Inventing the day,
Circular possessions,
All I own cannot be touched,

Everything lost in a fire,
Blazing nocturnal,
The slab of marble becomes
A tin marker,

Watching with stillness
As fleshes mesh with time,
     A poet remains:
The spherical elimination
   Casting lights on dark
I find my axis
      I find myself the epitome
And the footsteps
      In the puddles resound
In my minds echoes;
My body is a transparent verse,
        Night unfolds , I
Can see myself again.

      Listen to me as you listen
To the water,
     I am the unhindered thunder,
The shadow in the light's
     Ignorant glow,

      From my footsteps rise the
Steam,
I am still The DedPoet,
    As you sleep in your bed
I invent my new homes:
   Nightly I bocome a
Poem of The Nocturne.

I wear a mask
A mask that hides everything
I take it off only when I'm alone
I look happy
when I'm sad
I hide away my fears
and anger
My tears gather up and overflow
When I'm alone

Have
You
Ever
handled
something
a
little
too
roughly
and
it
just
...
broke?

Lone midnight crow caws,
Dutifully out to dark;
Darkness never sleeps!

Clouds like feathers
Float in the deep blue morning sky

The sun, bathes the spaces
Between houses.

Brown leaves, dry and curled
Gather at my front door

As the winds of autumn
Shake the enduring trees

I walk each day
The same pathway

Looking for signals
Searching for signs

A still, rounded body catches my eye
And I cross the road

A hedgehog lies
Motionless
In the middle of Tickfield avenue.

Is this your final resting place?

I move it with my foot to the curb

It feels soft to the touch
Is it still alive?

I take a picture
It’s mouth is open
I can see its teeth

Is it over?
Is this how a life ends?

I take my train
Report the case to the RSPCA

And wonder
And wonder

It's Friday
And tomorrow

I will lay beside my wife
And we will share the weekend

Together

And on that day I decided
I wasn't going to go home
Or at least not yet
And so I got in my car and drove the opposite direction and surrounded myself with books and not with the silence and solitude my house offers when no one is home
Where I sit and force myself to believe that there is nothing to do
But on that day I didn't go home
And the days after that I went on walks around neighborhoods with music drowning out all else like I was in Nirvana walking down streets nodding to old men on porches and watching trees sway in gentle breezes
And a few nights later I sat on an old swing in my back yard
And it was in that moment that I thought of you Allen
Allen Ginsberg big beat poet with Buddhist beard and round belly always smiling always there to help a friend whether it's money for Corso or a walk with Kerouac by all the locomotive sunflower days in California
Or Tangiers sipping on mint tea
Or ghats in India
Lost notebooks in Russia or was it Cuba
Oh Allen I think of you now on this summer night
Allen you would have turned 91 today isn't that crazy
The world has only gotten crazier since you left it and there are times I wish you were here because, though I never knew you, you seemed to have a lot of the answers
Like "you'll die when you die there's no use worrying about it"
And Allen wherever you are now I hope you are with Naomi and Peter and Neal and all the other angels you loved so deeply
Allen I wish I could love with half the strength you could
I wish I could see the world through your eyes or at the very least through your eyeglasses
But tonight I will have to make do with the jazz that's coming through my headphones
And the gentle summer breeze through my bedroom window

If you ask me on a good day
What we need to change the world
I'll tell you "each other"
If you ask me on a bad day
I'll look you in the eyes and tell you
"What we need are more riots"
We need people out in the streets
We need a little fire, chaos, and to embrace our friends like its the end
And I would say both answers are realistic
Realistic in the way that I don't have an actual plan

There's a reason I'm not an insurrectionist
Because while freedom is out there
If I only reach out and take it
You don't know how hard it is for me to reach out and turn off my alarm in the mornings
So I tip my hats to all the Dean Moriartys out in the world
Those beautiful adventurous people who go to marches and take a stand or take their whole life and move across states
People who know what it means to "live like you mean it"
I have trouble knowing if I really mean anything I say anymore, much less what I do
I've always been more of a Sal Paradise anyways
The background character in my own story
Writing the chronicles of all the Roman candle people
Beautifully illuminating in the night sky

But I still haven't wrote myself off completely
And I hope you haven't either
Because there are still times where there's power in my step and fire in my mouth
I was born a militant apathetic
All that's left for me is the right catalyst and I promise I'll burn brighter than all the molotovs thrown in Greece
And while I can't promise to make total destroy
I can promise that I'll try my best to fight when I'm needed
Because all we need is each other
Today's gonna be
A good day

It's too late for me my friends
Pacing around my kitchen with a half empty bottle of Red Stripe I write this poem to you
To anyone who gives a **** enough to pay attention and listen to all the nonsense that leaves my lips
I am a man with no realistic goals
I am a man who does not listen to the battle cry that beats in his chest and forces it's way through his veins
Instead I plug my ears because I know what danger would come from action
I am a slave to inaction
And I've been told that a slave that doesn't defy their master is not yet deserving of their freedom
While I don't believe that's the truth, I let it apply to me
Because I am a coward
Nothing I want is attainable
None of my dreams are feasible
I have lost more times than I can count
But maybe if I lose enough, it will mean someday I've won
Because I don't want to live a quantifiable life of wins and losses
Successes and failures
I want a life that is worth getting up each morning
A life of joy that is armed to the teeth
Because from John Brown to Emiliano Zapata
From Spanish barricades to French communes
I believe that the heroes who fail are the only one's worth having
Because in failure there is always action
There is sincerity and the feeling that what one is doing must happen eventually
So why not now?
What is stopping me from saying "no more shall I live a life that isn't according to the what I believe"
I believe in a life like the hardships of Paul
"Sorrowful but always rejoicing
Poor yet making many rich
Having nothing yet possessing everything"
Alone I must build for myself a life worth living
And together we can build a world we can finally call home

Aesthetic accounts on Twitter elicit long lost emotions I never thought I would feel again
I have never written a love poem
I don't know if I have even been in love since I've started writing some 3 or 4 years ago
There were always those few moments where I thought someone would come along and everything would change
But maybe I am fooling myself
Maybe I'm not ready for this idea of love
Or if it's more that I don't care to have it
I know I've never been the romantic type and surely I have said it before
But maybe it has gotten worse
Because no more do I write about people as angels or romanticize the passing of time
This poem itself is so matter of fact
There is no emotion here
I don't know what happened

Let us raise our glasses to toast
To the hope that I can write better poems in the future
To the hope that I can write about my emotions outside whatever political frenzy I work myself into
Let us raise a toast to love, the concept
Love, the flower that is always out of reach
Love, the conversation I have in dreams asleep that make it so much harder to get out of bed each morning
Love: the songs I refuse to sing, the poems I cannot write, the emotion I have forgotten, that one thing I don't necessarily want right now, but probably need, that I will reach on my own terms one day don't you worry it will all be wine and roses then
Let us raise a toast to love

An empty page is a perfect reflection
Of my empty mind

And who took the life away from the words I write?
Who has cursed me to pace nervously around dining rooms with the hope that something meaningful will appear on a page
Some words that are worthy of being said that will be met by crowds with adoration and applause
Yet I am not worthy
I am not worthy of adoration or applause or words with meaning
I am stuck in this flat affair
Because while others seek for meaning with action my hours are stained with a deep black oil that keeps me standing still
When I think about writing my head feels so empty
And I wonder if I have wasted all my pretty words on meaningless sayings in the hopes someone would look at me and say “now there is a good and articulate revolutionary soul, a good man with good answers”
Now, for once, the whole truth is clear
I cannot write sacred words for there are no sacred words
I cannot write a sacred poem for sacred poems do not exist
And I think this is what growing up feels like
The day you realize that just because you read Allen Ginsbergs Howl,
and wanted to write a poem just like that, and you spend two years attempting to create a facsimile of “I saw the best minds of my generation”,
None of that can make you a poet
Just as refusing to have a drivers license does not make one an anarchist
And how much have I grown away from that once holy phrase “I saw the best minds of my generation”?
Since then I have heard Marius Jacobs declare “I saw the world and it was not beautiful”
Max Stirner cry out “All things are nothing to me”
And Johnny Hobo singing “you wish that the world was clean/but I’m in love with the way it’s *****”
None of these words are holy
None of these sayings are sacred
But I hold each one in my heart as if they are my property, or rather, a property of me
I decided to write poetry because of people like Carl Sandburg and Jack Kerouac
I loved the words they wrote to the point that my words were lost
I celebrated their words as if they were holy
But growing up means I understand that, at the end of the day, they are just words
I tried so hard to write the words that came from them
And it’s about **** time I start writing the words
That can only come from me