Strands of light cross my wall.
Full moon through the blinds
So bright it shines within
a city without stars.
It bobs in a murky brown pond.
Mosquito satellites **** by.
I'm enthralled by its loneliness.
In a city without stars,
the moon conducts
the streetlamp orchestra
Though it's a solemn life she leads
May she never dream.
May she never wish.
Long as we exist, she's shrouded,
but as long as we do, she is loved.

There you were on 658 North Skyline drive, visiting the place where you once called home
With those innocent, helpless girls on your restless, manic mind.
At the age of twenty-five, a hopeless law-student drop out
Sitting in the blistering hot Summer Tacoma heat in your battered beige Volkswagen windows down,
wind blowing on your ruddy face.
Wishing you had a flashy Maserati
Thousands of beads of sweat trickle down your head like a waterfall.
Frustrated and exhausted
Knowing the fate what's going to become of the pretty, carefree girls laughing, walking ahead on the street by your car, but they're completely unaware.
The reminisce of cheap beer and stale cigarettes on your breath
As you quickly glance at your velvet crowbar, that resides on your chair-less passenger side, so desperately wanting another hit.

Jittering with panic inside, that familiar feeling surges with an adrenaline rush in your body, going from zero to eighty in 0.01 seconds
You start to get in a trance with self-destruction, panicking with chaotic anger beginning to emerge again, in waves like the ocean.
The entity begins to set in
Yet something abruptly stops you.
Holding a crumbled picture of dear Elizabeth and Molly, you keep your wallet in your right blue jean back pocket.
Yet you don't give in to your double life.No. Not this time.
Letting the devastating, destructive behavior from the entity consume your entire being.
As you begin to have sudden regret ignoring the powerful, impatient fidgety urge.


Ten girls have now suddenly evaporated into thin air, caused by your harmful doing.
Police and newspaper sightings of a certain man named "Ted" have appeared out of the woodwork,
But you keep that identity hidden under lock and key.
Newsflashes pop up at the five o'clock hour, but nothing seems to phase you into utter shock.

Now sitting in an unclean, rat-infested jail cell in Colorado
The walls only seem to know the REAL you
The light fixture is almost sawed off entirely to your liking, for your excitingly filled escape, set for tonight.
Going through the small labyrinth of the ceiling of the jail,
New, fresh, clean clothes on, and annoying coveralls off
You open the front door, as a blast of the bone-chilling cold goes through your body,
Fast, snow falling on the ground, and luckily a car with its doors  unlocked
You now fade away into the blackness.

After you've completed the horrendous event in Lake City that you so desired to do on a whim
There's now no recollection of your recent event, even though you were there.
The trees with the wind are whispering and gossip your horrific acts.
Only they truly know your lawless stories


A couple of years has rolled by,
Trial after trial, day in and day out
Hoping and confident that you'll win, but each time, you've disappointingly lost.
Judge Cowart sits on his throne, tentatively listens
The buzz from the ***** and pills that your beloved Carole snuck in for you is finally beginning to wear off.
Irritation sets
As you razzle-dazzle each individual with your stealthy charm
The time has finally come that the jury decides your ultimate, timely fate


Flash forward to eight years on death row, with that heavy metal that you wear
Living in a concrete castle, in a desolate foreign land
Indeed not Buckingham Palace.
Rowdy, loud, *****, unclean, unshaven men surround you.
Something that your not used to doing.
Not the place you wish to be at the moment.
Body odor and sweat with no air conditioning in a stagnant, minuscule cell might also be Hell on Earth.
While just an old malfunctioning fan tries to keep you cool from Florida's oppressive heat.
You talk to the four walls, that listen when the detectives get fed up and bored. With your perpetual beating around the bush rhetoric.
You wasted  your life on behalf of your destructive behavior and wrong choices
Time is ticking faster and faster when you only have a few days left till death day arrives
Rose is officially gone and is now a long distant faded memory of your failed career of a deadbeat father and husband.
It's been a few years since you last saw her and Carole as they vanished from your life.
Vanished and stolen.
Like the girl's lives, you had vanished and stolen from happy families only to destroy when you willingly obeyed and fulfilled the entity's destructive wish.
Your tears become your lullaby, for your last night on Earth.

January 24th, 1989.
Your expiration date has arrived.
Rowdy, drunk onlookers are at your last hurrah
The warden swiftly comes to your death watch cell and wakes you up from the unrestful, anxiety-filled sleep you had gotten
Are you ready? He asks you.
No longer now is a handsome forty-two-year-old, but a shaven bald gangly, ailing man, with the appearance of looking like a sixty-year-old who's unrecognizable to one's eye.
"Deadman walking," the warden shouts.
Emotionless expression looks of people that you've once known in your past are now seated in small white chairs
As officers restrain you in the infamous wooden chair, of the many in-humane men who've gone, years before your time.
Adjust your electric crown
Nerves begin to quake internally like a rattlesnake
And in less than a flash, with two- thousand volts, you'll be gone from this world forever.
At approximately 7:16 am, you're pronounced dead.




Alone & Forgotten.

Nightfall on the Sound,
Houselights come on one, two, three...
At last! I can write.

I’m hit with sounds and smells of you
Sitting behind a smoker on the transit
And I’m strangely nostalgic
I’ve grown to love it
Because on you it’s mixed with pine
Like you dozed off next to a fire pit

I realize you’re all around me
Because in these parts
short flannel clad men
with tall egos
are a dime a dozen

Though I know when I move away
I’ll look back with yearning
On those nights in your car
(they meant more to me than you know)
listening to Tame Impala and waiting for the bridge
bass cranked high like the heat
effervescent windows frosted
from our craft brewed breaths
singing and saturated with spirit(s)

Was this home or all I came to know?

I can’t deny that summer will never again
be as heavy with happiness
as when the sky has stopped her crying
long enough to paint in pastels
canopied air crisp enough to bite
I guess that’s what happens
when you spend 2/3 of the year in grey

it’s not for me

The page this was written on
has rain drop stains.
Something about all that falling water
gets a brain going.
A jogger bobs along,
only rain walkers remain,
the rest are gone
back to their homes.
Something about all that falling water
really gets to them.
The wetness does end folks,
it's a cycle.
Missing out on a whole.

There's a wind on,
a real, big wind.
Too strong for kites,
likely to snap the string,
flying the kite
far, far, far.

Walking is a battle
between you and the breeze,
brewing up a tussle.
See the people bent over double?
They know, they've got it,
they know the score.
You and the wind, destination moot.
Forget jobs, forget groceries and lunch dates,
you've got gusts to tackle!

The door shuts,
the whoosh mutes and hair settles,
you've made it, but the wind,
it still howls.

Petals flurried in the wind,
gusts rushing white clouds.
A final hoo-rah,
a perfect storm
before bare branches.

We sit and watch,
petals in our hair,
mischievous tendrils of air whipping.
We sit and watch
with wonder, this blessing,

yet we forget our own.

Sitting on a boulder
nestled in a valley,
clutch tea in a tumbler,
watch the water and leaves
that slide on its surface.
Green moss takes refuge on the rock,
a welcome pillar to guide toward the sun
which sifts through the trees.
A wound in the city,
a green scar
reminding us what once was.

There are three bright spots worth looking for on cloudy days.

In the morning, it’s coffee with you. We find our silver lining in a hole-in-the-wall cafe near the market where fish fly, talking vividly about what we dreamed as muted light finds its way through the window where we sit. We save the moment, but say bye too fast as if we had flights of our own to catch. And we loose sight of each other in the never-ending current of strangers rushing past. The sky reverts to its stone grey self, and I drift in the company of office buildings, weightless as the clouds from my breath.

We meet again, at a walk-up noodle joint on the pier. We share a steaming bowl of tonkatsu ramen and gaze at the mist-covered bay, talking about the jobs that keep us from waking up. The sun peeks through a blanket of overcast to find us. We take a selfie: in it, we are beaming. We say bye again, this time, with an embrace as warm as the soup on our lips. We save the moment, floating alongside the edge of the water with a glow that will see us through the chilly night ahead.

The last bright spot is the golden hour. It gets dark far too early here, so there is no time to waste. We spend what’s left of it together, over a drink that burns when swallowed in a dimly lit bar beneath a stairwell. It begins to rain. We say nothing this time, and instead, share an unspoken understanding of who we are at the end of cloudy days. We put a finger on it, and promise that we’ll see each other again no matter how heavy the fog may get. We’ll find our way through. We save one last moment and slip into the wintery mist, seeing clear.

In a place with as much grey area as this, the word ‘alone’ looks blurred: it’s ‘all’ and ‘one’ put together, where nothing is missing. The selfie we took comes into focus: it was myself, a complete stranger in my own company. Now, when it's cloudy outside, we see each other through it, filling whatever is empty like a glass, toasting to the brightness found within.