We are a multitude
of bad decisions.
A myriad of choices
which require revisions.
We are a cornicopia of coulda-beens
all wanting what could be.
If offered the genie's dilema
we'd change it all, wouldn't we?

We are hugging a spininng
ball of dirt and water
wrapped around a burning core
on a space ship with no rudder
and we close our eyes
and cross our fingers
and know, absolutely, we're on track
but the doubt still lingers.

When the universe exploded into being
the debris were set on their courses.
Like beads of rain water on glass
like rows of race horses.
And with the right math we could predict
where everything will land.
What then do we think of free will?
Is it just accidental cosmic sleight of hand?

I don't got answers, haven't picked a side.
Would that cancel choice?
Diminish those that have died?
Does it rob the world of song? Of voice?
My parents had a theory or they lied
I don't know. I leave it for you to decide.

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 held you captive
in a chance photograph.
Tucked into a small
notebook filled with
page after page of tired
unfinished verse
I travelled with you.
Moved from end table
to locker to glove box
I carried your cage with me.
When I got lonesome
or things seemed too
difficult for one person
to bare, in those moments
I would take the photograph
from the little notebook
and I would absorb you.
The curve of your smile
the shape of your nose.
I swear it looked just like you,
except the eyes were wrong.
Usually there is a light there
that makes everything around
them brighter and better
and more important
but from the cage,
as a prisoner of time
trapped in just that one
singular moment,
it wasn't you anymore.
I couldn't push through
and live in the moment
with you.
I was hundreds of miles
from home
and horribly alone.
I had your photograph
and though I treasure
it still, there is no going back.
I had learned that
when it comes to prisons
where the bars really are
can be misleading.

I drank all your poison, every drop.
didn't know to beg for help or to stop.
Surrendering to vengeance I've bought?
Suicidal intentions? Perish the thought.
I was born complete. Now I'm not.

Don' you forget me. Don't you dare. Please stay and love and care.
Come mornin' I sure wish I could be there.

'Fore I was rubble I was a man.
I'm not nothing, just nothing that can stand.
Can you fix this barren, empty land?
And create something else to spec? To plan?

Feed me sweet poison, if you think it'll help.
Treat me badly, like some churlish whelp.
But beware the skyline, my dearest friend
'Cause that sun is gonna set and this'll end.

An' listen, you're gonna remember me like the lingering taste of fruit.
I'll be seen in muddy footprints and a discarded roadside boot.
I'm gonna matter to you, I'll stick around like an elm and soon take root.

Don' you forget me. Don't you dare. Please stay and love and care.
Come mornin' I sure wish I could be there.


Build me like Lego.
Bake me like Eggo.
But don't forget to let go
before darkness falls and we go.

Forgotten as flowers on a grave plot.
Loved as long as unbraided hair.
I do care. I'll miss you a whole lot.
And come mournin' I'll be there.

You were brought low
by ******* pomp and circumstance,
fed a line of nonsense and
made to shutup and dance.
But I remember when.
When you held strong
as the levees.
Stood firm as trees
and thick as blood.
I remember you, love
and I remember you
at your best
before the flood.
I don't think I ever
told you
because I'd never tell
anyone,
but I used to
wanna be you
in spite
of what you done.
That was before
everything broke
and the rivers swelled
to run over and they
ran over bad.
That was before
we threw away
all that amazing
stuff we didn't know
that we had.
Now there's just
this place
all dim light
and broken trust.
After the flood
everyone else dwindled.
Disappeared and forgotten
until it was
just us.

There are these things...

Things I don't know how to say.
There are things I can't articulate.
Things I never learned to speak.
Perhaps, lost along the way.
I've hated myself for so long
it's difficult to know if I can change.
I feel different some days but
don't know if it means I've
stopped or if I'm happier
but still hate myself the same.
That hate grew inward and festered.
It attached itself to my identity
and became who I am. Innate.
I want to get better. I do want to change.
I need to see improvement.
To somehow rise above my fate.
It's just that...
When certain feelings are too big
or are too much like pain
I bury them somewhere inside
and pretend they never came.
You watch me with those big eyes
and repeat the things I say
and I know I gotta fix it.
I know it's not a ******* game.
(Language!)
For you I make the effort
I try to find the crooked path
back to good, and healthy and sane.
I love you, little bean
more than I hate myself.
I love you more than it's
possible for me to say.
Kiddo, I hope you know.

It's just that...

There are these things...

"Second star to the right."
You said.
"Straight on 'til morning."
I finished.
We were Peter Pan
Capt. Kirk.
We were teenagers
graduated from provisional licenses
and invincible and racing the dawn.
On the horizon was the future
and all the possibilities that entailed.
You and me,
my little brother.
The second star of our
stupid little story.

In Kansas you joked,
"I don't think we're in the Bronx anymore."
And even though it had
been years since we'd
left those streets behind
we laughed like criminals.
We weren't whole anymore
but we weren't totally broken
yet, either.

"I don't think I've ever been in love."
I confessed below an
open night sky filled with stars.
You punched me in the arm
and smiled the same smile
I had known all your life,
"Party ain't over yet, man."

I woke up yesterday
and I was thirty-something
but I remembered
the wanderlust of
yesteryear and I remembered
how much we'd been through
and I thought I'd give you
a call. Let you know
as long as we have one another,
Brother, we're Peter Pan
Capt. Kirk
And even if we're not
in The Bronx anymore,
The party ain't over.
Not for us.
You're still my second star.

I have built my home
in the silence between screams.
I've earned my keep
with shattered back and bad knees.
The ends are no comfort
and I still weep over the means.
I wish it was a happy story
but it's always been just as it seems.

Foot prints in the snow
left for you, should you follow.
It's not exactly easy
and it leaves you god awful hollow.
But there is strength, not peace
as bitter a pill as one could swallow.
And everyone talks about sunlight
but there is no sign of Apollo.

There is little of love
and nothing to help cope.
There is limited patience
but endless miles of rope.
There are boundless depths
beyond measure or scope.
There is almost no light
and absolutely no hope.

There is roof over head
and no view of the sky.
Everything is truth here
there is not one comforting lie.
I'd make attempts to give up
but can't be bothered to try.
I have built my home
where good has gone to die.

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.

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.

I stand on the forecourt
another job bound to drag
late into the night
in some other state
very far from home.
I'm staring across the street
waiting for other people
so I can get back to work
and I see the houses.
Like rows of uneven teeth,
different colors. Satellite dish
on that one.
Little differences.
I am suddenly consumed by
the enormity of all the
unfolding lives.
How I stand among them
but don't belong.
How my own life is miles
away and missed.
How we are all vital
but we are all strangers.
You read my words now
see these thoughts.
In this moment of wonder
which I here record
you have known me.
I wish I could know you
but I stand here
a stranger.
I intrude on your lives
and we'll never meet
and that's odd to me.
We're all out here, alone,
leading Stranger's lives.

Sometimes when I lay down my head
I'm sinking in oceans of neatly made bed.

I finally work out exactly what to say
and look to see you're a billion miles away.

Light dances delicate from pane to pane
in the apartment and between bouts of rain.

Heat spreads across my legs and chest
as I snuggle in and hope for the best.

And these are the whiled hours of our very own.
Not the hours bought and paid outside our home.
Flashes of smiles and visions of light
now and then interrupted by the odd fight.
And I'd trade it for nothing, we all always claim.
But we head in to work and trade it for money just the same.

I often wonder what life could really be,
If allowed to be just you and me.
When able we while away or moan and fuss.
It seem to be about currency and not just us.

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.

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?

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.

Once we trod the surface
like behemoth gods,
we moved through the world
like great ships under coal power
caring nothing for what
was in our way
or left in our wake.
And we could've been more
careful
I think we can admit
but ******* it's difficult
to slow down during
the doing of it.
When dawn came we were changed.
Softer round the middle
thinner in the knees
grayer at temples, perhaps.
Oh how gums and hairlines recede!
Payment for our lifetimes of greed.
And sure I've regrets,
what of it?
Sure I've been brought low,
who hasn't?
But ******* your eyes and see
how I stand whole and complete.
The years have caused me to bend
but nothing has broken me.

In the dark wood, where the stars
whisper stories to the fallen leaves,
we sit in robes of cobwebs and moonlight.
In search of lighted windows,
skeletons hanging from fire escapes,
perhaps punished mariners
caught by East India on open city seas.
Oh, we have our secrets
and they are kept.
Silence like mausoleums.
We cast will-o-wisp lights
from corpse candles and laugh
smoke into cold night air.
Walk inside the flashlight beams,
roaming ghoul haunted city streets.
We sit in gutters and divvy our spoil.
Yesterday's joyous revelry disappeared
in the digital blue light of tomorrow.

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.

I want to tell you everything,
but I want it direct and true.
No sing song nonsense like I always do.
I want to tell you simply about where I've been, about what I've done.
I wanna tell you about what I've seen.

I don't know where to start.
Where to begin.
I want to trim the fat from
this cut of meat and leave
it serviceable, tender
and lean.

This place in my head where the story lives
is cluttered and filthy.
Slightly out of use.
I want to scrub and polish the dirt
from these floors until you can see
the notes of starlight glittering
in the reflection of its sparkling clean.

I want to wring the purple
from my prose.
And every sweet lie from my throat.
I wanna wipe the slate and speak
and for once say just
exactly
what I mean.

The truth is blunt.
Any attempt to sharpen it
turns it into a lie.
I watch tv relentlessly and the secret
is I do it to hide.
'Cause when the movie ends I'm terrified
that I'll see my stepfather
in my reflection
on the darkening screen.

And listen, I swear,
that's not what I am
or what I want to be.
Ripped from my bed at three am
all held breath and violence
and varied screams
taught in his bitter
drunkard's mean.

My own father loved me in absentia.
MIA, but through no fault of his own,
a tale as old as two Christmases
with the slight twist that extreme poverty gives.
Happiness did not shout in
my lifetime.
It was nearly extinct and
like any dying animal
it would just wail and keen.

I want to overcome and improve.
I try so hard.
I've tried on all these shoes
and found myself miles away in my efforts.
But the monster he made lives
just below my practiced and
patient lean.

I want to be honest.
I want the power to say these truths.
Because even though I live afraid
my heart explodes with love
for you, my littlest man,
my tiny king.
I'd die to make you smile,
my sweetest Bean.

I've got my father's name.
First, last and middle.
My Grandfather's eyes
set deep and haunted.
I can wiggle my ears
I've got double jointed
ring fingers and thumbs.
I've got Grandma's nose.
Like everyone else
I'm living on borrowed time
waiting for the far off day
when I finally get what's mine.

In my life time I've been
bad, lapsed and formerly Catholic.
I've stood on both coasts
and wondered at forever.
I've got a thousand legacies
I've failed to live up to.
The third to have my name.
I've wilted under a night time
sea of stars and lamented all
I had failed to become.

Before you were even
the size of a bean,
my beautiful baby boy,
my precious PeterBean,
I refused to burden you
with the legacy of my name.
When you were born
I held you and realized
I had never known love
or fear or wonder until
you came along and taught me.
My brother smiled
"He has your nose."
I laughed,
"I know."

Spit my name out.
It isn't at home in your mouth.
Step away from the failure
of every ******* day
and embrace a future
of doing things a new way.

Kept in small rooms
the twin furies stretch.
Then push against boundries
until little is left.
They blink into the darkness
and wonder what's next.

And the fires, guys!
They've still not gone out!
The whole thing's still burning!
The smoke stings too much to shout.

We're so close to the end, now.
I've never felt worse.
I'm scared and I'm tired
and there is always more work.

No one's coming to save us.
It's up to us, hope as we might.
The world's on fire
and we still haven't a light.

The ghosts of
mothers and fathers
move in us all
still.
Unfinished
as the first draft of act three.

Listen: we are the heirs
of memories.
We are the inheritors
of bones and dust.
Ours is now monochrome
end of broadcast days.

The blue of
her eye.
The spiral in his
hair.
The toothy wide
smile.
The thousand yard
stare.

Shockwaves and echoes all.
Static on old television sets.
Guitars with repurposed frets.
Poetry borrowed from cemetery pall.

The aftereffects of
the dead, are we.
Bright sunny you,
big gloomy me.

Echoes calling through
the mists of time
with different words
But the mistakes?
The mistakes are the same.

Not repeat or homage
but with certainty
pastiche.

We are the shadows of
tombstones,
in many and
varied ways.
Built like roads on
these thousands and thousands
of graves.

Historical nonfiction
on endless
repeat.
Each of us a clip show,
nostalgic but
still,
obsolete.

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.

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.

Born on election day
his first act was to keep
someone from voting.
Broke two ribs on the way out
and never allowed to
forget it he thought himself
little more than a burden.

He was no fan of contact
but had only been conceived
because his mother had grown up
love-poor and thought of
her swelling belly as a remedy.
He always did seem to disappoint.

He would look after the
others, the newer solutions she'd
swollen with since, in her absences.
He didn't find purpose
he wasn't sure there was
any to find
but he early learned obligation.

They were little ghetto geniuses
destined to die in the poverty
they'd been born into
and cursed to realize how
****** up that really was.
High scores on tests and
whispers of potential from
the crueler adults,
sad eyed acknowledgment
from the kinder ones.

He got pushed around
moved about. Shushed and insulted.
He got beaten mercilessly
but refused to let them tie
on the puppet strings.
They would make efforts
with violence to change him
into the shape they liked
but made him into spite instead.

He grew distant and removed.
He let no one in.
He hated himself
and the world
and everyone and everything.
He recognized the cliche.

Lost for days in narcissistic
self inspection he emerged
with no better understanding
of himself or the world.
He thought as little of himself
as the violent world did.

He carried around scars
and thought his misfortune
meant the world owed him.
Sure, he was wrong,
but he only suspected so.

In time the world changed
when after years he finally
looked around and noticed
that everyone else was
suffering too.
It wasn't a happy ending.
Is there such a thing?

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.

Pin back your hair
with flower and bone.
Decorate your house
with river skipped stone.
Breathe in deep
the musty smell of loam.
Seal all your letters
hang up your phone.
Leave your bank
discard your loan.
Redefine the outside world
as a part of your home.

We ran naked down to the fairy cicrles
and laughed like sweet summertime.
I know it seems a thousand years
and triple that number of miles
away and ago. I know. I know.
It can't happen tomorrow,
never would today but, old friend,
it could be one yesterday away.

I loved you like family
and held you like hope.
You smiled so darkly
and bound me in rope.
And tragedy followed us
wouldn't let us cope.
Happiness a breath outta reach
and way beyond scope.
We refused to talk about it
pausing only to mope.
A tired old story, perhaps,
filled with tired old trope.
I once asked for my freedom
you called me a dope.

This morning I plucked a daisy
like the ones you'd put in your braid
and remembered a life we were given.
Where we were forced to behave.
I won't ask you to recall it
I won't force you to be so brave.
I no longer have my fire, my spark.
I'm hollow now, my world bare and dark.
Happy, for sure but much less gallant.

Sing me a song
in six or so notes.
Float me away
in several old boats.
Bundle against the cold
in scarves or in coats.
It's coming day over day
regardless of votes.
We've become empty
as brand new totes.
Spectacle without substance
like parade floats.

When I was young
the tragedy made me a hero.
Today I've become
just a man.
It's all gotten better
but it's all out of my hands.
It's not what I expected
I've learned not to plan.

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.

The sky is on fire,
it's early July
it's late at night.
My 14 hour shift
ended but I'm
an hour outside Baltimore.
I'm missing out on you.
I know it.
I'm shackled to the
systems of a fading empire
and you'll be grown
and I'll join my dead.
My dead never met you.

I get to thinking about the end.
How it'll be everything.
The little annoying ****
but also the good stuff.
It'll be left mournerless
when it all joins me
and my dead.

The people who loved me.
The people on the losing
side of my struggle
of my timeline.
They never knew me as a father,
some didn't know me as a man.

You belong to the generation
with the bleakest future so far.
I wanted to give you the world,
my littlest man,
unfortunately I am.
I don't have the words.

I'm thinking about the end.
Not the ending.
They're semantically different, sure.
Still...
They are not the same.
I am missing people.
All the time.
My living and my dead.

It's early July,
I'm tired. I feel old.
I feel like a bag of rocks
that used to be a wall.
When I was young,
so many dead ago,
I waited all year long
for the summer.
It was our time,
Goonies one and all.
Summer is different now.

I'm thinking about the end.
TV is over. I feel orphaned.
I used to watch Power Rangers
on a black and white set.
With tuning knobs.
At some point TV became movies
and movies became TV
and they both started to die.

I'm driving down 895
and I see the colorful explosions.
I can hear the pop pop
over the road noise.
The smoke falls and
the streets of Baltimore
are filled with descended haze.
I follow the fireworks home.

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 used to be so ******* brave.
Now filled to burst
with impotent rage.
Biting my tongue in traffic
shaking like a gun in a hand
curse words broken in my empty mouth.
In search of a lighthouse
we're crashing against the rocks.
Taking our difficult feelings
and cramming them into a buried box.
Desperately trying to be a better man
trying so ******* hard to be kind
asking for permissions and hearing,
"Go ahead. I don't mind."
We're still trying to find heaven
but only crashing to the ground.
A thousand elevators all lobby bound.
Waves, twisted metal, flames, wrecks and
impossibly deafening sound.
I was a he/him millennial
identifing primarily as mad
now to one little boy I'm just dad.
To all these brand new fears
I'm now a slave.
I'm ******* terrified, buddy. But I swear,
I used to be so ******* brave.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I find it hard to say,
I say it's hard to find.
I'm over a bail of hay,
and broken of spirit and mind.

I'm lost in the woods in the dark.
I'm running out of time.
I struggle against pitch black and bark.
I want to be happy, but worry it's a crime.

And can we be real for a second?
'Cause every new day is a ******* chore,
and I am always tired and terrified
teetering on the precipice of a steep decline
in mental health or personal wealth
out of luck. Out of time.
There is no ******* context.
Only words.
Words that always have to rhyme.

Let's pretend we're happy. Let's dance.
You and I will keep perfect step, we two.
We can set the world alight given the chance.
Become us and not just me and not just you.

I need you to tell me that I'm not alone,
that others feel this from time to time.
I'm feet of clay and heart of stone.
I'm useless ******* meter and ******* rhyme.

I love you. I really do.
I need you.
Believe me when I write.
I wish it was easy to say. I wish I was better.
More.
I'm buried in style but wish the substance was there.
On better display.
I am a museum of hidden exhibits.
Tradition in the place of honesty.

I love you.
I really do.
I hope you love me, too.
But I honestly haven't got a clue.

It's so strange how it changes scale.
See, my whole life I've been the star.
At the center of the tale,
head and chin over the bar.

The story is yours, now.
So casually it changed hands.
Started, with a sacred vow
two meaningful matching bands.

And you look a little like us
a little like them.
Borrowed expressions of fuss
on an unfinished gem.

My identity changed overnight
without the help of a phonebooth.
I'm become "Dad", my new birthright.
I was me until you altered my truth.

You amaze me, kid.
I watched you learn to smile.
Knocked me right off the lid
every loss just one more for the file.

And one day it'll be over and done.
One day you'll leave me. Get up and go.
When you're gone what do I become?
I'll be empty? Take of me for you to grow.

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.

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.

Between you sits a shared order of fries,
silence, anger, regret and of course, lies.
She licks your wet blood from her claws,
and glibly recites a litany of your flaws.

I'm right here.
******* it!
I'm still right here!

And you holler at the open night sky
clutching at your wounded inner eye
and the question shoots from your core:
"How much is enough?"
The answer, as always: More and more and more.

I mean, what the **** is personal privacy anymore?
We're splattered across digital realms like slasher movie gore.
Trying to communicate complex thoughts as sharp as swords,
using no more than one hundred and forty ******* words.

You don't have the means, your heart now a ******* wound,
to put a dent in the argument against you she's crooned.
It's like sitting before the cosmic mind for a game of chess.
It's like defending yourself when you've only ever been a ******* mess.

I am mountains of doubt and rivers of fear.
I haven't gone anywhere. I'm still right here
I just need you to see me, my love. My dear.
I'm still right ******* here.

One warm night in 2004:
I'd chased our old friend
around until finally
he collapsed onto that
bench in the quad.
We sat on the low wall
and looked at him.
"You're a good friend."
You told me, " You're always
making sure everyone is okay."
You asked what he'd taken
I told you it was on my list
of questions to get answered.


A year before:
I heard a knock
at the front door.
I opened it to find
you with our old friend.
"Heard you missed your bus."
You'd said, "Campus seems empty
without you."

Months later I bent over
to light a cigarette off the
glowing orange of
your cigarette.
Twin brief embers lighting
the cramped backseat
of your car.
You smiled,
and looked at me with
lightning in your eyes.
"We're kinda kissing."
You told me.
You moved closer...

That night:
You lit a cigarette and handed
it to me to light my own.
Our old friend slept it
off on the bench.
"Who takes care of you?"
You asked.
I told you it was on
the list.
"I could take care of you."
You'd said.

Before:
We were parked by my house
you had set off the
automatic locks on my door
so I couldn't get out.
I raised an eyebrow at you.
The ionic power between
your eyes and my heart
felt like it'd tear me apart.
"You can kiss me, you know."
You paused, "I want you to."
I moved closer...

We didn't last. We were
on an escalator at a mall
when it became official,
only I don't think we knew that.
A friend made it official
not us. Our friends had
the best of intentions.
But...
I moved further away from you.
I wasn't ready.
You weren't sure.
There is an outdoor table
on campus where it ended.

That night:
Maybe the moment
didn't matter to you
but it was the moment
I decided.
We'd already broken up
but everyone thought...
We thought it too,
that we might
not be finished.
That our flame might
be rekindled and burn
forever.
I put out my cigarette and
I turned back to
our old friend and I said,
"We've tried that. Didn't work."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Somewhen I will know truth from lie.
I'll be forgotten. Somewhen I'll die.
We will burn the candle down to wick.
We'll smile as we know every single trick.

We are seed, tossed to birds.
We are empty hours and hollow words.
Without a purpose but filling a need.
Monitors left absent a scrawling digital feed.


Tomorrow the sun will burn
Our stomachs will move and churn
That angry old moon will rise.
And our lips will tell innocuous lies.

We'll scrape the bottom of every barrel
Our eyes always wise but also feral.

We will be small gods with small needs
Big on mood but lost for worthy deeds.

One day we will love without earthly fear,
With wild abandon and endless cheer.
We will release all that we've pent.
Now only embers. I am fires spent.

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.

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'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.