I know, ultimately, it's true what they said,
That when it all comes down, we make our own beds,
Now we're adults, let's mess up the covers by jumping like kids,
I know we've a long way to go, but there's a life to be lived!

I'll never see it's like again;
The springtime coming to life
In my grandmothers back yard,
The birds singing, insects humming,
Sun dappled camouflage on the pond.
One mid-morning, mid-mourning,
Dreaming of love lost,
Hoping for hope.
It's funny, how young love is like childhood,
Gone before you truly value it,
Only cherished after the fact.
Only, cherish that fact,
Value it, before it's gone.
Humor your heart, like a child,
Hope for hope,
Dream of love!
And some mid-morning, quit mourning,
Let your camouflage fall, feel the sun,
Let the birdsong bring you back
To the wonder of childhood!
Love the autumn of life,
You'll never feel it's like again.

I am a reflection of
What should have been
The mirror darkened
Silver tarnished
Cracked in insouciance

I am the fallen fragments
Molecules devastated
Fractured facets of
Silicone sand
Meticulously separated

In scattered light
I am the shadow of
A jaded shade
An obscured apparition of
Abiding love

Framed in pain
I am the spaces between
The polished glass
The sharpened edges
The once-perfect dreams

I am the fist
Fear-enforced ferocity
I am the anger-driven
Hypervigilant philosophy
Responsible for each atrocity

I am the blood
Chasing each line
Filling each wrinkle
Draining reason
Never satiating time

I am the man
Left behind lies
Determined deficient
Dejected detritus
An unwanted prize

I am
I don't know who
I... don't know what to do
But since I don't know
I could be the superglue too

Don't have her eyes O' Lord
Bear the eyes of a devil before hers
Better even to stare with dead eyes
Let it be neutral, your saving gaze

_______________

Bewitched by the charming graces of my private hell

Honesty, leave me be, that I should never kiss and tell


Soul to the winds, body to the flames

Salvation is ash, destruction a game


Spirit starving, though gorging be

Whether passion, love, or ecstasy


Only eyes am I

No hands to grasp the things I see


Only prayers am I

Never to reach the powers that be


On bliss' wings I soar upon high

A slobbering slave of darkening sky


Mind for fire, heart for dust

My remains trapped in a body in lust


The master plans the subjects scheme

The circle of life, the cruelest theme


Only eyes am I

No way to catch the tears that fall


Only now am I

Too late to save one from the fate of all


At the end of my rope I dangle and twist

Should I climb for the top or cease to exist?


Reason and sorrow to sweetest wits end,

Ignorance and wisdom dance, twist, and bend.


Grey rains fall and tired eyes swell

Never again to kiss or to tell

I love reading.  My favorites are fantasy novels.

When I was in middle school and first starting to grasp the idea that one could read for fun --gross right?-- I read an awesome series called The Dragonriders of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey.

Man, what an amazing series for a young reader (soon to be aspiring writer, thank you Anne McCaffrey) to cut their teeth on.
It is intelligently and imaginatively written, adventurous, suspenseful, emotional, and like duh, it's got people riding dragons!

Well anyway, in the very first book one of the main characters is being attacked by an extremely large beast called a watch weyr, a genetic cousin of dragons bred for guarding castles.

At the very last instant, as the beast is pouncing upon our hero, the watch weyr realizes its intended target is actually one of the very people it was bred to protect.

In a desperate attempt to fling itself aside and spare the life of our hero, the watch weyr snaps its own spine, killing itself.

Now, this is no dog, it's a descendant of dragons, intelligent, sentient, and centuries-old.  That killed itself to avoid hurting someone it didn't even know.  Without a second thought.

Sometimes, not always or even most of the time, mind you, but sometimes...

I wish I had never read that book.

Dear Rapture,

It's been so many years, I'm so sorry to intrude,
I've so many things to say, but I've no desire to be rude,
I've tried to keep me locked away, during our long interlude,
I guess I've done okay, but so much has happened, and it isn't all good.

How are you?  I hope things are well.  I think about you, you know.
What've you been up to? Do tell! I haven't heard a word since so long ago.
I don't want to renew a war, but I had to either reach out or explode,
Tact's gone right out the door, for hope our hearts had adjacent zip codes.

What ever happened to you, what did you think, I wonder constantly,
You said give you space, or was it time, or was it just a slow-burn for me?
I always gave you the benefit of the doubt, but I just don't know lately...
I toss and turn, this garden bed feels like a grave, forgotten and buried.

The distance between us is further than any airline has ever been,
I'm sure that, like me, you've felt it growing since our relationships end.
I know we both hurt, we lost so many truths in all the confusion,
And I feel like the biggest loser of all because I lost my best friend.

If I sent this letter off, tear-stained and folded into a paper plane,
If it prevailed on the Trade Wind and soared away to your windowpane,
If it tapped ever-so-lightly, would you let it in or would you refrain?
Would you turn it away, unread, to dissolve in the Cascadian rain?

Maybe I'm hoping beyond hope, a delusional version of Lion-O's sight,
I just had to try one last time before we drift off into that long goodnight,
Though I go not gently, I'm no devil and I've no desire to cause a fright,
But hell, I'd wrestle all the angels in heaven if it was a question of might.

Well, I guess there's nothing I can do but fold it up and throw it hard,
Try not to shed a rogue tear when the movie gets to that part,
And whenever the clock says 2:22, 3:38, or 11:11, I'll wish on a star,
Truly, I just want you to know I care,

I love you,
Sincerely,
From,
Afar

It is ever-breaking fragile pain,
Thinly-strung lightning-flames.

It is stressing, tense, and pulsing life.
To force down grief, to strengthen strife.

It is flowing wonders' pouring heart,
A weathered, broken beggars' cart.

It is swimming through the sunlit air
On perfume-scented strands of hair.

It is sprouting springtimes luscious glade,
And lying down in burning shade.

It is a flashing trick of fading shadow,
In summer sunlights only meadow.

It is broken trust and spoken lies,
An angry haze in bleeding eyes.

It is sipping sweetness and pouting lips,
A flag of peace that snags and rips.

Sullenly, I quote whilst I quaff

Softly stammered surcease of wroth

Consummately ****** I sputter and cough

Sloshed ale sloppily sopped

Spite shed, soft shadows soughed

Soggily satiated at brimful trough

I have wings,
but no feet.
I am escape,
without retreat.
I am surrender,
but not defeat.

We were in love, successful, and happy,
We had a graphic novel series and a hit CD.

We did everything together, I stood tall beside her,
Then some insecure scientist turned on their LARGE particle collider.

Right was down, and down was blue, and blue was east,
Now she's married to another man, and I got no teeth.

Whipcracks, needles, and scorpion stings,
These are a few of my least favorite things.
Why do we devolve to insult and injury,
I don't want that, I need your arms around me.

Forgiving doesn't always take away the pain
As if washed away by some mythical rain
Generously applied truth is the only salve
Duel-edged and sharp enough to cut us in half
Pain-reaction, recoil, trauma response
Defensive action, budding trust is lost
This is normal human behavior
PTSD drains, Hope is savior
Catalyst for anxious dread
Water in the desert when nearly dead
Grateful hands lift life to lip
Thankful for the sandiest sip
Kindness inspires compassion and understanding starts
Enlightening dark corners in sun and healing the heart

I just wanted to say I love you before
I'm not forty-four anymore
Cause 44 = 2 x 22
And those numbers mean you

She lies

Because I lie

I lie

Because I am insecure

She lies

Because she no longer trusts me

I lie

Because she hurts me

She lies

Because she doesn't want me to see her pain

I lie

Because I fail to understand

She lies

Because she can no longer see the truth of me

I lost her

When I could no longer see the truth of her

Just wanna give a shout out to my mom and dad,

Who got married a full 3 months before I was born,

But despite whose valiant efforts,

I still turned out to be a *******.

____

To wallow in and under drown,

To shape a tear, to form a frown.


Exaggerations embracing pain,

They weave a spell to summon rain.


A heart to crush, a mind to flood,

And veins that throb with rivers blood.


Confusion swims where soft truth flies,

A cauldron to mix a concoction of lies.


These fires scar, yet sear no flesh,

While times slow healing turns souls to ash.

Words pour from my heart
Staining the page crimson
Shaking hand spatters ink
Pens azure life-blood leaking
Rhythmic refuge reverie
Beatboxed spittle
Tears accompany
Washing ink-blood
Into drumstick-pen dents
Petite purple puddles
Small seas of sadness
Storm-tossed soul
A sailor searching
Three-ring horizons
For spiral-bound cyclones

I like to take a second to think about the things I say.


Unfortunately, this usually tends to occur after I say a thing...

Two politicians standing around the grill in Anycity, USA.

"So wha'd'ya want? Heart or mind?" Asks the first politician.

"Mind," Answers the second.

"A man after my own heart!" Chuckles the first.

"I look like a melting gargoyle when I cry."

She laughed, like wind-chimes in sunlight, soothing and warm. She replied, "You don't have to show me."

"Will this really work? I feel silly."

"Well you won't know unless you try, now will you?" She smiled.

"Okay, okay. Like this?" I asked, crossing my hands over my chest.

"Kinda," She reached out and adjusted my hands slightly, "Like that, gently, like you're holding a baby bird against your heart."

She let go of my hands and floated backwards a pace, watching me encouragingly.

Still feeling silly, I tried to clear my mind, while remembering her instructions;

Focus, stay relaxed...

OK.

Think of hope, I told myself, and as I did I began to bring my cupped hands down away from my chest and hold them facing the sky.

"*******!" She exclaimed, leaning in, her face alight with - something.  

I started to lower my hands, thinking as I do, that she was poking fun.

Her face fell, and her hands shot out like lightning, gently bracing my hands and preventing me from lowering them. "Don't be shy," she smiled softly.

I looked up into her eyes, wary, but her face showed only concern.  I looked down again, ashamed of my reaction, and she ducked her head to maintain eye contact.  "You're a squirmy one, aren'cha?"

I felt my face flush, but I laughed, despite my anxiety.

She nodded towards my hands, "Don'cha wanna know what I see?"

I saw nothing. "Sure," I said, trying not to sound skeptical.

Apparently I failed because she let out another peal of chiming laughter.  She seemed to sober a bit, without losing her carefree smile and leaned in a bit more closely.  She peered into the bowl formed by my cupped hands like it was filled with stars instead of empty air.

She remained like that for what seemed an eternity.  I held as still as I could, awaiting her judgment.  She straightened and looked at me, very seriously.  Her face was not hard, exactly, it was like a waterfall that had just stopped falling, all trace of humor was gone.

"Why are you ashamed of me?" She asked softly, no anger or hurt, just concern.

"I..." I didn't actually know how to answer.  I thought for a moment, the both of us standing there, with her holding my hands like a fortune teller.

"I think I have just been convinced, over and over, that I should be." I said somberly.

"Silly boy," she replied, her face once again alive with that same ephemeral light.  "Don't you know?  People will tell themselves all kinds of things when they're hurting.  Don't you go and let hurt steal your hope, your light!"  

I hung my head a bit, somewhere, deep down, I did know.

She shook her head slightly, and smiling a bemused little smirk, she glided closer.  With her left hand she began to push my hands back up towards my chest, and brought her right hand around to cup the back of my neck, simultaneously drawing our foreheads together.

Her eyes drifted nearly closed, as if she was falling into a trance, and as my hands reached my chest she whispered something I could not quite understand.

I saw it first in her eyes, a faint glow, and as she finished her short silent prayer the tiny glow flared into uproarious brilliance!  The blinding light suffused us, filling my vision with blue/white fire.  

Hope's warm countenance floated before me now in the heart of a star, and just before I awoke, I realized that the light was coming not from her eyes, but from beneath my cradled hands.

I've cut open the corpse of this love
So I could crawl inside to survive
The eternal cold night of this loss

We joined ourselves
Mind, body, and soul
Is that not forever
You must've known some magic
I didn't
And had the heart to cast it
Because I didn't

Your gender roles
don't go very well
with my anxiety jam

A blank page blinks
Begging words to appear
I can't seem to think
Months lapse into years

Shake the ink from the pen
Alchemy art from grieving
Change a loss to a win
Turn that mill for demons

Crank out another liter
'Til the pump's run dry
Claw up one last meter
Over that ****'s the sky

In Soviet Russia,

Consequence face YOU.

Have you ever seen that video where they put food coloring in milk
and then they drip one drop of liquid soap in the middle and
it pushes all the food coloring away?

You do that to my nightmares.

__

Where once we met,

Passion stirred breezes for winds to form,

And drenched our hearts in it's growing storm.


Like clashing clouds each enveloped the other,

Releasing energies no depression could smother.


A thunderstorm raining lightning bolts,

Shamelessly shedding light in blinding jolts.


Water and Air, spinning, mixing, churning.

The chaos was music, the eye in a hurricane of yearning.


Oblivious, we destroyed, even as we created,

Endangered life as surely as rain sustains it.


The chaos of our perfect storm turned against us,

No music now, only the raging tempest.


Winds of passion calmed, storm-fronts collapsed within,

And the last teardrops of rain fell unforgiven.


Silence stretched, louder than any thunder,

Broken, after so long, by hope barely uttered.


With care hope grows, uplifts, and inspires,

Then sings of life, and love, and of passion like fire.


Testament to life, though unaware,

A butterfly batting its wings, stirring the smallest breath of air.


Now, a field of butterflies rise from dreams and cocoons,

A thousand tiny gusts of hope, born anew.


Innocent, they move the very sky,

Fledgling winds, breezes learning to fly,


Rising high above the meadow where they were born,

Quietly whispering prayers, of becoming a storm.

That's it.
That's the whole poem.
Not really much of a poem.
Not really much of a way to live either.
But it's what I got.

You flow through my poetry

like the blood from the movie Alien

_

I tore my hand from hers and I stumbled backwards feeling disgusted.  Feeling disgusting.  

Soiled, oily.

Five bottom-shelf screwdrivers and a pitcher-and-a-half of cheap beer briskly informed me that my stomach was a little too happenin, and they were gonna go ahead and go.  

Like, NOW.

I ran towards the bathroom, elbowing several people out of the way as I went.

Several much larger, and leather-clad Mowhawkians.

Moshers who had been standing in line for at least 15 minutes.

How I didn't get punched I will never know...

I careened into the stall like a methhead pinball and got ready to lose my liquid lunch.  

The watery hi-***** and natty light must have seen the same sight I did, because they decided they didn't really have anywhere to be after all.

I propelled myself away from the nightmare cesspool masquerading as a toilet, mostly by force of horror.

Luckily my legs wanted the **** out of there as badly as the rest of me, and they shakily complied.

Rocking side-to-side like a punch-drunk prize-fighter in Round-9, I bulled past an eight-foot-tall stick-figure goth-person, and it hit me:

I am going to have to tell her....

I was suddenly alone in the club.

...I am going to have to tell the love of my life that another woman kissed me.

The electricity went out.

Not in the seedy South East D.C. nightclub, but inside me.

The room was still, full of the life-like statues of dancers.

Lasers, frozen-fire, suspended in darkness and smoke.

The color had drained, like a rerun on a black & white TV...

I could only watch as my life crumbled in my mind's eye.

In the midst of this noisy, noxious, overcrowded *******.

In deafening, rhythmic silence.

What passed for air was sweaty-*****, and midsummer dank even in winter.

But the air around me became crisp.

Not crisp like the wind in February,

Crisp like the silence in a tomb.

Fitting.

Because I won't survive this.

I didn't know it yet, but this $5 cover open-bar might as well have been my tomb.

Sealed as tightly as my fate.

With a kiss.

I suppose the knife was used,

More like a tool,

But having been stabbed in the chest,

To not consider it a weapon,

We'd be thought the fool,

So to give the story that final deft twist,

We were convinced the blade didn't exist,

It's a scenario Kaiser Soze simply couldn't resist.

Your Honor,







The persecution rests.

I was a student of her spirit
I was in love with every aspect

I was accepting when she was distant
I was joyous on each return

I was more than a scapegoat
I was more than a back-story

I AM more than just broken pieces

I am not an Atari running Logo.

I will wear a turtle costume for you.

I will Go-To-Line-22, and I will STOP for you.

I will even Go-To-End, for you.

But if you're not there, for me, you'll eventually find that turtle costume unresponsive.

If I could quit you
If I could resist

If the truth did not ring true
If the pain did not persist

If the sun were to fail to shine
If I didn't live for dreams of rain

If they didn't drip-dry into this heart of mine
If I didn't weave them into and between every refrain

If I lost myself and I couldn't remember why
If I could ignore that you're not here, holding my hand

If I could picture your picture and refuse to cry
If I wasn't on my knees, if I was able to stand

If there was a drug to take to make me forget
If it erased longing, and sorrow, and pain, and regret

If I could simply eat it and you'd disappear
If I could just drink it and drift off, free of fear

If I pretended to want these things to come true
I would only be lying to myself, trying to spare you

In a pinch, you can use a pen to stir your coffee,
Thus proving that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
I mean, seriously...
Have you ever tried to stir a cup of coffee with a Claymore?

_

Young and in love, two kids with a lollipop.

The future is theirs, a sundae with a cherry on top.


Honest and innocent, immature and insecure,

Both happy and scared, both hearts sure.


Nine months spent together, three spent apart;

Missing, Longing, and Waiting:

One year til two broken hearts.


3 days left, 2 heartstrings severed by 1 lie.

"I talked to her!" Said her friend, "Come over, let's have a beer and get high."


"Well?! Why hasn't she called?  She's barely written..."

Jealous and wicked, she lies, "With another she's smitten."


The room spins, the floor falls away, the lights start to flash.

My cigarette just burns, the beer tastes like ash.


I expected to be abandoned, I always knew I'd end up alone.

Fool, I stayed when she said, "You're too drunk to go home."


I didn't deserve a second chance, nor should I have wasted,

But I couldn't speak, twisted, conflicted, and consumed by self-hatred.


I blamed her and her friend, I tried to hide it by running non-stop,

But in the end, it was my hand that broke the lollipop.