How to explain what it feels like,
when your soul is crumbling within,
to watch your possible futures meet eachother during the same night, and know that in order to survive,
you must leave one behind.

My ***** human lips touch their wine bottle
and they shudder like old women
whose propriety has been offended.

I think they must have been like me, once,
when they were young inside, however
many lifetimes ago that was for them.

They began their journey as I did,
full of sacred fire
and holy dreams.
I wish I had been who I am now,
in those lost times.

Discussing Plato and justice with fellow idealists
upon an Abuela's porch;
I would have been at home with them.

But there is no time for truth now,
no time for holy writ,
now that they have a mortgage, and investments, and me.
Ideas and the will that accompanies them
fall away
with the accumulation of wealth and age.

So now we are at odds, we new torch-bearers
and the old truth-seekers
because life has got the better of them, or they it.

Dare you say I have not the capacity to Love?
Have you ever loved someone you were sure would die before you?
Have you ever hidden yourself away for the benefit of another?
Have you ever wiped blood from a naked thigh?

Dare you say I am not a man?
Have you ever received a call fresh from ****?
Have you ever been the caretaker of another's memory?
Have you ever lost yourself within hope in spite of all?

Dare you say I am a coward?
Have you ever lost all you knew?
Have you ever pushed forward alone into the night?
Have you ever remade yourself in the image you so desired?

Dare you say?
Dare you nothing.
Dare you not live as a soul on fire.
Dare you not accept any kind of desire.
Dare you not.

It's late, and I still know nothing about women.
  
  They say that men have locked women up,
for all times, in all civilizations, in all lifestyles;
  in one way or another locking away the soft things,
supposedly for their own protection....
   maybe to break some kind of spell,
or, more likely...a fear.

But those men, on whom our gender might be judged,
   never have tasted freedom as I have.
And for the men, who love other men:
   it is probably easier for you.

Not socially, or politically, or overtly,
   but poetically, romantically, truly.

Please don't misinterpret me, I say nothing of morals,
  or religion...only Love.

And it really is hard for a man to Love a Woman,
  someone or something so...dangerous.
Yes, dangerous to men who have to learn to be hard,
  the hard way, dangerous to break down that fantasy.

There is a reason that most men are more hostile
   towards women, than vice versa.
How strange, when you have so much more to lose,
  than some misguided notion of superiority.

But this is what I want, this is what I need,
   this tearing down and burning up.
These hands, this flesh, a vessel for fire and light;
   I need your love, as the sun needs the night.

What city do you live in?
What town?
What hamlet?
What village?
What homestead out in the middle of supposed nowhere?

Where in this once great land could you live
and be able to say to yourself "No, I haven't
felt the pain of trying to provide for myself
and for those whom I love?"

Where could you be, from West Coast
to the East, and not at least wonder during your
work week once, what is happening all around us?

Or do you sit in relative comfort,
as I do, fighting only personal battles
and yet knowing deep down inside
that there is something not quite right.

Feeling perhaps there might be something wrong
not with yourself, but with where you live
and that maybe your supposed failings as a person
have nothing whatsoever to do with you
but rather, with the land you live in?

"What does Happiness mean to you Jon?"

First response without thinking about it: The absence of guilt and shame.

Second response after thinking about how terrible the first one sounded:
The absence of loneliness.

Third response after some serious soul searching:
Creating and sharing beautiful things.

Why don't you want me
to do something with
my hands,
these hands that can do better
than my cheap words?

I've never tried to pawn myself
off as the person you need in your life,
even though that's the want you
throw me when you eye me during
the obviously empty workday.

You ought to know though,
I really am not what you need,
not what you want,
not the man that can make things
the way you wish them to be.

In reality I'm just a sorry drunk
trying to wish my life back together,
and it's your misfortune
that I happened upon you
when you were fleeing wolves.

I.
These stars, this twilight palaver, out by what used to be a Wal-Mart;
   walking down streets in a fairytale, apart from you,
   putting on a good show, when all I wanted was to hold your hand.

My memories don't progress like pages, but ebb and flow,
  the way the river does, as it winds its way to the delta,
  with rapids around every other bend.

What is and what was and what should have been are written in your eyes,
  grey eyes, eyes that pierce me like lances when I gaze too long;
   my self then, afraid of being naked.

I clothed myself in words, and folly; raised myself up as intelligentsia,
   as protection, which you saw through so easily.
   What it was I wanted protection from, God only knows.

I bend my thoughts to you, my heart and hopes searching for some message,
   some sign, some carrier pigeon from the Hague,
   sent to change everything in one stroke.

II.
Walking in green fields once,
somewhere in high summer
full of the growing things
we turned
and were
here.

Here?
Yes.
Now?
I want to, please, yes.

The grass was so soft, the sun an everlasting lamp,
the world so clear I could almost see through it.

How can I?
Easily.

III.
Needles, so many needles.
I should have been there
Would have been there

But I made my choices
As you did yours
And who I was then
Was not who you needed

They told me you had a death drive
Who they were to fling Jung around like that
In passing remark about you
I will never know

Here let me.
No.
Please.

I wept for you
I still weep for you inside
This burning you have given me
Imagining as it should have been

IV.
I found you on the floor in your kitchen
Alone
Cold
Barely even a ghost

I gathered you in my arms
And put you in the car
And drove

We drove out past the city lights
On into the dying West
Your feet on the dash
And your heart in my hands

Reclaim that which was never taken away.
Seek out that which you have hidden.
Take the spear and drive it deep.

As within
So without
As above
So below

Understand this before all else:
What is right for your soul
Bears little resemblance
To what you expect.

To know thyself is the call
And the paradox.
By seeking the truth of thyself,
You discover the truth of others.

One must ****** your Minotaur,
And kiss Mephistopheles in his rage,
In order to assume your Theseus,
And fill your Faust with purpose.

I'd continue in the same vein if I weren't drunk and tired and simply out of patience. Essentially what I'm saying in a poor imitation of alchemical allegory is that the worlds outside of ourselves are bound to the worlds within.

It's twenty minutes to Midnight,
almost time for me to hate myself again.
Twenty minutes, and the clock is ticking
till I'll be hunted by you again.

Already I can smell you creeping,
taste you slithering up and out
of the past like some broken nightmare.

Some nights you've got the upper hand,
and others I can hold my own ground,
but neither of us can seem to outright
vanquish the hope in the other.

Were it fated for you and I,
to battle on for all eternity,
it just may be that I could jive,
nay, savy and roll with that.

But you, you've been putting your hooks
into my love's and my dear ones,
you've been putting your ****
in holes that don't belong to you.

Haunting hearts in need of repairs,
forcing your crooked smile
and your fingers made of knives
into places bleeding enough without you.

Come then, if monster enough ye may be,
to face me fully and let us end this
macabre dance in the old way,
have at me, and leave her to the
quiet love of the light of day.

The odd thing is that the words never stop.
Doesn't matter what time, nor how sober
I may or may not be.
I'll be at work in the middle of fixing
some poor fools situation he got himself
into by not paying attention to what buttons
he was randomly pushing and then all of
a sudden I can't really follow the rant he's
going on about windows 8 and Fannie Mae
/Freddie Mac and the whole corrupt housing industry.

Instead of paying attention to my customer there
are lines of Rumi or le Marquis de Sade or
(God Almighty) Dr. Gonzo pushing themselves
into my very frayed mind and demanding a voice.

It's at that point I decide that I have a need,
a yearning that I'm not able to fill,
subsequently I go home and drink
and write because it's all I've got keeping
me from going completely insane and
doing something ridiculous like selling
all I own and getting the hell out.

It's times like this that bring it all into
perspective for me I guess,
that moment I stop writing for the reader
and start writing for me.

Sure I'll be explicit, I'll throw my soul
onto a computer and worry about
what people think whenever I wake
up in the plastic morning.

I'm at the point now, where I'd
accept love from anybody,
my ideas (that weren't really mine)
about *** and morality, and the
strange connection between them,
really don't matter anymore.

If you want to touch me, do so.
If you want me to touch you, move my
tired hands to yours.

Amidst tangled lips and intertwined
hips, sweat and soul and heart
it's nothing but union I'm looking for.

It is time for me to depart
brow furrowed, burdens too heavy for lesser men.
So I tell myself in the long hours
without recourse to violence
or prayer.

I have grown soft you see
apparently
as I have almost forgotten the sting
of your love-whip at my back.

My road is not a lonely one
verily,
yet it's travelers have no heart for conversation
since the desert engenders silence from we wanderers.

You alone walk upright,
seemingly burdenless
free
but the desert and I, know
what you keep from the mortals.

You laugh at vengeful passersby
fearing nothing,
everything.
You should not worry over much
as your secret is probably safest with me.

We are walking to the blue mountains
out beyond Rumi's field,
that place where you and I made love
in the days before Christ made you his concubine.

I welcome your scorn, your disgust
lovingly...tenderly
for it proves how much you once loved me.
Though you truly have forgotten our
half healed wounds.

Smiling a child's smile as I tread behind
your bare shoulder of a memory
I recite poetry aloud;
heartlessly
you continue ahead and above.

It's almost over
this journey I began years ago
thoughtlessly
the day I held you close
so our souls could touch.

Hey there hott stuff why don't ya bust
out that saxophone and play some serious
New Orleans Blues while I drink a beer and
try to calm the **** down before I start crankin
out some seriously ungodly **** that I'm possibly
going to regret in the morning.

And then it hits me that I'm having a
Bukowski moment and maybe
even channeling the spirit of that St. Paul
of new age seekers and left out hippies
shooting up in broke down cars while
holding some sort've seance for he, Jim Morrison.

Or it could've just been a convenient excuse
to get a sad lonely hipster high and
**** her brains out since she was looking
for something that mattered and happened
to find your crooked *** and a **** begrimed needle.

So don't ask me why I take concepts half baked
such as just go with the flow and all things
go according to the will of the universe
and rub my perfectly shaped **** all over them
since 9 out of 10 it's an excuse for terrible
**** that people do to each other in the name of
great grandpa experience for experience's sake.

I'll laugh in the face of people who ***** platitudes
and I'll teach their cats to **** on their
newspapers in the morning just for the
pure naked mischief of it.

There are so many lives out there in the big blue
world full of so many hopes and dreams and
loves and hates and memories and futures
that no one, any where, has the right or the authority
to infringe upon for any reason especially
that golden calf of fearful worship
the supposed Great Scapegoat of the Greater Good.

So come along with me and my people,
we who do not bow, we who do not submit,
we who wake up in the morning filled with
a burning insatiable need to take our world
by the PMC encrusted ***** and make something new.

I said to my love,
in the waning spring
before yet children we bore,
"I will return dearest one,
fear you not, surrounded I am
by the songs and hopes of yore".

And yet never again walked I,
that path wandering
and beautiful at twilight
to our home in mystic hills
whispering truths and sighs.

For I, grown weary,
and forgetful by drink and blood,
cannot remember who I was then,
nor what even the touch of
that heav'n she gave
tasted of.

Our home,
a fleeting memory,
her face fading swiftly,
as a tearing and a burning
a sorrow and a yearning
swallow the magic,
our love once knew.

Timeless trinkets scattered about our home,
  pieces of those painted moments we shared.

This paper full of scribbled love; and your pencils,
  worn old with creation...and desire.

Why is it that such things are all I have left of you?
  These burning stars within me.

The paper is the novel you were writing, and promised to let me read.
And the erasers of your pencils; the pink of your breast.

These relics you've left behind,
  proof
    of your soul within mine,
have become my creed,
  my faith.

Because everything is biography.

Apparently I have no voice of my own
merely crowing sick imitations into the wee morning
moonlight as waves crash upon the beach
and I find myself in this ****** den of a room
again swallowing poison to drown my anxieties.

Is this really happening all around me
as colors start to blend and the one and
only Velvet Underground is pounding away
somewhere inside my seemingly mismatched head.

Run run run and type type type
cry cry cry and drink drink drink
**** **** **** and smoke smoke smoke
keep on keepin on and fake it till you make
it and eventually I'll wake up and realize
that all of this is just some childish acting out.

All this crap I call poetry, all this festering wound
of a single minded attempt at self validation
really and truly and unnecessarily is an attempt
for me to try and feel like a human being while slowly
inexorably slogging my way into a one armed knife
fight and all I've got is something that couldn't even
get it's **** hard enough to shoot that miserable
IED makin ******* in the face as he sanctimoniously deserved.

You wanna talk about real so then let's talk about real
lets dare some wannabe ******* to talk to my
pasty white *** about hard decisions and true to the
***** maxie pad core of human experience.

Call me a hipster and a beat while burning the pretty
marijuana fire that some use just as pervasively as others
drink while calling it medicine since it comes from a plant
but it's still a crutch unless you actually have cancer.

Maybe I am indeed just an angry kid fighting to find
a place in this metal shod ******* of a country
that we pray to like some slumbering god but
if that's the case than that is really what we all are
who live here and dare not take up the honest
trade of making molotov cocktails.

1) "An unstable political situation, marked by sharp social divisions and usually, but not always, by a foundering or stagnant economy." Check.

2) " A political objective, based on firm moral and ideological grounds, that can be understood and accepted by the majority as the overriding cause of the insurgency, desirable in and of itself and worthy of any sacrifice." We have yet to achieve that cohesiveness among the various factions and break-away groups within our society.

3) "An oppressive government, with which no political compromise is possible." As yet to be determined. The situation remains fluid.

4) " Some form of revolutionary political organization, capable of providing dedicated and consistent leadership toward the accepted goal." As yet, there is no organization that can muster the popular support or bring disparate groups together to make any sort of legal headway against our common enemy.

It's getting hot again, and I always start
to come back to life in the heat,
something to do with being covered in sweat
and the way things smell,
plants exploding everywhere,
wind caressing before a thunderstorm,
and the throbbing of drums deep in the night.
Somehow I always wake up with bites and scratches,
recurrent love-making and the urge
to put up mosquito netting so I can leave the windows open.
Ah, the sun turns everything soft here,
well, not necessarily everything when you're with me
and the world dissolves into a tangle of limbs and tongues,
something akin to dancing in private
and I'm not sure which I prefer;
the sensuality of moving to drums and guitars with you,
or the ferocity of our moonlight sonatas.

Shall I then have the audacity
to approach your magnificent figure?

Shall my bowed head incite contempt
as I expect from women such as you,
or would such old-world humility
touch your heart expecting brutality?

Yes, those men you count as a conquest,
those who don't spend time upon pleasure;
yours or their own doesn't matter,
the only need being your sense of owning
the man/boy, and his need to boast to his friends.

After the charade is pulled away though,
what then shall you have to say,
what then shall your conquests give to you?

What is left,
after the heart burns through?

There is a point in some lives
when those living it
must accept that the
hope and the dream
which drove it
will only ever
be that;
a hope
and
a
dream.

To my Dearest Readers, I wish to apologize beforehand for the things I'm going to start writing. I will offend many of you, I will probably lose many friends as well. I may in fact burn all of the bridges I have left in my desire to speak. I just want to warn you beforehand that there is no subject too politically incorrect, no logical fallacy too strange to address.

I have one wish,
and one only that carries any worth.

I wish to be found by you,
and yet I know that it's not
your desire.

Were you to appear at the door
Of my slightly ****** room,
it would be disappointing to
you I fear....I know.

Id not be the man you're seeking,
Never have been,
and never will be.

I will always be your friend,
will always be happy to cook
Chocolate chip pancakes for you.

But I suppose that I have to accept
that we will never be anything
but a dream.

You have your life
and I have mine.

Feel like I'm falling somewhere
somewhat transcendental
needing to stop pretending
that what I feel
and see
and live
isn't
real.

I suppose that I wanted to write
something that may
have been something
magically enticing
that could
bring me
back to
you.

But I'm sick of these vicious ravings
tacked up on some kind
of failing travesty
crying out
for an
idea.

So what that I was looking for someone
to cling to in this raging sea
so what that I may have
been the exact opposite
of who and what
she and I
may have
desired.

I don't think that my absolute and unwelcome
need to write whatever comes to mind
is some kind of balm that may cure
whatever sinking, slithering thing
that ails me so, irresolute
and very sullen
but rather
is a mirror
unforgiving.

How this phrase grown out of a horror movie
and one thousand years of Alchemy
has become a byword between us
living as a hashtag and a symbol
in the world we now have here
our only complete interaction
contact in something
souls flung
carelessly
away.

Realizing that I'm not writing this to you or me
but rather all of us that have fought
in our own way to continue
believing in something
greater than ourselves
weak and yet
resilient as
firelight.

I have not the words to break through the walls
that I have built for myself out of
shame and a soul wounded
and so scarred as to
have torn your
happiness from
you.

But I still retain this deep suspicion that
what still lives within us all
is a burning and a knowing
something not for Truth
but for not needing
to feel so
****** lonely
so sickeningly
often.

And so I sit here behind by computer forged from
metal and silicon and greed, typing out love and rage
not really believing that what I say
will ever have any real impact
on the society that I have
come here, truly
to destroy.

So let's take a true gander at this wretch of a world
that we've created for ourselves, hoping
that all of this half-assed search
for real and absolute
freedom from oppression
is more
than
a
pipe-dream.

Where can I find people like me?
Do they actually exist somewhere
out there int the vast expanse of the world?

Or do I sit here bemoaning my self made exile
in the same vein that a child does when placed
in the corner as punishment for some transgression?

Even if there were some community I might
feel welcome in hiding with at some far
flung place pledging true freedom, still I would
suffer the pains of having a broken soul.

It's been a long time since I opened up
my shoebox full of pictures and saw myself
five years old and wading barefoot through
a cold creek....loving every second of it.

There's another polaroid of me feeding a mint
to that angry old donkey, dead years now,
but that ornery ol ******* and I had some
sort've understanding, him knowing his place
and me trying to discover mine.

Most of my life has been spent clawing my
way toward some ill defined future I thought
I had to travel toward in order to live well,
and now I find myself willingly going backward.

My Dad achieved his dream of having land when
I was fifteen, and when I came back to live with him
again, his land became my own, his cares for our place,
became my own, hauling rocks and worrying after fences,
being a part of something that we built from our hands.

The world changed quickly though,
and if I had been older and wiser I
would have expected that the eventual
break would appear when most we all
needed something of peace.

But those minutes in the clear creek,
and that grudging comraderie with a donkey,
getting off the bus when seventeen and having
horses recognize me as I walk down the dirt road,
hoofed friends meeting me at a gate every day;
that is the home I need...and one day will return to.

Kyrie Eleison*

Father, my Father, Glory unto Thee, creator and sustainer of our Earth, hear my prayer. I found a single strand of hair in my car, long and reddish brown, and I wept.

I wept not for myself, or for something that I had lost, but for an idea which that represented, a yearning for something greater than myself, for a finale end to this loneliness I have run from for uncounted years.

Yet I understood that we, your children, are more than abstractions, more than symbols, more than mere variations on a theme.

We are the landscaper who left a single bunch of flowers unmowed in an open field, we are the children attending a theater in Palestine dedicated to self expression and non-violence, we are the penitent kneeling at the pillar of St. Simon in Syria, we are the bus driver giving free rides in Queens, we are the random person who pulled a needle out of my friend's arm one night, we are humanity, and our journey is a long one.

Many of us feel abandoned by You, many don't believe in You at all, and many, such as myself, are merely lost and wondering, searching for signs You have left along the way, managing as best we can to get back to that place where You live.

I thank You though, thank You for the beauty that is all around us, but more than that, I thank You for helping me to see it, to see the World, not as I am, but as You are. I am trying, and perhaps one day I shall succeed.

Public Service Announcement: Don't read "Women In Love" for the ***. Read it for the bleak, cynical examination of human experience in an industrial wasteland.

It's in there, somewhere;
the heart I wanted to give you.
And out there, somewhere;
you are waiting to receive it.

Turning inward, I weep no tears
and speak no words
nor weave broken memories together
from spools of light.

Turning inward, I wander
and I watch
and wait for you to pull me out.

It's in there, somewhere;
the verse that was made for you.
And out there, somewhere;
You wonder what I have to say.

Following you all these years
thinking that perhaps I would
one day overtake you on this
wandering path travelled so long.

I never did make it to Bethlehem
nor kept any other of the
hundred promises that I've made
to so many, some spoken aloud
and some made silently.

Of all the lives these other
pilgrims say I have touched,
I never could seem to
touch yours.

I am old now, and weary
of the sands and the winds,
beautiful as they are I
am sure that they also
have tired of me.

Where is there left to go?
I know now that I will never
find you, will never
be found by you,
weeping on the edge
of some oasis.

I have no answers
to my own questions
nor do I think does
anyone else upon this
road that leads where
all others do.

"I fell in love with a fairytale."

Those were her words when I asked why our lives had become what they are now.

The first entrance to her flat, tapestries and flowers and shards of pottery assaulting me as soon as I set foot through the door. A six foot print of The Accolade embroidered like the Bayeux hanging in an alcove. The single rose I gave her placed in an empty wine bottle. She played Yo-Yo Ma on vinyl with something that looked like the first gramophone ever made. I always think of her now when I hear a cello, and whatever it is I'm doing at the time stops for the memory. I will always remember her curled up on that red loveseat like the empress she was to me. We first made love there, on old red satin or whatever it was. Corse to the touch, but beautiful. It was only after the first time that she would let me kiss her on the lips, like it was something allowed after passing a test. She never spoke of it, when or why she let me into her world, a world I had only ever been permitted to sojourn through before. The Kiss hung above her bed, and after she had fallen asleep the first night we lay there together I stared up at it with her in my arms thinking....thinking that I had been searching for this woman forever. I have not been the same man since that night. She became my faith.

You wouldn't know to see it now that we had bliss in this place for five years. Five years of being whole, of the absolute knowledge that we were exactly what we were supposed to be. There is nothing left of us here now. The door is gone. An explosion of some sort destroyed most of the living room. I believe her bedroom was used as a firing position for an anti-tank team at one point in the fighting. Shell casings are everywhere, all the glass is shattered and there are stains in abundance.

Where is she you ask?  

I didn't want to believe what I first heard, but after seeing her face again I knew it was true. Oh, you know her well I'm sure since you were able to find me. She is the reason the front has been extended. She is the reason there is bread now, even if it isn't quite palatable. She is the reason so many more have died than necessary. Over here, let me show you who she is. She's on this poster, the valiant People's Commandante leading us into a glorious future. You know who she is now, serve her excellently I have no doubt. But before you do whatever it is you were sent to do I want you to know that I saved The Kiss before our city burned. You will never find it. And even if she refuses it now, once upon a time she had a different name. Once, when she loved me, her name was Ivy.

You had no room for a garden at your
    house in Valencia
so you made an Eden from brick walls.

I remember your kitchen full of tropics;
  how you loved the hot plants.
Loved what they whispered of even
  more; fleshy, supple summer nights
with no need of sleep.

Do you remember those golden afternoons,
  those siestas full of honeysuckle
and oranges?

Hop that train and ride,
please go forth,
go further and live that life,
that life that I wanted and yet shied from.

Dodge that Bull,
swing yourself and your puppy
up and into that boxcar,
living the life
we hypocrites yearn for.

Ride free,
ride hard,
live on your terms
and tell the rest of us
what that freedom is worth.

It was a good day for me today,
till Ryan told me he was going to rehab,
and you posted a pic of a jump....

I don't think that where we live
knows what love is anymore.

We're too wrapped up in norms and opinions,
too focused on crap that means absolutely nothing.

The fact that you opted out,
you said "No, I will not live as a number",
has proved something to me tonight.

You proved to me that it's not an
all or nothing gamble, that one doesn't have
to pay in autonomy in order to be happy.

All that I am goes with you....
and maybe one day
I'll be riding with my own caravan.

From: ex PFC Shierling, J. 16 CAB S-2 Analyst
To: Screwtape, Undersecretary, Hell CENTCOM
Date: 2015/02/14
Subject: Poor Methodology

My Dear Screwtape,

I must congratulate you on the position you've managed to hold intact for so many years. A fantastic strategic gamble to allow your correspondence with your nephew Wormword to have become published. The Patient's individual soul may have been taken in by your Enemy Himself, but the allowance of C.S. Lewis to come by those letters and publish them served you very well in it's purpose I suppose. Those souls already lost to your Enemy were confirmed, but those teetering on the edge of belief and hope in Him were turned away by such a blatant portrayal of human fallacies. Truly, your gamble may have been worth it...time will yet tell. But Screwtape, or whichever of his underlings has been assigned to break me, my own life is all I am responsible for. It's a great weapon you devised, this idea that individual humans are responsible for the actions of our entire race, that one of us is guilty of all. Yes indeed, self hate is the quickest way to your master's chains. Honestly though, your CENTCOM failed in the directives and the propaganda they fed you. Though you and your underlings may have experienced the War in Heaven, and that terrible retreat to the outer realm, I can say with absolute certainty that you were deceived in the beginning. I am imperfect, and everyday that I live I know this, and I also know that I will never be able to know the things that your Great Enemy knows, but I accept this. Nothing that you and your kind can do to me shall prevent me from looking to the stars, no pain could your broken spirits do unto me to take my hope in my Father, who is also called Love. And yet, weren't you punished by your own Chain-of-Command? Were you not tortured by those you gave loyalty to for giving Wormwood your nephew advise about your Enemy. Perhaps I, being human, have no right to cast judgement upon those who have walked about my people. All I have left to write tonight; should you grow tired of the horrors you and your kin live every day...ask of me, and we shall welcome you among those yet seeking.

Arise children of the fatherland
The day of glory has arrived
Against us tyranny's
****** standard is raised
Listen to the sound in the fields
The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

To arms citizens Form your battalions
March, march
Let impure blood
Water our furrows

What do they want this horde of slaves
Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?
For whom these vile chains
These long-prepared irons?
Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage
What methods must be taken?
It is us they dare plan
To return to the old slavery!

What! These foreign cohorts!
They would make laws in our courts!
What! These mercenary phalanxes
Would cut down our warrior sons
Good Lord! By chained hands
Our brow would yield under the yoke
The vile despots would have themselves be
The masters of destiny

Tremble, tyrants and traitors
The shame of all good men
Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Will receive their just reward
Against you we are all soldiers
If they fall, our young heros
France will bear new ones
Ready to join the fight against you

Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors
Bear or hold back your blows
Spare these sad victims
That they regret taking up arms against us
But not these ****** despots
These accomplices of Bouillé
All these tigers who pitilessly
Ripped out their mothers' wombs

We too shall enlist
When our elders' time has come
To add to the list of deeds
Inscribed upon their tombs
We are much less jealous of surviving them
Than of sharing their coffins
We shall have the sublime pride
Of avenging or joining them

Drive on sacred patriotism
Support our avenging arms
Liberty, cherished liberty
Join the struggle with your defenders
Under our flags, let victory
Hurry to your manly tone
So that in death your enemies
See your triumph and our glory!

Should I give thanks for something?

Should I give praise to Allah?

Should I thank Jeshua for His Compassion?

Should I thank Zoroaster for Dualism?

Should I weep for Peter's Pence?

Should I wonder what world Rumi came from?

Should I give all I have to my love?

Should I cease fearing someone perfect?

Should I stop wandering.....
    
and begin living.

Self-renewing logic fail, let us begin
as somebody believes that the Internet is actually God.
Or perhaps it's vice-versa, and Facebook is guiding us
to the promised land with a shared post from Jesus.

Well, I guess I shouldn't judge, as that
would make me a hypocrite of vociferous proportions.
If people want to find God in a machine,
that's their business.

My absolute worst fear,
worse than being empty,
worse than insanity,
far worse than dying
broken and alone....
is that you may one day
love me, and if I gave you
what remains of my heart
and ruptured soul on that
day, it would break you.

You've never asked what my
name means, probably because
yours is so obvious that I
haven't had to ask what
yours does, or where it comes from.

You are a Fox, English in origin
linguisticly, with a very illustrious
line, stretching back to the days
before the Norman conquest.

My name, from the Low German,
is Hemlock, and that is exactly
what I am. A beautiful tree in my
opinion, but poisonous to all.

They gave of me to Socrates
as a death sentence, and on
the deeply flawed romantic
in me, the sweet irony isn't lost.

Thus we come to the truth of
my fears, deep fears, deeper by
far than the usual ones that
accompany thoughts of you.

You, in your ignorance are
intrigued by me, as you said.
Should you eat of my heart,
and be poisoned, body and
soul, the last parts of me that
believe in all that you are,
would die with you.

The door to the apartment was unlocked when I got there, knowing I was minutes too late. The place was typical, exactly what I expected. Tiny kitchen with the basic bar and two swivel stools. TV on a stand and a floral pattern couch with the sliding door opening on the balcony to my right. Straight ahead was the hallway to the tiny bedroom. I gently closed the door and locked the *** and dead bolt. Walking straight ahead, noticing the bathroom door closed to my right in the tiny hallway. A queen bed in the one bedroom, red sheets and red comforter, white walls and an open closet. Fake flowers in a red plastic vase sitting innocent on a bedside table. No window and a single hanging print of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son on the wall above a folding desk. The desk was home to a record player, circa 60's, vinyl still spinning, Brand New's The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me.
At least she died to something good I thought to myself. I didn't handle the torn remains of the acid green dress laying on the bed. She had put her shoes away and selected the vinyl before they arrived, probably had a glass of wine since there was one of those stemless glasses sitting empty on the bar. I doubted those who had come were the wine drinking type. Death was not unknown to me, neither was **** and retribution nor cruelty to make a political statement. But I did not want to go into that bathroom. I did not want to find what was left. I did not want to add her face to the long, long list of empty faces kept in record by my memory. I hate histrionics and false drama, but expecting to find the Countess gone, I reset the vinyl.

She was still breathing when I walked in. Naked except for her black hose, splayed out in the tub, a perfect 9 millimeter hole six inches above her left breast. It was two in the morning on the dot. In that moment, everything left me. All loyalty, all ideology, all thoughts of advancement, all regrets from the past. Gone in an instant. I gathered what was left of her in my arms.

It was hard carrying her down the stairs, but she put one hand through my hair and it helped. To this day I'm not sure how I found her car keys, but I do remember she whispering to me that her's was the grey Buick out front. She was dead by the time I got to the hospital.

Encounter II

You cried the first night we spent together, and the night after, and almost every night since. At first I feared it was something that I was doing, some piece of love you needed that I couldn't give. Hateful as it sounds, you weren't the first that I've loved like that. Hopefully I'll love none after you and won't have to worry about the last. Regardless, I've come to love myself enough though, with your help, to understand that it wasn't lack of love that caused you to sob into my shoulder. It wasn't some failing of mine that pushed you to seek out what comfort I could give. You cried in front of me because you trusted me enough to do so. You had no part to play, no face to wear other than your own. And now, deep in the wee hours when you fold yourself in to me, I don't question. I give all I have of myself, so that you can sleep peacefully.

Blood

Let the Christians call it the devil's work, but I call it love. Really, if we want to get outrageous about it, most of their practices are just as anthropologically based as all other human ritual. All lovers have little rituals, small things that only they know, quirks and nuances that are the real mortar that hold the walls of their relationship together. Herodotus became an inside joke, my cheap metal raven head became a symbol, we trail leaves over each other after ******* (if available), our foreplay includes brushes and india ink, etc. When we began rearing up what we are to each other though, that work began with blood, as all holy things do....

"Baby, c'mere. Please?"

"Honey what the **** happened, you're bleeding everywhere?!?"

Wrapped your wrist in the gauzz I keep beneath the sink for just such an occasion. Insisted we sleep on the couch so I could hold you and you could watch your favorite shows at the same time. Spent enough time sleeping on couches anyway. Sleeping on one with you, listening to Jude Law talk up Cameron Diaz or some **** was gorgeous.

Weeks later

"Darlin, I ****** this one up."

"Don't say **** like that babe, what happened?"

"You know how I've been ******* about my ear hurting?"

"Yeeeaaaahhhh?" as you walk down the hallway.

You see the amount of blood on the tissue

"******* Daniel! C'mon, we're going to the MediQuick right the **** now!"

You did your damndest not to touch my ears for weeks after that, and it took a month of me saying they didn't hurt for you to start biting them again.

Submission*

I never want to give you up. But I'm not afraid of change. It's one of our favorite games, pretending we are elsewhere, loving like the world is different. Like we are different. Knowing that it's all transitory, knowing that these blue sky days will end. I always remember the Hospitaller in Kingdom of Heaven(played by David Thewlis), saying that even if something has only lived for a while, it still has lived. I try to keep that in mind on those occasions when we wander from each other. We will end, eventually, somehow, probably incredibly unwillingly....but that doesn't mean all that we are isn't beautiful.

I've always liked working the night shift, no matter what the job might be. Something to do with the solitude, like keeping a vigil almost. I've always been a night guy, wandering around St. Augustine at three in the morning when I was in school, cruising after-hours clubs in Seattle, watching the sun rise from the roof of my ex's apartment building. Funny thing is I hate big cities, so I live in a place where most everything closes at nine on Sundays and they won't sell ***** before ten in the morning. Makes no sense, but then I again I don't make many decisions that make sense.

One gets the chance to talk to strange people late at night, gets to see some strange things too. I guess I get off on it, the novelty, feeling like I've had some kind of original experience. God I hope I'm not a hipster.

Talked to a man in MN once, and it only bears noting because he didn't actually have a problem that needed fixing. For whatever reason, he felt like talking. Not about random ******* either mind you, he spoke some real philosophy. I won't do him injustice by paraphrasing, suffice to say that he likened the human condition to the process of metallurgy, which isn't all that original, but sometimes you need to hear a person say something and really mean it rather than just read dead words on a page. Whatever, call it pretentious or stupid or childish but he made a good point and I'm sticking to it. The experience had value in and of itself.

So sit back, make yourself a whiskey sour, throw on some David Lynch and place yourself here. It's storming, a real king hell of a thunderstorm, you're tired and punch drunk from staring at electronics too long and chugging coffee all day. The phone rings and you're ******, nobody wants to talk this late. It rings four of five times before you pick up. She doesn't have a problem per se, didn't know that anybody would even pick up, just dialed randomly. Guess you can talk, what the hell else are you gonna do, and you yourself know that you've done the same thing, called numbers in the middle of the night because you gotta talk to somebody, anybody. She makes you think of that Anais Nin book about Sabina, A Spy in the House of Love. And then she says she feels like that. "I've got a hurt inside," she says. You tell yourself you're not an idiot, but you know what's coming next. She says she called from a club. Thirty minutes later, you're sitting there.

Or should I say ride?
Should I say rather,
burning down the highway far too fast and wishing that maybe
just maybe I could find it out there somewhere
that was place where I could stop existing.

So I push the boundaries
push so hard to get through this unreality
drugs and ***** and ***
or alternatively
faith, religion and morality?

I've walked both ways
the straight and narrow
as well as the crooked and wide
and NOTHING has ever satisfied
the burning need to feel
alive.

So tell me readers and writers
inform me if you please
or perhaps sell me something
gimme some peyote or holy water
anything and everything
to explain why in all this self-induced rage
He has yet to simply let me die?

Because something inside is not of me
a two faced fiend with no imagination
and a jealous heart looking on the world
with scorn and derision,
knowing that there is a world out there
that I can see but will never be.

And apparently no one can teach me what to do
can't seem to inform how to simply be
seemingly the easiest of acts
but some hole in my soul
will not allow me to achieve.

There are two rivers within my heart
one flowing toward the future
and one toward the past.

There are two worlds I live in
one of the everyday materiel mundane
and one of something I have no words for.

Did I not bathe in the sweet waters
of both rivers flowing?
Do I not live within both worlds,
paying bills and yet loving with all my soul?

So here's the real question.....can I get drunk enough to have sixty pounds of Dutch courage to think I've got the ***** to start submitting the crap I write to these six badass UK Journals that supposedly want "New and Fluid"? Yeah, I can do that. I can be the drunk, no-*****-left-to-give American with a chip on my shoulder and a drawl when I have one too many shots. Especially since that's exactly what I am anyway.

I gathered myself from four winds when you first awoke in this life; As you opened yourself to the world, the center of the universe held it's breath in awe; When you wrote your first poem, in the depths of Heaven, angels cried for joy

Your spirit has journeyed through greater spaces than your body; You followed your soul and came to the East, the heart of faith awaiting your return; How many nights have you wandered these long roads upon a camel and your courage?

I first knew of you in my dreams, mere feelings in an ocean of feelings; And yet, before you had been conceived, I had walked with your soul through the streets of Babylon; I knew you a hundred lifetimes before the Towers fell beneath the wait of our folly;

When the world was still green and young, when our whole life was nothing but fireflies and honeysuckle; When the height of a summer's day gave us hope for the people; That old shaman, hy heart, bid me hasten unto you, and your quiet peace;

I met you in the robes of a ***** on the road to damascus; my soul broken, my heart tired, my faith nearly a dead thing, you brought me back from despair.

Ladies and Gentleman, esteemed friends and collaborators, we find ourselves beset once more by a particular individual's overwhelmingly perverse actions of self-aggrandizement. Yes indeed, there is a stranger here among us, a purveyor of hate and dismissal, lauding his own horrifying mimicry of poetry as the makings of a legend. I will not foul my words by speaking his thrice-accursed name, and in truth, there is no need. Any one of us who has found our heart-wrought pages smeared by the childish, aristocratic and may I say it, disgusting blabberings of this ill-begotten rake shall know exactly of whom it is I speak. And I speak in ernest, terrible ernest, against this self-proclaimed genius against whom we worthless ants are compared as to a god. And in the name of humanitas and libertas we tolerate his vile ravings and insensate curses thrown toward us as if we were nothing but cattle. Why? Because we believe in something that he will never be able to understand or appreciate, the very concept of a community throws him into confusion and fear. People are dying in the streets in the name of everything that we here stand for and he has the audacity, nay, the pompousness to assault my friends in the only haven some of them have ever known. Some of you may retain your hope for him and your patience in light of his narcissism. I however, have lost my patience and will tolerate it no longer. I consider it my duty to counter his message of hate wherever I find it. I urge you all to do the same.

There are no ancient swords to aid in this,
nor prophets pointing the way,
no magic rings to find in dark caves,
nor a sleeping host awaiting the call.

Under the mists of time,
the faces worn in the light,
and the fears in the night,
still we stand and fight.

There are no keys to hidden doors,
nor waystations upon the road,
no mountains which to climb,
nor holy refuge to stumble upon.

Under the mists of time,
the faces worn in the light,
and the fears in the night,
still we stand and fight.

There is no face to the dark,
nor name to cry out to within it,
no blessing that I can give you,
nor any promise I can make.

Under the mists of time,
the faces worn in the light,
and the fears in the night,
still we stand and fight.

break for riff

Under the mists of time,
the faces worn in the light,
and the fears in the night,
still we stand and fight.

How can I be what you need?
How can I fight the past without weapons?
How can I hold you in the dark and make it go away?

There is no quest to be had,
save the one that takes me to you,
no battle worth fighting,
except to fight for you.

So much said and done,
so much unsaid and undone,
lost here now, lost within and without.

Under the mists of time,
the faces worn in the light,
and the fears in the night,
still we stand and fight.

Wait for the drop.........
And go.

Just stop fighting it so hard,
the underwater after dark river
you love so much.

A part of you knew that
this is where you'd be carried
if even half-heartedly
those years ago
when you tempted fate first.

You're afraid to admit
afraid to accept
how much you love it
when you can let go.

How long have you been hunting
for an answer?
How long have you been hunted by
the answer you really want?

You must know by now
you'll never break the walls
of one you name equal;
you can't even break your own.

There is no way to walk the
road you chose without
becoming someone else;
you cannot traverse the abyss
between yourself and others
and yet remain inviolate;
you can't see without being seen.

You cannot touch,
without being touched.
You cannot love,
without being broken.

So then you can't go back
but you're afraid to go forward
staying in between is worse
since stagnation means death
what do you do?

You already know.