My heart yearns for what once was
   my mind fighting to hold the line in a quiet battle
  
Time, relentlessly persistent in its attempts to erase
   dragging my life forward into fading memory

Moments attenuating, absorbed by the past
   distorted in all but the essential
  
But their essence is distilled in my soul
   dormant in an archived strength and purity

Occasional mindbursts of beauty are released
   refusing to be contained or denied

A certain scent in the air, a certain quality of light
   a lyric of song, a touch of breeze...all catalysts

Spontaneously transported into a joyful state
   I'm consumed by a déjà vu of carefree ambiance

Bejeweled compartments spill their contents
   washing over my mind in a composite nostalgia

Familiar waves of concentrated being saturate
   my existence for a compelling glimpse of the idyllic

In those fleeting reveries of peaceful contentedness
   I feel completely at home within myself

I wish I could say...
  that I don't believe in love
  that I don't believe in truth
  that I don't believe in you

Life would seem less futile somehow
   but also...less beautiful

fragments of life
scattered on the photoshop floor
discarded moments
deleted before fully developed

urgency depicted as living for today
overexposing the instantaneous
cropping a disjointed existence
from the bitmap of impatience

why the aversion to time's darkroom
where future's blur slowly comes into focus
giving clarity to the contiguous
splicing realization from potential

cut to ending...

a panoramic view of destiny's horizon
where paths converge but never vanish

Once again, I am not only alive;
But newborn-alive.
Antoine de-Saint Exupery tried to tell us
That besides having the solution to every riddle,
Snakes can also teach us
That we have always been the better creatures
For we shed our insides,
The only touchable things our souls produce;
Instead of our outsides,
And they come out of our only way in
To another soul,
And everytime they do,
We run after our breaths
Like the first time we learned
We actually need it.
We will really always meet ourselves here,
In this middle darkness where we first saw light
And made that womb-to-tomb pact of companionship
With what we came with to this world,
The same thing we'd leave with
Or leave because of,
And leave behind to cause a whole lot more
Shedding of insides
When we finally go the only way,
Which, all along,
Is back...

How many more shots of Jack Daniel's
Will you pour over that glass
Half-full of Coke
And half-empty of enough
Until you get enough?
The sadness in your silence
Makes it hard to tell if you're paying attention
To the voices you hear
Or the thoughts you listen to,
And the more glasses you empty,
Objects you slam intentionally,
And songs you let speak for you,
The more you show the lonely twenty-something
Or more
Is better than the icy spirit I first met
Escaping his bottle
Back in that car ride I will now always remember,
For if it weren't for it,
You wouldn't be good as drunk now,
Sober enough to finally say out loud
What you've been screaming about quietly
In that seat you never sat on
In spite of the last few hours you stayed with us
And the only two or three times you excused yourself out,
And I hope somehow we really did do something
To make you feel better
Or better yet stop you
From feeling at all
For at least a little while,
But I'm pretty sure you only saw us
As a good excuse to finally
Take that bottle of Jack Daniel's
Out of your sight of misery
From that shelf where it was placed
To do you the most good.
So I'll leave you my cheeseburger,
In case you need a reminder
Of the moment you once had company
In that emptiness you call a condo unit,
That will last long enough
Until the next time we say goodbye,
And by then I just might try
To leave something other than
Cold food and disappointment
Upon my answer of “I don't like them”
To your question of whether or not
I know of Backstreet Boys,
And instead provide a better cheerer-upper,
Like a good song or advice or poem,
Than a bottle of Jack Daniel's.