The Obvious

I have been waiting my whole goddamned life for you to show up
Ok
So you get it now
Somethings are obvious

They hit you like shattered bar lights out of nowhere
The sky falls, rains glass, sparks fly
Electrify a dormant longing
That you've sat with in long discourse

As the specter on the pillow on the other side of the bed
The soft foolishness of recognition
How could I not know?
All this gesturing on dance floors

Swearing at satellites to false moon goddesses
Searching for nature's complement
Flush in gorgeous blood and skin passionately ready
The scars and madness

The torment of longing for a set of eyes
To stare into across a table enraptured in memory
Like medicine for the peril of dying without drinking
From the well we all hope to find in our own time

This is music appearing to begin to play
Realizing this is the melody always in the background
Of everything one has ever known
Surfacing into the foreground

Found in a pair of eyes and skin and yes
At stake in a present moment to declare
I want to try
I will take on the terribleness of the shitshow with you

A tribe life mate, face to face, humble and exalted
Healing and growing in the madness of declaring love
This is the audacity of knowing what one wants
And who one is with another human complement 

hard space

I never seen a feeling from a woman
That in retrospect had vulnerability in it
That if you go
I will feel loss

There is a manner of exchange
A price for presence
To know to be
Accrues a personal debt

That if this is not to be
One surrenders to feel
A space is created to fit
The act of holding

This is where feeling nests
In the thatch of broken aliveness
The egg yolk messiness
The stared heart invests

There is a look
I have seen feeling from a woman
In the way viewing other men
The look exists in this space

Wanting
And when I think of these eyes
I think of hope but most so
What the lack of this space appears

In hard indifference 

Three minutes past

One held breath, staring a clock past midnight, with a pinch of warm ache behind eyelids, remembering the nauseating flavor of hope swishing in aged spit. Two crumpled missives pasted into internet slurry dangling in retort to contradictory responses. Three resignations cumulatively folded into the self, knowing the odds of the bug crawling all the way across the desk before thumb and index fingers smear its exposed body are nil. Somehow the insect does! Applauded by soundlessness recognizing the spectators have all become preoccupied. For today I was a man and will become a boy again, into the sexless invisibility, praying to wallpaper and watching fan blades with a dry tongue.

Hope is

Hope is the most sinister of addictions.

Taste the elixir of safety on the tongue

Bubbles of might populate space taken

To be outside the normalized confines

A man rests child pose on beige carpet

Head to floor facing away from the computer screen

As his American god

No answers in the digital scrolls

The patient agony of expectation

For letters to materialize form the ethereal witchcraft

Of a specified other human’s choice to type

And alter the dreams of another human being

There is a parceled swallow of routine

Disrupted by the hope fuming its way into the parlors of thought

Rumbling down potholed streets like a Sewerage and Water Board truck

Finally coming to fix the leaks

The dare not speaks

The iced over roots of stumped trees

The warnings of best be this way as not to arouse suspicions

Of what it means to be a human wary of hope

The ecstasy and the foul bilateral pinch of the abdomen

Clenching the human form inward to recognize

The silence will remain unbroken

The stasis of this predicament ossifies

Tongue glides across implanted teeth

Stung anxious blood burns in forearms of matted hair

The urge for an adult to rationalize verbal release or tears

Or some representation of the disappointment exceeds the outer expression

For the addiction of a cumulative deficit

The pull toward hope is commensurate with hope’s unclimactic compensation

The musicality is an opera of indifference

Hummed between coronary beats, the pause in the lub dub

The stare outward into the nothing to explain

The did not start, the horror of might, the hope in the getting hopes up

The cliched acrobatics of peppered positive reinforcement

Into the ears of a human trained to second guess every decision

As no path in the labyrinth begets blood flow

The same pale moon and cold hard ground

The torn sheet and numb gaze across the horizon

The seafarer’s mirage hazy hope and full of terrors   

In the Stack

You tell yourself, “Today was just a bad day.”

Then remember one does not count, but there is still a stack of bad days.

You open up your Facebook feed to friends’ posts “Remember to be kind to yourself.”

A poet advertises a lyric t-shirt “I love you. I’ll miss you. Be careful.”

In a realm where no one talks ear to mouth.

Not alone feeling alone in the stack.

Play Pen

There is a fundamental question, do I want to be? I try hard to want to say yes, knowing the parts of me that deem it so logical to say no. These parties hold a pathetic argument. Neither wants to speak too loudly into the microphone. So I go through my days neither being or not being hazed in depression seeing little point to life, seeing my being as an anchor for others and self-isolating to minimize the collateral damage. Occasionally I can invent an illusion in digital correspondence until I say too much or too little or utter what feels like the truth at the time. I laugh at how simple a question like an infant that refuses to eat his food. Plop dumb and squalid in a stink playpen. Shit in diapers. Refuse to develop the muscles to stand and climb out.

Reruns on channel one

It is difficult to take yourself seriously when a vision of your hand holding a gun to your head and watching chunks of skull and blood fly out onto the door of the room you are sitting in replays over and over all day long no matter how you try to occupy your time. The humor of the repetition flops in every so often that this scene is always impossible for the human choosing the act to ever see. So it is suicide remains in this fantastical quality of unrealness. That is unless you survive, but even then the failure in the incomplete act stalks the actor as the goal was not to see the film, but to finally un-see it.