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.

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

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

I stayed awake to watch the sun come up.
I stayed up to watch it go down.
I climbed a tree to see what the country side told me.
I stood on the parking complex to hear the music of the city.
I ate food that were bad for me.
I drank V-8 and took those ****** vitamins.
I checked my blood pressure compulsively.
I checked my heart beat infrequently.
I drove fast through silent streets.
I slowed down on the highway.
I had not places to be.
I was in a hurry to get no where.
I breathed in the smoke from the end of this cigarette.
I breathed out under water to watch the bubbles.
I read like books were never going to be published again.
I watched DVDs until my eyes hurt.
When the third day came I slept.
I had such dreams.

Waiting in the nebulous
some day
is a hole that has yet
to be be dug in the ground
and we hope it
stays closer to
some day
and doesn't touch
soon.
We picture it as
a looming figure
in deep dark robes
with the gums pulled back
on a corpse smile
somewhere in the inky
depths of the hood.
Bone fingers point
toward our suddenly
very certain future
but that isn't it.
Not really.
It's that
Some Day
we're afraid of.
We stuck a stick
in the ground and
divided the shadow
into hours
strapped it to our
wrists and have
been terrified of it
ever since.
Nothing else on Earth
is worried about
Some day.
Just us.
They put a countdown
on our phones,
so important is it
to know how close
we are to over.
It is so vital we
can look over the
distant,
fingers crossed,
horizon and see it.
We invented a unit
of measure so we
could,
with growing fear,
count the seconds until
The End.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow contains hundreds of thousands of choices.
Options galore.
Tomorrow could be anything.
Tomorrow could always be more.

Yesterday is all regret.
Oh the things we could see, say or do.
The hours spent in effort or whiled away with you.
It is always over.
Nothing is left to lose.

Today is the hardest thing we do.
Today is about making decisions.
Today decides yesterday's regrets.
Today is what builds you.

If there was time to sleep,
I would dream larger
than mountains.
My fingers would rake
the pale sky and leave
streaks of the cosmos
in their wake.
I would conquer fear,
and death.
I would laugh at entropy.
Heat death wouldn't harm me.
I would stand my ground
among the myriad humiliations
of endless days.
I would let out all
the things that I keep in
and no more would I stand
a monster, but become
free as a cleansed man.
Obstinate structures would
never stand in my path
to rewards earned.
I would force the *******
world to a halt to hear
my words and beat
the rhythm my world
moves to.
A billion what ifs
would stretch before me
as I plucked the strings
of maybe to arrange
a song that matches
the perfect version of my life
But of course,
there is no time to sleep.
There is only now
and what is waiting.

When we were kids
you would chase me around
the block trying to kiss me
and giggle if you caught up.
I recall that you said
you liked my glasses
after I got my first pair.
You had missing teeth
and freckles on your nose
and a smile that looked like
flowers in bloom and somehow
I still remember your name.
I will remeber it the rest of
my life and I don't know why.
Maybe you still remember me?
I hope so, I really do
and I think if I hadn't
left that town...
Listen: Timing is everything.

I recall the look in your
eyes when you discovered
that we liked the same
Oasis song, I recall you
pulling me out of the store
we worked at during the
middle of our shared shift
to look at the brilliant colors
the pollution gave the setting sun
and saying you didn't think
any of our co-workers would
understand the beauty that
only you and I could see
and you looked at me with
your impossible blue eyes
and bit your lower lip
and I think I knew then
how you felt, but a few years
difference still mattered at
that age, and I was already
in love with someone else...
Timing, y'know? It's everything.

I loved you before you lived
and of course you never did.
We didn't even get a chance
to give you a name, didn't
need one yet.
Never would need to, in fact.
You were gone before
you were even here and
even though I never had so much
as one single interaction with you
I have never felt so sharp
a loss as I felt when I lost you.
It wasn't what was gone
that hurt so badly
it was the years and years
of what would never be.
Timing.
******* timing is everything.

There is a breath out there,
air, waiting for me to breathe
that will be the last one I do
and I'm running toward it
and I have been my whole life
and the people along the way
who I loved live in the air
I breathe in the interim
and the people I missed out on
or who missed out on me
live inside all that air that
I will never breathe.
I loved you madly in those
missed breaths, I hope you know,
but timing is everything.

I am so tired of toiling
blind in the dark
and of the casual unkindness
of traffic or queues for
parking spots or telephone
operators or restaurant tables.
I am tired of endless power
cords crisscrossing my
lifetimes and tabletops.
Of phone battery life and GPS
coordination and livestreams.
Tired of digital leases
and tubes for late night
breathing machines.
I am tired of learning
that sometimes it is too late
to try new adventures
and tired of ten hour
shifts at a minimum breaking
my hands and my back
and I'm tired of dying
but only half as much as
I'm tired of living.
I'm tired of timed pills
and twice a day vitals.
I'm tired of eating and sleeping
and winning and losing
and pressure cooker choices
and cooking.
and I'm tired of fighting
so hard to survive and tired
of having a ****** up childhood
and tired of trauma and
rehabilitation and tired
so very tired
of the nonstop
need to stop and explain why.
Why it's hard and why birds
are real and the earth isn't flat.
Why I'm like this because we all
know why I'm like this
it's been talked to ******* death.
I'm tired of me.
I wanna crawl outta my skin
and dance the night in my bones.
I wanna leave the past and the
shackles and the now and
the pain and the future and the
uncertainty and lay about
as nothing nowhere for untime.
I'm tired of it.
**** me and my *******.
How're you?

The Sky: Swollen and angry,
forces today into tonight.
It's going to open up.
Any minute now,
you can smell it already,
rain.
She cries: "Facebook me!"
Can you believe it?
Data, streaming endless,
from network to network.
P2P, not a single point of failure,
except this.
Except us.
Find me on the street,
friend.
Find me there.
Now: Never been so angry at youth,
or so scared of old age.
So young still,
but how my hair thins.
These bags under my eyes,
they won't go away,
these tired lines...
I suppose they  mean to stay.
Soon: Covered over in cinema fog,
haze to bleed the line away.
And so they go,
covered in clouds,
with the last remaining light
of today.

Falling through space
matter reflects the light
from a failing sun.
Here,
between the now and the then,
we slip past these gates,
provided a toll
exchanges
hands. From us to
them.
From them to
us.
Teach, or preach
of the wonders
around you.
If you can find the
words.
If you can find the
time.

There is a mirror image
but does it still
look like you?
Do you stand before
the altar of your bathroom
sink and whisper,
"нет,
but not yet"
There isn't time
to pause
to think
to wonder.
Is there a ghost in this machine?
Is there a need
to put a notion
behind the gears
of our universal,
cosmic meme?
And were we to drown,
weighed down by
hanging lines and
albatroses,
the thousand stupid ways
that we try to prove
our opinion matters,
*******! Hear me!
Look my way!
We fade to nothing,
ashes in pots
on mantle places,
dry bones in wet dirt.
We are all good people,
bound for modest graves.
Undone by ambition.
"Да,
that is always the way"
We are small men,
good in our minutes a day.
We are Tolstoy in passing,
In a Gethsemane way.

If that bell tolls one more time
I’ll rip it’s clock work out.
What does a man do with
all these hours in a day?
How do you fill them with meaning?
What is the meaning?

Tomorrow I will lay next to you,
breathing in the air
knowing home and love
and life and hope.
Knowing you.

There are raindrops racing each
other down my window pane.
I have these pictures, some are
of us, some are of places,
most are of you.

Tomorrow I will caress your hair.
I will fix the sheets on your bed,
rub your feet.
I will listen to your day,
and you will listen to mine.

Tonight (******* it tonight!)
I keep the time without you.
I hate the clock, I hate the light bulbs,
I hate the way your smile doesn’t
light up your eyes in pictures.

Tonight I’m on fire,
burning to ash and bone.
Tomorrow I will rise.
Reborn.

Picture a room
without a view.
A world where we do
what we ought to do.
She paused, because
******* this was hard to explain.
We don't live there,
in that soulless place,
where no one sees
the hands in front of them.
Where no one cares
because it'll be fine in the end.

He moved his arm,
sore from the arm rest.
Irony?
He thought.
Perhaps it is,
but no.
It is not.
She spoke volumes
about very little,
on shaky ground
where she could not stand.
He listened,
she accused time and again,
but didn't hear.
Her conversation
didn't actually include him.
It was her's to steer.

There was a lightness
in the air.
When she got
around to her point,
the one she couldn't bare,
her weight shifted from
foot to foot,
floor to floor.
Like falling,
screaming out
and then
no more.

He stood before her,
an examined man.
She looked on her works,
as one does when
their works are short
and callow,
with a series of small crimes
and personality quirks.
She had said of him
that he was bright,
but no great sight
to look upon.
He had called her shallow,
trite
and not quiet right.
Both were, as we all are,
very young
and very
wrong.
Both were only a harmony,
not a verse,
in each other's
song.

What they didn't know,
couldn't really,
was there was such
a thing
as too much
said.
Words, as lovely as
they are
and can
be,
Do little more than
buffer the blow
or render it
dead
when the point is blunt.
Say enough,
which can be very little,
and watch as they
do not look,
yet somehow
see.

Because I don't know how I will tell you,
or because I don't know if I am strong enough
to fight for the words,
I will say this:

When I was young I learned about tragedy.
I learned about loss on a scale that is unimaginable
unless you are there to see it, to breath it
and to be a sad living part of it.
I learned about hope, and courage,
and how the ordinary are extraordinary.
I learned that life is not a series of
tragic events, but a moment within where
you can find love and absolution.

How can I make you understand that this wasn't what
I wanted for you?
I didn't want to you to grow up in a world
that had once been so crippled by fear and
hate and pain and loss.
I wanted to give you the gift of peace,
like my parents wanted to give me.

How can I tell you that evil does not have a face,
but it does have an intention?
How can you possibly understand that
when everything is horrible we stand together
in the middle and embrace one another?
How?

There is so much that you will never see,
that I pray you will never have to learn.
What I want you to know,
indeed what I am struggling to tell you,
is that when everything seems darkest,
when everything is blood and dust and pain
and death, it is then, in that moment,
when we must
Hope the most.
It is then when we must
Love unconditionally.
It is then when we must always
be willing to let ourselves dream.

Because I don't know how to tell you,
because I don't want you to have to learn,
because I love you.

We live and have built uncounted cultures
on a spinning, pilotless spaceship
made of molten metal
covered in dirt and atmosphere
that is moving at 1.3 million miles-an-hour
and riding the wave of an explosion
older than the universe.
There is no fiction weirder
than every single second
spent alive in this universe
and we only get to be travelers
on this ship
for such a finite
amount of time.
Thank you,
fellow travelers,
for being here with me.

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

Cast your eyes toward me,
like a fisherman's line.
I will sing you starlight,
one single star at a time.

Breath in this air together,
and build toward the sky.
Because the dream is within us,
and these lover's knots we tie.

Don't promise me these rewards,
when I only want you.
Whole and total and every ounce.
Every word is true.

Yes, my love, distance is a factor.
Though the heart grows fonder.
But you know how I am,
my god, how my feet wander.

But if you kiss me before I go...
If you add up our days,
if I fight my very nature soul,
we will cut to the heart of our ways.

In the morning, how I love you.
Because of how the light hits your face.
Because of the smell of you.
Because I know this is my place.

Maybe it's the twisting,
the shrinking on the vine
or the hollow feelings
I've buried deep inside.
Or the late night emergencies
and the bleeding that
can't be stopped or tied.
Or maybe it's tomorrow
and the secrets it'll
find to scheme and hide.
Maybe it's the failures
following everything
we've ever tried.
Maybe the answers
aren't coming no matter
how much time we bide.
Maybe tonight is all the
chance we'll ever have
to stem the rising tide.
I don't have answers
to the long questions
of this ride
but I'm working toward
solutions to the promises
and the lies they've lied
even if it seems I'm aimless
or in penalty or standing
on the other side.

I remember, still, how
you smiled with blood
between your teeth
and the tangle of thrown
hands and kicked feet
in our search for Eliot's
elusive muttering retreats.
Neon bulbs and street lamps
lit up our nights and colored
these aching moments of our lives
and I recall we'd huddle
like insects under their lights
with lit cigarettes and lewd jokes
and the looming spectre of fights.
Children playing at being men
with so many tomorrows
still left ahead.
We knew each other
like story stucture.
Should the fire burn one
in would step his brother.
Alone but for each other
bonded with no shared
blood or father or mother.
Two of a kind
against a world
of full houses.
'Course that was then.
Before kids and spouses.
You're a country away
these days,
sharing facebook updates
about your son's latest
words and moods.
We send Christmas cards,
pictures of our families,
always a room should
the other ever visit,
say hi to the kid
to the wife.
Talk soon.
Good morning
oh? Sorry
Goodnight.
A million, billion years ago,
we tell our sons when
they ask about our
friend on the other
continent, before you,
during a period of strife,
Daddy trusted that guy
with his life.
They smile and we do, too.
Well, I do anyway.
I don't actually know
about you.

There are words laden with specialty or pop-cultural necessity.
They exist in this language or that and have meaning for the natives that the rest of us can't see or simply lack.
To give pause or to from front to back.
They add specificity to a subject to increase the clarity of communication to people of similar cultural heritage or proximity.
When we translate fictions that contain these linguistic marvels we get clever with syntax and verbage until the characters sound like they're speaking through marbles.
The words don't translate. The meanings are alien or insensate.
What need have I for a word that describes the particular movement of snow? For what purpose is that something I would ever need to know?

I think when I feel something emotional the exact same struggle to translate will invariably ensue.
How do I express my love or rage to someone that can't feel it
the way I do?
Does it feel like a switch or a crack?
Do you experience shock like a towel draped over your world or pulled taught for attack?

I am overcome with emotional schilderwald and left in bokketto.
A modicum of understanding, a lagom, if you will.
These words, alien and specific a keepsake for you. A momento.
No need to become so excited. Calm yourself; Chill.
But marvel with me at language and the tricks it can play.
And like battles or executions, like poker, this could be your moment to stand
or to stay.

When I sat in bare white walls
with unbought picture frames
and dusted ash from cigarettes
I was just usin' to count the days
I never fretted about the meaning.
I didn't care, then, about the end.
There is a cruel poetry in the
many and varied way things change.

I've never thought a greatness
or said something wasn't already said.
I've never been first up a mountain
or even spoke kindness to the dead.
I'm better at silence than talking
and I always leave everyone on read.
I'll be late when it matters
first into the breach, last into bed.

I'll love you until I'm finished
until the earth swallows these bones.
I'll miss you when I'm lost in darkness
with my heart failing and made of stones.
I'll feel you like whispers in my hope
light the dim blue light cast by phones.
I've lost all reason I'm all discordent
a melody of solitude absent of tones.

When I was harder and lost and alone
I didn't worry about the future.
Time was still on loan.
I don't got answers. Don't know from true.
I know things have now changed,
but it's too late to fix, loan's come due.

You will not find me
coward, pleading at your feet.
I'm searching through the heartbeats
of these breathing city streets.
My ear is to the grindstone,
my purpose, flight and free.

Ankle deep in rainwater,
as lightning tears apart the sky.
Pained breathing, bleeding, barely alive.
Skin feels like fire, struggle to survive.
I will grit my teeth,
and bare it.
Think before you act.

Jump to your conclusion,
pardon my intrusion.
They say multiple contusion.
Blood loss and confusion.

Scratch my fingers through this land.
Cough red spots toward the ground.
I will find the power in me.
Just watch. I will stand.

You will find me
complete through your pushing,
a little stretched after you pull.
Breathing ragged, and loud spoken.
You will find me
Unbroken.

I am overkill given voice and form.
Rubble as shelter against a storm.
A band saw used to slice morning toast.
Never the center, always a coast.
I am extreme opinion.
Crowned king with absent dominion.

I am extreme measures taken
with little reward.
Hours of banging for only one sword.
Hand squeezing oranges
for a single glass of juice.
I am always on but of little use.

You are magic and truth.
Honest and sincere proof.
You're a hiding place from thunder.
Something built that none can sunder.
A true shelter from storm.
Wonder given voice and form.

In some distant place,
some barren field,
We will meet once more.
You will be pleased,
We will smile and laugh.
I won't be such a ******* chore.

We are waiting on lightning,
so I might make glass.
We are wandering in search of hope
but find I am unequal to the task.

He was the great regret!
The unfinished melody
going slightly sour in its final notes.
Once meant to be anthemic
now little more than a dirge.
The brokenhearted one that got away;
No tear shed or throat vice gripped
in the absence of you,
but changed none the less.
And make no mistake,
He hurt you and you hurt him.
Sometimes badly.
Sometimes very badly.
Because nothing shatters as completely as a heart,
"My God" say the old men of hearts,
"And not a one the same."
He's sorry.
He never meant to hurt you,
and he knows you didn't either, love.
Don't worry.
We hurt each other, we hack away.
We expose the pulsating and raw innards of each other.
We chip away at each other
Until what is left is the perfect shape.
You made him into her matching set,
And he fixed you for whomever came next.
And seriously, he hopes for the best
because he didn't love you the way you needed but he did love you.
Maybe you loved him, too.
Even if you don't miss one another.
You were broken notes.
It wasn't the right song.
You are the great regret!
The brokenhearted ones that got away.
Or rather, grew up,
up, up and away.

She stands before a mirror,
swaying gently to the sounds
of anguish in the room above.

She sits in the café.
She's nursing the same drink
she always orders.
Just trying to drag out the time.
Because today could be the day.
Today you may look over and see
her. You may recognize her from
the hallways. From the mail
boxes. From the laundry room.
You may see her. Really see her.
If only for a minute.

She reads to herself. Holding
her place with her thumb.
Withstanding the interruptions.
It's you and that woman again.
That woman hates you.
She can feel it. You can't.
How easy would it be to
come downstairs. There would
be a friend, a lover, a soul mate
waiting for you. All you have to
do is move. All you have to do
is notice.

She is alone. She is always alone.
It's such a big city. There are so
many people. She is so afraid to
talk to them. To show the world
who she is. They tell her it'll change.
That the pills will help.
That all she needs to do is make one
friend and the others will just happen.
But it doesn't.
They don't.
They won't.

She sways gently to the noise.
She loves the way she looks
when she dances.
It's the only time she can look
at herself in the mirror.
She wishes you could see her.
She wishes you would see her.
But you won't.
You never will.

Scream with me, into the dark.
Match my pitch with your high arc.
And hear the sound of us, bare, stark.
Listen to it, feel it in you, the very human spark.

Wasted time, reversed rhetoric and given pause.
From the steep climb, we can look down on our flaw.
The very thing we never counted on, the err in this design.
The bitter notes of our old song,  it's love, it's divine.

Dig through the tainted wrecks.
Feel through your bones the context
of man made heart string reflex.
And ask me, soft as feathers, "What's next."

Can you feel us slip and fall?
The pit asks and we heed the call.
Does you stomach lurch and twist?
The fear is how you know you exist.

We may never know what we'll land upon,
but trust me, it's always darkest before dawn.
You have to understand, that though our era is bygone,
I refuse to become another man's pawn.

Reach inside you, my love, for the very human spark.
We will face down the ****** dark,
I the dreamer and you my skylark.
Forever, this night, will be our mark.

Be the immutable,
immovable
immortal
for as long as is possible.
Push fingers through dirt.
Climb through earth and veins of
rock and root.
Wake, like the dead at judgement.
Wake.
Wake!
Rise like heat
shimmering away above the blacktop.
Killed by distance
or a clever eye.
Leave it all behind.
Rise.
Rise!
Meet the day at the horizon,
grab hold of the sun.
Push it into noon, into night.
Take the empty spot in the sky.
Illuminate the path for others.
Radiate the warmth from inside.
Shine.
Shine!

Kicking out against the sheet,
trying hard to find sleep,
I wake and wonder why
when we fall we don't shy
our eyes against the sky.

The truth, if ever there was one,
is you find the ground when falling's done.
To feel the earth below your feet,
to wander empty city streets,
to keep from flying when complete.

But to reach out toward the sky and soar
imagine wanting that and nothing more.
When we are young we could trade it all to fly.
If asked the moon in return we would comply.
To see it all, our world, from on high.

Whatever happens to this urge?
Why dismiss it? Where is it's funeral dirge?
I think it comes back to us in dreams.
The little cracks in our lives between the seams.
(Maybe it returns in our winter.)
It lives on both ends of age's extremes.
(As our minds begin to splinter.)

I hope old age finds me thinking of flying.
Hoping to soar when I'm dying.
I have to try to find that place,
before I finish my solitary race,
where I can reach above and hope to touch space.

I think we waste lifetimes
decoding the lies of purpose
and maybe forget to fill
our mouths and stomachs
while the food is still out.
I think we leave empty
cupboards and memories
that we should fill up or
even just shout about.
I don't think it's revolutionary
to recognize these failings and faults
but maybe it's all the more tragic
that we all seem to know
but still just listen to the music
when we should join
together and waltz.

The wind beats out it's
slow steady song
through this hollow city.
We were told to expect rain.
Half a pack in and still
nothing.
I saw lightning hit water once.
It awed me in ways nothing
has since.The power of nature.
It changed me.
Nothing profound, just a simple
muted difference in me.
You never noticed.

The buildings act like instruments,
played like expert jazz musicians.
I sit here in the window,
as the smoke makes it's lazy
circles around my hand.
It could almost be playful
as the music of the wind reaches
yet another crescendo of
awesome power.

I remember bruised nose and scraped
knees,bee stings and Popsicle sticks.
I remember when snow was not
another in an ever growing list
of enemies.

I focus on the trash cans and bits of
paper. They dance in the music
like manic asylum residents.
I have to concentrate on something
or I'll be alone with a declining pack
and these kiss shaped scars.

We were told to expect rain.
I fell asleep waiting for it.
The ashtray was left overflowing
and the wind never let up.
Like a lullaby it rocked me gently
as my mind wandered.
I missed the rain.

I saw lightning strike water once.
It could change me again.

I.
When the snow came we sheltered ourselves away.
Warm by the pyres.
We let them burn.
Cinder and ash.
The dying light of our fires,
like a hundred stars swaying,
winking almost, against
the banks of snow covered hills.

Deep in our slumber we felt the
touch of warm spring.
Water cool enough to swim in.
Blue and green and milk white.
In waking, and we did so with protest,
there remained only the gray white
of winter dawn and the ****** cold.

When one of us fell, frostbite or exhaustion and little else,
we would carry them along.
Burials impossible, we added
their number to the pyre.
In this way we could keep warm.
In this way we could pretend that
we still felt human and alive.

Some days the snow was hard enough to
stand on.
Other days it was clean enough to eat.
Still we walked.
Always, it seemed, we walked.
Always we.

II.
In the heat of desert day we would fan
ourselves with our hands.
We didn't dare to remove any .
We didn't dare not to stop to drink.

We wrapped our heads in cloth and
worshiped long forgotten gods.
On days when we couldn't move through
the sand storms we made camp.
We were once many.
We were so many.

Now we are walking.
If this trudge toward oblivion
could be called walking.
And walking we called it.
We would stop to smile lies
at one another.
We would stop to die.

Forgotten as old gods.
Less than the sand we died on.
Less than the whole.
Incomplete.

And we would be left were we left.
We didn't bury anyone.
We were so many.

III.
Call to me, for I can only just hear you.
Call for me
and I will come.
I will find you against odds and
skies.
I will see you whole.
I will breath you complete.

We awake to movement.
We are movement.
Ever walking, ever here and there.
Looking, we believe.
We believe in nothing.

IV.
There are those that want our things.
Our sad detritus.
Our lives before it ended.

Incomplete decks of playing cards.
Eye glasses with lens missing.
A license plate from an old car.
(They are all old cars.)
Mason jars, soda bottles,
cans, thermos, can of peanuts
all filled with water.

It's the water they want from us,
though they will take the other things.
They always take the other things.
Memories and dust.
Memories and Dust.
Cinders and Ash.

We were many.

V.
When finally we are alone,
the leaves fall about us.
The moon hangs in our imperfect sky.
In the end there is us.
And the end is us.
And we?
We are alone.
We were many.
We are one.

You must learn to forgive.
No one is perfect, and in that
broken person sleeps the very
creature which will rip the
heavens apart and remake a
world that thrills and awes.

You must learn to forget.
Because old battles don't need to
have a victor. They don't need
to become new wars,
better weapons, or another
mark in the “cons” column.

You must learn to stop comparing notes.
No one sees the world the way
you do, with the wonder,
with the cynicism, with the tired
eyes of experience or the fresh
eyes of hope.

You must learn to let a part of yourself die.
Holding on to a single thing is dangerous.
No one thing makes us what we are,
no interest or hobby or opinion can
possibly build a human being as
unique and clever as we all are.

You must learn to retreat.
While you live there is always
hope.
The beginning of a new day,
as wonderful and memorable as
you can make it.

You must learn to laugh.
My god are we flawed, useless
broken things on this tired
worthless world.
It's hysterical.

You must learn to accept the consequences.
Take the step, not ignoring the
possibilities for disaster, but relishing
them. How exciting can one life be?
When it is over, you will have your answer.

We must learn to grow.
Evolve or die.

In my wake are ruins
where wonderful flowers grow.
I will leave behind desolation,
but alive inside will be hope.
I will become Krishna,
if that's what it takes.
I will roll storm and fury,
across oceans, rivers. Across lakes.
Behind all my clouds,
to the observing eye,
you will find sunlight.
You will see the truth in the lie.

But kept in soft cages, where only grass grows,
the sounds of our heartbeats can deafen,
the plague can wind to a close.

And so it goes, where it goes.
Along mountains and inside homes.

We'll rise from the debris.
Singing songs as easy as leaning.
And terrible hope gives way
to wonderful damage and deep meaning.
In classrooms, where the calls are called,
we'll answer in ways too subtle to see.
Children, ostracized by accident of nature,
will finally not have to defend to just be.
I cannot say it'll be better.
I cannot say it'll be worse.
It will only have to be different.
Destruction as a cure for our curse.

Speak answer to riddle, at least as best you can.
Words can be poison, we learn much too young.
When we can't/won't help, can we call ourselves "man"?


And so it goes, where it goes.
A helping of heart with highs and lows.

And where it goes, when we find ourselves through,
is as much mystery to me,
as it's evident to you.

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

I don't believe in it's over
I'm not here for that.
I came to be cut up before you
and you're gonna watch
while I bleed out.
I'm not here for joking
you can miss me with all that
I'm here to labor till my knuckles
grow fat and my skin wane.
Watch, love, as I work these
******* bones to dust
and choke on exhaust
and douse my dreams in
stale gasoline
and sit here laughing about
nothing just you, me
and my lit match.
I didn't show up for easy.
I don't believe in that.
You want me to run because
it's hard now? It's been hard
the whole time, my love.
I've bled and cried and
wished I'd ******* died.
I'd do it all three more lifetimes
if it would make you believe
like I do.
I'm not here 'cause you're perfect.
How could you think that?
I'm not gonna leave
just because it's gotten harder.
I was born to die on this hill.
I'll be here when the forests
are gone. When the stars go cold.
I'll be here when here is over
and mankind long forgotten.
Give me your worst, love.
It's why I'm here.

I won a competition I never lose.
There was no joy,
though there never is.
Not even the first time I played.
It was difficult to share,
once and long ago,
but now it comes as easily as
anger in a traffic jam.

I agree. It must've been rough
that your parents were not
supportive. It must have been
difficult moving from child to
adult without anyone telling you
how proud they were.
I may not agree with your
choice of reaction, but I understand
that it can be difficult to listen
to someone whine about their
kind and supportive parents.

Was all of that difficult to tell
everyone? You never felt like
the world was watching you,
waiting for you to slip up
so they could beat you?
It must've been hard to let
everyone into that, said the
spider to the fly.

I would take your fear of abandonment
over these storied scars.
I would take your careless parents
over the ones that cared enough
to beat me until I cared as well.
I would take your difficult life,
filled with family you can't stand
and a mother you hate when she's
not around over what I had.
It would have been easy.
People say that emotional wounds
run deeper, and it's true. They
just never bother to articulate
that physical pain can be a wonderful
source for emotional wounds as well.

But this is not a competition, not
that it would matter.
Having come from violence, and
neglect and abandonment, this
is not what wins this fight for me.
It is not what defines me.
I have built a family out of strangers
that will care for me with a caress, that
will support me with kind words,
that only yells and calls me names
with the inside joke smile of friends.

I have built a life that I always wanted.
That, my sad lonely girl
forever only three beers away
from living in the past,
That is why I win.

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

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

Today I told a secret.
Yesterday I lied.
I read an inscription,
in someone else's book.
It told a tale about the folly
of the wise.
I'm hoping to find solace,
in a remote place.
Instead I find noise/chaos
with a friendly and familiar face.
There was a song you used to sing.
I don't recall the words.
I used to sing it in the shower,
and fantasize about being king.
Turnabouts fair play,
my god the things we used to say.

I've got pockets full of *******
and hard and swollen eyes.
I want more than I have found,
I need something real and new and warm.
I got plans for leaving,
but I can't go without you.
I want a world of fire.
I need you to have me with you.
I need this journey, for once-
once in this hollow life-
I need this to not be alone.
I want you forever with me,
like we promised to.
I love you like identity,
I can't be me without you anymore.
I don't know when it happened, love.
I can't do it anymore.
Climb these mountains of doubt with me,
because I don't know if I like me anymore.
I know I'm better with you,
but you're not around, dear.
I think I want to be gone and away.
I think It should be me that isn't here.
I want you to reassure me.
I just want you near.

I remember sneaking out as teenagers,
hoping you'd hold my hand.
I remember not asking you to dance with me.
I remember wishing you had.
I remember wanting you.
I recall being scared to death.

I'm a real piece of garbage without you.
I'm worse than I'll ever be.
I'm broken down and beaten,
haunted by the demons you keep at bay.
I ******* hate it, baby.
Please look at me like I'm not damaged,
like you always do.
Convince me I'm repaired.
I need to be here with you.

Under uncaring stars
fatigue drowns the worry.
They have no concern
as I finally cannot make
it one more ******* hour.
I fell asleep sitting up,
sick in an unfixable way,
and recalled that once
I touched magic
from a distance
and heard whale song
on still, moonlit waters
and watched storms
roll away from mountain
top retreats leaving both
wreckage and beauty
in their sudden wake.
I heard music in the
car clogged summer street
and felt a subway replicate
a city's heartbeat under my feet.
I watched forever light
dance with smoke in rain
drenched neon midnight gutters
the permanent and the temporary
mixed for a moment that
only I got to see.
And a cynical part of me
knows that I take it all
with me when it's done.
But the stars look down on
our impermanence with
cold dispassion as they burn
for thousands of years and
remind me that just because
it doesn't matter that it
happened doesn't change
the fact that it did and
I am as witness to it as
the stars.

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

You can rake yourself
over fire and over stone
but they'll still punish you
should you stay home.

And you can bleed out
when they ask for blood
but you'll not find justice
you'll not earn love.

You can trade every second
of every day for an inch of floor
but when you ask what's enough
the answer will always be, "More."

Listen: They don't really care
and you won't change their mind.
Everyone knows it's a living
but it still feels like a bind.

You can spit out teeth standing
there's no place left to sit
they'll not give up a chair
because they don't give a ****.

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

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

Once, long time ago,
I was hungry
and I was strong.
I held you up,
carried you effortlessly
like a tune in a song.
Money was tight
and we were unprepared
but love was there.
It didn't make it easy
and it didn't fix the hurt
but we didn't much care.
Our timing didn't match
and I'd go to bed
as you left it, pillow still warm.
The blanket bunched up
beside me and underarm
in a parody of your form.
I missed you then
in our empty apartment
with a sharp, painful keening.
But the absences gave us depth
a pause in the action,
a break to find meaning.
God, those were the days
and we really lived
each and every one of them.
Hard as they were
flowers don't get to have
petals without first a stem.
Our love was forged hot
like the steel of a
battle ready sword.
Our course charted
and mapped for us
to point ourselves toward.
Things are better now,
I have you so often
money's less a trouble.
But we only stand this
tall today because we stand
on yesterday's rubble.

I ache and mewl and burn to life
under a sky the color of the sea.
Slow and sluggish I push through
the world.
From street to street
Lettered, numbered and named
and I'm ten years old again.
We ride our bikes all the way
to Coney and laugh first, then conspire.
We talk about the small things
that occupy lifetimes at a mere decade.
The world is on fire
red and blue pills and choices.
The sky is burnt from the smoke
a dull orange color.
I am seventeen.
We are strong in this new city.
Bold and young and alive.
We smoke until the filters feel
hot against our lips and joke
and we talk about the girls.
If only they knew the secrets.
If only.
And with speed we tear through
another city, another lifetime.
The sky purpling like a new bruise.
I'm 26 and downhill,
though we don't know it yet.
The street lights hold us in place.
We plan our plans across digital
airwaves and we smile small smiles
as we talk about the women.
What is too personal? What is too much?
Love is an unbroken chain of
icecream stains.
The time just soars now.
I'm a father. A husband. I'm not really me anymore, but then you aren't either.
It's been how long since we spoke?
The sky seems either blue or gray.
We're happy but we don't talk.
I send you a picture of my little man
and get a thumbs up in return.

And I remember bike rides and comic books.
I recall laughter and a world vivid beyond explanation.
I...
I remember when...

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

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

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

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