Your loving lines remind me of a girl I knew
To me she was the cats’ pajamas
In my mind I fell in love with her little painted toes
Sometimes they were the only thing I could see, curling over the branch above
She was a climber, you best believe
A fierce spirit in the form of delicate beauty
All her life she went higher
Exploring every limb
While I stuck close to the trunk
Watching her dance on the ends of leaves
My heart swelling with love, beating vicariously
One day she reached the top of the world I knew
Smiled down with the sun upon me
And leapt off into the breeze
All this time her fearlessness was a mystery
But now I see the only secret she kept from me
Was her ability to fly
And even that, in the end
She shared

We were young and dumb. If you are old and bitter and keeping track, I have said two redundant things already. I’ll try to stop.

It’s just not easy finding the right words. It’s almost as if each idea and feeling is just a puzzle piece that I pull out of the box in my gut and hold up to my tongue. Rubbing the edges along my taste buds, hoping to find the word that ‘fits’. You’d think after 15 years I’d have gotten it figured out by now, but you’d be wrong. I only have the border finished, and it is this:

We loved each other and that was reason enough to keep the baby. It didn’t matter that we were broke, and didn’t know the intricacies of air conditioning unit maintenance that older, wiser, homeowners all seem to know.

For some reason, and coupled with a hundred others, I never told her that I already named the baby. Her name was to be Elinore, and she’d serve tea to invisible friends while her feet dangled from her seat above the ground. I apologize for the long build up to this point (I needed it), but our baby was never meant to be. My girlfriend had a miscarriage.

So much happened, so much time passed, but still I kept her name a secret. My girlfriend has been my ex for years, lives in Seattle, and looks happy on Facebook. A couple weeks ago I got a tattoo. A tiny little name on my rib cage. I told the guy doing the ink that it was my girlfriends name. It feels almost shameful, but that’s not the right word. I’ll keep trying to find the proper one.

The mattress wicks my illness
Gallons of sweat sucked deep to its creaking core
I live in a dent, a small version of a crater
As if I am some sort of fallen meteor
There is a strip of pictures on my bed stand
Of me from years ago
Making faces in a photo booth alone
I like knowing it will be there when I’m dead
Like the constellations of star graveyards in the sky
Proof through faint flickers that something once shone
Somewhere in a pile of papers I have asked to be burned
Upon my mattress full of fuel
Like some sort of viking
Who traveled great distances upon his ship
Arrived at shores lined with savages
And eventually died in battle
Having finally found
Something worth dying for
Through the fever I dream
Of lit arrows streaking the sky
On their way to my funeral pyre
In a life sapped of romance
This is my poetry
To finally be consumed
Burning brilliantly for once
Blotting out the stars for a moment with smoke
To be the point of focus for eyes not my own

We go on knowing
Like the sun and moon
Our place in all this

Every day and night
The earth thinks it has us alone
While behind the horizon we would meet
If just to blow a kiss like a fall leaf
Coated in copper and tinged with the pain
Of unavoidable change

We both can hibernate
Like bears full on the fat of the land
We dream through our winters alone
While our bodies eat themselves

The sudden thaw telegraphs to our bones
Into the light we go
Stretching our legs
Shaking the sleep from our coats
Smelling the air, each at the mouth of our own cave
From which we flow, like words from the poet
Looking like water for the stream
To find the rest of ourselves
To become whole

In the ocean I’ll find you
Where the salt and fresh water mix, so will we
Carried by our purpose out to the ocean
Where land is a memory
We swallow the sky in gulps
While it bathes in the ocean

Into the atmosphere we go on the wings of air
Collecting with other lovers in clouds
Becoming so full of our selves we burst
Back onto the earth, we fall
Some up plant stalks
Some down ditches
Everyone to their place

On the earth
Beneath the sun
Beneath the moon
We are not alone, the earth does not have us
Alone

The streetlamps hum with electricity
And throw from their faces a dull yellow glow
Like jars of old piss with candles behind them
The street takes it, for it has no where else to go
At every bend and every turn there is another lamp
Till just outside the city
The public power grid stops
And the road breaks free
Into the country it goes
And never looks back
Because even though it’s as dumb as asphalt
It knows that through the darkness it must go

With an icepick ill punch out little bits of brain through the corners of your terrified eyes
And when you quit blinking the demons running down the walls will be senseless shadow puppets
You will shuffle the rest of your life like a deck of cards in a windowless casino
Unable to sense the passage of time
Worry, go ahead and worry because it will be the last time you do
The carpets, paints, and window treatments were selected to sedate you just like the little pills
That rattle around the plastic cups resting on sticky note coasters with names scribbled on them

Mr. Abraham it’s time for your medicine
They say to the mans dumb animal eyes which are as reflective as a cows
and betray just as much intelligence

Welcome to the madhouse, we know its a misnomer
We keep the agression in check here, there isn’t enough to pop a balloon
And our patients here are too high to be insane
Only when they come down in the morning before the orderlys make the rounds
Does that funny little quirk of mental illness show itself

Lean back now, don’t resist, the straps are just a precaution
No need to have your brain fire off a signal to jerk your leg or move your head
The icepick could go too deep and maybe just turn you off like a light

The streetlamps hum with electricity
And throw from their faces a dull yellow glow
Like jars of old piss with candles behind them
The street takes it, for it has no where else to go
At every bend and turn there is another lamp
and another
Till just outside the city
The public power grid stops
And the road breaks free
Down to two lanes
Into the country it goes
And never looks back
Only forward
Because even though it is dumb as asphalt
it knows
That through the darkness it must go

This is a warning you don’t deserve
You criminals, you killers, you vermin
I need only to lose one more hair from my head
And Ill start being about as forgiving as an old testament God
Turning those who cant let go to pillars of salt
So the animals can come from the woods and lick their eroding faces

My soul boils for more stories of the regular citizen
Who decides not to be so regular anymore
And goes and guns down the dopers shuffling lobotomized through the alleyways
Or follows them to their pusher masters
The bastards on the corner picking up little packets of crack rocks
From beneath the litter left behind by a bunch of fucks who couldn’t care
That a publicly paid for trash can is on the corner

Hold tight your empty coffee cup for half a block Juanito
I know its hard not to just let it go
But little kids do walk these streets
They are the little red blood cells
Running their way through the system and soon to be
The blood clot in the black heart of Hialeah

When the nation grabs its chest
And heaves its collective breath
Some fiend will be fucking a little girl behind a dumpster
Just before he comes and makes the nightly news
He will feel like something just went over an edge in him
And is falling into darkness that even his perversion can’t penetrate

Deep in the pit where the last bit of humanity fell
The demons will swarm like a storm around the remains
Each reaching out for a bone to crack, to suck the marrow and grow fat
From another feast paid for by forgiveness
Supported by a second chance
And made possible by turning the other cheek

Grow a spine, grow cold, steel your heart and pocket your soul
It’s time to let loose the flood
To flush the streets clean, set the prisons on fire
Sending the scum to hell faster than the demons can sort them
Clog the gates of Hades with the walking refuse of earth
And if in the end there is no one left on the earth
All will not be lost

The sun will rise and
The sun will set
Even if there is no one here to enjoy it

This is the time of looking on the bright side
When from our hospital beds we wake and into the streets we go
On broken bones we walk facing the sunset
Along the way abandon our falling hopes and regrets


We will wake in the morning on the beach, our feet in the ocean
Where the casts of our broken pasts dissolve in the salt water lapping upon us
With Our bodies mended, and dreams still fresh in our mind
We will scatter on the wind
Some will go to the desert, others to the hills, and more yet to the plains
All to the place from where each came

We will carry with us the message of tomorrow
And speak it confidently into the ears
Of friends and strangers who are stuck in today

They will feel the ocean in our breath and be filled to the point of bursting
We will raise them up like so many standing armies of hair
On arms touched with goosebumps under a cool breeze
As the weight of fear is swept away like fallen leaf in autumn

We will feel the draw once again, and submit to the current
Toward the contentment that we have relentlessly dreamed for
We may still stumble, but not alone, into the sunset we will go
To wake again on the beach with sand beneath our feet
While the ocean keeps reaching for us
Having known only failure, and will never give up

We live in the nth generation
The watered down, weakened, husk of a generation
Back when darkness was on the face of the deep
Colors were brighter, more alive
Blood spoke wet and red rubies to the air
Grass glowed green emeralds in the sun

Today we look in awe at colored and cut glass
Like the natives we trade our potential for baubles
While demons grow fat and full of beauty, sucking the marrow from its bones
There are not enough energy drinks
Or car commercials that bring families together
To rinse the grey out of our lives

No amount of fabric softener will make those clothes hurt the chubby girl less
No amount of rogain will restore the hope in the man who once thought looks werent everything
We keep buying into program, filling our homes with calculated obsolescence
Our lives are colanders and we keep looking to the image of a cup flowing over
like that is how its supposed to be

The image is a lie, constructed on contract by an ad agency
The cup is a prop, there is a cork in the bottom, and collagen, and botox in it’s rim
Keeping it full and motionless like the moon when it stops to look down
To see if anyone is looking up at how good a job it is doing
Reflecting light from the opposite side of the world, turning its grey dust white
Preaching a message of being full where being full of nothing is still being full
And if we can let go, let the hot coals of anger drop from our hands
And with their dying breath whisper secrets into the dirt and not our flesh
we can open our arms without fear of dropping what we are already losing
And wrap them around another who knows and feels the same as we
And for once in our lives
Not be alone