What do you want from me?
Do you want my love or my history?
Shall you accept these pieces of a man
living a life made of rusted ideas?

Are you willing to make love to an effigy?

I can give all that I am to you in a
single moment of purple ******,
but when the dawn comes,
my body turns to ash upon your bed.

Waking and you find the pieces of my
soul I left for you...my heart a burnt offering.

I am not a poet, not a man, not a person...
not the idea of love you were given.

I am pieces of a broken boy left to give you,
a love shaped and broken by the idea of love.

Pretending that there is something worth
hunting for deep within what I may have given.

I have nothing to give save emptiness.....
nothing but the desert sands.

I am going to make you love me,
but it will hurt.

HAS no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned?
I could have warned you; but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

It was windy when my father finally met the man who took his hopes from him. It's always windy in the desert during the day unless you're in a town or an arojjo. Greg had trailed the man from Tuson all the way to El Paso, a three hundred mile ride.  The story goes that the guy dad was after was just a bounty...but I know the real background.

My father may have been many things, may have had a dark streak in him, may have had a past he never spoke of...but so do I.

The ironic thing is that this man my father had been hunting over so many miles, used to be his best friend. This man, called Greene, taught my dad all he knew, and left Greg when he needed him most.

Word on the trail was that Greene and his boys cut up a couple workin girls, cut em up the way no woman ever should live through.

Greg found em, walked in on them when they weren't expecting anything, snuck up on them in their camp out of town .

My dad shot four of em down before they could draw...
and Greene was the only one left asking why?

"Why Greg?" he asked. "You know why."

I've had a car for years
but have been riding around with
somebody else at the wheel.
Didn't have a car yesterday
and walked the 8 miles home
through midnight wind.
Halfway there I realized
that I was the one driving now.

I just crossed over it.
That demarcation between
who I thought I was, and
wanted to be....and actually
have become.
Behind me now
is that person I
yearned to be.
In unfamiliar territory now
and expecting imminent
destruction.
Yet there is nothing here
on this side of oblivion
save a bottle of whiskey
and pure existentialism.
After having another drink
and putting on Led Zeppelin's
When The Levee Breaks,
I remember a similar rainy
night seven years ago,
stealing two bottles of
red wine from the Publix
in St.Augustine and drinking
said wine on the beach with
Lauren and Kiki as the storm
enveloped us in some sort
of human connection.
I never ****** either one
of them but I would have
liked to, but in those days
I had no confidence even
when drunk.
In those days I didn't
realize that I had something
to give besides money and
an averaged sized ****
(even though it's not crooked).
I believed in love and truth
and was eventually shown by
the world I find myself in now
that there is nothing but the
life we make for ourselves.
It is not up to me to change
the fetid world, it is not up to
me to hunt down that *******
who pumped a nasty load
all inside of a random **** victim.
I was raised to believe that
we actually had a purpose, a
mission given to us to do
all we can to negate human suffering.
I realize now that it was all
nothing but sheer false hope.