"5 Steps"
.. ..
Step 1, I was having fun,
I was cunning, I was on the run
Just no telling how many hearts,
I left undone.
I wish someone had told me,
"Son, your life has just begun."

Step 2, I had all the right moves.
I was sly, I was slick, I was cool.
Well I laughed and I smiled and said the right things,
just to set the mood
Wish someone had said to me,
"Don't you know the joker plays the fool."

Step 3, in the comfort zone,
I didn't love her, but at least I wasn't alone
Couldn't bring myself to look in her eyes and tell her,
tell her she's not the one.
Last thing she said to me is,
"One day, someone will do to you what you've done."

Step 4, slammed the door.
I was drunk as my body hit the floor.
Just never knew a breaking heart
could cause so much pain.
No one had to tell me,
I only had myself to blame.

Step 5, I was half alive,
as I stumbled into the local dive.
Closed the door, my heart hit the floor,
as her hair fell around her emerald eyes.
Never knew a stranger's glance,
could make you feel so alive.

Wish someone had told me,
I would have been waiting for step 5.
Wish someone had said to me,
"Wait, step five is why you're alive."

by R. Craig David-copyright 2004

Unrealistically going ballistic on premature political whistle blowing of missing ballistic missiles.
Rumors round the fickle frowns trickling down around town,
WMD's never found.
Media drowns out our original intent with swayed day-to-day comments about potential evidence or contents of secret documents or undisturbed "security clearancegate".
Still secret and still unclear year-to-date....
our eroded freedoms now appurtenances as consequence.
The missing  missiles long ago hidden or moved like agendas with chess-master finesse.
Citizens chide "You lied!! Confess!"
Behooving you proves nothing in bringing relief to your beliefs,
thieving your freedoms and Commander in Chief.
Lectures on conjecture don't secure a future.
It's almost "Au Revior" american cars and mortgages, hype puts the scarred afar Stars and Stripes Bail Bonds Czars in business.
Meanwhile billions are spent to rebuild the countries invaded without consent.
The Banks are saved but don't repent.
Far enough away to keep my iniquity a bay for today.
I clearly see what is before me, but respond not to my thoughts as I was taught.
Septed in guilt,
wept in filth
kept in tilt
loss is coming,
should have flossed.
The long term costs tossed aside.
Just another day I drive away from the driveway rarely driven to lie longer or lie down somber,
striving for stronger days lost,
feels wrong though.
I still go.
Pay the tolls.
Stop and go.
Fill the daily paying role outside my dreams and goals.
Play generic background music while my soul's on hold waiting for the next available operator.
Just another day, a way to stay alive and not lie down in hunger,
paying for my blunders,
staving off my heart's quiet thunder,
my dreams and wonders.
I still get up. I still go. Bills to pay. Traffic's slow. I mute the radio.

-R. Craig David-Copyright 2007

"Love Conquers and Conjures a Fall"

What do I do?
Could it truly be my ordained duty to this one of beauty set before me?
Not allowed to be proud,
to scream out loud that a cloud has been lifted,
that I've been gifted.
No longer the obsession of confusing my once unperceived deception.
The very essence of her presence reels my will from surreal to real,
revealing a feeling of peeling apart my concealed heart.
Under divine direction,
with opulent affection,
and your eyes reflection,
my heart gains protection,
my life direction,
my soul connection.
It's hard to conceive belief she could alleviate the gated fate of my forsaken heart.

By R. Craig David-copyrighted 2001

"The Scent of Spinning"

Following the curve of your neck in the dark.
Watching your eyes close in slow motion as I slow my motion.
The smell of your bare skin sends me spinning,
rendering me helpless into your fold.
Time slows the flows of sweet smelling wine down your neck line.
Tracing soft lines down your back, our eyes close.
Excesses of ecstasy rekindling even the cinder within our beating hearts.
Clinging to the start of each new moment, we slowly roll and fold together.
The scented potion of sweet devotion renders quiet all but steady motion like slow ocean waves.
Laws of science, all broken.
Jaws are silenced, none is spoken.
Embraced in compliance, a dream unwoken.
The hour after you're gone,
reminiscent hints of you scent linger on.
Again I descend into a hypnotic slumber,
sent spinning by the scent of your bare skin.

R. Craig David-Copyrighted 2002

Bump,thump,bump,thump.... the bass cases shake and quake  
Secreting heat, my skin blushes, that rush of a new secret crush.
She passes and her scent renders all around helpless.
The DJ's plush talons tow and myre you soul's wires.  
Seeping through, the beak crushing your conscience,  
falling, sleep down, the sound grounds you.  
Sowing the seeds of desire on the stone below.  
Called by the thumping, bumping beat,  
You jump from your seat into a market of meat, a sea of shifting feet.  
10,000 lights spin like sugar bright.  
Blood fuels your feet,  
feats of flight,  
blurs of sight.  
Spinning like cotton candy with all your might.  
Body overheating, heart overbeating, grains of lust over seeding.  
Your scars begin to heal as glassy eyes not blue appeal to your "at first sight" senses.  
Senses slow there motion to primal, tingling too much,  
not too much to touch, no sting as such.  
Such a blissful kiss t'would be from she before thee.  
Snip the wire.  
Feed the desire.  
The need grows to fan passion fire.  
The potent scent of dripping skin steams up like the devotional incline of nine combined love potions.  
Love, as real love, survives as only a notion in this moving motion of lust's contrived plot...  
But to feel alive, even for a moment,  
love's emotion fails... drawing bust to the ever opulent opponent of lust;  
a proponent to disguise the potent demise of the heart's conscious component.  
Gas and smoke blows.  
Beats high and low.  
The dancing mass of suppressed woes ebbs and flows,  
capturing the seconds, snatching your essence, rapturing your ethics.  
Feeding the peak you seek, heart weak, roaring soul silenced to squeak.  
Waning away your stay with the sweating sea of swing and sway leaves you adrift.  
The waves of the DJ begin to hammer you into enamerment  
Did this quaking wake the sober state of your forsakenness?  
That complaicent stained vacant place aching to be filled.  
A painful, dizzying blood rush floods your mind and muck the feeling first struck secret love crush  
Were the judgment-blurring thoughts occurring so alluring? They fought off pure thoughts sought before she heart-stopped me.  
In light of a moment caught, wrought with knots of naughty thoughts.  
Light and sound and the thumping, bumping ground drown your bounds. 
No more, no more. 
"Now I remember" internally sounds, profound rebounds. 
Lore from before when the last passing blue-eyed leggy lass tore the door off your soul's core.  
No more, no more.  
The crush becomes dust. You become stone.  
Cut to the bone. No seed will be sewn.
You face the floor and breathe. alone.
  
 "Cameo Theater South Beach"   
R. Craig David-Copyright 1995

From my "Bestifreadaloud" series about a girl that got away that Spring because I waited too long.

Part 1 The Past
A case made now faded of a simple place, a time, a space,
a perfect moment let pass in haste.
Clasped in clashes,
brash in passion,
rose from ashes,
desire fires every second's essence as it passes,
a ton amasses.
Fast bloom,
Blast!! Boom!!
The past relapses.
Notably lesser song notes float hopeful, emotional ends and remember whens.
Sent us spinning, then spin adrift again.
Sprung in spring, we fell,
Some are reasons to recall.
Summer's season breaks, we fall.
Flocks fly down and fallen callings fade to Winter's south.
How fate related still debated.
Re-Sprung the next Spring' rise, chance misses fate this date.
I weighed and debated and waited too late

PART 2
Still all these years alone, the "one", the "purpose" unsought.
Capturing thoughts,
The ones I caught and tossed,
Things I was taught and lost.
Proof framed and embossed for a cost.
Coping through the unabashed hopes to one day cash in on all this stashed trash I clash with.
"Smash it?" ...the thought crossed.  

Unimpressed by my evidence of self-less requests,
pursuit of self-evident truth proves a most ruthless abuse.
Even less are my skewed protests for “selfish quests" at the behest of the very strangers I sought to impress.
I digress.

The years compound, bossed around, kicked down but soundly employed,
I turn cold, blaming Freud for defining my non-violent, intolerance threshold on page 23 of some textbook I should have resold.
I go silent. Grow old.
"While your whining and shunning your shinning,
They're sinning and winning." Bad timing.

Girls come, go and follow this shallow, hollow fellow on the run.
While preyed upon...I paid a ton. I play.
The sum never more than the cost of rented fun.
Without insight but consent forthright,
my 30 years of intent were spent in a fortnight.
Still bent on shedding every pound of one first-moment's ton I lost not won.
Can't buy happy for less than the cost of your one-ness.
While prayed upon...paid a Son, they say.

part 3

Ohh the wait....
Ohh the weight...
My set-adrift-soul's mending depends solely on tossing
lost cause cost-spending into thrift.
Well it's a beginning.
All the amassed notes, quotes, boat-floaters,
and sailboat hopes spun in one 1-ton loss moment sprung that one Spring.

Now and again, it creeps in,
like slowly growing stinging nettles around a squelched,
once steaming scorched dream kettle.
Still stays packed away in my heart's darkest parts.
Blurred by time and place,
this burning, misplaced furnace space lays in wait.

Such compiled cold-case denial files from other life trials, lay piled in haste on my proverbial, "less pressing" messy desk of "not ready to face."
Too scared or daring to date, try to relate or contemplate
how to best equate this great weight.
Wait?... Wait.
Elation brewing from pursuing future fruition or ensuing
pure ruin gates these fates from moving, year-to-date.
For the sake of trying or dying forsaken,
another day awake is another day gained or taken.

I found her again,
the town's she's in
but she is taken and then
She learns of my wait, it's weight, my fate, she's shaken,
another ton amasses again. I pretend.
Lay down.
Drown the score of sounds surrounding.
Furthermore, slow the pulse-pounding abounding your core.
Fill your breath.
What is less is gone, tomorrow more.  

by R. Craig David-Copyright 2012

When do we start feeling hope?
As is with most complex emotions,  
babies do not feel hope‘s notions.  
As children, we feel our need to construct the foundations of love and  fear.  
The fail and the fall more painful each year.
Once we have a simply grasp on either or both of those,  
we then begin to form basic concepts of hope, I suppose.
As a child , when I hoped something would come to pass,  
I left my heart open to trespass.
What is possible?
What can be achieved?
Hope forms ideas about what our future life will look like and what we believe.
Who will love us?
What fears we will have to overcome or even concieve? 
This hope is not constructed in a time frame, day, month or year.
Hope is a whole concept of our future before it appears,  
before the way it will become a reality is clear.  
This formed hope, despite is origin, can subconsciously influence every major decision we make.  
Where we live, the jobs we chose, the reasons we work and live, who we date.
When in our lives does our hope change from things for ourselves vs. things for the greater good.
Why is the difference important and are we responsible once it’s understood?  
If you have never been suppressed, stripped of freedom, knock on wood.
What if we ignore our human need to be motivated by hope?  
What if we never established the construct of hope or struggled to keep it afloat? Hope’s value is tied to physical and emotional pain, hurt and sufferings.  
Complex constructs about Hope for the greater good born from the worst things.
The greatest accomplishments after starting with nothing.
What does this mean?  
Societies suffering under the rule of a ruthless dictator that don’t but could,
will have the highest number of people hoping for the greater good.  
Freedoms forsaken, worth taken, wills shaken, Conclusion…Revolution

by R. Craig David-Copyrighted 2012
Written about the riots in Turkey