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.

Let's make a list of all
the things I've failed to be.
We'll start with successful
and work back toward infinity.
If wasted potential could
be shaped like stone or clay
I'd be a pit fit as a source
that'd last until the very last day.
From the very bottom
I've scaled toward the middle
and along the way fallen
in stature and grace, just a little.
But still I'm on the front lines
fighting for the American dream
my hours consumed by employers
my words lost in the scream.
I got broken bones rattling through
me that never quiet properly set
I'll probably die of blood poisoning
or some other kinda self neglect.
I'm supposed to follow up on conditions
but can't afford to lose the day
I'm supposed to love myself better
but no one else ever did, anyway.
I'm not supposed to write these words
men shouldn't burden with complaints.
I'm just supposed to shut up
don't tug on these cumbersome restraints.
I know you want me to prize myself
more than I really try or do.
You guys want me to love myself
but I only ever learned how to love you.
I've taken all you see and love in me
and I've put them in this letter.
I'd mail it to myself today,
but maybe tomorrow is better.

Commands and demands shouted
down bloodlines in dead languages
carrying an urgency matched
in intensity only by the obscurity
of the meaning lost on me.
I've been a distant third since
before anyone else was in the race,
measured, forgotten, denied
easy to ignore or to replace.
Love and acceptance always seemed
the unattainable golden ring
born in the hands of others
but just beyond my own reach
I'd make my way without help
or affection. Fixated on fighting
the monsters of the dark
that everyone else had light enough
to keep away, until the same
light inside you also seemed
to keep me at bay.
Without the shared warmth
of the crowd I grew used to
breathing smoke as the venom
of jealousy in my stomach
bubbled and burned away.
Snapping loose the hanging
icicle barbs around my heart
became a task too great
and now the path in is covered
by a near impenetrable gate.
I don't know what others feel
they are owed, by virtue of
being born into this place,
but I've learned to expect nothing
because when I tried to
give you my love
Nothing is what you gave.
There are echoes of you
in my pumping blood
but you've hidden your heat
from me.
You've filled all around you
with what you have and
what they'll stand to have you be
but you've taken in incremented
turns from me.
Leaving me hard, perhaps,
but also empty by degree.

When it's over will tired
bones rest below the surface
in dry dirt and clay or
will they be compelled, once more,
to rise with the dawn on
forever unfinished work?
And which would we prefer?
Because tired and beaten
is a scene we've rushed toward
eternal silence to be done with
but the sacrifice is tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow.
And sure, trudging uphill
through pain filled rooms
with congealed blood pushing
in our viens is hard
but the sun may still rise
on the sweat of your brow.
And when it's over will
there still be love?
Will there still be need?
And what of the stiffness in
our backs and the sharp
stabbing looseness in our knees?
When the time comes do
we just stop or is there some
idea shared of what might
come next?
Would that be tragic or
would it be best?
When it's finally all over
will they wake in mourning
and live in slowly healing
lament?
And will he, after looking
at the total collection of
my life's works and worth
still respect me in the morning?

Leave it to Linklater films
to figure out what life is
we're rivers of blood seperated
forever from the greater ocean
we are constantly told we're
supposed to be a part of
and we walk around this
spinning ball of dust
and historically significant bones
wondering why we feel so
******* alone all the time.
On a sub-molecular level our
surface bends against the
surface of all other things
meaning, on a quantum level,
we never actually touch each other.
We sort of repel, in fact.
Maybe that's why we try so hard
to write ourselves into each other.
Can you feel me, in these words?
Do they stir in you the same
things I feel them move inside of me?
In this way, with text and grammar,
syntax and purpling context,
do you feel the bumps raise on
your flesh almost as if in
anticipation of the moment,
after the strings have swelled
and a valley of sweet percusive
harmonies have laid bare the
beating heart of the piece
you know a crash of cymbals must
be on the way?
Does hair stand on end on
the back of your neck when
you read, like a whisper in your
ear of late summer time regret
for feelings left unsaid or said
only in jest as the days grow shorter
and the time for action disappears,
at the words, in sequence, that
I've chosen to seranade you with?

Leave it to folk bands to figure
out what love is.
You and I are running at a sprint
against the wind toward the eternal
tomorrow and we've got no
idea how to engage the brakes.
We're on Barry's cosmic treadmill
without a clean understanding
of escape velocity that we need
to get off and go back.
Can we go back?
And inside our clothes
they will find only regret and
our time smoothed bones.
I'm workin' on it
I swear I am.
After walking through a lifetime
of doors it becomes hard to look
at how few are still open
and suicidal, in a sense,
to open many of them back up.
We're very near the top
in this endless climb.
This will not be a satisfying conclusion,
just a landing between flights of stairs.

I've not become bolder
with age,
but so much more afraid.
I don't miss being young
not really,
I miss having options before me.
We both know what most of
our days
will be between now and the grave
and for some reason we pretend
to ourselves
and to the world that it's okay.

It is not okay. It just isn't.

But there, as the bard would say,
is the rub.
One days have become coulda beens
and the ******* tomorrows are
no longer endless
but corralled into a very small pen.
I don't use a rearview anymore
looking back hurts.
The world's changing again.
How many more times in just
my single lifetime
will we leave people behind?

I'm so sick of playing games.

Games that last a lifetime and that
nobody ever even wins.
Games that count out our lives in
color coded swaths of angry nonsense
like daytime television refugees
until we've bitten our nails all the way
down to the quick
and have nothing but quitting smoking
to hold above the marquee with
any kind of pride
Of course I'll need to explain briefly
to my son what a marquee was
our history is wholesale
but much of it was priced out
of our ability to purchase it.
Old tv shows streaming
on services like new content is
judged against modern values
because finally time failed
to matter and only content may rule.
I rant in hope of caesura breaking
into my random line
with finality and meaning.

There is no depth. This was not a discussion.

You fall backwards and
slide into the earth unbidden.
The contours shaped to a tee
around your every line and curve.
You fade and slip without remorse
or resistance to be found or given.
You may wonder why
I smile as you snarl and venom.
You've spent years throwing
dirt on my name
to match the petty and
filthy needs you crave.
Go ahead, dear.
I've spent this time
digging you a perfect grave.
You made poor calls
and I've made mistakes.
We've been together when
we ought to have hit the brakes.
You've considered me nothing
more than target or fodder
but this isn't a fight, love.
This is a ******* slaughter.

In youth I followed bitterness
and poverty down the
95 corridor and finally found
perfect gasoline rainbows and
humid sudden summer storms.
I found your wide, wonderful smile
and freckles and love and
so, so much more.
I know you fell long ago
and have built up around
your landing spot a lifetime
of interconnected infrastructure
and much of it has lost the
sentimental spark it had
when, so many years ago,
you first erected it. I know.
Maybe now, so far down this
road you met me on,
the feeling is more distant
inside you than once it was.
Changed. Mutated. More
a memory of great passion
more than a physiological pull.
There is comfort in my doings
and stability in my works.
Fond familiarity in my features
and that is enough for me.
All you need do is love me
in the echo left behind
from your fall.
I can live as ghosts do,
on half recalled longings
and in the phrases and inside jokes
in the little smiles you give me
like when rereading a favorite
book or laughing at a scene
from a movie you're fond of
in spite of repeat viewings.
I don't require any more.
Stretch your wings into the flames
of the pit, my love.
You've landed, long ago
and set about your calling.
I'm still lost in you, as ever
and I'm still falling.

I've been nearly forty years
spent just picking at this sore
and if bleeding me is winning
I wish I'd been keeping score.
I don't know how to stop
it hurts worse than it did before
And if I don't start walking out
I'll just be crawling back for more
I wish I had something to sing
an answer or solution or a cure
but all I got are worries mounting
beating anxiety over what's in store.
White coats and medication
can't seem to fix what I tore.
Deep woods remedies and meditation
not even workouts for your core
Mystics and religion give scripture
and then walk you out the door.
Should you want to find me,
though I can't imagine what for,
Follow the trail of blood I'm leaving
'cause I'm too weak now to roar.
Trying to see a light ahead to follow
but can't stop staring at the floor.
I thought love could save me
if I wasn't such a ******* chore.
Don't ask me, after my years of looking,
for answers, love. I'm still not sure.

I'm so full of nervous energy
but I haven't got air to shout.
I'm scratching at understanding
with no clue what it's all about.
I'm six hours of sleep away from
another triple shift and I've slid
from past to present on the
slideshow of stupid **** I did.
The one that plays in my head
when all I want is anything else instead
the voice that tells me
better off dead
than loosed and unhappy
mean and angry and underfed
I'm so tired of talking to myself
about myself, I know you didn't ask
apologies sent but unrecieved
Still, I'm not undertaking the task
I complain out loud
to an audiance of me about how
I still don't got **** figured out.
I've heard so many answers
but none of 'em make any sense.
If I learn to love myself how
does that repair the fence
That I put up to keep all of them away
so I don't have to deal with
what all of 'em have got to say
I think we've learned talking doesn't work
and if I can't get a few hours sleep
I'll be another day running empty
How do I make me feel better?
What's the cheat code or the trick
to getting over all this *******
I've reached the breakdown
where it all falls apart
and I'm lost again
still not knowing where to start.

I can't seem to stop
thinking about the end,
about the final moments
the life I've worked so
hard to finally sorta
start to figure out
is over, finished
I've spent most of my life
selling my time to other
people and being largely
cheated on the deal
and I'm at the point
where the sand is
no longer in greater
amounts on the top
of the hour glass than below
and in the distance I can
just make out the rounded
edges that will mark
the empty place where dry
bones will soon lay at rest
and I worry what you'll get.
Will my legacy be something
you can hold high?
Will you reach into your memories
of me in times of difficulty
to use words spoken to you
in my atonal version of
warmth to help you get through?
Or will you just feel left behind?
Everyone leaves, given enough
tide or enough time.
Everybody goes foward toward
a reward of some kind
and they fade in the middle
distance as you sit behind.
It happened to me, too.
So, should you feel abandoned
when I'm no longer around
I'm sorry, buddy. I really
didn't want to go,
so long, goodbye.
I really hope you can
forgive me, but it's up
to you to do or say.
Tomorrow belongs to you
I still belong to yesterday.

Here's to absent friends
and present worries.
For clear skies of blue
or storms and their furies.
To our now idle hands
and our unfulfilled dreams.
For the cough drop weekends
and the week full of screams.
To you and I and the we
that we've now become.
And to the many varied pasts
we stole each other from.
Because everything changes
that has once begun
and because after every rising
there's a setting sun.
I do not wish to know the wonder
and terror of whatever comes next.
I'm a terrible student
and life's a hell of a test.
And finally here's to you
my very big, little one
I'm a boy become father
because you are my son.
I hope you'll find peace and love
and all that you deserve and need
just please do your best, son,
but just don't follow my lead.

Time is a Springsteen song
in that it may not have happened
at all to anyone but it almost
definitely happened to all
of us, if you squint around
the details, a little.
There was no front porch
in my youth with it's old
wood boards creaking
under foot as we danced
to the tinny sound of our
portable radio playing the
eras of blue collar rock music.
I don't have recollections of
suped up hotrods and
engine heavy motorcycles
tearing up the east coast
suburban streets as white
knuckled operators behind
the skid learned to forget her
or just finally felt something
come alive inside 'em again.
No dark red hair blowing
in the wind as her long skirt
sways like a flag to the movement
she keeps her hips in time to.
Somehow, though the details
are so different
I find I still miss it.
I remember tapping our
feet to the open car door
deep bass beat, sirens calling
like the song of our people
in the distance and the
hard to describe but always
present constant low hissing
pressure of warm city streets.
I remember swaying with
her in place, my hand on
her shoulder as she smiled
and laughed at my lack
of "Island rhythm" and I
know she wasn't named
Mary but it was still American
yesterday and I remember
it all in weather beaten sepia tone.
I remember riding our bikes
to get pizza together
a group of us, trying to
stay together, but not get
noticed by the cops,
and the weird anxious
feeling of forever and fleeting
that mixed together just
to trouble my thoughts.
We were going to be young
forever and we were never
ever going to die.
We'd be in love forever
and we'd always see eye to eye.
I don't know what became
of you, I hope you're well,
we've reached the age where
looking backs hurts me
more than I know how to tell.
A million years ago,
yesterday, that intangible
all at once way time works
if viewed extrademensionally,
like a helicopter taken
to see our old city from above,
it looks the same, but different.
It's all at once and it no longer
looms over you and makes you
feel small and also like you belong,
somewhere in all the mixed up
time stream nonsense we
went out of our way one
Thursday to get guava and cheese
empanadas from that hole
in the wall place you like(d)
run by that Korean guy and his
Mexican wife.
Your skirt never kicked up
to the far away sounds our
radio played, but somewhen
we shared that emanada
and even though it hurts
and even though I'm somewhere
farway from your view
it was my pleasure to have
been able once upon a time
to dance with you.

I cast out into the dark
letting the line drag across
the surface of a river
lit by neither moonlight
or halogen bulb and I ponder
the ever increasing presence
of entropy in our universe
and mostly in our own lives.
I haven't got a reference point,
nothing to point to on the
far horizon, no lyric pulled
from an oingo boingo song
and given false depth now
that it can breathe without all
the stifling context it had before
it was excised by way of example.
I've lamented a mouthful of
purpling nonesense and let the
truth go understood, perhaps,
but most certainly unsaid.
I am concerned now with what
happens at the end
because credits won't play
and I've prepared no coffin
in which to finally lay
And I'm tugging so hard at
my beard that my bottom lip
is flapping in a silent mockery
of language and I don't know
what it would say to a lip reader
but it means stress to me.
I've got lives at stake
and mouths to feed
and one thought starts
and sorta then just bleeds
into the next idea until
it becomes a nightmare
of neurotic over think
just like me.
I had my hand on a metaphore
that was, generously, unclear
but the truth is difficult
to parse and I'm not sure
how to start or with what chart-
The sun has gone down
on things I thought
were forever and the
sudden impermanence
was a shock to my system
that is still rippling out
like the water around
the fishing line I've cast
into the dark.
I'm too old for
wait and see
but I reel the line in slow
and what I hope to find
on the hook
out there
in this dark?
Frankly, I don't know.

When I was young I had insomnia
I would stare at the ceiling
picking up on all the scattered
ambient night time noises
a bedroom could make and
deaperately do the math,
If I fall asleep now I'll
have x hours of sleep.
I was awake.
And I was alone.
I'm awake and writing this
late at night, my wife and son
asleep in the room with me,
her by my side as she always
is, I'm so lucky to have found
her in all this ******* chaos,
and the boy asleep on his
little kid bed, his room empty
because I still don't have the
heart to turn him away and
send him back to his nightmares.
I lived enough of my own,
little man, you can sleep here.
Protected.
I'll fight the monsters,
as a boy I learned how
and it used to bother me
because I had this skill
which allowed me to survive
but I'll never have need of it.
Never again.
Baffled me,
until you came along, bud.
I know now that I learned it
so that you'd never have to.
I can take a measure
of pride in my years of bleeding
but let's not speak too loud.
They're sleeping.
I can't sleep.
I've done the math.
I've done the pleading.
I've laid still and quiet
and tried not to think of the needing.
I'm awake.
Wide.
I wait for the heavy blinks
and smile because
I spent a lifetime feeling
alone and hopeless
and even though tomorrow
I'll be just as tired as I was then
I will not be alone.
I'm awake
but I'm home.

Some nights the panic wins
and I spend hours dwelling
on my accumulated sins
and the healing has started
but the bruises and swelling
have not yet departed
and I wonder if medicine
could put it all back to right
like years ago, it could have been
if you and I had survived the fight.
These tired days the whispered shout
all ancient grudge and new regerts
are all I got the time to think about
it's difficult as quitting cigarettes.
I wake from dreams about drowning
and search for meaning in mistakes
the face of god in toast browning
the ring of truth in well known fakes.
And maybe one day it all ends
and maybe we're all that remains
healing is over but nothing mends
a group of kids and growing pains.
I want badly to get better
I try hard every single day
But I still worry and fretter
and watch as it all slips away.

Strangers came
to my grandmother's funeral.
They came to say goodbye.
To say goodbye to a woman
that I never knew.
Because legacy is this odd
thing full of surprises.
We plan for it but we
cannot be the hand that
guides a universe we
do not fully understand.
I knew her well.
Lived with her for years.
She loved me as a son
and I her as a mother
but these strangers knew
a woman, by given name
and I knew my grandma
and that they were the
same person is something
I struggle with to this day.
I don't know who will
or even who won't
attend my funeral,
should there be one.
I don't know if Grandma
knew, either.

It must be so quiet
at the end.
I've heard it's peaceful.
But these questions.
Unanswered.
Drives me up
a ******* wall.
All broken promises
clueless leads
and feeling all unsolved.

In endings there is room
to forgive the vilains of
the piece and there is
space enough to finally
breathe.
Heroes take their victory lap.
And over the face of the
fiction there is the deep quiet
of gods at rest.
At rest without total closure,
because often some threads
went unresolved.
Questions.
But the unanswered questions
plague only the audience.
The characters are at peace
with the thready nature of
these things.
They aren't looking to answer
every question, they only
ever wanted to slay the dragon
and win the day and ride
off into that sweet good night
never to be asked to lift
a hammer or a sword
toward unfinished purpose again.

But the questions plague me still.

Strangers came
to my grandmother's funeral.
To pay respects to a woman
they all knew that I did not.
I don't know what became of them.
I don't know what becomes of me.
Unanswered questions
but the deathly quiet end
is growing larger on that horizon
and I'm still all unsolved.

I'm gonna tell you a secret
but I'll dress it up as a lie
I don't speak the language
and I don't know why.
I often dream of a distant wood
ceiling of green, shafts of light beaming
and the calm interrupted by
a horrible steady screaming.
When we were young I wished
to trap moments in frozen jars
left overnight in the fridge
to keep them as the the sky keeps stars.
Now looking at the rugged lines
on my worn and aging hands
I hope for rebirth but watch our
heroes travel to distant lands.
What becomes of us when
the clock winds down and tonight ends?
Do we push at an obstinent earth
and continue to hope it bends?

Your heart will
pump enough blood
to fill over a million barrels
with your single lifetime.
You'll pump a river of blood
before it's done.
You'll shed roughly 44 pounds
of skin in your life,
assuming you're an American,
it'd be measured in kilos otherwise.
That's the average weight
of a six year old boy.
You'll breathe about 300
million liters of air
before you dress up for
that ol' pine box.
Your heart will beat more
than 2.5 billion times
and it'll break a few times, too.
You'll probably have a bad
habit or two that you feel
will diminish you.
You're going to say something,
some day, to somebody and
it will fundamentally change
the way they always looked
at the world and you may not
even notice you'd done it.
And of course somebody
someday, somewhere is gonna
do that to you, also.
I hope you hear a sweet song
and let yourself cry.
I want you to sit and listen
to the mystic sounds the world
makes when the sun goes down.
Look out over the ocean
and listen to the waves lap
against the shore and feel small
in that peculiar way that makes
you feel powerful, too.
Kiss somebody in the rain,
if you're so inclined, they're
a miracle, too, and they may
have been waiting their whole
lives for a kiss of that kind from you.
You don't have to move mountains,
you've a river inside.
You don't need to worry about
the end, it's ending all the time.
Stand barefoot on rain wet
sidewalk and smell the city
after a storm.
I don't know what we're doing.
I've no clue why we're born.
But I believe our greatness
are often forgotten or ignored.
You may never do anything
of value, living in poverty
and wearing a basic shroud
and maybe you'll never know
that when I look at you
I'm so very proud.

Give me ****** noses
and scrapped knees.
Hold me down as I
kick and I scream
and smile your cyanide
as you watch me bleed.
Drag me through miles of
broken glass and burning ash
and call me hearty and hale.
Healthy as you push me to fall.
Find me in loose rhymes
muttered swear words, tomorrow.
Tonight, beat me about the brow
with frustration and sorrow.
Tell me your darkest secrets
until the dark in me reaches out
and together we sway and weep
whisper your chocolate sweet lies
give me promises for better
and endless angry time to keep.
I've come to be broken up by you
to be torn down and worn
to stubs by the venom in your blood.
I came to look in this mirror
and see less of me but all of you.
I came here to be one of many
while you're one of few.
Don't spit love in excuse
because I'm not young, not anymore,
I've not got forgivness waiting
behind any gameshow door.
I'm tired of moving foward
fatigued from this long, long run
I'm seven chords from a ballad
when discordant, it all comes undone.
I'll still show up tomorrow
till the stars burn and are gone
I live for the fighting
Go on, now: Bring it on.

In dreams I walk familar hallways
stepping through beams of
dust mote polluted sunlight
and while I know I can't
I could swear, really
that I could almost smell
the polish on the wood floors.
My beat up old black Converse
make sad little squeaks
like a protest
but I keep going.
Even once I've put all the
pieces of the puzzle together
even when I know what I'm
walking toward, into,
even then
I keep going.
I used to think that once
something got broken you
couldn't break it more.
I would take appliances apart
try to figure them out.
I can fix most anything, given
the right tools and enough time,
but I got broken again and again
and there are no tools
there is no time.
I keep going.
In the distance now I can make out
the disharmony of a key ring
hanging from an active belt loop
and drunken judgement given as
sermon more than in the lilting
tones of conversation.
I keep going.
I always did. I was the oldest,
choices had to be made
and no one else was.
The kids were cowering
the blood pounding in my ears.
So, I made them
I keep going.
Nothing can stop me now.

Lately he's living with ghosts
and maybe we all start to
when the memories pile up
like snow or highway commuters.
He's been seeing in himself all
the things he was supposed to be
and how far short he's fallen
and his ghosts cannot comfort
they shake their heads slow
pressed down by eyes that bore
and they'd flay him alive
if they could
you can see it plain as day.
You were meant to be more.
but he failed alone!
He didn't ask permission.
This might be who he is now
and maybe he's not happy either
living so far below his promise
but he put himself here.
All by himself, mind.
He might be low, but he'll be honest.

Look at him now, our boy king
set high up on his shelf
he'd be the beating heart of history
if only he could live with himself.
Look at him go, now!
a great piece of art
perfect, just perfect
excepting the twice broken heart.
Always out front, our boy
Leader of the bands
all spoiled second chances
and blood on his hands.

She waits for him there
in that little duplex
walk up on Dartmouth,
Love me, she begs him
with mounting fear
from their shared bed
because he can be absent
he can be distant
and so very difficult to read
loving him is a chore
choked with anxiety
but still she somehow knows
that he'll never leave.

They told him to be less
and he did as he's told
he's got another winning hand
and he's just waiting to fold.

When I was young I
spent hours rubbing dirt
in these wounds but
they never seemed to
get any better.
I swallowed all that poison
I was fed like a
good little boy
for years and years
until the lining of my soul
eroded and the anger
started to seep in.
Now I walk around
trying to spit the taste
out of my mouth
but I don't get better
and I don't stumble
into happy and I cannot
stop being angry in that
deep place where I keep
all my other secrets.

Lessons from our fathers.

When you give someone
your love you give them
power over you.

I don't know how to
just say the words to her,
and while thankfully she seems
to know anyway, I want
to say them.
She deserves to hear them.
But there is this wall of
something that feels like shame
that I can't get a leg over
and it leaves unspoken words
trapped in my throat.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

I want our family to go
to events and laugh and
have friends. I want us
to produce light like
small suns of positive energy.
But I understand that
silence is the same thing
as strength and that mystery
is more welcome than
bad character.

I may be trapped in the mine,
but I am not the canary.

I want the boy, our boy
to smile and hug and laugh
with me.
I live in terror of the day
he starts to look at me with
the same mixture of fear
and anger that I gave him.

And many lessons more.

The truth is:
With enough time and talent
you become brave enough
to stop trying to sound
so ******* clever and you
learn to just say the
simple things in simple terms.
It's difficult without you.
I will always suffer for you.
I'm going to be proud of you
until I'm gone.

I know that.
I know it.
But it's so easy to leave it unsaid
and so hard to unlearn
these lessons.
I'll keep trying to do better.
To be better.
But the mine is deep
the secrets dark
and the mine holds
fears a lifetime
in the perfecting.

Excuses are like *******...

And many lessons more.

Sifting through all the
fractured metaphor
from the lost and lonely
boy I was before
I find the train,
no longer a silver snake
moving like desire
across rails on tree
dotted mountain ranges,
but abandoned and disused.
It is hulking, still.
As imposing as it ever was
but it is also suddenly
made of fragile rusted
parts that look so solid
from a distance but flake
to shale like dust at even
the gentlest of touches.
It is not smoking, though
there is clear evidence of fire,
but even the most persistent
embers burned out and down
and away a long, long time ago.
No, it does not smoke or burn
it merely festers.
Growing outward in decay
even while it shrinks
inward from structural damage.
It is no longer a machine
built for cool, honest purpose
it has become a wreck.
Still, if you find ways to
explore the innards of the wreck
you'll find bird's nests,
foxholes, **** from animals
big and small, bird song
and flowers and wild grass
growing up throughout the
twisted metal hull of the wreck.
The engineer's compartment
with it's no longer working
shifters and radios is
overcome by flowering vines
and the sweet, damp heaviness
the forest has under a canopy
of dark green leaves.
Moved from what it was
assumed was to be a life's work
and robbed of the purpose
behind every one of the many
design choices it does not
sit, not exactly, it seems to
lay into the countryside
as if it shrugged before
embracing the gentle *****
of a lover's chest.
It is desolate in this place,
The wreck,
but it is somehow still
very much alive.
I hope there is meaning
in the discovery,
but have grow tired
from reading between
every single
******* line
I'm not yet dead, my love,
but I've begun to wither
on the vine.

I walked you home through
aging arguments and the still
burning fires of dying
digital revolutions.
In spite of missed
celluar connections and differing
philosophy on relationships.
At intersections you'd squeeze
my hand and hold so tight
that my finger tips numbed
until your grip relaxed on
on the other side of the
deserted wintertime crosswalk.
I have dreams about you,
catch weird echoes of your
scent in the strangest places
and times and it seems so
inconsistent with what we were
and who I was and how it
all finally ******* ended.
It wasn't a love story, you and me
even though we pretended
even though we wished for it to be.
You thought I worked
like a stallion, only
after you'd broken me
but you weren't prepared for
the damage that was already there
before you even put a foot
in the stirrup
and I wasn't up to the task
of comforting your constant
keening need for affection
for reassurance, for company.
My god you filled every silence
with discomfort and inane babble
And I could lie and say I tried
but we were both there.
We both know I didn't.
But when the streetlights came on
I'd put my jacket around your
shoulders and hold your hand
and for forty minutes we loved
each other like storybook leads.
We'd talk, I'd brush hair, so gently,
from your eyes and tell you that
I could see the beauty in you
and you'd stand on the tip of
your toes and bite your lip
and breathe me in.
For forty minutes, a couple nights
a week, we were in love
as I walked you home.

Decades of industry speak
has polluted the vernacular
our cultural literacy has reached
dazzling hieghts but our ideas
have become threadbare with use
and the element that made art
is missing, lost in algorithms
you can download on your phone
and pimped out by YouTube
video essays and the sponsor segments
that fuel a burgeoning industry
of future exclusions and despair.
We're all thought transmissions
floating in the atmosphere
lords and ladies and battles
and songs and millennia of
triumph and tragedy and strife
replaced with canned laughter
because the sound of our tears
didn't hit the editor's ear just right.
Ten once in a lifetime catastrophic
events in every decade I've walked
this earth have numbed me to
the sense of awe that those men
had as they watched the cloud
rise over barren American desert.
I have seen Death on the periphery
of my whole lifetime and find
that I am so well acquainted with
it that the fear has been replaced
with a muted sense of resignation.
Yes, of course this is how it is.
This is how it's always been.
If we just keep "yes anding" to
the absurdity of every new day
we might claw our way clear to
the surface and breath rarified air.
Or we'll end up as Sisyphus
pushing the Gordian knot of
centuries of tangled unsolved
problems for all of time.
Or we'll be lost in scattered airwaves
when we fail to hold viewer interest
and the channel gets changed
to a more colorful and exciting
kind of suffering.
We're not historically good
with the Nielsen numbers
because we always shoot
the Blue revision.

Years ago we four stumbled
drunk down neon streets
and ate takeout chinese
on a marble park table
encouraged by a man who
made bird calls for drinks.
We were alive.
So ******* alive.
You flirted with every girl
in every bar we ever found
ourselves careening into
like flights without navigators.
We made dumb jokes
kept almost exclusively inside
and ordered manly dark
colored beers and whiskeys.
our loyalty without question
or peer we stayed steady.
We found the booth in the
corner to squirrel away
from the noise and the others
and talked about music
and comic books and youth
until we were drunk enough
on spirits and company to
talk fear and hope and pain and love.
Capital L love, boys.
You feared there was no one
out there waiting for you
and the two of our four were sure
we'd found, in those blushing
soon to be brides waiting at home,
our reward for long service.
And you worried you weren't
the type for settling down.
And in some ways we were
all right, in some ways not.
Love was a mystery
and we're talking history.
I loved all of you then.
Just so you know.
I love you all now.
Although,
it's been a long
time since we've all been
together, you are still who
I mean when I say
"my friends".
For what it's worth,
and I hope it's worth plenty.
It's been years, but not quite twenty.
I talk to other people now in group
chats and conference calls
and there are loyalties and
inside jokes but you guys,
the four of us they are not.
Good guys. But not like us four.
We were real friends.
Brothers by blood and by calling.
Young enough to care
too much about one another.
No one could replace you
though far away you might be
you still burn away in memory.
One of us will probably be
laid down in that old pine box
before we're all in the same
room again, and that makes me sad,
but the future waited for
no man and time got away
from us.
You were the best friends I ever had.
And we're distant these days
parenthood, careers, conflicting
schedules and life styles.
Nothing broke us up, no blood is bad.
I would trade our time for nothing
but I wish I'd known that
small and simple fact
when time was something
we all still had.

Lovers in mourning stand at
odd, opposite angles and reach
for one another through growing
animosity and they watch
with trepidation as the love
that had named and defined them
presently withers to nothing.
Maybe once they had hope
and maybe once they could
lift hands and touch pain away
maybe once they had each other
Guide posts in the darkness,
made suddenly impossible to read.

Walking down the street
on the way to a lifetime
of further nonsense
a tune sprang to mind.
Simple and sweet as a
a summer day.
She once whistled it while
you swept the dining area
of that apartment you'd
shared together.
A cleaning song,
she'd said,
from when she was young.
You'd not heard it before
she whistled it to you.
Now it lives in you, too.
A vestige of her youth
that you'll carry forever.

Patchwork people
A little yesterday planted
to grow today.
Tomorrow is another
person's problem, perhaps.
Once they had each other,
Lovers in mourning.

Plunge into icy depths
I remember waking to
****** knees on the sidewalk
outside your house
hungover and so *******
desperate.
I remember the cold in
your eyes and my bones
and the words,
"Go home."
I remember the walk back
stiff and aching.
You spent years bloodletting
only to move on to
another chump when
the veins ran dry in me.
I crashed into puddles
filled with frigid Feburary
rain water and felt the
frozen blood move in
disused chambers of a heart
I was certain you'd ripped
out and mounted to point
and laugh with him and your
friends, who never liked me
at all, anyway.
Nothing hurts so bad as
the first time your heart
shatters in your chest.
*******, the skill with
which the damage was done,
like a surgeon or clockmaker
set to careful work at the task
and equaled only by the
precision with which it was
built up again from the ruin
by nimble fingers and
careful consideration, sweet
words and earnest patience.
And it was months before
I felt the "*******" inside
me leaking out
and months more before
I felt nothing at all.
One day she said something
and I smiled because it was
funny and you didn't cross
my mind at all and I didn't
know it had died then
but that, that moment with
her, was the end of you
living inside my heart.
And we didn't last either
and I don't know what
became of you or her
but love isn't made to
stretch and rebound
it lives inside all the others
and it waits with quiet
patience for you to
search it out.
Love is out there,
again and again,
just waiting to be found.

I walked home in the rain
with holes in my shoes.
You asked why I didn't throw
'em out and I told you I couldn't.
I told you they were my favorite.
You thought I looked at love
that way, and you let yourself
trust in me for the fall
but the truth was poverty
and shame.
I'd been laughed out of one
too many pools in cut off jeans
to tell you I couldn't afford
another pair of shoes.
All of my clothes were threadbare
all of my belongings battered
I ordered water when we went out
and skipped meals.
Oh but Mr. Fictional just
cannot fail!
The excuse is solid!
His check is in the mail!
I was late to campus most days
or didn't show up at all
because I couldn't make the
bus fare materialise.
I was counting the ticks
of clocks in eternity
waiting for the chime
but you didn't really
understand poor, you knew
about it, sure.
You even claimed it on days
you didn't have funds to see
a movie or bowl.
But you didn't really
know poor.
Not like I did.
You didn't really understand
hunger or pain.
You had cried over lost
loves and unkindnesses
but I lived my life with
a sadness in my bones
I couldn't shake and I
...
I hated it. I hated myself.
Mr. Fictional, what a guy!
He'll always be there!
Why would he lie?
I valued others more than myself
and you thought me heroic,
but I just didn't care if it ended.
I liked the person you thought
was me
even though I knew
that person wasn't who I
had had to be.
Thank you for believing,
even if it was all misunderstood
or shades of play pretend,
You made up the best in me,
and that's the person I still try to be.
Mr. Fictional, what a go-getter!
He's been three decades a mess
but he's tryin' to be better.

Yesterday has fallen like
Autumn leaves or
capitol siege.
History written small
in cuniform apologies,
and arterial bleeds.
Uttered oaths
and guttered hopes
Ashes now where once, Oaks.

And still we try to remember
what's better forgotten
because the outside is tempting
but inside we're rotten.

Nostalgia as commerce has
become the way of today
kicking sleeping dogs
which growl to just lay
Watch us pull on childhood
begging it to stay.
Riding on horsebacks we're
still unsure will obey.

In abandoned towns filled
with waving ghost dolls
and in the fiber of desire
that lives in our phone calls
We search our yesterday for
thunderous warmth and applause.
but with questions unanswered
and great worrisome cause
I wonder if given a chance to redo it
would we do more than pause?

We are the look back
finding at near forty
all the things we lack.
Hoping tomorrow comes
and brings it all back.
Knowing it can't unless
we lay a solid track.

I recall you turning,
from a few feet ahead,
that ******* smile
under your button nose
and knowing brown eyes
but you were spinning
and laughing, squealing,
really, great peels of
girlish delight before setting
your eyes on distant
climes and racing away
toward where the sun
seemed to meet the pavement
and the entire ******* world ended.
White sundresses and
static in the air around you.
Hair tied on either side of
your head, in thick braids
with those ties that have
big colorful plastic *****.
Sometimes you'd have beads
in your hair, flowers now
and then, too. And your eyes
the color of earth after a
hard rain, I thought you
were a fairy, back then.
Mythical, you seemed to me.
Magical in a way I now
only pretend to understand
but recognized with awe
in those ancient days.
I've been a lifetime looking
for moody British countryside
in American urban squalor.
I've seen fairy-circles drawn
in chalk on black ashpault,
trickling heat waves rising
like a ******* spell
from them on hot days
and I used to feel the voltage
of lightening running in my
veins when I still believed
in that sort of magic.
I saw you on a rooftop once,
the one with the valley of
bare roof like the chamber
at the heart of a temple.
You stood against the moon
and though shadow obscured
your knowing beautiful eyes
and that ******* smile
I know you smiled at me.
I know it.
I danced with you in dreams
for the last years of my
too short youth.
I still see white sundresses
in echoes in my dreams
but I no longer believe
in magic things.
I no longer dance,
not even in my dreams.

The boy king shuddered
under another massive
weight, a crown made heavy
by the varied day to day
concerns of a kingdom
that was his to command
to preserve and to save.
If he seems curt, or haughty
or even rude,
please keep in mind
the pressure at his magnitude.

Looking back at the
boy king turns a man's
stomach in Gordian knots
loving him for what he is
knowing what he'll yet be
and hating all that he is still not.

No one's flying to the moon
or day tripping to Mars.
No one is wishing for a brighter
tomorrow from a field of stars.
We are still captives, tied to earth
for all the good it'll do us
waiting for a chance to blow this scene
before the world starts to rue us.

The boy king yawns and curls up
ready to hibernate away again.
Sleep in, best you can.
You will always be a boy
but the blood and fire
are callimg for a Man.

I've spent decades holding
my tongue and pretending
that the pain is normal.
Just operating procedure
and it don't matter if
it hurts or not
and I'm too hard,
too tough, too street wizened
to feel it the way other
people do, anyway.
And all I have
to show for acomplishing
this massive deception
is an inability to express
my needs and a tendency to
put my health secondary
to everything else.
I've been bleeding for
twenty years but I
won't fall down.
I've rubbed these wounds
in the dirt and refused
to blink until the wet
went back into my eyes
and I've taken it out
in fits of violence against
car doors and broken
household items
but the pain won't
******* stop and I'm
all outta ideas and
advice.
And the fix ain't working
and I can't make it right.
But listen: I know the rules.
I know 'em by heart
I could recite them right now
but let's not start, yeah?
I've worked sick or hurt
through many a shift
and I've complained about
stupidity in my workplace
or long shifts I gotta work.
I've complained about
being asked to do work
while I do that same work,
but not about the problem.
No, never ever about
my deeper, darker needs
for fiscal security over my
desire to create and be free.
It some times hurts
to breathe, and my finger
no longer bends.
My knees crack and
there is a soreness in
my elbow that just stays.
I thought it
would go away
but I guess this is the new
normal.
It hurts to live
and I can't seem to
stop the bleeding,
but I'm still here, love.
I'm not leaving.

Tomorrow I'll blow away
scattered across eternity
on a warm summer breeze.
Tomorrow all that's left
of me will be these blinking
transitor tube memories.
I had planned to build
great things but those
dreams are long
abandoned and now
given up completely.
Sifting through dimly
glowing embers and other
remnants which once
were so amazing and
tomorrow will be nothing
of consequence, I suppose.
Maybe we'll look back
and marvel, I mean
who really ever knows?
Tomorrow I'll be burnt
up into nothing more than
a history of almost was
and a future filled with
hundreds of could have beens.
Nothing really matters
except how everything does.
Tomorrow I'm dust
and you're searching for
the warmth of another
glowing fire somewhere
in the night, just beyond
this fork or that turn.
Tomorrow it'll be over
but tonight, I will burn.

distant burning signal fires,
complicated knots in lines
of tightly wound rope.
star sounds resonating
on frequencies our own ears
are not properly aligned
to receive or transmit.
blood stains on
fresh white linen that
won't come out and are
too difficult to hide.
that one lopsided too
toothy smile, all coy
and unassuming under
slightly uneven bangs,
that cast us away from
the shallow water like
a siren song.
the rusted out bottom
of a wheelbarrow that
you'd hoped to have
one more winter with,
and that odd earthy smell
blood gets when it's
settled beneath your
fingernails overnight.
language is a failure but
math hasn't the terminology
for vivid human memory
Life's like that, I think.

If I could just pull the
stars from the sky,
one at a time,
I could rewrite the
universe in a shape
more pleasing.
If I could just exert
the confidence inside
I could lead us all
toward the burning
tomorrow alive inside
my head.
If I could just fix the
myriad things *******
wrong with me I could
stand tall and become
a person of record,
worthy of note.
If I could just forgive my
mother I could put
these old demons to bed
and be whole against
the sky or at least try.
If I could just forgive myself
No.
Never that.
If I could just get out
of this bed I could empty
the sink of ***** dishes.
If I could just make the bed
I could lay tomorrow's
outfit down and feel like
in all this ******* I
for once have a plan.
If I could just get this laundry
done the constant dull
echo of time-distant pain
would go away and I
could feel like a person,
for a change.
If I could just learn to love myself
No.
Never that.
If I can just hold out
until he's in college and
she's happy I will
die with that *******
wrench in my hand
and not all of it will
have been a waste.
If I can just hold on
I could wade in just
to my nose and struggle.
Wait for it to end in dignity.
Still, it is remarked in refrain:
it isn't over!
Not yet for them
but my sun set a long
long time ago.
The sky is dark now.
If could just find the light
I could trace the awkward
footfalls that lead me away
back beyond those distant
moon-leaden waves toward
the swaying city lights
where, in our home with
him, I will find you.
I will breathe deep
close my eyes
and hope not to sleep.

Lightyears away sit the
burning embers of the night sky
and I cannot chart the
distance between stars
with factors or maps
but given a tall ship
I will navigate a course
through ink-dark midnight
and light signal fires
in cosmic bodies for
you to find, I will brave
the darkened void
leaving light in my
frieghtened wake
to guide you by.
We spent years
passing in the night
before you refused
to let us pass you by
and two decades later
I return the favor
because a lamp burning
against deep and endless night
only works if, by turn,
we endeavor to keep it alight.
The waters now are calm
and that's a deception of
the deep, luring us into
complacency and rocking
us in time with each heart's
pounding and specific beat.
I'll stay awak at the helm, love.
I'll fight the dark and push off
sleep. I'll keep us afloat.
Water tight and far from
the ever present brink.

This time of year always
brings the memories.
Here they float
to find me in my melancholy
evening hours.
Float, days gone by.
Float.
Snow, four or five feet deep,
walkways carved into
city sidewalks and streets
and dreams of Americana
countryside livin' carried on
radios tucked into our
windowsills in front of the
frosted glass world we
could almost make out.
Float, ancient melodies.
Float.
I sat under an umbrella
in the rainy season,
feet dangling from the edge
of the fire escape, toes
just about grazing the surface
of the rising flood water.
Escaping into comics about
heroes living in our city
and always wondering why
they never came around
our neighborhood.
Float, my childhood heroes.
Float.
Suddenly suspended in nothing
I am afraid of that
ship, of those memories.
I swerve my head
trying to steer away.
So anxious I become
conscious of the weight
(Of the wait)
and worry that I'll sink.
I breathe slow. I blink.
There in the distance...
Here you float
from somewhere deep down
and long, long ago:
A blanket laid against the
scratchy roof surface
our backs to hell, our
eyes to the bursting explosions
of color against the night sky.
Our beating hearts beating,
for one night only,
for each other.
Your hand finds mine
and my face is hot
and I'm unable to look
at you, but you are all
I want to see.
Float away, love.
Float.

We cut up this country
in miles per gallon,
punctuated with roadside
attractions and the yellow-green
median strips on highways
painted across purpling
distant mountains and
the ever absent affection
of young parents trying
to put thousands of miles
between the fight and
who was right.
Finally we got stuck,
like an axe in a stubborn tree.
We stopped moving
we grew a fixed address
and a waiting tragic
second act to sit in.
There is nowhere and there
is there and there is
right ******* this second
but we're always here,
just right ******* here,
and broken hearts won't
solve it and tears won't
stop it and nothing can
save us from the darkness
over that horizon
no point in begging
we just gotta live it.
It's funny how many places
have a Cambridge
how many streets are main.
It's ******* darkly
hilarious how often
you'll find a mean drunk
******* and cowering
scared kids.
Have a look in any
old mountain town and
you'll find us there.
Sing a song, Guthrie,
make it mean something.
Teach me the magic you found
in the bottoms of bottles
in the ends of needles
in the warmth of strange beds
and under night skies.
I want to learn to forget
because the limping
is giving me away.
I want to learn to forget
because all this remembering
is ******* killing me.
I'm full up on ghosts
and haunted by old hopes.
Oh, I learned the swear words
and prayers and the little
hours of quiet terror.
Love comes in so many
forms, no one warns you.
We notice all the little details
like a television detective
who only notices the
signs of his ordinary tragedy
in other people's kids.
What a gift we've been given.
At night we put out the
lights and close the doors
and we close the bottles
and whistle from the porch
into deep dark night
for the dog and for
the mystery and we
brush the day from
our teeth and our faces
We lay in the dark
facing the bare wall
and we remember everything.
I miss feeling youth
in my bones and blood
but I never want to go
back to being young.
I'll always love you,
you *******.

We were stunning in
the dying light of the moon,
full of consumed caffine,
mouths like ashtrays,
the whooping roar
of the cracked passenger window.
Music playing low now
so we could hear the breaking
hearts in our voices
as we raced dawn for
that distant horizon line.
******* we were beautiful.
Invincible as a wall that
has yet to be knocked down
and full of the confidence one
has before they've made the
very big and important mistakes.

You and I and our secrets
sat in parked cars in dark
parking lots and talked about
pain in a way that only people
who've never really been in love
can talk about pain.
You turned the radio up
because the lyric that would
change my life was about to
come on and you stared at me
and I counted the freckles
in your eyes and on your nose
and we learned, second hand,
what each other's brand of
cigarette tasted like.

One night you layed on the
hood of someone's car,
was it mine?
and you said you couldn't
wait to find out how this
all turned out and I said
you were beautiful and
you were and I don't
remember where or how
but maybe we're still
waiting to find out.

I miss them now,
old friends and lovers.
But the night is not long,
not anymore, and the days
bleed together
and I can't find you anymore.
Maybe I'm not looking,
not really,
not like I used to.
Nothing is how
you remember it.
But hold on to the
memory, anyway.

When I hear myself scream
I hear your echo coming
back at me.
Howling at the moon,
just like you taught me to.
I feel your rage boil away
in my blood.
Running my tongue along
my teeth and trying
not to remember the
comforting burst of copper.
But the way I feel sick
and hollow inside, the hate
I always feel for myself,
that's all me, man.
I worry that the bruises
and the broken bones
and the bloodletting
weren't enough to get
your poison out of me.
I'd lock myself away
on moon bright nights
if it came to that
and often I've felt the
sickening pull toward
rending flesh and shedding blood
felt the unconscious twitch
of a hand raised,
knuckles out,
you *******,
and I know the curse is
strong still inside me.
There is forever an itch
for the easy way.
I know how to circumvent
understanding and empathy.
I know the paved smooth path
to becoming the beast.
I'll always wear your mark,
you ragged old creature,
but I don't have to
live your life.
I don't have to find
someone else to bite.

We got history wide and
terrifying as the sky
and we're screaming a
million different versions of why
at crashing waves and
a big hollow lie.
I don't know if it'll get better
but we've just got to try
because one day soon
it'll be over, spent as a sigh.

If we had the ******* music
we'd need a key change
a drum coming in over this
slow chorded refrain
marking the start of something
anything that might just
breathe life into me again.

Smoke off musket barrels wafts
toward the forever just beyond
the sapphire sky and mingles
within the clouds there in a dance
waiting to expire against eternity.
The blood seeps into the ground
but somehow does not spoil
the earth it contaminates.
Take from that what you will.

The ship tears apart as the
lighter front end lifts from
the cold black sea and shudders
in the air before screaming
it's seperation in the ancient
moans of protesting metal.
We build them much bigger now
because we dare and we do
and we never ******* learn.

We got a history, you and I,
volumes enough to publish,
big as the whole ******* sky
and it'll be gone forever
just as soon as we both die.
I don't know how to take comfort
in forever in this blink of an eye
but if I know anything at all
I know how to say goodbye.

A prize fighter stands and sways
a lifetime of bruised flesh
and broken bones keeping
him on his feet after the
latest in a long series of beatings
has left him here again
in that nebulous space
between living and dying
and still he hasn't got a prize
he's still got no answer.

There is a question burning
away in our cores and we
ask the universe every day
in different ways and often
for very different reasons.
Some of us have a theory
a hope locked away
a secret wish
but none of us have an answer.

He could get up again
but he doesn't know if
he'd make the count
doesn't know if he counts.
After the pain and the
abuse, after a lifetime
of violence
he doesn't know what
matters or if he ever
even did.
Blood and sweat are moving
in rivulets, slow and uneven
threatening to blind him
and his opponent is still
out there, moving
unlike the blood and sweat
in tightening
circles around him,
waiting for him to fall
or failing that to
start beating him more.

I want to believe we get
better as it goes
that time doesn't march
away from the best version
of ourselves but it's
more difficult to tell than
one might imagine.
We were stronger and faster
yesterday than we ever
will be after tomorrow
but that day's knowledge
makes a difference, too.
I hope.

Maybe he'll win the match
maybe he won't
the pain follows forever
and the glory is gone
before he'll really be
able to enjoy it.
There might be more
to life than endless battery
and constant recovery
but he's only ever known
the fighting and he
learned years ago the only
secret he's ever needed
how to take a hit
and still stand up.
Damage is inevitable
like death.
The boxer flirts with
the inevitable
in search of
an answer.