Last night I started digging.
Tunneling through miles
of dirt and pounds of flesh
and leaving red wine droplets
on mud covered tile in my wake.
I scratched fine deep furrows
into my arms and legs
and wondered at mortality
as I watched 'em bleed for days.
Somewhere inside there's
treasure to be found
buried deep and hidden,
like a secret,
somewhere underground
or perhaps it's metaphore,
to add spice and substance
a tiny bit of charm
to an everyday benign chore.
What, after all, would be the harm
in cutting through the corded
tendon and raw meat
of the arm or in throwing
fistfuls of moist dirt
at an ever growing mound
and knowing you'd done
no real wrong?
Last night I started digging.
I don't even know what
I'm looking for.
I've put mountains of dirt
over my shoulder
added to that growing pile,
and I don't feel any better
though I'll keep at it a while.
I've spent countless hours
racked with nerves or anxiety
or guilt, an old catholic standby,
and I'm not saying that
I'll find my answers in the pit,
but I just can't see how it hurts
if I just wanna live with it.
Digging for answers
digging for treasure
tunneling toward profundity
on our way through.
I wonder why we think
the process is worthy
when the result is what
we avoid talking about.
The digging is in service,
at least lets admit the truth,
permit us all the option to be brave
we think we're out here
digging for answers or truth
searching for our
reurn to Plato's cave.
We're not digging out wisdom,
We're digging out a grave.
I'll burrow deep into the chest
in search of heartache
and then, weary, I'll rest.
Beyond bleeding or dirt
is purpose and truth
and so much more ******* hurt
but I'm digging, searching
to soothe an old painful need
stop my broken heart from lurching
from one minefield to the next
kisses and smoking craters
old flames and great heaving wrecks.
Last night I started digging.
Looking through blood and sinew
tree root and rocky soil
for the happy ending.
I ain't found it anywhere I been to.
I'll keep going tomorrow.
It isn't over yet. I don't mind.
I'll be searching forever
or until I learn what it is
that I hope to find.

I read the passages of giants
from the scattered debris of their wake
and I feel my soul splinter
and my shoulders quake.
I don't have these powers
the qualities that work to seperate
the detritus like me from
the very best, the great.
They have booming prose
with gravity and magnitude
and my own scrawling throes
is more often slim, crude
they belong in company on Olympus
while I merit only solitude.

I've divided the individual
failures of decades of hate
from the love shaped residual.
I can't see lost or departed hearts
among the horizon line
and the myriad false starts.
I am now about six months shy
of the burning need
to work harder or even to try.
Love what's left or don't bother
it's all only finite time
and I can't go on any farther.

Life is what life will be, I guess.
All inherent need and ache
for hours of pain and stress.
I'll grow and change until
one day I don't,
it's not about won't or will.
Things work out, they always do
one way or another it ends
with or without me or you.
I love you just like thunder
following the fury.
Drowning, love, going under.

It's only a moment to bare.
It's a whirlwind, a maelstrom
but it's only short term care.

The truth is
you aren't the
one who got away,
my long lost love,
you're just the
one who didn't stay.

There was no life
we could've comfortably
lived together
We had that one
******* summer, kid,
we never had a chance
at forever.

You wanted more
when I needed less
you needed better
but that was my best.
I know the love was real
we tried so hard
but temporary was
always part of our deal.

I know it isn't easy
swallowing a bitter pill
can be tough
And although I love you, madly
sometimes even love
ain't enough

I am digging through the zietgeist
for complicated meaning
and answers to questions
I've been sorely needing
but finding my pop culture
references are all aging
and the rest of my peers
are through staging.
The construction has long begun.
They've moved toward purpose
and still standing on this lonely
hill I find: I'm the only one.
I put my dreams and hobbies away.
I became a toolbelt
a punch card, a rope begun to fray.
I think I thought I'd be him again.
That man I so briefly was
at the lip of the wolf's den.
But I don't know how to mend
I don't know that man well enough
to even know start from end.
Gone at the turn and kept in
place still running until I've become something with which it's easy to reckon.
Where's that **** and vinegar gone?
The blood between your teeth?
The last fading embers of your dawn?
No one gets to do it again, my friend.
It only goes around once.
To each one start and one end.
I'm getting sick and tired of painful truth.
Give me pleasent fiction to enjoy.
I'm short on time and long in the tooth.

Life is made up of
pit stops filled with
people you knew.
Long stretches of road
between, empty of all
but your own company
until you stop again
and meet new people.
You stay with them
for a time but eventually
all relationships end,
even the ones we
promised each other
were forever.
Maybe especially those.
We make promises of
time we cannot live
long enough to fulfill
with the casual unkindness
of a natural disaster,
mercurial as a sudden
daylight summer storm.
And so we bow, hand in hand,
with the current round
of players fretting the stage
with us, or else slip away
with an Irish Goodbye
in spite of what we always
said we had meant to each other.
Still, we go back to that
dusty, lonesome stretch
of jagged road and head for
distant horizons.
And we feel bad,
maybe, in measured hours,
but mostly not at all.
Life moves on and
we find this sitcom's
cast of characters from
school or various jobs
replaced by the next
group from school or work.
Group chats will one
day go inactive and
the constant chirp of
digital friendship will
be as silent as a confession
of teenage affection caught in the
back of a young man's throat.
Some days we'll hear a
familiar laugh or see
a once discussed TV show
and it'll draw it out:
we'll have moments
when we miss the days
when...
But, don't let yourself
dangle when you hang up
on those thoughts,
because it may be sad
when one thing dies
but it isn't really the end.
Nothing is ever really
The End.

Give me a fast horse
and dark purpose
and watch as I burn
down the night time sky.
I'll pull sack cloth
across the cosmos
darkening the starlight
and bringing the evening to a hue
closer resembling pitch.
I'll take a fireplace poker
from it's rest and raise it up
and poke holes to
let the light through.
I'll make new constellations
of pin ****** and let
you name each and every one.
I will always be here
as long as you never leave.
I'll always be true
so long as you always believe.
No one will ever hurt you
my love
while I'm here and alive.
I'll love you until it hurts
until neither of us can survive.
I'll love you in absence of light
and long after hope has died.
Give me a fast horse
and dark purpose
and I'll chase the dark from the skies
I'll track it to whatever dim cave
in which it then hides
and bring light to a world
full of outrageous lies.
And if you'll search me out
'neath that bridge on the outskirts
of our lonely, haunted town
I'll love you for always
for as long as I'm around.
I don't know if lost things
can heal completely once found
but I've been lost for so long
in such a state that I would
gift you forever for a song.
A sweet deal, should you
love me back
a tad massive in scale, I guess,
but serious as a heart attack.
Give me a fast horse
and dark purpose
my love
and nothing will save me
from the great waiting fall.
But, I'll go down with a smile,
I've been so alone, afterall.
Give me a fast horse
and dark purpose
a smile, a working of the jaw,
a hangup and an intractable law.
I have a loss, a win, a draw.
One ounce a hope my fatal flaw.
Give me dark purpose
and a way out of here.
Without you I'm empty of cheer.
An escape rope, to make myself clear
I've somewhere to be, somewhere I fear.
Give me a fast horse
and by evening I'll be long gone.
The curtain can close, finally drawn
around nights wasted in endless hold on
before the breaking light of dawn.

The past is like a hangover
memory in my skull.
Barely remembered and sorted
in headachey chaos.
I don't recall, in detail or
even in any semblance of order,
the events of my youth.
I know this or that thing happened,
but when it happened in the
sequence alludes me.
I don't remember where my
head was or the other worries
I had the night we were over
or the day we began.
I can't picture giving you
a rose and dancing in the
hallway of our workplace.
I know it happened, you told
me it did.
I don't remeber tying your shoes
for you and imparting any
wisdom, poor or great, but
you told me all about it.
You said I brushed the hair
from your eyes before I really
saw you for the first time
and that my doing that made
you really see me.
The events, kiddo, gone like
smoke on a breezy summer
afternoon by the ocean,
but the feelings I'll always
recall the emotions of the times.
I remember feeling things bigger
and stronger than I ever had
or have felt since.
The sequence is meaningless
but the emotions meant everything
to me back then, and they have
all been shadows of those feelings since.
And that's good, that's exactly how
it should be, after all.
Yesterdays were for dreaming
of tomorrows, todays are for
thinking about yesterdays
and tomorrows may never come,
but I'll still have loved you all
as best as I could with the
limited powers that I have.
So, here's to the feelings we
left in yesterdays in the dim hope
that they'd help shape today.
And here, raise your glass higher,
Here is to tomorrow,
I know we ****** it all up
so, let's hope it never comes,
or arrives very gently
and does little to worsen
our poor headaches.