The silence is deafening
I fear it as one fears the dark
The emptiness
The lifelessness of the unknown
It awakens in me a desire
To fill the spaces
To yell and break the curse
But somehow I know that would make it worse
I want to send a melody into the dark
But it has a hand on my throat
And it silences me

In your eyes I find the echoes of my dreams
My hopes being amplified back at me
I find those unspoken wishes
Sent away with the smoke of a birthday candle
Those desperate whispers I pinned on the tails of shooting stars
The hopeful notions I tossed with the coin into the well
You are the personification of every wishful adjective I tucked away for a rainy day
I am losing my mind
Yet I somehow know that you hold it
In those searching eyes
That hold me so dearly
Let the years pass
For I know that, while we may break,
The hours will only magnify my love

I have to start somewhere
So I thought it should be at the top of a page
I know this isn't poetic
I rarely am myself
But I have to speak
Don't ask me why
I just must
It is who I am
I don't know how to shut up
I know that isn't eloquent
But does it really matter
As I said
I'm rarely a poet and this isn't a poem

Suffocation
The walls of culture are closing in
Ready to stifle the flame of imagination
They can't control it so it scares them
In that flicker is the possibility for a bonfire
That could burn down their fragile empire
It could illuminate the darkness
they have tried so hard to create
By surrounding us with the weight
Of daily monotony
They've instilled in us
A desire to fit into the social norm
A fear of any tangible form
Of creativity
They have made it foreign to us
To question
The boundaries formed to bind us
This is my rebellion

Religion taught me to fear
It told me to deny the aches of my bones
As if there was something inherently evil about it
That this body that God knit together
Was destined to be broken
I'm starting to doubt the height of the mountains
Because of the depth of my current valley
Have I always been here
Was that hill I stood on
Merely a mound in a canyon
Yet there is one thing I am sure of
That God is and was always here
Offering to take this burden
While there was me trying to believe that there wasn't one
Because I liked it
It kept me inside the lines
And each time I would wander too far
Send me a crippling shock of fear
And now, only while looking back,
Do I realize that I want more

I have to translate this emptiness into something tangible
Something I can easily digest
Because, currently, it is choking me
I want to see this beast with my own eyes
To stop those mind numbing questions
That have me drowning in self doubt
Am I sane?
Is this real?
Because it sure is real enough to lay me out on the ground
Questioning the reality of the stars watching me from great distances away
Sanity, such a fleeting thing.
Decided by culture and the forces that be.
It is hard to think outside of the box
When it would leave you drowning in the sea.

Words are the seeds of rebellion
A simple sentence may imprint a design of unrest
On the minds of the oppressed
And when watered by the unending tears
Of the motherless child
Of the widow or widower
These seeds spring eternal as weeds in the gardens of the oppressors
How quickly these starving plants grow
In the perceived beauty of the truly demented souls
Of those who used the corpses of the tormented as the topsoil
For their design of a utopia
The weeds of unrest will rise in the minds of those who have lost all
In a sacrifice for the comfort of those who walk above them
They will choke the oxygen
From the society
Who survives off of them
Those who carry the world on their backs
Words are the seeds of rebellion
And they are those who will stand
When these perverted gardens fall around them

This flesh is a prison
With desires and wants in stark contrast to my own
The sin of our ancestors
Has placed a price on our bones
That we will never be able to repay,
Yet there came one
Who let the blood be arrested from his veins
To pay
The debt that would, in the end, demand our lives
He took it upon his head as a crown
And let it draw that dark red blood to the surface
And form puddles at the foot of that rugged cross
To be the pools of salvation that will save us all
He took on this fleshly prison and let it be slain
To free us from this cage

There is hope now
For I can feel it slowly decomposing as I sit
The bars to this prison are slowly eroding away
And I find myself greatly anticipating the day
That I shall escape this fallen cage
And step into the glorious kingdom that awaits.

I'm sorry that I'm not your Prince Charming
The knight riding in with armor shining
I'm sorry I'm not your superhero
Carrying you up from the ground below
I have tried so hard to drop my guard
And open my hands to hold your heart
But it isn't mine to hold
There will come one to guard your soul
One to stand up for you strong and bold
The one made to hold your hand
And I am sorry that I'm not him.

The rain was falling in its usual haphazard way
Sporadically coming and going
Leaving me to accept the dampness that I attempted to delay
I say attempt as if it was earnest, yet my only shield was the paper from today
So truly, all that remained of my “attempt”
Was a sopping wet mushy mess
And I was left at the will of the chaotic fates
But as if I had called them by name
An umbrella harshly hit me in the head
In a flurry of words I could only pick out a few
With many of them being profuse “sorries” and a peculiar mixture of “what did I do’s"
What initially appeared to be a speaking parasol and a plume
Of brightly colored and rather endearing pastel hues
Tipped back to reveal
A Beautiful, short, red headed girl
Staring up with eyes painted a bright sky blue
Though my tongue had left me and I had become unglued
It seems I was capable of uttering a rather embarrassing “how do you do”
Immediately I realize my mistake in my haste
Which was probably immediately evident on my face
I had in an instant traded my usual southern twang
For a rather poorly performed and probably offensive English impression
I quickly turn away
Taking long strides before I find a place on a crowded park bench
Yet as I am about to sit
I feel a light tap on my shoulder
Slowly turning around, knowing the statistics were currently against me
I see the face of the girl I had just moments ago
Effectively ran away
I mean figuratively
Because it was literally me
Who had done the running
Yet all she had to offer was a smile
A small upturned grin
That ceased all attempts to explain what my unappealing dash had meant
For I knew I would meet with embarrassment again
Yet she quickly put my fears to peace
Offering the umbrella she held in her hand
And walked with me under the trees
Leading me to the reasoning
That though things may seem haphazard and drastically varied
Everything still manages to fall exactly where it’s meant to be.

When I see you time stops
And I can almost see the air around you glisten
As it does in movies
But then I realize that I'm staring
And it quickly becomes awkward
My eyes quickly dart away
hoping that you hadn't caught
My prolonged gaze
And as my eyes drift back my fears are confirmed
I catch your eyes focused on mine
But I quickly realize
That you were kind of staring at me as well
Perhaps it was hopeful thinking
Messing with my hope filled mind
But I quickly match your gaze
Finding myself unable to look away
And we sit there
Until I realize that time
Was still passing by
And I hadn't even said anything
So while I continued my gazing
I decided to say hi
And you returned my greeting

I am spaced out, distant, bored.
The teacher is running on and on,
while I am lost in some other world
tracing storylines of heroes, kings,
princesses, knights, jesters, and queens.
Writing romance beyond any I could ever wish for myself.
My pen is running across the paper,
writing down my thoughts and figures,
hoping it may somehow make it more real,
like if I poured enough of myself into these scratchings
they may leap from the page into the air
and bring my narrative to life.
I would not go as far as to call myself a writer, a poet, a dreamer,
but I do write and I do dream, and I put more of my emotion on a page
than I do into anybody or anything.
I lose myself to worlds, in which I only visit,
yet they are more home to me than any I know.
I come to with the ringing of a bell, and find that I had spent
the past hour staring at this beautiful girl,
ethereal and wrapped in light from the barred over windows,
long blonde hair, brown eyes, and earphones perched in her ears.
Thinking I may still be daydreaming, I blink a few times and time starts to still.
She smiles bashfully, knowing I had realized my mistake, and gathers her things.
Leaving me to think, maybe the story I’m living isn’t that bad,
and perhaps dreams are even better when they are real.

I have realized that all of the songs stuck in my mind are about you
Now, I don't want to put credit where credit's not due
But you might as well have been the muse
Of these tunes
Playing on repeat in my mind
You are like my favorite song that I play over and over
Until I grow sick of it
But then again, that's a poor metaphor
For how could I ever get sick of you
Your voice is the haunting melody
That I want to spend my life striving to harmonize
Your heart the tympani beat
That drives my feet
Leading you across the room
Your hand in mine
Like the needle in the groove
Singing out the beauty therein
The glow of your cheek and the gleam of your eye
Is the song eternally stuck in my mind

My heart aches
Yearning, burning
To find beauty in the mundane
To find meaning in the stirring of the strings
The secrets that hide behind the
Swell of the harmony
Why do our souls
Cling so desperately
To the mountainous musings of the melody
Riding over the hills
Of a despairing land.
The horns scream out the
Pain of the peasants
While the clarinets take up
The whispers of the voiceless
And the flutes cry with the motherless child
But all of that quiets as the black notes sail away
The strings adopt the voice of the man pleading to his star crossed love
To run away
And the woodwinds soon join the chase
Of this dreamy eyed couple from that ****** place
Music moves
It soars it sinks
It carries and spellbinds the wandering soul.
It promises a divine love that will heal
Music is truthful
It tells us that there is something bigger than us
How else could these vibrations
Rip our souls apart and just as quickly sew them back
Every soaring note carrying our dreams to the one that formed us
No other medium could as purely
Convey the true beauty
Of Gods unfailing love for humanity

The rain is racing down the window behind me
With a cup of warm tea sitting on the side.
I am propelled through the pages of the book that I hold in my clenched hands.
I am leading a charge into battle.
Storming the infallible towers that I ensure will fall by first light.
I am embracing my sweetheart
After a separation that seemed like a lifetime.
I am slaying the dragon
And saving the enslaved kingdom.
I am holding my love's hand
As we run through the night to places unknown.
The rain is beating against the window,
Yet I am warm living the lives of hundreds of others.

I don't know where this started
But it seems I can see the end
What at first seemed to merely happen
Has become too much of an effort to mend
The weight of unresolved pain is slowly ripping us apart
And only now do I know how the way I handle hate
Isn't conducive to caring for a heart
You gave me yours
And I did likewise
In a misguided effort to draw a line
Connecting me and you
But now those lines divide
And our hearts are no longer tied
And I feel like I've lost a piece of you
maybe I have
I've tried to find
The heart you freely gave
But it seems it has been misplaced
Or as I am afraid, you might have taken it away
So this must be the end, there seems to be no more
So please just leave my heart on the end table
On your way out the door

How we fall decides so much
Though inevitable is the crash
Rebuilding depends on such
Where we look and what we clutch
If we are frantic
And panic to find something to grasp
Then we will collapse
In a heap of destruction
But if we observe and look
For ways back up
Then we can prepare for the coming ascent

How far is far enough
For us to fall and drag ourselves through the mud
When will you be broken enough
To let it go as worthless and take the blood
Offered to us
How many times do we have to see man fail
To know not to place our trust
In this fitful lust
For the knowledge not meant for us
Men look at the stars and think
Those are mine to define
I must name them and place them in pictures beautiful to me
What foolishness to think
That the tiny dust
We make up could fathom infinity
It goes beyond delusions of grandeur
It is a mass hysteria under the guise of intelligence
This grand case of negligence
And It illustrates
What filthy rags pass as knowledge these days
There was a time when great men set their eyes on God
For they knew that he was the source of wisdom

There are questions in this old forest
Decomposing with the bodies that lay forgotten
They are brittle as the bones they rest on
And stir along with the flesh that is no longer
Tattered clothing clings to the apparition
The form of one who no longer exists
There are questions in this old forest
Questions that shall never be answered

I have faith in the ground under my feet
To remain unyielding
To the eroding
Of the trees.
Who's roots weave
A web of earth
Under me.
But through the decomposing
I have found myself falling
Through the land
That hides under me
Unseen by these eyes
That desperately cling
To the ideas that are structures in my belief
They are being attacked
They are under siege
From the same ground that once supported me
They are crumbling
They are fading
Under the light that has set me free
From these ashes
Arise a hope reborn
In the land of my fathers
My newfound home

It's as if the knowledge of our terminal nature
Awakens the fatal agents in our bones
That it is only when we learn of death
That we start dying
Such as with childhood
A time defined by ignorance of an end
Seems infinite
Yet as we start to see
Our favorite characters in the books we read
Reach the end of their adventures
Even with the promise of happily ever after
It is evident that just as the lines on the pages ceased
The lives told of in the story therein likewise fade into history
And then
It clicks...
In that instant we see the disease of fatality
A true virus to be caught
Transmitted through literature and tragedy
Crescendoing to an inevitable crash
No cure to be discovered
Only catalysts that act
To speed the immutable throws of death

I like order
I know that's not odd, it just needed to be said
I like to connect the dots
And make pictures out of the chaos inside of my head
I like to write lists
And alphabetize all of the things separating me from sleep
I like to organize
The pervading themes that I conjure in my dreams
I like to file and store things away
Only to be brought up on a cold rainy day
I like to bookmark
All the brilliant things I could possibly say
I like to highlight and underline
All of the empty spaces between reality and me
I like to document and record
All of the differences that I can't see
I like to graph
Demographics that don't include me
And I like to study
just how odd order can truly be.

If life fit in a line, it would be a horrible poem.
Not that it’s too messy, for some of the best poetry speak of tragedy as romance or vice versa, and I have never heard of a greater mess.
Nor that it is too scattered, for some of the best narratives lie in the tales of drug-addled minds.
The poet must fictionalize life and love to make it readable, and even then I am often uninterested in reading it.

We seem to think that being hurt is an option
That we can close people out and take the weapons from them
But being human means that we must love easily
Without worry of those who may not see
The weakness evident in trying to beat
The humanity
Out of those who stand
For in a land of hate, love is strength
And in the midst of uncaring
It is those who know they will be hurt
Yet still weep with those who are weeping
And stand for those who are kneeling
They are the ones who will be strong enough
To still be caring when the tides come
Who will maintain their humanity when it seems hope is gone
For those are the ones who know the price of love.

Please paint the walls of this empty room
That I have built up just for you
Plaster these halls with that bright sky blue
That I see each time my eyes rest on you
Splatter the walls with that light pastel pink
That I see you breathe out each time you speak
Drown them with that somber maroon
That fills my head when you leave the room
And douse it in the deep dark rouge
That spellbinds me when you say "I love you"

Hope has thrived in the veins of sinful men
For you have willed it to be so
A population which had spit in your face
And turned away
Time and time again
Oh, how the mighty fall to the hand of corruption
Decomposition befalls their morals
Yet you lived
Though clothed in humility
Was king over all
And never did your head fall to temptation
Planting that seed of hope
That we can find salvation
In your steadfast love
For on that cross wasn't a pillar of prideful strength
Standing against the corruption of humanity
But rather a ladder to transcend damnation
And ascend past tyranny
The tyranny of men who remain in their lustful ways
Yet salvation remains outstretched to them
And there lies the foundation of hope
That though you lived in a condemned world
You didn't come to condemn the world.

He died knowing how beautiful the stars are
Yet without the tongue to form the words
He died watching the beauty of a spring storm
Yet without the hands to paint them
He died hearing a young woman speaking prose
To the man who held her terribly close
Yet he was without the mind to put it to strings
To place it in the bells of the brass horns
He died with a broken heart
Though never held by anyone
He was without the voice to sing it out
As a wailing shout and have others call it honest
You see the fatal crime was not a mundane life lived to death
But rather death laying on a man ever since he was a sickly kid

It is not known from where a reaper comes
But perhaps it is from an artist, dead, before he ever lived

Thorns are ripping at my side
I can feel the sin that my blood has committed inside
Of my wretched veins
They provide
Temporary life
To our decomposing frames
Rather they wither and die
Then feed the drive
Of this repeating game
From grace we fly
Run till we die
And allow the ground to lay claim
Of the body that lies
Under the sky
In this eternal grave

God rip these earthly veins
From this fallen frame
And replace them
With the never ending streams of glory
Flowing forth from you
Your words knit my life
Into the beauty that can be seen
In the earth and the sea
In the birds that fly free
From this sinful earth
Allow me to escape the death of my blood
Of my sinful flesh
Slay this body lord
And make me new

Just wait
That's what they say
When I talk about me meeting the girl of my dreams
But why
I mean, I will wait
I will wait for the day to come
When I'll be struck by love
But please don't imply that it is a simple task
It is far from that.
As I wait I am counting the wasted moments I could be spending with her
The unshared sunsets
The unwritten sonnets
I am drowning in a sea of unfulfilled potential
But in the end I truly don't mind for I know that the moment that I'll meet her is worth it.
Worth this loneliness
So I won't "just wait"
I will strive
Strive to be a better man
To become the one able
To hold her hand

Ok, breath
She's averted her eyes

It seems like it's been ages as we've been casting glances across the table
Yet as soon as my eye catches on your gaze
It still steals my breath away
Just as it did the first time
I was stunned by the sight of you
It is like a war
One that I would gladly lose
So I start to cross the room
To wave the white flag
And admit defeat
For I have been taken captive
By the hands which I now hold in mine
I gladly drop my guard
Left with only the thought of how pleasant it is to lose to you

I have to speak
The words are building up and are becoming stale
I have lost something essential
Yet I can't recognize what it is
I have become weak
My knees buckling, skin turning pale
A thought has been planted
And it is spreading like a ****
"What if they don't like me"
It branches into all past rejections
And has become a large tree
To be truthful
I can't handle it
There seems to be more scars
In its gnarled trunk
Then there are stars
Caught in its reaching branches
It is of my own building
I watered and fed it
With self-pity
And now I have the gall to reject it
It is me

Do you not feel the weight of infinity on your bones
That as you search for the answers this burden holds
You are merely moving topsoil
We queer little creatures try to shout when we don't even have a voice
Try to dig yet don't have the sinews nor muscles to make a choice
We try to ascend past ignorance
And in doing so truly show it in believing there is any possible recompense
For this futile attempt to define our existence
We are merely flickers
Indistinguishable in the scope
Of the infinity that swallows us whole
But in the end there is truly only one answer
That no matter how much we ****
No matter how much we sift through the sod
There will always be the reaches of the universe to account for
The infinite presence of God

I don't know anymore
I don't know where I stand
In the grand scheme of things
It used to be so easy
When the lines weren't so definite
And crossing them wasn't such a big deal
When the painting could easily
Surpass the frame
Which acted almost in the same way
As a dare to set free
The dream that was held within
But now the frame has become reality
And the dream has become a boundary
Between what we can achieve
And things we can only strive to be while we are asleep
Now it's almost considered insanity
To reach for the things that we know would make us happy
I am told that I can only believe in things that can be seen
Anything other than that is stupidity
I am told that there is no more room for mystery
Yet I reject that for I know that there is more
More out there then what we've been told
And that is what I hold to be true

It is in the blood of the soldier
In the words of the peaceful protester
In the ever flowing wounds of the martyr

In the actions of one standing against tyranny
In the hope of one facing down the majority
In the one who fights for the right of diversity

It is the one who heals when everyone is wounding
The one who stands when everyone is breaking
The one who accepted steel in his flesh
for the soul of his beloved
The one who carried the weight
Of our deaths on his back
The one who loved us till he breathed his last.