Kept in small places.
Inhale: Breathing in rain.
Leave this place to the winners
the sinners
the last people standing
when the rest fall.
Remember: That crystallizing moment,
at the eye of a raging storm
when everything made sense
at long last.
Turn away, retreat if there is time.
So little time.
(Receding hairline)
We have so much to do,
so much left to say
and so much to make up for.
So very much.
Atone: Do not repent.
Make up for the things
you have done.
Wrought.
Smells like sidewalks,
after a storm.
The very storm we
run from and we
run to.
Exhale: Visible breath
like winter.
Frozen rainbows,
light trapped by the cold.
And we wait for all of
this to thaw.
Spring...
Summer...
Fall,
and those left standing.
Here in these lives,
these apartments
and homes.
These spaces
and people
where we are kept.
These small places.

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 believe that I am capable of anything.
I believe I am great.
I know that greatness is a part of me.
Liar.
I'm a ******* liar, is what I am.
Nearly thirty years I've done nothing
with all I've been given.
I'm overweight, I'm lost, I'm a giant of misplaced ego.
I am so ******* tired of being so ******* poor.
I am sick of living in a rut
and knowing--
In my ******* bones, knowing--
that I'm the only person who can pull me out.

I remember being young, sitting cross-legged
in your living room as you watched scary movies,
through your fingers as always.
I remember being brave and strong.
I cannot reconcile the me, sitting beside you,
trying to lend you my courage,
with me, balding and fat and constantly afraid of failure.

I recall my--
Pathetic!--
schoolboy flirtations with greatness.
I remember the adulation from my peers.
Liar, I remember the adulation from the peers
I picked.
The ones I decided to be around.

I am poor, and tired. I am beat down by the
riots and the killings
and the people running my country into the ground,
with my knowing--
in my bones, knowing--
consent.

I don't want to be great anymore.
I'd settle for good.
I could be good, I think.
Liar.
I hope.
They aren't mutually exclusive,
like I thought they were,
sitting cross-legged in your living room.

I whisper a truth to myself, now,
across years, across my lifetime,
"You would trade good, you liar.
You would trade good for remembered.
You would trade good for Great. And you know it."

And ******* my lying eyes, I do know it.
In my ******* bones, I know it.

The window is rolled down halfway
so I can let the ash off my cigarette.
The music, which holds special
meaning to us and faceless others
who have been touched by it,
blares from the dying speakers.
The yellow lines snake ever onward,
winding parallel to each other.
Forever yearning to meet and always
being denied.

The sun went down so long ago
that it is daring us to watch it rise.
We are six cans of monster, two packs
of Red 100's and eight hours past
caring what the fickle thing decides to do.
We are also two days past the desire to
sleep at all.

We tell jokes, poking fun of the things
we don't dare in polite company.
Enjoying the kind of monsters we can
only be around each other.
We share tales of our ****** deviations,
more candid than we've ever been to
anyone else. The lesser experienced,
namely me, blush profusely at the
notion of where parts of us have been.
We lament lost love, unmitigated failure,
wasted potential and the million little
white lie excuses for why we've yet to
become the icons we dreamed ourselves.

When finally sleep begins to win the
battle for control of our eye lids
we take turns behind the wheel.
The window is never rolled up, although
I'm the only smoker aboard.
It's constant noise a reassurance that we
are still moving.
Though in what direction is anyone's guess.

We'll know our destination when we
get there. We'll know when our bodies
cry for food, or *****, or our girlfriends
cry for us to come home.
Mostly we'll know when we can't
go any farther. When we have to turn
around.

I'll always remember our late night
“adventures”.
I'll be an old man, waiting on the
final stroke of any clock I'll ever
hear, and I'll still be listening for
the reassuring sound of wind rushing
past my half open window.
Still feel the cold in my fingertips.
Still feel the warmth and laughter
in my heart.
That has been your gift to me, my friends.
I cherish it always.

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.

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."

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.

I found a letter you wrote
when you were thirteen
and it doesn't bleed right
it barely reads right.
In youth there was fear
and lightning and violence
and sure maybe you weren't
complete but you were whole.
An island on which only you
could stand.
You could look into the distance
but you couldn't see forever
and maybe it scared you
but it didn't really matter.
You didn't deserve forever, anyway.
I read the letter and didn't
see you anymore.
Time and tide have long since
had their effect.
The island has gone
the violence
the silence
the fear
they've gone, too.
I look out into the distance
and I can see forever
but this letter,
these scared pages,
they aren't me
and by that, I mean you.

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

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

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

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

I've been thinking lately
about tumbling into space.
Spinning heel over head
through the cosmos
in intergalactic freefall
for the rest of always
and how familiar that
would feel to me.
I've been thinking that
if I could change the entire
fundamental makeup of
the slowly migrating universe,
to warp space and time, would it
be to my benefit to do so?
Small changes ripple outward
having profound consequence
on things we cannot even
fathom the connections between
and is it right?
Is it Good, capital g,
to make those changes?
Is it worth the risk of
losing this to illustrate
the profundity of it?
If I could move stars
would I do so for you?
If I could compress gravity
enough to warp time
would it even matter
that, from a
specific perspective,
we'd technically have
more time together?
I've been thinking lately
about forever
because it doesn't exisit,
it's an abstraction,
a thought given etheral form,
but it is also the only unit of
measurement that feels
consistent with what
I feel for you.

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 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.

I.
Where does the time go?

With cupped hands going slowly empty.
Ignite like a sun in this very room.
Burn for us.
Burn.

II.
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Falling.
The wind rushes by.
Accompany this flight with taunts.
You cannot achieve.
Over and over.
Falling.

III.
I’ll never be you! I don’t want to be you!

Voices echo back.
Bouncing off tile and brick.
Distorted.
Words that don’t fit
in sentences that don’t make sense.

IV.
I just have to get out of this town.

Turn signals switched like muscle memory.
Showers taken like anniversaries.
Faces cycle through.
Features changing only with time.
This is forever.
Escape.

V.
How did I become this person?

Read to me.
Teach me the stories.
Tell me the values.
Whisper life into these bones.
I ache to fly.
I see your sky, the clouds soft and perfect.
I want that.
Show me.

It all basically happened in Vegas,
Which is to say it was outrageous.
But when the car pulled away,
and we examined the remains of the day,
it turned out what most of us had was contagious.

The sheets still warm with you and me,
I am overcome with the same old guilt.
A shame that whispers,
like a dark secret down cobwebbed allies,
my own hidden name.

How, I lay and wonder, as the
sweat cools on our skin,
did man ever grow if the result
is always this?

Obvious, though it is.
After all, here we sit.

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?"

Blinking back the bright,
arm as a shield against the light.
Lost in open spaces.
These free and empty places.
They shout it from rooftops
and bellow it at full stops,
"Run. Run and hide"
This is open forum, long form suicide.
Every verse a kind of hopeless rant,
from broken homes and men who can't.

Dreams are a curious thing...
Sheltered ears.
Scattered light.
Repressed fears.
Conquered might.
The ever present sting...

And y'know:
******* my eyes,
and sweetest lies.
******* these false starts,
and bitter hearts.
******* this fractured life,
and this endless strife.
******* my hell-bound pride,
and the day I'll have died.

Was it tough to live it all?
To build a cage and watch it fall?
Because, man, look at it...
Passionate anger and the waiting pit.
Look, it's all an excuse to grieve.
That said: How can we ever leave?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been nearly forty years
spent just picking at this sore
and if bleeding me is winning
I wish I'd been keeping better 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.

There is a part of me that loves it
when you haven't washed your hair
in four days, loves the smell of it.
There is a part of me that doesn't understand
your playful nature about ******,
but loves you for it regardless.
There is a part of me that watches you
play your video game even though I'm
pretending to be caught up in my book.

You told me that your eyes are blue
when you are happy.
I confess that at first I never noticed,
that is until the day they weren't.
Eyes like a mood ring, we are
a curious species, and you a prime
specimen of the lot.

Your weight is so slight to me, even though
you never seem to be happy with it.
Beating your hands against your thighs,
complaining that most girls aren't so
thick. I don't understand how you can't
just look in the mirror and see that you're
beautiful.
I don't understand that you can't see your
life swelling to burst, infecting the world
with laughter, and with joy.
It seems so obvious to me.

Five years into the experiment of us,
and I am utterly captivated by you.
This is not a freak occurrence, not some
strange collection of lies and comfort,
every time I see you, I can feel my cold,
cynical outlook melt into the
living, breathing, screaming word of hope
you create around you.
Your own personal bubble of paradise.

I have green eyes always. Dull and uninspired.
But you can see the storm there,
just behind these eyes, these old man's
eyes on a young man's face.
(Remember when they said that?)
You, of all people, can see through the disguise
of my eyes, you can see into the heart
of me.

I stand in awe of your movement.
Did you know that?
I suppose not. You're every move is a
miracle to me.
When I freeze, so struck by you,
I see the slow smile spread, the giddy
joy that moves from your lips to
your limbs. That compels you to
run for me, across crowded rooms,
empty hallways, and filthy bedrooms.

My god are your eyes blue today.

I heard your voice
turned through digital
lines and distance
into a hollow shadow of itself.
You screamed my name,
almost roared with that
wild lion power you've
never kept secret,
tonight, you'd say, tonight!
We're gonna fix you, man
and then we're gonna
save the world!
We're gonna burn our
faces on the surface
of the moon so big that
we'll be the advertisement
for Earth throughout the cosmos.
You and I, love, cosmic
ambassadors.
And we'll never feel alone
in the universe, my love,
because our faces will be
there together, for always.
Tonight, baby, we're gonna be
forever.

You make me feel...

How does one go about
describing music?
How would you explain
the color red?
If you have bread after
starving for three days,
can you describe to someone
that has always eaten three
squares what it felt like to
be full?
What words capture the smell
of earth after a hard rain?

You make me feel...

Move the couch there.
Push the dresser up against
that door.
Draw the shades.
(Who talks like that?)
Throw the blankets against
the bottom of the door.
Move close to me, across
the ocean of cotton between us.
We have built seclusion.
Isn't it wonderful?

You breathe my stale air.
I know it's not romantic,
not to anyone but me.
But you do.
My head rests higher on
the bed. My warm
breath trickles down
to where you breath in.
I can't sleep with my head
under a blanket. Warm air
doesn't breathe right to me.
But you breathe my stale air.
I love you for that.

My bones don't ache.
My food doesn't taste different.
My eyes don't play tricks.
My home is still my home.
My colors are as vibrant as always.
My dreams as dark and empty as always.
When you aren't around
I'm not a different person.
My world isn't different.
I'm just not alive.
Not really.
Not without you.

You told me you hated me.
Then you told me you loved me.
That was the first time you said it.
I had always heard how close
those two feelings are.
Love & Hate.
(The ampersand is fancy.)
But you said it.
“I hate you.”
“Why?”
“Because I can't stop falling
in love with you.”
I should have laughed.
I should have bristled to
mark how silly I thought
that cliché was.
But I didn't.
I danced in place.
I gave the wall next to me
a high five.
I never do that.
I believed you.
I actually believed you.
How remarkable is that?

I always liked fall.
It's a better word than
Autumn.
Leaves fall.
We fall.
I fell.

We do not glide into love.
We have no control of it.
I did not glide for you.
I fell for you.
Closed my eyes,
leaned backward,
took a deep breath
and fell into you.
Into us.

There is a hill.
It stands between there,
the who I was, and here,
the who I am.
It is large, it has odd
lumps in it and it smells
of leather and flowers.
Like spices and fruit.
Sin and altruism.
It smells like your hair.
It smells like your neck.
Like your skin.

I have long since landed
but every time you smile,
your slow and wonderful smile,
I can feel the weightlessness
of the ****** thing.

I will always fall for you in
the fall.
I don't care for the
vagueness of
Autumn.

I have told myself a million times
that “this is the best moment in my life.”
I have sworn, billions of times
that leaves never seemed to fall
like this before, that rain never
felt so good on my skin.

It's just the fit.
Like we were factory made.
My hand fits perfectly into the
small of your back.
You fit against my contours, as
though you were molded, or I was,
into a shape convenient to the
purpose.

Sometimes, when you breath out,
your eyes flicker slightly.
Like the end of a first date.
They aren't sure if they should
stay or go.
I watch as you mumble and
fall back asleep. Re adjusting so
you won't have to sleep with your hair
pushed against your neck by my elbow.

You rested against the pillow.
Sweaty and smiling. Your cheeks
flushed, your eyes half closed from
the exertion. You looked wonderful.
Messy hair and tired eyes.
Wonderful.
It was the million and first
best moment of my life.

Keep me in your bastion
until I dream of home.
Twist me into lover’s knots,
till flesh rips from the bone.
Close me in the pages
for all I must atone.
Lodge me on this winter night,
I’ve come from places unknown.
Lock me in you golden heart,
least I once again be allowed to roam.
I beg you, to keep me in your heart,
just don’t leave me alone.

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 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.

How could any reasonable
person not live in fear
of the moment when,
swaddled in blankets,
their child opens their eyes
for the first time?
Who could want that?
And why?
It is a kind of madness.

I have seen what a father is,
what they do, or don't.
I have seen the ones that
want to be a friend,
the ones that have given up,
and the ones that respond
with violence.
I have seen the violence above all.

Tell me how I am supposed
to look at this world,
this broken, horrible *******
world that we were handed by
the irresponsible
Me generation before us,
and see a place where I
would want my children to grow,
to live to breathe and to learn.
This place doesn't dream,
it only sleeps.

And we are so many, and
there is so little.
Room, food, money,
joy.
The quantities are all out of sorts.
My god it's a nightmare.
It's unthinkable.
It's a ******* of nature.

But sometimes, through the
polished glass door, I see my reflection
super imposed on your face,
and I think, we would
make such wonderful children.
You would make such a wonderful Mom.
It is a kind of madness.

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.

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.

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

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

Me and Sisyphus have been
watching that ******* boulder
retreat down the *****
for a lifetime and there
has been no improvement yet.
A comma would change the
meaning in these decades
of regret but butterflies
don't beat wings at any distance
in the story we were born in.
Maybe you can tell?
I've bleeding bone where
fingers once wiggled but
the work is still incomplete,
****** up or half finished.
I used to watch raindrops
race on the car window
on long drives or bright storms
but I never could seem to
pick the winner.
We're alike in that way, love
even if you think I'm wrong
and why shouldn't you?
I've made a career outta
always being wrong.
I had thought this thing
was finally about over,
thought I'd get it up that hill
for good and for always,
but you know how it is
with me and ol' Sisyphus.
Somehow the story isn't over
and I find myself looking
at the ***** again.
always again.
I grit my teeth, darling,
wipe the sweat from my brow
place my hands on the friction
smooth surface of that obstinate
rounding old ******* rock
and push again and again and
always with all my might.
Stick around, love.
One of these days I may just
accidentally get something right.

I don't know how it got to safety last,
and cable television lifeblood.
I don't know when the dreams
got eaten out of you
and you turned into this.
Nonsense.
We were born screaming and unprepared,
we weren't meant for anything.
We weren't meant for this.
Was anything meant for this?

If we have nothing manifest
before us and no expectations
for better, and we don't, friend.
Let us be great, instead.
Let us lift those in need.
Let us sing the songs that bring peace.
I do not mean pacify, I mean peace.
Let us love the way we wish the world loved.
Let us become warmth and light.
And why not?
We aren't supposed to do anything else.

We are form seeking purpose.
We are lyrics without meaning.
We search for it, when we should create it.
We dig when we should build.
My God we can build.
What exactly do we think we are,
if not masters of our destiny?

Nonsense.

There is a meaning to life.
I know that there is.
I also know that it isn't
just one thing for all people.
How could it be?
Are we not told, a million
times and in a million different
ways, that we are all unique?
Are we not snow flakes, to use
the vernacular.

There is a meaning to life.
I know this more now than
ever before.
I don't know my own.
I'm afraid to, I'm young yet.
There is so much meaning to
be squeezed from this
humble man.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
Always changing.

There is a meaning to life.
I know that it can be hard to
see.
So ****** hard to see.
It is not blinding, it is not
far off.
It is based on drive,
on ambition,
on joy,
on pain,
on you.

There is a meaning to life.
It is made.
Never found.
Stop searching, put down
the maps and the books.
Cast off the chains and the
labels.
Make it.

Count my life in penny and dime.
Measure my hours in tea.
Know the whole of me,
if you have the time,
using lengths of twine.

Keep me in your cage.
It’s comfortable in it’s own way,
if only for a very brief stay.
Kept too long and be met with rage.
So say Magi and Sage.

Run with me to a place far from here.
Hand in hand I can lead you.
Be with me, be strong, be true.
There is a time and place for cheer,
So I’ve been told, so I hear.

I live in fear
I've said a little too much
or that once counted out
my deeds won't've been enough.
I feel tight awaiting release
coiled like a spring or rubber band.
Cocked like a shaking gun waiting
for input from an unsteady hand.
Now I know that I know what I am
but I worry that's the catch.
While everyone else unwound
I just continued to twist and stretch.
I don't know on what criteria
a human life is accounted
I measure and I weigh
but the summit is not mounted.
I wish that I believed
"Love will save us all!"
but I can't and I don't
and my spring is turning to fall.
Still, I am surrounded by love
and would do well to remember:
That this could be the criteria
on which human life is measured.

“How about a pick-me-up?”
The strap of your bra was peeking
through the slight fabric of your
thin shirt. Inviting me to get
lost in the pale shoulder it clung to.
There were lots of places around
that would sell us energy drinks
and cigarettes at three in the morning,
but I acted as though I couldn't
remember where they were.

“We'll just drive until we see one.”
But I didn't want to drive. I wanted
to hold your hand forever.
To have your small, delicate hands
wrapped up in my oafish and
calloused fingers. I wanted
to feel your soft, I needed to know
that it was there. I wanted to sit
awhile in the smell of you
and pretend that this night meant
as much to you as it did to me.

“We could walk, if you're worried about gas.”
I don't believe in fate, I don't
think anything is predetermined to be
any one particular way. But just for
that one minute I wanted to believe
that you were being pushed by
invisible strings toward me. That
in your earthly home I could find a
place where I finally belonged.
I held your hand as we crossed streets.

“I'll protect you.”
I joked, I lied, and I hoped.
I would protect you forever, from
anything if you would let me.
I would cradle you close, like a
precious gem or a hurt animal,
I would breath my stale life into
your form until we were both
alive and fresh for the first time.
Let me be that man. Let me be the
man you want but don't need.
I would do anything for that.

“I had a lot of fun tonight. Thank you.”

Look:
I aspire to greatness
But keep tripping in maybes.
And I hope
I'm always hopin'
That I can be honest
That I can be open.
But I'm always closed off,
Always building walls.
And I only want to look tall
But I feel small.
And I don't think there's a god above,
But even if there was
I still think we ****** up.
Listen:
I've stood close enough to me to smell the scared.
I know I'm totally unprepared
I make attempts to be candid
But I walk around feeling branded
By the life and crimes that that man did.
Now I wish wish wish
On oceans of my weak willed ****.
But nothing gets crossed from the list.
But listen, look and beware
Because the more you haunt the more you care
And sooner than later you find them there
You've put them in your path to greatness
As an excuse to fake this
And keep moving around, shaking.
Bones cold, feet quaking
Hands tied from errands unfinished
And sins and wins and all those **** wishes.
Millennial ******* couched in garbage transmission
With nothing to show for years of effort but failed ambition
How have I been awake through all these lost years?
How have I allowed these trivial fears
To own me?
Beware:
It all catches you up, friend.
It finds finds finds you in the end.
But regardless of warnings given
We never ******* listen.
Shush. Pulse quicken.
Bomb's tickin', but our
War of wills has turned toward attrition.
**** it. Good riddance to worthless
Millennial ambition.

So many years ago now
my canvas sneakers crashed
into the cold water of puddles in
our wintery East Coast city streets.
The ratty and frayed ends of
my jeans absorbing the
freezing liquid until the
cold damp was almost to my knees.
The notebooks in my bag,
filled with the near incomprehensible
mathematics of young heartbreak
and the earliest sparks of
drafting talent,
and also the stray notation
copied only occasionally in classes,
jostled dangerously; threatening
to fall out into the cold and wet
world of early January near
the Atlantic.
The trees were long bare,
and I wore mostly flannel
and denium and the absurd
certainty that I would be remembered
long after I no longer walked
these city streets or moved from
class to class inside the halls
of my high school.
I fell in love with a girl who
I knew was too good for me
and I drank and smoked in the
thin wood behind my school.
I made promises of eternity
that I only half suspected that
I couldn't keep and I screamed
full throated with the endless
viger and vitality of youth
into the darkened clouds as though
to seed them with ice cold rain
through the sheer power of
my determination.
I was righteous, though often wrong.
I was proud, though of what
I couldn't say.
I was powerful and I was alive.
I was electric.
I was lightning, crashing into
the earth and demanding to be felt
insisting I be known.

These days I'm not even thunder.
I'm a river-smooth stone.
My edges have been pared off,
my exterior polished to shine.
I'm on display in a suburban home,
occasionally noticed, complimented
and just as soon forgotten.
I watch life go by and it seems
faster now than it was.
So glad you could come.
How are the kids?
What was it you did for a living?
Does any of this matter?
We were meant to move the world.
We were meant for more.
I was supposed to be more.
There will always be then
and time may be an illusion
but it feels like we're coming
to the end, regardless.
We're all just moments in a life
and when those moments are
forgotten what's left only
looks like we did
Once.
I used to care so much...
I am a ghost haunting my own bones
and I dream of distant thunder.
I look at the darkening clouds
but do not dare.
Do not scream.
I do not believe I can call the rain.
I struck this earth once
but I can never strike the same
place again.

They were wrapped in anything they could find.
The wind biting at them,
as the rain pelted every layer of cloth
they had swaddled themselves in.
It was difficult to remember
what brought them there in the first place.
To this monument of forgotten men and monsters.

Once upon a time they would gather,
all their materials put together
in the center of the room,
as the game went on.
It was always the same game
in those sepia toned days.

Now they stand there, trying to
cry for a fallen friend,
but unable to fight back the betrayal
in their hearts. Their words were hollow
,their strength had wanned.
The rain mingled with the dirt.

They had once discovered the fairer ***.
Hormone driven conversations
about the lurid things they would do
if ever given the chance.
Caught up in the notion that *** was
somehow life. Somehow it would
make them men.

Men now stood where
there should have been boys.
Only days ago
they were children. How could it
be misread so badly?
They assumed that growing up was
going to be slow, and fueled by wild
nights and the women who would
come and go. Now, in the rain stained
world they find themselves in as men,
it only took mutual tragedy.

When we were children we used
to pull the blankets up to our chins.
Repeating the same tired mantras
again and again, the more we can
repeat it, the more it will ring of truth.
“I'm alone in this room.
There is no such thing as monsters.”

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.

Find him sun faded and aching
the prersistent sound of scrapping
from the shovel dragging pavement
six inches behind him as the day went.
He don't know how to make ends meet
he's pushin' his chuck taylors up the street
hoping for answers in tired shakin' hands
knocked knees and our endless demands.
Thirsty, for him, has become a profession
and broke a bitter given confession.
He'll fix what needs fixin', mend what's broke
and he'll smile and nod at every cruel joke.
He'll repair your service to keep his kids fed
work hours beyond when it's time for bed.
Overtime and weekends. Eighty hour weeks
his kids'll wonder where daddy sleeps.
We'll hate him for never being around
Say he was silence when they wanted sound.
We never wonder how he felt, if he's aware
not that it matters. No one will ever care.

******* it!
I'm my father's son,
all wasted potential
and missing someone.
Dog tired and thirty-one.
Ripped and torn
awed and reverential.
nail bit and forsworn.

I want Rockwellian sepia.
Perfection and meaning
published in old print media.
The American visionaries resplendent
with firework dreams and consumed
in whitewashed, denim faded pleasant.

But it's you, my love and my meaning.
The person to convince me I'm not broken.
I hope to be the one, who can get you to open.
You keep me alive and breathing.

You spin me around and make me crazy.
Let me know when you want to, baby.
I'm tired of being built on maybe.

I'm an hour away from the American Dream,
but I'm terrified by the winning team.
I want you and me, Lori.
I want the old theater stage story.

******* it!

I am my father's son
all wasted potential
and missing someone.

My City is on Fire.
What do I do?
It did not creep.
It did not descend.
It Erupted.
Exploded.

My City is on Fire.
Intersections are blocked and streets are closed.
Barricades of men and women behind shields
occupy my home.
City hall is silence as the panic spreads.
Spreads with the fire and the noise.
Because once the sun goes down...
******* it all! Once that sun goes down!

My City is on Fire!
Protest turned to looting,
looting, in turn, to riot.
RIOT!
Of course they riot. Of course.
We are disenfranchised, obfuscated, beaten down.
Ignored.
God, if only we were ignored...

My City is on Fire.
It is a war zone of forgotten intentions and over reactions.
Like calls to like.
And we are so ******* human
we know only to answer violence with more.
More and more and more.
And what does it solve?
Nothing! They shout.
Their limbs lick with flame and mouths full of blood,
of hate.
And they know, in that moment, Nothing.
My city is on fire
and they would have it be for nothing.
Mean nothing.

Listen!  A struggle is proud, noble.
A struggle is worth it
A struggle is NOT a fight.
Disown that idea. Throw it from you.
Do not join the fight.
Do not join the riot.
STOP!!

My City is on Fire.
But my words are a whisper
against the shouting.
They are nothing against the violence.
Nothing.
What do I do?
Turn your pleas for help on the world.
Shout for change as messages
carried as updates
Through Trending Hashtags,
and Status Updates.
What else can we do?

@Baltimore: Help is on the way! #Baltimoreburning

My City is on Fire.
Get the word out.
People should know.
Need to know.
The world needs to see it
if they're going to join us.
If they're going to help us fix it.
My city is Burning, world.
We can't let it be for Nothing.