you wake up
his hair is spilled across the pillow,
the sun slants across his cheekbone
and his breath is slow and even.
he smells like an open field
and his body is wrapped around yours
so he keeps you warm.
you think,
there is no moment better than this,
that he is too perfect to exist.
but you wake up gasping,
skin soaked in sweat.
you lie there for a long time,
in your completely empty bed.

I still dream of my father
crossing the pastures
on his one-eyed tractor
mowing acres of sorrow
heading east of a moon
that'll be gone tomorrow
turning one last time as
if to say: so long my son
there’s going to be days
of sunshine and plenty
more of rain as he went
along his way, and my
sadness waved back like
grain in fields of long past
summers and summers
before that, so long a time
ago I can remember only
on lonely nights of heat
lightning and the low
rumble of distant thunder.

Lying embedded in velvet gloom and night,
You and I are gazing up the northern hemisphere.
Within the sea of darkness is the stars' stained light.

Hidden inside the fabric of interstellar space,
Might be a kind of universal truth
That answers all the questions of human race.

Sensing the pull of the universe
I feel like we're lost between the infinite vastness
That none of us could ever dream to traverse.

Suddenly you get up on your knees -
Head in the sky and feet on the ground.
“Perhaps the stars only made us feel lost,
because we both wanted to be found.”

People only ever want to ask me about
the poetry -
those verses about
busted up noses in outer space;
about the pros working
way down passed
the corner of Broad and Main;
about fistfights and hard, hard drinking.
But I built a flowerbed this weekend...
Twenty two tastefully irregular stone blocks
in a crescent moon shape,
filled with the blackest of soils.
The sweat of toil.
The digging.
The planting.
Exotic grasses. Asian maybe?
Purple and yellow flowers.
Zinnias or some **** thing.
All covered in a thick blanket of brown mulch.
It's a fine thing to have dirt on your hands
instead of blood.
No one ever asks me about flowerbeds.

This depression
is borderline elegant,
it flows through my veins
like smooth jazz
or a dancer's pattering feet
on the cold concrete.
This life of mine
has chaotic undertones,
don't be fooled by the silence.
This poem I write
is a battle cry
but it's also known to me
as a declaration
of certain defeat.