There are two sides to all. Two sides
To the world, and where it may sit
On the wheel. Black or red?

A split of inheritance. Right sided
Dreams, left sided mornings. Mournings
For those fragments of imagination

Left gagged and bounded. Tamed by
Penny-pinching and waist-trimming
And all other concepts that work like

A chisel. Chip away at me, they happen
Like thorns and barbs until I don’t look
In mirrors. And I dare not breathe past sighs.

A split of inheritance. The joy of invention,
A brain for science. New discoveries smash
Like champagne bottles to bless understanding.

It splits. It splits in two. The descendants build
On the used brownfields. Grey matter on grey matter
As if building over condemned land.

The roses of love and star-travel are but one side.
A veneer, more accurately. For in their gift
We would pick apart their heads, our heads,

Forgetting the years of thicket and thorn that
Had grown underneath. In forgetting, they talk
Of surprise at our true nature, though the thorns came

Long before the flowers, and were ever-present throughout.

Each measure of wonder; of love and poem and comedy
Are cruelly tempered. They are tamed by lust.
Lust for power, for vengeance. In-group. Out-group.

Heads or tails? I lie instead on my side.
A fallow state, a false parade. Technicolor masts
To sail lazily on my false knowledge. I speak of compassion

And philosophy. I hope they validate me
In the same way certificates do, for those men in suits.
Their success apparent and substantial, its frame

Weighs heavy on me. Barbs and dead weight,
My breath perishes uselessly I feel. A dandelion head
Caught in a chain link fence or a jungle of concrete,
Full of promise, pregnant with fertility
In a sea of barren saltwater and cigarette ash.
There’s nothing left but to write. There are

Two sides, two sides to all. Two sides to my words,
The hope of a finished poem. The harrowing read-through
By the morning. A mourning for myself

And my inactivity. The breadth of life in other’s words,
Tales of movements, experience; novelties in my
Small-town mind. I dream of Peru.

Two sides to myself. Two sides as there is to all.
One side is a virtuoso. Tuxedo-clad and hair slicked back,
Detaching from its greased trap only through

My movements with the keys. A movement free
Of thought. A meditation of music, a collective
Unconscious of chords. It is a side.

The same side that tells of tales past. Man lived
Before money. If man dies, money is contracted to go too.
It is bound. It is rite. It is truth.

The other side, though. The other side
Begs and borrows. It casts anger at my dreams
And how they lighten my wallet so. It hacks

Away with my lungs. Cigarette tar laced in bronchioles,
The result of a dream unrealised. I fidget in this other side.
It makes me shift in my seat, forever impounding,

Forever confounding. Forever uncomfortable.

There are two sides, two sides to all.
One is the scope of man, the ideal self.
The other is the result. A bulb-lit scoreboard

Above our heads. Money signs and bloodlines
Are a measure of man. Our measure. Two teams;
One competing for gold, the other asking

Of what competition is at all. And so one side
Sees us as animals, our rules foolish and lame
Aside those of Nature (with a capital ‘N’)

And the other tells us it is all there is. At least
All that there is worth knowing. For what good
Is it, to dream of the stars? Or Peru, even?

If you do not have the successes to get there?

Two sides, there is forever two sides.
One is a love for myself and for all.
The other is brain-chatter. It tells me little

But it says a lot.