Sumer, Winter
shine, or rain,
Doesn't matter
its all the same.
Miles are miles.
They have nothing to say.
Littered with sweat;
Haunted by pain

Our backs are broken
Knees begin to give out
Blister upon blister;
yet none fall out
We are to tired to gripe,
so onward we  roam
into the night.

For all of our troubles;
all of our plight
Its just another day
that burdens no ones mind.
Thankless tasks
that consume our lives
If only we knew
When we signed those lines.

Birthdays,
Christmas,
Turkey dinner,
Weddings,
and funerals
replaced by miles,
burnt out bodies,
and restless hearts

For What?

We stare at other soldiers
and wonder why,
we alone
are bastardized.
After all,
does god not love the Infantry?  
Nay...
****** fools are we

It will never change.
It is
as it always will be.
A few good men
herded
straight to the butcher.
Paraded
like cattle.

Its funny though.
Given a second chance
I'd still wear my blue chord
Standing again an Infantryman.
For all of the ****,
For all of the take
I'd rather be a broken *******
than a *****.

we wound in stars on old fishing rods;
reeling on promises from days where
the light still brought species, clutter,
schematic belief. you caught three. i
caught nothing, but glimmers of hope.

allusions and reality are often cleft,
though. this truth i'd rather cast,
like myself, over cliff-face. but, i
alone am
mutable in this scheme. you named
yours as blank-faced children, born
to the sea.
predictably, i named mine woe.

fate moves through seasons, sovereign
groups, ways set down to dot. the
object stands;
here lies truth. this is the truth:
pebbles form kiltered circles
under the dock. floating
above the architecture of my
ribs consuming churned
air, i watch me fade. i
discern and too, dilapidate.

you raised yours with colour
in iris. i picked mine up
lovingly-
this woe is
awake and tightly circling.

Night is for the hours
Cowards,
Let a man of God speak or night
Will continue to burn flowers

It's been said napkins are the greatest currency
For it holds the food spittle of man
Like how ambulances sit waiting
To clean up after misfortunes
And make fortunes for the fortun-
Who Ate paragraphs of spider webs
And patted weaves like black men seating at the back of the limited luxurious Q46 bus nodding heads to the noise of Toyota cameras they couldn't afford in the land where they spend $300 million to part the seas for summer entertainment
While they only spent $40 on California cuteness and walked on water with 13 Jesus' and ate at the bottom of the sea with only three tokes from the plastic bag

Let a man of God speak or night
Will continue to burn flowers
For we graduated from 30 hot nights of mathematics
Only to find that the future will always be white and in the *******

it's hard to crack a
coconut while
sitting under the
water;
in order to understand
the fundamentals of a
broken heart
you've got to know the
secrets of the soul

wait.

99% of human beings
are enchanted
and to lick the moon
you don't always have to
travel to mars.

Now wait.

Promise Yourself

To be so strong that nothing
can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity
to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel
that there is something in them
To look at the sunny side of everything
and make your optimism come true.

To think only the best, to work only for the best,
and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others
as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past
and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times
and give every living creature you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself
that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear,
and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world,
not in loud words but great deeds.
To live in faith that the whole world is on your side
so long as you are true to the best that is in you.

For Naomi Lazard

Sometimes I can't wait until I look like Nadezhda Mandelstam.
-- Naomi Lazard

My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.
The ones who are single are tired
of being single.

They look at their wrinkles.
The ones who are single attribute their wrinkles
to being single.
The ones who are married attribute their wrinkles
to being married.

They have very few wrinkles.
Even taken together,
they have very few wrinkles.
But I cannot persuade them
to look at their wrinkles
collectively.
& I cannot persuade them that being married
or being single
has nothing to do with wrinkles.

Each one sees a deep & bitter groove,
a San Andreas fault across her forehead.
"It is only a matter of time
before the earthquake."
They trade the names of plastic surgeons
like recipes.

My friends are tired.
The ones who have children are tired
of having children.
The ones who are childless are tired
of being childless.

They love their wrinkles.
If only their were deeper
they could hide.

Sometimes I think
(but do not dare to tell them)
that when the face is left alone to dig its grave,
the soul is grateful
& rolls in.

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven't got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design -
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them - love,
your very life, should they need it - will not

and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what's to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.