At some point I tucked away
Somewhere in the back of my head
The idea that before I'm dead
I'll have a daughter
I'll be a father
I'll be forced to figure out how
Fragile this female creature can really be

I'll find all the time in my strength
To be one with her
To hug her head against my chest when she cries
To tell her everything is alright
At least she tried
Never stop trying
Nobody just hops on and
Rides a bike the very first time

It takes failure to finish things
It's the same reason I didn't add training wheels
A false sense of security that
Allows a leaning deviation from truth
You gotta grab life by the handlebars and
Hold on tight
Push one foot in front of the other

I will see in the offspring of her step
That she's come from me
Especially looking her up and down
At the end of the day
To find scraped knees
****** and still bleeding
From honest attempts to fly
She will claim I lied when I said
'It never hurts to try'
She will endlessly question and
Ask me why

I hope I have answers
I want to be able to tell her
Everything is was and is going to be ok
But I can't even say that today
How can I be sure
She won't have to live my life
In the very same way
I did

Every parents biggest fear is having their child turn out like they did
Living the same lies
Making the same mistakes
Never looking up
Tying themselves down to their frowns
Always shivering from trying to shake the sadness off
Taking too many ibuprofen for depression and
Never having that headache fully go away

But my daughter will be brighter
Than I ever was
She will love me unconditionally and
Accept my every flaw
She will call me daddy and break my heart
I want to teach her every good thing I know
But more than likely I will be the student and
The lesson will be love and
I will have remembered what it means to live life to the fullest

My daughter will work harder
Than I ever did and
She will put in half the effort
To get twice the result
She will do anything and everything she wants
Accomplishing admiration and acknowledgment
By simply existing and smiling

My daughter is the water and
I am the seed
I'm in need of her nectar
To change me from **** to flower
Her passion will be the rain

I have big plans for my daughter
But soon I will see she has
Even bigger plans for me

I felt like a scotch tape stretch screech screaming out to hang pictures of tigers teeth

[Teeth dripping of the colorful swirling primordial ooze that is forming and foaming in the corners of your mouth.]

A slightly sickening substance you don't perceive as gathering worries reminding you saliva leaves a maniacal residue

[A film of acidic copper coats your mouth as the tension in your mandible builds with each passing milisecond relieved by jagged popping motions, but if only for a moment as your hands melt into the carpet making a pool of creamy peach nothingness, but if only for a moment.]

The ripple relief is tension relieved yet a remix of images perceived as water washing over eyes cleansing and clearing obscurity but still obstructive and obtuse overwhelming

[The filter is flipped off,conscious activity roams free as if it were a rain dance of visual, tactile exploration of serotonin amongst limitless creativity. Never ending like the far reaches of space but just as tiny as a molecule.]

A never ending meandering mingle of the mind with minuscule details coming to life and finding a force unlike anything you've climbed, realizing the mountain of motion and the commotion of sparked senses is a let loose expression of deep down inner desire

[Teasing its way to the surface and tingling under skin like ants in an endless procession of drone servitude. Consume, ****, die. And realizing the meaning of it all, the sole driving forces of life is *** and death.]

An endless one by one two by two march in line behind other droids digging lines in the sands of time again and again obeying their inner desire design by the man with the magnifying glass in the sky. And all we can ask is why don't we just be us, ourselves and fly saying **** the confinements of our meaningless antennae lives we have wings and all we must do is express it in jumping and believing in flight

We are butterfly's and birds feeling wings we once thought worthless and it's because of this substance stance we are taking and the dance we are waltzing that we get to have this enlightening experience

I hope one day, and I know this day will come because I'll make sure of it, but I hope one day my sins become visual and cover the walls of a cabin far in the woods, and all my bad deeds will be residual and my soul will be attached to, but not trapped, there. People will come to visit only once or twice a year, but when they do, I'll make the ******* most of it. I'll stay subtle and silent, with gradual motions like a faucet turning on or a door closing in an empty room, and the living visitors will think 'how strange', but it's not strange, what's strange is I've waited for this opportunity hours on end in an afterlife limbo where I'm not entirely dead, but was I ever really completely alive? Here I'm still bound by time and space, and I could go on to forever, but I choose instead to make banging sounds on worldly walls and cause men to be macho and insist this house and these woods are not haunted, but the goosebumps on your girlfriends arms say otherwise, and so do I. But why do I waste my time? Yes, time, here it is again, and therein lies the answer to my question. Time. I have it, I posses it like fingernails or hair and watch it grow to indicate its ongoing forward crawl. Time with its mouthful of gnashing teeth that grind and grind and grind but never wear thin and toothless like a homeless man who humbly smiles at a passing stranger even though they scoff at his politically incorrect poverty, the teeth chomp constantly and rhythmically reminding him and all of us that we cannot escape it, not even in death. So I use this purgatory I've chosen to bother anonymous teenagers who come from far away to these mountains with a lust for adventure and in turn find themselves wondering what these sounds are they keep hearing and why the tv turns itself on and off and the channels change without warning.  I'm telling them 'hey, just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm not here', and it's not fear from them I want, only for them to understand that an invisible man is handcuffed here and has no hurry to get to hell. I'm just a phantom holding you ransom with my hardship, light the fireplace and I'll help you feel it.

I hear your hoofbeat heart
Galloping toward me
A stampede running steadily
Kicking up clouds of dust
As love to cover me
I have to admit
I don't feel *****
Coated in you
I feel nothing but clean

Love is ever changing clouds

At times a blanket that shrouds
Completely surrounding
With a gentle warming

but

Then it grows dark and
Cries out and
Bites down with
Razor rain

Screaming and shouting
Hollowing You out
Filling You with doubt

An overcast obscurity
A vapor veil
A growing gloom
A murky mist in moonlight

then

Morning comes clear and cloudless
You wish for shade or
An overshadowing fog
But this clarity is loveless

The sun blinks out
Everything extinguished
An enveloping eclipse

All is taken away
An illusion
Blotted out for now
The edges still shine rays

Bringing an amber overhead glow
A burning buttermilk sky
Now I see what they mean by cloud nine

Heaven is mine in peaceful paradise
A blissfulness that burns true and
Shoots me over the moon

and

Comes from only
Seeing and
Loving and
Being with the
Weather that is
You

Have you ever felt
The weight of the world crashing
Down upon your hopes?

I have never felt
The speed of the Earth turning,
Twisting up my thoughts

I have only felt
The depth of my mind racing
For understanding

I rewound the memory
A minds eye film of my heart on fire
One of my favorites to replay

I see it frame by frame
As if I were pressing pause repeatedly
Aflame from friction
I can feel the heat fill the air
The sparks lick my imagination
Surrounding with its love and conviction

I've always been afraid to hit fast forward
Watch my passion swiftly burn and extinguish
Leaving behind my ashen anguish

But this time my feline curiosity gets the best of me and
Suddenly I'm seeing the amber glow
Grow at double speed
Getting brighter and brighter
As the seconds keep accelerating

The warm ember a beacon
Illuminating our kindled future
Proving my worries wrong

Instead of dimming and losing life
My heart will be hotter ignited
Each moment we are together
Beside each other
Alive

I wish the world was rounder
Or at least a little softer around the edges
But what I've found up until now is that
The ground we walk on is flat and sharp and
I can only assume that the cosmos is the same and
Further conclude that the universe reflects
Our names in the stars
In a Milky Way white wonder  
With a backdrop of midnight mystery  
Placing obstacles in the way between
Us and our true identities so
We only get to see them as a
Twinkling reminder of history
Paying homage to the past
With a flat pinpoint canvas
To show us the sky is smooth
A shining mirror
The earth is flat
It has an edge
You can fall off
It happens so fast
I hope it starts to spin and
Begins its orbit
Before I slip again and
It's my last

Insatiably You inhale my every remark,
Swallowing each phrase as a personal token for Your own validity
The words bathe in benevolence and the
Sorrow of your guts and lungs;
Churning round, changing from light to dark-
Until You
Regurgitate them maliciously, coming up through Your throat, bypassing every past lump once resting there
Soaring past Your teeth, they grab hold of a few incisors while sailing toward me with a clatter
Chewing straight through me

Insufflate adulation, emanate malevolence

I am the number one sun
You are my two ; the moon.
We are love incarnate
Within one another,
We have set Our separate fires in each other,
But then combined them and
Allowed them to burn together
as Us and
We.
You are Her and
She.
We can find harmony in
Our silence eventually
Because knowing You are breathing On the other end of the receiver is a
Comforting feeling and
Even then I know
We share part of each other
While We are both just sitting and Listening and
Waiting.

We are two corresponding links in the chain.
Cuffed together like holding hands.
Coupled as consecutive arrows
Stuck in Our quivering hearts.

Held by Our bond and
Tethered by Our trust and
Attached by Our adoration.
Connected by a
Constant comfort cable
Two souls smiling in succession

As my cold air lungs collapse
My last frozen breath escapes my lips
I lay here dying all alone
Calling out to the falling snow

These winter woods are now my home
A bed of ice upon the ground
Myself a ghost to forever roam
Not a soul for miles around
I won't be found

The frigid frost is a blanket for my feelings
I've become numb to the bone
At first an uncomfortable chill
I've lost the ability to feel anything
This arctic atmosphere kills
I am coming toward comatose

My frame now rooted turned to stone
My hands are rigid and lifeless
My icy eyes are glazed and glaring
My being paralyzed by this piercing place

It's biting down and penetrating
Cutting with bitter precision
My condition desolate and dismal

A final shiver forbidding
One last winter whimper
As senses fail I fall
Buried by the blessed blizzard
A sacred silence ensues

I want you to understand
I don't need you to lend a hand
Your absence pulls my chest apart
I need you to lend your heart

I don't think I will ever understand
Why my heart fits perfectly in the palm of your hand
You hold it unpinned from my sleeve
Leaving me with my red stain vacancy

Reached through my ribs to apprehend
You took my love my skin won't mend
My soul won't send or receive signals

Grabbed hard squeezed tight
Grasped hugs felt right
Got greedy with your need
But never gave it back to me

Not a fair trade
More like a shady drug deal
You got the goods and
I got the grief to feel

So you see I'm empty
I want you to break open your body
Our transaction is incomplete
You have mine so swap your pulse out
So I can have a beat

I've fallen down I cannot stand
I don't need you to lend a hand
My blood is still and needs to start
I need you to lend a heart
I need you to lend your heart

I have these moments of brilliance clouded with a perpetuation of
vague remembrance and
a constant feeling of forgetfulness. Like consciousness is great
or terrible and
the memory is tenfold and
the story is tenfold more and
the compound of this equation equals extreme overload or
precise under load,
both of which arrive at the same verdict.

I stammer through my sentences
Like a stumbling drunkard ***
Holding out his thumb
For a free ride to anywhere but here
But he knows **** well
Ain't no way in hell
Is anyone gonna pick his wasted *** up

So I continue to talk and talk and
He try's to 'walk' and 'walk'
But it looks and sounds like
A sloppy tightrope tip toe or
A precisely timed and
Meticulously planned and controlled fall

Instead of breaking through barriers
My words begin to build walls
That trap and surround me
I can't sense how they're sounding
Until its too late and
The conversation takes place in my memory

I'm brought back to this stutter
An utterly annoying inarticulate attempt at
Conveying what I mean to mean and
How I'm feeling
Are you with me??

Relentless residual resentment
Anger plaguing me
I'm always meeting the wrong people
It keeps happening
They take advantage of me

I hate those that hurt
It should have been them first
No one ever really gets what they deserve

My knuckles should be permanently bruised
Because what they do makes me abuse myself
If I can't hit You I'll strike everything else

If my lungs won't spit fire
I'll write it down and spell it out
I hope it's enough to make them burn and
Put my own flames out

I'm not a handy man
Simply a man with hands
That wish to hold
I'm not Mr. Fix It
But I'll bet I can bend and
Twist and mend part of you
I'm certainly not Mr. Know It All
But what I do know could
Catch you before you fall
I'll never be Mr. Big Shot
But I feel like I've been shot
By a big ego
I'm not Mr. Executive
But I've lived consecutive years
Pursuing power and authority
I am Mr. E

Love is a question mark that starts with its
initial inquiry upwards
launching and
lifting off and
gaining ground for a moment because
you think you know the answer but then it peaks and
pinnacles and
hangs in the air
which is an illusion because it immediately slopes down and
plunges as you
talk a circle around the subject and finally fall
straight down into confusion
not quite knowing
what it is or
what to do and
the dot at the end with a period is
the actual question as
a bottomless pit of punctuation but
there is a point to all of this

What is love?

We've both become a living testament
Of how some people can only speak in argument
When Your words quickly change from night to day
You never say what You mean, You rarely mean what You say

Lust before trust has always been a failing policy
Love without devotion is a guaranteed fallacy
You've only been my companion intermittently
It's becoming too much to handle wondering where You could be
And
With whom

So I want to be able to see as far as the sky can see
Because only then would You always be within eyesight of me
But if I gaze too long my heaven starts to bruise and
Slams down upon me in black and blue

You can't run before You walk
If We start at a crawl
We tried to sprint to race the clock
But in turn We had to stumble and fall
We couldn't chase the embrace that made Us seem reborn
It was a fleeting feeling from failing hearts We'd torn
Your eyes were constantly shifting searching for more and more and
Soon I felt like nothing I could do was right for You, the now is now, no it's not like before

That morning came
The same as any other
A kiss and a hug
From daughter to mother
A departing smile
As she turned the corner
Unknowing this day would change everything and
Carry her away

A bird of prey
Swept down with eagle eyes and
Grabbed her and led her astray
Leaving loved ones lost
They hope and pray
For her safety in searching
Always in their hearts she will stay

A simple stroll
A routine walk to school
An innocent young girl
A bright spot in a dark world
She shines so beautiful

Her star was taken
A gentle twinkle
She shimmered in the night
But blinked out in an instant
A cloud formed to
Block her from the sky
A blanket of grey in an
Unfair display of evil incarnate that Brought hurt and pain

An entire community cannot comprehend
How can this happen?
With such malice and confusion
How can we continue to function?
A society filled with tragedy
Ongoing sorrow is sickening
Family and friends gather together
To support each other
With comforting words and
Violet flowers

That mourning came
Our worst fears realized
Our feelings and emotions paralyzed
This can't be real we say
Who could steal her away?

Her love is pure
A little angel
She did not deserve
To have her wings clipped or
Her soul hushed
But her spirit lives on forever

The villain of our beloved victim
Will cower and run and hide
But we will never stop until we find
The one who so suddenly shook our lives

We must remember the joy she gave
We must have faith the one responsible will be found
We must hold on tight to love and
Know she looks down on us now From above

Now we wait to join her once again
When we will embrace her in heaven
We can still feel her life within us
The memory of her laughter
Will echo in our minds
Until our own hereafter

She shook the earth
Standing still with an expression
A smile
Not of happiness or joy
But of sorrow
A perplexing fixation of
Flexed muscles that would
Shock anyone
The comfort of
Contradicting emotion is
Hard to explain and
Harder yet to show the world
But I feel Her
I live Her
She's my inner girl

If I had a dollar for every tear I've made
I would've watched the world drown while my bills got paid
I would've worn a salt crown while the sadness fades
I could've kept myself bound to the groundwork I laid

You should not judge me by my cover,
Because I'm an open book
You won't be able to read me in one sitting,
Or see me in a single look
The pages torn around the edges
Words are worn from weathered eyes
But newer chapters ever changing
Are living life within these lines
Breathing
There are parts that can be painful,
Those paragraphs are most important
This current section could seem stressful,
I carry with me no regret
It may be strange to start in the middle,
There's no better time than now
I'll fill You in on sections passed, what you've missed, true and honest
Just ask and I will tell You anything You wish to know
So what do You say, care to read a good story?
Or better yet, play a part in this plot for me, and I for You
It's one that ebbs and flows, and never ends, and perhaps, You can be a character in
Would You like to help me finish writing it?

How could you do this to me?
It's not You or I, but We
That make Us, that make up
Who we are not
Supposed to be

The way You hold on to me
With a blank face
You make me feel so empty
When will I finally see?
Your eyes alive within me

The knots You tied around me
The greater the gap
And I can feel them tightening
You make it hard to breathe
Short of breath and I'm always gasping

Rewind, repeat, and depart from me
These are my limbs You're severing
I'm barely functioning
There is still phantom feeling
Please bring them back to me

How could You do this to me?
You make me feel so empty
You make it hard to breathe
I'm barely functioning

It's not You or I but We
That make Us, that make up
Who We are not
Supposed to be

Some people think they speak with razors and spit fire
But there's a gun on the tip of this tongue
That shoots the truth straight through you
I know it goes in one ear and out the other  
I wish the words would fill your lungs
As punctured penetrating proof

Don't deny
You can't lie
For a moment you felt it
For a second you knew
I was right

I come from a breed that has a mom but needs a mother, that has a heart but needs a spark to jump start its beat, that has eyes that can't see you unless your being shines brightly, that has legs that walk for miles on end, that has knees that buckle and bend when it's too hard to stand, that has arms made to hug friends, that has hands formed to take hold of the wind and grasp it, that has ears that burn from politics, that has a mouth that moves mountains and a voice that wants nothing more than to say I love you and then prove it. I come from all that

There's a gun in Your hand
O son of the sun
That hushes Your voice and
Cheapens Your words
There's a gun in Your head
O sun of the son
That blinds Your vision and
Deafens Your ears
There's a gun at my heart
O son of the sun
With a gentle squeeze
You trigger my ache
Give me the gun,
O sun of the son
For it is my turn to aim

A-L-I-B I know you lie to me
I-R-O-N-I see things quite clear
L-I-A are you still there?
N-U-M be all that you can be 

I see those lies in your eyes,
I despise It insults my intelligence, and,
I watch your pupils they dilate with
Each word you exaggerate,
Fabricate 

I don't ever want to see you again 
I try and I tried but maybe we can't be 
Friends
And I'm addicted to the way you 
Pretend
That everything is alright, when I know 
Different

It seems like no matter which direction I walk
The sun is always following my right shoulder
I guess that's why it's darker
More brown burnt and
Redder than the other
The skin is more sensitive on that scar when I took a digger
Too drunk to stand or forgive myself
Too dumb to live so
I put myself on a shelf
High above your happiness and
Smiles and
Wealth and
Fun

So much higher

But not better

Where are You going?
It's been so long headed nowhere
So will You call me when You get there?
Cause I can't follow You anymore

It's aimless when You're wandering
It leaves me helpless and wondering
If what I do will change anything
Because it's never aided Your suffering

Wouldn't it be great if my words were pills to alleviate?
If my syllables were a remedy to rebuild You to Your proper state
If each letter was water to rehydrate

But both of us know that there's no healing in prose
Unless You let the lines linger and see the significance they show and
Allow the implication of their meaning
To bring truth and understanding

But You never do