If I don't see your goodness,
I will forget your face,
And there will be no sunlight for my life,
To dawn on the days of tomorrow,
Only the deep darkness of machines and men,
Where there is no innocence

Trigger finger 13 is hung
from his shoulders,
though not by hooks found in the butchers book,
but with pride and a sweating brow,
one that can survey the terrain with a quizzical eye,
analysing rustling in bushes only 3 clicks away.

Bible tattoos tattooed below the tribal
ones,
and a 13 on the finger used most
when they charge and come.

today a friend of mine told me that in china
they only say i love you when they really mean it;
she talked about it like it was a loaded gun,
like telling somebody i love you also meant
i'd **** for you, i'd die for you, i'd live for you.

i don't know how to be brave enough to say that
straight, but if i could, i would fly you across the globe
to help you understand.

I harbor a gentle whiskered beast
made of quiet sighs, all knees and elbows
jabbing my ribs while I sleep,
a weight shifting among the sheets
in the long shadows of earliness.

Suddenly, unprovoked, he is startled
as if threatened by an electric presence.
He listens intently to the silence and bristles
as though a ghost in the corner has spoken
in a tongue meant for beings higher than myself.

When the spirits have gone he sighs again,
his paws turn circles and he lays himself down
curled neatly behind my knees,
quietly pondering primal truths
that I was never meant to understand.

Outside he chases skittering leaves
and imagines he is wild
in the great wooded taiga,
flushing fowl from the brush,
scattering them like gasps of color,
with fluttering hearts beating warm in their *******
among pines capped white with snow.