What don’t you know about life
That I might be able to
Ponder, guess, describe, relate?
Why does my voice, the lilting phrases
Put in places left over from
Some overlooked template, matter?
Written words tell only what
Resides, stirring morosely, in
Time. Tell of the ticking away
Thoughts which
Long to perpetuate
And be looked upon again,
Known again.

Men are ******* each other over with no waiting,
Yet we still can pass proposition eight, the hating
Inspires new generations of children by baiting
Them with lies, telling them that it’s not too late
To save themselves from the others, standing on soap crates
Preaching God and the morals while the kid decorates
His pages with blood and his sorrows, writing straight
But thinking he thinks sideways, and the pressure’s too great
To overcome because the hate won’t let him live at a normal rate,
His heart beats on a different beat, not rap or country, but he creates
Music of the soul that transcends the forced ideals he ate
Directly from the mouth of the pressures, the hate,
And does not give up even in the most dire of straights
Not giving in to what some old man describes as a fate
Not of his own choosing, telling him who to date, don’t gyrate
Those hips it could be ****, so he grows up under an ******
Of false appearances and flawed beliefs, never feeling he can escape
From the hate, isn’t it great, this world we so decorate
And doesn’t it frustrate that no one can relate
That he’s on a never ending track on a train full of freight
In order to power an engine of hate, sating
His thirst for individuality by the fires that proclamate
His burned identity and when given the chance to extricate
Himself from the chaos of the tracks, it just exacerbates
Everything around him, all the hate reanimated
To the point where eighteen is the same as eighty
All he needs is a bullet, a gun, and some potassium nitrate
To stop the violence and state as his own mandate
That he is free from the belated strangers berating
Him for eating off another man’s plate
****** over by the hate, but wait,
It’s too late.

Melodies
mumbled through the corrosive
coating of plastic
pieces jammed directly into
damaged ear drums.

Songs
strained across beats
berating the mesmerized
mentality of awesome into the
auto-tuned automatons.

Notes
numbingly droned on rhythms
righteous in their
thinking that all problems are
part of the present past.

Words
are what brings the perfunctory lives of
people to a stop,
singularly holding onto
hell in lines and
living in the storing
of stories for
future generations to remember,
regardless of race gender or class,
creed religion or background.

Poetry, the
truly precious example of
earnest men and women
wearing their lives on paper
lined suits
strengthened by the emotional bodies
broken and bled for ink and
imagery, is capable of
capturing the base of humanity while
hearkening to the Immortal and his
ill-mentioned brother, is made
material by man and
meaning more to each whom
enter the world left
when they began, is
perfection without ever needing to
win, is love
without ever having to
hear the other speak, is everlasting and forever
evolving just as
all life does.

Remember E’s?
Or smiley faces and stickers?
Simple signs of approval
not A’s.
When Acceptable was okay
and Excellent was amazing?
Arts and crafts, science and math,
everything taught to the child
not to the grade.
Now we are obsessed with the A,
without the memory of E’s.
A, B, C, D…then F?
Whatever happened to E?
Was it lost with
our Energy, our Excitement,
our in-Experience?
Did they get rid of it to get rid of Us,
the Individual, the kid?
Changing our Efforts from Excitement
to Acceptance.
Engaging our stresses not our minds,
so simple to accomplish without E’s.
So I’ll shoot for an E,
a sticker or stamp
and say to A, ‘oh I didn’t expect you, hey’.

I was meant to wander,
which ever way seemed fonder,
not left or right or straight,
never lost to a chosen fate.

I was mean to wander,
the mind constantly moving,
ever here, ever yonder,
with her and he, proving
to no one anything.

I was meant to wander,
but men stopped thinking
of the possibilities they squander
our of love, sinking
out of love everywhere.

I was mean to wander,
my heart is left to ponder,
those who risk to love
without approval from above.

I would
Cite the sources
Of the sights we saw, the
Kites sited on the south sea,
The lights
From the starts which lit
The surroundings of our lives, the
Luster in living
From sea to coast to city
With only the
Sails and
Seals for our company, the
Sensation of being lost
In the surreal hills and
Limitless mountains
Of us,
Were it not that
The source of my sadness now
Was not the very same
Which made
The kites fly higher,
The starts burn brighter, and
The sea seem endless.