How do you do it?
You know, make me float
Leave me on a life raft and swim for the nearest island
There are none on the horizon
Your arms glisten in the same light that evaporates me slowly
I majored in philosophy
I’m troubled by the things that I see
Been a month since we left the atoll
The sun is setting and it’s getting harder to make out
Your form as I float with the current
I’ve run out of things to write about in this journal
But most importantly I’ve run out of hope
The universe checks its reflection and doesn’t notice us,
Flecks of dust on the surface of this dessert mirror
Light is falling

Instead of sleeping - like the fawn in the holler -
Holler I will, and sing a swan’s siren song.
Say you’ll join me in hand and in hymn.

There is a path.
Its rickety bridges dangle you over the jaws of despair;
I welcome the jagged teeth with pursed lips.
A planet does not choose its sun.
This diminutive island orbits obediently, tracing an oblong avenue
Around a heavenly beacon which burns at close range,
But protects from the uncharted perils of a frozen infinity
Beyond the horizons of our understanding.

Books.
Here they are seemingly as plentiful as stars in the great expanse.
For every one I read, there are a thousand more
That could pour out of my fingertips without warning.
Here on these shelves (and in my hands) are words –
Legions of ideas, cries for help, and declarations of the self –
Collecting dust to pass the time.
Bound by a spine, each page is a painting,
Or a singular brush stroke;
It depends where on the museum’s crisscrossing paths
We place it.
I am allowed to manipulate
These likenesses with my own unkempt paws.
I sift through each layer with great care.
Poised above my isolated figure is a cloud of silence.
Luridly dark, it threatens to immerse every shelf in its corrupting solitude.
My fascination decays into sorrow.
Curators grow weary.
Thick lenses become damp with labored breath.
A tomb of these words encases the regenerative key
Our depleted cityscape so desperately needs.
But the museum has not received enough submissions; funding is being cut.
Fingers spanning a soiled palm have grown tired of the dirt.
Limp breezes are now strong
Enough to disconnect them
Permanently
From the words that burn at close range.
They allow themselves to drift, because it’s easier.
It is cleaner, more “cost-efficient”.
Straying from the museums, we drift from realization (from reality, even)
Into delusions of creation and achievement.
Lo! How accomplished we are!
We, the Cash-Rich People of the Thought-Poor States,
In order to form a more synergized union,
Do downsize the words that disseminate from our digits,
Dutifully drowning them out with more rambunctious
Gurgles from our gullets.


Curators warned and a generation of disobedient phalanges paid no mind.
My feeble hands mold a clay cadaver, grooving oily prints into its hull.
This incoherent signature will fall perpetually unnoticed between the cracks.
No one is looking.

Lucky?
You think I am lucky? I am many things
(I presume)
Lucky is not one of them.
I am hungry.
Very hungry.
My stomach’s longing whimpers are replaced by accusatory screams
From within the same starving sac as soon as I look at food –  
These days my body rejects everything I consume
Except for the pills.
Oh, the pills.
You claim they help me run better, run faster.
I’m lucky that my mind runs
more efficiently than normal?
I am many things,
But lucky is not one of them.
Nor is normal.
You have it backwards.
My mind does run
Without the capsules.
It runs and runs and runs and runs.
It’s unstoppable, I mean really unstoppable;
I have no more control of it than you do.
Listen to me. I need these Schedule II controlled crutches
In order to walk.
Because some days I wake up crippled.
Other days I wake up in the middle of a marathon.
Either way I am simultaneously supported and restrained
And end up crawling through the daylight hours.
But hey, I am lucky to have such a close relationship
With your study buddy. We’re in the library today and
You want to “hold” one or two for your “all nighter” for an exam tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a sad day for you.
Not because you will end up failing despite your last minute efforts,
But because the sun won’t come out from behind the gray.
You will feel sad, upset, perhaps even confused.
I will show no empathy. I will console you half-heartedly with the driest monotone a Human larynx can generate.
Tomorrow you will realize why I don’t feel lucky.
I don’t feel anything.
I am flat, and you tomorrow will notice I have been all along.
I don’t have happy; I don’t have sad.
What I have now is a routine. A convincing façade.
I have coping mechanisms and instincts hell-bent on survival.
I have a problem.
I don’t know if I have love anymore.
I think I have a few friends left.
I am losing my grip on the tattered remains of my personality.
I have already lost everything else.


I am many things, I presume,
But forgive me if I don’t feel lucky today.

Survival is imbedded in instinct.
What I know to be right
Tears me apart at every crossroads.


Today, like all days, I am sick.
Outside my childhood home,
Spring brings with it an air of change.
Tulips burst from the earth,
Freed from their bulbs and stretching
Every petal and leaf skyward.
They lean towards the sun.
Reminded of the Chesapeake with each brackish breeze,
Birds warble a welcome to warmer weather.
Harvest is upon us, and most will eat their fill.
Sayers and doers move about the world
Saying. Doing.
Perhaps one day I will go outside.
One day I may be able to say and do –
It doesn’t hurt to dream –
Maybe I’ll even rule the world outside my childhood home.

Inside, everything is the same.
My voice is a passive one.
It screams from the bottom of an ever-expanding hole
No one listens because a birdsong is prettier.
No one taught me how to live on the surface
So I adapted.
No one taught me.
I dug myself a hole away from liability
Inside my childhood home.
I lied, cheated, and sacrificed my freedom
just to remain comfortable.
My dark, cold hole knows no tulips.
The spring breeze doesn’t bother
to wake me in the mornings.
Perhaps one day I will know what to say –
It doesn’t hurt to dream –


What I know to be right tears me apart at every crossroads.
This is my survival story.

For her, it has been
The perfect birthday dinner.
Then he gets down on one knee.
A busy restaurant comes to a standstill.
Small beads of his sweat shine brilliantly;
The birthstones around her neck are green with envy.
Maybe a hundred eyeballs are
Making quiet squishing sounds in his direction.
A man is kneeling,
A woman is thinking,
And too many oysters are struggling to breathe their filth.
A star explodes as its gravity loses its struggle with kinetic energy.
Thoughts drive a brain to damage itself
Via a painfully gray zero-sum highway
Littered with roadkill:
Reasons to lose sleep-
Only to find it permanently.
The hummingbird, lonely,
Flutters above a lake, tries to kiss
The reflection of the moon on the water,
And drowns in her ignorant affection.
Someone, studying their own hands,
Realizes fingerprints
Are tiny maps of the earth.
Thousands of tiny honeycombs
Pour golden lava into the air,
Only to be collected by the wind.

~

Unaware of everything else that happened
In that moment,
The couple now stand
facing each other at dusk.
Facing a lifetime of seeing the world together.
Her smile reassures him.
Though he doesn’t know it,
When he’s old and gray, that smile
Will reassure him from every page of his scrapbook.
Several hundred eyeballs are fighting
A losing battle against
A storm’s surge;
There is a collective hum as fluttering hearts
In the crowd race to form a drum circle.
Summer’s warm breath wishes
Their sweat away, lifting
Nervous spirits.
They passively ride the emotive current
As the pair gift each other  
Forever.
As the pads of their fingers meet,
He is distracted by how the pearls in her ears
Catch the moonlight.
His bride leans in towards him
But in this moment,
He only wants to kiss her earrings.

The hectic hubbub of the New York
subway – overwhelming,
to say the least.
Crack.
Screams pierce any sense of peace remaining.
Gunfire? Is this a riot?
The businessman to my left
Is too engulfed in the sweetness
of his blackberry to even hazard a glance.
As the commotion settles, people
return to their normal pace.
A hobo with a Goofy tee hobbles around,
claiming he has AIDS in four
different languages.
Drunk, he comes up to me,
Asking for a smooch.
I give him a quarter.
The smudges on his face
Wrinkle into a frown.
Almost falling, as if in a swoon,
He looks at me.
Dead in the eyes.
“*******,” he says…


Tackle.