John Scalla inexorably finds himself
again
navel gazing awkwardly at chair legs
girls legs
this guy named Greg face down
passed out
in someone else’s kitchen where
multiple eyes
glimmer, glazed visibly with
half-recognition
and the amp that human ivory smile
plays on
where deaf hands moving with
blunt precision
fumbling for alarm clocks bra hooks
silent red cups
doing essential jobs that essentially involve
doing nothing

There’s this 4th grader brushing his teeth
slowly on the living room couch confused
contemplating the consequences of mom
turning on the TV to talking heads spinning
anxious talking points while shock rage revenge
unilateral retaliation is considered in executive bunkers
and everyone else watches desperate people leap out windows
through airwaves broadcasting what we couldn’t comprehend
looping those heavenly bodies those two burning buildings
still falling still burning before school starts:

“Does this mean I get to stay home?”

***** like a child
The candy-house of your mind
Sugar-coated doors
Pulling farther further away
Into endless rooms
Where the gumdrop roof leaks
And the gingerbread walls crumble

Halfway towards the midpoint
On my journey through life
I find an impasse shaped by love:
Love of words
The intimacy of bookshelves
Sitting in the back rows
Classrooms of right words wrong words
A trillion others between an answer
A lesson too subtle to learn

After a quest spent moralizing his point all the way home
After leaving lance, buckler, and steed at the door
After a few hefty flagons of old school mead
A Sir Lancelot turns to an empty bar stool
And decrees:

Whether ***** or damsel
It matters not to me.
Luckily I never have to choose.
They’re similar ***** you see.
Coins or courage to open
The velvet doors between legs.
Towers of ******
Which isn’t saying
Only ****** reside in towers
Just why the ones I free?
Oh bards sing unto me
A song fit for my misery.
For no one’s figured the secret
That it’s only the armor they need to see.

John Scalla’s multi-geared aluminum pony
saddled up in the corner of a studio apartment
quietly rusts it’s best years away
watching him take another **** rip
pass it to a friend who passes it
to another friend who passes it to
another who passes it back to him
who is now wondering if that last hit
was necessary and whether the aluminum
pony’s quiet crying in the corner
is any cause for alarm.

John Scalla remembers
plain–clothed white coiffed nuns
in sunday school classes
who were the sweetest things
you’ve ever seen with a razors edge
carried proudly from an emerald isle

John Scalla spent his sundays digging
through big soft Bibles discovering
a father who loved everyone
as equally as he was thorough
a son born to wear a crown of blood
but never lost his most sacred heart
and a universal spirit’s open-armed
quiet embrace of your trembling frame

John Scalla was born to hold a communion
with something far more complex or
precise then our poor sweaty coils
wondering how bread could be body
and blood so eagerly consumed

John Scalla stole from complex pages buried
deep beneath outdated expressions
and miscommunicated messages
a simple cypher that condenses
all the rhetoric down to it’s square root
love

John Scalla locked the cypher
in that secret spot between heart
and stomach holding it close
dreaming on distant playgrounds
where it was slowly worn away
by bullies still casting long shadows
like limestone sphinxes now noseless

John Scalla’s distant playground dreaming
of a personal relationship with God are gone
because if He was there then that makes him
a single string of an infinitely intricate
vast woven narrative where he is only aware
of adjacent pieces unable to take a firm grasp
of the situation continuing to grow

John Scalla weaves narratives through
his prayers sending them nowhere
because they wouldn’t know where to go
with so many far-off stars dead and leaving
cosmic vibrations both here and everywhere
making it hard for them to escape with
their best intentions unmolested