I will not trade
my serenity for
madness.
This sadness only
lasts a little while.
I don't want to be
in Wonderland anymore.
Everyone is crazy.
whichever way I
turn, left or right,
it's lunacy.

I deal in reality now.
I won't play croquet with
the queen, no matter
how much she smiles.
The game is fixed, and I
know it.
The deck is stacked.
The cards are laid,
and I see the
***** behind
her eyes.

Hey everyone.  It has been quite a journey here.  I have come to think of you as family.  I love you all.  I am happy to announce that my book, Seedy Town Blues, Collected Poems is available on Amazon, All formats available. Thank you all.  If the link doesn't work, just search the title on Amazon.  If you do purchase the book, would you mind leaving a review?  All of you are great.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Thomas-W.-Case/author/B0CL2RKDGX?ref=aprdr&storeref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

I watched a young
boy beat his
chest and scream at
the dawn until
the liquid sky drove
him away.
He chased thunder
and
butterflies with the
same enthusiasm;
oozing a lust for
living in his chasm
of youth.
Ten years full of
questions and scabbed
up knees, freckled dreams
running across green fields
and sunlit meadows.
Golden little life,
resting beneath a
willow tree to sip the
sweetness
from the clover and
honeysuckle flowers.
Hours full of pocketknife
afternoons, whittling sticks
into arrows to
shoot at the moon.
And after the rain
oh sweet green youth,
run barefoot with the
wind
toward a sinless
sky.
And live, live
live, for tomorrow
will come with a sigh.

Light bends through the grass.

making dinner seen by him.

The worm says goodbye.

Time melts away like
a Dali painting,
and my mind flies north;
a Canadian goose against the
loose gray sky,
freer than any man's ever been.
Yesterday, I was a
melancholic little one, feeling all of
Seasons in the Sun, on the radio.
5 years old, in the
backseat of my mom's black Plymouth.

Mom's gone.
Dad is too.
I'm getting old, but I will
never stop searching for that
gold in the heart.
I'm finally the simple prairie man that I
always longed to be.
I smell the autumnal night, and it's
nothing but cattails and bass from here until
that big orange fire paints the
west end of the lake.

Your raven hair drapes
my bronzed back.
I attack your neck and
*******, beamed by the
moonlight, I carry you to
Nirvana on a chariot made
of steel.

I'm tired of that
Humpty Dumpty
kind of love,
proud and walled
up,
falling
shattered into a
thousand tattered
pieces.

Love drives between
the lines.
It doesn't rush
headlong into
oncoming traffic,
taking the lives of
others.

It's never
cruel or brutal.

It comforts the sick.
It doesn't think with
its ****.
It doesn't leave when
times get tough.
it buckles down through
this rough and tumble
game we call life.