People are always giving me notebooks
Once they find out I write
At christmas
At birthdays
At random
At least two a year
They sit in a stack on my shelf
Hundreds of pages blank
Hundreds of poems unwritten
White page syndrome
Magnified ten fold
Intimidation radiating off them in waves
I prefer to use a computer
There, the pages are infinite
The limits are unknowable
No silent expectations to fulfill
Just a never ending canvas

He had his hand outstretched
And my stomach wretched
At the moment of indecision
There was a sudden collision
Of reason and emotion
As i lost all notion
Of what is possible and real
Because he makes me feel
Like the sky is always green
And that I could scream
In the vacuum of space.
When I look at his face
He tells me impossible lies
And I respond in smiles and half sighs
Because I want to believe
Because he can cleave
Through all of my worries in an instant
Make everything else seem distant
I always buy into his game
When I hear my name
Spring from his tongue
Because I'm stupid and I'm young
And things happen so fast
And the world is so vast
At the end of the day
I just want someone to show me the way

you are like a never ending poem
continually crashing on the shores of my mind.
your words, your rythm, the sheer grace of your cadences
Resonate within me

You took all beer out of the fridge
After burning the last bridge
After fighting the last fight
You left in the middle of the night
After I went to the Red Roof Inn
Because I couldn't start what was about to begin
But you started without me
You saw what I didn't want to see
Gone; were all of your possessions
and with you, all of my confessions
I still had more I wanted to say
But maybe its better this way
No long awkward conversations
No failing each other expectations
Just silence

I've been burning the candle at both ends
and the flame is strangely beautiful
it's white hot
seemingly eternal
and by these flames
I have learned to see
in terrifying clarity

All my hopes hung on one promise
One impossible magical promise
Everything traces back
To this one point
That only holds up
When I don't look at it directly
It hangs in my peripheral
Out of time, out of focus
Fluid in definition
Like a monolith
It supports me
Like a ghost
It haunts me
Like gravity
It grounds me
Like a black hole
It consumes me

The conversational well
We've tapped into
Quickly runs dry

We're left
Gasping
For air

We use our phones
Like shields
From wandering eyes
Silences that linger

Grasping at straws
We deal in small talk
Like a cashier and a customer  
Like people who've never met

Distance has betrayed us
Time has eroded our foundation
But if we dig deep enough
We will discover why we were friends

Trapped beneath the surface of the ice again
Nothing I say will penetrate the thick crust of permafrost
That has surrounded and enveloped me.
Sympathies of my confidants have been exhausted
A well has been bled dry by slow repetition.  
There’s a black hole in the center of my chest
Nothing escapes from its dark clutches
Nothing escapes this  tempest, only silence remains,
The lake is calm on the surface
But underneath lies a vortex threatening to consume everything in its path.
Everything is a puzzle waiting to be solved.
With the right knowledge and perspective, conundrums can be unraveled.
But I can’t seem to solve myself.
I want to untie the gordian knot
Revealing the root cause of my problems.
Ghosts from the past that need to be confronted.
The past is always erupting into the present
Interrupting the natural progression of things.
The past nudges things ever so slightly
Until you're on a path wondering how you ended up there.
In order to confront the apparitions of the past,
They must be summoned first.
Offer them memories buried underneath years of emotional sediment.
The ghosts of my past are murky nameless things that are beyond definition.
Will naming the things that have haunted me dispel them?
What if nothing is gained from digging up the bodies and studying the bones beneath the earth that was better left undisturbed.