When I exit this existence
There will be no mournful songs.
The cosmos will not cry for me.
Sirens will not sing my sad melody.
Angels will not weep passionately.
Gods will not even notice me.
When I pass through that parted veil
I will not see heaven or hell.
I was never good enough for one,
Or bad enough for the other.
I do not foresee any sort of forever.
When I die I will just be dead.

On tv it looks so copper clean
Ringing in naked dreams
Living out those picket fence schemes
To get the American bling

Morality is black and white
There are no heroic black knights
The good guys are just
And they just wear white hats

But life is painful
Like a cancer vampire
******* your life force
Pale skin quivering

Dark bags under your eyes
No hair there because of the chemo
Despair and denial on ivy drips
And reality tv made us ill equipped
To handle it

Sometime I wish the tears would stop
That the empathy would vanish from me
That I couldn’t see what I see
See what this reality has made of me

History is white sheets
Red arm bands, fat *******
Uninformed Loud mouths
A canvass that drips wet with my outrage

I sip the last drops of my stimulants
Drop the anti-depressants in the toilet
Forget my docility
Embrace more than half of my hostility

I don’t think much will change
Despite how hard I clamor
Despite the sparkles and the glamour
How I use the language to entertain and inform

This is therapy
In the form of Poetry

People say you can tell a lot about a woman's style by what her nails look like.
For my mother, acrylics with baby pink sparkly french-tips.
For the blonde sitting at the nail dryer, coral.
Something about the color
looks strange with her new engagement ring.
She talks about how the second time she hung out with her fiancé
she asked him to paint her nails.
Her mother, who she insists she'll pay for, gets french tips.
They look new and fresh in contrast to her tarnished wedding ring.
The little girl with skinned knees and bug bites sitting in the chair across from me asks for blue polish on her toe nails.
Her mother tells her she should get pink.

2.
The act of women getting their nails done reminds me of warriors being armed for a fight.
long acrylics,
pointed,
rounded,
squared,
all fit for different types of battle.
Pointed for the woman who has to walk home alone at night,
rounded for the woman in the workplace who must work harder than her male co-workers,
and square for the woman at home raising her kids to know that strength and kindness
are the same thing.


3.
The women who work here speak better English than most high school students.
And their accents tell stories that I will never know.
An older woman speaks loudly and slowly,
she treats them as if they do not understand.
She will not speak to anyone but the owner; she wants him to translate what she wants to the salon workers.
What she doesn't realize is
that she is the only person here who doesn't understand.

4.
The little girl's doll is named Tessa.
She tells me that she likes my hair and shoes,
even though she has been told not to talk to strangers
twice in the last hour she has been here.
She asked her mother for change,
we all assume it's for the gumball machine in the corner.
She puts all of it in the charity jar.
I hope this girl never changes.

5. Having bare nails in a nail salon
feels the same as being naked in public.

6.
I feel terrible for laughing at the women trying to walk in those little salon flip-flops.
Some look like ducks,
others look like trained Barbies;
marching
newly polished,
ready for the world to chip away their coating
over,
and over,
and over again.

Let us bend our minds
toward simpler times
and hail the coming
of an unexpected apocalypse

Limping toward the infinite
scattering thank yous
and blessings
like popcorn to the wind
a foolish man
am I

This life was supposed to be
different
a changing of the guard
But the guard stayed on
same old starched suits
same old
old

So how did I become
so young?
I woke just yesterday
to a sunrise stretched
like God's fresh linen
across the eastern sky
No idea how I got here

Every memory is dipped
from the well of time
and I draw that bucket well
and carefully

I taste the water
as a sacrament

The tick tock of time
is a goad
and  a constant reminder
that we must never forget
and never should fret

So drink deeply
and know the sacred
in every moment in time
and every moment
long gone from time.

It is a gift that you are given.

Maybe it's the poet in me
that believes
that after all these years,
and miles,
and songs,
that you might untangle yourself from her arms,
tug on the string I tied to our fingers before you left,
and find your way back
to me.

Your heart
is pulling you across the ocean,
to ports with open arms waiting for you;
and I'm left here wondering
why it wasn't enough
that I would have tore out my rib cage
and made it into a boat
for you to sail yourself there in.

I would wait here,
at this port
that is both where you have been
and where you still are,
until I turned to stone.

It's the poet in me
that can't let you go.