I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”
There's A Wocket In My Pocket by Dr. Seuss

           Your past, your romantic past, is a shadow. Like all towns, Port Angeles was a combination of rain and clouds, sun and mist, with a chamber of commerce, barrooms and boards of directors, the known and unknown. No one of course is completely unknown. I was known for my tragic love life. She had found another man, a backwoods man, living on the land but not above a night on the town, who according to her would wipe snot on his pants, a statement of poverty or thrift or anger against the niceties of society. All of us heated our hovels with wood but only the rich burned hardwoods, me and probably this guy were softwood gatherers.

            There were few aspects to my life. First, I can remember a nook in the kitchen of the house I shared with a beautiful faceless woman who wore a ring in her nose where I wrote and watched flocks of unidentified birds comb a tree for seeds. This particular day the sky was blue with clean pillowy cumulus clouds floating toward Puget Sound. I believe all the poems written in that nook have been forgotten by their author.

            Nights, for entertainment, I would wander the aisles of the supermarket, admiring everything and buying nothing. I had no money. The fluorescent lighting, clean straight neat shelving and floors, warmth and the fact I could identify nobody attracted me. I lived on cream cheese and honey sandwiches eating them leaning against the kitchen sink. Thinking go back to New York City which is what I ultimately did. Drove cross country nonstop three days and three nights seeing and feeling nothing.

           I populated P.A. during the Reagan recession inherited from Carter. I'm unclear how presidents affect your life but good or bad, democrat or whig, alive or dead you've got to get a job, which I did. I supervised the living arrangements of developmentally disabled adults in what I thought were humorous contexts that gave no offense. They were beautiful and incorrigible having regular *** without protection. Normally harmless they'd sometimes have altercations with their neighbors. I balanced the checkbooks, paid the bills. Supposedly teaching living skills, I had few of my own as evidenced by my sleeping on the floor, I had no bed. One mature woman colleague judged me a short-timer living a useless fantasy about big cities. Still lost in my own history, still didn't know the calculus.

            I had a dog, Shade, black lab, leftover from my near-marriage until she realized I had no economic prospects, no interest in further *** or her logger boyfriend, and a complete inability to translate or imagine nesting and gestation. My homework comes to me in daily disconnected increments. Shade lived in my gray van, a Dodge slant six, which I could never afford to fix. Once the driveshaft disconnected from the rear axle and I tied it on with rope. Drove 60 miles on a knot. Shade was hyper and sad, both. He smelled bad but was a good dog with a lonely heart. When my wife who wasn't a wife finally found a boyfriend who wouldn't wipe snot on his pant leg they took Shade to British Columbia where I believe he runs free on a vast estate by the sea. I once beat Shade like a slave because he attacked a small dog out of frustration and loneliness and until I had kids and started saying and doing things just as bad to humans it was the lowest meanest moment of my life. The farmer who saw it will never forget or forgive it.

            Having confessed all this there's just one last fact to tell. The mountains were cold, the waters clear, deep snow and shadows.

you insisted that i write my number down on the blank part of a mix tape...you used to slam down a beer like some kind of super hero...saw myself in your eyes and made sounds only you could hear...you'd press your lips into my forehead so fiercely it hurt; leading us deep into your distortions...

witnessed you spilling your soul into empty barrooms where last call came well before midnight...there wasn't any room in there for me...I made forfeit everything to stand in your arms; and how it lost me all I wanted...

I spread my palms wide across your ribs...curled my fingers tightly toward your spine and believed that you loved me...you turned on me and my wit...so you left me...I wanted to clumsily strew myself on your pillows and press my hand on your thigh, kiss your neck and giggle at your sarcasm...you convinced me that the flood of my insecurities drove you away, that i was the author of our demise...

we collide rarely...your eyes are always tired...you've built the Berlin wall around your heart...you have become a testament to the passage of time because I know I will not remember being the same...

you inappropriately love me but will never trust me...

you stand me in your arms, and it is like coming home after so many years abroad; we never will hold each other this way again...
our Rome became graffiti on my bedroom wall...
this undertow of wordshed always reminding me that I am not lost but I am not home...

I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”

Kiss me in hallways and backyards,
in barrooms, and back rooms and in basements,
enslaved with the treatment and easement of lips
twisted which time ceases to be with
and be of, to believe of lease treats of the Grand Paradis,
trysting bright lights of the night.

Give me a center to move around,
a dance to take my hands into, a wall
to build a fortress on, a body to move
motionless inside a shadow upon, fending off tides,
embodied in touching, this turnstile of heavy whetted emotions churns a fuse,
burns loose the moment that time has lead us to produce.

So cute. Impeccable,
irrevocably festive with all of the pyres night's desires
iron onto our wrists, lifting up each other's shirts,
flirting with our fine twilight dessert.
Sewn by such estranged Earth's involvement, our arms
wrapped, chests spasming with deep breaths and ripe
peddling. Pampering first chaste grace of the soul, whether
our bodies entwine or fast in the hours of this world.

How conceived of delight, the moments effervescent reproach,
like Apollo's gold wing's flying from his chariot's coach. The mien
of publicly idling in two, what seemed like an hour happened
in only sixty seconds times two. A year passes, entranced with
shining infinite lust, with a cornucopia of different kisses that
began with just us.

He’s standing in front of me
Wearing a ten-gallon hat
And I think, take it off
You’re in the city, you look like a prat
But it’s only when you get a talking
That you really begin to understand
He may be an old cowpoke
But he’s really worked the land
Sweating in the midday sun
With a little cowgirl on the side
A smile flashes across his face
A knowing that he can’t hide
Yes I’ve drank in smoky barrooms
I’ve taken a few hotties on the lash
I’ve seen clear mountain mornings
I’ve even railed with Johnny Cash
So don’t judge me by the tatty hat
Or by my faded wrangler jeans
Because looks can be deceptive
When everything’s not as it seems
I’ve seen the world, I’ve been to town
I’ve know the love on a woman’s breath
I don’t mean to bone, but leave me alone
Now while I collect my redundancy cheque.

Think I'll wash you out,
I'll drown an ocean
and I'll milk the moon,
I"ll think about you
at the wrong times,
I'll eat ice cream
from melting tubs,
do your lips taste
like sugar?
I don't know anymore;
don't think I ever knew.

Could you just be one of those things
that never goes away?
could I be one of those things?

I've been eating too much for a morning
and too little for an afternoon.

Coffee is good
for turning barrooms
into bedrooms,
and girls with boredom on their tongues
into oracles.

Sometimes I just want to eat
my soul
until I"m full and nothing,

To finally be
impoverished
and ***** again
would be the best breath
my lungs
have ever ushered in.

Eat me.

Every drip from bleeding pen
will forever drop
into an ocean
of broken hearts and distant shores
drowning hopes and flailing flaws
Every line, a path to cross
detailing every love lost
Every hate turns into crime
presenting as a moment in time
failing are the words
sitting as wingless birds
as Winter settles
upon us under snow clouds
we allow to own us
Our words will ever fail
leaving a faint trail
that allows me to find you
but only if you speak true
Speak to me
so I feel rhythm
give my heart beat a rhyme
break me out of this prison
where words have failed me
I'm done being a prisoner
for committing no crime

And the old habits once that led to good times
are just now old addictions
it wasn't supposed to last
to see another day
now it's fifteen years.
With the scars we bare
the shackles sting
we forged a prison
only to never see past the bars
Empty scenes and the faces
I no longer recall
I'm beyond the edge
welcome to the abyss.
**** the greetings lets just start this
as strangers who have grown all to familiar to the flame.
The story is there I just don't care to recall.

Perhaps because you sit there
at the edge of a fiery pit
casting memories into a flame
that were never legit
mocking the chains that hold me
casting aspersions to the skies
when did you get so close
to Purgatory, held hostage
by others lies?
Unchain me from this misery
how so easy it is to forget
the path taken to Ecstasy
is scarred with arrowed hearts
something more scary than
Lost Love and littered with
bones of Regret
You know the story well
you feed the fire with it's ripped pages

As in wasted lies and tattered pages nothing feeds a fire like a good dose of delusion.
No more do I view the possibilitites, simply count the days and escape further into myself.
Sometimes we find within the depths there are no clear answers .
Sometimes locked within we find just more emptiness and nothing more.

Old tracks and new scars together keep company with stories
I care no longer to tell.
The page as it was before you is as broken as before we met.
Does it all ever truly change or just become as twisted and bitter as I?

Do we wish to re read old stories, those that shattered into glass?
Do we want to tell the same old tales? Should we even try to rehash?
Sitting in the darkness, tracing old scars, feeding the fire from pages
that are not who we really are.
Wishing  we were progeny of those that had it good.
Thinking we are better than most but they misunderstood
that we stand in front of the fire, feeding it pages from our book,
never understanding all the mistakes that we took.
Never understanding that we listen to our conscious as we lay,
never understanding there was a price we had to pay.

We tell old stories out of the same old lies
In seconds and empty barrooms taking comfort in space
and drowning in distance .
We wore this disguise, we no longer can recognize our own reflections .

Sometimes truth is the only thing that keeps us from the destruction
all of it built upon lies .
The tides change, taken to a distant shore only returned like a message in a bottle,
discovered long past our time .

Why weather the storm when we always preferred it’s chaos my dear?
Old wrongs would be far easier if not feeling ever so right .
Sometimes you have to follow a dead-end for the pure hell of knowing.

And in that dead end we find the final passage of the book
Written in blood, scratched upon the walls,
tucked away in some hidden nook, in a corner
where we like to hide our eyes.
The final lines of a storm damaged mind, a wrecked soul cast upon a lonely
tide, the final words scratched into scars that wind around a body like a
cloak
The last three words scribbled in a ****** mess..
What a joke!
In empty crowds and fallen stars we often see only what gives us a much easier day.
Wine with regrets, hearts and barbwire confessions, none where ever as true as you .
Bleed those thoughts once more and we will pretend together .

This waltz is as clear as a sinking ships bliss
tell them all I've long since gone insane
Give my regards to your memories for I will burn in their illusions
till our Hell is left barren,  no remorse suits the ash as does this bitter pill
and a never existent flame.

To hide what is so easily viewed  now the scars we bare with such glee in a perfectly twisted display.
Give me no tomorrows promise for I only yearn for today.

The time just before
Night

The setting sun

The wavering wind

The families all
Bundling up
To escape the madmen
Of the streets
And the alley-ways

Whenever there was
Peace
They were there

Whenever there was
War
They were there too

Crimson clad captains
Of the criminally insane
Free as the forest and
All of its mysterious ways

The nights
Are worse

The sun has gone
The sounds have changed
The people grimmer
Greedier and
Meaner...

My kind of
People

The way we walk
Like we own the world
And everything in it

Clinking glasses and
Smoke filled barrooms

Wearing our loneliness
Like a badge of honor

Throwing our weight around
Like we've been eating and
Drinking all day

To press matters further
We burn the postal service
And contemplate the brink
Of natural disasters, all over
Salted peanuts and stale
Glasses of tap water, the television
On full blast to drown out the
Half-drunken chatter of teens with
Fake-id's and half a pair of *****

The way I keep it together
Is to inhale and exhale, or breathe

Sometimes that doesn't work

So I think of Freud and how
Much I haven't read of him but
How right I think he is about
Anxiety and how it runs the show

Afraid of our failures
Before even an attempt
Is made

And the schoolchildren are
Let out early because of rain
And all the friends that were there
Are now gone or have changed

Their eyes
Look different

Their smells
Not the same

Their attitudes more
Reserved and adult
And mature and collected

Discussing the
Future of the American Dream
And how we - the freedom negotiating youth -
Hold on to our morals until
A paycheck big enough comes
Our way

How expensive is happiness?
How much money does it take
To **** the virus of loneliness and sloth?
How much does unrequited love
Truly cost?

"In answers, "wept the preacher, "We will
Find the truth of the lord, but, to seek truth
We must first ask the questions the Lord
Wishes us to ask. Think and ye' shall be
Given questions to find His truth."

Winged beast of mythical lore
Your credit here is no longer good
Please, tip the bouncer
On the way out

And you know that it is true
The way the wind blows through
The opened window, a view
Looking down and out toward the street

Fear has her fingers
Wrapped around your throat
The de-anxietized man is
Just out of reach as

The clouds burn to black
And the rain begins to fall
And the last rays of the sun
Can just be seen with the
Flooding of the sky

Blank cards to be dealt
Everyone is all in
The money is on the table
Transfer's on the cable

We are quite alone now
Aren't we?

You and I

When the ***** naked ******
Make their rounds
Searching for coin or purse
Or wallet

We will be watching
We will be seeing
The worst that man
Has to offer

When was it
When life turned
So sour?

So processed?

What was the turning point?

When the dust finally settled
And all that was left
Were the debts and
The massacres and the
Racism and the end
Of any kind of genuine
Human kindness and
The death of music, poetry,
And literature?

When did the last page
Turn to only show there
Were no more books left
Because we burned them all?

So much has come to pass
So much that many thought
Would be eternal and last

Everything
Is re-born

Everything turns
To dust to feed the
Ground for the new

We are the changing
Wind within the
Crevices of the highest mountains

The leaking water
Chilled from the night
Echoing within the fountain

The ink that dries
Has dried before
And will continue to do so

In truth we will see
Answers we wish
Not to believe

Steps will be taken
Backward, forward,
Left and right and
Backward again

To wait
For the forward

To strive
For the forward

To believe
In moving forward

Is our key

See morning rolls around,
and brings another April snow day

This sleepy town stirs
on white streets under a white sky
And the only lights that shine
are the ones in traffic--
red and yellow watercolor
on the windshield.
We get home, the lights are down.
We lie in bed under the blankets
and dream of spring...
In barrooms across town
others gather ballads and sing.

Drive these roads
See for yourself the sky
flat, where meets it the earth
and the stars glimmering cold
And Polaris promises to bring you home
Even if they let you down,
you'll rise up off the ground
when you hear morning sound,
maybe it’ll bring one more day of sun.

We called ourselves a gang
when we gathered,
these Missouri poets
and I.

We were the same,
yet starkly contrasted
nonetheless.

They wrote of daybreak,
meadows full of mist,
thickets of mule deer
appearing at first light
or
rabbits snared, squealing
in tangles of hawthorn.

I could not;
did not do
the same.

Instead, choosing
to squint in the shadows
of barrooms or truck stops,

I became the raconteur
for a different type of wildlife.

My heavens were full
of angels whose halos
were made of cigarette smoke
as it circled toward dim ceilings

or

bright neon rooms that sizzled
and popped with the scents
of bacon, eggs, and brewed
coffee in Bunn flasks,
waiting for the pour.

Today, as I begin my 43rd,
it is much the same as it
has always been.

But, there is one angel,
who is celestially sorrowful.

Her melancholy is thought
to be total until,
my storyteller’s eye is better
educated by my ears.

The jukebox has played
lost love’s anthems since
breakfast began.

Her head has shaken
a negative with each song’s
passing.

Her downturned mouth
and sleepy eyes are
actually awake, painfully
aware of the feelings
locked inside of each
and every lyric.

She hasn’t told me any
stories of disappointment
with her station in life.

Instead,
she has shared
the complexity of her empathy,
the breadth and depth of
her heart’s ache for love
lost, even if it’s not her
own.

She owns it.

Singing in silence,
feeling out loud.

A rabbit snared
in a tangle of hawthorn.

The dawn has broken on
The 43rd anniversary of my birth.

The day’s first gifts are received…

A belly full of food,
a story,
love songs
sung with an ache
I’ll carry for a while.

I trap a $5 under the salt shaker
and exit.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2018

I searched the streets uncertain
corners and alleyways
to find my escape,
a place where
some mythical
love sits and waits.

I looked in libraries,
comic book shops.
not barrooms
where normal people stop,
but everywhere
I might dare
find the other half
of this lonely pair,

Because songs, tv shows,
movies and books
promised me
there was love
somewhere
out there.

But, I am slowly
learning
that that promise
is a cruel lie,
that the only love
I will ever know
is fictional
small fantasies
in paperbacks
or tv screen,

or sometime
in my mind
where I find
only I can touch myself
while dreaming of
a make believe love
that is nowhere to be seen.

Solitude is virtuous
Visions of the overgrown forests
Ferment in your dreams
I am embodied health
For wealth or for love
We must all shelter our self
Angels and devils and other parties
Are no longer wanted/needed
I'm wandering, wondering
It's a purposeful colorful mess
How we fell down the stairs last night
Complexity ignites you
But its business as usual
In barrooms and bus-stops
Busy waitresses
Fuss with their hair and makeup
To make themselves look good enough
For you to compare them to others
That's why we never trust our lovers
For Eros makes waste
And Psyche is feeling pretty
Lonely these days

This must be it,
What broken men drown away in barrooms,
But always comes back the next day,
Gnawing, painful loneliness,
Along with a headache.

I don't blame the men who turn to bars,
If there's no one in your bed to warm you,
At least there's something in the bottle.

Maybe I'm destined to end like them,
Of blackened mood and blackened liver,
It doesn't seem like such a bad prospect tonight,
To drink myself to a stupor while bathed in neon light.