence.

Nerves
trembling,
close the phone.

I was immortal once,
believe me, you, I was
invincible.
And back when I was immortal
I used and play hopscotch on the clouds
high above New York City Traffic
and laugh every time I caught myself
on the edge.

I used to play hide and seek
with the truth

I'd hide in the bedroom closet
of this muse
and be there when
she’d come home after a long day's inspiration.
I’d watch her undress
searching her naked self in the mirror
like something was missing
but she never did find it.
I think she knew I was there
yeah, she knew.

I used to race with shooting stars
I won once
but I cheated
so it doesn’t count.

I used to dance with The Moon all night
she moved my waters
and I took her virginity.
Ours was a love of necessity.

I kissed The Sun.
She blushed
and The Moon got jealous.

Then I met God,
the most beautiful of all my conquests.
I knew no one else would quite match up to her.
She and I made man together.
It was parenthood that tore us apart.

Yeah, I was immortal once
but now,  
now I’m just waiting to die
like everybody else.

Sometimes I muse about the strangers in my life.
I like to pretend that some of them have telepathy like radio
and when they see me as they always do,
in the commons at the school,
jogging past me on the sidewalk,
or in the polite but awkward silence of the elevator,
I wonder if I intrude upon their fuzzy bubble of mid-morning consciousness.  
If my inappropriate thoughts make their way through the static of theirs.

I almost want to apologize to the woman who jogged passed me this morning.
She didn’t need to know that I scratched my nuts
sniffed my hand,
and the scent of that ball-sweat brought me back a time when the room reeked of sin,
in the afterglow of rough ***, and that it made me miss
Her.

And that classmate didn’t need to know
that I secretly hoped the girl
that they keep talking about on the news would just show up dead,
so I don’t have to hear about it anymore.
Or the guy I just shared the mandatory hellos with,
if only he knew that just before we talked I was pondering the best way to induce mass hysteria
- a plan involving a *** of one dollar bills and LSD -
not that I’d ever actually put it into action.
Chaos is just fun to think about sometimes, I think.

And now I’m thinking of how weird it would be,
if one of these people tuned in right now and overheard me musing about them.
Woah…that’s so meta.

I gotta write this **** down.

Snake-boy’s arrival
has ****** everything up.

People are in a frenzy
some curious to see how their personalities
are going to dramatically change.
Some just curious to see what the tabloids will say about them now.

Others are forming an angry mob
in defense of nostalgia.
They haven’t been this ******* since
Pluto stopped being a planet.

These are the great injustices people get riled up about.
Nothing is more important to man
than the talk of gods and destiny.

We will **** for the things we cannot touch.
It’s in our worse nature
to look up at the sky and make meaning from the emptiness.
Just as it is in our worse nature to fight about what that meaning is.

So, here we are,
In midst of the ever changing chaos of the universe,
which far more interesting than what they may have to say
about our terribly insignificant lives,
caught up in our own imaginations.

Like children,
we make up our own games
and we don’t like it
when other kids change the rules.

Despite the fact that other children are starving
and other children are sleeping and dying in the cold
and real things,
horrible things, tragic little things
still happen.

We don’t think about them nearly as much.
They aren’t intangible gods, or destiny
yet, they affect the us more
and they are not
beyond our reach.

I once heard this somewhere;
that there are only two stories:
A boy leaves home
and a stranger comes to town.

Sometimes I lie
in my bed and think about the strangers.
I think about how terrifying some strangers are.
How we tell our children to run and hide
from what they don’t know;
to stay where it’s safe
here, at home
with their stories untold.

I think of how lost those strangers must feel
with no one who will talk to them.
I think about the darkest villains of childhood lore.
How they all started out as children
afraid of reaching out and changing anything.

I think of how hard is must have been for them
as young adults, to built up the courage
and tell their parents they were leaving
against their wishes
to explore the world
and find the role they were meant to play.

I think
of the stories
hiding in between the boy
and the stranger.
The conversations they wished they could have
if only time weren’t so stubborn
and bent over backwards sometimes
for special cases,
like true love or some karmic mistake.

I think of all of the heroes and their journeys
and that how inevitably, at some point
they are going to be the stranger coming to town.

I think about where I live.
How many stories I’ve heard and told
that are heavy on one side.
I both envy and pity those who live the stories.
Those little boys leaving home;
they know how strange the world really is
and what it’s like
to strike fear in the townsfolk of some distant village;

Where it’s probably nicer this time of year.