I. Awaken

How did I find you?
Like a shifting in the winds
Of my consciousness.

II. Attraction

My love, in my heart,
And in the arms of the sky,
You burn like the dawn.

III. Detachment

Once too warm to touch,
You're now cold, and soon you're gone:
Carried far away.

IV. Blankness

How did we get here?
Like we never met at all,
Two strangers, drifting.

you don't see it
                            (you don't see me)
your eyes are new
and your spirit is still fresh
           i'm a dangerous idea
           wrapped up in flesh and blood
           i wait for you to notice
           to notice i'm not the kind who
                                 can give you love
                                                anymore

it kills me to know that someday soon

                                   i'll be the first one
                        to teach you that people
         are as hard and cold as the earth
       beneath your tender, trusting feet

that expired promises
don't keep

you changed me
me, with my steel skin
                      (young heart)
and stone gaze
       (wild)
you wonder why i pull away
                                (look your way)
you wonder why you say you love me
and why i never say
                    anything
                   (the same)

you killed me
you, the first one to teach me that
when angels finally fly your way
there's no reason they can't fade
                    into a passing glance
                           (an agonizing)
                              into the eyes of
        a once-too-familiar stranger
       (the other half of myself)

A chord of realization is struck,
Emerging from your throat.
The tone bubbles out like laughter but
Reeks of cough syrup and sorrow.

Physically well,
Mentally healing,
Emotionally kneeling to
Every broken phrase,
Spoken over endless days—
Then promises
Of progress to follow.

More bitter medicine to swallow:

Jagged edged words, lacerations,
Fleeting sense of
Motivation.

Later, a bitter pill to take.

Yet, regret tastes sweeter
Than another mistake.

We only burn for one more heartbeat:
Our tears fall through the stars,
Then all our passions melt away
In the heat of their melancholy flames.
The world quivers under
The weight of your words:
"I love her. I love her."
Your heavy breath blowing out the candles
That burned in your eyes.
As I reach to pluck your celestial body
From the lonely sky,
You waste away
Waiting to catch her gaze.
You need her strength; I need your light.
We ask one another,
"Is it worse to love from afar
Or to watch that love die?"

Shed your skin
On my bathroom floor
As muscular coils,
Shining scales,
Draw me in and out the door.
You wanted more for me than this,
But it's all I was ever good for.

She grew up on old TV shows,
Wearing baggy clothes,
And climbing trees,
Scraping knees,
Flirting with the other girls
As much as she pleased.

Her mother's a summer kind of lady,
But she'***** her October,
Heart freezing over.

Winter sweaters don't keep her warm.
Her father's arms wrapped 'round her
Are a once-every-three-months kind of
Comfort.

She's a man in disguise,
Under the soft skin and
Long-lashed eyes.
She's a renaissance man,
With a noble kind of pride,
Loneliness matching
Her long strides, beside her,
A paradoxical kind of
Comfort.

In the place of your kin I found you,
In the meadow left out to dry
Your porcelain face,
Glazed in white, glassy blood.
No carmine kiss had spoilt it
On the eve of its last breath,
But the flood, the flush
Of bluish-purple life-fluids
Decaying within your chest.

Hydrangeas will grow from the tears you wept,
And the crows will carry off the bones you left.
Is it best for your love to run out,
Rather than be caressed by death?

It ends:

The resounding sounds bounce
Down the halls,
Bound to a place you can't call home.
Echoes of your lost hellos
Live within those walls,

And between them we slept through
The afternoon.
Between them was all I knew of you,
And between them we kissed
In and empty room,

The ghost of my everything
Seeping through
The open door,
The cracks in the floor,
And so it ends before

It begins.

All I know is the charcoal of my hands: it covers them in such a way that makes me believe the charcoal stain has found its way underneath. I draw myself half a city, until no part of me remains. I then look, so sorrowfully, at the broken landscape. All its harsh edges beg for attention, but I have to ask myself where all the real people are. I look all around, but all I see is you and I, on a charcoal street—somewhere we always wanted to be—hand in hand, off to wander together and gather up all the other real people we meet.

She soaked her raincoat
Through again, her boots are
Full of water,
But tomorrow I will wake and her hair
Will still smell of pine.

Her crooked fingers caught a chill,
For all their heat fled
To her face
When they entangled themselves
In mine.

Heart beats, blood flows,
Like a river from her feet, and
The crimson of her footprints
Scares the locals on the beach.
Red tinted, tainted toes, just
Moving flesh, the indents fresh
And raw in the rough sand. On
The skin of her palm is written

A sin that she committed.
They told her again and again:
"It is forbidden, it is forbidden,"
But what of forgiveness?

God and the Devil know nothing
Of how long she must have waited.

What of all she has given up
To save her inward vision? The one
They told her was found only
Through complete submission, but

God and the Devil know nothing
Of the way she loved that woman.

The summer swallowed
You away with the orange
Blossoms of lost spring

All the loose edges of yourself,
If only out of fear
Of your heart dividing asunder
And sinking underneath.
I, she, he, they,
We are all the same.
In the end, always to
Pretend to understand
The heart of those closest.
What does it mean,
The heat
That comes from closeness?

Bright-eyes,
Warmth-giver,
Why does your heart
Still shiver next to the
One who gives the most?

She breaks away from you, but
You will be left broken in
The wake of all the fragments
Left behind.

Blood runs back to the heart,
As it runs back to her now.
Movements break apart,
Now just a thought--

A mournful sound signals to lengthen the strides you take
To stagger forward.
She, too, boils down to
Just one--

Retreat, retreat,
Rather for fear of suffering
Defeat at the hands of someone who
Merely wishes to love her.

Every word a contradiction.
How many blows of rearranged phrases
To chip a guarded expression.
"What did you mean to say?"

And here you are,
Practicing the art of loneliness,
Shutting all the pain
Outside the darkened window pane.

Finding loneliness in company, though
Just enough to humble me
Down to my bones:
My barest structure.
Hands tremble,
Heart ruptures,
Digging holes to hide inside,
But in the end I feel too deeply.
As for you,
You love too sweetly
For me to ever deserve.
As for me,
Not to discreetly
Do I devote my every word
To you.

She broke herself against the walls
Which smelt of dry earth
And cigarettes
Clenching her teeth on charred ends
And trying to make amends
With a bloodstream of saturated
Nicotine
Which pulled her into the depths

Exhaling ghosts from a blackened throat
But wishing to catch them in her arms again

Dedicate our lives
To try to remember how they felt
In time to write it down
Did we feel it begin to end
Or end to begin
A cycle of shedding our skin

A partial emancipation of respiration
Trying out new lungs
On stale air
Different shapes and shorter hair though
I was born in the penumbra
Of prohibition
To gaze in fascination
At your efflorescence

But for me it is enough
To see how beautiful you've become
Now that you've broken the chrysalis

The violin
I have yet to pick up
It weeps for you
Someday
When my fingers learn to play
A tune so bittersweet
It causes the winds to tremble
And brush across the quivering leaves
To bring your heart back to me
To mine
Where your name is embossed
In fine carved mahogany

That the melancholy cries
Of the bow across the strings
Stretched thin across the miles
Could reach your pensive ears
And last you
Through the years
Only two until we are both free

Maybe nostalgia is a weapon
Or maybe I am too ambitious

I have yet to discover the depths
Of what I would become for you

You await the day
The weight of oppression will rise
From your shoulders
As the wax runs down the
Candlestick holder and
Pools in the grooves of your table
Only to grow cold

You taught me how to walk as
We grew old
Receiving many a distant embrace
With arms empty
And I still wish to fill the space
Words are inefficient
It seems at times
Nothing is sufficient enough
To make you feel
How loved you really are

I have not lost you yet
So there is no need for you to feel lost

Are these the arms that
So carefully enveloped
My small, sinking shoulders?
My legs must be soldiers
To keep moving
Though my bones are lead
And the pain in my head
Echoes through every cell
That composes this broken body—
This body that is dead.
This body that is not mine.

I am a stranger.

     (Madeline
     Am I in love?

     It's not like they said it would be)

They say it is
What we are made to find,
The reason for human existence.
Is not everything we do
Driven by the mad desire
To feel cared for?

We're chasing a delusion:
Something people tell themselves
To help them fall asleep at night.
We live on children's bedtime stories,
Though we were never children.
Maybe one day we will be

After learning to cry more softly
As not to be made vulnerable
To those who do not wish to hear it,

After learning to stifle those tears
After the nightmares
And the panic attacks,

     (Madeline
     Find me—

    I have lost myself again
     But you seem to know me)

When my world comes crashing down
And my shattered limbs frame
My unevenly bruised skin.

     (Madeline
     Will you hold me again?
     I feel much stronger
     When you are here with me)

     (I've never
     Wanted to forget anything more
     Than I've wanted to forget myself)

I never knew that the drug
I would become addicted to
Would not be painkiller,
Nor antidepressants.

     (I never knew
     It would have soft
     Pale skin and clear
     Bright eyes and a
     Warmth that permeates even my
     Fossilized heart)

Little flowers in the meadow
Exchanging brief blushing kisses
And if you blink,
Even once, you will miss it.
The wind blows their chaste faces
In just the right way
As petals overlap
And intertwine,
Like grasping fingers
Destined for one another,

Or
At least they are
According to fate's cunning design.

It's spontaneous,
Instantaneous
Convergence of the stars,
And their hearts
Spiral down to the planet's face
In a plummeting
Fiery haze—

And they destroy.

In smoking craters they sleep
As one body,
One broken mass of
Tangled limbs,
As if it was their cradle.

At least they have each other.
They have themselves and
That is all.
To heal oneself
In another's arms,
And to throw oneself
Off the cliff face,

It is the same.
It is all the same.
And the jagged rocks below,
Of course,
The rocks below will be blamed
For the scarlet water,
The scarlet sands,
Slipping through the gaps between
Their white knuckles
And clasped hands
Still stained scarlet,

And the harlot
On the street corner,
In her little black dress,
The men who know her
Know her not
And do not care:

They only see the curls in her hair,
And the sway of her hips,
And the gentle movements
Of her deep red lips,
But they don't hear a word she says,
And do not care.

Should have never been born at all
Not born at all is way
With this face
And this name
Don't cry inside your paper house or
Your paper hours comes crashing down
More than what my mother said
More than just a doll to dress
More than just an empty head
That couldn't ammount to less
Am I

What little I know about myself
Is piled high upon a shelf
Waiting for my mind to realign
And find that I've been
Starving my ego
Having conversations
With the skeletons in my closet
Making fun of their
Feeble spines But realizing
So is mine

Still too proud to apologize
I tried to write a poem
But ended up with a full waste bin
And a dull safety pin
Yet I don't mean to jeopardize
The precision of your perfect lies
Oh humanity I've tried
To define myself with a dictionary

Leaving fingerprints on the obituary
The fabric scraps in my closet still
Send me guilt from my grandmother
In patterns from the sixties

Oh one day when day when I'm dead and gone
And know that life is much too long
To spend as someone else
My poems and my fabric will become
Vintage pessimism in a shoebox
Glowering down from someone else's shelf

I collect my soul
Though never whole

When the pain of the past
Leaks into the present
Unpleasant resentments
Tighten in my throat
Seeping out like cold smoke
Through the splintering cracks
In my veneer

You spend your days
In drunken haze and try
To use the liquor to excuse
The things you do
Suggesting I was only
By your side to
Fill the space between
You and your next high

Realizing
A child in its mother's womb
Is not unlike
A body in a tomb
You say you don't want to waste a life
But you can't suppress your appetite
It seems a familiar thing because
It's what you always do
Avoiding truth
With out hesitation
Or sense of self-preservation

Forgive me if
I forgive
But I do not

Tell pretty little white lies
As insincere sorrow pools in
Wide brown eyes looking up guiltily
In vain
When there was never any fidelity
Just cheap substitutional remedies

Every note
Every word

Penetrating like a sword into
The wounds you leave
When you deceive
The injuries you inflict

Objectifying her
And her all too human needs
She cleaves to you with all she has left
Needing only tenderness to keep

Her roof from caving in
Never saying what you mean
Because her life is strung up
From the ceiling by thin

Knotted strings
Each thread to be
Tread carefully as not to shake
The limb upon which the nest rests

You don't seem to know her anymore
The muted throat you knew
Before has learned to counter
Whilst still hiding from

The uneven voice that
Spurns justified unbelief
Beyond the sum of inability
To combat or rather to retreat from

Bigoted obscenities which do not
Quite fly overhead instead
They are spat with no discretion
And blatant direction

From cavities in prejudiced faces
Into the ears of one whose self
Is bottled up in a medicine cabinet
Next to the antidepressant

Falling into disrepair
And sinking deeper into despair

Our souls were like
The eyes of children
Long before
Careless hands stirred the
Dust that settled in the
Bottoms of our hearts.
Out of sight is out of
Mind but
We have consciences for
A good reason.
We studied our plain
Reflections in the pools
Of our tears mixed
With the morning dew
Until the glittering turquoise
Water made our
Countenances look like
Gemstones.
Our greedy lungs
Grew tired of oxygen,
So we sunk deep into
The bottomless puddles
And inhaled deeply.
We soothed our throats
At the expense of
Our lives, but
Sometimes we ****
Ourselves father than
Endure painful betrayals.
Follow  me as the
Watery stars lead us
Deeper into darkness,
For they will purge us of
Our prosaic existence
Right before our eyes,
Which were once as
Pure and lovely
As polished chalcedony.

"My heart and lungs
Are like songbirds in a cage,
Compressed so they
Can no longer function,
Weighed down by
The poison in the air
And in my blood.
Break my ribs and set them free.
Set me free."

I set down my pen. Poetry comes easily
to me but today I am stuck. That
terrible, gnawing feeling in the pit of
my stomach is back, the one that seems
to say to me, "Your words are useless,
you can never truly express the
complexity of emotion through
something as imperfect as words. You
were never very good with words
anyway."

There it is, the truth. Words and I have
A complex relationship. Most say I use
them well because they do not know
better. They think that I have mastered this,
that these combinations of letters serve
me like a goddess.

They are quite mistaken, for I am
powerless against them. Words are a
mystery to be left unsolved. They are
my only useful tool.

I cannot speak, I write because I have
time to ease the words into a
cooperating mood. The voice is hard,
cutting and swift. There is little time to
craft something beautiful from it when
our imperfect human mouths
spontaneously spew whatever thoughts
make it to the threshold of our minds.

Though all these things are true, all I
really wish is for someone to listen.
Listen to only what is important. Do not
bother your ears with my voice, because
my voice is flawed. My voice is cruel,
and will hurt you , and will tell you
things that will lead you far from what
I am really trying to convey.


No, all I wish is for you to listen to my
written words. Though your ears my
not hear much but the scratching of a
pen, I hope for your soul to hear my
masterpiece, this symphony of only
half-conveyed thoughts.

I wish for you to listen to my songbirds as well.
Hear my heart beat softly like a
pulsing flame, and hear the wind
whistle through the echoing caverns in
my lungs. This is the sound of life, and it
is in the trees and the water and
the earth as well. This is what perfect
words sound like. Nature has
learned to speak perfectly. We could
learn too, if only we could stop and
listen...

And so I write:
"Listen, there are songbirds,
I assure you.
One is drumming along,
His beat muffled by human flesh,
And the others are whistling while
There is still air for them.
Can you not hear?
Unlock the cage,
Oh, break my ribs and set them free
Oh, set me free.
Then they will fly from my
Bloodied chest,
And their song will be clear.
I will listen
And learn to sing this
Bittersweet melody too."

Wasted.
My soul. My time.
I spent all my days
Chafing my fingertips
To make the rope
That would eventually become
My noose.
But had I not done this,
The world would have
Laid me to rest on the road
Where my blood would be
Spilt--
Ground into the dust
By the heels for
The armies that march
To wage war
On our innocence.

Wave your solemn goodbyes,
And sink deep into
This murky clot of my
Broken memories
And messy past,
For you've chosen that as your
Dwelling place.

Is there such a thing as a beginning?
I refuse to believe it is so;
There are only endings.
Even this poem,
A safe outlet for the tension
In my mind to come forth into a
Half-sleeping existence,
Did not begin.
Before I wrote this line,
There were more, and before the
Very first of them,
Before I even put my pen to the paper,
There was a thought.
Even before that thought came to be,
It was a memory:

A memory of an event
And the events before then, spanning
History from its first breath
To its culminating heartbeat.

Shall we neglect the technicalities
And philosophical musings for a
Brief moment
And return to the single drop of water

Not quite yet, I rather enjoy confusing
My own mind.

Do you ever wonder why I
Tend to cleave to you now?
Because when one has nothing and
Gains even the most trivial of things,
It becomes infinity.
Everything in one's world becomes
Filled with the
Essence of what was once so scarce.

Give me a grain of sand
And my world becomes a desert.
Give me a pebble
And my universe becomes a mountain.
Give me a raindrop
And my eyes behold a waterfall.
Give me a seed
And my feet take root in a forest.
Give me nothing
And I shall remain in darkness,
As I was from the start,
But never from the beginning.

You dare give me your affection?
You're dealing drugs to the addict.
My empty life becomes a
Panorama of your love, and what more
Does humanity exist for
Than to be loved as passionately
As they do.

Lines blur as if
The world has inconveniently
Placed itself behind a foggy window.
My horizon becomes the sky,
My sea becomes the shore,
My feet become the grass,
And everything--
Everything there is--becomes you.
My heart becomes yours,
My mind becomes yours,
My soul becomes yours,
My skin becomes yours,
My lips become yours,
And my breath becomes yours...
Oh especially that , I am sure
Because you stole it right from my
Sensitive lungs.

All my senses can detect is you
And there is nothing better,
Nothing more I could want for.


I will be whatever I wish to
Because I refuse to sit still and
Settle into the
Preset mold prepared for me,
Yet now that I see you
I loose my identity in your
Fine dark eyes.
I wish to be noting more of less
Than what you choose to make me.
Who am I? All I can process
Is what thoughts sweep across your
Beautiful mind.

You finally realize what I
Questioned all along: how can
You love someone who is no one?

I am the grain of sand
And you are the desert.
I am the pebble,
And you are the mountain.
I am the raindrop,
and you are the waterfall.
I am the seed
And you are the forest.
I am nothing
And you are everything

To me.

Hastily recoil and retreat with all
You bestowed upon me
If that is what pleases you.
I will still be nothing
And my world will also be nothing,
And you will be nothing but a face
That tugs at my nothingness of a heart,
Sinking deep into
This murky clot of my
Broken memories
And messy past.

I long for the smell of a breeze
In the mornings,
And to breathe in the misty air,
Fresh and heavy with the sweet
Fragrance.
When dawn grows weary
And gives way to
Lazy summer afternoons
Spent in the gentle sunlight,
I sink my bare toes deep into
The warm, damp earth
And pray to become a tree:
Strong, tall, unbending even
In the most wild windstorms.
I stretch my roots to the ground
As to never forget where I come from.
I reach my eager fingers to the sky
As to always remember my plans.
Plans for a future of blissful sleep
And an eternity of drinking in the
Sun's rays as if they were
Rich, golden honey,
All condensed into a single moment.
My life, after all these years,
Has now truly begun,
And I have no other intention than to
Spend my days basking in the
Generously light of merely existing.
This is a marvelous day,
And so shall it be for the
Remainder of my days.
The possibilities are truly boundless,
For I have forsaken my hindrances
And endured my heart's winter
Only to see Spring flourish and
Pave the pathway for
Summer in all her glorious majesty
And fruitful splendor.

The woven fibers of our lives give way
And silver threads mislead our hearts and minds
We follow as our edges tear and fray
Forgetting all the ones we left behind
These tethers hold our limbs to what we know
But tie us to the ones we love and lose
What happens when we can’t seem to let go
I don’t think I am strong enough to choose
My indecision is my only hope
My hesitation keeps me by his side
My calloused hands cling to this fraying rope
And to it all my troubles I confide
But sometimes fingers slip and lifelines fail
And leave us to endure our own betrayal

My flesh grows tired.
Sounds seep through the walls
Chaining me to consciousness.
The flood seeps through the walls
To drown me in my sleep.
The floor breathes beneath my feet
And its heart bleeds in the corner
Where I dare not glance.
My flesh has betrayed me.
My mind is a surrealist.
I hear birds taking refuge
In my ceiling
Leaving their hollow bones in a pile.
If I spoke their language,
I would ask them to stop,
For I am not fond of
The sound of wind chimes.

Will she kiss the windowsills
Of my dreams?
They are brimming with the
Tears of a red water lily.
When she treads the path
Of broken glass
And leaves her blood on the pavement
As others have,
As others will,
(Oh the mess I've made)
Will she realize what she has
Forsaken?

White crested waves cascade down
In ivory and azure
On the rugged shore
Until it is transformed
To soft velvet sands

I want to lie in the ocean
Until my edges become smooth
And the salt cleanses my wounds
That marked my face
With crystalline scars
Left by fragments of dead stars
As the glass sky shattered
And every facet refracted
An incoherent light
I lost my eyes
My life
My sight
To this beautiful thief
Who comes at night
To steal away my sanity

They writhe in blackness
Clinging to vanity

You are still far away
Through smoky haze
Of northwestern streets
On avenues where redwoods once
Grew and may still through the
Cold concrete when
All my dreams lead back to you
And I have since been gone away
Through the same haze
Oh better days come so slowly
Waiting to escape to
A home in the cityscape

Among the billions of people
Living in this
Empty world,
I am singular--


Isolated.


The skies are polluted by
City lights,
Would-be stars,
If only the world would let them be so.

For a landscape so luminescent,
This oil painting portrait reality
Is rather opaque
And lifeless--
A mere lack of sensation.
We swim in milky nothingness,
A blind man's iris,
Brined in its tears
And then drowned.

Water is running,
Running dry
And I am
Running swiftly
Down long-deserted streets
To long-forgotten houses
With chipped paint and
Dusty woodwork
Where our childhood memories
Lay strewn in the scorched, dead grass
Like toys that had been
Carelessly cast aside there
So very long ago.

This is not a place,
It is many:

All images of what a home
Should have been,
But wasn't;
What youth should have meant,
But didn't.
The empty bottles from
Who-knows-where
Are piling up behind the brambles in the
Corner of what was once a yard,
And empty promises from
Someone in
A black and white photograph
Are piling up in the
Corner of what was once a heart—

Mine, I believe.

Waiting for the sun to rise
And never set again
Is more tedious than what is believable,
And still I find part of myself waiting,
Left behind in the arms of all the
Trees I've ever climbed
And fallen asleep in.

There was a tow-headed little girl
Running through the streets,
Dragging stray cats out of the gutter
And bringing them home for her
Mama to find.
She was laying in the summer sun,
Matting down the grass until
There was a shallow, child-sized
Indentation on the ground,
And she spent hours making chains of
Clover blossoms to be tossed
Into the grass, forsaken by the
End of the day.
She was always alone—

Always alone.

I watch her every second I spend
Drowning in time
In the lower half of an hourglass.
Where would she be now
If things had been different,
If things had been better,
If things had not fallen apart.
Everything is broken now,
And blame has been tossed around
Mended then shattered again
And we're running out of superglue.

Adults become children
And children have adulthood
Prematurely imposed upon them
Because crisis makes people
Both strong and weak,
Serious yet emotional,
Bold yet
So very small and frightened
Of the world around them
And the chaos that rends the cloth
Of our lives and leaves it in
Tattered ribbons
While similar scars
Decorate pale youthful skin like
The battle wounds of veteran soldiers
And the mental wounds
No one can perceive
This is the answer,
The reason,
But not the remedy.
This is the source.

What should have been happy memories
Are tinted with anguish
Like a film of dirt on the glass
Of an old picture frame
Containing images
That are growing startlingly unfamiliar.

Why does each day begin and end like this?
I am at war within my own cramped head.
Why am I not allowed to fade away,
When either way I wish that I was dead?
My mournful songs do seem to please your ears,
But pity seeps into the hearts of all
Who have known me through all the endless years
And know of my redemption and my fall.
I've fallen many times but still outlast,
And each rebirth is torture to my mind.
Each life is merely echoing my past,
Reminding me of all that once was mine.
So I raise my glass for all to see
This bitter cup of immortality.

I've wept, too many tears
Too many times,
From these ancient, youthful eyes
Until their stagnant springs run dry,
For the dewdrops that the morning leaves
On blades of green
She leaves for me.
Woeful and passionate,
She grieves for me
And what I have become.

Take my face
My identity
My mask is all this world knows of me
But they will make me into a monster
Created by society
They paint it themselves
The way they think it should look but I
Am wearing the skin of my mother

She killed herself to give it to me
But I miss my face
And I hate this mask

They tell me I cannot cut my hair

Under the flesh that belongs to another
I say nothing
I tell no one
I writhe within my adopted skin
They tell me it is sin

But God is a noose around my neck
My gender is a cage I cannot break

I hate this flesh
It has betrayed me

I believe in those of us
Who will never know how to be loved
Because we are always pushed away
I never stay in a single place
Because all I know
Is how to walk an endless
Road that leads to nowhere

And maybe I will cut my hair

Leave it on the bathroom floor
And lock the door
Because that is who I used to be
And they can still take that
Away from me
Like all the things they took from me

So many times before I’ve lost
All I am to what I’m not

what is the point
when destruction is nigh
a wavering hand
a kiss goodnight
and all that remains
is a dreadful sight
that is hidden under
its blackened cloak
of opaque smoke

from cigarettes
thrown down on welcome mats
instead of ash trays

and alley cats
battered strays
forage for scraps
in the cluttered heaps
of our rotting sense of humanity
perhaps if they devour the remains they
will become more human than we
and finally
the world will find its peace

the way we live
forget forget forget
what is pain
to a man with an empty bottle in his hand
for he is in better humor
than the rest of his kind
who swallow their depression
in spoonfuls
like children taking medicine

let me live my introverted life
let them think me queer
as I laugh at them
behind drawn curtains
today I think I will read or write a little
rather than
join in humanity's biggest pratfall

I am
better off
in the audience
where I can put my good sense of humor
to use and
stuff my ears full of cotton
when the musical numbers
are out of key

the ending is always happy
so they say
and is it so?
I do not believe it it so
for the heroine has gotten herself
in quite a fix
and her gentleman friend has
gotten his big toe shot off

is this living?

I. The Tree

In broken limbs I built a nest
And burrowed right into its chest

Oh am I a bird
Or a parasite?

I ate its heart I watched it die
And begin to rot from the inside

Our children fell asleep and I
Spent another sleepless night

Learning once more how to breathe
The poison that is escaping me


II. The Bird

Useless ***** that pumps my blood
Gone now but what could I have done

Oh am I a tree
Or a hollow shell?

My roots went too deep so I fell
Breaking through the ceiling of hell

Our children fell asleep and I
Am left to finally realize

Most of me is underneath
The soil or scraped by tiny teeth