Everything at once,
Now nothing at all,
A cycle recycled over and over until it is the last thing my mind can get a grasp on, the only thing I can rely on,

Friends, enemies, on, off, stuck

Stuck

Between the wall of abundance and the wall of isolation,
Finding love in the rubble,
Forming friendships from the dirt of the garden, picking flowers to give to hopelessness,
A toast risen to the collapse of the modern poet,
Surrounded by wreckless abandon and driven out by the fear of living,
The fear of not being enough,
The fear of being too much,
The fear of a little bit of everything,

Taken by the hand and shown true beauty, wiping tears away from the face that's too far exhausted to even make out in broad daylight,
A disaster,
A broken messiah picking gospels out of the hairs of broken hearts trying to mend,

I,
The soldier,
The commander,
We, they, us,
A figment of a wild imagination trying to thread the string of suicide together with the string of optimism, getting stuck on the pessimism catching the needle at every vice,

I will suffice,
I,
The soldier,
The commander,
Fighting a war with no winner,
Stopping to rest my head on the headstones of the forgotten,
Please do not forget about me when I am gone,
Paint my flowers golden and light a cigarette while doing so,
Lay them together on my grave, and, instead of a moment of silence, raise your lighter to my name and read to yourself quietly,

I,
The romantic,
The saddened,
The disaster,
The punk playing music so loud it vibrates your thoughts,
I, the remembered,
I will go out in flames just like how I showed up in flames,

You, try your best for me
I am not much, but trust me, I am worth it

Think hard, think often
Don't make me sad, just make me try
Don't make me cry, just make me catch my breath
A sorry sinner is nothing but a disappointment to a praying priest, regardless of how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise

The dog days of summer draw heat from the burning sunflowers putting forth freakishly light fragments of a long gone but not forgotten dark alley way in the back of a decomposing poet's mind
Thought of a thousand times, but not remembered nearly as often as it should be
From whiskey saturated journal pages in the back of a city bus to a bouquet of roses delivered from lovers to their others, heartbreak is a beautifully tragic masterpiece that deserves the utmost respect even when being respectful is the last thing you want to be

Trust me, living is truly not believing until you've lived to tell about your beliefs without a crack in your voice
If I put this pen down, I will never get the strength to pick it back up again
If there is beauty in floating up, there is beauty in crashing back down
I just hope my forgetfulness never reminds me of the time I felt whole, I may never get the chance to write again
But my god, what I would give to not feel everything crumbling down all at once

I would die a thousand times if I were promised that emotions and feelings were never ending, I wish to feel everything all at once all the time; it gives me reassurance that I am alive
I wish to live forever
I wish to suffer
I do not love it, however I do need it
I want to feel until I no longer can feel at all
Let it be known that I will live forever in these writings
I have said all that I need to say
And when I am laying in my death bed, I will shout, "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough"

Flowers for loved ones

Reminders of mortality

Graves decorated,
The inconsistency of stories

Memory floating in on river breezes,
Bitter and sweet in cramped summer
Swaying with leaves and sanity, glimpses of history repeating

Movements in a piece of music,
Strings swell over sleepless city
Percussion beat urgency into angry hearts
Woodwind ease the beasts back towards dreams
Brass to commemorate the time lost in the between

Forests burnt entirely down
Wildlife returning in uneasy steps
Retracing paths lost to ash
Reconnecting with roots
Miracles in a slow march
Water from streams
Beauty in the remains
Finding a way to cope with the fallout

Light up a smoke
Start to cry
Relapse just enough
Rewrite your reality
Present a better narrative
Take stock of your surroundings;
Friends, lovers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, memories, psychoses, vices, recurring nightmares, moments of brilliance
Words that keep bleeding no matter how many times you write them down
People that keep calling no matter how many times you change your name
Spirits that cling to skin, absence of escape routes, confessions that never solidify into repentance, apologies that never pass through lips,
Heretic heart burning vicious under black sky
Bones aching for the weight of mourning
Take a breath
Stop freaking out
Keep your sense of humor
Give it teeth and let it draw blood
Dig yourself out
Kiss your lover
Kiss your friends
Kiss the sunrise as she relieves you of burden
Find the furthest corners of your mind
Keep a candle lit to view the writing left on the walls there
Take photographs of each moment in the event you find yourself missing it someday
Release yourself shamelessly into the night
Reinvent your language
Speak over people when they stop respecting your voice
Bleed it out bleed it out bleed it out
Fill your page
Fill your lungs
It will be enough someday

I, the capitalist war machine,
I, the magnificent static,
I, the bomb shelter peace,
I, the twenty four hour news cycle, the rise, the relapse, the detox, the retox, the crucifixion, the rebirth, the disgrace, the continuation of the theme repeating ad nausea towards annihilation,
I, the caged ******,
I, the black boy bleeding to death,
I, the rioters in the street,
I, the Wall Street gallows,
I, the old money militia,
I, the yuppie **** appropriating culture from the scraps of endless genocide,
I, the shock value mockeries of conventional moralities dumbed down to be digested,
I, the blood spilled on sacrificial altars on holy ground,
I, the celestial body ignored, passing back and forth endlessly through peripheral visions,
I, the madman howling at the moon for some ******* peace and quiet
I, the pill popping siren choking on adoration,
I, the mass hallucination shared and reshared till it loses all meaning,
I, the Pantheon collapsed,
The downfall broadcast,
The television unplugged and still playing,
I, the crushing realization,
The devastating grip of ruinous apathy,
The movement monetized,
The victory shallow,
I have built this tomb with my own hands,
I have changed the channel one too many times,
I have let this consume me
I am guilty
You are no better
Lie still
Let it consume you

I am in love with Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra
And I am in love with sunflowers
But those two facts aren't necessarily connected
If someone ever asks me when I think I will die my reply will be "exactly when I need to"
I once heard of a Buddhist philosophy where you envision everything you own broken, so when the world beats everything you own into the dirt you can smile because it is a fact you have already accepted
The things you own cannot be truly yours until you accept that they are not eternal
I find it important to smile at everyone I make eye contact with
Even if the smile I produce is the usual awkward mess
I don't carry on this practice with the idea that "smiles are contagious"
I do it because I have spent enough of my life with the look of distaste across my face to grow tired of it
This poem is nothing special
It will start no revolutions
It will be forgotten
It will not make you or me or anyone else holy
That's not what it's for
This poem is for a small smile and a chuckle on a night where everything is so bleak and dull
This poem is for me to remember the little things that make this life of mine worth all the trouble
You can feel free to use it too
I won't mind

I am a simple soul
When I die I want to be remembered fondly as a pretty decent poet
I don't want fanfare
But if I receive it I won't complain
Most of all I want to be remembered
My greatest fear is that everything I am and everything I have ever done will be reduced to a forgotten blip in the back of someone's mind
How I so much wish I had the power and strength to start fires I have no intention of putting out
My greatest philosophy is that a majority of people who do evil know **** well what they are doing, they just don't care
And enough of them can get away with it to inspire the next generation
Let me inspire a generation that won't allow evil to be done and go unpunished
Leniency towards evil is a joke that stopped being funny long before now
It never really was funny to start out with
Sometimes I catch myself thinking of all the rocks thrown at Peekskill and how they got away with it
I think of the four dead in Ohio
Even now I think of Sacco and Vanzetti and cry

I am a simple soul
I only wish that you remember those that came before us and sacrificed everything they had
And then I hope you think of me

How much of the world is nothing more than what we experience?
William S Burroughs believed that everything you experience in your life you were meant to, that it was made for you
He wasn't very religious but in a way I am
He argues that every opinion is both subjective and objective
Because there is always an object, and a subject experiencing it
I'm sure, however, he was a better judge of art than I am

There is nothing more bittersweet than hearing the poetry of someone who you know is about to die
But here I am at nearly 1 am
Listening to your song

How much of the world has passed me by because I'm afraid to get my hands ***** or get my heartbroken?
I talk about our past creating who we are and then I spend months pushing no envelopes and not even stepping near a single line
How disappointed Hunter Thompson must be

I know I write a lot about dead men I idolize
Yet all the women in my life whom I love are living and although many of them have gone their separate paths in life I look fondly on every moment spent and know that no words I possess can describe them.
We are living in a world completely possessed by the human mind
And I promise to be more than along for the ride

My love is like an old stubborn dog
It's tired and sick and sits around all day
But dogs are know for being loyal and sometimes that's all I can offer
The problem with this love is it still has many tricks to learn and I promise to be a good student
But you gotta be patient because this old dog gets wrapped up too much in its own self pity to know better half the time and if it gets too mopey it doesn't know what to do with itself
But even dogs in their eldest years need the love of any of those young scrappy puppies that go running around ******* on the carpet
My love does not **** on carpets
And neither do I

But there is something you must understand
If things go south and we split
If I leave, this old love isn't going to follow
For better or worse this love is yours
It belongs to you
I can't take it back, no matter how I try
You can do what you want with it
You can put it in the back room of your mind and forget the key
It will sit and it will stay exactly where you leave it
But nothing that happens and no mater how bad you treat it,
With you it will remain
So if you are going to come looking for love in my heart come prepared
And please be gentle

A sadistic sickened scatter brain is something I consider myself to be
Not in the over emotional attention seeking teenager kind of way, more in the overthinking pain seeker, seeking love and affection where I know I'll get hurt
It isn't much of wanting to get hurt, it's more like wanting to be with someone so badly that you don't care how badly you're getting hurt because of it, someone who over analyzes how to get someone else to fall in love with them, forgetting to care about themselves and only caring about the person they want so badly to be in love with

It really shouldn't be hard, it should be easy
I know I don't ever shut the **** up about you, but I can't help myself
As much as I hate this, I can't stop
You're everything I want
Really you aren't, I really don't know what it is about you
Maybe it's your recklessness and how badly I wish I didn't care about everything like you don't
You pull off danger in the most seductive way, always on some **** that I've never heard of, and I ache so badly to have you
You're a ******* car crash and let me be the first to tell you that I'd die for a rush like you

You live on the edge and I'm stuck in my safe place
I'm finally coming to the realization that being in my safe place is good for me
You're just so enticing, I'd do anything to get a taste
Maybe it's the lust that's trying to convince me that this isn't love
Maybe this is love and we're just too young
You keep coming into my life and I can't tell if I should appreciate it or hate it
Either way, I don't know what I'd do without it
I don't know what I'd do without you

It ***** to be so attached to someone that doesn't even really know you're in love with them
It's been five years and your face was and still is the only face that could make my heart flutter with a simple glance
I just wish I knew what was holding me back
I don't know if it's a sign, that I should keep away, that you're a mistake
Or if it's just my head holding me back because of the ones who came into my life and rocked my world so badly that I don't have the ability to trust anything or anyone anymore
I don't know if the ones who ruined me were there to make me realize that you're my diamond in the rough, or if they taught me to stay away from bad feelings like this one

I know I should talk to you, but instead, here's another poem documenting the breaking of my heart
Maybe that's why I'm so self loathing
If I hurt myself, no one else has the chance to

You don't even need to break my heart, I'm doing it myself