I've got a heartbeat
that's irregular
like the narrative
strings on which
I have danced
throughout my
brief time here
so far

We are all planets
wanderers in an
endless waltz
across the canvases
of the cosmos
trying to find the
nearest star to
provide warmth
and light
to support the life
within and
we sometimes get
sunburned and
we sometimes get
frozen
but
the endless vacuum
seems a lot less desperate
when we are in synchronous
orbit with
one another

The statistical impossibility of our births is something that hurts even more when your parents aren't fit for the role as such and you grow up in this haze of if and when. Of "If I catch you, when I catch you", and you learn to run faster than any Olympian but you're too afraid of going to practice because you know your parents will be there and you are a prize, something to be marveled at, and you are breakable and replaceable and you know the second you do wrong, like when you lost the spelling bee on the word Massachusetts, they will be there for you. You will always remember that there are two T's at the end because there's no way to escape the brand on your soul of making a mistake in their eyes. Parents will always be there for you.

But so will vultures when you die.
But so will death, waiting for you to make a mistake.

We do things
in hopes of the
perpetual tangibility
of happiness
trying to seize
as many days
as we can before
the winter comes
and leaves us with
picturesque backdrops
in front of which
our hearts freeze and break
because we rubbed them too hard
in trying to keep each other
warm

While waiting for
my tires to be changed
an old lady struck up
conversation with me
and we talked like old friends
and she told me about how
she grew up near a cannery
where you could buy unlabeled
cans for two dollars a case
so dinner was always a surprise
and we talked about how to
heal the world and she gave
me a book of Catholic prayers
and when we parted ways
we agreed that we would like
to cross paths again but
didn't exchange information
because sometimes the absolute
best experiences are spontaneous
but altogether life-changing

I write poetry
for strangers
instead of my friends
because I can't see
my fears and dreams
reflected off the eyes
of strangers they way I can
in the mirrors
that are my loved ones
and looking
at other people is far
easier than looking
at myself
trying to find
the spots that gleam
in the sunlight

I have a tremendously
cinematic memory
all sepia-toned
and the good moments
are surrounded
in perfect lighting
and orchestral swells
and the bad moments
are filled with endless
drum beats
and I imagine one of my
mothers as Judy Garland
and my father as Ernest Hemingway
and it makes it just
a little bit easier
to understand how
they were so consumed
by their ambitions and
their self-destructive
tendencies

She had a heart like
one of those two-way
mirrors
and those around her
debated endlessly
about whether or not
you could see in
or if it was her heart looking out
and when the mirror
eventually cracked
under the constant
poking and prodding
those around her
were suddenly
a lot less
interested

Last night I dreamt
that eagles came
to bring the end of
civilization as we knew it
and with every beat of
their wings more of our
society would crumble
all the while on the ground
we argued about whether
or not this happening
was the fault
of Wolves

My father was always
a bit of a showman
but I'll never know
if he was aware of that
fact
as he would stand up a little
straighter and puff out his
chest and his slight
Ohio/Texas twang would
become a full on
Sam Elliot drawl
but three octaves lower
like he was a real life cowboy
only to be outdone
by his favorite president
Ol' Papa Reagan
and I guess I found it strange
that he could never really
get into the role
of being a caring, kind, and sweet
parent

I've walked by that
park
once in the last
four years
baseball speckled
and bloodied concrete
visible only to those
who lived it
and I can't help but
think of how the world
is awash in great strokes
from the mental paintbrushes
we all wield
in trying to make sense of
our own existences
and I won't ever see
the glory in what you see
but I won't ever try to peel
away those layers of paint either
as we need the artistry of
our nostalgia to cover all the
chips and scuffs that appear
when you're not looking

It's not that
I have troubles
with people
it's more that
I spend far too
much time
putting words
to made-up
fantastic landscapes
and scenarios
because I find
people so much
more interesting
when they're hiding
in the rain

someone once
told me
"zach, the eyes
are the windows
to the soul and
if you look hard enough
you can see what people are
truly like"
of course
this was all fueled by
drug and drink
and perhaps my
friend was just feeling
philosophical
and perhaps
I ignore that adage
because I was always
afraid to look into
your eyes
because I didn't want
to end up being
disappointed
that your soul
was nothing like I had
imagined

I appreciate the
fact that
I'm able to stand on
the corner here
and *****
and *****
and moan
and complain
and it's being
accepted as
poetry

Everyone knows
what they say
about love
yet nobody
knows
who they even
are
and we all fail
to acknowledge
that we are taking
advice from conceptualized
wise-men
because we like
what they have to say
more than our own
ideas

I'm delirious from
the pressure in my head
and I can't help but wonder
what the first sick caveman thought
about his illness
and if he was concerned with
the frailty of life
or did none of that matter
until we didn't have to be
worried about being killed
by large beasts
to whom
we were the
disease

"God's really a nice guy
once you get to know
Him,"
they said
after the flood

I used to have this
terrible habit
of falling in love
with strangers
based on fictional
narratives I could
compose in an instant
at the provocation
of a fluttered eyelash
or eye contact held
for way too long
like the whole
Ballad of Airplane Girl
(a story for another time)
and the fact that I
would have my heart
broken
every single day
by strangers whose
voices I'd never know
couldn't seem to deter
me from looking out
at the world hoping for love
without ever looking in
the mirror
to finally love myself
and my own
narrative in all its fractured
glory

Is it really
any wonder that
our ancestors
looked at the
celestial sphere
they saw the seemingly
random array of stars
and instead of feeling
meaningless created
a narrative of
constellations
flinging
Orion
Taurus
and Ursa
at the temple walls
that make up our
night sky,
ever moving but
staying the same

Sometimes late
at night when I'm
mostly sure no one
is watching,
I like to close my eyes
and breathe deeply
through my nose in hopes
that maybe I could catch
the comforting smell
of death in the air
because decay is the only
thing that reminds me
of you and
your crumbled leaf
psyche,
a reminder that
we'll all be dust some day

I sometimes catch
my eyes and mind
latching onto the
Autumn leaves
all bathed in the
inherent frailty of
change between
life and death
and I remember how
beautifully you crumbled
like a forgotten statue
of a forgotten temple
with only rubble
and dead leaves
crunching underfoot
as reminders of what was.

I laid next
to you and the
window was open
allowing your breaths
to mix with the sound
of the endless crickets
and frogs out there
and in all the endless
white noise I felt myself
come apart and was left
adrift in the emptiness
of space and time
sinking through infinity
with not a care in the world
for you are my anchor.

An
ancient
monolithic
structure built
before the advent
of written history and
all we can really do is try
to speculate as to the building
processes without acknowledging
how many people always must perish
in the name of megalithic shots at greatness

I need an archaeologist
who is willing to sift
through the rubble
of my life
and piece together
the narrative
of my existence
and brush off
the old and dusty
artifacts that
I've forgotten to
look at in years
and tell me
how to brush off the
cobwebs and spiders
without getting
bit.

I tend to suffer
from bouts of
paranoia
that only seem to
get worse as
my days get better
as though my
subconscious needs
something
anything
of which
I should be
afraid
to maintain
equilibrium

I feel neither
here
nor there
but rather
stuck in the
in-between
of certainty
and infinite possibility
only clinging
to the vague
notions of human nature
for comfort

I wonder if in
the far flung
future they'll
look at our poetry
here with the same
regard we had for
cave paintings in
the Chauvet Cave
looking on with
fascination
as we fling words
at the walls of our own caves
trying to make sense
of our individual stories
through art

last night
I dreamt
that I got into
a fistfight
with Copernicus
because
he wouldn't agree
with me that
the universe seems
to revolve around
your smile

If you think about it,
being angry all the time is
a pretty great loophole
if you don't want to put in the
effort of growing up,
all you have to do is
react
react
react
to whatever is going on around you
and while the rest of the world moves
and creates and forges forward into
eternity,
you will be left behind
with the Hindenburg
and Herostratus
trying to burn
and you can't tell what's accidental anymore
only knowing that the fire hurts like hell
and ain't nobody around to give you water.

leave, leave
won't you?
now that the air is getting
chilly again and the bite
of winter is coming hard
leave, leave
with the changing trees
as there is no space in this
cooled off utopia
for the bitter flames of
hated
you hold so near to your soul
in lieu
of an actual identity.

I've spent more time
than usual lately
thinking about friends
who became strangers
and I feel a mix of
sadness and anger
when I let myself go
and forget that
we are all in a perpetual
state of flux
and the space we occupy is
only as temporary
as the nights we spent together laying
on blankets under the stars
and hiding out in your mom's car
that you finally got to borrow since your
sister was out of town for the weekends
and I always am too busy mourning
my newfound stranger group
that I never remember to
remember those to whom
I became a stranger for some reason
or another
as there is no emotional profit
in counting those you've left
only those who left you
matter
in this great wheel
of organic existence

twenty four
days
since thoughts met
action
met data
met words
and I don't know
how or why I ever stopped writing.

perhaps I'm getting worse
or maybe better
I can't seem to tell most days
where my mind is
and some days i feel alone
in the universe and
am terrified that a breeze
with scatter my atoms among
the cosmos
and some days I feel as though
a god I haven't made up my mind on yet
is watching me and
I am terrified
that He's going to send a breeze
that will scatter my atoms among
the cosmos
and at the end of it all
I'll just be re-purposed into
something,
perhaps someone,
better.

The hardest part
about living through
trauma
is when someone wants to
claim you
and use your suffering as
a badge of honor in that
they helped you get to a better
place and time in your life
but all you can hear is how
they introduce you to others
and leave all of your trauma
attached to your identity
instead of in the past where
it would die
and you know,
maybe this has a negative effect sometimes
like,
say,
for example,
a third grade boy introducing himself
to his teacher and immediately
explaining the sad tale of abuse and
people gone astray
because up to that point all he had
known was how to be injured,
how to be a trophy
for mother dearest
after all,
there can be no heroes
without victims
and some heroes find it better
to just keep a victim around to
be brought out and dance
to the same sad song
of the evil that men do.

It's like a thunderstorm
hidden behind your
eyes
ready to strike
and send lightning
streaking across the subconscious
like branches and roots
of a poisoned vine
strangling what gardens
of joy used to grow there
leaving only bitter thorns
and the vague idea of
a beauty that has the potential
to exist where only blackened
skies roam

God is no longer
an obligation
but rather a feeling,
an inclination to invoke
when things really start to
go wrong
and you can be born again
because you have now
Subscribed to God (patent pending)
for only $8.99 a month

we all live as
ghosts
of our former selves
haunting the fringes
of minds that at one time
could think of nothing else
other than
us
and how well we
all mixed together before we all
flew apart
it's like being dead
when you are no longer
remembered by loved ones
ghosts walk the earth
and they are you
and they are me

The thing about
prolonged loneliness
especially as a child
is that eventually you
blur
the lines of understanding
and feel as though there is
something
that is fundamentally
broken
about you and has rendered
you unlovable
so you value those around you too much
and if and when they leave
you are brought back to all the
pain and confusion that came when your
father left on valentine's day,
a month and a half into the new
millennium
and hurtled into his own future
leaving you in the
Texas dust.

When you told me about
how you had hit a low
and a Gorillaz song
led to you taking the
blade
to your skin
I remember hitting you
because I felt betrayed that
you were self destructing
faster than I was
and I didn't want to be left
alone
burning out in the sky,
a novel constellation
for people who always had it better
to look upon
and cheer

I once caught
Patriotism (capital p)
and it was like the
spirit of ol' Ronnie Reagan
had possessed me
and I wanted to fling
myself through the
rows
and rows
of houses that hold
the standards of modern suburbia
and coopt the values of the
chrisitan (lowercase c) flavor
of ethics
and I found myself surrounded
by emptiness
and the flag flying outside
had become a stranger to me
as I had become a stranger to my
country
and I looked to the horizon
trying to find a savior
and I couldn't see
past the sun

We watched him fall
from the sky
and thought about
how lucky he was
to be able to follow
his dreams.

We stood there,
the fire lapping
at our feet,
and argued about
the best way
to achieve salvation
instead of putting
the fire out.

With the strength
of the devil
he pulled his heart out
and held it up for all to see
and in his final moments
he saw in their eyes
the realization that they had
done something wrong

There's nothing
noble
about suffering without
change.
We do not
cheer
as buildings burn
and crumble to ash,
we cheer the ones that
stay standing in face of
adversity
and fire.
It's okay to become ash
but to stay in there
and not rise up
as a phoenix
is not why
your heart
has so much
fire burning within

On a one way
path
to martyrdom
he endlessly
causes suffering
so that he may hoard
the scars left by those
who leave him
because sometime
somewhere
somebody
gave him the idea
that the only way
to be valid
to be real
to be human
is to suffer immensely
and that the more
scars you have
the more genuine
you are
and he hopes that
one day he'll be able
to buy
his humanity
with his pain

The stories you tell
and the stories
you live
remain endlessly
untitled
in their retellings
only to be quantified
and labeled by those
who can only read them
but never experience
how they truly went

Marduk
came down to Hammurabi
and provided the
laws
of the kingdom
in hopes that
the strong
might not oppress
the weak
and it all disappeared
under the ceaseless
sands of existence
and doubt.

If God
is love
then I really
need to tell you
how intensely
I experience
God
when you're in
the room.

I seem to have
lost
form and structure
and spark
and fire
and the words
won't come when
I call

Is this what it's
like to be alone?
To be without?

Where are the words
when I need them most?

play your stringless
guitar and shout
at the sky
words previously
unheard by
God himself