The clerk behind the coffee counter,
she stares out the window
onto the sunny street, lost in thought.
Her half smile on that young face
is an art exhibit of a daydream
about a possible future.
An old woman at a nearby table,
she stares out the same window.
Her eyes glossed over,
they indicate she's remembering
the good moments long past.
The coffee shop daydreamers
have much in common.

-Ron Gavalik

Calling all day dreamers,
Keep your eyes shut
Don’t ever open them to this brainwashed society
Grip onto your soul before they come to take it away
Hide all your thoughts for they are quite possessive
Remind yourself that to be different in a world full of copies
Is to be a diamond in a pond full of rocks
Hold onto your heart as they come around with a hammer
Picture a daisy instead of the trash they all left behind
Imagine it is all just a fiction to numb the pain
Pretend the hurt in the world can all be cured with a band aid
Attempt to smile even when there is nothing worth smiling
Stay dreaming in this beautiful nightmare
Find the good hidden beneath these restless souls
Wear your crown of flowers although you are nothing but a peasant
Dance until the judgement is felt around the room
Calling all day dreamers,
Don’t ever wake up.

Oh my little daydreamer,
Dreaming of better days
Dreaming of cotton candy clouds
and a sky you see your reflection in

Didn't anyone tell you silly little dreamer?
You can have anything you dream?
Open your mind, your soul, your heart
You are stronger than you believe

Daydreamer of mine,
Please don't grow up to be masochistic
Be a soldier that defeats any obstacle
Be a lover that loves in the loveliest of ways

My darling little dreamer
Be the dreamer of dreams for all of those who can't
For those of us who have fallen
For the ones who used to be daydreamers

What else there is in life
Other than our struggle to thrive
The rest are just bluffs
By those, who are not worthy enough

Unworthy enough
To face the world's ravaging
But worthy enough
To sit tight and keep dreaming

To keep on dreaming, and dreaming
By their sleep in the night
By their wake in the day
Comes silently screaming, and screaming

They want change, difference, recognition
Things they don't possess, nor see
Which they will achieve and be
With the might of their creation

The dreams they dream, are different
The dreams they dream, are irrelevant
They escapes from this darkness
Into a world they created, upon the rubbles of their sadness


Pain, misery, disappointment
Carved in, like a mine of silver
As they keep on sitting, sleeping, wondering
As they keep on dreaming, and dreaming

They have power over their world
They have control over their universe
They are the gods of their own
They are the ones we ignore

pummeled down by society
abandoned their own sanity    
But they will live on
Oh, yes, the daydreamers lives on

And maybe we are all a little broken but that's okay because I know some people throw out their old broken things but others notice that they are broken and love them even more because they see the imperfections as beautiful. And there are others who look down at tiny little shattered pieces and get the glue and magnifying glass and get a table out they haven't seen in years and put all the pieces on it. And they sit down for hours and days putting it back together knowing that it will never be what everyone else sees as perfect again but it will be together and damaged but it will be loved. Because the first time it was created it was instantly whole and someone else thought it was good enough. But a lot of things are just good enough. Every single Hershey's kiss looks the same except for the ones labeled as mistakes. Those are less likely to occur. But if they turned out this way normally than we would consider our current norm abnormal. So then the normal would be abnormal and the abnormal would be normal. It's all perspective. So the guy who spent all that time fixing you thinks you're absurdly and absolutely perfect. Because he saw the broken bits that were your original as even better than the whole you started as. Some people just get a few cracks in shipping and some people want the discounted price. But you gotta find the ones who see scars as beauty marks. That's what it's all about. Perspective. We are like this because we aren't like everybody else. We have the abnormal make. We are the 3 am word fighters and the night riders. We are all the bad and the good and we speak in bittersweet tongues. Nobody can fix us because we aren't broken. We are disassembled and can build ourselves. We don't need anyone else's tool chest because we have one right below our rib cage. Our lungs are practically indestructible because they know just how sacred air can be. We are the strong because we've cried ourselves to sleep and thought that was normal. We are the ones who were told they were doing it wrong the first time they cut but were strong enough to realize that they were wrong and there is no right way to destroy yourself. We are the future. We are the pain. We are the daydreamers who know how brilliant the sky looks at 4:27 am east coast time in Atlanta. And just because we've thrown up in too many bathrooms and told too many family members we ate before we got there, that sure as hell doesn't mean we aren't craving life and have had too many heartaches for breakfast. We are the ones who rolled over in bed and realized that the boy was gone and that we would have to hug ourselves. My shoulders are strong from carrying the weight of the world. Our eyes think that floods are normal because that's all they have seen. I have lived my life walking along the train tracks trying to find a way to get home. All I have gotten is calluses on my feet and strangers dreams in my heart. We keep them there. We carry the letters of the broken hearted and deliver them to the lost. As we saved others we lost ourselves. And then we look up and see the stars and realize that there's this whole galaxy that we are. We are everyone's broken promises and expired wishes. We carry the spirits of the deceased and the never born. We hold on to the spirits of the people who changed. I've cried myself to sleep too many **** nights for one person so I know I am the embodied spirit of everyone who's never had a voice and everyone who has needed one. We are the ones who were pushed against a wall and didn't say no because we thought that was the only love we may ever get and didn't realize just how twisted it was to trust a boy who treated you like trash and to think his kisses were your anti depressants when they were your poison.  But then we wake up and push him off and say, "Boy, I don't need you. You were nothing but heartache and pain. You see these scars? Don't tell me to stop until you are there to take away the ******* blade. Do not tell me suicide is a joke because every single part of me has thought it was a blessing at one time or another. Do not ever touch me until the day you will not be repulsed by the blood or *****. Do not tell me you are not in to scars because that is all you have left on both my body and my heart."And we are the sad nights where the boy you just fell in love with leaves on a plane to go home to California. We are the tropical islands where we met the loves of our lives. I am the tears I shed on the balcony in the Bahamas the night I got so scared I may never see you again. I am the song I sang out to the tropical storm winds that night where I repeated, "love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah." I am the same girl who pushed the tears off her cheeks after letting their significance sink in and put on her makeup to go out and fake a few smiles. We are the ones who take care of the drunk girl we just met even though the boy we love just left. We are the ones who love our fathers even though they’ve broken more than a few bones in their lifetime. We are the ones who have treasure chest souls where children hide their keepsakes so that in twenty five years they can tell the story of their discovery to a 6 year old little girl with huge green eyes. We are the freckles on the lonely girls shoulder that made a beautiful boy fall in love with her; yet she wishes she could erase them. And we are the long distance phone calls between broken lovers that last 1 hour and 6 minutes and deliver lost hopes and shattered promises. We are the weddings that unite two people who thought about stepping in front of buses just 8 years before. We are the ones who cried on bathroom floors thinking it was our fault but stopped when we thought someone would hear. We are those who never want to be seen as weak because we don't want anyone to figure out that we can't always hold it all together. We are the ones who are bones and flesh and have died because their souls and bodies were robbed of nutrients. We are the ones who bled out on the carpet and weren't found for days. We are the student deaths that never made the announcement and never got a commemorative tree. There is nothing beautiful about sadness. But there is something beautiful about watching destruction save itself. There's something beautiful about terrible moments that turn gorgeous. We are the thorns that were trimmed back too soon because no one ever realized we were a rose. And we were never broken. We just needed to be too many heroes at once. So sometimes we get stretched too thin because our souls are too wide. Because there are a lot of broken promises and heart breaks and love affairs and sad minds and beautiful days and long nights that we must embody. We are the ones who would never change being all those things because we like having an ever changing soul. We are the ones who must fight to live even though we have patchwork hearts and memories that are in love with romanticizing the past. We must fight because when we die, others die with us. All the things we have carried and delivered turn to ash and lay beside us in a velvet and oak box for the rest of eternity on the day we are lowered in to the ground. But in reality we know that things will get better because the grandmothers dreams of an education located in our left knee cap on the right hand side tell us to never give up. So that's what we do. We listen to the demons in our souls and the angels that also pay rent. But we carry all our memories even when they jab us in the ribs and make us believe that we will never breathe again. But we are breathing. We are living and the daughter we are yet to have needs us to tell her about the world. Because I pray she has a soul like mine so that I may show her that the world is both bitter and sweet but that every single thing looks better after thinking you'd seen the most beautiful thing in the world. So we keep these bodies and live our lives so that we may realize that there are many more parts of us that magnifying glasses don't show and pounds can't measure.  And we hold on for everyone but must learn to hold the firmest grip for ourselves. Because I will always love that boy who left the island with the crystal clear water and I will never forget the girl who told me I didn't destroy myself in the right way. And I am okay with that. I am okay with carrying these things. I am used to the weight of noth the beautiful and the terrible. And although it makes me feel empty at times, I realize that it is only because my ever hungry soul is still craving even more life.

Yellow spheres are terror to the daydreamers
whirling past faces disgraces grazing ears
Recollections of multipurpose room taunts
And Mr. Neptune's rolled eyes as he gives up

Just send me to my fortress of books n poetry
Let me slip away unnoticed and forgotten
between the blue carpet and shelves inside
Let me bang my head on the laminated particle board

I disappear in here where it's just me and three thousand years
floating historically through black & white epochs
Alone, the world is heavy but not so much as my feet
planted and feigning mobility as roots become weeds

I think how dumb it is to talk of my Soul or to sing in the shower
or my car or alone in my apartment with stereo blasting
It's strange how the red is everywhere and I can't imagine
any longer when I'll finally need to draw a line

For you are not with me as I am with me and I'm green
But I can't say if it's in my stomach or in my eyes
And despite the heaviness I feel like I could be swept away
I could flutter up like one of those winglike seeds in Spring

Heaven is no place outside either, and I suddenly remember
That this all started with a love for the color orange
And I realize the silliness of red and yellow by themselves,
still wondering if I am bathed or baked in the warmth.

A lost in time, forgotten track
colorless, washed out, hollowed rather
meaningless if you were to describe it
used to write all the time, used to dream
in the bus, in bed as well, it has all
said its bitter farewell, oh dearie!
oh my beloved!, spare me of this cruel
misery filled path, I now cross
some sort of emotionless symphony
worthless effort, faded paint
insignificant piece of poetry
a fallen ode to legacies, significance
and memories, all fantasies
dreams, hopes and tales of stargazers
daydreamers and hopeless romantics
have been lead astray, by this
oh this filthy tray of decandence
forsaking a mournful heart
an adulterated soul...

My mind is quite like the world I live..
Corrupted....
Sin in a mural of fear...
I've plagued the Daydreamers...
Killed off their first borns...
With fantasies of success...
In defeat they shall mourn ...
Cuz Tomorrow will never come..
cause it will always be today..
when you wake up
go to sleep
No matter what you say....
When the sunrises you will be in Today..
The sickness this disease,
will seep from my brain..
and or it seeped there, still,
I will proclaim that
I'm Pyscho for real....
You just haven't accepted
what you really feel...

These dreams are what we have to build on
What we have come to know

Our minds have been ravaged
These voices echoed so many times
Controlling who we are, and how we get by

The road seems long as ever
As we grow restless to escape this place

As I remember
I am everything I have ever wanted, And everything you didn't want for me.

All I wanted was someone who believed in me.

We are daydreamers
With aspirations that touch the sky
And now I know this is where I lie

We may be blind
But we can see what we were meant to be
All I know is that this means so much to me

Tired hands and waking eyes
Will tell the story of how we lived our lives

As I fall in my final days

These are the memories that will never fade away.

dust off your shoes
lets leave this town,
holding hands-
finding ourselves
lost in these daydreams.
dust off your shoes
we're leaving this town-
they won't even notice
that we're not around.
they'll be busy looking down-
and we'll be bouncin' from cloud to cloud
celebrating our daydreams.

Lily on my crown,
My soul is rooted with sunflowers,
Love springs from my lungs.
Death is a garden.
Affection a coffin.

Hedge around ribs,
Holy light tightened on heart,
Beating carols only heard by dogs
Like a whistle, thistle on my knees cutting heaven real deep.

Tulips lace my tongue
Taste of angels, backwash of Lucifer.
Eyes pupiled amethyst. The healing stone. My world is healing while thorns and samsara hold my ankles to material and the edge of avarice.

World of loom hill parade ecstasy while weather ignites to 24° psychic readings being hosted in palace atrium & column walls where the archaic clock gongs upward to ****** addict ghosts and mental wards in lucid Babylons.

Lovers screaming against bombs, blister billow black clouds and smoke with marijuana haze in flats and compassion for grief cottoned years.
Rumble of music soaked into ratless insulation, long conversations with the insomniac self who hides from monsters inches over his head.

World of daysetting group understandings amidst orange moonlight. Coalmine haired bereaved droop nose man crawls from darkness for another cigarette on the balcony, 4th floor apartment complex in May. Depression hit like **** **** fogging out the brain.
Emptiness is the west.

Travelers who sway on driftwood face The Cascades acknowledging past times, revolving themes and bullet mouthed villains who seek away from starvation from ego lacking.
Their bile is sentences and the rest, anyways.  

Japanese instrumental rolls through closed eyelids in flashing Technicolor, rabbits watch the highways unaware of mortality.

World of bicycle rides on packed ** Chi Minh
City 2016 Winter where twenty-something North Americans go for pho while others go for broke. Palm trees polka dotting college campus in Afternoon, insects whine for the daydreamers. One is writing poetry in a small Vietnamese cafe sipping earl grey inspired by the Oriental clutter and a redheaded girl back home who paces frantically in the attic besides a crooked lamp scrawling flowers to the rotted whitewood panel work

The artist’s craft is a keepsake for eternity, as wells dry out and desert becomes ocean, poems will melt to matter zipping to outer space, satellite ink spots expanding by forever realms.

Pillow foot sole cracks shell casings on forgotten battlefields in later decades, wiping off grit shoeshine boy corpse particle reformation and fairy spit from brow, the last mad prophet sees visions of Christ as arachnid wretch black widow who venomed our bones with rapture,
doom wax peeling away after the damages had been committed.  

Now I check for spiders beneath my sheets.

Banshee howl symphonic sorrows leak in unison with all lanes of commuting traffic. Denial curse for positivity, mindset slate hiding
The weary souls radiance. On the 15x down Johnson! psychedelic chasm quakes through the wheels and my thoughts are spinning sunshine!
Washing machine dynamo recollections of whiskey spilt over carpet dark sand shade while La Vie En Rose resonates from playerless pianos topped with incense sticks in arabesque ashrams, imaginary shelters. We all have one!

Nick Cave is sleeping by back row while we approach final stop in front of bankrupt Chinese corner stores. He’s murmuring Oblivions and the bus keeps on going.

Death is a garden.
Tears are its rainwater and bucket flow.
Nectar pattern reveries honeybee the flowerpots.
Peoples sprout from them bloomed full.

Rosy reaper blasts past the solar system in a comet rocket since she saved the aliens, she hums Vivaldi and huffs a good huff from her cherry cigar.
She tightens her starlight hood and black holes be born.
Torn apart Pluto goes

B    A    N    G

Comet delirious ignores the decimation
And shouts the Lotus Sutra

“ALL GODS WERE TOO PASSIVE”
Reaper hollers back steering by the milky way and beyond on their hallucinogenic trip.

Lily on my crown.
Crown for the kingdom
wherein Reaper resides
and sings with galaxy ukulele to
the great empty.
Great as all can be.

a letter is just a piece of paper
and ink is just a mess if it falls off a table
these are incredibly simple things but
i want to make them special
and special is a very broad term but
i mean as special as that burning, flaming desire to
give other people our entire lives worth of special

so if i shape the mess into words
and i craft the paper into a message
could you understand what special truly means to me
could you realize it encompasses all that you are
and could you hold me the way
pieces of paper soak up ink and
symbols soak up meaning and
romantic daydreamers soak up beautiful fantasies

with this burning, flaming desire i’ve lit the candlestick at both ends
crafting carefully the contents of my heart
into this letter for you.
and in calligraphy, too.
because i want to shape the ink to fit
the curves of your lips when you smile
and the creases of the paper to bend
your heart into knots like mine,
and you could imagine your favorite word
in my handwriting
and sometimes the meaning of special will be me
just as much as it is you

shattered dreams
evolving present
sleepless nights
lucky those daydreamers.-04.12.2016

Daydreamer
Turn your head a notch
and we'll see that perfect
dot beside your nose.

Tell me,
even though
sanity may jettison
and stroll down
the lane as naked
as a jay bird.

you remember,
that I had on too many clothes
or not enough and neither one
at the appropriate time,
still,
I can't soften
the discard-
the tint of rose
from my cheeks or the
titan grip on my jugular.

Remind me still ,
with patience,
like every other
seven year old
wearing a zirconium,
Tiaras, pink taffeta
and soft as night ballet
slippers,
that it's o.k.
to sit on my spotted pony
dreaming,
that all princes
will have a heart of gold.

That promises mean
something
even to spectra
and daydreamers...

we stopped laughing
when
the song ended
with the world spinning

and I fell down
calling your name
on the back
street of my worst
nightmare coming true.

Remind me gently,
That best friends can't say
I love you
and still be best friends,
well, I already knew,
it just might be that
all the time my eyes
were wide open
they just
wouldn't stop listening
to the skipping thud of
my pulse.

I've been sleep deprived for since
I cannot even remember.
I look up and I see your smile:
A blasphemous hallucination,
But a welcome one, nonetheless

(Insomnia  has never been fond of
  Daydreamers like myself.)

"I don't know what I want"
But I do.

Today I looked out the window,
As the sun danced around;
Such a beautiful day to dream.

I've memorized my script,
I know what to say,
I know what to do,
I know how to speak,
I know how to move,

But the timing just isn't right--
Or is it?
You tell me.
Tell me, tell me, tell me!
Your smile is my cue--
(Will you laugh for me too?)

Do you want to know a secret, love?
Come closer, let me tell you..
Let me press my finger to your lips,
Let my lips brush your ear,
Let me whisper what you already know,
But I know you long to hear.

I'm looking out the window now,
Counting all the stars;
What a beautiful night to...

I know my part on this stage:
I live to please--
But please,

Tell me who you are,
Tell me who you are,
And
Tell me who you are..

Tell me slowly,
Tell me completely,
Tell me everything,
So I'll never forget,

So that I may keep your words in an ink bottle
On the writing desk of my mind,

So that I can have your smile on my lips,
As I sing along with the radio,

So that I can picture your face,
In my chemical induced dreamland,
When sleep never wants to come.

Write a poem about anything.

Rip the page from the book and make a paper plane. The simple ones we made as children.

When I was a kid we would breathe into the wings of a paper plane like somehow we had the lungs of God and that must be how he kept planes in the sky, because even then we knew that living isn’t just breathing but the application of breath. So breath into yours, and let that paper plane poem fly. Believe without questioning that air and words can keep anything alive, for what is God but words that come to life when the world feels dark and empty.

My mirror always gives advice like, consider the big picture, but always pay attention to detail.

All my gods don’t pay attention to detail and I don’t blame them, there’s over 7 billion details. So maybe we all don’t matter the same, but at some point we all believed that out breaths could keep paper planes in the sky, at some point we all believed that God will make our dreams come true.

So today I am writing poems and making planes and taking breaths so deep the paper ripples from the wind of my lungs. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying.

Men like me, we daydreamers, we caterpillars trying to be birds but we’ll settle for butterflies. But my best friend, she is a tree, planted deep but reaching for the sky, shedding leaves in autumn cos she knows that even the ground needs a blanket from the cold.

All my gods don’t pay attention to detail, but my best friend, she is human and kind or at least she tries.

We still fear the empty in a half full glass, but we know we need air as much as we need water. So we drink, half believing we are all gods in charge of our planes. And we breath, as humans, capable of much better.

On a day as good as this
I should be roaming wild and free
instead of on this path of lonely
for all eternity

On a day as good as this
I should be hanging with the trees
In my arms you should be wrapped tightly
foreboding ancient memories

Can you smell the spirits in the air?
Can you smell the spirits in the air?
Can you smell the spirits in the air?

And before you realize it'll be another day gone
with no hands of time to hold onto
I'm a chooser not a beggar
On a day as good as this.