Lily dear
my greenhouse queen
you were the spunkiest
little kitten I knew
and I hope that
maybe you're up
in the greenhouses of
Valhalla
or
heaven
or
paradise
and that you're doing
a good job keeping
the birds and mice away
and they don't have
automatic windows in
heaven
Lily
you don't have to worry
anymore.

"it's probably for the best"
the old woman had whispered
to her
after
she miscarried what could
have been my older sister or brother
and the list of unnamed secrets
grew

I thought about you
again today as I drove
past that one street sign
that says
"Victoria Road"
and I've always wanted to
steal
that for you
and I don't know why
and today I nearly did
but that's probably because I had
a little too much of this nice Merlot
(with lots of oak notes, or so the label tells me)
while celebrating a grandparent's 80th birthday
and I just thought I'd let you know you crossed
my mind today
before I go try and sleep off the wine buzz
before work this evening

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.

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 been so busy
with other things
that I've just been
scrawling poetry
across whatever surface
will hold my words
my favorite medium
being McDonald's napkins
so now I have a ton of poetry
I can't seem to find because
I tuck it away between my notes
when I actually have to pay attention
in class

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.

I wandered down
the street in
a Manhattan daydream
pretending to be in
a town to which I've never gone
imagining the boring
small-town architecture
to be skyscrapers
and the strangely viable
candy shop down the street
to be something that isn't
the embodiment of the
hokey nature of this town
and all I want is some noise
someone to yell at me from their
car and call me an *******
instead of the vultures who
stand outside the bars
with their cigarettes and secrets
who get all quiet when you walk by
because their conversations are just
that important in this
small town
where nothing happens
and the pulse of the city is
a straight flat line
because any deviation
would cause our local
herald of the free world
to sit down and write
and form everyone's opinion
about just how great it is to
never change,
and that only a fresh coat of paint
is ever acceptable around here

I wore tie dye
to the funeral
because it was what
your family requested
and a sibling of mine cried
to me later about how
she felt out of place
with all the misfits
in tie dye
and her in her
impossibly chic
getup with all her
friends
as though a funeral
is the place to make
a fashion statement

Sorry about your loss!
#newme
#sensitive

As though she'd been
inconvenienced
by the family's preferences
to remember their daughter
by her favorite patterns
and funerals were really just
events you could save
imaginary tickets from
and frame them in a beautiful collage
next to all your beautiful outfits
and memories of how you and
your friends got dressed up
so nice
and looked out of place
at a funeral
where you didn't give
a **** about the
person who
had
died

contradiction
followed by
contradiction
with

u n u s u a l
spacing

endless metaphor
describing pain
and injustice

wash
rinse
repeat

you're a poet, harry

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

you spend so much
time
writing poems
in the form of
love letters
to memories
that you can't be
one hundred percent
sure
ever existed
in the first place

Someone I chose to forget
once told me that everyone
is blessed with gifts
and his was that he could lucid dream
and I thought it was stupid
but didn't say anything
because through fist and word
I was blessed with
the gift of a fragile heart
that breaks more for people than
it has ever beat for me
because mama I'm a god ******
coward
and I'm always on the run from an
unnameable dread
that some have called
love

Sometimes I sit
hunched
over a pile of
broken glass
trying to glue the pieces
together to make something
that makes sense
but the pieces are all
different every time I
look at them
sizes, shapes and colors
all in flux
like beach sand
under a microscope
and some are circles
worn by this ceaseless sand
and some are jagged
and freshly broken
and look
you can see
a little blood
on this one here
and it’s not my blood
--this time.
Not that it matters
anyway because
I pick through this glass
and get cut
again
and again
and again
until my fingers are
shreds
and can’t grip
anything
and my blood makes
the glass all the same color
and when it dries
the coagulation
of my failure
holds together this ball of
endless translucent
torment
and I put it back into my chest
and zip up my ribs and
try to forget about the whole thing.

Until
it starts
to hurt
again.

The night came
screaming
across the sky
faster than
the sun was
dying
to meet the horizon
like I was dying
to meet
the ideas in your mind
and all the curvature
of your soul
and all the bits
and pieces of
space dust orbiting
those eyes that
can't quite focus on
anything other than
the horizon where
dreams and hopes
await the sunrise
to bring nourishment
and the eventual bloom
of reality
with creeping roots
dancing down our
brain stems
and into the
bottoms of our
hearts
where the truly good
in this world lies

She's the kind of
woman who never
messages first,
wading through
endless attempts at contact
all left as "read"
and yet a line of
baggage holding hopefuls
wait to be used
as toys
for her ego

I tend to stay
away from gods
and goddesses
because if there's anything
I've learned from
ancient texts,
it's that gods and goddesses
tend to leave piles
of bodies strewn
in their wake.

I told a friend
that my gallbladder
had stopped working
and he said
May Allah bless you
with good health
and I thanked him
but can't stop thinking
about the time God
wiped out humanity
for not listening
to Him
and I hope that I've
been listening well
enough
to at least
survive the surgery

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.

The boy had a heart of gold
which was fine
until the price of gold went up.
Now a commodity,
the boy was
coveted,
traded,
owned,
by collectors who cared only for
the purity of a golden heart
and little for the humanity
surrounding it.
With a little gray matter
and a little bit of paint,
the boy disguised his heart
with a layer of silver.

Which was fine,
Until the price of silver went up.

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

I put a picture of my parents,
Fifteen years divorced,
Into my copy of Gone With the Wind
and took a moment to muse over the irony.

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.

She liked to
decorate with
makeshift gravestones
and shrines
for those around her
who had died
but still walked
the earth
unaware

The world moves
in shades of gray
around me
and people aren't
one way
or another
they just sort of
are
and they sometimes
do great things
and sometimes
terrible
but they themselves
are just shades of gray
arguing over who
makes the best
stormy sky

sand
silt
clay
water
sunlight
sunlight
sunlight
oh lord
how I miss your light
and my back aches
as it stretches from
horizon to horizon
as I watch the day
and among the elite
the sunflowers
the zinnias
and the forgotten
I root deeper and deeper
because warmth is found within
this world
within ourselves
and some of us have lost that knowledge
that growth

I have this terrible
habit
of meeting the best
sorts of people
right before I
have to go somewhere else
to begin anew

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

Which box do I check
when born an anomaly
a paradox
to a white supremacist
father
and a Mexican
mother
and not looking
much the part for either
half
since I don't speak Spanish
and don't like Nascar
I reside in a gray
area
like the empty space
between the boxes for
white
and
Hispanic
and I feel like an
outsider to both cultures.

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.

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

He wasn't much
to look at
all raging
against mediocrity
trying to make sense
of the hurts in the world
by seeing how much
pain he could tolerate
and how many others
could bear
that pain with him

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

She was fun
in the way that
she would send
Poetry
to me
through text messaging.

Sometimes it was
just the way she wrote
to tell me to
do the dishes.

Other times,
it was prose
and verse
helping her make sense of the day.

Sending her thoughts
from the cosmos of
her mind
into the cosmos surrounding
our terra firma,
converted into
zeroes
and ones
and then
back into beauty.

He spent the evening
talking with a poor Australian accent
to impress a strange girl
who couldn't decide
whether or not
she had a boyfriend
and on our way home
he told me about how
he liked to walk closer to the curb
in case he had to
valiantly
shove someone
out of the way
of a car
that had careened out of control
and hopped the curb
and he would martyr himself
to save those around him
if only because it would
save him from his
greatest fear
of dying and not
being known.

We have all this
technology in the world
and yet we still haven't found
a way to dampen the pain
of putting my best half
on a plane
bound for the other side
of the country

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

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.

It's not about
fiery passion
challenging the sun
but rather about
the moments
during movies where
she gently elbows
me in the side and
points
with a smirk
to tell me that the
man on the screen
being particular about
his food reminds
her of me

quiet nudges
have moved mountains
more than fire ever
could
in our journey together

Is it really any
surprise
that I write my
best poetry
when I'm
writing about
you?

She and I
are in two
very different
holding patterns of existence.

Yet the very thought of her
sets electricity coursing
through my brain.

A wildfire
in the backdrop
as I tell her
I love her.

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.

Time
is but a human
measurement
dictating the amount of existence
between one moment and another.
Like inches on a ruler,
time moves in a linear fashion
but my favorite moments are with her
and I feel infinite
and we laugh about dumb
things until two in the morning
and oh hey we have to work tomorrow
but can take a nap
together
when she gets home.

It's only a matter of time.

After a day
of pondering
I flew into
a frenzy,
burning books that
couldn’t help me
and so through centuries
of love poems and stories
I blazed
wondering if this was how the
ghosts who wrote them felt
when they poured out their
souls
and I burned and
I burned and I
burned
until I came to my final
book.
A Dictionary…
And I burned that too
because in it
I could not find words to
adequately describe how you
make me feel.

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

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.

Feeling the inaccurate
heartbeat
rhythm and
indulging
in a moment
where the only
harmony
was that out our
own breathing
while everything else
trembled

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

Poetry started out
as a hobby
for me but
as time has gone on
it's turned into something
bigger
if only because it's
cheaper than therapy

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