Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

I see lovers
holding hands and giving each other the look that can only be described as
"the look"
because only those who are out of love are bitterly aware of the sickeningly admiring gaze that one partner gives to the other when they speak  
and only those who are in love are oblivious to the fact that they are giving the look

And I see friends,
friends in love with friendship
friends in love with being with each other
in love with the adventure and the memories
and the comfort and familiarity that comes with knowing each other like the back of your hand

I see individuals
completely, and utterly in love with themselves
the kind of arrogance that is almost admirable
in love with their passion,  their ambition
with their goals and their futures
in love with the potential they know they have and in love with the hope that maybe one day,
they'll be an All-Star
or a politician
or a beautiful poet
or a parent

I see all of these people who are in love and I wonder, are these people really as in love as they claim to be?

And if so, when is it my turn to be in love?

What if I fell in love
With a broken down *******
Not because I needed to fix him
But simply because I wanted to revel in his beauty
The maddening craziness
Of a life
A life that didn't need to be maintained with perfection
A life where you could just knock down pillars that you didn't need
Destroy friendships that weren't beneficial
A life where one could disown one's own mother
Without the whole neighbourhood offering their tut-tuts
And their 5 cents too many
About how to trim your garden
What if I fell in love with a life
Who let their weeds grow
And created a garden out of thorns
A **** patch that would make those neighbours shriek
What if I fell in love with chaos and disorder
Not to right the tables
Nor to order the shelves
What if I didn't attempt to prune the garden
But I let it grow into a forest
And then laughed when I stepped on a thorn
What if I let the sun shine through the madness
What if I opened my arms to the destruction
What if you sung me a lullaby out of tune
And I asked you to sing it anyways…

A slate cannot
be wiped clean
if sins are
written with a
chisel.

Could the power of poetry be used
To bring about a change in life
As it digs its way deep
Into the heart, the soul, the mind

Could it dig its way in deeper
And perhaps influence the scope of time
Could the answer to life's problems
Be found inside the rhyme

We all know what's said about music
Could the same be said about poetry
If the right words were spoken
Would it calm the savage beast

If you took it to the highest heights
And recited it from the mountain tops
Or planted it in the field of man
Would it grow the strongest crops

If they brought poetry onto the battlefield
Would it put an end to war
Or introduced in the halls of medicine
Could it bring about a cure

I just know the power that poetry
Holds over my life
And that if it were up to me
I'd use it for the good of all mankind

The rain makes your
veins look like
dark black bra straps
underneath a veil of Topshop sale items-
the bangles were bought elsewhere.
Though it's not their size that worry me,
it's what look lives within your eyes
every time you run a finger up your arm
and back down your arm again;
the charm in your slightly curling autumn leafed smile
curls a little more, turning smooth lakeside skin
into Nile-esturay wrinkles that say save me Tim.

Your red delta cheeks pulsate
in the late afternoon sun coming in on
a diagonal through the newly installed,
doesn't quite close properly, velux window;
you ran through fields only
to end up teary eyed in the kitchen
doorway threshold.

But here, here is where your river 
meets my sea, and turbulent tides
swell up to ferry us away to new coastline
continents:
forget we ever swimmed and swam,
poured sand from our shoes,
held hands and ran, and
forget we held hips on train station steps,
shared lips, left and then hid.

*When you see this you'll know it's an apology