The old wives
from the mountains
used to tale us  ;)
that if you tell a lie
when it’s lightning
you’ll wake up
at midnight
spitting blood
which makes me
think I must’ve been
talking in my sleep
last night when
the storm blew through
loud enough to
shake the house
and wake the dead
so I woke up to
smoke a cigarette
and let my dog go
outside to take a ****
when I saw a rose
pretty as you please
there on my pillow
I swear, I think I dreamed
that I was the President. ;)

It’s cold outside tonight
but I had to get out of the house
so I went walking about without
any particular thought in mind
as to where I was heading, you see
I was feeling kind of pine-boxed in
and couldn’t sleep, I needed a 2 a.m.
cigarette, so I put on my clothes, my boots
a coat, grabbed my smokes and slipped
on out the sliding glass door, it’s quieter
than the front one that has a bad habit of slamming, not laying blame, but ****
if it wasn’t darker than the inside of my
eyelids, darker than  the catacombs where
dead stars go when they die, and the moon hides away when it’s all out of shine, just
like where my thoughts sometimes seem
to go, you know, when my mind just won’t
put things behind me, and I’m feeling all
kinds of silence, it’s like listening to moss
growing on stones and wondering things
like why bees don’t die in their own honey
and a white stone in a field full of field-
stone is a pretty nice rock, but still, a rock
all the same, so I walk to the dock down
the road in the dark where a man can go to wash his troubles away before day breaks.

I keep seeing the snow
on its sideways swing
pelting, impervious, against the ground

to escape human conclusion,
conviction

without fail
it's all the same to me
I pluck the fourth leaf, before it can wither

to be a willing participant to love
I don't know

I watch it thicken from the window
a wayward swarm of whiteflies
that building, bloodless blanket outside
I don't know
it never sticks