We shelter in caves
Beneath a man-made steel sky
Once reflective of our soul
Now corroded, its reflection a reminder of our great lie
That the Earth could be tamed
Exploited and submitted in the name
Of the human race
Now it is we who must abase ourselves
Deep underground
As above the megastorms tear apart the heavens
Grinding all the atmospheric rust
into vicious orange clouds
Which fall upon us: a forever-rain of dust
Blue oceans smothered
Forests choked
Fields unrecovered
Fires infinitely stoked
We dreamed once of going to Mars
But see instead it's Mars that's come to us
Descended people of a dead planet
We reap the fallen dust
We weep
       the falling dust

Lightest of the brightest
Priceless and worthless
Least of the lowly
Crowded and lonely

Newmerica
A kind word up oldcrupt
It all burns down huground
Newmerica

Usedtobecans
Newmericans
Virtuquired Datalives
Newvolved digihives

Newmericans
Dearhear a dreamveiw
Knowsaw memberyou
Newmerican

DRIVING A FERRARI INTO THE FUTURE

the house floated out of the darkness
as if it had been flying about in the fog
before perching on the mountain's side

the house was embarrassed
to be seen
in its ruin

this was the somewhere
she had come from
it now no longer existed

she felt that she too
no longer existed
an equation erased on a blackboard

she became naked
wearing only the lake
and moonlight

water flowed over her
like a silken garment
she the empress of this nowhere

only when she stood dripping
on the edge of this nothingness
did she feel the cold and shiver

the stars were like an atlas
of themselves...the Milky Way
reaching over a hedge...lapping the lake

time fell all about her
like a sudden rain
the seen and un-seen together

she drove her Ferrari into the future
leaving behind forever
the girl she once had been

When I was an
ideal and dreamy teenager walking amidst the
trees in the backyard,
there, curled up beneath a pine, I discovered a small creature and stared at it.
I gently picked it up and held it to
my chest.
It opened its eyes.
I felt The power within .
It went back to sleep,
and I set it down.

The next morning
when I walked
out the back door,
headed for school,
the little creature
was sitting there,
wide awake,
looking up at me.
It had the most
unreal looking eyes.
They seemed to change color.
Apart from English and art class, I hated school.
I didn't quite fit in .
I had good friends,
but I always felt lonely.
Bouts of melancholia struck me at the strangest times,
soon after, I found
it to be the
terminal affliction of being a poet.

I stayed home from school that day and played with the
creature.
It seemed to
hear me, almost understand me.
I liked the feeling.
it became my
best friend.

I fed it every day
and it grew and became unruly and hard to control at times, but overall, it caused me much more joy than pain, way back then.
I missed it when it
was gone,
and threw my arms around it when it
came home.
I named it buffer
because it was an equalizer for me,
and the world, and pain,
It went inbetween the sharpness and vividness, in which I didn't know how to cope.

It got big
and became
a beast.
I had a love / hate relationship with
the thing.
I sacrificed a lot
for it at the
altar of idolatry.
It wouldn't let anyone get close to me,
My wife, my kids,
I chased them
all away.
I was alone with
the beast.

After years of
pain and degradation,
I put the beast down.
I shot it in
the back of the
head, like a rabid dog.

Life raged on.
Pain and joy came with equal measure,
but I no longer
needed a buffer to
keep living, laughing, and learning.
I finally figured
out how to
truly love.