This nature of me,
the skin over my bones over my poetry,
I've missed this tender discourse,
the rhyme and reason of my slight frame held against glass.

I see myself better when I'm not trying to cry,
and I'd left this naked art so long
I could no longer tell the difference between
a night with stars and a night without.

This is buttermilk to starvation,
drowning twice and coming up for air.
The first mouthful aches like forestfire,
by the third I am a gulping animal.

Her eyes gleam in the light
Like stolen treasure
Her laugh replays in your mind
Long after she leaves
She is never there long enough
For the cracks to surface
For her laughter to ring hollow
For you to notice that
Her smile doesn't reach her eyes
She wanders from place to place
But she is not lost
She is fleeing
From the ghosts
That haunt the church
That she left behind
Five thousand miles ago

Old poems dead and buried
In death the words deteriorated
Into things I no longer recognized
Strange arcane relics
Gateways to past minds
Awaiting to be excavated
By wandering eyes

I want to write long rambling letters
Like Ginsberg, Kerouac Burroughs
Stream of consciousness
The sea of unconsciousness

But I have no correspondents
No one writes letters
None of my friends ever have
No one puts pen to paper

Texts are ethereal wisps of smoke
Letters are concrete things
That belong in old shoeboxes
Until the words fade into obscurity

I should deliver my letters to the void
With no mailing address, no stamps, no nothing
Just drop them in mailboxes
Like a single raindrop falling into the sea

The words won’t be trapped
In my head or in in old notebooks
Or in undiscovered corners of the web
But floating out there in the kosmos forever

Flask in pocket
Like a gun in a holster
Fingers itching
To squeeze that trigger
Im already loaded
Prone to misfire
Ready to administer
The self inflicted bullet

The future shines bright
In the theatre of my mind
The past is always better
Through thick rose tinted lenses
The past was great
The present is dying
But the future will be great again
Now is being suffocated
By boundless optimism
And reverence for the dead

Outside drizzle not seen
except through
silhouettes of trees.
An old Nikon swings
from the strap
on my neck.

I get excited
about the tree
next to
the most photographed tree.
I let my finger
rest on the wet trigger
and never shoot.