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.

I do not claim to represent.
I humbly present my claim.

______(Begin Forwarded Message) ______

3 April 2014
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
From: me@example.com
To: THC@TheHumanCondition.net
RE: present

To whom it may concern:
I have been subscribed
To your service
Involuntarily.
Two springs ago there was an anniversary.
An old friend tempted me
Under the guise of celebration.
That is not to say
There weren’t suspicious omens about;
Oh, what I would give
To have heeded them!
I’m afraid you provide
A service which far surpasses my needs
(Such that it is the only thing I want).
Your free trial led me to believe
Led me
To the promised land
Only to enslave me there.
The fertile grasslands,
The forests, and the island shores
Mock me in my imagination.
Your service has been
deemed surplus.
The benefits
no longer
justify
the cost.

______(End Forwarded Message) ______

I humbly present my claim.
I do not claim to represent.

The world slowly spinning:
one of the few constants of life.
Growing up, we learned the sun’s rays
were not to be charged
with waking us in the morning.
Schedules change;
excuses are made.
Life greets us with delicious variety.
Someday,
when we’ve managed to **** each other off,
one thing will remain:
the world slowly spinning.

The empire is in flames.
I watch from a stoop.
Blazing orange turns to gray;
I've cried out all my cones.
All that remains is the twisted
corpse of happiness.
Fate's disembodied laugh
silences the moans.
Harmony has be replaced by
a more pensive, gloomy anthem.
Ash falls from the sky,
filling a bird's nest.
I will die a warm, lonely death.
A butterfly, exhausted, lands on
a withered rose.
The empire is in flames,
so I light my blunt and walk away.

tonight a girl stands on a bridge.
the midsummer breeze dances around her curves.
it begs her to come play.
her heart beats steady.
her gaze is motionless.
the changing air steals a whisper.
"we are moving into the house of Aquarius"
under the bridge a man sleeps.
in a few weeks he'll turn fifty-eight,
but he doesn't know that.
he hasn't had a birthday celebration in years.
he hasn't had anything to celebrate in years.
the bridge is home now.
above  him,
a girl is rediscovering herself.
a girl is rediscovering her fear of heights.
she looks 25 light years above her, at Vega.
in a way, she thinks, she is like this star.
she is about midway through her life expectancy,
but her light died a quarter century ago.
the man sleeps soundly.
a smile is spread across his face.
he is dreaming of his dinner,
a footlong sub.
extra olives, just the way he likes it.
it was his first meal in several days
but tonight, his stomach is full.
he has come to like the grease on his face.
it shows he has survived many challenges.
the hardships have only made him wiser.
the girl, she minored in astrology.
she was fifth in her graduating class.
debt lurked deep in her mind.
it polluted her every thought with
reminders that she was not in control.
now, she tries to justify her current position.
on the bridge.
looking out at Lyra, partially hidden by clouds
"nothing I do will matter."
she reconsiders.
she recalls an anecdote she overheard
on the subway, or somewhere:
"when you're dead, you're dead for a looooong time"
she smiles. kids say the darnedest things.
tonight she curses her 'lucky stars'.
nothing the girl does will matter.
tonight she will become a woman.
tonight she will give  herself to the wind.
the man will find her in the morning.
the man will chuckle to himself.
"they always make it down here,
one way or another"

I asked the Master of Shadows
How long I can sing

But was soon interrupted
By a cry from the weak

The master screamed his last
Triumphant first roar
I’m alive

Then the master whispered
His last reassurance
I’m alive

In this moment I watched
A tree reluctantly let go of the dirt
Its best friend
And though it hadn’t happened yet

I asked the Master of Shadows
If he would accept my gratitude
He told me to thank my lucky stars
But I was greedy

I saw undying potential in the sky
So I wished Haley grant me happiness
Crossed myself three times

Shadows thicken across the hallway,
As the aging master sleeps and smiles.

Catch me in the act.

Catch me destroying
evidence
on the riverbank.

Evidence of daydreams,
of picnics in the grass.
Grass so green it has
never thirsted
But drank so heavily
when we spilled that 2005 bordeaux.

I promise you:
this is not a poem.

This the red-winged blackbird,
narrating (singing)
as I push you on a swing.
catch me smiling, helplessly,
when you turn around

Catch me because I’ve fallen
not because you pushed me;
I never watch
where I’m going