You never know
if something
is worth it
or if it's slowly
killing you.

That all depends on the lighting
and the score
and the hope that this time
won't be a waste
a lost investment,
but now the finale
is here
and the stars are nowhere to be found
so you run out of the studio
and look up into the black sky
and all the dead light
from galaxies away
all seem to have
gone out.

When we kissed I laughed
Because I thought it was funny
How you tasted like communion wine
A concept so immaculate
A salvation so immediate
The Fall could never find us.
Through Holy Sonnets we wandered
Through earthly sunsets we sat
Feeling nothing but the pull that keeps us to the ground
Never acknowledging that the pull of gravity will keep us in our graves when the time comes.
communion wine flavored memories
paint an endless still-life of something
that suffers in motion
hurtling, hurtling towards disintegration

Don't write home about
me
I can never live up to
the expectations
put forth in abstract
poetry.
How do you expect me
to be a waterfall
when I can barely
get out of bed some
mornings?
I don't move mountains.
I am not a mountain.
I am not what you need
me to be.
I am only that which
will enable me to survive.

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

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.

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.

She is a beam
of light
whose radiance
strikes my eyes
and wakes me up
in the morning
and being awake next to her
is much more exciting
than being ensconced
in my dreams.

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

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.

In our attempts
to remain unknown
it's no surprise
how long we're
alone

There was something
romantic
about the hiss of the phone
after you'd hung up.
As though the rapid fire
conversation about my
grandmother's death
existed only in the space
between our receivers.
As though hanging up
would make the conversation
disappear
and the things said
would be undone.

That hiss only gets louder
and eventually starts to echo
with things said and unsaid.

"Good. She was crazy anyway."
"Good. She was crazy anyway."
"Good. She was crazy anyway."

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 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

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.

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.

I'll
never
have
the
Heart
to
tell
him
how
much
of
our
father
I
se­e
in
him.

She was the kind of woman
who would light
candles
only to blow them out
because she knew that the
wafting smoke
made her look mysterious
and I
a fool
who likes concepts
more than dealing with people
allowed myself to be enveloped
until the secondhand smoke
made it hard to breathe
and I couldn't see anything
anymore
and all I could hear
was the flick flick
of a lighter that
had run out of fuel.

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

I'm sitting in a
different coffee shop
than the one I usually
would go to
because
I swore off the first place
after the owner was
rude to me and
I'm sipping on
some mint tea concoction
and the picture next to me is
highly reflective
and man
do I have long eye lashes

soon enough one of the
baristas
notices me winking at myself
in the picture
and there's no way I can explain
myself out of this one
so I'll probably have to swear this
coffee place off
too

I love having
positive people
around me
all sunshine
and rainbows
so that my tired cells
can feed and thrive
until I get sunburned
and push them away
because I am a
delicate
*******
flower

All too often
I find myself
looking at my roots
and remembering
the warmth
the comfort
the stability
of the tilled earth
from where I began
where our roots ran
free through the cotton-dried
soil
instead of curling unto themselves
for warmth creating endless
loops and portholes
through which the past
scorched earth
looks greener
than the rolling hills
of the kettle moraine

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.

Everything has
its purpose
including nothing
the space between
our fingers
allow us to grip
and to hold
more efficiently
and the spaces between
us
allow me to love you
more beautifully
and wholly
because I had to learn
how to make my love
caress you
hold you
and warm you
when I’m not there
and the stars
just like our moments
together
wouldn’t look so
beautiful
if it were not for the
spaces between them

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.

The cat's in heat
and I can't remember
the last time I slept
without the endless
coo coo
of my sweetest kitten
howling like a wounded
dove

Every time
I see her
it adds another drop
to the torrential flood
that is her love
and I feel like
I can breathe
underwater
like in a dream.

For a while
even the word
poetry
made me flinch.
I had so many thoughts
swirling
in my head
but no courage to
put them down.
My cup and mind
runneth over,
and it's best to aim
the spillage at
paper (digital or otherwise).

It was a friend,
someone I trusted
whom I sent my poetry to.

I asked for her thoughts
and she responded,
"****"

And that was the best
advice I'd ever received.
Too bad it nearly broke me.

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 skipped stones
flinging them at
the waves
with just the right amount
of spin
in hopes that they
would catch the front
of a wave and shoot
skywards
and in the moment
those stones
so smooth and
worn by endless
water
would soar skyward
no longer bound
by the gravity
that kept pulling
us down
into the sand

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

I kept throwing
coins into that well
in the hopes that I could
wish myself back into
your arms
until I went
bankrupt from hoping

My friend,
my colleague,
my fellow human.

Life is ******* hard.
And I wish there were
something
anything
I could say to make you feel better
about this whole living thing.
I will never claim to understand
why people
in trying to carve out an identity
for themselves,
decided to carve great holes in your
soul.
Through these holes I can see your
kindness and your love escaping,
and it breaks my heart.

I don't know what you should do,
friend,
but I do know this:

Your path in life is nebulous at best.
And that's not a bad thing,
because when everything's in the ****
like this,
and you want to get somewhere better,
all you have to do is
point your feet in a direction

and
Walk.

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.

Remember a T is nothing but a cross without a martyr
and when life gets hard you just try harder
because no matter how it ends up we still have a box of participation medals
waiting for you at the finish line.
Trials and Tribulation are just accidental martyrdom waiting to happen.
Don’t fall on your sword, but rather
Take it up,
Tear down Tyranny
Teach those around you the Truth.
Never mind the Tears because with vulnerability comes beauty.
You’re so beautiful when you cry
They said,
You’re so very real.
True to yourself, you said, is all you can be.

Welcome to the land of make-believe
where we all like to pretend
that the sun is always rising
and our dreams will never end
and here we are liars
defenders of the soul
believing we'll never tire
of making each other whole
but a brief word of warning,
something to keep you safe
don't let any of us lie to you
and say wine tastes like anything but grapes.

I want
My Way
playing,
the Sinatra version
so that when
each one of those
******* goes home
he’ll be remembering
“And now the end is near
and so I face my final curtain”

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.

I once knew a guy
who was obsessed
with death and
all its possibilities.
He once informed me
that we are more
likely to survive a gunshot
wound to the head
than to the heart.

"The mind is resilient,"
he said,
"but the heart can't handle such
a blow."

I guess that's why heartbreak
feels like ******* death.

Coffee is gross
Though I still drink it.
Why would anyone subject
Themselves to something
That tastes like the inside
Of someone’s ***** muffler?

Yes, that was a *** joke.

I guess there comes a point
In everyone’s life where
Practicality outweighs pleasure
And it’s far easier to pay a dollar for
A cup of swill
Than five for a cup of personality.
I guess that point happened to me already
But I was too busy blinking
From the flavor of this ****** coffee
To notice that
I somehow became an adult.