Not just me
Who is ceasing to be
Interested
Came a time
I once cared
But now there
In its stead
Is a somber indifference
A sullen withdrawal
Where I used to be
Head over heels
Now I fall
Not in love,
From above
From on high
I deny
Having any incentive
To send a reply
Having any stake left
In the politics game
Having all the ink drain
From my pen hand
In vein

Empty is us, is you, is me
Empty is accepting it will never be

Empty is the regret, the guilt and the shame
Empty is never again speaking your name

Empty is the dilemma, the most difficult choice
Empty is forgetting the sound of your voice

Empty is a frail hope which hopelessness grips
Empty is craving the taste of your lips

Empty is the cold malice of winter’s cruel blight
Empty is dreaming of you night after night

Empty is a pocket filled with money
Empty is laughing when you weren’t funny

Empty is the void within the abyss
Empty is knowing it’s you I will miss

Empty is a desert longing for rain
Empty is thinking I could ease all your pain

Empty is the shadow cast by the sun
Empty is believing that you were the one

Empty is a ******, beckoning sin
Empty is lying, I know where you’ve been

Empty is the end, life’s bitter conclusion
Empty is your promise, it was all an illusion

Empty is the night that never sees dawn
Empty is without you, forever you’re gone

Keep reading about
How the good life is led
How by telling the truth
I would rather be dead
Than have pled
With the night
Interlocutor’s
Silence
To bring you back to me
And end
The disquiet
From narrowing further
My impudent fervor
The pride in my ideological
Murmur
Some dent in the armor
Of resting assured
Guaranteed is tomorrow
I give you my word

Better be barely
By breath
Breaking out
For that death
Do us part stuff
I’m just not about
But take heart in awareness
You occupy thoughts
Of less savory urges
Are more often fraught
With a lot
Of traumatic
Explosives and omens
The ghosts of my past
Have so cryptically spoken
And though not
Initially
What I envisioned
We still come together
Like head-on collision
And into it full speed ahead
Would I go
If on your end
The fender bends
Backwards
To show
A committed
Emitted
Fuel standard
Machine
For I’m just a pollutant
Still tryna’ come clean

Still rising
And writhing
In bellies of beasts
Like a maggot-filled carcass,
In darkness
I feast
Beneath criminal underworlds,  
First come to serve
And just might
Get the labor force
Striking  
A nerve

Was there with the simple folk
Brokering peace
Liberal hubris incarnate
From Hellenic Greece
I was sent
To sow discord
And sword out the weak,
Like a lord over wheat
Grew inured to privation,
In filth I would eat
Not the least bit perturbed
By the state of police
For I stated my nature
With wraiths in my speech,
Cultivated my culture
Like vultures in heat
Infiltrated the ranks
Of the skanks there to tempt me
A sentry, preemptively,
Of feelings emptied

Before compromising,
Devising the next
Annexation prospects
And subjecting the rest
To exalt the apex
Because love is a war,
Just a game of conquest
And my argument formed
Of the West’s architects
In the bastion of sophistry
History’s greatest
Imperial city,
Glossary glossing me as
A Romantic
But no sense disputing
The paltry semantics,
Was just serving what
Time itself can’t resist,
The interest
Of my people’s

Utopian bliss

She remains
But an image
Unreachable
Distance
The once again
Just the pen’s
Favorite for instants
Insistence on trying
Just seemingly fails
Every time
Love eludes
And unbalances scales
So confusing
How one day
Your path and hers cross
And the next
Couldn’t care less,
But I grieve the loss
And bereave the departed,
The fallen
Once fond
The no longer beside me,
The physically gone
Still remind me
Interminably
In eternity
I am the drifter
Through rifts in absurdity

Is it joy or contentment
Eluding me still
Or this happiness curse
That is making me ill
For where there's a will
I am still without weigh
I am feathers of nothing
In zephyrs astray
Only blue shades of grey
In my novel romance
By the twist I am fated
To wait in this trance
With no chance to advance
To the unwritten chapter
Without a prologue
So I know what comes after
The sound of her laughter
Now rhyming and riddle
This story began
Somewhere in the middle

Good to feel good again
Spoken word stimulant
Working with like-minded
Active participants
Perks of the job include
Shorter commute,
Better pay
And I may
Even really be liked
Be appreciated
For the works that I write
That I type
That I scribe
To assist
With the ongoing struggle
To end homelessness

I deem the divine
Out of time, as I court them
Impregnate the fates
Till I choose to abort them
The muses my brood
I imbue with the spark
And by my hand the arrows
Of Eros to mark
Have inspired the vehement
Seed of creation
To gush from the brush’s
Unbridled temptation
In lust germination
Bore lush dripping red
Misconceptions of my
Hellenistic skin shed
And in discordant dreams
I’ve enchanted naive
Lonely Edens and watched
As they died to believe
That beyond me exists
An escape from the end
That conception itself
Does not to my will bend

Won't you be mine
Let your arrows run through
Inaccurate archer
If only you knew
How many volleys
From Cupid's bow flew

And scattered about
Their fortified mark
An impregnable fortress
Containing my heart
Besieged by the distance
That tears it apart

So silly baby
Come take your best shot
Come put a hole
In my unfulfilled plot
Empty your quiver
Forgetting me not

Yet missing each time
I run from your sights
Surpassing the perches
Of your greatest heights
Where love is as weightless
As heaven's white lights

And worlds of conceptions
And structures so tall
Are but specks on the surface
Of bricks in the wall
Which crumble to dust
When I rise above all

Don't let me go
But don't ask me to stay
Just let our song play
To a synchronized flow
Let it take us away
To resetting the clock
With emotion in motion
Pledging our love
To the silky skin sheets
In a heartwarming anthem
Of our body heat
As we melt away blizzards
Of harsh winters past
With sensational summers
Volcanoes of passion
Solar flares burning
Like candles in spaces
Between supernovas
Of spirit embraces
Beholden in eyes
Which penetrate mind
Soul and body with all
Of the clandestine forces
Inthrusted in hips
Synthesesia storms
Of tempestuous lips
And exuberant smiles
Caressing expression
With free-roaming hands
To impalpable places
Bewilderness lands
Of empathic convergence
A carnal cohesion
In which no words needed
To ascertain meaning
Of how this duet
Can turn melodies
Into volumes comprising
Crescendos arising
Ethereal rhapsodies
Still harmonizing
In notes we're depending
Might someday compose
Of our fairy tale ending
Of X's and Oh's

The power lines provide
Elucidation in disguise
A sanctuary shadow-stained
Estate commandment private enterprise
Desensitizing blinded lies
The buy, buy, buy
Consumes the lives
As malnutrition feasts its eyes
Monopolized, the profits rise
The pockets lined with earth’s demise
Until the rockets own the skies
Devising how to energize
The Helios within our minds
As we just sit and stare with pride
Ascending our expenses climb
Mankind amidst the stars will shine
Except for who gets left behind
To overpopulate in time

Queries persist
Though I seldom inquire
For answers I seek
Contradict
The replier’s
Desire to part with
Its genesis fire
Didactic to teach
Me a moral
Of stories
Too skewed
To be viewed
Through a lens of what’s
Credulous,
Let alone true
So the rules
I submit to,
The virtuous few
All divine their commands
Not from absolute monarchs
Or hordes of lord’s lands
But from man’s
Innate will
To be all
Powerful
And from Pan’s
Sensate skill
To see all,
Natural

Have I not
Yet overstated
Graves and havens
All the same and
Grim as I’ve ever been
Staunch proletarian
There is but one
Whom I hold
Dearest sentiment
Much to the complement
Of my addictions,
My bastions
In ashes
Atop my convictions
My practical
Prosperous
Prose
Only knows
How irrational
Feels
How emotional flows
When she goes
Beyond where
I relinquish control
Where the only choice left
Is to give her my soul

Eternal the struggle
Of dispossessed rebels
I finished God’s work
Now I’m doin’ the Devil’s
Duplicitous, shiftiest,
Dirtiest deeds
To the landless,
The peasants,
The outcasted breeds
An outsider
Ghost writer
Adrifting through town
And unleashing my unbounded
Hellhound around
My cause lost
To the cost
Of a hole in the ground
That I sought to make common
Man’s claim
All the same
But to do so
Required
The gentrified’s bane
By the slain
They defined me
A murderous ****
And insane they confined me
To mind-numbing drugs
They prescribed me
Attempts to revive
The reptile
The coldest-blood guile,
Service with a smile,
Reviled exile
This side of the Nile
And in a submissive state
Made me a slave
To the for-prophet
Profiteers’
People enchained
To a system
I swore to destroy
As a boy
With his head in the clouds
In the muses’ employ
Where continuing still
Is that struggle
Eternal
But these days
It just rages on
In this journal

I'm not cut out
From the cloth
Of the beggar
No morally purer
Than drunken bootleggers
Don't claim to be better
Than junkies
And thieves
And in fact
Often share
In their proclivities
When my conscience agrees
To be righteously wrong
For the sake
Of forsaken
Virtues, all along
I have known to be merely
In theory
No more
Than the voice
In the back of my head
I ignore
When imploring me to
Ask it
What would God do?
Perhaps suffer the many
And save but a few
Of the most loyal supplicants
Bowing to none of it
Proving the makers
Who made us
Are done with it

Come weep
Like a willow
Come mourn
As a widow
Come wallow
In hollowed
Out parts of my whole
Come expose
Why I sold
All that’s left
Of my soul
Come beseech
Me to linger
A shadow,
A stain
Come release
Me to bring her
Back home
From the grave

The good and just god
Or the God is just good
Either way
A falsehood
Only mortal minds could
Believe true
Despite proven
We too misconstrue
The conclusion
Illusion
As piety’s cue
To divine its define nature
More than a fruitless
Attempt to uncover
The root of its hubris

Nothing adds up
If equations of us
Not a word I could say or write
Earns me your trust
And there must be two people
Both present
In this
When you’re gone
And I’m gone
Want the other to miss
How it feels to be whisked away
Wistfully with
An intention to mention
The taken for granted
Want you in my arms
By your charms
Am enchanted
Just need you to want
Me more present in flesh
When I get there
Allow our personas  
To mesh
And entangle
Ensnare me
Come bare your whole soul
Have a drink with me
Trip with me
Pack us a bowl

She sits in a room
All alone
All day sobbing
Her brain overheats
In anxiety throbbing
And lobbing grenades
Upon rainy parades
Is the only way she
Can ensure the pain fades
Crossing over again
To succumb and suppress
She still seems
In control
But is a
Complete mess
But her kind
Of frenetic
Magnetic
To me
She stills pulls me
As if
The full moon
To my sea

How much of a failure
I’ve been
I’ve become
Couldn’t stop any wars
I just hide
And I run
I can’t even have fun
Without substance abuse
All attempts to find love
Tie the knot
In a noose
And you think I’d be used to it
Now
After all
Of the times I’ve uplifted
Myself
Just to fall
In a discontent pit
No escaping it
Slip
Further down
More than ever
Before I have dwelled
And despite the implacable
Anger expelled
Can’t dispel the illusion
That things will get better
That I can be happy
Alone in forever

When it really comes down to it
Instinct is key
Solutions you don’t conclude
Rationally
Although naturally yield
An appealing
Fanfare
Popularity contest
To racialize hair
Unaware
That the struggle
Does not even care
When it’s hungry
And pushed to the brink
Of extinction
Detained
In a cage
Like a subhuman species
So why try to train
What does not want to learn
Your new tricks
Why insist
Making it
Your concern?

We’ve been here before
Down the same broken road
Of a vision obscured
By such clearly in love
Deep philosophers learning
How all the worlds turning
Could be in our hands
And still not be enough
To unconquer these lands

How could someone so far
Feel so close
Within reach
Like I’m already next to her
Down on the beach
And each day
Through destabilized life
Disarray
She is my equilibrium
Song that I play
The insightful awareness
Her fairness
Inherent
She sees me in ways
Not so often
Apparent
Unerring
Assessing
The depths of my mind
And repairing
Its faulty
Default
Out of time
For with her
There is more to be spent
In progressing,
Improving,
Correcting
Recursive transgression
A reason to stay
When I’d much rather leave
Broken dreams
She awakens
As yet to achieve
Not aggrieved,
Nor consigned
To no chance to attain
And as long as she’ll have me
With her
I remain

Desperate as ever
To find my way
Back to you
Reconnect,
Synchronize,
See the whole world
Anew
Should even slip
A quick hiccup
Or glitch
In the system presenting itself
Be amiss
Then I may
For a moment
Consider it thusly
But never imagine
You no longer trust me
But just me
Would be
The conclusion
I’d reach
To whatever end
Seemingly
I tried to teach

Dread the free time
But still can't wait to have it
To seize peace and quiet
By my force of habit
And flee far away
From a central locale
Of a jobless, impoverished
Human garbage pail
Full of wasted potential
Unutilized power
Another kid lost to disease
By the hour
Devoured from inside out,
Parasitic
A malnourished mortality
Fated statistic
Accounting for little more than
A UN
Detrimental development
Index embellishment
IMF, World Bankers swooping in
Heaven-sent
Millions lent
Never spent
Back on the people
Just keep them like sheep
Marching on to the steeple
And reap what they sow
How so little they yield
Until cityscapes swallow up
Forest and field
And behind their most opulent
Optic facades
In their decadence festers
The graces of Gods

Excuses
Excuses
Make me
A reclusive
Reduced to
Expecting the worst
Kind of mutant
Aberrant
Outlander
Unwelcome
Across
The whole globe
Have I strove
To belong
And get lost
Concomitantly
Constantly
Claim contradictory
Opposite views
At least two
Sides are needed
But always the one
Whose mere presence is fleeting
And then there is me
‘Bout to go unresponsive
For by
Dead of night
Silences
I am haunted

The realist idealist
Marxist on acid
Unruliest Julius
Social class bashin'
Hash waxin' Jet Jackson
I'm back in it, packin'
My 9 days of fastin'
And rockin' my Rama
Like Lama of Dalai
To Burma, Malawi
I'm thirsty for Mali
Diwali to light up in spite of the plight
From the right, I'm so left that it's theft
All I own is the night
I been deep in the jungles
Apocalypse Now
Reading little red books
About chairmen named Mao
But like Gandhi's ahimsa I'm teaching them how
We make no man's land peace
From they cash Curacao

Where I see water everywhere
But not a drop to drink
Just hydro-frackin' krakens
They're unleashing on your kitchen sink
And still the rising Apartheid
Brings death before the dioxide
Insecticidal suicide
And herbicidal genocide
Colombia? That's classified
It's why I build my ark from FARC
Embarking on my Narcos kick
A fix fit for a Bolshevik
For now my journey never ends
Until I cure this homesickness

Was there in a former life
Mighty,
Exalted
Convictions
Ambitions
To pantheons vaulted
Me up to ascending
Empyrean visions
But lost my place
Somehow
To squalid conditions
Returned to the soil
To toil
And labor
And sharpened my edge
Of depravity’s razor
Sharp intellect
Circumspect
To be applied
For it only would yield
Fallow earth
Deified

Dearest one
Wasn’t one
Single mistaken
Heart breaking
Before
It was even us
Making
It up as we went along
Somehow connected
Unbound
And unburdened
Affections
Defected
From system schismatics
Too ******-frenetic
Forget it
It’s better off
Dead and regretted

Surface tension
Wearing thin
Emaciated
Bones in skin
The shock sets in
Upon the sight
Of transformations
Into this
Cadaverous
Dehumanist
Adapting to impractical
Apathy practiced
Tactfully
To physically appear to them
Augmented exoskeleton

What does anyone do
At the end of such times
Does it wallow and wilt
In the fading of rhymes
Or admit that it still
Is mistaken
I know
Or still has to face forward
And think of it slow
In the show up as usual
Lost and alone
You look dressed for a party
Political throne
And the worker bees buzz
And the servants condone
Unacceptable rifts
In the peace
I am prone
To embody
And sway
And then never more stray
To the morning
Stay sleeping
Don’t wake to dismay

I am the dementor
Come
Gimme your soul
I’ll unfold
Its undoing
In withers of woe
As the shivers
Proliferate,
Glaciate,
Hold
You in skeletal clutches
My touch is
So cold
And I sow lonely
Floating
Atop blighted fields
As I sap the life out of
Your energy
Feels
Shall it yield
To me screaming
In resonant fear
When before you
My spectral dread
Form
Reappears

Didn’t get
To speak my mind
The rest of life
Left me behind
Forgotten
By its innovation
Adaptation
Conflagration
No more home remains
To thrive
Survival, my last right
Denied,
Captivity’s
No place to hide
My species deemed
Undignified
And all I asked
Was peace and plenty
Not so different
From the many
Extirpated
Population
Biospheric
Degradation
Dust within a vacuum
Void
Of even empathy
Destroyed
Barbarians behaving thus
As civilized
As not enough
Consumption stuff
Could bring them back
In tact
Forever
Gone in fact
And never, ever
Coming back

We just have to perch
And the lurkers
Come searching
They know we’re the guys
That get high
With the earthlings

Out in the rain
Don’t want to go in
I would
Sooner pay
To sleep in
A coffin
Even with
Dripping wet
Muddy clothes
All a mess
Of what I can attest
To being the coldest of nights
Of unrest
When from under a tin awning’s
Flickering light
I look out on this withering
Underworld’s
Plight
And recede to the shadows
Of how I can write
What the first world urbanity
Keeps out of sight
In its wish to forget
The injustice of wealthy
Elite kingdom’s
Debt
To the ones it regrets
To inform
Have no home
Just like me
Among them
In this city
Alone

My vision's extreme
In the dreams I discern
From the truths I have seen
Through my passion to learn
Or the levels I turn up
My mind microwaves
In the money I burn
With a sacrilege fervor
In every concern
For a naturalist order
Where I am the hero
On silver surf boards
And webs that I spin
All amounting to zero
For greedy ring lords
My sting will strike down
Their thrones of excess
With my Leninist unrest
And save the world with methods that
Most leaders would detest
Like finding peace in nothing
But the self-destructive ends
To justify the means
Of the passing words with friends
Though the love you share is real
Your lives will move in flashes
I enjoy it while lasts
And then I burn it all to ashes
For I find my warmth in blizzards
Roastin' grand old dragon wizards
As I slither with the lizards
Running shivers down their crooked spines
And sautéing their livers
With some venom as my glass of wine
Droppin' toxin trips divine
Baptized in a river of the finer-sided knife
While I'm gettin' schizophrenic
In the severed ties to life
To empathize with those
Less fortunate than me
By calling it compassion
When I'm just an empty sea
Because I've felt it all before
And died at least a dozen times
But I still search alone for more
Than coloring the lines
With these radical approaches
To slaughtering the infantile
Crawling, begging roaches
By forcing them to stand against
The real exterminators
I'd Dooku them like Anakin
Did in the tusken raiders
Bringing justice to the galaxy
As I become Darth Vader
Still the chosen Jedi knight
Since my Eden is an orchard
In a poison apple bite
Despite my balanced forces
That are rooted in the trees
Making green the autumn leaves again
To plant my lega-seeds
By shedding skins to sin with Eve
In paradises lost
I'd sell my soul to Satan

*No matter what the cost

There was Africa me
No one wanted to be around
Couldn’t so much
As set foot on the ground
Make a sound
That was welcome
Contentious abounded
Whatever I said
Or I did
Or I didn’t do
Already
Dead
Now there’s back at home me
Land of liberty
Bound
Unemployed
But enjoying
A stroll into town
And a run in the park
Past a people who know me
Don’t throw stones
Or shade
And don’t try to control me
Just let me go
On my way
‘Bout my day
Only slowing to smile
And wave
No delay
But still something is missing
Some sense
Of community
Lost in a country
This virus
Is ruining

And now I get angry
There’s no one to save me
Can’t make me be happy
I might as well stake
My heart through
Love is blue
Each attempt,
A mistake
And you knew
Going into it
Sooner than late
It would break,
Fall apart,
Or deteriorate
As it has
Now diminished
To here we are finished
With you
And with me
All my flaws
Insurmountable
Just a lost cause
For the fallout
Accountable
Doubt permeated
My brain
And unmade it
Created estrangement between us
And bade it
To hating what we couldn’t change
Or rephrase
In a more perfect way
Than just from our lives fade

If fading light
From her sad eyes
Could shine like stars of white
This vast abyss
This chaos mind
This endless wall of night
Would soon ignite
Amidst the glow
Of burning suns so bright
This loveless void
This shadow soul
This darkened veil of sight
Would ne'er benight
My pulse and pen
Nor blacken words I write
Again

I am Death in the flesh
Bereft life’s final breath
I have conquered eternity’s peak
Without rest
As I longed to express
From my emptiness chest
Why I can’t seem to pass this mortality
Test

If once upon a time could bring back
Fairy tales I chased outside
Enchanted forests in my mind
I’d write my fabled hero labors
With a hint of her sublime
Confusion, calm and innocence
Her sorrow eyes as elegant
As ballerina dancing leaves
The steps we sat upon and spoke
Of nothings sweeter than the sound
Of incandescent laughter chiming
All around us in the air
The crisp of autumn on her lips
That taste of lust amidst her kiss
Betwixt us coalescing pure
Was love in its imperfect form
Simplistic as the heart is deep
Intricacies as numerous
As any secrets I could keep
Of no day more fortuitous

Embracing tonight
I feel lonely and pensive
I heard from my girl
But my home is so empty
Seems like a lot less
Than three years ago
Entered
Found purpose and cause
In the people I’ve mentored
A living,
A being,
A place to belong
A community
Hidden
Was here all along
And still part of it
Just at a distance
Transition
To next chapters
Elsewhere
Adventures unwritten

Fight as if you really know
What it means to live
Share the love of precious life
For it is yours to give
Don't let the world destroy your world
Or crush your weary shoulders
Bow to no existences
Keep pushing up your boulders
Sail the seas and climb to peaks
Embrace the open road
Release the yesterdays of time
And grow the seeds you've sowed
Step into the light and feel
The perishing of fears
Let your voice be heard by more
Than pairs of prowling ears
Never privatize the skies
Or set your sights below
The levels you have dared to dream
Could be salvation's glow

Cheek to cheek
Ear to ear
Fake this smile
Hide my fear

Behind a mask
Of non-revealing
Lies a tomb
Of buried feeling

Deep within
A rotten core
The good has died
There is no more

All that's left
Is pain remaining
Hidden by
The joy I'm feigning

Empty, hopeless
Gaping hole
Wretched, worthless
Blackened soul

Longing for
Illumination
Falling for
The Dark's temptation

Mitigate
My need to die
Perpetuate
Contention's lie

Forget my face
End this charade
Remove this guise
I have portrayed