She is a Flower.
Not as pretty or as loved
As the fairytale Rose.
Nor as ugly or avoided
As the invasive Dandilion.
Yet, she is not as average
As the Daisy or the Tulip.

She is brilliantly subtle.
Unlike the Rose, who's achievements
And beauty have been boasted for ages.
Nor the Dandilions, who have nothing
But false promises to offer.
Yet, still unlike the Daisies and Tulips,
Who offer only fake love and false beauty.

She is a solitary friend.
Whereas the obnoxious Rose chooses only
Those who fit the likes of itself.
And the Dandilion only attracts those
Who are not annoyed by its attitude.
Even still, there are those affected by the Daisy's lies,
And the Tulips, who do little behind masks.

She surrounds herself with the Dandilions,
To make up for her ability to be a Rose,
But inability to care.
The Tulips and Daisies learn to outshine
The presence that has always glowed within.
She grows in shadows,
Struggling for light,
And nobody notices the jewel of the flower that she is.
Because the Roses, and the Dandilions, and the Tulips
Grow like weeds around her
So she loses sight of what she could be.

She is a Flower.
A dying species.
Love her, nuture her, and help her to grow.
There are only a few that will ever know
What she looks like
When she blooms.

Be one.

You sleep earthquake some nights
like a puppy
Whimper and swim

You dream like the grand canyon did when it was just a shallow river bed

You never expect to get so big
to create so much space

So I know holding you won't make you still

Your head in my hands like a sunrise
strands of gold
drizzling between my fingers

Your body
like a lonely bear living in a city
you miss home
eat only yellow things
Dandilions
and honey
bumble bees
and chips of paint from fire hydrants

Inside you belly it is always
daytime
always spring

So much light
you don't sleep well most nights

And I wish I could place my hands
inside the space between your shoulder blades

and take it out of you
hold it swirling in my hands

I will put it into a jar of water
and in then in the fridge
so that it might learn stillness in the cold

I will come back to bed to you
a beer bottle still in my hand

I will pull the blankets from you
and let the dark settle
Inside this new space

And maybe this night
You can sleep peacefully

Too often, when I begin my poems- I turn on the caps lock key. I want the letters to be big and tower above my body so maybe I’ll be able to believe they actually mean something. What I am still learning, is you cannot always start out screaming. You can not always begin with ripping your hair out and spitting out your own tongue, you cannot always start with passion. Sometimes you need to work up to it as if you are riding the gondola just to see the sunset meet the waves. For so long, I believed poetry wasn’t real unless it was uninterrupted. It didn’t truly matter unless it all come out at once, unless you are imagining and rewriting the next line before you even finish the first. Is it even art if you stop halfway to think about what word sounds best?

Well, who’s to say its not?

Art exists for two reasons, to make your audience feel something, and to calm down the rapids within your own veins. Sometimes we choke or we spit or we throw it all up but no matter how it flies out of our paper matte lips, it still fills our lungs the same. You are like the ash I flick off of the burning skyline my cigarette is. I always compared you to an ocean, because I could drown in your eyes, but you are not quite so vast. You are not as important as I make you out to be. (Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe.)

Maybe you are everything, maybe you are the shooting star that rolls by my window just slow enough for me to spot it in the sky. Maybe you are that crack in the sidewalk where the weeds and dandilions took out their latest mortgage. Maybe you are all the things I told myself I would detatch from your name.

I cannot keep these promises to myself no matter how hard I try, two years later and you’re still my biggest influence. There has been a block in my bloodstream since I lifted my fingers from the keyboard, since I let the lightning stop starting fires.
There has been a hold up but if we are putting it all out in the open, I still try to swallow my feelings for you because you liked me best when the fibers of my sweater were caught in my zipper. You liked me best when I had too much cotton in my mouth for me to even breathe.

I’ve been spitting and coughing up poetry since I could speak, I have been substituing and backspacing until I found perfection in my own words, especially considering I couldn’t find anything else about myself even remotely close to perfect.
You are the only thing in this world that’s truly left me speechless.

But the words I never got the chance to say, are growing stale on my tongue.
I call this; rocket ship poetry.
It is like the day after the night of drinking. Of stomach bile and bread eating and promising to a god that only exists once in a while that you will never, ever, drink again.
It is the way you remember an angry middle aged man banging on the door before he burst in, fuming mad that you forgot to turn the lights off.
It is real and it happens so quick sometimes you don’t even see it coming. It is the pink ***** on your window sill from that party where you didn’t even feel drunk.
The time where silver smiles painted your skin to match the depth of your veins. All the flowers you picked out of the ground from their roots.
There is no stopping it when it’s arrived, there is no way to unravel it.
It is a rocket ship because you count down the seconds until take off and before you know it the stars are in your ears and you hit the caps lock key, and it isn’t because you want the letters to mean something, it’s because they mean so much already that you need to raise your voice.
You need to stop using periods and start using commas because after awhile you get tired of being interrupted. You get tired of taking two trips and saying what you want to scream. You just get tired. There is broken glass rattling around inside of you, and sometimes it’ll slash you open from the inside but you are going to be okay.
Sometimes you will get too close to the flame,
but it’s better to get burnt,
then to burn out.

Dandilions swept by the summer breeze
And sore past the crashing shore
Stretching to yonder horizon peaks
Far from whispering hymns
Beyond the isle of mundane tales

Oh how i wish my heart was as light
To then be carried by flirting gusts
Escorting me with arbitrary candor
Further from these infertile soils

Maybe, with luck, to the smoldering sea of dark
Where shimmering eyes of light are housed

where have
all the
dandilions gone
where have
all the
dandilions blown
but they
shall not
return
back home
where have
they gone

I reach out for you but you're gone
Vapor of loneliness hides the mask inside
I can't even dream of a better time
It's such a dark era in my life
I hurt so badly and just want to die
But the pain helps with the insanity
That goes through this mind
I hear only a faint whisper of you
And the rest of the sound disappears
I can't help but wonder where you are
Do you wonder where I drifted off to?
I see the dandilions waving in the wind
The smell of fresh cut grass tickles my nose
I fear all has passed away in the twilight of reason
And there is not a soul to touch this broken season
Cast out of the streets of happiness to a ghostly kind
Taken stock of what craziness one will find
And the threshold is an open book of words devine
But all is lost from the moment this thought perks up
And takes form into the very essence of dark light

Thanksgiving Dinner
Home for the holiday from New Orleans,
with Mother and Father at the tiny
drop leaf, brown rosewood, mahogany
table with the gold, grinning claw feet;
Father, choler- red-in the-face, short-
sleeved white shirt and cane, says the blessing
as Mother brings in the turkey and cranberry.
Then Mother asks, " Won't you have more ?' and father :
"Do you think Moll Flanders was a ***** ?"

(I have suffered and bleached my hair blond. )
I am silent before their replies.
Mother sighs. "I can scarce speak to her."
And Father, too, quotes Shakespeare. (I am thin
as paper and the rose- colored bowl
of blown glass sitting on the silver stand,
half- filled with water. )

" How shaper than a serpent's tooth it is
to have a thankless daughter "


John Hyland's Best

I hung a painting of one of John Hyland's best
nestled in the fabricated forest of unrest
I dwell beneath the sod of circumstance
unaiding the way seems hard & fierce

through the waves of reason,
it maybe the changing of the seasons
a true artist paint his heart in its piece
captivated with a brush stroke of knowing

to develop a following
below the gauntlet of thought & reason
come away with me through a parting scene
hills and valleys with a loving cosmic debris

life is a bit messy
as if in the tropics with a tone of logic
breath deeper then ever before
the social injustices can effect so many

now here's the part it gets a bit messy
not to mention sweet charity
we look at our lives through such a dull lens
do we give in well it all depends ?

vanity has moved through natures prowess sleeve
start spreading its disease
in the highways and byways of the human heart
you shall light the spark to what it is I have been searching for




My Sweet Rosemary

cling to me my sweet Rosemary
among the leaves cascading & fading
upon a crimsome shade of belief
chosen vine by a great enough design

filtered through a song with an added yawn
look how precious is the lovely fawn
basking in the lawn
she clings to a hope of a distant memory

chosen of the scope inside of thee
My sweet Rosemary paints to her astonishment
inside she decideds what will transpire
getting down to the wire

solace proclaimed upon an empty shade
enough time the source to make the grade
loves the simple things of a new day swing
bringing lulabyes and dandilions to the front

cadence to the simple
on Rosemary's sweet dimple
radiate with times solvent
empty's herself inside its swell