Dragon fire come burn me,
Turn my thoughts into carbon.
My purest intentions will extinguish your flame,
Your mythology grants me the wish
To climb the mountains of despair,
To conquer the hills and make love
To the people with my thoughts
Gaining supremacy is not my aim,
Nor is victory by default.
My measure is  to teach,
To hold the universe in my grasp
And shake the evil and the egotistic
Taste the goodness of universal love
Quell the fiery breath of the dragon
To a whisper of man's destructive force
The green scales of his skin slowly falling
Realising his strength is waning.
The knight of the natural world
Has shown how giants and dragons
Can be brought to book
By common sense and love.

By Max Hale

It used to be the little things that I hated
Whenever I used to watch “God” smile at me from the front door
I forgot about the thin spaces in the yard that I could hide
And then I woke up. . .

Falling through the air looked easier when I was asleep
But now the words that I search for are far more hollow than I ever dreamed
Maybe a good dream could place itself in my writing instead of going away
Like the memories of the ghost I loved

She can’t hear me anymore    
My dreams are stained with blood and gold
The good thing is once I’m old I’ll just stay broken    
Instead of burning alive and feeling alright about how loud I scream at night

Do the lies inside his body cover up the moon that you and I once howled to?
When we felt so alive and slowly made a change in our memories    
I just hope that in the times that you’re alone,
You will maybe wish upon the stars to stop completely like the trees of our yesterday

Today I’ll scream at the ground outside
People seven miles away would be able to hear my wicked thoughts

If I could just kiss your hands once more I’d lose my breathe once more
But I’d better wait and see before I believe that I could try living a few days without me and you

I’m sure that their cold faces will say okay in one holy moment tonight
Maybe they will hold enough room for the truth that would come closed up so tight
Until an angel could come out of the water and takes the strangeness away so quiet

Let me complete the silence so I can feel your new sense of love upon my rough skin

Out there in the slow house the story could **** the darkness of the old town    
The sick lonely blue rain lives only once to save the song I once sang    
****, I guess the green secret came and helped me carry along alright in my life  
And then the blood red stain stood upon the white blank page and closed down all of the searching for you that I've done

So let me please scream aloud
So that maybe I will touch those lost souls with my deep voice  
In a way that you would be so sorry that you couldn't have reached me first    
Now my brain can begin its wicked ways of passing smoke through the city
But just enough that it takes a hold of the space that runs grey strands of hate through the dirt
Please understand this isn't what's shutting down ones broken army
It’s the eyes that run across this earth and fear the horrendous storm that meets our city in the morning

Girl, I know that pain comes with beauty
But just try and continue to live past the mean handed strangers in the mucky **** of it all.
Listen to the sound of the buildings falling down around the unseen disaster
You’ll be pulling strands of your hair out because the truth will burn down the doors
You once opened when your father was still here

And yet, the waves have taken another page out of tomorrow
When you reach out for an opening, the demons will offer an eternal hello
While all the best will get clouds for the minutes when they shared a breath for the forgotten

All of the questions that these ******* humans have about my poems
Make me understand why those people are so wrong in their parting with the black sea
It starts to put feet into the holes along the path finally chosen for its sweet song sang

When I start to care again is when I will be standing high upon the mountain
With my spirit fully awake and my sight just waiting to see the lights that lead me there
And in turn my bones will be given to the wind and I’ll read the book of heaven’s secrets
And all of the demons that tried to follow me there will drown in the lines they drew to try and cover my happiness.

Finally the walls of hell will be stripped from the silence that began with the message from the lying bleeding vision that we all drank down with such comfort and ease
You knew when to turn and walk away, but you didn't and now the walls of hell are naked
Because of all the nights you spent breathing the hours away, but not asleep.
While you lied awake you couldn't help but think of a land where beautiful scenes shined with such radiant sunlight and allowed the fears of this country to drift into the streaming skies and the meaning of all the years spent smelling the dying leaves brought tears to your eyes, but you still can’t sleep.

Meet the true, imperfect writer with fingers that are getting old and bones that are falling out of order
I figured the moment to pass this dark figure would probably happen on a beach
Where the clock couldn't explain the feelings it’s kept near the broken picture on the wall
And the way I always felt underneath its stained glass would certainly put gold into the pages of this unfinished book and then hopefully onto the streets of this brand new mirror

Step don’t sink into the unknown
Don’t wave goodbye and let time pass and be a waste
Into the infinite grand opening of the birth in the foggy woods

We are miles away from the summer now
So don’t get locked up in the *******!

Use the new methods you've learned to demonstrate the new form of closing your soft lips
Use them and then throw them back into their ****** hands
Try and pull the star away fast without trying to thank them for trying so fast

The answer may be to severe to think upon now
So try and remain calm when the simple plan gets burned on the ever changing shoreline
Thank the waves for not knowing the answer but praise God when he creeps in with an obvious sign

Instead of speaking of pretty places,
Try walking through the universe to seek comfort from these stretched out speeches.

You are barely lifting a finger to mark the piece of a colorful gift that a strong yet strange reason gave to you.

Speak of the arrows which collapse unfaded through the gates of gated gratuities
Expansive perpetuity
Leading to the loose leaf paper falling from empty trees in the dead of an autumnal night
Moonlight,
Clouded contact lenses

Mills billowing, malls bellowing
"Open for busy-ness! Open for busy-ness!"

Unzipping jackets with a smile that says
"From the ends of endings, I have always begun with an eternal grin while you slept on my knees and I dreamed of things smaller than the precipice of the period at the end of this sentence."

This never loved that
And that never loved this
Because they soon discovered 'This' was not this, and 'That' was not that
They were all There together, and discovered an 8 kicked sideways was an honesty beyond promises
And angrily, I remember wondering what had ever come over the all of us that wanted nothing more to do with anger

Had we stormed off in all directions, reading to seek in veins for a blood that was unfounded in the deadly hallows of happy mathematics?
Or were we simply throwing words together in the hopes of sounding surreal?

Sometimes I feel psuedo when I write, when I know I'm quite as real as anyone else.
I just need to struggle with the words more honestly, I suppose.

Perhaps I need to struggle more honestly with myself.
As Kerouac said,
“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

I need to go mad.

I need to quit my job and be here and all over here without a worry for the ideas
Yesterday, tomorrow
It is only ever today.

It doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need to oblige my mother and father with a proper philosophical argument as to why I want to be here, because all they've ever been is 'there,' with the best intentions at heart I know, but without ever coming back down to Earth and letting their worries waft away like the smell of fresh, metallic rain during the Ides of March.

They failed the exam of the lilies which did not accept the parental "this is the way it is."
It is only the way it is because we are too cowardly to endorse our wildest dreams.

We do not wish upon stars, and if we do, it is because we wish upon those stars to help us get out of there, when all we have to do to escape there is to be here like a sudden clash of thunder upon a bobby-pin that has been pricked into the arm out of an innocent curiosity which all the There-Afters would call strange, while the Here-Nows would smile and nod at such beautiful sincerity.

At such pristine reality.

All the logical arguments my father confers upon me during our Grand Cosmic Debates always feel gently serious. He does not wish to convert me, nor to convince me.

He simply tries to pull me gently back into his reality, which sits reinforced by the rest of the global nay-sayers and There-Afters.

Why is it that my parents never had the courage to go mad?

Why was it nothing but a literary curiosity to them?

Why do they still continue to believe that one cannot simply run off into the sunset with a cosmic sense of reckless abandon?


The human race is nothing but a grand conviction.
The words themselves look to say, "Now, here here young one! You are a part of our great label. You owe us. We have been measuring since the day of your birth."
It's like we are born, and hopped through hoops until satisfaction meets the empty stomach to tell it that it must be full. So we struggle to fill, but it always becomes empty again. We seek to devour and consume and listen to the creased minds of our parents as they confer to us their common notion of sense which truly senses nothing beyond nonsense.

All of this makes me feel like I'm jogging on a sidewalk of soap.

And I'm sleepy.

We all work too hard, even when we're not at work.

We feel the affluenzic pull of occupation.

Not because we occupy our occupations,
but because our occupations occupy us.

I am a Cosmic Hobbyist

For the infinite round of nowever and always again.

I am making a desicion
to clean my body of
your hollow whispered bruises
cracks in my diaphragm
your words left sizzling there
like acid that dripped from your lips
I forgot the deception that swam from your eyes
I have never been stupid
enough to believe
that you were only one
when there were three.
But we stood and watched that house burn
never feeling colder,
than we did that night.
Im sorry your brother died and took
your parents with you.
So you are an orphan that
demonstrated car crashes
in the mere rhythm of your hands
or melody of your speech.
But I find myself drawn to angry cobalt blue eyes
too often enough to know that
I cannot grapple out of your choke-hold
and frozen fingers will bruise me every shade of your
roaring ocean-like blue.
I can only admire the sapphire in your soul from a distance
and hope the red ruby rage turns to wine and not blood.
I have left my marks on too many wooden floorboards, pleaded with too many icy aquamarine eyes;
from boys with steel in their voices but a fury in their hearts.
Too many fingernails stuck between infinite spaces somewhere in houses
where the silence reminded me of the stillness of a teal lake in spring
your eyes are reminiscent of a grey morning I do not wish to remember
I will leave a mark here.

I know someone who finds solace in ballet shoes
                A boy who strums his secrets to guitar strings
Someone that spends his waking moments with glazed red eyes
             As if facing this world cold turkey
                       Isn’t even an option.

For boys whose fingertips shake
                Like the burning end of a cigarette
And girls whose smiles resemble
Car crashes waiting to happen
A cacophony of shattered noises
             And those of us who feel guilty for the
                     mere act
                           Inhaling air
                        And exhaling poison
So we spend lifetimes holding our breaths

   Until we burn our lungs out trying
            To warm our hearts
            With something other than the fire
           That burns out in a smoky haze

Until our eyes become rivers,
flowing oceans
That cry out a thousand melted glaciers

Our tongues speak ruined languages
We read everything backwards
Curse in Latin
Make oaths in Russian
So whatever we say sounds beautiful.

So that our hands wont have to learn permanence,
affection
consolation.