I've spent counted years
terrified of what those
hands could do.
I'm forced to keep a record
of their works,
a tapastry of scar tissue
and memory seared into me
like a branding.
I have shaken awake
like colors swirling together
into screaming horror
in a paint mixer.
Every choice I have made
good, bad and indifferent
has been informed
by the childhood you
stole from me with
your violence and
your base, spiteful meaness.
You drank yourself,
nightly, into oblivion
and took the day you'd
self-medicated away out
on three scared children
and still not a day went by
that you didn't make
sure they knew how
******* big you still
thought you were.
I was convinced you
were evil incarnate.
That you were larger
than life and too bad
for good to touch.
You took my mother from
me, turned her into
a sobbing wreck,
alternatively apologizing
and pretending nothing
was even happening.
It was so cruel, so precise
it just had to be on purpose.
You drove me so far
into the darkness
I was a lifetime finding
my way back out
and I assumed you'd
known what you were doing
and I learned to hate
everyone and everything
and I started with you
because you taught me
to be that way.
You taught me how little
to trust, how unhelpful
hope can be, how a little bit
of light or laughter only
makes the hurt deeper.
You turned me into an engine
of spite. You taught me how
worthless love can be.
How important it was to be
tough, unfeeling and cruel.
You taught me to be exacting
in my actions, and people
praised me for the lessons
you cut into me.
With distance and with time
I see a different you.
Beaten, as you beat me,
scared and lost and
small, so very ******* small.
You had no designs
no great plan.
You're a little man
who felt big by hurting
some kids.
Nothing original there.
You're an ordinary monster
and I'm not afraid of you
any longer.
I wanted you to know
I do not and may never
forgive you for what
you did and what you are,
for what you made me,
but I do understand.
You made sure of that.
Maybe that was your plan,
I don't know.
I think perhaps you were
not smart enough
to have a plan.
I learned to always have
a plan.
With our cruelty you
accidentally gave us cunning.
I know, it bothers me to
think you may have helped
me in any way, as well.
But I have always had a plan
I have one still.
I have one right now.
Wanna know mine?
I plan to die with the knowledge.
My plan is to make sure
my son doesn't understand.
You must've been so lonely,
you oridinary monster.
I don't need the company.

We are three years and six thousand miles
from sunburned kisses at midnight.
We're exploding somewhere out there
in the great somewhen.
***** of fire. Great is a coin flip.

I am sixteen hours worth of coffee
and who gives a ****.
I drag broken skin across dried Earth and scream at gods, old and new, that I miss them half as much as I miss you.
I've become an engine running on what could've been and what might still be.

Somewhen we're joining like atoms,
our collision giving startling birth to universes of maybes and an entire cosmos of prizes at rainbows end.
Crumbling into disinterested sentence fragments trying their best to contain sentiments of truth. My truth.

What are happy endings in all this ******* nonsense?
What matters anymore if nothing ever mattered at all?
Why does absence breed such boring ******* nihilist sentiment in me?
I'm fighting for better.
Cracked knuckles and sweat and blood given freely at the alter of hopefully.
Make me better.
Make me whole.

Somewhen we are a fire, burning together through the whole of time and space.
We were then.
We are now.
Always.
Love.
Always.

Under all the suffering
is a drum beat.
Staccato, like rain
on a tin roof
or the steady off beat
pounding of a heart
filled with fear and love
and it moves in us,
slithering under skin.
A parasite growing fat
on the swell of blood
inside us.
One word and our feet
leave the earth
as suddenly we're
soaring toward the stars
at a velocity high
and strong enough
to break gravity and
punch a hole in the atmo.
We're baseballs, our skin
shed, as we sail over
the parking lot outside
the stadium.
A glance and we're
crashing through car
windshields and bouncing
off of highways.
We're burning up on re-entry
hoping our time outside
the suffering made a
difference, hoping that
one ******* time in
all this stupid, sensless
daily pain that we
scratched important.
Hoping we mattered.
We are high metaphor
wrapped in low fantasy.
We were young and
in love and it was extraordinary,
even though it was
so ******* ordinary,
because it was happening
to us.
Does anything ever
feel that big again?
We are always chasing
oceans inside ourselves.
We contain multitudes,
as sure as I'm alive,
and all of it fades
into nothing,
as sure as I'll die.
I loved like an ocean,
like a wild summer storm.
Burned like starlight
distant and faintly warm.
I once lit up the night
just like approaching dawn,
We burn hot for awhile
then one day: we're gone.

Color me with Technicolor
like prisms casting light
meet me in the middle, love
'cause I don't think we'll last the night.
Find me in your multi-chambered
beating, hungry heart
because all this screaming,
lately, is tearing us apart.
Whisper sweet nothings
instead of just demanding ***
or start getting ready, honey
to pester whoever comes next.
I don't want to argue,
I don't care if I'm even right
just please come to the table
I just don't want to fight.
No one said it was gonna be easy
but how is it this hard?
I'm pacing up halls and stairwells
doing nightly rounds like a guard.
It was supposed to be transcendent
supposed to lift us off the ground
all we're doing is shouting
our better angels lost in all the sound.
We're still angry as the purpling
sky turns red with the rising sun
and we're promising to fix it
'cause it would hurt more to be done.
Color me in the nighttime hues
the dark blues after sunset
I kiss your finger tips and smile
we both know it ain't over yet.

I remember the air
shimmering above hot roads
and sidewalks.
It rippled like water
and invited mirage.
We'd meet up in the
alleyway under my
fire escape and set off,
on bikes and skates and boards
and even on foot.
We'd be gone from the block
but usually still in the neighborhood.
Sometimes at lunch,
when everyone came back
to eat, I'd go up to the
corner store and one of
the uncles would buy me
a coke if I swept up or
moved some boxes.
I'd roll up comic books and
stuff them in my back pockets
because I had seen
Ric's older cousin do it
and I thought it was
the coolest thing.
At night we'd sneak into
the public pool to go for swims.
Some of the us would smoke
and talk about gossipy nothing
and some of us would try
to convince the girls to
give us secret kisses under
the water.
We were happy to be out
of the heat.
One weekend we biked,
my brother and I,
onto the island so we
could go to the good
theather, the air conditioner
worked and the movies
were played as double features.
We killed an entire
afternoon watching films
from the 80s play
back to back.
I sat, one evening, on the
lip of the roof of Ami's building.
She was staring at me
from across the roof
daring me to call her attention.
"Whatchu got, big guy?"
I leaned back and threw
out my arms, making slow
lazy circles and smiling
broadly at her and at everyone.
For a second, though it was
brief, the smile vanished.
I could feel the pull of
gravity in my belly and groin.
I felt suddenly weightless.
I was so sure...
but my feet kicked out and
the weight shifted
and I was fine.
She was making her way
over to me and I don't
remember what happened
next or what we said.
I remember the feeling.
I remember the fear.
I had nothing to compare
it to. It was huge and
intense and profound.
It was like...
It was like falling in love.
When it rained,
like sheets with wind whipping
between the buildings
as though through canyon walls,
we'd stay in and futz
with Great Grandma's
old black and white set.
One of us would hold the antenna,
the rest indicating how high
or far away.
We'd take turns,
switching out during commercials.
Waiting out the rain.
It's gone now, of course.
The city has a gestational period
like cicadas.
The city I know,
the city I moved away from
is gone.
Yesterday's New York.
I've learned since
to fall in love, elsewhere.

Remember turning and churning and roiling like water the night before.
Recall the moist palmed, thick tongued, planned conversations in mirrors.
My god, the hair cuts, the clothes, the damnably dramatic second guessing.
"Just the right moment." As if such a thing existed.

I remember sitting on the table in your work area, because I wanted you to see me breaking school rules and thinking I was so ******* cool.
I would tell you jokes until the wrinkles on your nose scrunched up and your eyes glimmered.
Jokes, but not ***** jokes. I wanted you to think I was pure.
So ******* pure.
Truth is I was just ready for you. Thought I was.
Did you know I waited by the baseball diamond for you to run by? I did. Did I ever.
I didn't have club but I was always at school late, hoping you'd talk to me. Knowing if I could make you laugh the right amount of times in the right kind of way...maybe, just maybe, then you would love me.

I could see it. Crowded school hallways would part like seas before us and we would move to one another as magnets do. Drawn. And finally in the middle, met and smiling, we would kiss like consumation. The applause would fall and the strings would swell and the percussion would announce the emotive lyrics sung by the pop musician with the widest range available for the budget we have.
Silly boy.
Silly.
I loved you like reckless, feckless children do. With all the passion and none of the wit.
But wait! There's just this last bit:
I love you now. With ALL the passion and what wits I can muster.
Decades later and the smell of you on the pillow or the smile your genes have given our son and I'm that silly young man again. Weak in the knees and hoping...maybe, just maybe, then you would love me.

I don't know how to apologise.
Never got the hang of it.
Don't know how to be human around humans.
I'm worst when it matters.
I've a lifetime of dropped ***** surrounding me.
I'm suffocating.
(I digress)
McDonald's removed it's ball pits for that reason, I think.
(Do I ever?)

Here are the ten thousand examples of my absence!
Here the times it mattered when I couldn't live up to the set bar.
Dig deeper with me, oh archeologists, and find my failure after failure.
How did I measure up?
Did I even?

I'm forever enigmatic, barely in the pictures.
I wonder if they'll know I was here?
You probably didn't find me out in the field, under dusty rocks.
Future historians may puzzle over our ancient customs but I doubt any evidence of me will survive.
For the best really.
(I digress)
I suppose so. Do I even matter?
(Do I ever?)

For what it's worth, I am sorry.

Try brevity, they tell me.
Short and concise.
The distance between points,
not stars.
Essential employee,
stressed out,
hurting financially,
most of the time I'm scared.
I'm also...
I dunno...blond?
I still don't really know
my father.
I guess that's now.

I'm a father. A millennial.
I've seen several epidemics,
I remember AIDS after school specials.
I remember the towers and the rash
of tragedy that followed.
I've survived two recessions,
a war and Y2K.
Hell, I remember where I was
when they killed Superman.
Is that enough, y'know?
Probably not.
Fill in the blanks for me.
History is in the books
But a man's life is in his hands.

I'm worried about now.
I'm terrified of what's next.
I held your tiny hand,
soft and new in my hard
calloused mitt, and watched
as you learned how to smile.
I quit smoking years ago.
Hardest thing I'd ever done.
This?
This'll rip out the heart of me.

Do you remember?
Do you recall?
The story starts
the same way,
don't they all?
Once,
There was a storm raging
against the outside
of the building we
were in that we could
hear through the wall.
We both reached for
the same object
at the same time
and there was something
in the casual intimacy
of that brief touch
that I've thought about
all my life.
I've been chasing lightening
through dark skies
and old mythology
and coming up hollow,
empty as a promise to behave
but I'm still hunting
it down as I while away
these humid dog days.
In the soft wet soil
with Nimoy tracking
In Search of...
but finding questions
answered, discarded or
pointless and losing
years in the rabbit holes
that I fall down.
What was the magic
of a moment just after
I knew what I know
but before I knew that
I had no clue what
I know, afterall.
And how do you explain
a longing for something
as ineffable as a fleeting
moment of comfort
wrapped in nervous
flirty laughter?
Once,
I found myself attempting
to recover and laid
out against a bare floor.
You floated over me in
dimples and sunlight
and soft, sweet kisses
or...am I remebering that right?
I'm sitting in the Summer
trying to relate to
Winter how I got
caught up in the Spring
trying to explain the Fall.
Still, fires burn
and waves crash.
Babies are born
and nothing will last.
But for a moment,
years and exactly
one lifetime ago,
I was okay with it all.
I found comfort
in the thunder
and shelter
in the squall.

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.

I've seen churches on fire and wondered what that meant.
Is God's judgement final? Is his wisdom all spent?
I saw the parishioners teary eyed, jaws muscles tightly knit.
But, like, how does this help me understand the world or where in it I fit?
I don't know if it's courage that you battle the darkness every day
Just because you know how much I want you to stay.

I gotta be honest, man.
I don't know how to be happy.
I don't know how other people do this ****.
I don't know much about life or happiness or love.
But I do know: it's gonna have to come from us.

Life can be dystopian. It's a long relationship with violence.
I've known it to be twisting pain and having to suffer in silence.
We are clenched little fingers, nails dug deep into the palms of our hands.
We are all odd, emotional nationals of strange and distant lands.
Sure, I mean, we were born and raised in the same places.
But we stare out from foreign countries behind the eyes in our faces.
What works for you, my old friend, will not work for me.
You bask in shining, brilliant light but I gotta squint just to see.

We'll lie and say we're happy.
Say we're just fine.
We try to believe it, too.
But we just feel like we were left behind.
Like, somehow we missed the day they taught this ****.
How is everyone smiling in timeline photos?

Everyone's got perfect teeth and an audience to keep.
A life of happiness, assuming we don't look too deep.
I wonder if the pervasive sadness is in the water or if it's just in me.
I hope for end of tunnel lights and locks to fit this ******* key.

Keep up the fight, my friend. Don't quit. Stay.
I know it's ******* hard. I know. Find a way.
I love you. I need you. Don't you dare leave me.
I'll fit the mold. I'll be what you need me to be.

Sometimes I'm kinda absent, Bean.
like Spidey when he was still Venom.
I don't have dreams without you
they're nightmares when you're not in 'em.
I remember the panic inside me
when the waves knocked out my knees.
I remember lunging into surf
trying to save you from the seas.
I've reached into space and saw
the reassured look spread on your face
as you fell into my waiting catch
instead of alone into empty space.
I think back to when you weren't
and the silly person I used to be
you're like glasses, son
you allow me, finally, to see.

He was a halfhearted attempt
at a slow motion smile
and it made my spine tingle
in all its goblinesque glory.
At noon he'd start drinking
to forget but by six o'clock
he was drinking to remember.
He would become oblivian
and the sound of his keys
jingling as he walked up the hall
broke a cold sweat across my
forehead and sat me bolt
upright in bed.
She was loneliness in human
form and she'd do anything
ignore all of it if he'd tell her
she belonged.
She'd try to fix things
from time to time.
Smoothing our hair and
trying to make us smile.
We were collateral damage
moved like pawns and treated
like puppets by the people
meant to care and teach.
We grew into adults at young
ages or arrested in place
never really seemed to change.
It's hard to remember
but I remember all the time.

I can't seem to **** my heroes.
The flood is coming
the Earth on fire
and my mark is invisible.
Still.
My swollen head echoes
words, profound or silly,
down decades of failed attempts
to soar the cloudless sky.
Icarus falls from great heights
but got so close
and I flap my arms like crazy
but can't get off the ground.
I've drowned in oblivion
with Van Gogh and Platt.
I've lived as riversmooth as stones
and felt their number crashing
against me but have never
known the taste of silver.
I've weighed myself down
in insecurity and anxiety
and come off as insincere
and mildly neurotic.

I'm waiting for the flood.
It's coming, after all.
Maybe it'll wipe a clean slate
on broken earth and make
gravestones of us all.
Equal in obscurity
unknown to a waiting,
impatient universe
hosting a party at which
we'll never arrive.
Still.
Still...

My heroes call to me.
They advise.
They say, "Hard work."
They say, " Timing."
They say, "Luck."
Beyond the pale blue they call
back to me not to waste my
time with something I
don't love.
They say, "Throw it away. Write
what you know. Become a lover
of your works."
I want so badly to please them,
but I love it all.

The flood is coming.
Still.
Time is running out.
Everyday an EOD email
arrives to find me toiling
but not at love's labor,
perhaps,
but a labor of love, nonetheless.

I can't seem to **** my heroes.
At least not before
they've killed me.
"**** your heroes",
My heroes say,
"The flood is coming."
And I love them,
still.

I woke up to find myself
a million meters down a hole
I dug myself, lights out
fight bitten and looking
into darkness for a savior.
Thousands of travelled miles
ago a monster stood in my skin
and maybe I deserve this
slow burn punishment. I mean,
blame it on the rage or...

... There are hollow ringing notes
crashing off the walls and the back
of the inside of my head.
Playing cymbals behind my eye
Symphonies for my inner demon.
Young men wrung out and hollowed
used up and swallowed. Thrown away
like fastfood wrappers on the floors
of cars we would drive late into nights
thinking of beds we don't dream in...

...At some point you age out,
you ghetto geniuses,
and find a hostile world
not quite the fish bowl you
spent your life looking through.
And you write hundreds of thousands
of lines in the pursuit of high art
and praise and accolade
and" let's face it" fame
and never write one word that's true...

...you are always that little monster.
No matter where you go
how big you grow
or the quality of what you do,
No one will ever be proud of you.

I blink into darkness and hope
for help or better for rescue.
I find myself, some days,
looking at cherub faced photos
of myself from infanthood
It's been hard practically since
day one. I'll always wonder
if life had been different would
I have built the monster
in the skin in which I stood?

He would open
The Amazing Spider-man
and climb inside.
Swinging the urban
canyons of Midtown
and never noticing that
it was much cleaner than
those same streets were
only hours earlier
when he walked fast
through them.
He fought the bad guys
and laughed at all
of Spidey's quips.
There was the constant
background drone of
screaming and the
constant threat of real
violence, undetected
even by Spider-man's
wonderful Spider sense.
He landed neatly next to
his hero and rescued the
poor, innocent New Yorker
and he prided himself on
the restraint he had to
never ask the only question
he ever had inside himself.
He never even said why.
He closed the book and
crawled into bed and curled
up, his eye on the space between
the edge of the door and
the doorjam, where the light
would be when it started.
His breath was shakey
his knuckles white.
Inside him he held the question
"Why won't anyone save me?"

You sit nearing forty
doing nothing noteworthy,
doomscrolling and
wondering when the
wisdom comes.
Sure, you mocked
us when we broke against
the distant ground
because you had the
knowledge not to leap,
knew where to keep
planted firm with both feet.
But now you worry
at why we seem to know
why we move confident
you wonder at the secret
behind our success and your stall
and the truth is there
is knowledge not to leap
but wisdom comes from the fall.

I cant seem to get the words right
or find meaning on a moonless night
or impart wisdom from an endless fight
I mean to but cannot, try as I might.

It's all inconsistent meter
and rhyme schemes which teeter
on the edge of verse but too eager
I wonder am I even the speaker?

God, give me a second try at youth
I swear I could do a better job
I know the pits and traps and
I know how it feels on the other side
of wasting it.
I know I could be me better.

I heard a song on the radio
from when we were young
and I thought of all the promise
when we'd just begun
and I've loved you like crazy
even though I know it's not
been enough.
I want you to know that I fought
too late to be greater
perhaps too late to be good
hopefully not too late
to be loved
or too late to be understood.

I can't seem to get the words right
You've got vision and I've only got sight
You've got power and I've only got might
You grew up yesterday and I haven't quite

I can hear you breathing
beside me at night, curled in your blanket
eyes shut but not tight
and you look like twenty years
of versions of you I've known
you smell of warm comfort
and feel just like home.

I've been avoiding the mirror lately.
For reasons of my own.
I want you to be happy
You risked much to get here
and taken hit after hit
gritted your teeth and swore
to love and commit.
I'm in constant awe of your grit
your charm, grace and whit
but I wish I'd been a better fit
as your prize for fighting in the pit
I'm hardly a get. Not even worth it.

I can't seem to get the words right
or the structure, and what's worse
the language is halted and terse
not remotely poetic.
Just formless verse.
Language cannot frame my regret
or my mortality, or hue.
And if it fails to frame me
it could never capture you.

Time marches foward with
little regard for you or me,
and of course much has changed
but I wish I could still ******* believe.
Remember how sure
we used to be?
Running around with dreams
and the myth of meritocracy.
Years ago we were strong
as a lapping ocean wave
or the mile wide light and heat
of a forest fire blaze.
We were songs stuck
in each other's swollen head
we were so ******* alive
absent a mounting sense of dread.
And I'm lying if I say I didn't
think back and miss us then
but I've been scraped along a lifetime
of disappointment again and again.
There is hope still for you
to climb to success, I hope
but my dreams have gone,
I'm at the end of my rope.
It's a hard thing to have learned
and to know better.
It's a hard thing to listen to
her go and to just let her.

Your judgement rains down
like machinegun fire,
but I grew up in a viperpit
full of violence and ire.
You wonder why I'm distant
but I was raised under attack.
Struck down in the moments
before you swore you'd be back.

You want to share credit
for my accomplishments but
where even were you?
What claim has your absence
on these things that I do?
I made myself from your ashes
like some backwards phoenix
worried at all times of the you
inside my double helix.
I went booming across the midwest
chasing the Thunderbird
and nuclear aftershocks.
Hoping any moment to be stirred
to freedom by these mythical hawks.


I was awoken
consiserably broken
and while I've done work
glass just don't uncrack
and there's **** from which
we just can't come back.
I don't know what to say
don't know who to tell.
I'm sorry, Pavlov
but we can't unring that bell.

I love you.
I always will
I've tried not to
and here we are. Still.
You watched them turn
me into this horrible closed off
monster shaped man
and then demanded explanations
for why I am what I am.
I've not got it all fixed
but I'm trying.
I've got a past to escape
and the cracks aren't uncracked
but they are traced in painter's tape.
I'm gonna be better
I'm gonna likely die trying.
And the credit will be all mine
in spite of your lying.

I wanted more but here's
what I've got.
I want to be whole and normal
but ******* it, I'm not.
You weren't there to teach
or to provide or to even try.
I wasn't worth staying for
and I still don't know why.

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?

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.

Following the twisting,
bobbing fairy lights
deeper into the dark
Pennsylvania forest,
surrounded by the musky
scent dirt has at night
and the pervasive odor
of pine sap, his foot
finds in the darkness
a curled, coiled tree root
and he stumbles,
seems for the smallest
of moments to recover,
and plunges toward the
moss covered earth of
the midnight Keystone
State woodland.

He remembers hay bales
stacked in double
out by the tree he'd
hung the rope swing from.
A target placed and
a quiver of bolts
and a lesson about
violence, firstly
about the kind that
we do and finally
the kind done to him.
There is a small
tool shed that stands
a witness to the
moment when he
did his best not to
cry or to call out.

Snow would fall in feet
and schools would look
for terrifying accumulation
before they closed for the day.
He spent the two hour delay
sleeping, he hoped.
But hope is for the wealthy
and suffering is for the
poor and his thrift store
wardrobe told him how
the world worked.
He leapt from his warm
bed and started in on
the chores that barroom
visitations left undone.

He rode his bike down
to the poorly built
and badly lit little bar
his step father frequently
spent time in on nice
summer or cold winter days.
He nodded to the old man
who ran the place as he
Began walking the old man
back toward the house.
He'd come back for the bike
later on, assuming no one
took it before then.

There was a dirt road
and a gravel driveway.
The radio was static or
country music and the
days lasted forever
or at least they seemed to.
The lot next to his house
was huge and barren
and bordered by dense
northeastern forest.
If you walk in far enough
the world grows dim
and everything else,
all of it, is unseen.
It can't touch you,
nothing can.
He wondered if anyone
had ever decided to
just not come out.

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.

There are secrets and distances
kept between us.
Small dark truths we dare not face.
Large scary facts left buried.
Yet...
There you stand, shovel in hand.
Prepared to uncover, unearth
and learn all about me
and us.
But, my love, word of warning:
you can never not know again
and once it's all been exposed
you'll have to face the future.

Here: Take my hand and walk awhile.
The future is scary.
It's full of uncertainty
even those of us that have found
the truth have not found the path.
And yes, now it's all out there,
a public manuscript of secrets
but look, love, I'm here beside you.
Sure the facts are now present
between us but absent is the distance.
I know the future is a scary thing to face
But you don't have to face it alone.

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.

Closer and closer still.
Boiled blood and ******* bones.
Hallowed out the marrow
hung on a string around your neck.
Crossed like salvation
But backed with trumpets like judgement day.
Knuckles pronounced like a second language
stand on cracked and stained hands but hold nothing.
And that old sun is setting
future, my love, the future is coming.
Bored like teenagers into the meat of our chests are messages cryptic and final.
Messages written about us and left by others, cross pollination.
Freeform Saturday shopping trips are become the air I live for.
You my raison de'tre.
Stand back and watch us bleed for the future.
His quiet breathing like music between us.
Bring on the judgement.
Welcome the night.
Stand.

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.

Thousands of years from
right ******* now
they'll find us decorated
in the 21st century version
of hundreds of fox teeth
strung together on lines of
hair and they'll speculate
our importance to the tribe.
They won't know our
sharing of posts about
out of state listings for
our jobs making more money
with more paid time off.
They won't care that we
often got home the afternoon
of the day following the
morning we left for work
and in this way they'll resemble
best from our point of view
the folks who employ us.
Will crypts be discovered
hewn deep into the living rock
of our dying Earth or will we
have to find our dead through
the thousands of lines of
scrolling text that we
leave behind us when we go?
And if so...
What is the value of human life?
The price point, as econ 101
would have asked me to
specify, to be immaculate in my
words. Allow for this
question to haunt us all:
How much?
How many crumpled
peices of cloth infused paper
with numbers printed on them
for the sanctity missing?
In dollars, what is the cost
of a human soul?
Sure, once in the past, it was invaluable
but late stage capitalism
has taught us some
new lessons and I'll bet
it's got a value now.
I'll bet its dropped already.
Appreciably.

She moves like low fog
settling in place
leaving no sign or signal
or any particular trace.
It isn't on purpose
oh no, dear me, far from
she longs to be thought of
gladly marching to your drum.
She spent her life in
hope and holding her breath
shambling from one approval
to the next like living death.
She heard them throughout
like a distant echoed shout
and learned to care for others
learned to just do without.
Build us a temple
fit for the age.
Make us some content
and watch them engage.
She longed for the one
who would light up her life
so she kept walking
along the edge of the knife.
She thought she knew what
was needed, round about
but finds herself coward
and so full of doubt.
She was taught right from wrong
and where to begin
She was made to know rote
the varied qualities of sin.
She was oh so prepared for
the tightening noose
education metered in daily
lessons and routine abuse.
Made different from the others
but told not to stand out
She blended in like kale
was as common as grout.
Talents were hidden behind
practiced and placid modesty
average and ordinary
plain yogurt, not prodigy.
It is a difficult journey
when you try to atone
and she knows that, she does
but she is terrified to be alone.
She slaved under winter freeze
and through summer melt
and hoped to be noticed
or have her absence felt.
She often worries about
what she's already become
but has no clue that it's over
that the damage is done.

I went to church as a boy.
Learned my saints
and my psalms.
Memorized "and with you."s
and The Hail Mary
(Full of grace, you see.)
Drank the wine
ate the Eucharist.
Spectacles, testicles,
wallet and watch.
I sat at each station
and read my reading.
Said my prayer.
At some point I wondered
if god was even there.

I went to school in my youth.
Carved swearwords in desks
and learned an insane amount of math.
I sat through pep rallies
and detentions.
I read poems and novels
and text books and notes.
Passed to each other in class
(Check yes or no.)
I didn't know the diiference
between *** and love.
I often wondered at the
line of trees I could see
from the window.
What kept me there?
Who held the power?

In my childhood I fought a monster.
He looked like a man
and smelled of a bar.
He seemed a giant
as he loomed over me
(I'm six inches taller now.)
I remember his thick fingers
meaty from blue collar work
pressed against my eyelids.
I remember my head through
the hallway wall.
I still have that uneasy
feeling before bed.
I sometimes wonder
if one of those times
I never got up at all.

Years and miles
time and tide ago
my world was very
different and I wasn't
in control.
Tonight her gentle
breathing fills our room
and the sweet laughter
of our son fills our house
and I 've never been more happy
and I've never been more proud.
(He can count to 30 out loud!)
And I pray to an absent god
that an unknown power
taught me better.
I hope I got back up.
I do sometimes, when it's late
or I've allowed my thoughts
too much free reign, wonder
if maybe one day
my sweet little boy
will have to fight
a monster, too.

Can you feel the heartbeat?
It's pounding on the door.
It's calling from the empty street.
Screaming for more and more and more.
Can you hear the fire?
It's ripping through my chest.
Branding my skin with the word, "liar".
Consuming the world with no pause, no rest.
Do you smell the rain, love?
Drumming a rhythm on loyal earth.
Beating on sidewalks. Falling from above.
Meeting out new growth and startling birth.
Can you feel my ache, dear?
Rattling injury through my bones,
telling me to rise up against my fear
and claim newly conquered thrones.
Can you hear my past?
It whispers swear words in deepest night.
It tells me I come last
try and try as I might.
Do you know my love, dear?
Dripping devotion saccharin in it's sincerity.
I'm going to try, love, I'll always try to be there.
I want you see my love, crystal in it's clarity.

Pushing through water
is a human face frozen
in time forever.
Hung on walls in the
stuffy offices of
guidance counselors
accompanied by frivolous
encouraging platitudes
and are meaningless as the
echoes of happiness
sprinkled throughout
bouts of depression.
Just once I wanna feel
the earth move underfoot.
I wanna hear the swell
of the string section
as I say the oh so quotable
one liner about pushing
ahead in spite of pain.
Just once in the *******
miserable suffer I wanna
be the hero of a story
with a happy ending.
Stucco walls and yellowing
ceiling tile dominated my
earliest memory and now
blood, sweat and hard labor
define a period that ends
when I do.
Ring the ******* bell, Ref.
I can't throw in the towel
but I can't do this
anymore, either.
I thought we were dancing
before the lights came up
on a theater of embarassing
mistakes.
I thought we were building
but surrounded now by
all this debris I can clearly
see we were breaking
all this time.
Amazing the difference
a day makes.
How slowly the chorus
of shouts turned
to couplets and verse.
I can smell the bread
baking, early morning
downtown and the world
seems at peace but
only because the people
the thieves and the time wasters
are asleep and the streets
are empty.
The world rose colored
but still deeply mean.
Now calm and pleasant,
if not better or clean.
The illusion is nice
like coinop or tarot,
but it isn't whole.
It's all bone and no marrow

Lessons come on like glass cuts.
Sudden welling blood
pooling in your palm,
understanding crystallizing
roughly analogous.
And so are we.
Analogues for bigger things.
Our absences filled with
the crippling enormity
of grief.
******* wounds in the world.
And somehow we're expected
not to recover but to be
suddenly good as new.
Glass cuts jagged through skin
like understanding
but you're gone like
forever
and I'm having a hard time
grasping that.
We are analogues for absence
we're just standing in the
place where missing us
and losing us
and forgetting us
is supposed to go.
We are cenotaphs
adorning our own
empty graves.
Roughly analogous.
Like understanding
and the violent, jagged
cuts that the glass made.
The blood pools in my palm
and try as I might
I don't forget you.

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.

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.

You saw me brought low
broken, bereft and grievin'.
You stopped on your way
to pick me up when I was bleedin'.
My god, I recall your taste! I felt you
in empty veins as a powerful needin'.
I kicked the dust and wallowed in the dark
but still you just kept on believein'.
I wish I'd been different. Wish I was better.
Despite your wishes, despite your pleadin'
I was never there for you
I couldn't stay. I'm the best at leavin'.

Late night on the subway platform
you whispered, "I'm in love with you."
and thought the train would cover the sound
and I let you continue to think it true
because I didn't have an answer
I didn't know how I felt about you.
Life changed for both of us
we were two kids without a clue
and we've grown in my absence
we've our triumph and our rue.
We've grown in ways alien to each other
in times of laughter and in blue.
Time isn't flying, old friend.
Time already flew.
And look, I may have a regret
maybe one or two
a half dozen, hundreds
let's say I've got a few
Listen, I've got the love of my life
and I heard and hope you also do.
I don't wish any harm
and I don't want anything from you.
I just thought you should know
when the train passed I loved you, too.

My whole life we've been
a generation about to collapse.
An abanboned cigarette burned
down to a cylinder of ash.
We get up each day
full of new aches and old hurtings
and we make our commutes
to chain ourselves up to our hauntings.
We find ourselves caught in forever.
Our fingers break, our nailbeds bleed
as we scratch at eternity. Stuck fast as flies
our bodies shake out sorrow and need.
We're preached body positivity
and self ******* care
by billionaires with no intent
to ever ******* share.
We look at heavily curated streams
of the lives of friends, who boast
their picture perfect weekends
and wonder what we could ever post.
Between work and sleep
we manage something like twenty-three.
That's hours a week we don't owe.
For less than a day you can find us free.
People scream at us to fix it
while giving no proffered solution.
The blue strong arm of the system
kills in the streets with no retribution.
We find no solution
from asking or starting fires.
We're just cast away
as criminals or as liars.
I'm not Superman, I don't have the answer
though I really wish I did.
But we aren't Kandor
safe behing glass or lid.
And the wind will find the cylinder
and scatter it to ash.
And just like my whole ******* life
we'll still be seconds from collapse.

I am seventy pounds of coffee and salt
trying my best to be good or at least understood.
You are promise and blueberries served chilled while in bed.
Dappled sunlight and smiles.

And what a bent and twisted world you'll come of age in.
Will you grow crooked among all the other imperfect reeds?
If there was time left to fix it...

Can I paint a perfect world over this canvas of broken promises?
I hope so.
I doubt it.
If possible I would leave you a perfect world.
But all I have is this.
I'm doing my best.

I am cracked leather features and water damaged paper.
I get the job done, I guess.
You are the lingering taste of sweet fruit and cream.
Pleasant travels and a good dream.
But we are moments from disaster.
You and I and this.

Waves crashed onto the shoreline
on the day I was born.
In future: Gone will be I
and the shoreline
and the day I was born.
But the Ocean will keep.

We live inside an explosion
and mistake trajectory
for free will and we talk
about nothing. We just
perform meaningless tasks
and boggle at the scope of
existence and how miniscule
it makes our lives seem.

We are each a record of failures
and success and sure
time is an illusion
but how we perceive it
is all of who we are.
A loosely held collection
of memories and half
recalled facts.
Most of, but not all of,
a thousand different
stories and opinions.
Piles of electrified dust
and water in the shape of people
haunted by the memories
of where they've been.
We are ghosts inside
homunculi all hoping
we're not going to stop.

We will, though.
Stop, I mean.
What we do and where
we've been will become
meaningless in the grand
big picture.
Our smiles will be forgotten,
our laughs, too.
If we're lucky our names
will be spoken in a hundred years,
but most of them won't make fifty.

I don't know how to
explain this,
but here goes:
That's why all of it matters.
All of it.
All of us.
The big picture is every thing.
The small ones are everything

I look for myself in fiction.
In music and in sport, too.
I look for flashes
of my green eyed reflection
in the words that friends choose.
I look for all the parts and pieces
of myself I claim to resent but
that I'm terrified to lose.
And when I find them
in the art you've left behind
I leave me in some small way
and in exchange
I keep it in my mind.
I feel myself disentangle
and fall unto the floor.
Left behind to worship at
the altar of the me
in your art I was looking for.
When I create I see myself
trapped inbetween the lines
and I hate him and wish him gone.
I don't want it to seem like mine.
That duality is ******
or maybe suicide
it drives me crazy
either way you decide.
I just want purity
in the things I do or make
I want people to see themselves
when they go looking
and leave parts and pieces I can take.

My whole life I've been
waiting for the music to swell.
I've been wincing at raised hands
and obidient of Pavlov's bell.
I've been thinking about the end
and what that might mean.
I've run with sudden violent shudders
I've never run clean.
I want peace and solitude
like a snowy mountain cap.
I've been lost. It's been
a nightmare without a map.
I'd secret away lits bits and bobs.
Some string, a subway token.
We used poverty as excuse, but we
weren't just broke we were broken.

I like the stinging numbness
of eating radish slices.
I like the quiet oblivion
of heavy rain.
I like to imagine that
this will all lead to crisis.
I'd rather leave behind the past.
I'd rather not focus on pain.

I often dream about dying.
Walking the room at
my own funeral and
wondering why no one is crying.

I locked away my heart
at a tender age
because it hurt to feel
and for reasons left off the page.
I put it in a cold, high place
locked it and told it to run.
Told to always hide.
But you journeyed there,
chased it down and picked the lock
releasing all the horrible
truthsome **** inside.

You could be better.
You should be more.
Instead you're this.
This miserable ******* chore.
I woke up this morning
and wrote the note.
I finally knew the ending.
It's tucked in my coat.
Why you ask did I not just
put it in the mail?
How could I have discarded
it, should I fail?
This is how it is
how it should be.
A little secret, reader,
between you and me.
You're free, of course.
Free as birds.
Not that it matters,
they are only words.

My best friend said
I like my endings to be sad.
Maybe he's right. I don't know.
But those are
the only endings I've ever had.

Your hand on the side
of my face, gentle but firm,
as long as you need
no need to squirm.
Your eyes steady and alive
burning from your core.
your voice whispering
that I deserved more.

Whether it'll be heaven
or it'll be hell
I'm not sure or at least
I cannot tell.
I'm feeling amazing
I'm going out on top.
In the distance the music
begins to swell.
To celebrate my short drop
and very sudden stop.
Swing life away.
Free as bees. Free as birds.
Of course, we both know,
these have been only words.

I've been a lifetime trying
different combinations of words
looking for the series that
forms the litany needed
to cast the spell that'll make
me love myself.
Lost magics are these
somehow beyond my reach
or comprehension but are
all I would need to stop
living in the suffer
and the hurt;
all I need to look into
that ******* mirror
and care about it's
fat, stupid inhabitant.
If not a magic, maybe an art.
Perhaps I can learn it
with practice rather than
conjour it into being
like the skill that comes
from the repetition of sketching
the same line or shape
for hours and days.
I've drawn the character
I wish to be onto the earth
and in my place for
exactly one mortal age
but it still looks rough
and unfinished like the
frantic scratches and doodles
of a child before motor skills
can help to make sense
of their work.
Art, perhaps I've not the skill.
The right art can transform
wht couldn't it transform me?
Magic, perhaps I've not the luck.
The right words in the right order
could save me.
Ancient magics or arts
whichever it may be
that I am certain that
once I knew, before the
thick fingered punishments
and judgements.
Things I understood before
the casual unkindness
and ever present violence
learned me my value
and taught me to think like
a tool on my best days
a weapon on my worst
and a lump of useless ****
the rest of the time.
I do not know why
I continue on from day to day.
I do not know if it's
some form of love
that even I am able to
show to myself
or if it is rank cowardice
and I'm not sure if there's,
when you think about it,
even a real difference.
I may never know
what I don't know
and that, I'm sorry,
is one of only a handful
of things that I know.
Perhaps the right words
in the right order
will fix me.
The right sketched lines
in the right place
could make me forever.
Perhaps that's too
much the ask
of magic or art
but I've no other clue
where else to start.

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.

Dragged bleeding across Two thousand seven hundred and seventy-miles
a dozen times
before we met.
I saw a tornado rip
the roof away from
my shelter once.
I learned to sleep sitting
up straight with city sirens
or pounding rain
as a constant refrain
in the back seats of cars
we lived out of.
I saw the open vastness
of the Grand Canyon
and heard the gentle
weeping of the ocean as it
met the rocky New England shore.
I found tree canopy darkened
groves, thickets, woodlots and stands
by streams and creeks
brooks and rills
and wondered in the almost
shelter of the forest if any other
person had ever stood there.
In cities I've danced on streets
and eaten exotic meats
and smelled the densely packed
cultures breathing on their feet.
On mountain peaks and deserts
I've encountered extremes
and bow before nature, esteemed.
Down highways and roads
that crisscross the map like veins
I've felt this country heave
and I've never been the same.
Off the map are memories
of a time before you.
A bygone era when
I was a different man.
Did you know me as a traveller?
Could you sense the roadwear?
I apologize for the damage.
Like most well travelled
things I've been battered
and beaten and left
broken beyond repair
on the way here from there.
I've got some use left in me,
I'm pretty sure, at least.
Now, I've met you I can
feel my roots plant deep.
Now you're beside me at night
I can finally close my eyes and sleep.

I'm locked in a death match
with the cynic in me
over whether or not to hope.
It's not been going well
but one of the two of us
will still have to go.
Perhaps if happenstance
was lately just
a little more kind.
Perhaps if light in darkness
was just a little bit
easier to find.
And, y'know, yes.
For sure, there is
more I could try.
But the truth is so
much smaller than
even any one lie.
At night, from the
other room I can
still hear you cry.
Though miles and ages
seperate me and you
from him and those dark times.
It has been a rough road
and barefoot we've
walked every inch.
We've been beggers and
heroes and labor and chore.
The songs of Darwin's finch
and the wheel turning
Twain's riverboat toward shore.
We've been the music of the spheres
impressive in sound but nothing more.
It'd be easier to hope
if it were easier to live.
That's the rub, I guess...
I'll have to give.
I've been thirty-five years
in search of answers
and I just don't know.
It's me verse my inner cynic
in a death match about hope.
But, still one of us must go.

Broken eyesight and
shaking, weathered hands
reach toward the open
ocean and take in
what is there.
I wish I'd loved you
like you'd deserved
like you'd wanted me to.
Mixed into my hair
are strands of white
and I can feel the decades
in my knees and joints
but you'll sleep, forever
only ever twenty-something.
I should've missed you
when you were gone.
I should've felt your
heart through phone lines
and digital lines of type.
While you were one
of the many and not
one of my lost.

I know you wanted me.
I know you cared.
I know you were open.
I know you were always there.
If I'd been better or more
if I'd been different
if I'd cared...

I want to apologize
because you deserve it.
Because you always did.
And because I mean it
and that changes the
shape of the thing.

I'm moving closer,
all the time,
to that waiting pit.
But you beat me there,
by more than a little bit.

She had not known fear
until she could no longer
see the shore.
Drifting in alien waters
she felt pangs,
like butterfly wings,
against the inside of
her ribcage.
The fluttering, building hollow
that hope makes in it's
death throes.
When you enter the ocean
she heard her grandfather say
you enter the food chain.
The lazy, lapping drift
which brought her ever
farther into the empty sea
would have been soothing
in very different conditions.
Her eyes raked the clouds
searching out the signs
of bird flight.
She was suddenly at the
dawn of seafaring with
early man and his silent gods.
Looking for hope in
the blue void above.
She wondered idlely
whatever became of the
lifeboats from sunken ships
when the coast guard or
someone else pulls the
survivors free of them.
Would she, if she kept floating on
encounter them on the high seas
like a salvation graveyard?
She tried to think
of ways to stay out of the sun
but images of headstones
flocked like an armada
stalking the sea forever
growing but staying
impossibly empty always
pressed down on her.
She too was adrift.
Maybe she'd been headed
that way all her life.
Hard to say.

Snow covers Autum's
earth like a blanket on
a freshly made bed.
The sound goes out
of the world as you
walk through the winter.
The white sky meets
the white ground
in the far distance
and if not for the shadows
we might be standing
on blank canvas
waiting for some lesser
god to pencil in our
live's purpose.
Hoping it doesn't get
stale.
I can hear only my
footsteps in the cushioned
quiet of the air
and I've never felt
more alone.
When asked what grief
is all I can think of
is that crunching sound.
How dark a bright
white world can seem.
How life and bloom are
only ever inches away.
Maybe over this snow drift
perhaps the next?
These are the winter bones
of loneliness on which
spring is built.
It ain't over yet,
it may never end.
Before every spring
a winter
under every winter
a fall.