vibrant colors on beautiful birds
caged in uselessness
and never flying free
when the doors wide open
from the presence of fear
and the absence of dream.

mortared into corners and
clutching onto our terrible lives
and meaningless possessions
with talons of counterproductivity.
terror-stricken by vagrancy and
holding up the dagger to our hearts
while submissively allowing the
beast of prey to cut through with
ease until the blue waves come out
through the tear ducts of depression
and the voice starts trembling
and the feathers start molting
and we start falling apart
at the seams.

working hard for everything
and surviving on nothing.

our lives and our deaths
wouldn’t be so sad
and we wouldn’t be
so terrified of change
if only we had proficiency
and understanding
in our viviparous days
that when we wake up
to face the sunrise,
the reckoning of agony
begins.

we’d be able to
fly free
a little more often
like catapulted
hippopotamuses
but here,
in the swampland
of our darkness
that’s our cross to bear.

the claws of
these poems
scratching into
the eyeballs
of blank faces,

faces holding onto
beliefs and propaganda,
and politicians and positions,
faces holding onto
justice and an outlook and
occupations and opinions
faces holding onto
****** victories and wisdom
and problems and grudges
fearful of losing
what little they have
with their incisive
expression of style and
evacuating their poisons
into conversations
into people.

but someone will be
there to replace you,
sleeping in your bed,
filling in at your job,
preaching morality
while the ******
are singing
in their showers
and someone who
you don’t know
will shovel dirt
2 yards into the
ground onto your
decomposing body
so let it all go
and just be

who knew that these
assortment of words,
arranged in peculiar ways
would save me
and get me this far?

but how much more
am I willing to go?

I’ve been living with the dead
and dead to the living
for so long,
there is
no more
light.

you can’t use the public restroom  
without smelling someone else’s ****,
counting smeared boogers on the wall
and reading poetry written by little boys
who will one day run the country.

use the past as a present
for self education of
caution and awareness
on what not to do
in the future
and then continuously
keep making
new mistakes
and ******* up
as life goes on
in front of
perfect eyes.

you are the itch on my *******
and I have use the razor blades
of cheap toilet paper to get rid
of you

you are the dirt and grime
under my fingernails
and I have to dig deep
with a safety pin
to get you out

you are like fiberglass
swimming in the pools
of my porous skin and
consciously reminding
the hemisphere of my
suffering with every
thread that I’m alive

you are the haughty
paint chips that have
peeled off the wall and
lightly floated to the
floor awaiting to taint
the envenomed mind
of toddlers

you are the popped
**** blisters oozing
down my sun poisoned
shoulders

you are the gummy
white film that has
coagulated at the
corner of my mouth

you are the burning rash
on top of my feet and
there is no soothing
aloe that will cure you

you only provide brine
and lemon juice to the
paper cuts of my limitations

and if the choice was mine
to either have another
conversation with you
or take a beheading

I’d sprint towards the guillotine,
impatiently waiting for the
executioner to carry out
the sentence

and my tilted severed head
will slouch peacefully in the
brightly shining sun, smiling
in the woven basket of relief

but I know you’ll be there
painting a mural of
fabricated stories
of aches and moans
in the hallways of
my ear canals

because after I’m long gone
and I’ve said my farewells
to all the foolish molecules
of easily forgotten pastimes
you’ll just keep coming back
like a thunderstorm of
bill collectors
like a kitten to a shoelace
like ****** to your father
and you’ll bring nothing to
the table or offerings to the
gods except exasperation
to our nerve endings and
disdain to everyone and
anyone you fall in with
like a bear claw to the back

so why is it that
the quiet guy who wants
to be left alone, somehow
always attracts the most
bothersome people
of the world who
never
  shut
the
  ****
up?

it began with the two cats

then the dog trotted in

then enough time past
and unfortunately, so did
one of the cats

then we rescued a bearded dragon

and for a while there
it was just a trifecta
of various species

until the new kitten had arrived

and now the bird is on its way

as the animals keep rolling
into this sanctuary
we call HOME

I spend my afternoons
taking care of our pets
feeding them
watering them
picking up their ****
maintaining their
living spaces
making sure they each
get attention

along with working all morning
and taking care of the kids
cooking dinner
tending to the ignored laundry
mowing the lawn
washing ***** dishes

my wife thinks I’m *******
on my leisurely hours
but not taking into consideration
that *** is no longer
an aching mystery

and as I’m ******* about
common domestic work

those pets bring such
rapturous enlightenment
to my spinning brain

but they don’t pull out
my inane thoughts and
put it down on paper

except for maybe
this poem

the gods have spotted me
in the estuary of dreams
and they laugh at me,
they torment me
with their unresponsiveness
but I must outwit them
and I mustn’t let the gods
decide my fate
and the fate of others
lies in the hands of others,
it’s there prerogative to decide
what to make of it
just as well as it is mine.

if I decide to squander the
rest of my days conspiring
for the words of immortality
then that is my privilege and
if the time comes
when nothing comes
from it
then that is my outcome
but I must write everyday
with assertiveness and
guile as if one day I’m
going to tear this job
down brick by brick
before the dogs from
hell come for me and
tear me to shreds but
if my doing is a waste
then our jobs are similar.

we work hard,
make minimal and
produce nothing
that goes to waste
for a profit and
eventually
transmogrifies
into garbage
and no one even
seems to bat an eye.

someone spent time away
from their loved ones,
resenting the minutes that
are massacred by monotony
during the dull, senseless hours
of moil with the other working
stiffs who are hand-picked by
someone else, having to take
a **** and breathing in the
smell someone else’s ****
as a piece of them dies slowly,
all while barely making a living on
base pay just so the product they
manufacture is conveniently
available at your fingertips
but nobody ever thinks
of what happens to
a crashed car or
a candy bar wrapper or
a half eaten hamburger,
it just gets scooped up
and tossed away
without mulling over
or questioning.

but no matter
how remarkable
anything may seem,
everything has already
been written including
this poem and the next
one after but much like
our lives, it’s a waste,
it’s not as much of a
shame that we waste
our lives but that life
is wasted on us and
what we do with it is
anything but extraordinary
and all this is for nothing,
just another add on to the
heap on Garbage Mountain
so the raccoons that defile
this poisoned Earth
will finally
come
to collect