Shunted and hunted and chased by the pack..
I look back in despair.
There is no longer anyone there, it seems they gave up on this ghost.

Sometimes the things that you hate are the things you love most.
And now with nobody chasing I find I am pacing the floors..slamming doors..bored to the death of it.

But I shall fit in this groove..be unable to move...be tied to the millstones...no thrills in my old bones.

Someone please call for the Doc..I think I'm going in shock with the joy of it all..this quiet life is too much of a ball.
My heart starts to race..I can't keep up this pace..How do I keep a straight face when I lie through my teeth.
Good grief..this is a slow way to die..being as nice as a slice of stale apple pie.
I am really wondering why..
I don't break out of this mould..leave the safety of this fold and meet again with the pack at my back and the wind in my hair..when I just didn't care it was great.
Fate takes a hand..makes a stand and I am pushed to the ground..
Which is where I found
The answer.

As ones mind wanders
It tends to go to dark places
Into the shadows
Only ever lit by emotion
But these emotions
Will always be a part of life
Learn to live with them
Is what the youth is taught today
But ususally
To just live with the emotion
Is how shadows form
One should embrace the emotions
Not only to live
But to feel, laugh, and even love

She digs her fingernails into the cerebral mush, as if pressing down on the sponge they keep perched on the edge of a sink full of soap-stacked dishes.

Only she uses that sponge, cleaning up after the others—the ones for whom she feels so many things (one of which is love)—every night after the day has diminished a little more of her youth.

Then in household quiet-calm of some time after 10 pm, she compresses and expands what’s left of her mind, hoping to achieve a serenity to match the towering magazines on the coffee table, next to the coasters, and a framed picture of bucolic scenery, because none of the vacation photographs came out well.

She recalled the blurred, smile-stretched faces of the family, standing behind their cabin, Up-North, and in front of the lake whose waters spread out like steel sheets.  Feigning contentment, she leaves the room for the bed, her mind heavy, as if soaked in metal.

I feel you slip away
slowly--
like a breath of smoke
from my lungs--
at once foreign and
part of me.

You drift away
from my lips--
parting,
as if to say,
Goodbye?

Sultry smoke dissolves,
Tearing scars into
my lungs,
As you-- you
also burn inside
my chest(my heart)

and I watch,
with stinging eyes,
all the smoke
fades west,
into the wind.

wears overalls
and drives an old pickup truck

about half the speed
we’ve set our heart to travel

through this dying stretch of Nebraska,
our trail slicing west without end.

Time admires his work, keeping pace with
the changing season, and forcing us to  

follow: windows down, we fill our lungs
with the colors of transition

exhaled by tinged leaves that grow
up and older, matching the rust on the truck.

You finally manage to pass, and we leave
Time and his fields fading behind us.

Part 1:
&words; spill out:
heart-hued as a sunset accident
steeped in courage
&staining; my night sleepless

∈ prayer
our hands raise up to caress this newnight,
&cas;; scattered shadows like
spooked birds in flight

Part 2:
&inkscribble; spreads
fully across the tablet
of my sullied, aging heart.
Pages soaked&dying;
purpledark

weightedbeauty
after you speak the sunset-things
to fruition across the fields:
Nebraska solitude&desire;

Part 3:
&rising; again
on a third day, I must depart
&brea;; our day in two
(you&i;)

The sun&i; shatter time,
as the dawnmirror
remembering dusk
cracks today into the night

&words; escape
from parted lips&uncapped; pen
to fly above the broken world
as sparrows rising like

Son&Wor;; resurrected
pouring salvation on the stony soil
of our souls
like sundrench in spring

&script; winds verdant
vines around us
watered by heavenwords of
forever ago

Part 4:
&ink; fills up my bookheart
as I return it to a cage
&leave; the you&i; behind me
in a vagabond-blue nighttime

This story circles the earth
like a river scribbling a message
of scars and songs and a something-else,
swirling like old-fashioned script
beyond the binding of a book.

A vagabond leaves the trail of words
dropping from palms stained with ink,
blue from a wet horizon.
The salt of three seas press to her lips
as they part.

The wind brings songs to quench her word-thirst.
Syllables soak the world with sound
and the air fills with the smell before rain,

She tastes phrases of perhaps
and imagines the final page as a picture book:
a rowboat anchored with hope.

I want to be your dreamcatcher
And keep ahold of the insults meant for you.

Dreamcatchers don't catch dreams

They catch the things that keep you from having them.