Fire burns across the universe.
Lighting it up, showing all of it's
darkest flaws, and brightest gifts.
It is this fire, burning it's way
across the cosmos, building one
on another, crafting this place as
infinite, as eternal, as unending,
it is this fire which brings us to
the place where we will all see
the beginnings and the ends of
our tired songs.

The fire rages still, waiting it's
long wait, it's silent smoldering,
waiting for us. And we will join
it, that is not something that can be
stopped or denied, only delayed.
Energy is forever, it will never fade
it will never leave, it will only become
something more profound, only more
amazing.

We are that energy, and it is our
life's sole purpose to end. To wither
and fade into some lost and tangent
flow of energy, one more wisp on the
cosmic winds. But it is with this purpose
that we become great, it is in the joining
of matter and time that we will be complete.

Fire burns across the universe.
I will one day burn with it,
until then this energy, this body,
this me.
I will become eternal.

I have misread “meek”.
I thought it was the wise, but weak of
skill, of body. Rich in mind.
Brilliant, crafty and clever.
It was us, we were promised to
inherit the Earth.

I have come to realize that I was
naïve, young, and a little too hopeful.
Now, with jaded eyes, and a cynical
heart I realize, only now, that it was
never meant to be us. The clever
are not meant to rise to the occasion.
It was always going to be the meek of mind.
Like it has always been.

We are outnumbered in a war I never realized
we were fighting.
How did this happen? How did I not see before?
The phrase that inspired hope during all
those years of catholic school, of
nuns hating my left handed writing, of
priests telling me that atheists like me
were horrible people.
All that time being told to look, but not see.
To listen but not think.
To move but not dream.

How did I not see?
“The meek shall inherit the Earth”
It's a warning. It was always a warning.

Sometimes,
The world, I have been told long ago
by people I have since forgotten or
hold dearly, runs on “Sometimes”.
Fueled by the occasion that exceeds expectation
or explanation. Once, in every life, if not
more often, we are all the exception
that proves the rule.
In these moments, when tears fall, or hearts
swell, when memory and present exist in the same
place, and impossibly at the same time, the world
itself heaves, shrugs and thanks us all
for the way we struggle.
How we long, how we need, to feel one more time,
or for the first time, the way we felt when...

Sometimes, with the lights dim and the rain
threatening an otherwise sunny sky, we reach
out our hands, and we hold onto the very fabric
of life and time and love.
We want to squirrel it away, secret if off to
some quiet place where we can visit it when we like
and live it when we need a reminder.
We know that we can't, that it's these moments,
these seemingly small or random moments of
epiphany or joy or pain or rage, it is these
Sometimes which make the world spin, which
make us spin.
So we release our hold on the stream, we relinquish
it to memory, locked inside ourselves we hold onto
this piece of providence. It is no longer real, it
does not breath with us as it once did,
but it is ours, forever, and no one will have it
from us. No one can.

Sometimes,
If not for Sometimes, where would we be?
Life would be shallow, a dreamless place,
noisy and surrounding, but pointless.
It is the Sometimes that turn the gears of the
world, and it is the hope for Sometimes that
turns the gears of our worlds.
Let us turn The Gears of the World, as
only we can. Let us Sometimes, one day, and hope
until then.

The shadows of my past whisper to me,
The scared boy huddled, fetal, listening to the
violence from behind his locked door,
the weak kneed love struck teenager,
the confident man, holding his future
torch like before him, they call
to me, whisper words in my ear.
They say, or so I'm told, that the world
runs on Sometimes.

I have been halted by a blinking
black vertical line.
It taunts me, it's subversive
stillness, waiting to move, to become
solid with each new character in it's
horrible wake.
I long for the sentence structure that
will make it tangible, that will force it
to silent life.
The great white expanse seems so
lonely, so barren. Sterile,
like an operating room, or
the breath of a school mate first thing in
the morning.
Who decided it ought to be white?
Glaring and bright, illuminating failure
as if it were a spot light.
The words won't come, they stay hidden
away in the place stories are born.
Locked in that deep, hard sought and often
not found region of the mind.
Waiting, most times without patience to
be brought, screaming excitement, to life.
I imagine that in that place, that undiscovered
country of premise and prose, that there
are no blank white pages, no jittery yet still
cursors, only complete and
wonderful tales, just waiting,
yearning to be free.

Sometimes, when I shake badly
tossing pillows on the floor,
waking with a start because of
the invisible pressure around my throat
or on my eyelids; you're there
again. Like you always were.

Bigger than I was. Beer bottle
judgment and fingers fattened
from work. Fingers I lived in
fear of. You're there as you
always were.

I never saw a monster under my bed.
That's the healthy paranoia
children get when they
aren't afraid they'll die,
or worse; Live.

There are scars that remind me of you.
Lines of poetry, and the dialogue
in bad movies. Spite.
Spite reminds me of you.
Because it was spite that made
me strong, that made me hard,
that made me angry.
It was letting go of that spite,
at long last resting from tired work,
that made me happy.

Lying in bed next to her. Waking,
with a start, perhaps gasping,
her hand resting on my face,
the future spreading out endlessly
in her eyes back at me.
The look of understanding dancing
a timed waltz with concern.
She loves me.

After everything I was told, all
that was beaten into me.
She loves me.
You taught me not to see that
coming. Taught me to think it never could.
You only taught me spite.

Thanks for the pleasant surprise.

Casting light, from finger tip
to hard sidewalk top.
Sneakers, the kind with laces,
send squeaks up and down the streets
of this old town.
Basking in the reflection of
youth. Soft hands. Small feet.
Eyes large enough to dream.

Bright. Strong. Awake!

The bounds are called. Monsters here.
Lava (molten and flowing like
the letters on the board that
fill up our days, and ignore our
nights) here.
The night is our bastion.
It will hide us. Mask us.
Make secret our clubs,
our crowns, our meetings.

And here! My god, here!
Mark this place; Remember it!
(How could anyplace not be made for small hands?)
This will be our place. It is
all ours. Find us, we dare you!

Dreams are filled; sugar candies.
Cartoons. Not with life as it is known,
but with shades of not known, instead.

Cast this light. Tip to top.
From here to there, on the count.

One. Two. Three.

Run!

If the heavens were to part,
if the earth were to crack,
if everything we knew before
and everything we now know
turned out to be a wonderful
fiction, would you find me?

                                                There is a path. It is not long
                                                it is not dark. It does not wind.
                                                It is simply there. I have looked
                                                for purpose there.
                                                          ­             It is gone now. So much is gone now.

Between stale smoke, making circles
as it leaves our table, and conversation,
which does much the same, we found
ourselves in undiscovered territory.
You had not known that there was a
place inside me that you had not lovingly
explored. You did not know that when
you found it, you would not want to.
And in you, my god in you, I found a
place that was all at once not as inviting
as you had always been.
I need to know more. I need to find this place.
I need to map it out, and leave an imprint there.

                                                They should know who we are, that we were there.

Raindrops are battering the window. A storm
rages outside, the kind that knocks over trees
and lights up the sky a million times. The
kind that reminds us that the war on nature
has not gone unnoticed. My favorite kind.
Your warm body is wrapped in mine.
My arm feels dead. Just below the elbow.
Your pressure is slight, but constant.
I can't decide if that is irony.

                                           I gave you a potato. I told you that it
                                           was more permanent than a flower,
                                           more useful.
                                           I told you that I loved you like I loved the potato,
                                           like I could never love a flower.
                                                                ­                               Forever.

I'm waiting for you now.
Waiting for the heavens to open,
the earth to crack, and the wonderful
fiction that is my life to collapse. I'm hoping too.
Come find me.