I glared Pandora in her sinful eyes
And simply asked her, "Why?"
Concerning all the dreadfulness unleashed upon the earth
And only for a peek, for the sake of curiosity. 
Serpents and plagues spewed past her decaying lips,
Tears streamed and turned to blood 
On contact with her ancient skin. 
Her eyes pooled and screamed "I'm sorry,"
But faint and drowning, as if under oceans:
Seas of anguish
And centuries of bearing blame.

The mockingbird in arbored sanctum
rehearses his newest musing
an addition to his lifelong
plagiaristic monologue

satisfied,
he ***** into the chaparral
to declaim his litany to
anything with ears.

A screaming pierces the serenity of the river valley.
Overturned wreck of a car and splattered, shattered, scattered glass.
A fresh-cut gouge in the dirt embankment where he clipped it
and in retaliation it flipped him on his roof. 
He staggers from the chaos
moaning not from pain, but from the Jaeger, Keystone, and regret
of totaling his mother's car. 
He flees the scene with his homies, his fellow drunken cronies
and the witnesses are left behind, scratching heads and raising brows. 
I among them contemplate the carnage
and I try remembering a different time, ten years ago or so...

This place used to be so beautiful
before the partiers and potheads and Varrio Locos took it over. 
Shallow waters filled with algae drifts and interspersed with boulder bridges. 
Sandy beaches, nature trails, wild grapes, and fishing holes. 
The last free-flowing, undammed, undamned river in the state...
Now it's bloated with beer and blood and bad decisions. 
Not a bare rock face remains, each one caked up in graffiti makeup. 
And the air, once frequented by the heady scent of sycamore
is far too thick with marijuana anymore.
Santa Margarita, choking on smoke and dope and disrespect,
once my heart and home and refuge, now and forever a cheapened wasteland.

Daughter of a rocket scientist 
son of a nuclear engineer
and they begat a son

a boy
too starry-eyed to question the stars—
the way they hang in space, the fusion
that keeps them burning brightly,
or how to launch an object past them—
more concerned with the constellations
of perfect freckles found on his beloved's shoulders

a boy 
too enthralled with Existence
and describing it in artful words
to contemplate its composition
or to ponder Existence's place
on Other Worlds

a boy 
enraptured with the Changing of the Seasons—
photosynthesis and 
chloroplasts and 
planetary tilt?
Irrelevant

a boy 
who'd rather write of Love
than consider its chemical makeup
or wonder how or why it is
who'd prefer to write of leaves
dancing spirals in the breeze 
than aerodynamics and 
air resistance and
gravitational pull

a boy 
who sometimes stops 
and only ponders Science
concerning his Genetics
and wonders where it all was lost.

Our
         love
          was
       a hand
      grenade.
   You pulled
      the pin.

Don't interpret this as arrogance
But somehow I believe that every word I've penned of you has given you eternal life. 
I don’t intend my mindless musings to last beyond the end of days.
But once the pen impacts the paper,
Once the key is struck, 
My words obtain a permanence that cannot be undone. 
The ways you built me up and broke me down
How you fulfilled my every dream, then showed me where they go to die
How you whispered to me where to find my heart, and then you ripped it out before my eyes.
Every action, every word, love and spite, here and now, immortalized. 

If you love a poet 
(And worse, if you choose to let him love you, too)
Then you, my dear, will never cease to be.

Two poets, hopelessly romantic
hearts and minds ablaze
and their love like a fireworks show:
brilliant and bright and beautiful and

     brief.

If I can call a woman beautiful or pure
It's safe to say she's far beyond my reach.
So here's my resignation:
I want the world to know I'm giving up.
It would be far more noble in my mind
to be alone by choice than consequence.

An ever-growing list of things that I can't fix
a set of scribbles on a blank lined page
a lifetime of regretful (in)decisions
a stack of unstamped postcards that I swear I meant to send
my clinginess, my neediness
a drawer full of unused paper clips
two eyes that work too well to see what lies beneath the skin
a mouth that I may never learn to tame
two ears that someday soon will cease to hear
a cluttered, clumsy, cumbersome soul
two hands with scars and calloused fingertips
a mind that only ever thinks of you
two legs that don't know where the hell to go
and
a heart that's only satisfied when beating next to yours...

And this is all I have to give to you.

Every needle in the wind-whipped pines whispers out a soft "I do"
and the daisies dancing in their grassy ballrooms
"I do, I do, I do"
and the cardinals crowned with Christmas snow
chirping their identical
"I do."
Resonating through the trees and channeled through the earth
in places where the sun shines red
and stars shimmer through the waking hours
"I do."
Perhaps one day
our hearts and lips conform to the rhythm
as we whisper with transparent eyes
"I do,
I do."

In the absence of you, what have I left to pursue?
Everything I know is nothing but an unattainable end:
The hunt for perfection in what is flawed,
The search for beauty among the mundane,
The crusade for sanctity and sacredness in all that is profane.
Hence, everything I seek is only madness, and all I say is meaningless.
Simple musings of a man whose mind succumbed to a broken heart
Driven to insanity when he lost the only thing he loved.

Sometimes I wonder if you ever think of me and, if so,
How you manage to brush me from your thoughts
And dream of someone else (I know I never could).
Vagrant minds procure no solace but in love, and
Only in its fair requital. Alas...
Nothing’s ever meant so much to me.
No one’s ever occupied my mind for
Every passing moment of my empty days.

2:00 am
This is the sort of silence that makes a man insane.
2:01
I find myself writing once again, coping as I can.
A lovesick heart still writhing in the throes of loss
And spewing empty words, lacking any meaning.  
2:03
And I'm still unoriginal;
Never have I said a thing not said before.
2:10
And I wonder why it's taking me so long to get over you
And why your visage fills my vision every time I shut my weary eyes.
2:12
And I ought to take back every word I’ve said
Because I didn’t mean them, or at least I shouldn’t have.
2:25
I'm beginning to believe you'll never be the one for me.
2:26
And I realize you came to that conclusion long ago.
2:40
And I find it funny that somehow, even now
You keep me from my sleep and haunt my every dream.
2:45
I'm feeling rather sick
Of sitting on the sadder side of somberness.
2:58
It's nights like this that make me wonder if I'll ever be complete again.

When you died,
O, God,
and my life flashed before your eyes

did it make you wish you never chose the cross?

As the flowers bow their heavy heads at the cusp of early winter,
In such a way do I withdraw, as freezing rains begin to fall.
When the dew becomes the frost, summer's grass recedes into the earth.
So do I surrender, stumble, and finally retreat within myself.
When the rain begins to pour upon the sand, it seeps between the grains and soaks into the ground
And in this way, my musings dissolve into the ocean of my mind.
The leaves of trees have long since fallen, trodden underfoot
As have my aspirations, love, and longing for the warmth.
Budding bushes, noting winter's cue, fall into their dormancy
As I close my eyes, let out a sigh, and lurch into a snowy sleep.

In a world that fears commitment
you said you'd spend your life with me.
In a world that asks for payment,
you gave your love for free.

Despite the pain of loss, life goes on
in an almost morbid mockery of me.
No matter where I go, I feel I don’t belong
in a place where I stand fixed and everything is moving.

They all said to me:
“Recognize, indeed, she's really
not a thing you need
And abstain from writing things of her
that she will never read.”

Somehow, I still long for the harmony
of our full and beating hearts entwined.
And I wonder if you miss me, reminiscing
of all the times when I could hold your hand in mine.

But I still hold you close to my head
and closer to my heart,
it was always us against the world,
and now we're worlds apart.

When it comes time for my soul to part from my body,
bury me somewhere I've never seen before.
Inter me in a place I've not yet visited.
If you have any difficulty doing so,
then you may be assured
my life was one worth living.

Hello.
I'll not bother with the trivialities.
I'll forgo the lingering, longing stares
nix the stuttered words and long-departed trains of thought
skip the goofy, giddy smiles and tangential conversations
and I'll never utter the words,
"I think you're truly beautiful"
because you are,
and because you are
you've heard it all before.