Love burns you
--even when we
describe it as something
positive
a burning love
so to speak
we are still
describing destruction
although not all
destruction is bad
such as the destruction
of your flawed coping mechanisms
and the walls you build around
your vulnerability
after the last brush with love
melted your wings
and sent you plummeting
into the icy sea below
where the cold helped your
heart come together once
more and all that’s left
now is to destroy
the shell of your former self
with fire.

It’s the first day of
summer
and from here on out
the days get shorter so
we are racing against
the clock and the setting sun
to ensure that only the
very best of our memories
survive and the pain
gets lost in the impending
shadows of winter

ha ha
joke's on you
it wasn't the
liver
this whole time
it was your gallbladder
filling with sludge

anyway
that'll be $23,000

Instead of
practicing what we
preach
we should
preach
what we practice
and laugh in the
ensuing chaos

I need a friend
with whom
I can talk about
things like
poetry
and the shudder of
the earth when we
write a line that
seems to resonate
with infinity
and with whom
I can discuss
the fear of rejection
and the sneaking suspicion
that maybe none of this
is actually very good
and I've struck
an anomaly
and I need a friend
who will bear with me
during moments of weakness
where i want to burn away all of
my words

One hundred poems
one hundred fractured thoughts
spawned by less than one hundred heartbreaks
but I suppose a city hit by a magnitude 8
earthquake
is worse off than one hit by one hundred
at the level of magnitude 2.

One hundred poems
one hundred running narratives
all telling a story that's some truth
some lie
and a whole lot of pain.

One hundred poems
and someday I'll be one hundred years old
and tell a story to a stranger on a park
bench in which I describe how writing
can help the soul mend itself.

When we split
it was three days
before my grandmother
died
and the blow was so great that
I couldn't stomach listening
to Andrew Bird
lest I hear the conversation
again
where you talked about how his
music
was for the "higher echelon of people"
and even though I thought this was
absurd
I didn't say anything because
I was so
determined
to make that failing relationship work
because if I couldn't fix the fact
that I heard a piece of my grandmother
dying each and every night
during the month of November
the very least I could do
would be to make the relationship
last so as not to suffer
too much loss all at once.

Late nights
the glow of the tv
lighting up our otherwise
drab basement
I mean, green carpets, really?
and I played Sonic the Hedgehog
all night long desperately
wishing for the speed to outrun
my problems
and the fact that I couldn't sleep
because my bedroom was underneath
my parents' room and I could hear
the thunder of impending divorce
rolling around at the speed of sound.

I wonder if God loves
us in the way we love
puppies
like how when a puppy
does something silly
like fall over
or eat something they're
not supposed to,
we are upset
but still love them
and maybe when
we decided to
you know,
nuke each other
and ****
and maim
and hurt
God just looked down
and said
"Oh you guys"
with a wink
because we were
all just a bunch
of sick puppies
and didn't know any better.

Camels are
in fact
my favorite animal
not that you asked
but I love how
beautifully efficient they are
and I prefer the dromedary
to the bactrian camel
but that's only because
I rode a bactrian camel at
a fair when I was a kid
and they sat me between the
humps and every step the camel took
led to my head being bounced
forward
then back
then forward
then back
against each ****
and I spent more time shielding
myself
than actually enjoying the ride.

I gave up once
and nothing changed
the world kept turning
the hyenas kept laughing
the buzzards kept feasting
the sun kept shining
and nothing was undone
so I changed myself
and
the world kept turning
the hyenas kept laughing
the buzzards kept feasting
the sun kept shining
and I kept living
which isn't too bad.

On a particularly rough
night I found myself
on a bridge overlooking
a shallow, icy river below
and while I was contemplating
how much it would hurt to land
and whether or not it would be
the impact or the cold water
to which I would succumb
someone honked their horn
scaring me
and I turned and shouted
"You *******!
I could have fallen in because of you!"

We wandered through the
upper floor of the library
surrounded by the endless
words from people long dead
whispering to us from the endless
shelves that serve as mausoleums
standing parallel and closing in
on me as I leafed through random
books hoping to find a dollar or
two among the priceless ideas
so that I could pay off the $1.75
late fee I had garnered from a
book I don't remember taking home.

It's raining today
and I'm laying in bed
listening to the raindrops
fling themselves at my windows
and I keep wondering
what's going on in Chicago
New York
or any other city
where the rain makes
things seem picturesque
and a perfect backdrop
to fall in and out of love
instead of this town
where the rain just
makes things
wet.

Live
Laugh
Love
printed on a piece
of wood deliberately
designed
to look worn and
vintage
so you don't have to
actually
go on adventures,
you can just hang it up
and show your friends
how worldly you are
while drinking boxed wine
and discussing your children's
failures.

A friend of mine
died some years back
while trying to do a U-turn
and I found out secondhand
through gossip
"Did you hear that she died?"
"Why is everyone saying RIP
about her on Facebook, what happened?"
and I will never forget the smirk
that you had when you told me.
Was it the juicy gossip that had you excited?
Was it the exposure to death?
All you had to say to me in the aftermath
was
"Oh I heard there were drugs in her system"
as you mimed out the action
of smoking a joint
as though being high
and wanting to dull your senses
for pleasure
meant that the accident
was somehow deserved
as punishment from above
and I'm not sure about heaven
but I know Hell was living with you.

I couldn't even cry at her funeral
because you were there.
I cried for her when another friend
died three weeks later.

This summer vacation
I chose to write poetry
and someone told me
that I'm not the worst
at it because I am a human
and not a Vogon
and I spent my time standing
on a digital street corner
shouting my threnodies
into the digital white sky
to join the cacophony of
suffering
and healing
and dwelling
and moving on
and of love and hate
and how
the thought of you keeps us up so
god ****** late
that we forgot to set an alarm
and were late to work for the second
time in four years
but in the darkness we
are huddled
bleeding binary
into words of hope.
Rise, rise
and shine
better than the sun ever could.

Blocked and unfriended
blocked and unfriended
blocked and unfriended
is this truly the death
sentence we make it out
to be?

It fascinates me how pervasive
technology has become
and how a friend request
gives way to knowing
every intimate detail
about each other's lives

Congrats on that baby, by the way
Yes it looks just like the father!
(No it doesn't, it looks like an alien
because it is a newborn baby)

But when we cut the umbilical
cords that we have attached to each other
for emotional sustenance,
what are we saying?

I don't want you to know
about my life!
We aren't friends online
so you can't permanently
eavesdrop on my eventful
and much-more-exciting-than-yours life!

And you should feel bad
about that.
You're being left out.
I don't value you enough
to let you be
a bystander
an extra
in my life hoping for a little screentime.

What a creative way to hurt each other.

My water tastes
like the lake tonight
and plop and fizz
aren't helping this burning
sensation in my heart
and I'm thinking about the lake
mostly due to the taste
and I remember a time when I went
to a lake where the water was so
clear
that I could see the bottom
which was several feet down
and on the bottom
rested many smooth
stones
tossed and tumbled
throughout the endless
motion
and I wonder if those stones
ever look at the jagged stones
and tell them that they just need
to relax and go with the flow
and if these stones tell the ones
that compose our homes
that they work too hard and really should
just take a vacation
like where I would rather be now,
on a lake
with the endless screaming
of stones
holding my body afloat.

A camel bit my face once
after I had fed it a whole bag
of carrots
and I really appreciated
his honesty in that moment.

I remember how
you got upset over
the fact that I didn't cry when
we reconnected after several years
apart
and I still think
about how absurd that
is to me
because there's no way in hell
that after two marriages
and countless jobs
that you hadn't encountered
a situation in which the narrative
in your mind
did not match up with
how things unfolded in your life
and what do tears do anyway?
Sobbing in a George Webb's
would only make the desolate
atmosphere even worse.

I can't stop thinking
about a stranger
from my graduating class
who killed himself a while back
and how he was a quiet type
and had a cloud of hateful rumors floating
around him at all times and
a few years back he took a shotgun
and you know the rest
and all I can think about is how
there are a thousand people
on his memorial page on Facebook
all reminiscing about their time
with the boy they ignored
but all really cared about
deep down
and it makes me afraid of death
because I don't want to be remembered
on some page that gets filed away
with all the other pages and groups
and noise
about buy/sell/trade
and swap meets
and the latest crazy wrap thing.

I can't rhyme when
it comes to writing poetry.
I can't rhyme because it limits
the words that I want to use
to describe my thoughts and ideas
and what if those thoughts have
something to do with
orange or
purple or
silver?
Are your thoughts valid if they
can't rhyme with anything?
As is the case in life,
the things I write about do not share
phonic similarities and cannot be
bound by rhyming structures.
It's not that my ideas are too big,
because they aren't,
they're just too **** messy
and the more I trim off,
the less powerful these words feel

She showed me the lyrics to a song
that she wrote for me,
I don't remember what it was about
or if it was any good at all,
but I know I told her that I liked it
and she said
"Now I'm going to put music to this"
and she said it with such confidence
that it didn't matter whether or not
the song was ever finished,
she said it with the finality
that comes with being an accomplished
musician
and I became so enamored with her
confidence and the idea of music
that I stopped playing my own music
and waited
and waited
and waited
and waited
for the song that she never played for me.

Music pulsing in my ears
and even though it's a sixteen minute
song,
I feel like my time is running
out as I plod along
the near empty historic downtown
on a sunday evening
and I'm feeling antsy
and on edge
for some unknown reason.
I round the corner while
my eyes are distracted by
endless daydreams of heroism
and death
and I run into a bush
and in my panic I flail at the non-burning bush
to scare away any gods that are going
to tell me that I need to tell people
how to live their lives
but I had McDonald's for dinner,
so I really can't be trusted
with that sort of thing anyway.
All I'm left with is a scratched up hand
and a blank sky with the stars as
endless eyes
staring blankly at my hysteria.

From the parking lot
by the park
you walk a little bit down
the road and there's an opening
in the woods and hidden there
is a teepee.

It's more of a bunch of sticks
arranged to look like a teepee
than an actual teepee
but it still offers a little shelter
from the weight of the world
when you're hanging out in
there with a bunch of your
misfit friends
and talking about the future
as the cacophony of all the
animals and bugs in the trees
wells up like the 1812 Overture
at sundown,
the fading orange light
challenged by the glow of your faces.

I haven't been there
in years,
but have directed many
of my younger acquaintances there
to offer a little bit of solace
that can't be expressed
in any way other than experience.

Like a broken
copy of Wizard of Oz
on repeat,
watching this situation
is seeing the Wicked Witch,
(Who has problems of her own, mind you.)
ask if the Scarecrow wants
a little fire
over and over again
and he just stands there
and barely moves
and I understand that it's
just a movie and that he wasn't
supposed to move but he
could have done anything to
stop the burn
the second time around
How about a little fire,
Scarecrow?
I've watched you burn up again and again
and yet the film keeps repeating
itself
and all I want to do
is click my ruby slippers
and get the **** out of Oz.

I go back and
forth on whether I
should make an effort to make
my poetry rhyme
in order to make it seem
more poetic(?)
but my thoughts
don't fit into
rhyme
and when I try to
force it,
the rhymes feel
fake
and rigid
and I feel like rhyming for
the sake of rhyming doesn't
inherently make something
good poetry
and I hope that if
we can give Kid Rock
a pass for rhyming
"things"
with
"things"
I'm hoping you
can give me a pass for
writing a poem that has
nothing to do with Father's Day.

I watched a video
where a pastor was
talking about why they
were building a second sanctuary
in the mega-complex-compound
that was his church and he said
"We've thought carefully and prayerfully
about this..."
and I tuned out because I got
caught up in the time I couldn't
come home because someone had a
dream that they had to ****** me
and how
"That was God's way of telling
me that I can't let you come home"
which made me feel really
special that God was sending dreams
about me to people
and so I asked Him real prayerfully
while He was at it
to send a Magic Mike-esque dream
about me
to this girl I had a crush on
and in the dream
I would have the body of Hulk Hogan
in his pre reality show years.

She and I never ended up together.

I was having a rough life
and somehow found God
and was progressing
through the valley of the shadow of death
until I was told to shut the **** up
by somebody on Twitter.

The best I can do
is give you advice
that I should've followed
so that I don't have to see
you get hurt in that way
because it's easier to dig
a moat around your castle
than it is to build a new castle
out of the bombed out fragments
of an acropolis devoted to the
concept of what she could've been.

I don't even own
a wall clock
yet I keep hearing a persistent
tick-tock tick-tock tonight.
Maybe it's because it's one thirty
in the morning and I should be asleep
but instead I'm writing poetry
to relax and take my mind off of things
with the added benefit of validation from strangers
who think that my words are pleasant to read
even though my poetry feels like a big run-on sentence
to me and all of these poems are a part
of a larger, more coherent
narrative but all I can do
is amputate and crop
here and there
and break the hands off of the wall
clock that I don't own
in the hopes that for
an unmeasured moment,
my mind will be clear from all
the white noise
that tick tick ticks
away,
hurtling at
one second per second
into infinity.

Do not be afraid to write
poetry,
do not be afraid to let parts
of your soul take form
in word and verse
and do not be afraid to crush the mountains
of doubt from the ones you love
and show them that what you have
to say is worthwhile and permanent
and show them that you are not afraid
of your scars and your thoughts
and your mistakes
and do not be afraid of the pain
of reopening old wounds
and letting the gush splash across
the page in witty diatribes
that make you feel a little better
about the fact that you let a relationship
nearly **** you
and do not be afraid to line up all the painful
memories and conversations you'll never be able to have
and one by one
write them into poetry
and get them out of your soul
where they've been rotting
and turning you inside out.

A lot of poetry
comes to me while I'm
driving
because theres
an awful lot to take in
on the road.
Like the woman in the
minivan who came tearing up
out of the ether like Death himself
only to cut me off
and I couldn't even be mad
about it because
She had a life sized rabbit
stuffed animal collection
on her dash board
and before I could even guess
where she got them,
there's a guy leaning out of his
truck flipping off another person who
is texting while driving
and I think back to what a pastor
told me:
"If you want to see an example
of original sin, just go drive on the freeway"
But to me,
freeway driving
is just high speed poetry
waiting to happen.

Sometimes you
just let the
bad ****
in the relationship
beat you over
the head over and over
again in the hopes
that you can convince yourself
that the dizziness
and the haze
are actually butterflies
like the ones you
got when you kissed
spontaneously
by your car and
you drove
home listening to
Van Halen's first
album feeling
like you had earned
the right to sing
along to
Runnin' With The Devil
and it meant something.

When you
found out
that you had
a long lost
brother
born out of wedlock
I wondered if you
were happier to have
another sibling
or just happy to
have finally
found something
to show that your
long dead
father wasn't
perfect.

I'd write a poem
about you
but I haven't fallen
in love with you
nor do I regret meeting
you.
The gray area in which
you reside is poetry
in and of itself
and I would prefer
to keep it that way,
friend.

He just wanted
to fly
so that he could
escape this place
and see everything
from on high.

Last time I saw him
he was clutching
a pair of wings,
one paper mache
the other still bleeding
and I prayed that
he had just found one
and hadn't gone hunting
angels.

The sun
is a beautiful
thing from afar,
bringing life and color
to the world and faces
around us.
Almost makes you
forget that it's a screaming
ball of turmoil that would
destroy you in an instant
if you got too close.

Speaking of which
I once knew a couple,
two particularly sunny people,
who found that their
individual lights looked better
together
and though their
relationship
was short,
the fireworks
were fun to watch
before everyone got
burned out.

It only happens
every now and again
where you meet someone who
seems to be almost magical
like when your blinker syncs up
with the song you’re listening to on the radio.
It’s not necessarily fate but you
can't help but wonder
as to whether or not the two
were designed to go together.

Like blinkers and songs
the two weren’t made for each other
but happen to function independently
and just sound good when running in parallel
which is more than can be said
for a lot of the people I know
who are searching
endlessly
for the perfect accompanying beat
to their words while
ignoring
the symphonies within.

I am a storyteller
and my life is a series of dusty open books
and I'll tell you whatever you want to know
if you ask.
My only request
is that you do not use my
life
as a litmus test
to gauge how bad a time
you're having these days.

New Year's Eve,
two breakups,
four deaths,
all within five months
and the depression
had taken a firm hold.
I sat hunched over
a computer spending
virtual time
at a virtual party
with strangers online
and he messaged me.
An ex of an ex,
is that how it goes?
he said he was sorry
for being rude before
and that he was upset
that she had taken me
to the same place she
had taken him on their first
date.
I told him I was sorry
for being rude
and that she had left me
because
"she didn't want the
responsibility of a relationship
anymore"
and he said that's what
she had told him
when she broke up with him
and we both shared a bittersweet
laugh
and parted ways,
a little less fractured than before.

Life is full
of surprises
like that time
the repair shop
told you that the
checkup on your
car was a courtesy
and then told you that
their courtesy would
cost you fifty dollars
but if you brought the car
back and did the repairs with
them,
they would take that fifty dollars
off the repair costs.

Reminds me of that time
we were rescued
out of the selflessness
of her heart
and were expected
not to flinch at her hand
held out,
waiting for infinite gratitude.

"War is good for the economy
like cannibalism is nutritious"
I sent that text,
knowing that you were a rebel
and trying to show that
we were of like minds.
I waited,
hoping for some sort of response
in agreement,
especially after you went to the
protests in Madison.
You wore your political
leanings in a patchwork
across your canvas
backpack that my family
couldn't afford.

Instead you sent back
" cannibalism gives you brain worms
and war boosts the economy I don't
get it."

I knew you were lying
and realized how
badly I wanted
to join your *******
pretentious friend group.

Maybe I'm a *******.
Maybe that's why I write
poems that are open letters
the the skeletons
that shriek at me
from the closet in
my mind.

I remember the way
the alcohol
lubricated our words to each other
and she told me those three
poisonous words:
"I love you"
Except she added
my name to the end
to make sure I knew
how important it was.
"You're the only
person I've said that to,"
She told me that night
as we parted ways

The next day she told
me that it didn't count
and that she was being
dramatic
and I remained in place
amongst those
who function better
as shadows,
withering under her
light,
hoping to hear the
meaningless words
again.

Find a penny,
pick it up,
and whatever happens next is entirely up to you.

I am aware
that I sometimes
write rambling
senseless
words with strange
spacing and indentation
and it's overall not very
good poetry
but it's a really
good way of cataloging
the thoughts that flutter in for a
moment or two like:

Whatever happened to
Emilio Estevez?

I could Google it, but I'm happier with
the mystery.

I write because
it's the most
fun way to
make sense of the
world around us
and take all the pain
and imperfections
and the beauty
and the hope
and turn it into
something that sloppily
resonates into infinity
in the hopes
that maybe
it'll mean more to someone
than it does to me.

You should keep your head
up high.
If not in the clouds
at least above your shoulders
and out of the sand.
So that I can hear you
and the beautiful things you say
without it all sounding like
gibberishmumbles.
You should keep your head
up high
if only so that when someone
lops it off,
the ride down will be like
the physical manifestation
of the rollercoaster
of your life and emotions

I heard them
before I saw them.
On a street corner
broad daylight,
shouting at each other
about something or other
involving money
and how she made them
drive down to Texas to see
Pat Benatar in concert
and I really shouldn't
have laughed but
Love is a Battlefield
kept playing in my head
over and over
and over again.