Other worlds have hopes,
for plants, for trees and
dogs walking by, panting
soaking in humidity like carp
above water.
Not ours.
Dead ends, parked cars supplanting
serenity with passion, desire
crammed into
row upon row of heartless
dwellings expunging sunglass-wearing
**** suckers
blocking their emptiness from the world
with reverse blindfolds.
I know their eyes still glare at me, scoffing at
them. Walking, I
walk past
their barricaded kennels, under-
construction housing
impersonating natural climes
with sushi and slushy shops.
People like them have admiss-
able drives, hankering after
freedom; they're indoctrinated
to believe admission is
monthly cable bills
wired in beneath concrete slabs
maintained compliance
through lines painted on grass
where overlords can tell livestock
what to do.
Bus chutes form
hillsides, beside lines of
trees which perfume these
feedlots
we call
cities.
**** oozes below streets
walked on, they stared at me
like cows, watching a ranch-hand
suspicion toward anything
beyond bistro fences.
"What the **** are you looking at,
you filthy animal?
Have you no idea which species your greed
feeds?
Do you know where this ends
for you?
Who's tazing your ***,
who's making you sit there?"
Moo, mooo.
Mooooooooooooooooooo.
Receipts, a cudgel on each table,
more cudgels ring
from pockets
telling them what time it is,
where they're to be.
Sunday's almost over,
back to blocks of houses!
Graze on painted grass,
then die,
but not before you stare at me
with empty eyes,
you pathetic, miserable
creatures.

The children of this town speak of vacation and travel.
Worrying about the summer before it's even Spring.
I tell them, "why, why, why are you
LEAVING here before you've fulfilled your night-
time fantasy?"
They board a train or ship uncoothed and begging for more time.
I tell them "the ones you want are here already, in your being. They are
present and ready to be called out of the closets and crawlspaces of your dwellings,
looking for the belongings
you forwarded them in the shape of skin and grain and blood."
I tell them "Alone you leave this city and your self returns with you,
empty, even emptier than at birth. This city is your womb,
you can't escape the placental waters of your home,
the umbilical rail, the breathing air."
But when it is summer, they go. To be gone, to starve
the children in the closets clawing at
the fastened latch and watching time escape their follicles.
While they are sitting in darkness, we tell them we left to get away, to catch a sky
that crashes into distant lands or hold up
stars with out bare hands.
We say "bless this city and the state of our birth."
We stand, alive, unconquered and surprised that closet children are dead when we get back
it's just us in this city
                                      With all stars surrounding
                                      Unseen with the same lights
                                      We saw out there which blot them out
                                      The sky has fallen and our hands are cleaned
                                      By the starving blood of closet children
                                      Whom we refused to feed
                                      Dried up under the moon.

Even the words now are pictures, or
fixtures holding light, illuminating oil-stained paintings that darkness had drowned.
Exclusion of meaning was power, but all it destroyed now is found.
Meaning in words forms a tower, buckling with pressure it waves.
I hold my breath as it wobbles, as structure feigns to degrade.
I watch every shaking beam-length tremble then snap under invisible weight of doubt.
Like rays of our sun are your eyes furthermore, their radiance only temporarily put out.
Centuries of planning united, now threaten to sunder apart
the lifetimes we both used to build mortal city, formed with material from our own hearts.
I wanted to be certain I’m seeing what my eyes refuse to believe.
A city felled as a tree, lined by satin and your skin perfumed with dew.
Your three names were “I Love You,” bundled and thrown into a Spring grave.
Before, your mouth directed sailors to a shoreline without destroying their boats,
floatation swept from your eyes left every tired vessel afloat.
But now that your guiding-light is burned out, and our city is flat and deserted,
flotsam washes up on the shore, in the form of your words which I pass onward, evermore.

You read a poem and think about your life.

The words spill over the dam of your reservoir and seep into the soil of your brain.

Why do you hide yourself from this fact?

The writer couldn’t have known any other reality than your own when they wrote this piece.

They could not have anticipated the oneness you two now share.

If you hadn’t let their words into your spine, tingling through the vertebrae,

touching the synapses with fluttering hands, gentle and soft,

wouldn’t they have known their failure to reach their destination?

The tuba player in a park walking, shouting through an amplified medium of open air.
You are the park, I am the tuba.
Who is the author?
I ask this not to pander or to interest you, but because I honestly do not know.
Why are there so many questions asked these days without the realization that the answer is unobtainable.
Why do we think that by putting a curved line over a period we’ll find the truth.
I am tired of asking and expecting a reply?
I am tired of telling others what I want to hear back “that’s what everybody wants.”
If that’s what you want so much, then stop going to malls.
Stop pumping fossilized plant life into your gas tank.
Stop buying new clothes and cell phones and computers.
Stop telling your parents you love them just because they’re the easy ones to love.
If god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, then who's our ******* father?

What
          can be said
in eight words
alone?