I am under the sun’s dust-specked rays
With the low mumbles of a nearby river flowing into my ears
My brain bathes in it’s cool water
The pitter-patter of energetic drips hopping in and out of their prism
Becomes the only sound that occupies my head

Leaves,
Brown
Gold
Holey
Deep
Crunch crunch crunching
Dirt like magnetic attraction clasp to
My boots
My pants
My hair
The sky
Empty
Unoccupied by nothing but the birds that fly in it

Deep breaths of wind proud and tenacious caress my eager face

And it gets dark and the sky swirls and contorts
Screaming out it’s agony and frustration
Over another dying day
It assaults my eyes with it’s canvas
Melted oranges, cascading reds, opaque violets
Illuminating all it looks over
With the glow of it’s ferocity

The scent of pine needles and bark seep into my weary lungs
And I am invigorated with a burst of life
I’ll laugh and let the cold air cap my teeth
And grab my naked eyes
And shake me and shake me and shake me until
I can’t take it
And I cry from it’s frozen clutch
And I laugh and my face is as red as the burnt burgundy leaves that cushion the bottom of my boots

And all
I can hear
Are the echos
Of my solitude
And the toads
Croaking
And
My skin
Warms
And my
Heartbeats
And
My brain
Is silenced
And my eyes close


When I open them I see nothing but my ceiling

And I look forward and my TV is staring at me
With the look of nefariousness it always has

Frantic, desperate, delirious

I grab at my skin

And I
Am
Cold

It’s out of my reach
There are always vultures hovering pensively above for any remains
And your sad blue eyes have seen a million disappointments
From
Sea
To
Sea
And I don’t think an
“It’ll be okay”
Will stop them from sinking

And the ****** addicts, and the prostitutes, and all those corporate men
Will live on blithely
While you slowly wither

Whatever they say
Love is never enough
It is a merely a puppet show
Colorful and loud
With a Shakespearean script

During its duration
It’s master drinks a fifth
Until his cheeks are rosy and his eyes are bullets
Until he stumbles onto the stage he built piece by piece
Filled with liquored-up animosity
He’ll rip his wooden companions apart

Wood rigid like claws
Protruding with unabashed vehemence
Paint seeping like a thousand comets gone awry
The audience erupts with laughter
Destruction being
The only logical way
Hearts are suppose to end up

I’ll pull you in until my veins scream with purple agony
But you’ll simply unhook my line and smile
Your face will dismiss me with false reassurance

You just crack open a beer

And the storm continues it’s unwavering journey
You look down at your bottle and your blue eyes fall into it
You’ll take a sip and glance up
And the sky is nothing but pestilence
Face solemn and unmoved
Eyes filled with white

You crack open another

I avoid writing poems about flowers  

I don’t need to tell you that roses
Bright, blood red, placed perfectly atop a broccoli-green vine,
Existing solely for the purpose of atheistic pleasure
Is something that is beautiful

Put a white background behind anything and it becomes beautiful

Flowers are more than a hyped-up beauty pageant queen that those old white women grow to fill their voids with

They sometimes manage to grow in my neighborhood too

Once prominent Victorian homes now squalid and neglected
Weathered wood, dirt embedded in the sea-foam green, navy blue, eggshell white paint they were once coated with

Trash thrown in front of their faces
Like their appalling forms granted validity for those who passed by to toss their gum wrappers, soda cans, and cigarettes without hesitation

It’s an age-old tale

Ugly things deserve ugly treatment

I’ll always spot a savage grove of mutt flowers
Amongst the trash cans and recycle bins
Struggling to make their way to the surface of these rejected homes
Acknowledging them, coddling them, interweaving themselves along their battered walls
Ignorant to their repugnancy
Eager to decorate and give them an evanescent glow
Sad too,
Sad they didn’t grow in front of some rich family’s home
Where they would’ve been given weekly haircuts and fertilizer containing only the best **** on the market

They wilt a little
They have no direction,
No will to live or to die

They exist and sit there until a bike runs them over
And takes them out in one swoop

Or until those stray dogs **** and **** on them until their weak
Frames fall staunchly onto the grave sidewalk

Exquisite wild lepers,

You do more for society than I ever could

You’ll sit there with a dutiful posture
Harboring old McDonald French Fry boxes
Eating the sewer-infested dirt that you laboriously grew from
Constantly breathing air swarmed with smog

Beautiful because,

Despite it all,

You don’t hate them

You’ll peek at me through your prison of trash and give me a flash of your purple and blue skin

And

My eyes feel your love and serenity

And for a moment,

The world is nothing but a kaleidoscope of warm skin and heartbeats

Your words are a runaway train
Cart after cart
Of regret
And disappointment

You can’t stop explaining
And justifying
The reasons and the choices and the decisions
And why this and why not that

Your tremor
Holds back the true, paramount fear
Of living a life empty and unfulfilled
Dried up oasis
Of what was and never was

We always forget that we are going to die

I wish I could tell you that it’s okay

I love you and your golden brown eyes
I love touching your hand
And having something to love
When my heart gets down to its lowest point
And I need someone so desperately to hang onto
So my panic
And my emptiness
And all those people
Don’t close in on me
With intentions to violently consume me
Dragging me
Into their cold irreparable pit
Spitting me back out
just
tatters
of
flesh
and
bone
left

Sometimes I forget that I need you so much


And if Death suddenly snatched you away
Took you apart
Unwove you

Through my eyes
The world would stop spinning
The sun would stop shining
Every flower would rot
Every building would fall to the floor

Because you may have felt nothing while here
But you are everything to me
And without you
The world isn’t a bearable wasteland
It’s just a million broken pieces
Cutting into me
As I wander aimlessly
******
Disillusioned and hungry for what no longer exists

And I’ll never be lulled into a comfortable slumber ever again

You don’t love me
I want to be hard and impenetrable
I never want to feel wanted
Your fingertips
Tracing themselves over my arms
Again
And
Again
In perfect unison
“I do love you”
“I do love you”
“I do…”
Until my eyes give in to your hypnotic reassurance

Forever and always

But I tell myself I don’t need it

Brow furrowed, eyes shifty
Always trying to tell my heart to shut up
Listening to it gets me nowhere
No thanks, it’s too dangerous of a mission
What’s that?
Your rapid heartbeats don’t resonate
Houston; abort

But I tell myself I don’t need it

The hugging, the laughter, the sparkle in others eyes
I’d rather be a napkin in the corner of the street
Existing in a permanent state of rejection
Once desired for a purpose no longer
Once sought after for a grimy hand in need
Now free to blow away at my convenience; haphazardly, twitching down the bumpy road, soiled with the dirt of my one human encounter
Maybe I’ll make a decent home for a cockroach
Or simply dissolve into the urban street I was tossed into

But I tell myself I don’t need it

So where’s my gun?

Where’s my bottle of pills?

Where’s the bus I’ve been waiting on?

Recklessness is deaths pawn
And they make a flawless team
I feel them lurking in

Every bottle I drink
Every cigarette I smoke
Every dark street I walk alone on

But I tell myself I don’t need it

It’s the wisp of the wind
The transparency of a glass
The soul of a person
I grab it in the palm of my hand, clutching to its fleeting warmth
Only knowing after it’s gone I’ll resume being cold and empty

But I tell myself I don’t need it

But there’s a thin line between what we want and what we need

So I’ll be the battered wife that stays with her abusive husband
I’ll be the alcoholic with a bible and a cross
I’ll be the homophobic man with a secret male lover
Hoping the next day I won’t awake
So everything I stuff down and suffocate will wither away inside my casket
Because the worst thing you can do is let them know
Let them know you are it
You are what they need

So I’ll gaze down this building and hope I’ll inch too close
And become a bit dizzy
And laugh a bit nervouslessy
And tease the edge with the tip of my shoe
And feel the blood rushing
To my nose
And my head
And feel the ground sinking
And the wind flowing
Hands shaking
And the rock it’s tittering, falling so fast
Gravity kills it in one swoop like it never even mattered
And the ground it all looks so awfully far away
Is this right? Is it? What about everyone else?
I’m so ******* sweaty and I’m thinking of everything of all the scenarios
The do’s and the don’ts’ and whether I should’ve given Jesus a shot
And the tears are gushing a salty mask all across my cold face
And I’ll fall and prove to them all that I was nothing but an intangible feeling
And they’ll all cry and think I was something
Worth feeling and touching and believing in and…

But I tell myself I don’t need it

Walking through crowds is an experience equivalent to suffocating

I can’t avoid them even when I’m staring down
I’ll see their conniving other halves
Black and soulless
Empty and treacherous
Crawling about near the bottom of my feet
Wrapping themselves around my ankles
Never facing a specific way
No eyes for me to look at
To determine their candor
Their abundance of humanity
A reassurance that
When I turn my back
There won’t be a cold, silver dagger
Snaking it’s way into my soft, unassuming flesh

I hate the way their faces always demand something from me
What the **** is there to give?
Whatever’s on your agenda I don’t want to be a part of it
I’m a person by nature
Seemingly capable of a variety of feelings
But I’m an empty carcass by choice
I don’t want contact or connection
Only a coffee in my hand and the knowledge that the sun will set on another day

Their boisterous laughs, loud voices, spittle projecting from their mouths
Group of ditzy girls in front of me
Impatient old man behind me
All plotting to push off of the sidewalk
Disgusting aimless animals
It’s always an internal right
To get ahead, be ahead, to yell ******* for insulting their bigotry
Their infectious god complex
Where everyone’s certain their the best
All racing towards a cliff foaming at its mouth
To taste their massive demise

And you’ll see me trotting along behind
With the sewer rats and the lepers
Overly aware and alone
Ugly and nervous
Hateful and uninspired
Humbled by the realization
That every time somebody told us we could be President
We’d laugh and opt for the flask
Instead of joining the masses
And tearing at our competitions flesh
Until we all fell apart
Blue ribbon upon us all
****** and plastic

“You’re # 1!”

Like a fawn looking into the barrel of a shotgun
Your naivety is what got you here; pending
Just a few bad decisions away from letting the bullet tear apart your head
And feed the forest the uncountable remains of your brain
It’ll be your worst nightmare
Something you were incapable of foreseeing
Your eyes painted with a sedated glaze
Drool seeping out of the corner of your mouth
Unable to see the harm in anything

So pretty
So pretty
So pretty

Everything is just a landscape for me to paint my happiness on
The sun greets me with a warm embrace
And the birds make the gift of hearing that much better
Get ready for me world, I am the magical spark who was born
To break up your system
To show you what a real human being was meant to accomplish
I’ll emanate courage that would make Jesus weep
I don’t care what history has to say

Holocausts, crusades, war

All of it means nothing because I am here

Wall street, poverty, oil spills

All of it because there were a few bad eggs
But people
People are all right
Most of them don’t mean it
What do you mean how?
They just don’t

Please don’t **** your gun

I wanted to be a lawyer and help the people who cant help themselves
But I’m just a person that no one will help either
But they don’t mean it
They would help me if they could
They just need my spark
My love
My courage
And they’ll see what they can be

Please, get that away from my temple

I wanted to show them all,
I wanted to uphold my values
And show them the benefits of having morals

Please, I can forgive you if you just let me go

I see your soul and it’s just been a little damaged
Nothing positivity can’t fix
I believe in people
They aren’t the way they are on purpose….


Boom



You left your mark on this landscape and it’s bright red

Are you peering down? Saying it’s your love instead of your blood

Are you looking at your killer? Saying it was a misunderstanding instead of hatred

Are you looking at Positivity?
Picking its teeth with a toothpick,
Full of the bulshit you’ve been feeding it
Until it’s never-ending stomach gave into its gluttony
And gobbled you whole

Left you a carcass

Buried you

So you could be another part of the ground

Where Coke cans and McDonalds bags provide you with a permanent quilt

The sun shining on you nevermore