A Dedication

I need to see a piece of your history that shows itself worn

I cannot wait to make acquaintance with your storm drains

To watch their advance toward your runoff ditches

All the way to your eventual floodplains

The way you tell me that no man is an island

…

I feel you might be the first and last to teach me

Such a valuable lesson

Such becoming, coming into my own

As how to be a peninsula

Surrounded on three sides by the shrink and swell of another’s body

Obeying their own deep blue reflected moods and salty norms

I’ve known you for a while, but I’ve been so long and far away

I really don’t recall what leads to your downtown, old town, marketplace

I remember there were flower shops somewhere, as well as musty life scents

Muddy, reverberated experiences

Stretched out all the way to your bridges

And there likely isn’t a battered soul, or God complex, uncased, that you don’t hold

See, you have the potential to be a place

Where it doesn’t matter

How many viruses we computers can gather

For your power lines stretch

Across your poles which will stand

Not forever, but longer than I’ll keep from taking for granted

How you reduce me to

A predictable joke

“Boobies” math’d out across

The upside-down screen of a scientific calculator

You turn me into the lowest common denominator

Sitting here

Remembering you

Trying to recall the

Trolley tracks, drug stores, pigeon nests

And

Street artists

Of your waving, dancing hands.

Societal Esteem

(Everyone’s a slut and slave these days, so don’t just spit at me)

Lye on any couch because everyone is a drug dealer and therapist these days

And open up about the paint chipping off of my old paint brushes

And everything else that collapses into itself

And bring my session to a climax, revealing a side of me that I cannot see, which cannot speak freely

Because I’m oblivious to the majority of me

I’m not the sun, but I’m not the ceiling

But I’m still searching

And I prove it by not crumpling my poems just because I can’t spell or sell

All I want from life is to leave on a high note

Maybe with the tendencies that carried away most of my childhood heroes

And leave my wiring process as meaningless as an atheist’s God

                                               

By the way, when I’ve talked to God, I’ve asked him to talk back to everyone else

Because my selfish will doesn’t mean a thing

No one is worth God’s ultimatum

The reality we’ve created is the result of a half-hearted bargain

But I get the feeling that if the darkness in it all no longer existed

Then we’d waste our extra sunlight on extending our work hours everyday

So why do we feel we deserve help?

Ever meet someone that tried to suck off a shotgun for everyone wrong doing?

For ever reason we struggle to progress?

Or even for every girl that didn’t love him back?

After all this, how can we still be redeemed by one 33 year old with nails through his hands?

Laughing in his face we open the flood gates and infect his land

Everyone’s childhood was messed up, thus will be your children’s hall-pass to apathy

And no matter how hard we try, we’ll never be stuck in immortality

To

–sigh-

Finally -live our lives

Disenfranchised through our own lives we refuse to live

Pocket a lie

Live like a note

Sign

And say goodbye.

The Lofidel

In a moment of miles

He wakes to confusion:

Is she stranger or lover?

Gorging to finish the night before

You wouldn’t take him to be the kind of guy

With smiley faces dotting his I’s

He’ll find that there is much to be found

The same day he forgot to wash the ink from his hands

From the morning paper

But dropped anchor anyhow

Looming forgetfulness or naivety

Anyone could tell he handled her nervously

Rolling over, he smeared the black powder mess all over her breasts and face

They met through the Coffee Saints

Decided they might as well cover Coffee Stains

But could she be the wrong song, played at the wrong time?

Preserving rather than conserving?

In the name of beasts or paranormal light-sides

Or the undecided middle grey smudge containing their species

They were questions of faith, nothing more

But he worried that her facts seemed to pollute

His observations and compositions

Of blood and soul and honest concern...

They crumbled to his feet, just to trip him

So thinks this man over-bored

And so he doesn’t holler it out

By the advice of men that fell before him

Stopped hearing so hard, those melodies

“They mean nothing to me”

Those men said the same and fell off

At about the same age

Giving in to bribes

That matched their frustrations

Because in a perfect, breezy magic-hour

We all find our price

So, now he longs for the morning sun

To reach his seams, to warm his constricted fingertips

Of which he suspects he must have held above his heart for too long

Cold covering his lips, just to speak gingerly

Not to feel candidly

A guest he has been, he feels, for far too long…

So he tries his hardest to cold stare her

Without stirring her

Just analyzing her

Neglecting the first rays of day

And so, on he stares

Man over-bored

Finds his mansion

In the containment

Of her hairpin

Finds his confidence

In the safe confines

Of her period piece

Finds his spine

Pressed against

The comforting plume

Of her cuddle space

And just shy

Of violent rapture

He falls around her

And wonders, "To rise again?"

And in another

Measurement of whatever

He will find solutions in her distraction

Because her distraction is reality

And her reality

Is within him

And in that bone-snapped moment

He recalls the morning sun

As it reflects off of the brand new curves of their shoulders and face

And in the nick of time he’ll feel right

To clean that black powder mess

With his first loving kiss

Before it bleeds into her eyes

And stings them from sleep.

Worms

There was a time

If he messed up

You’d've been mine…

It’s getting

Cold back home

Didn’t want to hear

So now sings the crow

I see you’re flying

In Kite formations

Singing songs

Stayed in state

Knocking down

My forgotten nest

Didn’t miss it

It’s compost anyway

So tie your hair up…

I let black wings drop…

Fade this town…

…Your house…

…It gets smaller…

So this time

I’ll warm my eggs

Just enough to

Keep it vague

Let your hair

Move with static

Cutting up

The placid air

These are worms worth rising…

So tie loose ends down…

Or let evaporate…

Fade this town…

…These worms…

…Keep rising…

(I keep your Anti-Ansel-esque

Self portrait

Hidden in a lock of

Things to be thrown out.)

The Vanishing

One day

You will actively vanish

Not freeze, fight, or flight

But more along the lines of

A chameleon blending with flora that “they” just found

And he heard “them” coming

-No-

More like

Playing hide and seek

…and there you are

Turning it into a constant state of positional improvement

And you’ll just continue evading

Not running away

This is no mere reaction to what you’ve been dealt

No

This has been a lifetime coming

And maybe you don’t know why

But the desire to do

Stomps the desire to explain

It’s in your nature

So

In your genetics

And as far as duration?

Until you are satisfied

Until the season to be utterly free grows too cold and wet

Until the modern man existence seems appealing again

And that’s just the honest truth

Good luck

I hope you get to disappear

By your own doing and with your own destination

And one day bloom

Into your own.

Chasing Pleiades

You know,

In the grand scheme of things

We’re all beasts, compared to someone or something

So,

You were far too surprised to find me

Running in circles

Chasing Pleiades

You dismissed it as nothing

But I assure you, it was someone or something

And I’m still running

But not far enough or fast enough

I can’t run on all fours, like in my dreams

But,

In the grand scheme of things

I’ve been surprised

To find you chasing me.

Clay Crumbs

When statues fall out of love

It’s a split of two ideas that define each other

The crumbles are just little copies of the combination

And there’s nothing left for ruins

They just become ruined

Like we’re all ruined

There are no melds held important

Just crumbles to value, or clean up