You can hear the rain as it gathers
Soaked cosmopolitan soldiers in the gravel,
Complaining of urban trenchfoot.
Those stars on their hands, declarations of evil
Felt the roughed hands of homeless men
Asking, “where you gonna be next week?”
And other cherries of vagabond greetings
Of his situational pleasantries;
The kids couldn’t say:
Topics avoided are done so the loudest—

That old man who’s friends with the devil
Lying infirm, walking infirm, his only guests are strangers
I hear his didacticisms from long ago
Curtailing the copper snakes despite their promise of knowledge
Good or evil
Because life is too short to be more than just friends.

Everyone works at least one day on the jakes
At the desk at day’s end
At plaster fist on the rivers in tar
Where Rat-prophets have their
Schizoid visions peaking in fright
To a starlit bible-edge clatter and smash
Shaking and roiling, denimized
Words pinpointing you down
Assembly-lined out by the smirking madman

Capital, he says, capital, capital
Looking out on our heads graduated heads
Cap it all, cap them all,
Jagged and four-squared edge
Happy enough to dogpaddle in a maelstrom
Called Sallie Mae
And to forget ‘graduation’ means ‘to rise’
These ocean floors, dark and darkening.

Yet, his debt crushes him for lack of want,
Chicanery and shady deals
Mine’s a blessing, a burden of love;
The brochure is a better read—

Where am I going to be next week?
Recalling the difference
Between indebted and dead
Recalling the difference
Between a ton of feathers and that of lead.

Green limb upon the ground
Mark’d for death you I’ve found,
Still, though removed from branches awry
And crashed to earth as stars from the sky,
Your berries are ripe, and leaves still green.
How do you, dear limb resistance,
Deny furor mean
And Death’s persistence?
How, there on the ****,
With no draught of sap,
Do you insist “more battering, more”?
Like the feet that trample you,
You buck the sole of cruel fate’s shoe
Where I would bear the grind,
Gritted teeth, whilst I shed a tear,
But pay no mind!
When, shorn from your grace of pure vitality
Leaves hope aloft, high as the canopy.
Is try not, then, the struggles portend
Such are the means, so banal, too, the end?
Even in the noon affair,
You envy green becomes more fair
And by six bells your might is dun
And you, alike with the settled sun,
For where was limb, there now is none.
It seems that Nature foul has, this battle, won.
But in the shades of passing night
Your rebel clarion on black is white,
And my own nihil
Walks with me still
Though at some limb’s great distance
Urging me with Death’s persistence
That I too am so green a limb
And will befall a similar fate
To wilt and fade, just as he.
Along to death, I carry this profession
Though even that, now,
Green and envious of life,
Its certainties I begin to question
And hum the mantra of the green limb strife.

Now’s the time for dichotomies,
For good and evil, for right and wrong
For calling upon the very myths
Which divided us in the first place;
Now’s the time to call evil as it stands,
As the wrong people die
Murdered by the right,
Insulated by edelweiss dreams
And makeshift armies of fascist fascinations
They cannot see
The wrong people are dying—
The wrong people are dying—

She sang starling in the dying noonish air
Whether the benches knew or no
Our finger slipped for better wear
And down we went onto the grass
We cupped the leaves so scattered there.

We both saw what was to come
Took our solace from a wint’ring sky
Tombstones flat against our backs,
And the wine in the folds of plams,
While I stopped singing
“Ya’arbernee.”

I sang nightingale and knew she would not hear
Turn up the music, baby, all sad songs
Sing the same, sing the same,
But I was looking for a love song, drowned
In the bitter verses of by-gone haunts.

I found I could only speak in epitaphs,
A cat drank water from a parchment leaf,
Of which we wrote our histories, Troys apart
But we only brought ourselves to think
On the weeds.
Turn up the music, baby, I want to sing
I want to sing starling.
Something sweet on the Reaper’s Bow
These breezes chill me, spurn us both
Twist your hair as was my oath.

She sang nightingale but to the distance
In which I buried it deep and blamed myself
I could be the good boy and kept the cards I’d dealt.
Talking loosely between tight lips
We felt the moment go in between sips.

Innocence
Your story of silence
Took a shot below the belt
And other colloquialisms.
I would not have it any other way
Nothing of my origin
Flows from these fingers
Suddenly
I’d brought to inspiration
From the driving drums of music
And a $24 bottle
Never has Jackson given me so much.
Who gave you permission
But the idiots of understanding?

My eyes fail me, the spirit is but a ripple, an echo
Afloat on the sun cast waters
With parting gifts and wine
The hands, the toil, push me on
But,
It’s pretty, the ripple, the sky and I
Like bodies at a funeral
My soul crying
Mouths are sighing
"How very pretty the evening sky looks"
As it looks back on us, two bodies,
Day and me
Dead and dying, dying, dying.

There is a wound that sits behind the eye
Triad tonality, a fearsome sigh
Plucks a ****** chord
Lyric’d by the word “why?”
Acid fingers grin in lust
Anticipating another ****** into the belly
Of time gone by
Hot skin taut and merely waiting
For suicides to release their hands
In the chain their concert makes
Eternities in some hellish waste lived in only seconds.
How strong the forces are!
So steep a severing blow!
Still fresh a carrion scar, festering miles still to go
To beset the pinkest eves
This blade of regret
Within a greater narrative,
Tiny little vignettes
Armed in fashion of drunken odes
Those promises sworn to keep
Accompanied by such pathos woes
Accoutered, finally, in weep.
Brandished when it’s not so fresh:
This minor paring of my flesh
Gleaming in the summer laughs
To caterwaul my gaff, or plural if you like
The humor undercuts enormity
Or screams on shafts in biting breezes
This lived-in clime
I, this prey, displeases.
Unsheathed, the memories, in jovial acts of war
Besiege, beleaguer, the since-immured
True blood and guts long-since obscured
By friendliness, camaraderie
Intentions jester-pure
Trick suppressing-shields raised, jaundiced wills will not deflect
No blade or arrow of regret.

Smart, wild thing
Sent, pathetic and starving,
In need of work
[By] the Computer-being,
Acting on profit
To a crazy, very bad job.
[When asked] feel up to protest?
[It answered] Hard no.
[Yes], Everlasting authority
Is totally scary
[But], my mind, body, and soul
[Are] dog-tired [and] dumb today.
[So], [I’ll just] sit here,
Impatient [and] act [like things
are] hunky-dory.

1
We read the Titans in a ***** binding, stitches
Crossing in inspiring genetic code and though
Sweet winds in Elysian plans blow, peppered
On the fertile mind, great poets sowed these realms of Hell
Petite scholars pass cursorily, in attempt or ignorance
This classroom won’t appreciate, for years behind, years until.

There was substance in their parting wrists, or ninth ring
Of some divorce in descending rings of darkness and liquor,
And binding chains clasped too numbed from vacillation
I find the journey down their spiral, sad but beautiful
Who wakes with them on either side: design, ebullient suicide?

They lie before me, still vivacious, I lay on looking
In their papery autopsies revealing nothing but scars,
Nothing but the inexplicable, the inescapable prophesy of war
So distant, papery, eternally recurrent and so beyond us men,

Did you sacrifice yourself for the poem, little shred of self
For the gleam of light of day in time of the beloved belated?
What caught your heart, the one you slain, that looks past us all
But moves beyond tears—something ungraspable you had to shed
Life to attain, whose mockery was impetus, just as it was bane.

Pray tell, does it hurt to, in time, become absurd?
A living contradiction, a multiplicity, tiny strings, and blood
Black as ink and nihilism, but swooning, structured, and romance
Pure dialectic, two bodies of verse coincide; a black hole
Dark and Worse. The ultimate catharsis of poetry, lived in every line.

#2
There were abysses in those falling leaves,
Fullness of a lighted walk, irreclaimable annihilations
And empty existences. Now, we write them
Write them down, on these falling loose leaf scraps.
But what has been, is smashed to bits, eventually withering
Eventually splits; yet, something of history is fed from their breast
And we know the miseries that were forewarned.
Ever shall we follow, now that you’re died and died ever on?

To Hell with Socrates; art’s no imposter, but the rudiments
In fact it rears us philosophers, asks and answers all questions
We’re all philosophers: we know what knowledge denies,
Laughs at, and awes: the sole thing nihil cannot belie
Therefore, the pantheonic blood is spilled and I
Drink headily. Draw the same course and dark spirit
That plucks the ferns pushed through the crack
From the grains of aged monuments, past frisson of
Repeated denouement and Time’s cynosure has lent.
The poets may suffer but know what we don’t
And die just to find the panaceaic solution to death
For they, they will never die, and we will pass, unleft.

Stepping on the pavements bits
That run into a concrete yard
A sprinkler spells its little yarn
Of countless **’rs, click-by-click

Puzzle pieces, broken brush
Make rough the plumage, dreamy air
In’t, surprised, pass others there
Since my own breath made them hush.

Autumn, were’t a talon’d hawk
Perhaps I scurry as mice do
Caught by awe and confusion, too
He dropped down, I, now free to walk

Maybe I will fetch the moon
A marble in the pocket cloud
Stays, but wavers, as wind does th’shroud
Safe, no pretense in its bloom.

New zeniths, gold peaks, wrought art by the dawn
Replete i’a chorus befitting a god
Surreal i’ the sound, arrest hearts to beat on
Perfect not i’ the void of song, of we awed
We be humbl’d by that seraphic tenor
And that feigned haughtiness, urge, morale arise!
Hoist high the gift which holds none the better
Evoking the spirits in a calm’d sea of eyes
Turned aloft, to masks or tried bounds of that range,
Caught on the line betwixt life and a fantasy
We watch and we wait for our lives’ swift change
I lament for the throngs, you, that won’t see
Souls alight brilliantly, rushed by your song
And who will forget you when you are gone?

Let’s go away,
To my haven in the wood
To the lazy, little river
Stay longer than we should
Let’s watch the sun
Lay across the leaves
Chase it with my car
Go until we’re pleased
Let’s just stand
In some field
Dance with the breeze
In each other’s eyes yield
Let’s just forget
The daylight will end
Your light is my light
So we can just pretend
Let’s lay here
In the dark, dewy lawn
We’ll go away together
But let’s stay here ‘till dawn.

A flurry descends
Upon this town
Like a snow globe
Shaken up and down.
Given time
It does settle
Disappearing on
Glass and metal.
And when it stops
Then starts again
Squalls abreast
All down the glen
The clouds will tumble
And grey the dome
--Above the sky
--Above this home,
The winds, they sway
The wire of phones
The sun that shines
Once was not shone
While snow once more
Flung to the air
Where it lingers and tarries there
Then to rest on house and stone
To claim the earth that was its own
My fingers retract from the window pane
To watch it start
Then stop again.

Look not into that hopeful scene, away and down the alleyway
Of your new life—new memories gambol and of them a new past,
Look not into that hopeful scene, nostalgia when comes as a new god
An infant-you beseeching you, “I’ll guide thy hand down two hist’ries.”
Look not into that hopeful scene, the past is clear and now empty
Autumn is sweet, exalted still though with this cold, and bitter will
A hopeful scene as it looks not, as car-exhaust mornings spray cool
The baby-sitter years, or days under the eye both looking in
That hopeless scene, the beauty of this never-was, never-had, likely
Never-will. For the reclaiming of past selves as wonton, fickle
As the purchase of small antiques and filling up those jars of brine
Today’s home is a present-past, recalled in ferns up through the cracks
Sure as coating on thy heart, it wants us to return, to call on
Doors that long ago inured to wailing of their theft, so it goes
And capturing the long-ago: look not into that hopeless scene.

All I want
Is my heroine
That I see vicariously
In the arms of a coincidence
And elected poems to speak for me.
I Want to hope to god
Of whom I cannot believe
Because my teenage mouth
Shaped by adultery
Has made a vile construct.
My love becomes a useless thing
A sentiment without action
A stray paper with blood peppered bout.
I’ve made my service
I felt the grandiose emotion
The holy bliss of a teenage kiss
That felt of everything.
It is gone.
I, left with this contradiction,
Am left with nothing but jealous sentiment
Of the more deserving
And the louder-mouthed end,
A questioned answer
That love, love, love is gone
Is becoming, that seeing
Across a nothingness
I held so much significance for
That—****, I felt so a heart-pulse
—is gone.
What I felt is an illusion
And destined to fall to the wayside
As all in this absurdity.

1
And I just wanted to know, insatiable anticipation,
Just how you keep smiling
While all your teeth show
Stained with all that grief? And though,
Outside, you’re nectarine, just as the
Ducks ‘midst torrents preen and raindrops
Fall fat and unseen, outside
Abide, the open window wide, in clear mien
I see rain falling over glass, replenish, renew
And though you can’t cry,
The world does it for you,
To yourself, you utter a lie, but the world weeps here
For you
Just as I do, though, tears unseen
Separated by some barrier
Between.

I’m not thinking of you
All the time
That’s why you’re (in) my poem again
And a fleeting memory of mine.
Nothing of pith, nor something to question:
Like a simple, transient indigestion.
Though, you were once a wound
--Another shard of glitt’ry ceramic—
Certainly, I’m sure, I’ve healed
While meditating you, the font endemic.
Rest assured, I’ve loosed the bind
Aft’ some disparaged thought
Where I hit the wayside
So I no longer think of you.
…Be certain and clear,
You, gift, once so dear
That I think not of you all the time
You that waylaid
Temper, spirit, and mind
You that effulged the soul of my words
Of romance, of fiction
And other dribble of that kind
You, at my distance, seemed a creature a divine
From, several of my works, your being derived.
In life I could not have
Nor in thought shall I play
(As though thought was of any consequence, anyway),
So, I’m happy to chime
My resistance to doting
And quitted my practices
Of  elegiac sonnets and poetic noting
And no longer think of you all the time
Nor do I lament, nor do I whine
I proclaim that this is…fine
And I assure you, so am I…

What’s this, again? My favorite!
Whiskey and ink, pen and drink
And blood to punctuate
It all.
Cross-out the L’s and dash off the I’s
Filling the spaces where tears used to fall,
Fill up the keys, drained arteries
And I give them to my stanzaic-self
Who weeps on command, is a comedy
Since these dramas of the mind
Often too risky for poets’ traverse
The grey imprisoned between the words
Is home and salvage for us bleeders, but
Too often
A delight
For you readers.
Can I write drunk? And let the truth come out?
I could be at the end of the barrel of my own words,
Absolve the guilt, art itself or no,
I could find the beautiful truth at the end
—And hope I misfire.
What if I’m not strong enough?
What if this kills me?
The whiskey and the pen are the friends
As much as they are paring knives
—But, never have the dark times seemed so bearable.
I get drunk off the tears I hold back
All the faces I wear,
Who, like fantasies, from inside rend and tear
To get to the top
Until the hole of suicide surfaces…
And I stand a stare, pretending it is beautiful
And write a poem about it,
******* myself to become the empty beloved poet
The suffering aloof homework assignment
The voice of sadness
The joke
The cliché,
Always and ever
To hold me over till the next day
Distracted by a different kind of self-loathing,
Through that, I can go on
To forget it
Again.
Tonight.
Tomorrow.
And then again,
Till death.

Go
With me
Where the winds of grain
May breathe
Small atoms of woven gold
So that I may lose my own.
With the oxygen you’ve gilded
Filling our lungs—may I dazzle like you?
Two creations intervene—We are the constellations
The spider webs you see
How paltry and few
The stars, they seem
I cast them off, they sickly gleam
To fill my sky
With you.

“Travesty,” those orange words spilled across the highway lines
Came on swathes of a stilled
And perfect evening time,
‘Tween buffeting air and screaming music
It seems but a step in a cyclic progression,
Or the lines that commence
This processional of cars
That follows, to the site, trails of incense,
Tears of mourn and memoirs.
Towards the hills canvassed in reluctant ennui
Jutting in the shadows the bleached ribs and pearly jaw lines
That, at times, may have looked alive, yet now
They rest static as the dead ought to be.
I sense I’m getting close, the ***** surges its triumph
As it does the sanctuary,
My head swells with deep booming sound,
The lyric of the preacher without need to expound,
Too late as the ***** shan’t stop or abate
As I pass through churchyard admonished “Hell,
Is truth realized only too late.”
Though I am soothed by that song of my youth,
Lyric’d by many-a familiar cadence and tune
Vestiges of naïveté play on the lips
But, “Hell is truth only realized too soon.”
I wait at its back and reminisce
The coming great years were something to fight for
With life, defend,
But I now see that I spent those last seconds
Waiting for them to end,
Whilst prayers of hollow wind abound
Escaped to show something holds on, at least
Pretends,
Will remain after me, aft’ I’ve settled in the ground,
To be as a sunset and come back around.
I feel like a sun, burning in fury,
Not simply a shimmer in the vastness afar,
Or the muddy face of fetid puddle
Simply rippling like a star.
Keep driving! Don’t cease my tiny hearse!
Just now do I hear the mourners’ verse,
It sounds so golden and couldn’t get worse!
But the ***** has ceased,
The daylight, it rots
(Never mind that, I’ll charge it with haught!)
And the processional laughs as they go to their plots
Their verses fall too coward to brave
The ice and the snow that is to come, mine fall stricken
With every sense of the word ‘dumb,’
But the sun reassuring with it warmth-giving rays
Will be sure to put flowers next to our graves.

This October metal seat feels a hotbed
Made of coals

Eager and empty, questions arise
Existence, absurdity, human demise
Much more to this…here
Meets the eye.

Where’bout, dear prof, would you age my words?
But stuck in loftiness is useful like birds—

That face you gave before turning away?
Let it be be finale seemed
Be it a smile—not at me.

Minutae rules the day
More use—and, yes, I’m inclined to agree
For these are the points I give, but break free
To a pity, pretty tongue fit vague for poetry
--Though it pride, I know it, that speaks
I don’t like to hear it from my own mouth—
And never for a lifespan talk.

It’s that I see in missed detail
Where, myself, this class and level do fail
But never, never can I correct it
When focusing on such impossible ****.

Lushness falls short of rigorous yarn
Robes, academic, not rightly worn
For, in the professor, his or her eyes
Children like me are still ill-learned
And grandiose—though this, I know
I know it to be
That inner me:
The pride-shielding boast.

Love is like leaves
Falling from trees
The cold causes us both to fall
The heart is at ease
When the skin is pleased
Warm sheets for our survival
Icy snow falls
We’ve given our all
That warmth enweaved in severance
Never mind you
One lasts of two
Dead branches bud with petulance
But never despair
Be tender with care
The leaves will fall again

Drown in sweetness, my end of days
To rest the restless
Sobriety assuage,
For when the chalice is all but full
And I have crushed,
Erotically and made dull,
The grapes beneath my palate wall.
The Rush! The Calm!
Serenity!
She cries her tears along the edge
And becks me find no other,
Since I wail when clear as glass
She bids me fill another.
And I do, for I love you so,
For every moment is calm like
Ebbing tides,
As musical as the crashing surf,
And only made better with time
Oh, my vintage Divine.
With my darling on our repast
We sup on forgetting my sober past
And with it humor abounds.
My broken heart wet with kisses
Losing count of imbibed vintages
We invite the presence of my Spirit’d friends
Make light the wrongs by night’s end.
So why think at length of misty futures,
When all I need are distilled, blush sutures
Or of a past, beyond control,
When the light of day it thusly stole?
I do not drink with infinite hers
I drink them all away.
Now, with me, I call us we
Is my vintage Divine.
We drink, we laugh,
But she departs,
I was yours and you were mine
(everything is turning and meshed with time!)
Now I’m befouled with poisonous past
And on my tongue is left a stain
Which drugs my better faculties
In the hated day,
The infinite hers,
This lack of drunken clarity.
Since sobriety proper is fruit of the vine
And all this terror in my sober mind
Can only be healed
By Spirit
By Wine,
Leave me lusting for the flight
In eua de vie: the water of life.

There is something, a more perfect flame
Born of the cold of its self-destructive Same
As all fire in every iteration.
Why does it consume, a being therefrom
Ash, budding in envy and infantile,
Itself? Where shall it return? Tragedies
In waves and yet I’m so affixed
To those weeping, weeping lost
Amidst themselves, wanting completeness
Or one leaf to survive them
Through the Spring. Here, amidst
The tragedies, red-eyed, disheveled
And hoping for rebirth.
I will stand here, bury it in earth.

Often, in the day, the tickle begins its havoc
One where the answers my head rested on
Beget those questions anew,
Begetting more questions, their answers, too
I, with upright, beating breast, am fit to take on such a feat
To sing out fame and knowledge in the streets,
They shall know what I mean,
The truth is all and everything I mean.
Wracked by what seems a natural progression
From confident concreity to existential congestion
And subdued by chiasmatic coughing fits,
Beginning with the first, ending on the last
Confounded by the night where last may come first,
I got to bed discomforted, a few shots in me,
Knowing not what to blame: me or everything,
Who is it that makes no sense?

Staring at the dreamy ‘scape
I can see the algorithmic lynch pin
Taper off and down
Fantasies, angels spread their wings
And marvelous oceans rend
There at the bottom, or there in the sky,
Or in their middle-way
Is the delible surface with wanting cajolery
Written across it, “thou may.”

Though paths remain uncrossed
And souls still give a friendly gesture,
The local haunts are still shuttered
To those that brave these occult and rural roads.
The busted macadam speaks volumes
Written in its faults those riddles and anecdotes
Long kept in the spirit of the place
And the etchings of otherwise mute country spaces.
Such is the clarion of a hero’s return
On the lips of a medium, forever for profit
Incanting enchantments upon grounds
Which formed his genesis and the ash he became.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Delusions of that throbbing arrogant wound
Have played tricks on these eyes before
To all soothsayers and falsifiers with words
So dulcimer as they are harmful to restful nights.
This is the true passing of the hero:
A loss of a child’s wonder to the silver lines
In the unnatural twinning of reality and make-believe
As sung from cardstock ramparts of an ocean of carpet.
There is no looking backwards to a road disappearing
With the valley’s crushing winds to my back though
The battle grounds and olive trees suspending offerings of peace
Run headlong in their respective directions, those unrealities: present, past.
Only spirits can hold time’s scales
With such precision or precariousness
As preternature may devise—
Those creatures of children’s books.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Smoke crafts the forms of three adolescents
Jogging along the culverts of the West Fall hill:
Among them, the long-haired boy I know, face as though a mirror
In fear, I fire my arrow straight and true in the name of reason.

They scatter into the fronds of wheat and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.

Or so the flicker of passing wheat conceits.

I come to the shores of that river where young men dive
Inside the crater that grave of bicycles inured twelve in all
Attempting to dredge the depth for a lost frivolity
And the scattered refuse of the year before: perhaps a trading card.
I throw myself to westward skies out from that sylvan steppe,
Whose lustrating turgid flow repelled the revenant of the past.
May its purity allow me to meditate upon its unwavering face,
And it shall shine back stern with an idol of a comforting familiar.
As it opens its eyes, halfway, its clear aspect scatters
Beneath the inflatable tubes where, hand-in-hand and sweetly as birds
The voices of those long-haired wraiths: the girl of his fancy,
Whose name was destined to be cast aside in the autumn wind.

They pass beneath and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.
Or so the flicker of the passing stream conceits.

And, oh, the mountains rise as the curtain
Upon which a young poet casts dispersions
And anger for the sclerotic moments in flowery metaphors,
For there at the altar of renunciation, one can only speak in tongues.
And over the young poet, the fog hangs lazily to mark the world’s turning away:
A blinding of witness to his offerings, the deafening of ears to his word.
For I am no mere present, but the possession of that which looms
And that which as passed—for whom am I, the present, a memory?
Yet, this knowledge sates all hunger and quenches thirst
For those wounds, those ashes,
Those songs written deeply
Have proven fertile for genesis before.

Or so the flicker of passing dreams conceit.

These slights only meet me
Like a stray kiss on the cheek
The kinds you dream of at 13,
Moments made to be stretched
And puttied minutes, days, years after
The best, the most incongruous and shameful,
The most despised,
The kind that curl your toes
And sour the stomach
At that introspective drunkenness
One foot grounded, one knee tingling numb
On the bar;
Oh, she came, oh she went
Those poetical revelations at the bar
Our best ideas on human suffering
Forgotten to write down,
Fuel for the manuscript, pressed
In dirt and blood, soul and spit
Another, another, whilst all others
Run for the rip tickets and defaming hope
Each lose a sneer and a cyclical hoping.
Never once, in love or lottery,
Do you suspect
Maybe lady luck is chasing other hands tonight
While you’re chasing those loses
And maybe, leave the lotto machine alone for a spell
Yeah,
That’ll teach it a thing or two.
But who hasn’t loved vice
Just a little too close?
Whispered a promise to appetite
Before lying down for good?
I loved her like everyone else,
And it’s still a single paystub dissolved
Without recourse or cause for revenge.
But she, vice, I can share with others
Being the only thing I’ve ever thought
Of stealing
Was a glance into that torn dress
Looking for a pattern
Or that wayward hand across my cheek.

To travel and live on a roaring ocean
A life of ebbing and flowing waves
And transformation
Is seductive to my
Ink-stained fingers
Begging to wash in the surf
To ready themselves for some journey
Ahead.
Prepare the vessel!
Call here the mark!
But only a few tick before we finally
Embark; the orange arch of salt-spray and freedom
Wade in the glass of the inert sea
Directed in the way of time’s linearity
Perhaps to a coast on only one design:
A message in a bottle
To wherever the wind calls mine
With but a simple story
For whomever it may find.

The pen may hit the page
But for what gain?
Scribbles
Were they ever
Of worth?
The greatness
Is not in the state I’m found in
Kneeling
Without a place to call room
Or home
Something to call home
Just acreage to call roam
Or place to go, a bed to sleep
A ***** too distract like a chime
******* to sleep upon and lie to
Ears to
Tell sweet nothings to because my PATRIARCHICAL ****
May desire a sweet lie
And my spirit may desire a sweet lying to.

I can’t sit here and pretend I’m seeing a person
Who’s
Not you: the genuine spell, the real self-starter,
The Devil’s in my hands
In the drag, on my forked tongue
That’s full of emotion;
Do I play with his fire? Do I dance with his devils?
I’m putting my words through Hell, darling
To get to Paradise.
A lunch-moneyed fist pulls fame towards you
I walk
With something that’s significant of
Romantica
And so important in the first draft
So raw.

…and quite becoming, disillusionment.
Old and young children are holding their legs
At the terminal of a new life,
new…

Two forms sat, eye to eye
Alight by ambiguity
To you, I, you to me.
The air and lamps
Breathed like knives
As they both listened
At a distance
Some eulogy
Both known and alien
On pipes in the wall.
A debt rent in half
Empty purchases
Turned to roses
Bouqueted ‘round the dagger’s haft:
When the flowers would thirst
Weapons remain.
We knew this would happen.

So upset am I by desire, a want that extends to another.
How unfair it must be on the other side of this transaction,
Invisible.

To think each day is the same evolution of the same sentiments
Rising and falling under the same horizon:
I see it as my own tendencies

Wake, contemplate, fight with myself, eat, elate,
Fall asleep with contention—no dreams
Want to sleep next to me.

For it is the root of philosophy to have your other half—
I am completeness without my other half whose existence
Is questionable,

Is irrespective of fate and, frankly, unaware. Yes, we’re all
Philosophers to the grave, to the ebb of human passion,
Of which I’ve been bereft by forces apathetic to my demise

I am alone—shall I always be? These and other serious questions
Come from misery. You’re a placeholder for something I lost long ago
And my watch is endlessly caught on the twenty-fifth hour

Unmoving.
I want to not feel alone—and so that is my relationship
Concerning the other person, whom is rightly not here

I am too wrapped up in the concept to think of others as people
But means to my own happiness. I am ultimately the selfish one
The only difference between me and other people: success.

Drink and bleed: defining moments in my life to discover both
So my problems can take on their own lives and breath,
And there is my distraction, my face in the display window at a zoo.

Though, if ever I were to break through the clouds, I would not
See paradise, nor if I looked down, see cities in the lake—no, there would just be
Another film too high for me to puncture. I can float in the endlessness,

Uncertainty glimmers like angels across the bold nighttime sky
I let the inertia move me, let poor mood speak my piece
Until I, like all other human interaction, fall out of place.

If I could be your guard of solitude, the shadow of your light
I would gladly stay, half-starved of oxygen
For then I'd be strong enough to cope with falling out of place.

I fear not the killer
I fear not the gun
I fear not the monsters
Or shapes born of settled-sun
I fear not myths or holy wrath.
No, I fear the lonesome
What solitude may bring
At loss irretrievable
Come swift on Time’s white wing
I fear not death
For that, at least, is comfort
A purchase for my cling
A little voice I can deny.
No, I fear derision and ties I’ve rent
I fear a nil my wants will bring
Long before death I’ve kent
I fear not fantasy
But nothing.

Velvet black plays coy in the breeze
Sashay ‘twixt those earthen palms, makes light
Dark corners of isolated trees. Flitting,
The velvet, intended candid yet so beguiles
The eyes that hide so much
And see so little
(That what they do see and don’t defile)
The ears the capture so small a sound
Only from fingers where machination’s found
And loud to the velvet that chips at the mortar,
Sighs at how incomplete is disorder, to harmonize chaos
And try as I may to dismiss, oppose,
I’m at a loss,
Locked in and froze.
Like veins in the hand and the blood therein,
Now, only now, the velvet tells my heart to begin,
Since, in solidity, my pulse was rescind’d
Now, only now, may my heart begin.
My forked tongue, it flicks, to spit thanks to the breeze
To capture the freedom of velvety ease, but then
As I look, in the highest of ken,
The velvet black shutters,
Then finally flees.

You are a dawn
Vibrant, full of light
Behind ebon clouds
In the middle of the night.

What would happen
If we read “X over X”
As the calculation
It deserves
Instead of so much
Self-serving banter?
We’d find what goes in what
And in quantities unforeseen
As conversing crowds
Among the qualities:
How about this?
“Mind over matter.”
How much matter is within mind,
What pieces of the world
For ideals left behind—
Perhaps what memories
In nutrients we disregard
And the patchwork politics
Between chocolate and hearts
Of artichoke.
What of “ballots over bullets?”
When blood spells the words
We’ve yet to choke
Down?
How many shots will be fired
Before we like band-aids
To wounds apply?
How much violence endures
Till democracy is blest,
How many protests cut down
Before we can lay down the sword?
What of the adage “brains over brawn?”
The well-known oath of courts and kratocrats
With force harp upon?
The strength which one must possess
To prove intelligence
Proves unattained
Yet so many beatings
Are reasoned as recompense—
What sense must be made of pain
To convince us the path of enlightened men
We must avoid
To stay in line.
Thus, submission over freedom
Is where true freedom stems.

Upon this day, a reckoning of an ideal
Has begun—the immortalizing of ideologies
In statues, in tremendous acts, in carbon footprints
Has kept humankind comforted well into
Its collective existential crisis,
Like a black hole consuming all matter around it
So has David Koch created a hole
So powerful, only the crumbs of an economy
Still circle recognizable, having long disfigured
What it means to be human—
Randian liquors dribble from his lips
Like crude from earth’s entrails,
Where to heal the ills of an unequal system
Forever picked and scratched open,
Fresh blood lines a gilded age promenade
And workers follow the path,
Churches follow the path,
Business executives follow the path,
The fossil fuel industry follows the path—
The legacy is strikingly apparent
In the folds and lines of the earth,
Carving human-shaped beds
In the crust and forever below
One such for David Koch, too,
The legacy is strikingly apparent
In the ****** of things human and not,
The legacy is strikingly apparent,
In the killing of the human and the birthing
Of the industrial human, the consumer race
With word opines what industry cannot solve
With deed makes hurdles far exceeding industry,
A contradicting race
A self-limiting virus,
An impossible being, the consuming race,
An inhuman being—
This ******* of the over-man
Should come with minor fanfare
In babelic tongues as we celebrate,
Good or bad, happily or tearfully,
The death of the invisible hand’s seraphim,
Who, while building the tower to heaven,
Took up the horns, encouraged us with
The Gospel of individualism that Russian sociopath
Espoused so convincingly, so fetishistically,
We’ve risen above, we’ve moved beyond,
No longer human but capital:
What does not **** us
Only makes them stronger.

1
A dark September of the rising sun, lay it
Think on Nature’s belly, gaze to wide, and wide forget
All about the open, a shutter and a swelling,
As frost upon a filament, snapped and waving round
This cord could pluck amorous sound
Now it’s fat and dead vibration
Swallowed by Nature, her acoustics.
#2
He said I dreamt we made love on moss
Quickly his nature for it longs
Before and thence thereafter
Battered his own skull, the truncheon of those blast desires
All of their dreams, disillusioned by a rotting cream
Before he ate so gluttonously
And loath to think so freely.
#3
In the throes of such blanket miseries
He was a mountain climbing itself
Taillights seeking headlights
Middle of the line, seeking the end
Though this absolution of Dark September
Wretched and cold, has months as he miles
Towards the snow of Darkest November.

Some, ode-to-be,
Never let my get so close
That I should turn to graphite
That which set notes
To a discordant symphony,
Lyrics to that beautiful muteness.
Never—I promise—will you be my poem
You’ve mastered an art
Only dreams could capture
Half as well.
You make me seek and chase
A fantasy
And long to capture what, before
I never thought.
I am left in division:
Do I love what I can’t have?
If so, how?
Do I release what eschews chains,
Arrests me having done the better?
O, then this I hear a locket
Whole, in faith, on my breast
And lest I’m to sail
Towards an in an eastern destiny
The key will blow in warm
From the west
Strangely, a pattern unlike my own
On wings that flutter
Free
And I will, somehow, hold the key
That, somehow, predates
Her western destiny.
Two lockets broken
And chains entwined
Shall render useless an eager hand
But still the palsy that urges it
Amidst the ailing hate of it:
Love in its purest.

I am the snow
In the rains of the March;
The returning flocks to an icy home
—Too bitter to advance, yet too far to return;
The million insect in the fleeing sun
—At blissful risk from a sudden burn.
I emerged (once more) from a shattered winter
My frozen core would never splinter
By grace of storms that built me up
From many unrealized sunny days
To be a summit of hearts dismayed
And from then, here, I stayed.
These warming days retract their touch
As I refuse to melt as much
As kindred of the winter, all
Who grew with me in circumstance.
Yet, this March has in me bred
(Perhaps then, too, I’m in full their kindred)
A space in me, a hole I melt
Dripping with that Spring Emotion
I forgot I ever felt.
Beautiful warms come kissing me
I fear until I’ll wither completely
And lose this body to a formless drop
Evaporating discreetly.
Tho’ the winter from which I’m born
And the ends of rejection I still bear in scorn
I can not go to a new loving Spring
Nor pray to a Winter, more snow to bring
For one only feeds frozen past miseries
The other, this essence, too quick to parch,
Will  do just the same as these
Rains of the March.

Take punches
And smile
The big never get small.
Like dust
Along the mountainside
Take their everything
And be not at all.
Be proud, little dust
Do not fear the all alone;
Every mountain of we
Is divisible by infinite
I.
To dream of stones
Is petrified,
But how can you move mountains
When you can’t even move yourself?
Let them have their lands
That stop along the shore
Mountains stay just where they are
But you’ve got
A million and one
Other places
That wind could take you.

I thought at once the hands
Took hold of life
But only to loosen them
Inside the pockets:
It merely seems a bit tight today.

In the middle of it all, linoleum and cleaners
I find the shelves of candles and pry off their lids
Just to find out what scents they hid.
No noise, no racket, and nothing meaner.

The balsam fir in craters of wax
A chirstmas tree hunt and sugarsnackes
Recollect times to play and relax
Late December days and skies overcast
The carrides back smelled of this.

Of the wild rose, all pink and flush
Our faces betrayed us after stealing a kiss
And stealing away hidden with a wild blush
When asked just where we were.

I’d say the black bamboo
Where the growing pains began
I remembered what I never wanted to know
Smelling her sweat on my hands.

After every cupcake and fall harvest
We felt torn in two
Amidst the parents and summer’s zest
Everything I wanted couldn’t possibly be true,

The strawberries, the honeybees
Clean linen on a quick, tense rainstorm
I fell to my knees,
Afraid that my passions would
Take on another form.

Far too wild and winterborn,
You have your sleights in sympathy
And obtain what may decorate your court
I amuse you with love: an elegy.

But, the heart is no traitor, not to any court
And says I’m no citizen of your lovely heart
I’m a smiling nomad that goes in due time
And, love, we can trade castles
Since you’re no citizen of mine.

Again, the scents linger with no flame to their wick
Closed were their lids to choke out the burn
Cool were the insides, like ash in an urn
A single spark dazzles but goes out too quick
Each smell left unfamiliar may not have you
It’s not you and me, but me and you and you and you.

She’s going clean
She’s going sober
After the high from chase
Is all but over—
It’s not the envy
But hypocrisy that stings:
We both agreed we’d worry
About more important things—

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

Call it stupid
Or call it fate
20/20 vision
Is too little, too late—
Purse my lips and wrap my arms
To the closet thing around me
And give my vows
To slick roads and sneaky trees—

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

I guess I found the question
To an unsaid answer:
What is hate
But a little love with anger?
I’ve had to stew in shame
As a judgment was made
Right above my name—
There it is,
In my crumpled dashboard:
These black thoughts
Spelled out on my record.

****** up going 45
I’m lucky enough just to be alive—
Her lips are sealed
She’s all she’ll ever need
I’m seeing double
Looking retroactively.
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)
A three letter ball and chain
(I should have stayed)

Who, I ask,
Is this phantom I pen poems for?
What ghost
Is this, apparition of my verse
And greatly its inspiration?
None; that’s who.
Worse yet,
My insistence on wasting ink away
On mysterious “you”s
Whatever, whoever
She may be.

The very sky fell to greet a wandering shade
Only by a falling light
His form and frame were made
Calling, with his silence
A Solsticine, on whom
None could find reliance.
What of this world walked with the fog
But he, small,
In mist, walks without his giant
At the fields of Arcad’
To golden plains
A Dasein, in which nothing is flawed
Standing at media
Fit for the amused, too tall to walk
On and on, on shoulders the sun takes its leave
Its rest.
To giants the day is drudgery, when one dawn falls
And moon, I, dreading it won’t find me
My idler goes in wistful mists
On to the breaking light
Onward to the reddened night
My idler goes in wistful mists
Silent, absolutely.

I could take your hand
But then I would restrain you.
And why would I want to do that?
You’re so perfect you should be free.
I could draw hearts on your skin
But then it’d be as though you branded mine
And why would I want to do that?
You’re beautiful even without me there.
I could swim through your veins, dance in your eyes
But then I’d be trapped and invisible to you
And why would I want to do that?
You’re too special to waste from on the inside.
I could have you like in consummation,
But then we’d have ruined all that could be
And why would I want to do that?
You’re worth too much to just take and not give.
I could tell you I love you
But then you’re placed second to me
And why would I want to do that?
You’re always going to finished tied with me
I could marry you and clasp your hands in rings
But then you’d be, by statute, legally mine
And why would I want to do that?
You’re not the zoo animal destined to wilt.
Why make us apart-of when we’re grand wholes alone
Neither are we halves-of or the other’s-better
When we could be two, with lives of our own,
Standing, by divided love, beside and together.

One can hear the ingenuine
Consolations as yet another person
Succumbs to despair;
Faceless, nameless, blank, and distant,
Another person succumbs to despair.
We only know by the uptick
In certain metrics that
There will be one less consumer
Come tomorrow, tears shed
For dollars lost.
A controversial opinion, that suicide
Is bravery taken to its extreme,
But, when at the shores of the Rubicon
And a stone must be cast,
The strongest willed, the most charitable
Will cast theirs as everyone else commiserates
******* the stones around their necks,
Watching the soft taps on the water’s surface,
Farther and further into the distance.
The egoist in the ivory tower
Can hear their wailing from inside
The sterile room without window or door,
And, to protect himself, slips
Ammo into the cracks—
Those closest to the base
Grab fistfuls of cash and arms
To protect their own millstones,
Their livelihoods as sparks begin to fly:
Who to blame is the first question
******* them, the next,
While others see the ruse behind
Ritual suicide at the loss of the stone,
Some others turn to pity—
But, those unwilling to protect their leash
Are sacrificed to the gun-happy mongrels,
The rebels of the capitalist’s first vanguard
As they wave their blood-soaked flags
High, knowing the millstones
Rightly belong to the faceless victor in his tower;
Suicide is nothing more than theft, he says.
Thus the vanguard follows
Pulling the unwitting in
As they start fires with friction
And get lost in the smoke and mirrors,
Killing the wrong people—

A furious screaming came off the lakes
And drowned out a million curses
Hiding from the cold, as hands in their pockets:
Isolated and trembling.
Despite a proprioception lost,
One body, blue at the tips, curls closer
To the dikes of thickening blood,
That, neatly, remain outward, exposed.
Do we not huddle in coaches and spaces
When our passions’ armor cracks?
Do we not crave touch for lack of warmth
When the skies above are clear?
Do we not risk hypothermia
When we expose ourselves to another?
We are the organs of great cities,
As we are great cities of cells
Seeking outlet on natural course all rigid
Those unconscious fraternities
Ebb and grow as we, like lakes, turn to floes
By cruel chemical realities held to bodies are—
As hands of distant lovers are—
Seeking outlet, seeking tributary.
Stagnant, though, cities stand
As the thin-skinned tissues flow
Swelling at inlets, at terminus expand
To compensate, give room—
This winter of hearts only lengthens
And so bodies begin to quake
As our bedrock breaks through
Its torments cutting outward from the skin.