Monitor
Watching me
Reading over my shoulder
Danger lies in depression
Fear
I just want to be normal
Dauntless
Not this
Not me
Monitor
Watching me
Watching
I can't breathe
Silence is key
Staying alive
The true goal
But how
With this monitor?

Six a.m. and the morning leans
To kiss the night;
The streets are full of stars
And sleepwalking business suits

The citrus woman
With peroxide blonde hair
And peroxide blonde fingers
If she spoke I imagine it would sound
Like lemon trees and smoke
Her cigarette burns holes in the sky
But when she passes me by
She smells like the Boots Cosmetics Isle
She paints the yellowed-ivory
Of her finger-claws
With crystallised orange
To cover the nicotine stains
And maybe I think I recognise
My lemonade shampoo
And tangerine hand wash
Like a setting sun over Sicily

The beer can boy
With stuffed up hair
And a stuffed up liver
He’s grey like a November playground
Once all the children have grown
And he’s hole-punched right through
I might think he was heart-broken
And trying to see how many other lost souls
The bottoms of bottles hold
If he wasn’t here every morning
Lolling down the pavement
Like a spring stretched too far
Asking for a paper
That I’m not allowed to give
And trying to drown himself
In the pooled rain under the streetlights

The coat-and-cardie bundle
With wind-swept hair
And wind-swept grimace
Like a tornado tore up
The geography of her personality
And left it with just a bike and a death wish
And those features heaped together
Between chimney-tops and table tops
For consolation
Her feet on the pedals while her hair throttles
Because she’s unlit
Unseen, unprotected
And she rides like this morning is the last
As if she knows that skulls
Crack like eggshells sometimes
And handlebars are sometimes not in front of you.

If my Dad was here he’d see
A smoker
A drunk
A dangerous cyclist
But I see lemon zest and love hearts and black liquorish
After all I’m at home
Among these mistakes
That the morning hours make

He saw me sleep
Blood flow from the mind
And fumes from the eyes
He clattered and ground
His gears

His grim fermented
Circuits and wires
Fusing within
A core of metal droplets

I shot up
Blown from my slumber
His bright stare in slate
Wouldn’t fade, but
Burned in my eyes

I shook and sweated
As he could not
That foul machine
Clatters on.

The invisible man watching as you
Produce, consume, intake all of this vice
The lies, mind boggling stories untrue
But boring, these things are life's spice
Why, the man must ask, unseen and ignored
Why does life need stimulations as these
To them, to thee, transmuted water poured
Allowing the moment and time to freeze
Bitter, angst and oppression of rights wrong
Sweet, the tantalizing succor of thee
By the time the evil shown in the throng
It's too late, of your freedom you be free
A joy, a friend that's all but it seems
Is a silent ****** of all your dreams

I love to sit
In a building
Way up high
And look down at the ground
And see all of the people
The size of ants
And all the cars
Like the toys I once had
Hurry around
Walking, running, driving
Everyone is in a hurry
Somewhere to be
Somewhere to go
Faster, faster
They go
Each one with there one story
Relatively insignificant to everyone else
Only people in your life care
About you and your story
The same way only you care
About people's stories
Who are in your life
Everyone else is just a face
In the way
Walking past you
Driving your bus
Your train
Your taxi
Insignificant
A pawn that gets you where you want to be
So you can ccontinue your life
What if
We cared more
About these people
Probably others would think you are crazy
But maybe you would touch someone's heart
Change their life
Maybe smiling could be a social normalcy
If those ant sized people
Could slow down
For a moment
What would I see
Way up high
If the world became
A friendlier place

bright honey pours
all across my dawn
for pictures of you

that seem a hundred years ago
or seven, or beautifully
transparent into who
I once was, and the person
I’ve become, the nectar is curved

love never leaves us truly
just a nameless horizon
where faces shimmer

and wisdom like a fabric
can be held from world to world
planet to planet, until
our body of pure love suddenly
touches the light of a new day

and every face seems like
somebody we should have known
every personality feels really

intimate, I get that a lot
when I’m people watching
it’s a baptism of love
fluid as golden light
as I melt so easily into a stranger’s

eyes, that I feel my entire life
cupped in their hands, in their
memories, as they mix with my own.

she was always told to dance
like nobody was watching

for the first few years,
she was too young
to understand what it meant

when she finally understood,
she was too afraid to listen
to the music in her head

when she got over her fear
and took that first step,
a dance began
but nobody cared

she danced
and nobody watched

oh
but e v e r y o n e noticed
when she stopped

Their eyes wandered,
Crowding the scene
But I averted
My own
To lend privacy
To the disaster.

Tears ran down her face
And cries were heard
And she muffled them
But the man said curtly,
Keep him crying,
It means he's alive.

What had happened
In an instant
Drew out,
As they stared
And I turned away
Thinking I was helping,
My eyes hardly probing
Like theirs.

But in the end,
I'm not the one
Who uttered reassurances
Or found the doctor.
They did.