There is a sort of romance one can find at a bar
A mysterious sense of love
Removed from everyday life
From work or phone calls home
If you close your eyes you can hear it
The clacking of ice-cube
The clacking of glass
The slow pour of a beer
The faster swish of it being
Slid down to your hand
Bumping once or twice on the uneven wooden surface
The slightly cold drip running down the side of your glass
These sounds are romantic
Hemmingway wrote at a bar
Odds are your parents feel in love in one
First kisses and embraces with friends you’ve missed
They happen at a bar
If you close your ears you can see it
A dingy light from over head
A spotlight for a pretty girl’s smile
The colors that the last sip of whisky
After they’re watered down with ice
The swooshing hues of red and white
Inside wine glasses from a couple a few seats down
The hand of the bartender covering yours
As you hand them their tip
And in that same second lock eyes
Before quickly looking down
A love in a life before this one maybe.
One can find romance in a bar
In the littlest of things
When paid attention to
They hold a sense of mystery.

She shot me dead on
With a pistol that
Would have looked better on a cowboy
It was too heavy for her holster
Her body shifted from side to side
As she walked towards me
And she had to eventually prop her hand
Up on her unarmed hip
As she stopped to stop over me
She let her sweat drip down from
Her forehead to dip of her collar bone
And she let her mouth smile
Bigger than had seen it grow in years
She didn’t bother to wipe off
Her black powered fingers
She touched the spot just below my neck
Where I could feel the bullet sink further in
She shot me dead on
And I remembered telling her once
How she wore tears like a diamond necklace
She shot me dead on
And I remembered telling her once
How I much preferred rubies.

Can I be cavalier with a heart
That doesn’t belong to me
Can I afford the same careless
Actions to be inflicted onto someone else
As I have inflected them onto my own heart
Will I not feel knots in my stomach
And pains in my chest if I allow
The dread in my heart
To stain another’s who
I promised to keep untainted
Promised to hold with gentle hands
And look at with kind eyes
To blow off the dust that settles
On it after too much time
Without enough use
I said I would love your heart for
As long as mine would pump
But is that promise broken
If the beating slows so severely
It severs the sound of the second hand
Tick of a tenuous time keeper
My heart as always been my keeper
And it’s working at a slower rate
Than is needed for oxygen
To run through my veins
And into to my muscles
Making my mouth lethargic
And unable to not be cavalier
With the words I love you
And to shy away from someone else’s heart
I promised to love till mine stopped beating.

Day in and day out we feed.
The night grows tired when we need
An excess amount in times when struggles amount to greed.
Day in and day out we thirst.
Living in this material curse.
Hopeless gestures of wants and entitlements, forgetting we were humble first.
Day in and day out we learn
How the whims of life can sometimes burn.
Wishing for things when reality settles with different concerns.
Day in and day out.
This battle for your soul ensues.
No matter what you believe do good and good will find its why back to you

The ordinary man
Is always, in part, the villain.
The supporting role for the hero’s story-
They are never adorned with
Fangs or ominous and dark eyes
Their evil is much more insidious
Subtle but complex
Within a man that could easily
Pass for the hero himself
If his bad days did not over shadow the good
If he did not so strongly hold steady
His own beliefs
So that he felt bound to bind them to others
We are all part hero and villain
What casts us in our role as one or the other
Is if we act on the small part of us
That fights to the death for our beliefs
In the face of the popular opposition.

Maybe it was the gun hidden beneath
Or perhaps the words used to trick and deceit.
I fell off the cliff, abrupt, through the dark.
Fallen, I fell. Forgotten and lost.
I chose to climb and regain my feeling.
Paralysis isn't simple when love's the reason.
I loathed to focus my fate and hold on to pulse.
Risen, I rose to stop this horrific curse.
Maybe it was the gun hidden beneath
Or perhaps the words used to trick and deceit
The protagonist I stand to take on the world,
In reality it was you but you were just one world.
Chosen, I chose to hold on to whispers.
It was me who had to realize the truth from the giver.
I needed a reason to feel the commitment;
The gun shot from you is what made me resilient.
Maybe it was the gun hidden beneath
Or perhaps the words used to trick and deceit.
Either way the afterlife I was given
Gave me a reason to pursue a life worth living.