Oh John
How far we've come
You'd be marching, so much marching you've missed

Oh John
We're not yet done
So much to do, so much to change still

Oh John
Your anthems still lead us
Power To The People battle cries
Give Peace A Chance to try and make things right
Imagine cops not killing innocent people
Working Class Hero is not something to be John

Oh John
You'd know what to do
I wish you were here to champion this through
Or hold one of your obnoxious bed-ins to prove
That it's okay to look ridiculous for a cause

You'd have egg on your face over all that's gone on
And truly be the Egg Man
Oh John

Time
you enchant
beg for hours
                        endless

Every minute
you never waste away
like all the things in your grace

You are the only one here
who will see the sun explode

Beyond that
even

Relentless in your thirst for endings
because you can't end

Fires in ferguson
Bridges in Brooklyn
The youth in the streets cry out in unison
Hands up
Don't shoot
A young man took twelve bullets
Because he was brown
Battered bodies on the ground
This countries streets are paved in glass
and blood
The air we breath is tear gas
And polluted by discrimination
We are connected by rage
And in this day and age
We are convicted by fear
The civil servants drive armored vehicles
The oppressed pay takes to the oppressors
Who pays for the tank that the city bought?
Who pays for the policeman's bullets?
How hard is it to live without fear of death from your own government.
ISIS is less threatening
Than the grand jury
This story keeps coming back into our history books. Trayvon Martin,
Michael brown,
Emmet till
I am no longer proud to be american
We all live in
MISsouERiY

Home is a collar bone in my ear
Home is smells of polyurethane
And epoxy
Home is a mountainous beard
Lush with soft brown hair
that I can squish between my fingers
Home is two sunken eyes
Cradled by wrinkles
That smile at me
Home is hard-working calloused hands
That when led to soft skin
Work the opposite
Home is skinny legs and a concave chest
And a poked out belly full of fur
Home is seventeen years older
Twenty pounds lighter
Inside of an aging man

If there is any crazy beast in me
It comes out onto you

And you stay anyway

I look back and see all my wrongs
Yet I do them again and again

You still don't go away

I don't know how you deal with me
I'm batshit crazy
I'm unstable and unclean
I can't cook and I'm bossy

I fly off the handle some days
At things I don't mind the next
I don't make sense
But I can convince us both that I do

You're growing weary of me
I can tell
And I don't blame you

To take my first puff
Because they didn't understand
And they smoked! Hypocrites.

To hop in back and not buckle
Like I envisioned years of PTSD
And my cat stuck in the seat

To make you a daddy
Not one time but three
Like I could envision this zoo

To undo number  four

Struggling to quit, brave, deal, forgive.

Stand beside me
Stand and exhale and
Tower over me
Shadow me

Fold me in your darkest
Where no light can hit me
Speak normal
Be usual
But teeming with me

Shelter me
Not caring
and bearing
it all

Look at me between warm breaths
Amid the frightful
Swat away
Keep my gaze
Steady

In your cover
I am everything
Cosmos Mephistopheles
Cancer
Jesus reborn