My heart didn't break
When you texted me "we're through."
It broke too, too terribly long ago.

You'd push away and longingly stare
At those with a nobody
pretending to be someone.

You closed off your life
And blamed me for respecting you
For giving you space.

But now, your grindstone letters
Which have crushed me for so long
Merely ground the flour
That Will, one day, bake a beautiful cake.

I wait for the day,
That may never come,
When I can say

Stronger now
Better now
Repaired now
Myself now.

But like the dust in the mill,
You've stained the flour, tainted the cake.
You got what you wanted, but still you take,
With the impunity of the grindstone, crushing the flour.

And that is why the flour never wears on the grindstone.

Gliding deftly along the city street
rolling quick and constantly
onward to some unknown scene,
some backward park in the nighttime
smoke curling from these
parted lips, moist and inviting
calling me somewhere I've never seen.

New day, new night
new feelings, rage in delight
fill me with your hilarious entropy,
knock my quarks into the next century,
will you please?

Now you're smoking the pipe and all at once you are free
between you and me, this smoke is thicker and sticks
like glue,
wispy and dreamy and the world spins and calls Toltec
telephone company can't pay me for all those calls collected
and rendered obsolete
Sun god dead as that silly calendar meme

Amaterasu,
and Imma tell you
these ladies in the picnic table
buried alive for boxed lunch and god's brunch
Jesus ******* Christ
and a indelible roster of good guys,
to which we all must strive to live and die
behind,
never moving forward
chasing our tails like a sick dog
under the jasmine runner between the decades-old tanbark
imported from overseas
dead trees
dead canine
and oh isn't it just divine?

You see it, pretty lady.
I can see it hiding behind your eyes
the things you don't tell the others because you're afraid
if they found out,
you'd be crucified.

Well honey I hate to inform,
With KGB efficiency that these love-a-dumbs
aint Methuselah,
they'll be dead!
long before your flood of tears tears me from the land
ballistas me across the great expanse to some strange Ararat
of the eastern seaboard,
or maybe wash me deep along the 80
into the desert sands and tiles
on a leaky cell phone screen
desperately trying to dial home on low battery,
realizing all this was one big deferred dream,
baking in the sun and shriveling
oh well, back to the grindstone-- all those lies plucked your nose,
gotta cut it back to size,
'else your soul it'll outgrow

Don't worry honey bee
It hasn't happened to me,
and We know with calcuable mathematical truth
that it'll never happen to you.

Keep your nose to the grindstone
echo and boom.
Tucked in shirt and buttoned blue collars.
Coffee, no milk, no sugar.
Pagans in a pageant
lifting slabs with slack hands.
Old muscles knotted and torn
a drone sound, stillborn as the childless playground.
Mocking and mundane
the bell rings and shatters the silence
leaving tools on the floor and empty parking spaces.
Nothing left but the weep of pigeons in the rafters
and the breeze that arrives
only after the workers departure.

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

Hitting the grindstone once again
Aching regretting pounding ringing

Words pages lines and letters
Chewing mashing crunching swallowing

I left you lonely in your bed
Sleeping easing dreaming wheezing

To come home to you later
Driving bussing going speeding

And make love to you
Writhing releasing hearts beating

Only to fall asleep
Slowly softly warmly with me

And rise again to repeat the cycle

An ode seems appropriate
To the classical style
Of the columns and the domes
Above the green court.

Many things have adorned that dome:
Squad car, fire truck, droid, and phone
But today, viewed in a mind's eye—sunlight.

But as were that phone booth still apparent
From afar it now calls, and now I shall answer.
Over the river, and through the urban jungle,
Through the sky, 400 miles, as the airliner flies
But worth every inch, rod, meter or smoot.
It beckons to the mind and to the heart;
It beckons to the soul of a scholar.

Were I less knowing I might think not
That light fell from above onto that dome.
But rather, that the hemisphere
Gave forth the blazing light
ebullience of photons, amidst
Torrents of knowledge.

Its hallowed halls, numbered precisely,
Soon no longer a forbidden temple shall be
Instead, I shall tread there, such as I am
Learn from efforts I effect and others I see

O Halls, I shall greet thee, O Tunnels in winter
Traverse and find warmth to keep body to task
For knowledge, always, comes with a high price
In joules, dollars, cents, days and hours of rest
Long nights turn to dawns, nose to the grindstone
Maybe just one more tool; okay, maybe another.

But brother meets brother, and sister meets sister
On both sides of the river, and the work gets done.
Whether Greek or not, there is community here
A problem, or a set of them, is always seen through.

As the sun now rises, a new day sets in. In a few
hours of my life I will rise to these challenges.

With a chirping, I shall cross the paths that I come to,
Enter the halls .. and my journey shall begin.

~ D. B. Guy

I have to find home
to get back to the grindstone
but the lined clones
are where my mind goes
until wasted time shows
that I'm dying slow
in the blinding snow
of finding glows
whose fleeting blinks
give me clouds of pink
that start to sink
and then disappear
leaving me here
wondering what I did wrong
smoking a ****
and singing songs
to get along
with myself for my health
otherwise I give myself the belt
when there's gold I can smelt
sitting in a laptop or a notebook
I need to hit the blacktop and go cook
instead of waiting by the phone hook
I just hate the way being alone looks
but every time I try I get my dome shook
grinding my soft heart into stone
so I need to get back to where that heart is
before I'm grinded down to bone
on grindstone marches.

i dreamt of holding your hand, i dreamt of hating you; i am hansel & gretel sharing halves of a sexless edgeless soft young body together sitting in your home and waiting with folded hands patiently, quietly, to be devoured. look i am telling you — it's fine. sink in your teeth, i like the feel of them. today in the trees i saw mary magdalene's shawl-framed face written in shadows between the branches, today i saw the ***** of babylon's hands at my window and i wept. today you kissed my barren chest with the mouth of judas, today i am nobody's child. tomorrow i am yours.

i dreamt i poured you wine from my mouth, i made you bread from my flesh. all i ever did was miss you even when you were right here. you cradled my hand like a mother and later the bones of my fingers like a lover; the walls were stainless peach and the sun was setting and filtered through the window the light from behind made your hair glow, your face was so dark i couldn't find the colour in your eyes. i cried now for what you made me feel until you kissed me quiet, your breath so warm and my voice lost within it, lost like a sailor all at sea, and i felt so safe with you then even knowing how this story ended — you drew away and in my mouth from yours had slipped charon's obol, slipped all down my throat with no resistance. through the suffocation i laughed a little and through the laughter i said to you "yes, that's right," only glad that you had remembered.

look i am telling you — i died perfectly happy because i had not died at all. i watched you from the eyes of the wood-pigeons at your window and i know you burned my body and i know you swallowed the ashes and still! still then all you ever did was miss me, even when i was right there, right inside of you. silly boy.

i dreamt of hating you and by the end i only loved you again.

What Dr. Lector devours with fava beans, inside rots. Too much Chianti?
Not likely. Likely, not enough
but there has been much else. Still,
no amounts warranting any shy example of overload. Mild splurges,
done in high style equal
nothing in comparison to toxic
baths taken in industrial grindstone
mortors. And the payback?
Walking papers and abdominal lump.

Poke it and choke on acid reflux. Pop
more pills to keep it down. Downers
prescribed on more downers.
Feeling down? Have another downer.
What else can we do? Your MRI's
and ultrasound, unsound, do not
come with flag from foreign invader,
claiming this new territory for king.

So, blame it on the offal.
Blame it all on the offal for not
having guts and glory
to fight off its own infection.
And eat your chicken livers.

Across the road
A J-K girl,
Skipped and laughed
On her way to school.
She was strapped
To a big back-pack,
Looking like
A pink pack mule.
Behind her strove
Her drover,
Directing her to quarry
All the stones of learning.

By three o'clock
My minature mule,
A little slower
Trudged from school.
The pack was filled
With rules and tools.
She had panned
The ores of knowledge;
She'll assay them
In days to follow.

Each day my mule
Will turn the grindstone,
Crunching numbers,
Sifting fine poems.
She's mining all the hidden gems
To fill her back-pack
Once again.

Ants crawl across this floor we’ve fallen on before
Crawling away from painful light meant for death
It takes time and height to view this bitter facsimile
Of the life that was when our legs shortened and
We carried righteous angst in disaffected thoraxes

We lived such a life chased by light unrepentant.
So it went with soldiers straying and fraying
Under the stress of the chase by cruel illumination
While those on the scent of something sweeter
Managed to stay out of the heat and find salvation

Truly miraculous things are these
that have no future but cocoon just the same
poor souls that should be outshined by time
find reprieve enough to shield timid bodies
long enough to find their own legs stilting

No feat of glory to any still around
But to those scattered by the wayside
These hulking creatures are visions of
Promise, a promise that one’s own feeble feelers
May one day cast out into oblivion and latch onto
The stuff dreams are made of and close their eyes
With open mouths for serums of wonderland

Such a shame then, when the hopeful
Can’t be afforded the lofty visions
Of their grindstone nose counterparts
And the wayside entraps them in whorish
Promises of paid-for pleasure

But life digresses while the underbelly
Digests the stumblers of chance
So we have you and me, and the world
Feeling inadequate legs stripped bare
So superior parts could be strapped on

This machination of imagination
Is how we get by that heat of life
What once incinerated futures
Inflicts faint unseen blisters--
Reminders of humility rising

At long last our earth-drawn eyes
Draw level with this glass half empty
But magnified with the intention of more,
More, more, more, colors filling prisms across the sky
Gaining beauty and color from the heat of long ago

But who would care about the minute minutes
Of suffering felt by those not bold or quick enough
When compared to this veritable Monet
Blessed with the gift of chasing pasts away
To be replaced with this gilded new day.

So it goes and so it must be in the minds
Still intact, kindled not hindered by the heat

                             ...

Towering over this glass of possibility,
Our focus is intent, not missing a thing
You and me, and the world all focus
On this contrived concoction of color
Bewitching that betwixt reason and love

All our eyes and all our thoughts
Gather power by the hour
Drawn from this pool of glory
Not a thought dropped into
This wishing well

While we sate our psyches
From this languishing pool
We forget how the same spark
That defined us, as we grew above the fray
Is now returned earthward

Isn’t it entertaining to contemplate
Life in the context of those wretches
Blessed to have the power of immediacy
While we sit serially still, no purpose
But to make these poor ants run.