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.

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.

The place I go where they play Led Zep and don't give a ****. Basically the place I go when I don't wanna pretend anymore.

It is very strange to be a man, schooled in the acts of love by the writings of Anais Nin and Pablo Neruda, living in this place. So absurd to be told by women expecting savageness that he is gentle, that he is kind, that he is something other than what they have known before and yet...this very tenderness is what drives them away in the morning. I am not an idiot, I know what a seeming contradiction this is. Perhaps I have some failing I'm not aware of, perhaps my guess at what the women I make love to really want is a complete falsehood. I suppose that is probably correct, considering my experience and what I'm told men should do to women. "Yes, a good, swift and utterly meaningless **** in a bathroom or a car, just give it to them ***** like an almost ****, that's what the girls want...your **** and nothing else."
Yet the women I've spoken to purely platonically want and need the exact opposite, but seem to have given up on anything beyond it. I'm at a loss, completely befuddled by what I feel in my heart, and what I've experienced.

What sick process turned a man's tenderness into closet homosexuality?
What terrible ******* turned a woman's need for warmth and love into a weakness?

I filled my veins with forgetfulness
to escape the knives in your eyes
and the thunder of the drums in my ears;
Empty me out
as water into a sieve
and leave me here for the jackals.

All my life I have lived
next to oceans or mountains,
and at one time both.

I have lived with people
in these these places as well,
some of them beautiful
and some made terrible.

I see my bookshelf next to my door
and I hear the waves crashing with my
window open, but it seems to
mean nothing to me anymore.

I understand now that my
essential fallacy was in thinking
that me, being broken, could
somehow heal myself by
healing others.

The realization that my
entire way of looking at life
is entirely superfluous,
may be more than I
am willing to accept.

I go to bars with the
intention of putting
assumptions behind me,
of seeing people without
the judgements laid upon
me and without the judgements
I in turn lay upon them.

But  know that it means nothing,
that all of my writing and
all of my talk about God
and Morality and the search for
Truth is merely a cover, a charade.

All I have ever been looking for,
the only thing that I have ever really
wanted more than money or talent
or prestige or power, more than
anything...is for someone to
tell me that it will one day be ok.

We shall speak, and by speaking loudly and fervently enough, we shall be heard.

We shall be heard, and by being heard, we will be dismissed as the lost denizens of a failing society.

We shall be dismissed, and by being dismissed, we shall not disappear quietly into the night as our forerunners have done.

We shall be branded "Communists" & "Traitors", and in doing so we shall aquire the attentions of those we aim to educate.

We shall not be silenced, and by refusing to be marginalized into a portion of "freaks and outcasts", we shall be known.

We shall not be paid off or coerced into "negotiations", and by maintaining unity, we shall be outlawed.

We shall not accept the scorn of those whose power seems unassailable,
and in so doing, we shall be feared.

We shall not accept platitudes and half measures as answers to our grievances, and in so doing, we will be persecuted.

We shall not accept a world where our worth as human beings is measured by GDP, and in doing so, we will become that which we seek.

We shall not accept that "Some people are better than others", rather,
we KNOW that liberty is born from knowledge.

We shall speak, and by speaking, be heard, and by being heard, we will effect change, and by effecting change, we will be victorious.

What if you could stand up and be more than you were made?
What if you could wake up and see the world as it really is?

What if, by the power of your love, you could mend any wound.
What if you realized that you are not merely a product of your environment?

What if you could truly believe that the dark shall not conquer.
What if you could see all of the lives you have touched with your compassion.

What if, one day, we all could do those things.

Pulled out an old journal of mine,
on a whim to read empty words.
I found her pages inserted in the
front of my ten year old book.

She gave me her soul on paper,
and I was too much of a fool to read
the love that she wanted to give.

Your voice on the wind
A sigh in the night

Trailing fingers across my neck
The kiss of flowers

Folding into each other
The embrace of rainfall

I turn to your presence
The sound of water

I feel like an alien, descended from another planet and viewing humanity for the first time.

What dark tempest drives us to do the things we do to each other, and to the world we live in? We create monuments to our greatness while selling our children? What justification do we have to sell our own kind for our ****** pleasure? What lack of understanding drove our sadistic forays into torturing each other in the name of progress? Why do we do the horrible things that humanity is capable of? And at the same time, how are we able to create beauty out of nothing? What kind of sense does it make for some of us to turn inward and love, and others to turn outward and destroy?

To bring it back to a more personal level....

Why is it that I can take all the good and bad I've lived, and still make myself get up in the morning?

What is it that drives me to go to a bar knowing what I'll find when I get there? Why do I see so many lonely people, men and women, girls and boys, seeking...and not finding?

I am consciously willing into existence the day,
when it won't be so hard for us to love each other.

I think I've realized that my words are just that:
  mere words.
I may have yearned for them to convey more than sounds,
  hoped that through them I could help others see,
and feel,
as I do.

But now, I think I've come to understand that even if
I did have that power once,
   I can wield it no longer.

To the more pragmatic:
  why I ever thought anybody would care or want
to see and feel as I do,
  is a mystery to me.

So I think I should go in silence then,
   unselfishly,
  as when I speak, it seems that I light fires in holy places,
and when I sojourn in some tranquil space
  I carry horrors with me.

Oh don't gimme that look again babe,
that sideways glance you sneak through
those curtains of grapevines you cultivate so well,
kinda like you got some sort of suspicion
that maybe I used to be a blues player
or a James Bond villain.

I sure as **** ain't no Nick Cave
but I got a couple of bad seeds
you might have been lookin for.

Think of this as a forwards backwards
inside out message to you
and maybe I'll show it to the future,
that is if there is a future
worth showin this **** to.

I tell ya one thing though
and even though this'll make me
sound exactly like what I am,
that is to say one arrogant sonofabitch
that wants to give, I mean
really give something to you.

I want to give you whatever you'll have of me
because I don't write poetry

I live it.
And it hurts most of the time.

Except for that select couple of seconds
when you walk me back through your history
and you forget what I used to be.

As if the masks I wear for the world are anything
more than mere artifice.
Make no mistake I am no civilized intellectual,
I am no yuppie at a tech company living for machines.

My soul was old when Rome ruled the world
and beneath my person suit I am an utter
****** savage with the face of a starving jackal.

I am an uncivilized, spear-wielding force of
nature ruled by monstrous passions
born from years of torture and supplication.

Take my hand and follow me to the forest.
I'll teach you it's secrets and we'll dance
naked in the moonlight for a thousand years.