simplicity is
an acknowledgment of love
in diminished light.

On the West Side of a flagpole,
In December's later breaths,
The wind whipped Winter's white quilt
Burnishing words, words, words,
From the ***** metal monument.
Knives and pens had etched
Their love into malleable matrimony
Beneath the flicker of that flag,
But the etchings became wishes
Of Winter's White Wedding.
My fingers grazed the forgetful frost
As muscle memory recalled
A pair of initials and an addition sign.
Fresh drops of condensed ice
Hung within the ridges
Of our four lettered addition problem.
I exhaled a condensed breath
Which sifted towards the pole
then dissipated.  
I glanced over as the moths
Attacked the only streetlight
Causing flickers of light
In the starless night sky.
A half second stare
Was a half second too long;
I looked back at the iron pole,
And the letters were gone.
A white wash of frost
Mixed with my exhale,
Covered the West Side of the flagpole.
Pockets of wind snapped in the flag.
I peered up at the streaks of crimson
And field of blue whipping in misery.
The seams of the flag's fabric
Became weathered and torn,
As I walked away from the flagpole—
Tired of dreaming in the stars.

I am love without commitment
I am pain without cause
I am choice without reason
I am broken, beaten, and scarred.
I am thunder without rain
I am the sun without heat
I am a hailstorm in summer
I am the dreamer of empty dreams.

Here lies Georg.
A hero of war—
The iron youth.

A hero of war—
That’s what they called him.
They spent themselves
Trying to find words
To give meaning to his death,
But all was lost and all was
Pointless.

His angular head
Hung in glory
For the things he carried
Were not his own.
The cross he carried
Was his father’s story.
He hung upon the
crossbar of deaths row.
“Mother may I, go on and die?
There is nothing left for me.
Nothing!” He bowed his head—
He died.

“Abba! Abba!
Why have you forsaken me?
Abba! Abba!
Why have you traded glory for my death?
Abba! Abba!
The iron hath rusted
The youth hath faded away.
Here outstretched lay I for a stupid war.
If you must father, drive spikes through my hands
Make them spikes of *** to forget about war
Today I have tasted the good wine,
And today I will die as a holy sign.”

Panic set in as he woke up naked on the table.
He looked down his slender leg
to find a stump of yellow and green projections.
His stump was sewn together like a Christmas ham.
Chloroform callbacks reeled into his mind.
Naked, he felt as though a free man.
Here on this table in the dying days
Lay the last breaths of hope in humanity.

Metal protruded from his skull
He felt the war deep in his mind.
No man’s land hugged Georg
With a frigid sense of endearment.
Wrapped in the tendrils of the night,
What good was his wound now?
He was missing pieces,
Waiting for a missing peace.  
God softly called,
“This is the end”

Victors of vices,
We were kings of lean to castles.
Smoking was breathing
And breathing was frigid.
Women were objects,
But then again so were we.
Our master of puppets,
At home in his bed,
Dreamt of war.
While the puppets
At war in their shacks,
Dreamt of home.
So in came the women,
Up went the moral.
The peeps became stares;
The touches became feels;
The feels became ghostly
whispers of a love
they would never have.

Round two sounds the bell,
Flesh wounds are new.
It blisters.
**** filled sores.
The wait begins.
“How long will it be?
Perhaps an hour.
Wait! Perhaps—
Perhaps they wouldn't come.
Yes! My way out of it all.
A hero’s escape.
They just couldn't get me in time.
Maybe I’ll die in the wait—
I’d rather die in hope.
Alas, the stretcher of life comes.
**** it.
I live to fight another day.”

Through the haze of dust came
The miraculous love.
Love brought vapors of sweet befores.
“Ahh the smell,” thought he, “This be the
Temptation of youth.” Girls doused in
Thick smell: summer’s scented sand.
T’was not many girls, but one. One who
He loved—He fathomed possible.
Soap and towel, given for the purge.
Dunked in baptismal waters,
But the earth was resilient.
The details are in the fabric.
The fabric is in the details.
Was it his stitching, or the towel’s?
imprinted with a thorny crown.

Georg lay waste to sharp shrapnel pangs.
The hand of Simon reached, gripping
The leatherneck deformity
Off the forsaken war floor.
Spitting slurred speech he raged to Georg
“Take my hand Comrade! Do not wait!
Gas is coming, can not you taste?”
Georg could taste the thicket of dust.
The dust preyed upon him—his youth.
Under cover the two discussed,
The pains of war—the loves they lost.
“I loved my wife” spoke he: Simon.
“I loved my books,” Spoke he: Georg.
“I loved my faith,” Spoke he: Simon.
“Tell me Simon, what good is faith?”
“I know not why—I just hold it.”
“I hold far too much don’t you see?
My father’s will doth burden me.
Besides, what of faith here entrenched?
They let us carry dead men, but
What of faith? I ponder this so.
Should not faith carry us comrade?
Oh how the faith has lost its weight.
Trust me comrade faith will not save.”

Mother may I, take two steps forward?
Mother may I, come to your bedside?
Mother may I, tell you of the torture?
Mother may I, request a sweet lullaby?
Mother may I, plant understanding?
Mother may I, ever cross the sea?
Mother may I, keep on exploring?
Mother may I, drift away from thee?
I may, mother, drift across the bar.
I may, mother, sink beneath the storm.
I may, mother, find God over par.
I may, mother, be whole yet still torn.
I may, mother, be gloried yet pained.
I may, mother, be generationally *****.
I may, mother, be lost and not found.
I may, mother, be within—without.

Georg was an afterthought
Of a short metal round.
Which Pierced him in the ear,
Beside his holy crown.
“What luck,” he thought as the
Blood ran thick.  “Only half
Of this war I will hear—
Only half will exist.”
He stood half in the dark
Hearing only one side
Of the war.  He heard the
Cries of his enemy.
The tongue seemed forlorn,
But the message was one:
Befallen was no country,
No province had been won,
Not a yard would be gained,
For war is deaf, blind, and dumb.

The million dollar war, and a penniless soul
Become entrapped in an ephemeral state.
Reality is not his father’s cold brewery,
Reality is the burning, fermented sweat
Which singes his eyes.  “Salute” rang
The officer, as the crowd looked on.
Georg fell in line to salute his soul away
To a reality of misconstrued differences.
A moment of bombastic glory rang out in his ears,
As he began to carry what his father had bestowed on him.
He didn’t realize, or did not conceive,
The sound of the months following.
The bombs of the months following did not ring.
The bombs were quiet—
A silent brigade of destruction.

A young heart blisters raw with war,
And a young mind wonders nevermore.
A young man stands upon the hinge of glory,
And a young man fights his history.
A young body ails in the pouring rain,
And a young body weeps with cold estrange.
A young spirit is condemned to death,
As a young spirit bears the cross of the rest.

love.
The knife rests on the counter.
Her freshly chopped hair
Feels so estranged.
A healing process
That seems to cut more than give.
Black eyeliner fresh to her skin;
Only worn after –
Never before.
Light flicks to her ear.
Her father’s gift of an earring
Ripped away.
A long ribbed scar
Of the letter “A” behind her ear
From a singed lighter burn.
The color was grey,
But it burned scarlet in her heart.
Impressionist choke lines ran across her throat
From her unwanted suitor.
Biting her lips with pain,
She felt a ruby red rawness.
Salvador Dali’s black lipstick
Twisted open to bleed
memories into mirrors.
Impulsive strokes of darkness filled the glass
With a diminished, backwards word
About a diminished and backwards girl,
She finished titling someone else’s art.
The gritty glass gleamed—
evol.

The wind diverges the horizon boughs
into view finders of royal blue.
The flicker of the blue beyond washes to
brown sticks fettered with dry leaves.
Oh what cadence ensues,
From a bent bough and a
Sifting wind?  
If that limb but a will,
And that breeze but a pulse,
Harmony would hide in the
Heartbeat of an eternal summer.
Yet eternity suffers sterile sadness,
And cadence breeds a timid tempo
Of hollow trees against a grey sky.
So speak the world in discord,
Unveil blue skies from cacophonous trees of green,
And push the wind in hurricanes.
As wind and bough dance in perfect imbalance,
I admire the flicker of their countenance.

Miles Apart, and still miles left to go—
You seem so far away, yet you feel so close.
Hearts which beat at a separate pace,
And minds that wander so,
Are linked to love through destiny,
Changing as they go.
If our paths must split,
And you find another road,
I wish you love that is true—
Not one that is faux.
Still I will walk my separate road;
Passing fate’s fickle mistress as I go.
I sing a song with a familiar tone
As I wave to her a sweet hello.
I stop and stare in her endless eyes,
And say thank you for my wonderful life.
Fate stared back at me
With a welcome to the end,
And I saw in her eyes
My young beautiful friend.
She had walked a road which I had once known—
The road I reminisce to with miles left to go.
I imagined her hand in mine as we took a long walk
The past echoed in harmony though we dared not talk
Then fate whispered to me that it was finally time to go,
So I took my lover to be, and we walked the final road—
A finite infinity of love we had once known.
Her hand back in mine—love was finally home.

Ohio valley in the sun,
We are the broken ones.
Rays of fools gold
Crease your hills
Of walking regrets
And stagnant thrills.
Oh you—Ohio valley in the sun.
Highways to nowhere
Run through your land
Of imprisoned visionaries
And the dreaming man
Oh you—Ohio Valley in the sun
What did we do to deserve this numb?
Oh you—Ohio valley in the sun.