One Friday night
You sat across from me.
Counting your change.
Unfurling old and new
bills
gathering them
Into neat stacks.
Brows furrowed.

You ordered these bacon-and-cheese wraps
For both of us
Which we agreed
Tasted like salt.
Salt and texture.

these days everywhere you look
people have their noses in their phones
and while some believe its because this generation is so obsessed with technology--
I think that's shallow and ignorant.

we wouldn't feel the need to hide our faces behind our phones typing out paragraph messages if we were happy,
and close to the people we want to talk to, and
if we weren't having every experience by ourselves or around people we don't know past their home town and major.

we're all going places we feel we need to go
but we're going alone
and these little pieces of distancing technology
is the only thing that keeps up together.

I didn't understand the guy who
said that we as observers can alter reality,
maybe it's just that I can't trust anyone
who tells me I can change the world
from my living room but
come on, think about how can we
alter what we can see because we
don't see these tiny particles, or is it
that we do alter them by looking
into the void to where a wall tells us
that there's a swarm of these things,
or we just don't because if we
are in fact altering them the wall might
turn into a different wall, let's just say, or if
there are two of us looking, it might
as well change from my wall to your beach and if
there are more of us we might end up looking at
an infinite ever-changing never anything per se of marvels
that we all carry around and our observation
would fire up to the swarm of particles
when in apparent reality I was just
standing there staring at my wall alone
the one wall I was looking at with the eyes of the blind,
who see by not seeing.

Permanently fixed to the rest room wall,
waiting for the golden rain to fall,
oh you've many a tale to tell,
The stains on your sides, the distinctive smell,
That gum in the drain hole, spat out in haste,
The crown and glory ‘mongst the human waste.
All those members, large and small,
have hung over your orifice, you've seen them all,
Your starting to choke on the ***** hair,
While drunk men with whiskey breath,  look down and stare,
no one seems to notice your vitreous gleam,
under the constant haze of the ***** stream,
you just suffer in silence and long for the day,
When you’re no longer needed and they take you away.

A coffee shop afternoon can say it looms significant
In the steamer’s sweet humidity
And the idle legs pace for more
I hear the whispers of world-changers and gossip mix
Local color of a quiet little town.

Sit humble and lean, a fixture ‘till showtime
And ask lines around just we’ve they’ve been
And who they’ve seen.

There’s a poetry in the patron, come
My gaze permits and intervenes
Its narrative and scheme, in lover’s hand enweaved.

Graphite plays its frustrate part the writer
Seated far, far in a blissful nadir
Bristles in his pony tail like drawers end to no avail.

Snake in the grass
slides stealthily
slippery through
the dry

c  u      d
  r  s  e
       h

leaves

slithering its way
secretly 'round
through the red forest
with red leaves
and red trees
and red tape

He slithers quietly
Creeps and crawls
on his belly
so

l


o




w


through Ferguson
he slides
Scraping the scab
of a fresh, infected wound
Stinging it
with his tail
his tongue

Snake in the grass
Slides smoothly
into Texas

Hex us Vex us
Nexus Correct us

to the cusp of reason
the the edge of insanity
Siphoning tight
in the barrel of their guns
salivating at the fresh prey
crawling in the distance

He's not so different
from you and I

He's just like us
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She stepped back until the branch that hit her
Was nothing but a still part of a tree
Until the wind that had cut her skin
Didn't move her sight no more
Until she was just an observer
Of the mess her life had become
So she could set it still, paint it
As a picture more rosy than it
Ever would become