Broken people
Broken lives
Cheated on husbands
Beaten down wives
Living in a fresh hell
Every day
Daughters are *****
And sons are gay
Broken people
Broken lives
Swallowing fire
Sleeping on knives
**** your ******* world view
The cancer lessens without you
Broken people
Broken lives
Leave the gap
The great divide
Let us all suffer on in peace
Wear your absence like a fleece
Keep us warm with the thought of death
Such a waste until your last breath

Geese gather in pools
Fissures cut out by the sun
In the frozen lake

Onion grass hangs limp
Bedazzled with morning dew
Cold jewels in the sun

My sunlit white walls
Pockmarked by shadows of leaves
Caught in morning wind

Crimson maple leaves
Thinly veiled by sheets of fog
The smell of damp earth

Fence post forced to bow
As gravity and ivy
Pull it to the ground

Shadows of dead leaves
Drift silent over creek beds
Babbling of water

Chain mail of green moss
Blazing paths on slick tree trunks
Damp armor of shade

Geese cry in the fog
Feathered steamboats bob listless
Herons watch from shore

Invisible mist
Falls on herons’ folded wings
Statues in the reeds

Serpentine river
Winds through orange, yellow, red
Catching sun on scales

Patchwork of birdsong
Dead leaves dance through hazy light
Kissing the lake’s face

Sun warms dark water
Wraiths of mist dance on the lake
Waltzing through the reeds

Swollen with the cold
Flowers peek into the street
Between fence pickets

Gnarled ancient oak
Crows hold court in high branches
Dew clings to the trunk

Bird’s songs at sunrise
Rain working down from perches
Gathering puddles

Letting fresh air in
The gaze of two pale emeralds
Searching for the sun

Face open to sky
A life of darkness exposed
Drying in the sun

Bird song peels back night
Insects play solemn music
Wet lawns still at dawn

Creeping between blades
A pair of unseeing eyes
Looking to ascend

Clinging to chaos
Remnants of a spider's web
Catch the morning sun

Playing hide and seek
A twisting vine finds purchase
Reaching for conquest

My dad is an enigma
He’s getting older but is
Healthier than guys 30 years younger than him
I’m convinced it’s because he drinks white wine from sun up to sun down and is performing a ritual of slow embalming

And his fridge has an assortment of salad dressings and Clamato juice
That were good in 2008
And he eats it saying
“It’s fine, best by dates are just marketing”

And god ****** if he doesn’t wake up kicking and content every day

A solid mass of boxed wine and 6 year old salad dressing
All over confident opinions and ***** jokes
Feeding foxes kibble in the backyard
Feeding his dogs liverwurst and chocolate ice cream
Crying in front of strangers at documentaries about people in countries he’s never been to

An obelisk of weirdness in a sea of pale mediocrity

And he’ll let you know
He wouldn’t want to be any other way.

If you've never pressed a gun barrel against the side of your head
It feels like
A dime or a quarter (depending on the caliber) that you put
To rest in a freezer
It's always cold
It could have been sitting in a car baking in a
Humid Pennsylvania July or the
Harsh southern sun
But it always feels like you've pulled it out of a freezer
And it always feels like its been made to sit in your hand
Pressed against your head.

I had a sick thought the other day
That I'd put that cold barrel to my head and pull the trigger
And the gun wouldn't go off
The hammer would fall and the cylinder would rotate and I
Would have a story:
"Imagine if it would have gone off!"

It's a weird self serving fantasy
Some otherworldly power saving me
Me admiring a primer that was dented but unfired
Putting it on a chain and wearing it around to say
"I'm serious, it could have gone off!"
And people would say
"Wow, he's deep, he feels things, he know what pain is"

But the truth is
We all know what pain is
In one form or another
Whether it's a inattentive parent
A drinking problem
A stressful job
Or no job at all
A spent shell casing
Or believing that your
Life is worth saving.

In reality
There would be no dented primer
No necklace
No veil of pain and deeper understanding

It would be my brains as a greasy stain over the
Poor paint job of my apartment
A screaming fiance
A job that would scold my absence until someone called them
And told them that the primer was fine
The life was over
The position was open.

It's odd
To weather some of the hardest things in life
But a minor slip up or mistake
Can make you fantasize about it being over
It's the minor inconveniences that make
The abrupt ending all the more appealing
Like wind rustling a dead leaf from a
Barren branch.

Susan hides a nest of goose eggs behind her hairline
She’s trapped with a man she doesn’t know anymore
Because of a child who won’t return her calls

She’s living in a fresh hell everyday

Ariel is trying to find a job
Sleeping in an overpriced oven of an apartment
Taking care of his brothers and sisters
They sleep on the floor and play with broken toys
While he travels city blocks dammed with trash
He comes home with nothing to show
And listens to his neighbors fight and **** through thin walls

He’s living in a fresh hell everyday

Everyone is barricaded in their houses
Or they’re out on the streets killing each other to get hashtags trending
The world is ruled by fools and we’re so self centered
We can’t understand that nature is trying to remove the cancer

We’re all living in a fresh hell everyday

There is a fire that has burned
Inside of me for all my life
Painful and brilliant
But as I lay here
I realize that after 30 years
The fire is starting to cool
And I am to become
Smoldering embers
And now,
I’m cold in bed

What am I really
Thinking mass in a vacuum
Life is painfully short
Everyone understands
But pretends not to

**** you Halloween
It's Gobstoppers and Sweet Tarts
For breakfast, I guess

Ah **** man, my bad
I wanted to write something
And now I'm too drunk

I was at an art museum and
I saw these girls snickering around a
Collection of black and white photographs
In a corner of the gallery

As I approached they moved on
But not before I heard one of them say
"Who wants to look at pictures of an old guy's ****"

The photographs in question did have a rather large picture
Of an old man's *****, but there we’re others
Pictures of his hands, feet, face
All zoomed in enough that you could see his skin
In detail

In the wrinkles, freckles, and weathered lines
Of this old man you could see an entire
Lifetime on display
The time etching into his surface
Like the needle into a warm wax cylinder
The song of his years played as lines and furrows

A venerable road map of a life lived

As for the ****
I'm sure that thing had some miles put
On it too.

I woke up this morning
Depressed from a dream

In the dream, I was cradling
A little yellow bird
In my hands
I could feel a strong attraction
A bond
Love
For the small yellow bird
As it cheeped gingerly
In my cupped hands

I was walking through a vast field
With a carpet of waist high grass
With the little yellow bird


I told it to fly
And opened it's makeshift cage of
Flesh blood and bone
And it took off

But it had only just left my hands
When it dropped dead
Its tiny body being lost
In the gently blowing
Waist high reeds

I bent down and picked up its limp frame
One wing splayed over the edge of my palm
And I wept

I dropped to my knees and wept
The grass touching my face

Then I woke up
And I looked out the fogged, wet window
But outside
All the birds were black.

Life is
Time sitting
Stale on the back of the tongue

A lot of it is not worth tasting
Like when a girl says she doesn’t
Love you like you love her
Or that she has your baby
And its only been a few months

It’s stale on the tongue

Why taste bitterness
When you can taste nothing
At all?
What’s the point
Of flailing in the void
Paroxysm on the floor
Of the pit
As opposed to passing
Through the afternoon air
Like a shadow in summer:

Stale on the tongue
Easy in the mind
Numb like a
Curled autumn leaf in
The swirling winds of autumn

What does one write when the feeling flows through them
But the words keep getting sifted out?

A blank canvas
Is a blank canvas
Is a blank canvas

It's hard to write something that
Really means anything
It sounds cliche
Because it is

"Buy into my creative work
Because I lack the creativity
To make it genuine"

But really
Sometimes I feel the current of
Violence
Creativity
Passion
Rip through me
Just under the skin and
I can't find the words that can make it
Mean something to anyone else

So here is to all the unwritten words
Hidden grins and
Bitten tongues
For those that feel the wave
But can't figure out
How to ride it.

Yeah, it can get rough sometimes
But one day
You'll learn to **** on
Your own stings
And you'll swim uninterrupted

There are few people I enjoy beating
Quite like myself

A missed period at the end of a sentence
A different data point on a graph
The wrong email to send
The incorrect setting on whatever it may be

It all hits you suddenly like
A putrid wind and lodges
Deep in your chest
Where it forms a solid mass that
Breaks into jagged pieces that
Permeate through every
Pore of your being

But don't worry
The wind will pass and
Jagged pieces will meld into
Skin

You will learn from your mistakes

The path to change
And in effect learning
Is hard and rigorous
And the victories at the end of each path
Will be brief

But they are necessary

And then
When you finally get it all
It will all be over

But

Hopefully you will
Have spent some of your time
Leaving trail markers for others
Bright paint on a trunk
A stack of rocks
A brightly colored piece of fabric
As they traverse the same paths.

My dad shouted up that the
Space Lab was passing overhead in
The next few minutes

I put on my adidas and a hoodie
And stood in the snow and mud
Of the front yard trying to find the
Passing station as it traveled past
Hundreds of miles up

It was more excited than I had seen
My father in a long time
And I was glad to be out there with him

We almost missed it
But I caught it in the chalky
Luminescence of the moon
It glided past easily
And my father shouted excitedly
I stared straight up and took all the air
Into my lungs between the passing station
And my body on the ground

Until it was lost
In the sanguine of the night sky
Like my father's excitement
It passed too quickly

And we ventured back inside
To watch TV in separate rooms

A most deceiving mask
A coiled contemplation
A look of despair and woe

The grimace of pain
The coming of rain
The stubbing of a toe

My sweet love
I am ready to confess to every sin
The rumbling of the gut
The raising of the ****
The flatulence's raucous din

But lo!

This is not a measly prairie wind
That passes lazily through the tall grass
This is a grinning of the devil
A demon's carefully constructed bevel
A hell fire that rips from your ***!

From what I thought was my own fault
To cause you such a look
Twas' a stalk of broccoli
A sprout of Brussels
A miscalculation by the cook

So white knuckle my dear
Hold tight for life
As your intestines come trembling out
Whatever you ate
My succulent date
Is making your **** shout

But bless the heavens
And all that is eternal
That this has come to pass
What I thought was the end
The loss of my friend
Was just a spot of gas.

I imagine death
Is like snow blown from a branch
Upon hitting the earth
There is a rapid loss
Of color and form

The sound of a plane
And a robin's egg blue sky
Peppered with pink clouds

Unexpected warmth
The sun hanging comfortably in the sky
Porches hidden in the shade of their roofs
The smell of damp earth
The high green hedges hiding it from
Everyone on the root raised sidewalk

I find you everywhere
In a bird's song echoing down a brick laden alley way
In the pitter of rain on a slate roof
In the cold sting of an abandoned bobby pin stabbing the sole of my foot
Left from your last visit
But I feel you most of all in the cold spaces
The empty indent in my bed
Makes me realize how empty my life is
Without you

Red tail circling
Your cry echoes through the trees
Who do you call for?

Hello World
Thank you for the white birds and blue sky
The green grass and brown bottles
The gnarled roots and the flower petals
The packed sidewalks and empty fields
The sounds of dress shoes on pavement and
The smell of gasoline and leftover Chinese

Hello Void
Thank you for the sanguine embrace
The swarm of ants on the fallen bird
The weeds peeking through the cracks
The calloused conditions and the jaded outlooks
The fields of blood and people impaled on metal skewers
The smiling skeletons and cackling hyenas

Goodbye All
For all the white birds and swarms of ants
There is little solace to find on either side
So I'll rest here
In the middle of it
Where we thrash in barren hills
And gather under the stinking blooms
To try and find the sense
In any of it

Black cat perched on wall
Watching a dead, **** choked tree
In a ruined yard

"Metal Elitist"
A nasty title for sure
Slayer ******* rules

"****** Death, alright!"
Sunburned smile reclining
On plastic pool chairs

Procrastination
So obviously hollow
Nothing, with false weight

It's hard to focus
When the fan blows hot trash smell
Through the apartment

Humidity thick
A fallen leaf with curled sides
On the puddles edge

I went to the shooting range with my friend
We both grew up in families that valued guns
Hate it if you'd like
But it'll happen whether you want it to or not

After we punched holes through paper
We went to a local dive bar to have a beer

We call Yunegling "lager" in PA
You just ask for a lager
And out it comes
I've made this mistake of asking for "lager" in other states
The bartender looks at you like you just cut your tongue off
And put it next to your bill as a tip

My friend told me that he has a reoccurring dream
Where he's in a fox hole
And his rifle jams
And the enemy charges him and
Runs him through with a bayonet

"That's horrifying"
I tell him, putting my glass heavily on the bar top
"Nah, you get used to it"
He says, lightly lifting his glass to his lips
"It doesn't hurt, it just has that floaty feeling
Like 'this doesn't belong there' and then
I wake up clenching my fists"

I guess that one can get used to all things
Even being run through in the sacred
Space of dreams