The problem with creation is it comes from destruction
One life created is only another destroyed

See, a delicately engraved chest is just a gutted tree
Like diamond rings are just contemporary slave drivers

Long and lovely road trips are but poisonous gases
Like gourmet dinners are pesticides and animal bones

These books and beautiful words are murdered worlds
(And a poem is just a dead part of the soul)

But I guess that's just for cynics
I guess the darkness doesn't haunt us all
(And it isn't always the Circle of Death that revolves)

O, you blessed creatures, do you really mean to say
You aren't at all plagued by the morbid fall?

God, you've got those eyes
I ******* hate those eyes
The way they hold mine
The way they know me
Trace me

You've got those eyes
That see more than I want them to
You've got eyes that know me
You've got eyes that scare me
Light up when they see me
I ******* hate those eyes

Think of everything you know: you don't
Think of everything we knew: we didn't
Think of everything you think: do you?

The earth used to be flat, we knew it
Cigarettes were the cure, we blew it
Double entendres, we'll lose it
Translation, time, linguistic disintegration

This god, that god, miracles or chemicals?
Brain make-up, societal shake-up
Left wing, right wing, cha-ching, quiet king
Extremists all around, different by nature
A set of monkeys trained to hunt grandeur
The science of the day, the philosophy of the age
Every other thing is the best thing since sliced bread

Think of everything you think: do you?

I'll admit, you're my weakness
Oh, but not in the way that you want to be
I don't yearn for you the way you want me to
The same reason I try to leave is the reason I stay
You offer me no sustenance, no mental nutrition

So, when I'm feeling the world crashing down around me
And when I'm hearing a million voices telling me "no"
I call you back from the darkness and you say "yes"
You're a walk in the park, you don't further my questions
You don't leave me to play tennis with my own demons

But when they subside, and the light comes back to me
I realize I don't want you there, you offer no challenges
And I push you into the dark until I need you again
And you will wait and smoke another cigarette
Until I call you again, and you will say "yes"

You will always say "yes"
Just once, won't you fight me?

I had a dream
A nightmare
A premonition of another dimension

I was in front of a one-way mirror
With my life's mistakes lined up against the wall
Dressed up like personified Envy or Sloth in a preaching play
And I had to chose which one I thought had been my killer
I had to chose which one I thought had placed me in the morgue

And the warden, the sheriff, the detective
The shadow in my dream said:
     "It doesn't matter much. It all ends the same way."

I had a premonition of another dimension
I had always feared it would end this way

I wonder
do they not think
about these things
these things which
haunt my nights
broil my days

Conformity
Excess
Consumption
Purpose
Death
The whys
and the why nots

I wonder
do they not think
about what else
this world holds

About how what
we knew yesterday
we scoff at today

I wonder
what don't we know

I wonder
what does tomorrow hold

It haunts my nights
It broils my days

Some nights I drown in poetry
Its watery depths fill me whole
It sloshes around inside of me
Cleaning me up for tomorrow

Some nights I'm not ready for poetry
I am a helpless child sobbing alone
Gasping for the air I crave to make me whole
Drawing breaths to fill me for a cleaner dawn