As dawn unfolds today beyond my fractured windowpane,
a breeze beguiles the ashen drapes. Like snakes they slip aside,
revealing wanton worlds that race and run aground, insane,
immersed in scenes obscene that savants strive to mask and hide.

Outside, the twisted streets retreat. Last night they seemed so cruel.
While lamps illumed lithe demons dancing neath the gallows tree,
their lurking shadows shuddered as they breached the vestibule.
Within the gloom strange things abound, I sense and sometimes see.

Perdu in darkened doorways (those which soothe the ones who weep)
men hide their shame in crevices in search of cloaked relief.
The ladies of the evening leave, it’s soon their time to sleep!
The alleyways are silent now but taste of untold grief.

Distraught nomadic drifters (dregs who stray from street to street)
abandon bedtime benches, squat on curbs they call a home,
appeal to passing strangers for a coin or bite to eat.
Rebuffed, they gaze with icy eyes that chill the morning gloam.

Observe with me once more, beyond my fractured windowpane,
the broken boy with crooked smile, the one who's seen the beast.
With tears, he kneels and clasps the cross to exorcise the stain.
The abbey door along the lane enshrouds a pious priest.

At nearby mall, Mike needs a cig, and stealth'ly steals a pack.
The Man, observing, thinks ‘Hey Boy, this caper calls for blood’,
takes aim, then shoots the fated stripling six times in the back.
Come, mourn for Mike and brother Justice, facedown in the mud.

The shanty town has hunkered down engaged in mortal sports
while shattered bodies' broken bones at last repose supine,
and mama (now bereft of child) in anguished pain contorts,
her eyes drip drops of bitter wrath which wither on a vine.

Fatigued and bored, some kids harass the crowded alley now.
To pass the time, Joe smokes a joint and Lizzy snorts a line.
The NRA (which deals with doom) can sometimes help somehow,
though Eric died with Dylan in ‘The Curse of Columbine’.

Marauders scam the marketplace (with billions guaranteed)  
while babes with bloated bellies beg with barren sunken eyes,
and (cut to naught) the down-and-out (like trodden beet roots) bleed.
Life's carousel confronts us all, though few can ring the prize.

Yes, Mr Madoff, private bankster (cruising down the road,
with other Ponzi pushers, waving magic mushroom wands),
adores addiction to the bailout (coffers overflowed),
and jests with all the junkies, while they’re bilking us with bonds.

A timeworn washerwoman totters, stumbling from a tram -
she shuffles to her hovel on a dismal distant hill,
despondent, shuts the shutters, prays then downs her final dram -
a raven quickly picks at crumbs forsaken on her sill.

Jihadist and Crusader warders faithfully guard the gates,
behead impious infidels, else burn them at the stake
(yes, God adores the faithful side, the heathen sides He hates),
with saintly satisfaction reaped begetting pagan ache.

All day the watchers skulk around our fractured windowpanes
inspecting all our secret thoughts, our realms of privacy,
controlling every point of view opinion entertains,
forbidding thoughts one mustn't think, with which they don’t agree.

Our rulers (kings and other things) have often made demands
of populations breathing air on near or distant shores
and when they didn’t yield and kneel, we conquered all their lands
with sticks and stones, then bullets, bombs and battleships in wars.

Come, cast just once a furtive glance… there's something in the far…
from towns to dunes in deserts dry, the welkin belches death
by dint of soulless drones that stalk beneath a straying star
erasing life in random ways with freedom’s dying breath.

But closer lies an island, where the keepers grill their wards.
Impartial trials? A travesty, indeed quite Kafkaesque.
The guiltless gush confessions, born and bred on waterboards.
No sense, no charges nor defense. A verdict? Yes, grotesque!

Now dusk is drawing near outside my fractured windowpane
while mankind wanes like burnt-out suns in fading lurid light;
and scarlet clots of grim deceit and ebon beads of bane
flow, deified, within a corpse, the fruit of human blight.

Sometimes I wonder why
I write and what the reason is
for breaks and lapses in words
and writing and why I would write
about an Elvis pumping his neon
with unleaded and myself
at the pump across the way
with my eyes fixed on this Elvis
a forty something burnout
with too many relapses
who returns my stare and says
in the most average Elvis voice
"How ya doin"

How am I doin
I think to myself
okay and think about why I write
and why I would impersonate
an impersonator in words
for my own consumption
or for the one person I will have
read this or entertainment
or just a way to get from eleven
to midnight to one in the morning

it seems my dreams
have taken over
my life
I sleep like a dolphin
with one eye open

Open your mind to wonder.
Don't close it with belief.
For the spell it puts you under makes it difficult to leave.

The road to self deception, paved with preconceived conception, makes an evolutionary blunder that much harder to believe.

But in the natural ways we suffer and the things we have achieved, I don't think we should be misplaced -- mistaking all things as perceived.

And the self-redeeming peace that lives in uttered pleas for buttered ease -- like praying for forgiveness for the feeling of appease.
Or kneeling-bound to beg facedown for children with a sickness.
(Although prayer doesn't prove to cure disease or wickedness, it seems.)  

So if you ever get a chance to wander and start to see the world with wonder, don't let it slip into neglect.

Nor impose upon another what you chose when you were younger.
Don't abuse your self-respect.

Instead, just seek to be free
and find the wonder in-between.

Calcified age lines,
driftwood was once a shiny ship:
hallowed bow, curved spine, dead.

Jaundiced and gaunt didn’t appear
until after the fact,
break a bottle on its back
because I'm facedown,
dead drunk, waves of saliva breaking
desperately against the asphalt.
Tree branches grappling together in the wind
are handsome
like a handshake
in a bad poem
but they're just trees, just wood.
I am slowburning like an all natural cigarette.

Jaunt through the woods. Drinking spot.
Acrid friends.
Warm bonfire, I want it to be more like a movie.  
Davy Jones my sorrows. Sitting on a log.
Rock bottom and I’m sitting on a log.
Weird girl comes over, she’s artsy and dyslexic.
I hate that word. Artsy. *******.
She asks if I’m okay and I say yeah.

At home,
exhume pillowcase from *****,
futon forget-me-nots
some thick haired little boy
had curled up to die inside;

Post embrace.
Crashed; a solemnly sinking ship captain
with skin peeling like lottery tickets
too leather-faced to shout anything but
TEN THOUSAND THUNDERING TYPHOONS
as he goes down
with his cracked nymphal exoskeleton
wipes the fire off his brow
he is burning like an all natural cigarette
but phoenixes are not legends
they are metaphors,
and that is enough difference for me.

The sea is salty and stinging
and they say
a smooth one
never made a skillful sailor
but you cannot build a ship
out of driftwood,
just watch one deteriorate into it.

Maybe that’s the point.

For three years,
I found myself in an oozing freefall
base jumping as I carved through the air
like an anchor
parachute made of somber bottle twist
carved cork and microscope slide,
salt stained shoes,
brackish eyes
distort flashes of organic sunlight
thick necked forays into begging for fare
at deserted train stations
lashed out at friends with bullwhip arms
I couldn’t reach my own back
freefalling, base camp
welling up to greet me
from the depths of a tar pit
but the thing about rock bottoms is:
if they don’t destroy you
they give you something solid to stand on.

And if you leap back up, spread eagle
Like a petrified starfish, swim through that tar pit
that is ocean, the warm hovel of under the covers,
Bonfire, whiskey in the back of an old sailors throat,
All natural cigarette,
You can be born again. I promise.

Depression is not sadness, it is the absence of hope
And it is numb. Reduces us to ashes and drowns us all at once.
But it waxes and it wanes, burns itself out if you let it.

And from that flame, scattered splinters in the ocean,
The shedding of my cracked, nymphal exoskeleton,
I understood the impermanence and necessity of flailing tendrils
White hot curling up a mainmast like a handshake
Wet flesh in the womb of moment between sleep and wake,
Breath slipping away like low tide
Gasping for air until it’s easier to ****
Oxygen out of the saltwater in your lungs
Pain killed a boy and made a man

Watch a phoenix **** a baptism
Violently conjure steam into existence
Just for it to disappear, watch them smile.
You’ll understand.

And i'm dying to hear you say the word,
but forever is a hoax and I'm trying to find my way back home

Do I look fine ?
Do I look ok?
raindrops falling down
My window
Everyday
And you wouldn't know
You can't see my face.
When it's facedown on the pillowcase

And I'm dying to hear your voice
But love is just a bittersweet word
They tell you when your dumb and young

Do I look fine ?
Do I look ok?
raindrops falling down
My window
Everyday
And you wouldn't know
You can't see my face.
When it's facedown on the pillowcase

And I'm dying to feel you here
But the distance is too great when your miles away and just don't feel the same

Forever is a hoax and love is just something they tell you when your young and dumb, young and dumb
Your don't feel the same.

Facedown on the pillowcase
My escape.

come on now, you didn't think you were going to get away with not dreaming about the undead after all this business at work, did you?--that was the problem with you thinkers: all you ever did was thinking!--the truth is that you thought far too much--you should've been out there living, trying to get laid, trying to knock the hell out of the world with your next verse...but instead, there you were lying awake for hours, literally hours, and all because of what?: some witch at work who wants to run everyone's world by being what she can't help but being?--you'd even said it to yourself driving home, that she wasn't a bad person, she was just a petty and sick ******* who had to make everyone's life that much lousier, that was her "power," if you wanted to call such a thing power...but it's not like she was your boss, she'd just said something that had injured you because you'd allowed it to injure you, because it had been true a long time ago that you'd let it appear that you'd "****** up" when in truth you'd saved yourself a ton of misery by doing so--the thing itself was so small, though, that only someone who was picayune was ever going to know that you'd still felt ****** up over it...it just so happens that she had remembered and that she was just petty and picky enough to throw it back in your face at the exact right time...but how often had you said to yourself that you really needed to combat such ******* behavior by thinking as clearly as you could in the moment, by just knowing that you hadn't done anything wrong, that in most cases, you were probably smarter and more capable than whoever it was who was accusing of something ridiculous or trying to make you look bad for whatever reason...and how often had you failed in taking this information to heart, facts that would make anyone else feel good about themselves, but with you, it was just another reason why you made yourself miserable: you just couldn't translate all of these individual positive things about you into a more cohesive and positive whole--to you, you were always doing spin control to get yourself back from the edge you felt they were all pushing you closer and closer toward--and when you got there, and if you went over, what then?--only what had happened last night, which is what was happening all the time...you lie awake sleepless and fuming over feeling like you were made to look bad even understanding in the moment that you would never remember this ***** or anything she said, that you'd even forget her name in time because people like that were nothing to you, they meant nothing to you--but how long would that take?: five years, ten years?--you wanted to forget all about her now, but it's not like you weren't ever going to see her again, which is why you were getting all stressed out, because in a few hours, you'd have to drag your sorry carcass out of bed and go back there and do it all over again--so you were going to have to figure out a way to evolve through this experience, you were going to have to sort all this out in your head and get right with it somehow because in fewer than twenty-four hours, you'd be right back here, crawling into bed and asking yourself if it was going to be "another one of those nights" where you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and when you returned, found it impossible to get your mind off of anything but what had happened involving this woman, this creature, this **** who was a bought on all womankind--yes, she was really that bad, maybe not a bad person per se, but bad enough to lump her in with all the other ***** you'd ever run across in your travails in this world, these bleeding animals who just wanted the world to serve them in one form or fashion and who didn't care who had to lie facedown in the mud to do it--in such a scenario, that doomed fool lying facedown was you...but you didn't want that to be you, and at the very least you'd wanted to have your slice of revenge by having your slice of life have nothing to do with her, by being able to crawl into bed and get good sleep and if you couldn't, then let the reason be anything but having to do with her--god almighty, how many women like her had you encountered in your life, and already your father's voice was drilling down to the very core of the question: how many times had you met people like her, and how many times had you let them get to you, bother your harass you, ******* up, make you look bad, ruin your sleep, ruin your day?--and you still hadn't found a way to not give a ****, you still hadn't found a way to disconnect from caring about whatever it was that made you feel like it was your reputation on the line?--your old man was right in his own way, though: you cared far too much about how you were perceived than you wanted to believe you did, and wasn't all of this, wasn't your insomnia over this ***** the proof of it?--and now you were going back to your old nervous habit of chewing at the dead skin of your fingers, watching them become gnawed and decayed and all because of this nonsense you had let go to your head--and you wanted to think therapy had made you better somehow, that it had opened up the pathways in your mind to the "self-talk" that was going to save you?--did you call this bit of torture salvation?--but no, it wasn't like this every night, it really wasn't...only when things got to you, only when you were stressed out...but still, the question should be, "why do you allow yourself to get stressed out over situations out of your control?"--invariable, it all leads to these dreams where the undead find you wherever you go to run and hide, and last night you'd gotten especially clever and told yourself if all else failed, you could hide in the walls, and yet, you had seen her climb into those walls, which is when you knew even your dreams were smarter than you--enough was enough though, right?--no way on earth or in hell should you allow any of this to continue: you were a grown-*** man in his mid-forties, you were a hard worker, you were good at what you did, and more than anything else, this ***** did not get to decide what kind of a person you were--you needed to detach yourself from the idea that she was going to make your life a hell, that she was going to do this or that to you because what was all that anyway?--it was just worry atop worry, and all of it was useless and needless, all of it was based on fear and as you'd been asking yourself for the last few decades, when had fear ever served you?--all of this only seemed like you were in prison, but it was one you had built for yourself...wasn't it bad enough your old man had drilled into you not just those words of criticism about how you'd let everything "get to you," but also that he'd made you care so much, too much, about what others thought because you were always trying to please them just like you were always trying to please him?--and how often had you been able to do this successfully to the point where you didn't have to try so hard anymore?: never--you had never succeeded in such a venture because there was always another hour, another day, another task for you to accomplish to another's satisfaction...this was the paradigm you'd been locked into...but it wasn't too late, for look, just look at how you'd analyzed all of this, at how wonderfully you'd dismantled all the **** that surrounded the real reason why you wasted others to accept you, to find you and label you as "good"--that never would've been possible before, you would've just stayed awake the whole night long and woken up in a foul mood and let it ruin a new day...but not anymore, right?--well, almost: because while the slogan "knowledge is power" seems like an empowering one, what is it really?--do you feel any more powerful than you did before you started having this conversation with yourself?--were you going to be able to make all this ******* in your life disappear just like that(!) because you'd suddenly figured out that you wasted people to think highly of you because you'd never been able to get your father to think highly of you?--no, no, because there you were turning over and over in bed trying to unlock the thing that would let you live again, that would let you sleep again...there you were begging for mercy, for a clue as to how to do this nightwork within you, for it felt like you were being made to dig your own grave whenever this happened to you, and the deeper you dug, the more out felt trapped in that hole you'd just made deeper--what else could you do but make it deeper?: but when had you looked up, when had you asked if you couldn't just dig your hands into the packed earth and climb out?--this is how and where your imagination had failed you, for yes, you had managed to fal, back asleep, it hadn't conquered you quite so much...but here you were being presented with the facts all over again that it would happen again and again and that you were doomed to allow it to because, really, who didn't want others to think well of them?--you were always going to be human--

lying facedown on the train tracks;
home is where the heart is.
i sharpen my alibi on my mother’s bones
blink blink blink
the rays of the sun gouge my eyes out and
i blink, feeding on her conscience
through roots in the dirt.
regret metastasizes inside of me
like the very consumption that killed her

i found a way out, what now?
the daylight picked out my ribs one by one
the moon died and i buried her in the flowerbeds.
brave molly, come save me, the train's at the station

maybe today
i can talk to myself
out loud on the way there.
primal scream therapy.

(in between bittersweet fragments of memory
i can say your name without—
gangrene makes a home within my brittle skull.
cyanotic lips preach to me the
everlasting weight of my sin)

today
i’ll talk to myself out loud
on the way there
and maybe the echo won't
sound so **** scared

When  my mom was dying
We put a bed in the living room
Fresh from the hospital
In front of the piano
Behind the rocking chair

We still called it the "living room"
I didn't mention the cruel irony in that
And the living people
Who knew my mother
All came and sat around her

And we weren't allowed to touch her
Cause the morphine lost its memory
And every bit of her was falling down
Dozing in a straw house
When the weather man called for hurricanes
She was right there
But miles away from rescue efforts
And hand-holding daughters

Marilyn Monroe went the same way
In bed, I mean
Facedown
Her pill supply run out
And I imagine her room was a beautiful mess
Full of roses and tokens from insincere men

An icon deserves better than that
A pin up with no one
But ex-lovers and sheets to hold her
And a pillow stained with last lipstick kisses
All those little white beads of forgetfulness
Crawling on the floor
And happy birthday Mr. President

Billy woke up bawling the other night
In bed with a girl
Who was not my sister
And he called and told her he loved her still
She hugged my dog and cried into her fur
She finished the roll
Of toilet paper blowing her nose

There were three of us in bed that night
And two somewhere else
Continents, nations, states apart
The air in my room was like asphalt
And allergies weighing us down
Lulu barked at our crestfallen hearts

Under the supermoon
I turned into a twentysomethingwolf
Keen senses acute defenses
And all I could smell on my sheets
Was the kitchen I work in
I wanted to be human
Taste the fear and perfection
Of being a ******
In bed with a boy who is not family
A teenager whispering under sheets again

I stayed at home alone
Soothing, sighing, and howling sweet nothings
To my lonely bed
Telling mom and Marilyn Monroe
The fever dreams in my lone wolf head
Praying "please God, send us someone"
"Please God, let love burn us quick and strong"
"Please God, don't draw the blues out. We all buckle."

NEXT!
Good lord, that was a disaster.
Forget the script. Perhaps it's time to improvise
Get her on stage and just dialogue.
She has such a comfortable presence up there,
Like she was born to play that part.
It's as if she's seen the words contained within those pages
Even though they lie, facedown, on the chair.
But the script is direction, it is control.
The script. THE SCRIPT.

It's wrong.
The script is wrong.
The lines are wrong.
Her delivery is wrong.
This whole theatre reeks of wrong.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Out. GET OUT.
**** the lights as you go.

Nothing but dark, and quiet.
The darkness persists, but the quiet cannot last.
Unwritten lines met with easy delivery,
Unscripted staging matched by effortless movement,
A couple of bumps in the road
(What production is without those?)
But still, beauty in the performance--
Now replaying in the silence.

A single bulb flickers on,
Casts its wavering light over that script,
That work, crafted so meticulously.
A fat lot of good it's been.

A new idea strikes.
Certain? No. Nothing is certain.
But worth a shot.
The script? Facedown in the trash
Except the few words to set the opening scene.
The play? Not for one actor, but two.
A note scrawled to she who was chased out,
And nothing left to do but sit
Under the solitary bulb
In a darkened theatre
Hoping for a knock at the door.

Never let the ******* get us down
The world won’t stop, won’t be letdown
The ground won’t shatter, won’t be a breakdown
The power is out, complete shutdown
Fall to the ground, facedown
Sometimes all is not okay in the comedown
Sometimes all you have to do is slowdown
Don’t make this into a showdown
Turn it into a knockdown
Quarantined, put into lockdown
Don’t let them be a putdown
This world is a freetown.

The morning came slowly on that third day
The sun wondered how it might be able to shine through such darkness
The tears of the earth came early in the dew that morning
The flowers began to bloom in an open defiance to the earth
Perhaps the decaying body of the Lord gave them new life

The birds sang songs of jubilee that morning, as if there were reason for joy
Did they not know that the Light of the World had been snuffed out?
Did they not know that the one who fed them had gone away?
Did they not know that their creator lay below them dead in the ground?
Or did they sing defiantly knowing what we yet did not know?

Much like it had been in Bethlehem decades before, the world was silent
Breaking the silence like the Divine Child’s cries, somewhere a child cried
As if this child knew that his Lord lay dead below the earth
As if he could feel the thick darkness that surrounded him
But then, in defiance like only a child could bring, the first laughter in days

The new world was cold, dark, and bitter, and a child dared to laugh
While the rest of the world cried and mourned the death of their only hope
This child laughed while the birds sang and the flowers bloomed
It was as if they did not know that the Life of the World was still dead
Rather, though, it was as if they had read the prophets of old, and believed

When the sun finally rose, it could not shine through the thick darkness
We lived in a dark purgatorial world where we awaited the judgement
What a terrible judgement that must be coming toward us
We, who drove the nails into His hands, and gave Him over to death
But then, a glimmer of light comes upon the horizon

The light was not the rising of the sun, but some holy other
Those disciples who had run away while He hung on the cross ran again
This time not away from their Savior, but toward that otherworldly light
When they came to where He has been buried, they fell upon their faces
The brightest light to ever grace this old world poured out of the tomb

Then they heard a voice, the voice of the Risen Lord
‘Rise up you men of earth’ He said to the men lying facedown
‘Rise up oh you sleepers!’
‘Behold the Light of the World is upon you’
It was then that the world began its slow change

The cosmos, which had fractured so long ago in Eden, began to mend
Dead men rose to new life
Dark places were then filled with life
The world became a new place where the old had passed away
Every crack and crevice filled with an uncreated light never before seen

For the Lord has risen from the dead!
Indeed He has defeated death!
And forever, we shall keep the feast !
Alleluia!