Life wears me out with
its twists and turns
and hairpin curves.
I keep waiting for a long
peaceful stretch of
highway, bathed in
the rising sun;
a golden wheat field
to the left, a moss covered
pond with dragonflies to
the right.

The road turns to
gravel and rapidly
climbs uphill.
There are signs along
the way that promise
the world.
The road becomes narrow,
turns to dirt,
and ultimately disappears.

Dreams lost,
like golden fields
of youth.

Hay bales dapple
my mind;
if only that
appaloosa could
nibble me now.

Dandelions and clover
for the
pretend wife,

a **** dog and
lots of lonely
acres for the
real boy.

I look at the pictures of us, and it's like looking at a paper graveyard.
The smiles, so frozen in time, so distant and temporary.

My memories are of cut flowers,
laid at the altar of us.
Bright and then fading, losing petals
like prayers scattered over fresh earth.

Your eyes have lost their shine in my mind.
I can barely taste you on my tongue.
My mouth starves at your garden.
As time slips away, the pain becomes like
an old rusty machine
on an abandoned farm.

We disintegrate and decompose.
A gentle thundering rain swallows us
in hazy downpouring sheets.
But a new life is carried
through turbulent groundwater currents.
A sprout, seeking root on fertile ground,
where fleeting moments of new joy
will be captured again and again.

And through the death of the old,
we embrace the birth of the new.

Just in case you
couldn't
guess, it's not a
a fair fight
or a level
playing field.

It's you with
boxing gloves
and them with
machine guns.

It's Van Gogh
throwing his paintings
out the window
to stop the hecklers.

It's Janis falling
down
the stairs, lonely
and
broken
looking for love.

It's Morrison seeing
the game for
what it was,
wanting to disappear
in France and
write poetry,
then dying in a
bathtub with a
witch in the wings.

It's morphine dreams
and thorazine days.
It's the tiger
declawed and lobotomized
at the zoo.

It's the lobster
cursed with
precious meat.

It's the statue of liberty,
burning her bra
and impaling
working class men with
her stiletto heels.

It's Gogol
dying after a
prolonged fast,
because a charlatan
told him
it was evil.

It's the elephant
domesticated by
the cage, but
still dreaming of
the Serengeti.

It's the dolphin in
a Hollywood
swimming pool,
a shark in your
coffee cup;
it's the criminality
of releasing the insane
from their cages to
wander the streets of
Santa Barbara.

It's pathetic and putrid,
a setup up;
the perfect tragedy;
a crime that goes beyond
denunciation.

It's what they will continue
to do to
you and me
until someone or something
intervenes.

To get back
in the game,
I need one
good hit.
A horse with
early lick;
that has more
heart than
Joe Louis
and Jake
LaMotta
combined.
I need decent odds,
at least 8-1.
The racing
gods have to
smile on me
one more time.
At least for
6 furlongs,
and then baby,
I'm back in the
game.

When the
naked branches
blew in
the late
autumn winds,
our love died.
How I long
for the days
of spring,
when all was
alive with
newness.
We lay beneath
the willow tree
and dined on wine,
bread and love.
God,
how I miss you.

And then
the night
comes flooding
in, like
a spilled beer.

Fear is a
rabid bat;
fatally
infecting.

Loneliness is
an ice cube
in a bathtub
melt-
ing
slow-
ly.

Love is a
flat toad in
the road of
life.

Hope is a
broken dish,
an empty
pocket,
a shattered dream.

Life is a sparrow
in the cat's mouth,
an abscessed
tooth, with no
antibiotic.
It's a whale
in a frozen
ocean;
an eagle in the
city.

Insanity is
digging for the
courage to
continue
day after
day
after day.