The best of you
I find
are writing words
my mind
is taking them
away
and molding them
as clay
responsively
inspired
when all my thoughts
are tired
I lean on you
and start
to feel myself,
my heart.

The sound of flesh tones
takes me back to you,
somehow.
The flavor of your words,
the smell of snow
sending your skin crawling;
windows pain and
suffer in ice.
We perch precariously
hardly inside my car,
bleed into night
breathing delicacies
into the hollow air,
our hands full of each others'.

If this poem had melody,
it would sound alarms.
Sickly sweet thumps from
drums dripping discord
hard lines
lead down
lead down
lead down
Keys to carry our
lock-boxed thoughts
overseas, we
are just unaccustomed
to these breeds
of attuning, intoning,
singing serenades
in shameless shades
like ghosts of each other
found only here,
some haunted isle.

I hear your breath in the fog
See your body like a moment
Taste you bitter in recital
like some copiously black coffee
which your tongue taught me to love.
You burn my hands,
my lips,
my lungs.
You burn.


Syncopate and center,
taking this legal pad
for some sort of joy ride
to break all the rules with.
Warm now beneath tips
of pen and ink and finger,
blues bleeding;
You stay, still
stuck in my mind,
impervious to scrawls,
and immune to memory,
yet found in songs of
another's composition.

I'm putting on my flowing cape
to contrast against these
skin tight words,
delivering truth, freedom,
beauty, hope,
love, joy, ***, war
hate, passion,
and emotional genocide

I'm flaunting my anatomy
in mis-measured feet,
peculiar textual bulges
with evidence of discrepancies,
and wondering why
the mayor won't call me back.

I'm slipping,

stepping silently through
mountains of air
wind
whipping this clay shod body
earth and sod and
stones to small to see


I'm stuck,

this pen wedged within
my corpus callosum,
not big enough to handle the task
not up not *****,
doesn't have the stuff.

I'm all.

Honest, to the tip of each hair on my head
cut and styled, and put into place;

truth bubbling out
from behind crimson painted lips;

but so that I may not mince words, / there is nothing straight about me
save the razor's edge / with which I detail my semantics,
my words cut with conveniences / resilient as talcum powder

you / we have so much to look forward to

I punched the volume ****
like Tyson and Holyfield,
plunged us into silence,
our heads swimming in
phantom sounds.
The sun was a muffled glare,
but you squinted at me
and broke the silent virginity
with a cough.

The planet whirled
like an exotic dancer,
stars screamed how beautiful they are,
but were outmatched by our sun
just because of how
close it is.

The stars never go away.
Not really.
We just stop expecting them to be there.

We sat still.

And me, with all my
hypodermic words
unable to scratch the surface.

And you, with all your
delicate features
unable to soften the blow.

Because at night, we exchange
one star for millions,
though none of them
can keep us warm,
and all we want
is to see where we're going.

My time with you is
the first few seconds before
all your flavor's gone.

We cannot get to
Happiness if we are not
in the carpool lane

I had four dreams last night.                                                           ­                                                                 ­          

In my dream
there was a man
alone in a room
surrounded by frames without pictures,
walls without windows,
faces without voices,
living another man's life
exactly as he was told he should.
He did not feel sad
because he thought
there was no point to feeling.
So he thought he was happy.


In my dream                                                            ­                                    
I saw a woman                                                            ­                                    
laying alone in bed.                                                             ­                                   
She had watched her life                                                             ­                                   
slipping past                                                             ­                                           
day by day.                                                             ­                                             
Her children had                                                              ­                                  
grown and gone,                                                            ­                                    
and her lovers                                                           ­                                     
forgot her name.                                                            ­                                    
She fell asleep each night                                                            ­                                    
embraced only by the cold.                                                            ­                                    


                          ­                                                                 ­                                             In my dream
                                                                ­                                                                 ­           was a boy
                                                             ­                                   who sat and watched his friends
                                                         ­                                       running and laughing.        
                                               ­                                                   He wished that he was beautiful
                                                       ­                                         and that everyone else would like
                                                            ­                                                              loo­king at him,          
                                                                ­                                                   his hair and his makeup.
                                                         ­                                                         But they dressed him up
                                                              ­                                                       in a suit and tie          
                                                                ­                                   and they cut his hair short
                                                           ­                                     and everyone thought he was just
                                                            ­                                    bad at being a boy. Disappointment.


In my dream, I was a city.
My streets were filled with dreams
and the dreams were filled with ***
                                   and greed
                             and pain
                         and lust
          and loneliness.
My buildings ached
like weathered bones
and I felt myself being torn
            at the seams
because no one cared
to hold me together.
And as they died,
they never knew
that they
      were me,
          and I,
I was immortal.

We're too old now.


Too old to indulge in

partitioned plastic plates

shatter resistant

but molded to hold in

three ounces of fun

per serving.


We've outgrown yesterday's

gaudy voice acting

and crude cartoon lines

washed out, two dimensional

color schemes

and character types, now

redux in high gloss CGI,

300 dpi

1080p

5.1 surrounding

both of our senses.




What's that?

We have three others?


But we've no time

for scented markers

on monochrome pages

Breakfast food no longer

simply sugar and bread

We swath ourselves

with succulent self-importance

tech savvy misanthropy

dolled up in decadent

anonymity

We are too old

to go to a friends house and play.





A list of woes and throes

gives us nothing-

leaves us nowhere

except in thinking

patiently praying

that we may never outgrow

our love for the things

which we've long since outgrown.

If I
am the man
you thought I would be, how
could you have thought
so little
of me?

I fear I've become
formulaic and dishonest
though honesty has never
flown freely when I bleed.
I instead inscribe
insolence, decadence
dolled up in demand and
hand picked participles
to show my snappy wordsuits
down this two dimension catwalk.
I've tasted the fraudulent freeverse fantasy
and washed out what I've done
years past, former lives,
servitude to scheming rhymes
and tracking down the feet
meter by meter.
See!
I own the jargon,
jot it down freely
with a casuality undeserved.
Read carefully, cause herein spouts my effort.

Slink back to default,
once in whiles,
show them that you
got it still.
Baring teeth or
gleaming smiles
differ at souls'
windowsills.

And simply so, it seems again
like pox against my aching skin
I simply substitute some time
to rhyme and let it all begin...

Belief is never sweeter

than to those who can't believe.

Reconciliation is for

those without relief.

Forgiveness comes in times and places
farthest from our expectations.

But ultimately,

we're the ones

who must forgive

ourselves.

Every room has a din.
You just have to listen
hard enough.

This din was a spoken one,
like where actors mutter
"...rhubarb, rhubarb..."


Her steps made a percussive
clacking sound
that echoed from
wall       to       wall,
pervasive and acute.

But what truly stuck out
                                                             ­                 did so from only one side.

Her, the weird one.
  Her, accident prone.
   Her, the girl with
            one wing.

In a room full of faeries,
                       she stuck out.
                   An entire people
who hid themselves by day,
                           and she
was sequestered.


Everything
twisted          
down          
in a

s    
p      
i    
r
  a
      l
      i
    n
g

d  
e    
s    
  c  
    e
     n
    t

But what would you expect
     from a girl with one wing?

The bleak, unbridled 
fury of a granite sky
bids me, Welcome Home

There is a churning,
spurning surge
like sickly sushi
or bad first dates
rollercoasters
Take it slow, I say
take it no more
than two days at a time
like when your brother
slipped, fell fell fell
down the basement steps
Remember that?
Let it fester
lactic acid
Let it drown
Let it bloat
Then make your
chalk outline
of feelings deceased
Let it waver or
whimper or wallow
but don't let it go.

This is the beginning
of your next great write.

This church is haunted,
so they say,
the sanctuary possessed,
filled with the melancholy
lingering spirits
like the echoes of
cheap communion wine
and halfhearted Hail Marys.
Those who think that
sitting in a pew
is next to godliness.
So they stay here-
too afraid of hell
to ever embark for heaven.