Big ships, small ships, yachts and dingeys
Floating across the mighty sea
Carving their way, displacing their weight
To keep afloat the Captain and First mate.

Old ships, new ships, schooners and cruise liners
Have crossed paths throughout the ages old
Once to explore, make claim, pirate and fight
Now to wine and dine on a luxurious bite

Salted beef, rock hard bread and weevil-friendly biscuits
A 3 course meal fit for Old Salts alike
Weevils & worms and bugs of all kind
Along with sparse portions of meat, you might find

French wine, filet mignon, sushi and pastries
Buffets and fine dining, variety is key
All you can eat, whenever you'd like
No chores, no work, just eating all night'

What a contrast exists between these two worlds
Only 2 to 300 hundred years apart
Once grimy, risky, arduous and fraught
Now fancy, lazy, and much to be bought

What if the Old Salts could teleport to today
And live aboard our floating hotels?
With no masts to climb or sheets to tend
Would they break or would they bend?

I suppose that switch would be easy enough
But send us back to Pirate-ridden waters
You'd be sure never to hear from us again
Swabbing the deck would **** us alone
Not to mention the food and disease of back when.

- BPW 
Dec. 11, 2013

Am I losing hold?
In a hurricane thought storm
Little deaths on the television
Remind me of my inactions

Said I’d even myself
Out, after giving into self
Doubt. Unstable, leaning toward self
Harm, while the world tumbles itself
Round

Bitter at my own lack
Feel the fire dying in my breath
While the world
Burns and breaks and blisters in a growing wreck

Did my stutter break another heart?
Did my whisper **** that child?
Too quiet for him to hear the reason
I searched for myself, at sixteen

Is every stilted thought, wasted potential / opportunity
To better myself, better the world,
And every person I'll ever meet?

I will not let
Hesitation
Separate
Soul from body
Ever again

I am not lifeless
I am not cruel
I will not be a bystander
I swear

I am not lifeless
I am not cruel
I will not be a bystander
I swear
Ever again

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.