similies like crazy
at the end of every day
when we sit and watch and wonder
where we throw our lives away
when we throw our lives away

we're smiling like crazy
at the people walking by
hope that they dont hear us talking
as we laugh and then we sigh
then we laugh, and then we sigh

its similar to falling
yet exceptional at best
when we're standing up together
when we're sitting down to rest
when we're laying down to rest

as simply as i see you
its as easy then to say
that i see us intertwining
in a convoluted way
such a transcendental way



as disentegrating phrases
meet our pierced and weary ears
will we try to patch together
all our long and weary years
oh such long and weary years


but i know when we lay morbid
and we close our heavy lids
we will hand in hand be living
loving life as we were kids
living life when we were kids

I count my steps,
my heart like some
mis-ticking pedometer
uneven and syncopated
disassociated and dislocated
     with my head in the clouds
I found, retracing my steps,
my foot in my mouth
all the while we kissed.

No wonder, then
that you tasted like
the roads we traveled together,
each time more insipid than the last,
and each word I spoke
was muddled
dry and bland
or saturated and sticking
under fingernails
between your teeth

you may watch me crest the icy black
surface of your minds wide ocean
with moonlight catching brilliant spray
and casting shadows of doubt
follow me down
     and listen to me
   singing you to sleep
a pacifist lullaby
of malcontent
and lonliness

your breath is as level as the choppy seas
and your thoughts will follow wherever I please

I know that you have reservations
keeping your heart bound
safely to the shore,
your hopes lapping loosely around your feet
receding,
returning,
remitting,
refreshing,
and all the while you know
that the whitecaps
     are the faces of regret
     are the voices of dissent
     are forces to be reckoned
and that stormy seas are only a problem
if you're trying to stay afloat

each night as you dream, your thoughts set sail
and I will be your great white whale

apologies like stones in homes of glass
i watch you sleeping, drowning all the while
a sad array of closets stuffed with bones
veneer release -- a desecrated smile

i take my leave of life devoid of love
and turn it to the mountain precipice
a metaphor of solidarity
where Aphrodite earns no sacrifice

i leave you laying in the urban sprawl
a pearl among the sands of broken dreams
where i cannot articulate my fear
that everything may wind up as it seems

and so i prematurely take my leave
and so i leave your life as love leaves mine
i write upon the walls of this, my cave,
"a tribute to the death of life divine"

Call me stricken
by her
          my favorite color.

I want to fill my ears with static
to give my thoughts some room to move
and my eyes monochromatic
with an artistic side to prove


She writes
like shes giving
Noah Webster a *******,
her labyrinthine constructions
of consonants and vowels,
leading in circles
obliterating disbelief,
and I
          AM

the words.


She tastes like ***
and nostalgia
nauseating my pages,
wearing thin over keystrokes,
repetition,
               the mother of decrepitude
so my muse
               decimates my thoughts
          one in ten
     one in ten
one in ten
*CRACK

I know what's real won't end until we start
ignoring what we want within our heart.
But deeper lines will never score
the bottom of the ocean floor
more than I feel whenever we're apart.

Your skin laid out
in shades of blue and teal,
the brilliant white streaks
of wind tossed hair.
Your backdrop, a sky
painted in a noontime orange
as dark wisps of cloud
paint the fluorescent atmosphere.
With everything in
perfect opposites
I wonder
if that is why you seem
so happy.

I do not much care for poets
We're a touchy bunch indeed
How we validate our feelings
By what other people read
How we dive into our writing
Like a swine into its mud
And we savor every sentence
Like a ruminating cud
How we strike upon the heartstrings
Of the others like ourselves
But we feel so violated
When we're pulled out of our shells
How we make such grand investments
With our twenty dollar words
Toward the inevitability
That our voice will be heard
And we slather on the sentiment
With metaphoric verse
Vindication in our imagery
So beautiful and terse
And I sometimes have to wonder
If the reason we create
Is exclusively attracting
Someone else who can relate
No, I don't much care for poets
Though the blame is not on you
As the simple truth about it
Is that I'm a poet too

I don't want to sleep tonight
so we can hear the rain,
and watch our memories slowly spin
like whispers in my brain.
You say forever feels like love
and death is but a day.
But little help that offers me
when you're a world away.

So I don't want to hear the rain
if it will wash you out.
But someday soon we'll find the tune
our life can sing about.

His thoughts smell like caffeine.
Defied the day/night drummer, he did.
Watched the world nearly die
     then awaken unaware.
Ready, though, for the autopsy,
searching for the COD
he read in the wrinkles
of street lamps and satellites,
"Death due to the search for life."

Instead he wrote, inadvertently,
the biography of the day,
playful and concise,
wise despite his best efforts.
I'll not write it all down here,
so as not to plagiarize.
Suffice it did no more that night
to keep the world from sleep.
Supine he waited, wished with
baited breath. Each fulcrum
of solar ascent went
slowly, wholly over his head.
Each night laid him down
something elaborately unseen.
Each of us heard his rhymes
                and in turn
         wrote him off.

Daylight simply hides the shadows -
passive state of things.
Life simply hides the death
which time inevitably brings.
Mourning dove finds company
and to the other sings.
I pick for you these roses,
but we're waiting for the rings.
                               - unsung

So many things to say.
Between the floods and raindrops,
pain and heartthrobs,
living for better, for worse,
for now,
for following through
on the sins we commit to.
Somehow
we expect to see light.
I can feel with my skin
but it's blistering,
I can't hear,
but I know you're not listening.
You'd be here
anon and otherwise
punctual.
Instead you're a societal gut-punch
who makes me puke.
Truthfully, I'd set camp come the dusk
where I knew I could feel the warmth
from your bridges burned.
Feel the light, dried and cracked.
Tell me what you learned.

Love is found not
in fixation
obsession and attraction to
the point of abstraction.
Love does not demand
sacrifice of soul and will,
sitting still, sifting
through emotional ruminants.
Love does not need me.

Love is what I need to be.

(S)he finds me trapped
strength sapped
and gives me heart to heart
resuscitation.
This is love.
I am free to die and weep
and hate and wallow;
love is unfettered by languish,
not lackluster if let to age.
In time, we find, we see the truth
of love's supposed strength in youth,
and instead see
antiquity
grows vines around our walls, and through
windows and doors, inside and out.
Now, when we crumble into dust,
our framework cracks like cheap glass,
we find this love, slow and insidious,
to be the only thing holding us aloft.
*This is your heart becoming mine.

There was nothing ahead
but the blazing red
brazen brake lights watching
for the likes of us,
with somewhere to be
besides the whipping chills
of concrete and ice
spliced into our state,
uniquely white.

Inside, the air
surged the song out
and over our bundled bodies
thermal anomalies
in the amalgamating night.
Music
wrapped and coiled,
covered the lazy silence
like insulation commitment
to keep us safe,
deployed in case of a conversational
head on collision,
curtailed with soft sounds,
in amber lamps
simple.

Your particulate words
freckles in the face of ill
conceived ideas of entitled
Sirs and Madams,
my van Gogh brush
damning them all to hell.

Songs like shadows softly lift
the light from darkened, tainted lips,
cursed with memories from which
the lighter tones withhold their gifts.

Brighter beams, meanwhile, tell
the shadows where they're meant to dwell.
All contained within the swell
of one small voice's silent shell.

Stories told of artifacts
in hands of greed with hearts of black,
laying in curses, spreading that
which sticks, and stays, and wont hold back.

Hardly living, all alone
within the house she built of bones,
memorizing muted tones
that speak of light theyve never known.

And wandering from place to place,
the sands of time erode, erase
from this world's ever-changing face.
And so is gone without a trace.

its been hours and days
and weeks and
months
and people are
watching me nightly
with my music and
bottles, my
words and my makeup
and dried blood
so very unsightly
i'm sitting and musing
and writing
so
slowly
and
watching
the minutes
go bye
but time is a place
and each second i ****
is another small
void in the sky

She took a hundred candles
and burned them all to stubs
to watch the life go burning out
of each and every one.

And once she took a person,
and meant to light their heart.
She missed and lit their lungs, instead.
Now they speak flaming darts.

One time she took to drowning
in oceans vast and deep.
But she is dreams, and dreams don't die,
so she just fell asleep.

When she would sit up lonely
and watch while all the rest
would lay, and dream, and breathe, and stay,
then, gorgeous she was left.

As she would search for beauty
from uglies, odds, or couths,
she oftentimes would find herself
and still not know the truth.

I watched her light a candle
and burn it to the ground,
then say that hers was not the hand
that scattered flames around.

I watched her light a candle,
then try to blow it out.
But she inhaled, and now instead
shes left with burning lungs of red.
Her words, still burning in my head,
I recognize when late, in bed
my candle won't go out.

sins of thieves are born
of patience, care, courage, strength
virtues every one

His name was Adam Chester,
          and I killed him.

He was something early thirties
still built like twenty-two.
His eyes were as green as life
and the corners of his mouth could
shine enough certainly to
photosynthesize.

He was dying.

I was something late twenties,
young enough in Hollywood
to still be exposing my ******* for parts.
My hair still had more red than shame,
and my body still looked like a
parenthetical aside
in all the right places.

I had never felt more dead.


He said he saw me in some room
with some people sometime
and that the spark in my eyes had
restarted his heart,
cause he was surely dead,
just waiting to die.
I said I understood,
and I drank daiquiris.
Later, he would tell me
my skin felt softer than the
Egyptian cotton sarcophagus
entangling our legs,
that my lips tasted like cherry,
my breath like alcohol,
and my skin like so many
     squandered summer nights,
     bikini tops and Tanqueray,
     riding solar flares between friendships
     and not taking no **** from no one.

For weeks and months we were together. He didn't seem to be wasting any way but spiritually, and I didn't seem to be wasting anything but time. He told me that everybody dies alone, and that he would give anything to break the trend. I told him that of course I would help, and that I didn't love him, but I loved the thought of him, and that in me that thought would live forever. I promised I would find a way. He would touch my hair and smile without showing his teeth - either because it seemed too aggressive or too disingenuous. He told me how our lives resembled Moulin Rouge, except that he was the one on the clock, and I just wanted to drink and ****, and that was precisely why he chose me; perhaps if he was never alone, he would never have time to die.


It was the kind of arid night that makes you want to water your plants compulsively.
The air had our lips cracking like sarcastic smiles
and skin too dry like a sense of humor,
unable to turn the pages of our paperbacks.
I asked him to be my chapstick.
He asked me to be his lotion.
I told him that he was gross.
He told me to go to hell.
               I told him...
          He told me...
     I told him...
He told me...
I told...
He...

I woke in the cold embrace of solitude.
She kissed my neck and called me Lover.
I told Solitude to leave me sleep.
She told me she was lonely.
Told me I was breathing, if barely.
More than could be said for some.
She kissed my neck.
My heart stopped.

Time flows not like grains of sand,
but like grains of wood,
back and forth, swaying, dancing,
some ****** understanding within itself
which we have no place in,
no fate with or without.
I saw him laying alone,
saw him stand beside himself.
Saw him wonder
where I had gone.
Saw him go.
Saw him, gone.
When you die alone, you leave even yourself behind.


I went back to bed,
back to my body,

where Solitude could have her way with me.

'Tis the season for
deconstruction
and rebirth with rebar
'Tis the time for me
to create the word
chauvimaniacal
To drink
more than my doctor wants
but less than my audience deserves
'Tis a passing, flashing
immolating infatuation
toward progress
through denial and other forms
of self medication
It's summer
and I not-so-secretly
******* hate it.

I would distain to be a character
in one or many of the classic acts
wherein I’d sacrifice myself if e'er
I might find presence only in the past.
There all would look at me and wonder how
an artist with such skill could sculpt me so.
And in this irony, as 'tis called now,
still those who "know" me best, me hardly know!
I would distain to live by others words,
each hanging my intentions to their own.
While screenplays dare not script the flight of birds,
instead, expect love, ne'er having been grown.
What I would rather do had I not been
so tightly reined by such a sharpened pen?

There is a beauty in my life like air--
that is she follows me and fills me up,
and when my lungs in joyous mirth erupt,
it is by her my song is even there.
And should the gathered throngs around me stare,
or try to cease my song or interrupt
the rhythms of my heart, and so corrupt
the flowing of my verses, then beware.
The tumults of a love perceived too soft
may soon upset the sails of those too near;
these very winds hold eagles' wings aloft,
cause waves to break, and on a lesser tone
may carry whispers, tho it be a mere
few inches, saying "you are not alone."

Show me the man who dreams his faerie tale,
who gives it breath and depth, who sings it in,
and who can animate these without fail;
who robes the mind and gives the bones their skin.
Give me the chance to ask him how he lives
amidst the mortal memories of loss,
and what about his love of living gives
his mind resolve that death cannot accost.
And let me tell him, then, that when he dreams,
a thousand others pale against its light,
because, when everything is at it seems,
we use his champions to slay our blight.
Without a mind as his to give us wings,
we might forever pray for simple things.

Beloved, I swear to you to make my life
a testimony of my love to you,
to live with you as wedded man and wife,
to stand with you in everything you do.
I swear to give my love to you alone,
to stand with you in triumph and in grief,
in valleys where the sun has never shown
and mountaintops of hope and of relief.
I swear to stand beside you, should our days
be darkened with the promises of loss,
and with you, I will never shy away
from any task or trial life may toss.
I swear to keep these things with all my heart
until the day that death shall do us part.

I've braved the life of living in the past,
Of caring for what never cared for me.
I've watched a hundred thousand days be flashed
like glints of sun across a choppy sea.
I've never taken tea with foreign kings,
but I could tell you tales of how I have,
and in those fleeting moments, fickle things,
my words would be your melancholy's salve.
I read my tales and stories with a head
that sits upon a swivel and a lie,
and every word I've written, thought, or said
will follow you until the day you die.
A greater sun as never shone on me
Than when I found my immortality.

I'm living in a skin that's not my own -
instead resembling something of a man
who hides for fear, or else confronted, ran.
Now as I wear this self, so loosely sewn,
with shreds of muscle hanging off of bone,
it seems to be that anything I can,
I do to dodge the truth of who I am.
In multitudes or mirrors, I'm alone.
So I take solace here, that in my rest,
as surely as I'm speaking to you now,
you'll know the truth about my state of heart.
And though I am no Nietzsche or Descartes,
I'll postulate, grey templed, furrowed brow,
my heart has ne'er beat truer in my breast.

The ink spills dark as lights are flitting on,
the thoughts and dreams and very souls of ours.
Though bright the future, waiting, poised anon,
it notices but flippantly our scars.

A man might make his words into a deed,
might voice his hopes too loudly and be heard,
or else might sleep his days and so accede
the universe refuses to be stirred.

We came onto this planet lame and cold,
with Time already plotting our demise.
But rue the world which fetters us in gold;
We see the black and gaze into its eyes.

The moon sits innocently, just and fair.
The Devil's footsteps kiss the evening air.

I'm languished here in lack of lit'rature,
for treading words - writ oceans black and pale.
I woe my want of discipline demure
to hoist my mental canvas and set sail.
To set this sextant sentence south to north,
my odyssey sees strange sands lap aground
with trepidation slipping slowly forth,
and omnipresent, inauspicious sound.
Please show me now around this simple isle.
Lead me by hand to cliffs by time distressed.
Forgive me then if I retreat a while
to cast off, searching ****** shorelines' rest.
This covered ground, font foliage, anon
will meet me once this weary world is gone.

Quick spiraling up
dust, cut through
particulate, converse
for wear - no worse
lines taut, held terse
for sure, bravely held
when expected projected,
and shown to the rest with
confection rejected
Tested, tried true, you
tread boldly into
stone cold reserves told
tritely, mighty fine end
This spring/summer confection
     inside of my head

I might be a budding botanist.

You see I watch you take root
in the back of my mind,
while your deepviolet dreams
flower up from behind.
With my withering construct
and green disposition
your ivy league discord
leaves fetid pollution.
my limbs aren't strong enough
to hold you at bay
so I'm prone to let grow on me
whatever you say
these seedlings sap strength
and succor my faults
i could fight back
but what use against this garden gestalt
i am tripping on lilacs
or maybe just lies
and its only a matter of time
till we die
so im keeping my footing
my head above water
and were i a fish
not a lamb to the slaughter
my frame it grows thin
growing gaunt, growing weak
and i cant help but feel
this is what you would seek
then i cant help but feel
i was wrong, and so then
i will try not to go
about feeling again

So today, I think, I
will simply search out my own people.
The thinkers, believers,
soothsayers speaking in acrylic discrepancies
between what is and what will,
what might and ought but won't as long as.

It's so simple, they say.
Just apply yourself daily
and try not to sway
lest your habit break.
Then striped of practice,
you take up your vows again.
Simple, it seems.
Except that I'm swearing daily
"**** all this!
Tropes and tricks!
There's no ease here.
How could there be?
Baring me scarcely seems
to meet the measures
of rarely seen wear and tear
but these **** seams are holding true."

Remember you have only to apply
once daily doses of madness and hope.
If memory serves, it's these
worthwhile self-service tricks
that have woven our sails.
Drink the seas. Come and capsize.
You'll finally meet me.

Seldom am I so direct,
Like Wayne, Parker, Kent,
I prefer my subterfuge.
But these words are penned
     (figuratively speaking)
by the penultimate,
              tumultuous,
and often callous wordjockey
yours truly.

As I've said, I'm seldom
more than the sum
of my company kept
[let slip,
reacquainted,
self-righteous reconciliation,
          regret, repeat]
And today, I find
myself
writing thrice,
twice toward pride,
once of consequence.
Que sera sera.

I'm lead like a horse
who had to drink -
or perhaps imbibe?
your softly streaming sentences,
words which kicked like a mule.
Remember, I was hoarse,
parched.

On that parchment, I find these words:

I am a cause...



Truth at last, truth at last,
Thank God almighty...

     ...you know the rest.


I stand on this principle -
that I cannot stand at all
sin ustedes
your words the salve,
my words the therapy.
"Progress."
Just Cause.

Now, waxing on
toward the triumphant,
anthemic Aye!
If you are the cause and the casualty,
then each daily account
of what might be made martyrdom
should be cannon.
Am I eliciting allusions and assumptions?
Inadvertently, but then precariously so.
So the pieces fall,
the causality, literary
the eventuality, progressive.

Aye, we are naught but what
we are made of by others.
So each concussive consonant chips and chisels
off the ol' block.

To a good Mister John Henry,
my gratitude.

Beware of armour
that shines too bright. Who knows if
it's never been used?

It's so hard to compete
with well shaped human form.
My lines are all bulky,
uneven, and lumpy.
I've no ******* to caress,
no hips and no rear.
That is, I do have them,
but you'll not find them here.
It's so hard to compete
sipping long slurps of mead,
somewhat sweet, something biting,
when shots come much quicker,
they get you there
down the line
move along
spending time
wisely. I
have to take mine.
I can't rush this.
You must understand.
I'm a poet. I hold these words
tight in my hands.
I release them, but slowly,
like time's grains of sand.
There's no **** here,
just titles.
No models, just writers.
Our words are our craft.
We drink, we expire.
If photos are worth just one thousand words each,
then I am the camera
with the film out of reach.

We were all sitting here alone
spiking our breakfast cereal
monochrome and melancholy
unique like bad grammar
we stammer and stumble
through thoughts sepia
and savor each sip
from bourbon laced Special K
our amber memories matching
the luxurious proof that we need
each other like broken toes
need designer moccasins
more or less useless in stupors
suave though still
as captains Morgan and Crunch
sail the high seas of our internal struggle
and pitch with unspoken conversation starters
and serene belief that the storm over head
is just a migraine like any other
meanwhile we sing seaworthy refrains of how
Honey Jack and Cheerios were made for each other
sending our feelings down to Davey Jones' deep

ten cent poems
hiding in numbers
a shotgun blast
of ink and paper
hoping that one slug
strikes true.

knick an artery,
crack the bone
call yourself
a marksman wordsmith

im sorry i saw
through the muzzle flash
im sorry i told

but to be fair..

you lied first.
and im not sorry.

this is a new place
a new time for me
and ive never been here before
not here like this
maybe once before,
but that was on the cycle down

sometimes i need to move
to make sure that im in control
of my own reflection

im watching him looking
back at me
and i just know
that that ******
is up to something.

all the while
things are moving
just on the edge
as im watching
a movie about sounds
and wishing that
someone would talk to me
that way

and now that i am in the throes
ill tell you something else
a secret everybody knows
a secret nonetheless
ive never truly been a one
for free or spoken word
the things i do and speak and write
are better seen than heard
i write instead in flashing rhyme
that catches unawares
not flowery, but in its time
a fuller meaning shares

then tired of this back and forth
we contemplate our honest worth
and ever lonely on this earth,
we pray that someone, somewhere
trapped in the confines of their
time served here
reads our humble verse.

I's stuffed with mouthfulls
stuck bombastic swabs back, silly tonsils
attract this kind of swelling
blood flow filling brash, crass
rusted filter engorged but not gorgeous.
Leaking, not porous. I'd fight for us
but you're the one fighting me.
So I stuff this all down from the surface.
It's worth it. You see,
argumentatively I concede to the truth.
You withhold resolute and spew weather.
I'm better. I hold it inside. Stuff it down,
bottle up all my thoughts and I swallow them
frothing and foaming in cheeks around teeth
gargle responses, apologize
but I's stuffed with this awful,
awful mouthful.

You stole my breath
but needed only ask.
Gave love freely
and demanded the same back.
You took no ****
so never gave one.
You showed me the way
- my eyes followed you -
to feel no regret.

You were bold and brazen,
I was empathetically italicized,
leaning on you
in times of duress.
You gave and gave and gave and gave and gave
two-bit trinkets
half-assed like alimony.
I took and took and took until
I was overburdened and
rooted in place.
You walked away like an action hero
and never looked back.
You showed me the way
- my eyes followed you -
straight out the window.

Yesterday you gave
     me a call. Said
     you were fine.
I didn't ask
     if you felt my eyes
     searching you out
     in dreams,
digging deeper through memories
to us, together.
You teaching me to love
     selfishly,
showing me the way you did.
My eyes followed you,
  followed yours
     following her,
and you showed me the way
you felt no regrets.

Perhaps sometime I can show you
how I find my way
straight out the window
and let your eyes follow me
down.

All my friends keep dying--
I buried one today.
All this time we're buying
all gets whisked away.
All these words defying
what I want to say
as all my friends keep dying,
and all their corpses stay.

i love alliteration
like kings love living
like lions love killing
like love lost leaves aching
and wonder
wide wonder
where we were, when we were
we were
so...
alive.

awesome.

some sleep. others dream.
fetch fire from fire
blaze
blaze and black
opposites. awesome opposites.

still not us.

some sleep. some slip away.
slippery like fish.
i dont like fish very much.
live late. love long.
life
if it is life
lives
lest life linger, sub-par
sub-average

far more fitting.
(the former phrase, of course, following "fish"
sans "sub-" sentences)


some sleep, some dream.
others, oddly enough, bother both
both worlds, which while one works without what one would supply
(some sleepers dont dream)
dreamers, sometimes, seldom sleep.
rather, wrestle restlessly, fervently
futile fights
fighting fear, hate, hardship, hardly having strength to share their ideas.
folly.
does it seem, slightly
that they need both?
sleep and strength?
brains and brawn?

take teamwork, temporarily.
you and i...
we
we would win.
we wish,
we wonder,
we wander wherever.
we watch,
we would, whatever,
win.
because we live.
like lines long for letters
which would whittle words from whiteness
we would work with one another
and,
so,
we could rule the world.

would you rule with me?
please?

because i love alliteration
like lines and letters love leading listless eyes
lacking lids
courses carved across canvas
craving closure.
craving cause.
point.
place a period.

pause.

pax. peace.

pretty please?

I wrote a book called "Useless"
a thousand pages long,
and every page is useless
a thousand letters strong.
And each disjointed sentence
on each disjointed page
makes up another chapter
that I could call a day.

And in this book called "Useless,"
each task I was assigned
took up another hour
I wanted to call mine.
But in this useless novel
where nothing lasts for good,
it made such little difference.
I wish they understood.

It seems most of my pages
were writ without my words
by many other people.
Oh, had I only heard
the voices of the others
who told me not to write
unless I was the author,
and never stand contrite.

The creases in these pages
were put there not by me,
but by the "Learned" people
who thought it best to be
the leaders of my charges!
The heroins and kings
that lead me on to vic'try --
the "freedom" that it brings.

And so they tore those pages,
divided from the spine
of that old book called "Useless."
I loathe to call it mine.
There each and every paper,
now added to their own
collection of these useless
thoughts, was ne'er made known.

'Till dust began collecting
upon the golden leaf
that read the title "Useless"
so powerful and brief,
until I dared to read it
and so lament each time
I had no say in rhythm,
in meter or in rhyme.

And there spread out before me,
each letter cold and black,
contained my very life, still
no life was reading back.
I wanted so to burn it
and send it to its grave.
'Till, better or for worse, I saw
this book is all I have.

I quietly replaced it
between the other books,
now something less embarrassed
by all the space it took,
and realized there with reverence
I needed a new page,
to change my manuscript and
above all else, engage.

And so I keep old "Useless"
so that they might believe
that I write in these pages
for them and not for me.
And here I write another.
It does not have a name
since only time will dictate
the nature of my game.

Now tired of that story,
monotonous and prose,
I altered my technique. now,
it, something like this, goes:
I wrote a poem called useless
though I dont think it is.
You see, it is a prologue.

I live
  dream
  die
to create
    complete
each letter
         word
         turning phrase and
         thought-out straightaway

You read
        breathe
        digest
every syllable
letters strung
like a popcorn necklace
fingerpainted fragment sentences
authoritatively artistic and
defended in brazen resolve



my keeper of the slight,
the nuanced, softly sung,
down-quilted gerunds:
holding, brushing, sweeping
tasting, loving

There is no sound in space.
No quiet nothings whispered.
The sunlight on my face
now scorching, cracking, blistered,


Starvation
comes quickly
when the cook's not around;
so when the words stop
if need be,
feast on me.