ballad
from the eighties
vibrates my car speakers -
for a moment I'm reminded
of you

young men
dance with bullets -
spill blood and fight in war;
sent to their deaths on the whims of
old men

disease,
poverty, war -
hatred and bigotry
everywhere; yet each day birds
still sing

i was already dying
   when I met you
the
     cancer
eating away at my body
one
  cell
     at a time
for a year, in clandestine
   hostility
my carcass was animated by only
        the hope of love
        a yearning for
            something sensed
            not seen
     but then
    your aspect fell
       upon me
  savage, yet serene
proclaiming your love
   with all that you were
and the
       healing
           began

dolphin slaughter
   in disingenuous and exquisite
Japanese inlets
hunger as an epidemic
   in the shadowed corners of
the world
putrid and rotting flesh
rampant disease
gmo crops making us all
     fat
these are things to
          worry
about, to fret and rally over
   yet here
I sit, wondering in
      mild horror
why I write better poetry
with
    two
       shots
of whiskey
  in my gullet
than when I am sober

in the center
of my garden of thought
is an
     inky black pool
an obsidian mirror that ripples
     and grows
with each
          and every
hurt, pain, and torment I endure
circling the pool
     my verdant hopes
     my violaceous loves
     my carmine furies -
their blooms crawl, intertwine, creep
  in a mass of emotion and impulse
      pushing ever against the center
where my garden meets that
     ebony pond;
a barren desolate blight
  of decay and hopelessness
the vivid chromaticity of my
   emotion
in perpetual campaign against
          the void
        that forever
    threatens to
               consume
                    me

summer sweat
hugs my whiskey glass;
runs down my back