Waiting at a café table
You walk in and I’m disabled
Seeing for the first time
The blue-green-grey of those troubled eyes
Lost in the limelight
Where I found you, saw you,
Knew you in this new space,
Feeling this strange rhyme,
Waiting at an intersection of
Strung out weathered hope
The silence lengthens, the stare deepens
Casting what I knew into distant realms,
Reworking the good and
Finding those lines redrawn
I no longer anticipate, but wait
For those answers only you can give,
Those I was never able to predict.

The air is heavy,
As it occupies this space
Leaden molecules fill my lungs
Weighing me down
My chest aches from the pressure
Breathing, expounding the effort
I in-, ex- hale.
My weakness manifests,
In a state of pure duress.

Tired and fatigued
Every ounce of strength has
Escaped me
Leaving my body worn and spent
I lay here, thinking
Nothing comes —
It all takes too much to try
To muster the will to survive
My lack of resolve
Has left me undone
My struggle, this fight
Left to be won

I love the wind,
Before an evening summer storm
The way it tussles my hair
And swarms around me
The cricket's peaceful warning call
The breath of the sky against my skin
Akin to a feeling of serenity
And walking in the cool night air
Cares slide from my shoulders
Floating to the ground
As this wind before the storm
Swirls and surrounds.

The steady pounding rhythm
Coursing through my veins
The sign I'm still alive
The beautiful, yet mundane
Focusing, I close my eyes
The thumping fills my fingertips,
Flows to my toes
The beat is in my temples,
At the bridge of my nose
This is the surest thing.
Ever present, unchanging
And the irony of
The inevitable truth:
The beat that never comes
The last final pulse
Of that steady pounding rhythm
The cessation of my symphony,
An explosion of bombs.

Defenseless
Taken away…
I lay on the concrete floor
Tortured by the noise,
Loud, pulsing, relentless,
Destroying, Driving my senses.
Stripped bare,
Frozen in my very bones
Not cold enough to die,
Barely warm enough to stay alive.
Unguarded, I wait
Forever an inmate
Debased,
Imprisoned and alone
Broken.  Apart.

Here I sit with you by my side
Living in a perfect flawless lie
Mechanical love instead of suicide
Couldn’t find the real thing
Manufactured it instead
A living wonder
Lifeless, but not dead
You are my creation
Void of all elation