Package on your Doorstep

Package on your Doorstep

I want to speak a life’s story in a whisper

Without discernable syllable or length

Just an inserted pebble of a memory to deposit in your thoughts

Like a bread crumb for you to find uncovered beneath a toadstool of time

Shifting over for your inspection as if always there and now exposed

Discovered and aroused suspicion has fostered a collision

Between our paths laid out like railroad tracks years ago

But only now exposed as a considered method of traveling

Between you and I

The task of explaining and refraining from burying any chance of us

Under my spider web concerns is exhausting at the front

Like a package left on a door step with a labyrinth of instructions

That I pray upon patience for Cinderella to read

And I want to erase and chase someone asking me to read their own

Inklings of a parallel path like a road map of all of that

Matters in the crux of time of a her and I

Are now afterthoughts despite all the scribbling it is better off living

In a now of how all these colors sprinkled outside the lines of these pages

Blue on a rainbow of where I can go and so undefined

In mind that pebble was just an appetizer of the life her

And I could confide of conversations alive

Rejected Sentiment

Rejected Sentiment

Rejection like a counterweight expelled

No longer a ball and chain boot to trudge

Through the spasm of wondering what will happen

Festering conjecture of all that bleeds and levers

Clean like simple cream splashed on and lapped up

Soup of this cramped chicken coup

Can break apart and stumble to pieces

Because I must leave this heap of questions

Back under some replacement floor of lessons

Tiled down in flipped frowns to know

This may work and I will go or it may not and I will show

A sense of independent bliss to grow on from this

It is not about opportunity, but opportunity for others

To balance in fashion build a new and crash them

Behind like bowling pins rejection catapulting into

Separate bins of discarded lessons

Harmless like puppies or kittens kenneled up

And purring for sympathy, but no matter how familiar

I know my enemy

Last Exit for Worm Food

Fears like caverns in the distance

Spectral out there like beacons of inevitable failure

Knowing the shining light ahead

Is my last exit before the finality of empty

Wanting to sit idle, peddle in singularity

Resting on time as if all potential outcomes

Scrape the soul like hydrogen peroxide on a second grade skin-shredded shin

Where the administrator knows the benefits and the applicant is all regrets

Bellowing for another avenue, but the last stop is still good for you

Grilling on my shortened end why do I have to go through this again

Loneliness like a forest nest of a balding eagle up in a tree

Watching the understory go on without me

Wanting to stay up here out of fear

Doubt like a blanket comfortable and ragged

Cuddled up and dragged with me on this highway

Knowing the exit is coming up sideways

What if I call out into this night and hear silence despite

My tries with underbellies of desperation

Rising like worms in the rain, what will I see if I look down in the pain

Hundreds, thousands? of purple browned lines squirming for air

Out from the grime, somehow I don’t want to know what is buried

Just let me stay, just let me stay alone in this frayed stance

Wishing I could go back, wishing all of that was different, that kindness had listened

The first time, that fun had an upside that I ever felt the benefit of doubt

Instead of an elixir of rain drop turning my stomach like a puppet inside out

Bent with my mouth in my ass trying to speak but some how she laughs

So distorted for trying as if God only gave beautiful people options

Voices worth hearing and a box you could get out from

Shudder in height wanting to grow taller in the night time

Like a princess with a pea, if only the obstruction could be removed

Progress would continue to its original intended outcome

Of towering and showering the world with the same words from a revived perspective

All the crowds would gather to hear as if simple stature could clear

Out doubt like a cleansing flood with the length to rise my head above

The suffocation of Earth, this worm could rise and breath and find

Shelter and not a concrete reverb heating the insides in inescapable solitary contact

Arizona

I overestimated your heart as if carrying around my counterpart

Like an oil tanker, cavern of an interstate at night in an Arizona desert

Open for miles with the blackest sky and tumble weed drives

Blowing a colder than expected wind rustling mixed images

On the fringes of expectations waiting for melting days

Dripping out would be wax skin like candles expiring

Eggs in a skillet asphalt expanse just waiting for you to ask

A question back staring at that egg man

Dangling on the bottom tip of the crescent moon

Fishing for your emotions and plunking the cork

Felt like a gushing steam of Colorado

Breaking down the mountain’s tongue licking down

From Paris to Rome and seeing me in that sand all alone

Pulling my feet right off the edge of that lunar bench

Fling me down like a sacrament; snap my limbs against the dunes

Burry me under all those grains, completely full

No need to breathe or even conceive a mirage

But justice shows ten years gone and now I now

The splendor was a sliver, a drop from a canteen

Could keep me from seeing the life you were living

Using me for a pick you up like a vagabond hunched over in the back of a pick up truck

Passing through sympathy for a second glance with lies about the happen stance

And the food-colored love just doesn’t taste the same

Without all this sand in my eyes

Turn around, drop me off back here in the dunes and

This time I will find my way out of here on my own,

Stand up and stake my claim on a golden pan right here in my own hands

Spit these specks of you right of my lips and dead end dreaming, I’m gone, I’m gone,

I’m gone, I’m gone, I’m gone

Aneurism Lurking

I sit here afraid of the swell like a lurking home invasion

Silent behind a curtain with my own butcher knife

As if I rush in to flip the lights on or nonchalantly clank my keys into the bowl

The cobra will strike with a piercing and a thumping

A slither in my brain up a river of my blood steam

Flopping through my cerebellum like a porcupine in a zip lock bag

Unleashed from a cortex den of synapse leaped and ravaged

With quills rocketing off like New Year’s Eve for near death experiences

An aneurism sponsored on the elevation of the systems core

With the pipes wheezing and the joints whistling

As the adjoining bolts pop like kernels singed

Evacuated for the plant closure and the five o’clock buzzer

For down time, out of control and patience melting

And the year blanks out into absurdity

As if the time to amend the story to edit the memory

The fringes of my life have seen the sand collect in full

At the bottom of this glass and she may never know her father

Beyond what is written in a computer file, pictured in a jpeg

Or ingrained into a subconscious memory unearthed in a

Sentiment expressed at sixteen on a dance floor for a replacement

Hand to hold and shoulder to soak in the moment

Is it possible the flood is just on the horizon,

After the hurricane, the house, the betrayal,

The coring of all that I knew to be true

My own health will now abandon me as well?

Shattered Snowflakes

Crackling on the fringe of breaking

Can not think of all the misplaced messages taking

Tangents like breaks in the pavement

Fissures for speed bumps, caverns for back shoves

Like missiles launched from behind, exploding at my weakest time

My shields are drained so low the slightest blow could knock me out

For the longest count of days mixed up in this vision of

White bread ignorance red blood bled over skin

Like vampire tears off huddled in some sequestered corner

Abandoning sunlight for starvation of a core wasting away

Day after day of mirror-only sight, explanations

Shivering for daylight like some medicine of afterthoughts

Bottled up in a winery for soured grapes and maple leaves

Maybe December is coming and I don’t want the trees

To shed their clothing standing naked for all to see

Pale sap dripping from an aperture sticky and as open as

The naked city bustling with faces like snowflakes coming

With the light attached like burned up match sticks

All taken up, stories told and strewn about

The sidewalk like pick up sticks in red, blue and green

From frosted faces sticking up my scene

Where can I have a side to state my peace within the crease?

Of shedding leaves rumbling with tumble-weed speed

Bowling balls of clogged up emotional drain pipes

Flung like Rochambeau finding logic in the inane

Is this any way to live like a fortress in Maine?

With icicles growing like whiskers on the border of my home

Trickling for questions to try on new outfits for skinny dipping in thirty below

Exposed like shattered crystals scattered across the sidewalk

Frost broken for heated steps and back tracking regrets

Of knowing there is no knowing of all the traps of spring secretly growing

Of ice-cold roots and stolen bamboo forests where pandas broke through

To run around the back yard like super heroes on patrol in magic unfurled

Like a flag of then and now and I don’t know how

To make a painted bear fly with her and I, to tell her

I can not make it change and Anna begins to see

This fractured part of me trying to hang on by the threads

Of ripped clothing just to pray it mends

Moving me like a satellite of what I might

Have been and then it disappears with the rotation

And I can not mention the turning planet like a magnet of attrition

It is coming and I can not replace what is missing

Only add to a difference that no one wants except the Mrs.

Envelope Lead Head

Smile like an envelope sitting on a counter

Ready to send off without a mailing address

Limp and creased blank in speech

Wondering the space to unleash like a

Whisper-silk emotion passing wrapped in white-paper loneliness

Stagnant and breaking for a set of fingertips

To grip the edges of transport and added ink a lick and a moving street

To the bags of jumbled expressions confused about the order

Of lettering and numbers mumbled with return to sender monologues

Repeated adnauseum in blind response

That words are read in blocks with only the first and last making contact

As if the insides don’t matter in the understanding of the extremities

And just looking around I can see where I stand

In face in stature and extrapolated back the path to here

Her letter known and crashes across my confidence

Like a tower tipping wrecking ball that I was nothing special

In looks, in soul in all of whole, and if not to here then who?

Who in this world could respond differently?
Paper like lead, moving like granite abandoned in head.

Pumpkin

Malaise like caked on dirt in February

On a hollow pumpkin teetering on a window sill

Gazing out of a two bedroom apartment

With jeans and socks scattered like accruements

Of abandoned concern with all the dresses left

Waiting for re-deployment into more robust closets

After an eventual phone call, marching orders

Or catastrophic intervention to re-adjust the

Gravitational forces off the balcony

In a fit of freedom from clock-locked referendums

To travel there and back like an automat pumping quarters for

Repetitive motion, put cheese in front the wheel to urge the

Rodent to run to keep the lights on, from day job to

Night fevers and chills blanking out the ceiling in a pit of black
Pills not even taken to feel the effects of knowing there is nothing

Left here in this shell, just an orange jack-face with crooked teeth

And a desperate maze of scuttled strands of amber pulp

Maybe someone will find this apartment preserved in perfect crust

With the television screaming and the blinds raised staring at

Nothing but this cities haze of smog and a life’s epilogue

Aleutian Ice float

Maybe I am not meant to understand the sentiment

Of throwing a scribble of the middle of a plastic name and

A placid claim with generic speak to stand back and blow the meek

Mickey Mouse appearance to put on hats and shows

To let no body know a personality of any kind, but generality

Could be anybody trapped in a flesh and blood carrier

Bare of any real concerns perfect for you to mold and turn

Into a fantasy or a nightmare to show you all of nothing, but facade

Can not hurt me or hurt you because I might as well be a blank tissue

Sitting in the box, fluffy and cuddly, but eventually not

Covered in the darkest secrets I would rather not tell

So why don’t I just come out and tell you right from the start

But then would you pick me used and burnt

Got to swindle what wins and whistles the beginning of the race

Going to run out there like flowers unfazed to give you someone to chase

As if I could be your dream, but then again I don’t even have the face

The height or beauty despite the lie and the inflection of changing

My voice just for our own protection to step there to a second level

Of actually speaking I think I might just be leaving out here adrift

On this ice float going to go kamikaze Eskimo knowing better for my place

Is out here cold and thawing too slow to ever feel

Going numb in secret why should I even excrete a semblance of a sentence

About me, loser of a bet I haven’t kept to even have a wager parlor to take it yet

But if you say you know before you go then a conversation in tune inside only

Two ears instead of four will get you twisted all the way to a core

Of lonely on an isle of one, frozen for knowing you have done

Nothing but plastic because you couldn’t bare to ask if

Any of this made sense, if any of this was preventative

Digital Edit

So I see you have changed your name and all the same

Please get off my letters collected as if you ever had the order

Placed just set there for a temporary stay

I bet your father is ecstatic to have his claim re-intact

Printing up placards and business cards to hand out at funerals and birthdays

And every stranger on the streets walking away never felt so clean

To rid the shove and power over the crust to flake the taint of me off

Like burnt pastry flecks on an otherwise scrumptious éclair

But only I know the filling and you are playing the dare

Appearances and lengths of deception like an orbit for secret satellites

Who the hell are you out there in the cosmos?

Is there a distance to fall before gravity applies to your emotions?

As if any had pertinence or reference or you ever had qualms about

Refusing to explain why or when or how any of this could ever fall upon the ground

Because you intend to spend all your time up there above the atmosphere

In the corners of darkened space searching for moon rocks hoping to break

Silence in three thousand and twelve, just before the dinosaurs return

To cure cancer with ray guns and carnival prize sized paper tigers

Dispensed on the street corners with tiny notes attached with

Your rekindled name under the title compliments of

Wow, how amazing to grace us with your sentiments and splendor

To be within earshot to bask in the glow of the great pretender

Will the gravity be your kryptonite to soften the core, to shed emotion

Like a fissure for stores of pent up delusions or apathy whispered in a tidal wave

Of nothing limping out the gates for the harbinger of hollow

That love for you is like a narcoleptic vagabond estranged in a closed box car

Traversing a line from San Francisco to New York pin-balling back and forth

For years on end never to be seen or acknowledged because there is no room

For him in all your arrogance, saying you are probably going to hell

And then trucking on to tell how justified, you could do all of this without a fight

For us at all to ask for reparations or a second chance to make it right

Just rocket off out there into the oblivion of Saturn, leave your ring by the sink

Without a blink of where it was or when you plunked it out into the brink

Of silence you have left me with, extinct as the dinosaurs never to return

Buried in a past and a December for me to learn who you really are

In a flash like a meteor shower blanketing the sky impending black midnight on you and I

Never seeing it coming, never finishing my drink just sitting in a rocking chair

Holding the missing link

Like a lock of hair, like a whisper on a pillow,

Like brown eyes reflecting an unspoken story of all the lines that you have been hurling

Behind the fence line in a garbage pile for me to find after the maggots have had their fill

Never knowing what was there to begin or whatever will make sense in a thousand years

Just a flash in the sky of gravity taking effect on one of us on a crash and burn

The Rape of Quasimodo

The hunchback sits up in the bell tower ignorant and free

Waiting for the sunrise of her sweetness, not the tide of his enemy

Coming in with mutiny and damage on the stack

Foolish in the foundry of why she was coming back

And out come her words like wolves from the den

Slumped over in our living room hearing it all come to its end

Scattered emotional ball bearings rolling across the hard wood flooring

Like sprung traps of dizzy days peppered in consequence exploding

Some idle, some futile, some bitter, and others like the rape of my soul

Hating myself for this oblivion, this wretched coring burrowed into my being

Like a plunger of nothingness spiraling in pumping its pistons and extracting

Everything I have ever hoped for or had faith in out in droplets of deceit

Decorating the oak boards like an indoor rain storm weather pattern beyond my choice

Playing poke-a-dots with the normally placid surface servicing as temporary landing

Space for miniature menageries, doctor kits, coloring contests and daddy back rides

But tonight is an exorcism of trust for the high priestess in high heels

To utter chants in as few syllables as possible to segregate any last molecule of concern

From her body and let it cascade down onto the floor boards to intermix and hide out

In the crowd of waste matter left of me waiting to be squished like grapes

Between her toes as she dashes for her escape in minutes to come

And chaos and confusion battle it out for supremacy

Like trying to herd in renegade sheep back to the fences

As she keeps pulling out her chainsaw to shred gaps in the gates

The moon just keeps on rising knowing how many will be missing in the morning

Searching inside my recollections for a silhouette of her to frame upon my memory

As if she ever was that person making vows for better or worse all the days of her life

As if she ever was on that green sofa or

Two steps from the curb in front the Notre Dame accepting a proposal

As if going in and praying God could see this day and could not warn me

As if taking sides is beyond the boundaries of labels

As if rape victims were really asking for it

As if promises are a function of depleted convenience

If she could make me as empty inside as her sense of responsibility

The vapid expanse between us could consume the truths of

This old life like a black hole immense in gravity and

No one would ever have to speak of them again,

But memories are like roots shooting up through the soil and out through these

Hard wood floors like canopies in a living room searching for sunlight

Like a blood hound oak expanding creating its own understory in time

That in retrospect we all can see the what, the how, the why

Maybe in time confide an explanation, a ribbon of truth like a belated band aid

On the red swell knowing I have been spoiled for the reality of what love should be

That the memory of my rapist haunts my private times like a sadistic intruder

Hovering to remind me of my worthlessness that

I had poured my everything into the fruition of an us and

Her dreams were like quests of testaments to our inverted priority lists that

I yearned to map out into golden years

And all her other plans stored in her parent’s basement mock me

Like a high school prank to elect the nerd home coming king

And Quasimodo always knew Esmeralda was only visiting, but a boy could dream

And I hold the lambs like infant lions struggling to make it to the morning

And one day she won’t be the she that sets the sunrise in my eyes

The bell tower will ring, the congregation will exit, and a man will stand up straight

In the Event of My Funeral (A Living Will)

Maybe I will be here maybe I will not,

But if I kick this can under a train to the pancake face splattered

Or an explosion in my neural matter

I want you to read this at my ash burial procedure post-cremation

With disbursement of my scarred innards and bones

That were not able to be sold on EBay to support the greater charities of this earth

Like the A. D. guilt-free fund so here I bequeath

My Magic cards to my brother so he can sell them for the pursuit of rock and roll

This world with a smile and soul earnest and honest to keep his promise

Of that Cyclops card on a blue carpet hallway that there are lines you can cross

As long as you accept the consequences of what might be lost

Being yourself is always worth the chase and come what may

In the lawn over by whoever has bothered to come please get

A Sharpie pen, a poster board and raised high for all to relay that today

The greatest bastard to ever live is now laid to rest,

Please put some stars and sparkles and let me know if the press shows

By shoveling melting Fruiti pops on my remains

And in monastic collective chant belt out, “Two Fifteen” a dozen times

Throw in a copy of Rancid’s “And Out come the Wolves” and something from my daughter.  Set me to life and everybody hold hands like grade school and sing

Corazon de Oro from Rancid’s “Life Won’t Wait” album

And if I found her by this point in time than let her shed a tear

And somebody hold her hand

For my daughter, I want you to go find that brown bear we put your stuffed

Animals in when you were five and have Uncle Greg roll you around in it with

Your bike helmet on if you want down a hill or somewhere near by

And laugh loud enough to cry if you need to

To my friend Jason, I want you to bring a full Deanie’s seafood platter and pick a partner and eat the whole thing in one sitting in front of everybody and have them cheer the two of you on, At the end I want everybody to raise a glass to say

“He had the metabolism of a hamster on methamphetamines in high school

All hail gluttonous consumption of crustaceans and fried breaded shards of sea life!”

And if A shows up tell her to wear a jack o lantern on her head

Because she was always a two-faced Halloween costumed persona who fooled me

For so long hollow and rotting out from the inside, please let her know that I would

Have forgiven her if only she genuinely asked, but she would have to approach a frozen hell when she makes her own exit for that to probably happen

So I have kept these words until now because there is no place left for me to keep them, but given that she is hearing them, tell her in a big bad ass voice,

“I can no longer forgive you and you have hurt me more than anyone ever has, May everyone here turn around form a line hold you down and spit in your mouth”

The way Mike did to me when I was six, and if she fails to show please put the pumpkin on a pedestal and spit in the it just the same.

To my mom and dad, you were great parents, to mom I forgive you for almost letting me choke to death at that swim meet and I am asking you now to say Amadeus Amadeus,

Amadeus, Amadeus until you start laughing,

Dad please make up all the conspiracy theories about my death because some how they are all true and read them aloud to the crowd and get Mike to yell out random Hell yeas at intervals in your speech, just because it makes it funny and please God laugh, laugh

And know that death is random and inevitable and nothing for metaphors because the dead don’t write metaphors to give valid comparisons to be included in literature

And at the end of whatever reverent and solemn stuff you want to fill in the blanks with,

I want everyone to stand up and scream at the top of their lungs a one two three count and then the words, “Not my Honda Viva la E, Viva la resistance.”

Oh and please have this printed real big or on a projection screen so that everyone can read it and know that these were my wishes and no one is crazy but me or

Trying to dishonor my memory except for the Atlanta Falcons, who can all go to hell. 

Go Saints. Go.

Afterwards please have a reception playing sixties soul music from Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, as well as 90’s punk from Rancid, a few Avett Brothers Song including Murder in the City and stuff from Greg’s selections

Add a roundtable of everyone in the room blurting out one of the following three words as loud as they can, Shamalamadingdong, Cock-knocker, or Snot-blaster, and

When all irreverence has dispatched please light a match and burn some of my old clothes in a pile just to see the flames.  Then walk away move on and watch it all on videotape when you miss me. 

And in the end I would like to be cremated and made into cigarettes with little labels that say death sticks and either kept in a make shift box that says things about me on Greg’s mantle or mailed to George Lucas.

Blue eyes and blue skies

Your face wafts like morning blades cradling dew

While running in the park on a Saturday morning

Waiting for days adventures, hillsides and palisades leaped

For no other reason than to see the actions of parallel universes

Commencing beyond visual representations

The smell of auburn zeal on an outlook unpeeled,

Dunking life on a malachite of natural hands and indigo eyes growing in fruition

Of a transparent mission honest as an ambition

Walking in pace to hear my name in novelty,

Hold for a pause and interest like an adjacent clause to the story of all that was ever said was somehow moving on lips of apple red promised for simplicity with all the momentum of a whirlwind of here to Hawaii and all the smiles of New York skylines

Blended and some how sent with a classic grip of Otis Redding and fumbling towards Grace in lines extended appearing without exertion on the flex of a metatarsal

Set to flight in a pledge liberated in exuberant sunshine unfolding in disguised effort

Icarus hoping with tepid wax joyous of possibility on the fringe of the sunset

Crafting tonight into a memory stashed away in shoe boxes with love letters

Scripted on sage blunders discovered like fingertips on the small of a back

Making circles of movement undulating in rhythm of undertones

Like drum beats of cracking open the yolk of feeling alive once again

After three hundred more days of flaccid white stark and plastic plight

Mailed out rent envelopes of stashed away stasis and stale carpet rug burns

The yellow movement jolts the senses like fresh citrus to the nostrils

Cayenne to the tongue and reverberating opening timpani overtures

To pinball attention in my bones with the startling reminders of possibility

That the chatter of squirrels could be silenced by the prance of the fawn

In lines extended of exquisite movement above the fuzz of clustered myopic fixation

On the time and placement of the flashes of the idiot boxes next apparition

To disguise a life magnanimous in earnest pursuit of beauty in delicate application

Through the intrinsic language of identity revealed in purpose and relaxation

Of the gates of hardened defenses with lances withdrawn as armored dances end

To cease the pomp and pass the lager, raise the heel and become the talker of tales

Of loves lost and swindled from courage unearthed and fires kindled

Letters to the wind

Letters to the wind carried out like parchments on the ankles of owls

Racing for the sunrise to whisper in sentiments like fairies in her ears

To guide dreams with the thoughts of flower petals pollinated

Prayed out truths could uncover consequence in response

Which once stirred in either resolute direction would either execute

My hopes like razorblades performing morning duties or

Open waterfalls from damnation uncorked and spouting fervor to the

Valleys and grasslands below to germinate and explode in

Shadows of new life extrapolating upon a logarithm of what could be

And desperation looms like a murder flocking in the sky

Lathering to peck at my exposed flesh rotting out in wait

For word that never returns that another overture was released and

This parade of silence keeps on marching with stick-less drummers and

Maimed guitar players strumming string-less mandolins

Parched and famished gasping for contact

Chocking on isolation with dust on the tongue,

Holding services for a drop or the implication of the colored twinge

In the sky of a forming cloud a pink-hued sunset of an Indian dream

Dancing for rain pellets traded for sacrifices of years pilled up

Like buffalo carcasses stripped of every sinew and applied for every use

To maximize resources in this Mojave valley depleting with every syllable

Inked out and flown on the backs of elephant seals equipped with cupid extremities

Arrowless bows and dangling noses like shields

From avoiding potential for conversing in this wrinkled perception

Like one big tinted window crowded out in a car locked with the key

Sitting on the top of the right front Goodyear with a man in a straight jacket

Bobbing like a worm on the hook in the driver’s seat praying for someone to notice

His predicament like a Christmas robbery in a parking lot where

No one stops to stare and the twinkles of the season keep the

Speakers moving to a soundtrack muted out to all inside the car

Thirsting, thirsting, thirsting and hopes shaved as dawn approaches

The benefit of error

Thirty-one years and no one has ever fought for me

Beyond my own blood lines

Given me the benefit of error

Of lashing out, of stumbling prematurely

To recover my footing in the benefit of their doubt

To pursue my approval with nervous tension

To endure the specter of actual concern over my choices

As if I had the power to walk out on their hope

And squelch it between my toes as my feet

Moved in an opposite direction

That prayed upon my return with an elevated heart rate

That would chase me down and beg me to reverse course

When I elected to utilize the freedom to act irrationally

That wrote their soul in ink and spread it out upon the page

Like a plea of conscience to barter breathing in duality

I have never had those powers of omnipotent options over anyone

My applications for the reverse position have gone out

Like coronary bypass operations dislodging dysfunctions in my machinery

And gone unrequited on every occasion in perpetuity

I am so weary like a catapult with a tension band

Stretched to its geriatric limitation on the fringe of unleashing

All sense of self control into a room of nothing

Desperation sticks to my skunk-skin like a genetic repellent

Signaling weakness prompting drivers to exchange lanes into oncoming traffic

To avoid exposure, and I am caught in a head on collision between rambling and silence

Uncertain as a fawn approaching autumn acknowledging winter’s grip

Like a blanket of absolute white polishing off every speck of foliage,

Marked territory or apple blossom for a pale canvas devoid of all markings

But my own unanswered hoof prints

Gut decision

When all instincts say to lay down, my compulsions rise

Like a drug addict’s demons praying for solace in the escape

Of irrational action trying to find a gap in this hedge maze

To find ruination just off the grip of my potential

To pull it in like a teddy bear of days and nights

Recreating infancy in clutched uncertainty

Wanting to find ration like a lion knowing the lioness does all the hunting

Yet championing such regality in uncensored movements

Knowing I am the king of nothing, not even the rain

Guessing in seconds, triples and pellets falling in staples

Bursting into discontent of disconnect

Hopelessness like a welcome mat shown like the words

Communicated after work each evening

All I ever see is what comes out of me

Sides like tender holds wanting my innards to explode

Leach upon the floor like the excreted nonsense

Contained with in could begin to exit my system

Forever, change the oil of a body, put something more proficient in

Or at least a one in a thousand days, held at never

Feeling as ugly and unlovable as God’s unanswered prayers

Falling back into the hearts of cowards banking on hope

Fishing in despair, make a life in the lottery of free will

Knowing misconception is the rationalization that pays the bills

To keep myself from stating the obvious, that no one ever will

Change the map of this, the kraken cracked the ship but it was already over with

No memories, nothing pure, empty before the ghosts floated ashore

Swim, drift, row, which ever, the indifference cascades in a parade

Of the men I will never be, brave or needed or the focus of the enemy

Just left idle, alone and unaddressed, Captain of a raft of one and the sum

Of double negative one slumped and wondering

If there is one thing anyone remembers about me and smiles as if they could take it like

A wish list stored under a pillow to keep it close to their dreams

As if I would ever show up some place and mean more to them then

They did to me, this December is never ending and

I can’t help but keep pretending there is an answer searching for my question

Asking, Asking and knowing no one has ever mentioned

Pioneer Town

I don’t believe in romantic atheism

I suppose that is a detriment to my character

I have never been able to locate the stable

For my white horse assigned before birth

However, baring my soul to reach out in naked plea

From atop a donkey in street light manifestos

Is fraught with a virus of ineptitude

Setting off trip wires of need, negating the reciprocal pursuit

I am staggered by my belief in old bovine theories,

Where the haggard are made into hamburger

While one bull inseminates the entire herd of heifers

Only to practice all avoidance once the spread is complete

And he is replaced by another ordained stud

Like a pheromone release catapulting olfactory pellets

Of subsurface desperation like relationship repellent

Into the brain once effort is extended all need for interest

Is negated with absolute termination of sentimentality

Concern or romantic reciprocation

Pathetic kindness stitches the doormat 

As if it is the thread of neutrality sewing the fabric

Bathed in beige that belies all context for concern

From anyone moving through detaching the mud from their soles

Like speckles of nonchalant accoutrements

I may be the last cowboy to believe in romance

A troubadour at the last pioneer town bar

Begging for a solitary audience snuggled on a stool

Waiting on a window like a daffodil in winter

For an eardrum for my chalice of syllables

Dribbling the beats in reverberating waves

Expanding her irises with hooked accords

Raising the partnered apex of the edges of her smile

The moon wanes like an envelope closing

Stories written and messages mailed with the fruition

Of misguided hopes, as if the return address contained transposition errors

Knowing the cold code of re-writes and edits into the witching hour

To assure the author of every opportunity for an earnest presentation

Would have all but prevented such crimes of numerology

And the cowboy rides into a black still wind like a block of empty

Brushing his cheeks back erasing external semblance of a curvature

Flat and stark staring into the streetlights out of place on asphalt

With hooves clopping in a fatigued arrhythmia

Staggering to find a new song

Slow Cooker

A couple in their kitchen parceling a recipe in stages

Butcher block of chopped pork and cut bell peppers

Ringing for a sizzle slopped on a cook top and finished in the oven

As the heat swelters the metal rattling sauce pan teeters on

The fringe as the covered lid undulates up and down, up and down

A home with so many sterile lions in wait, accoutrements in drawers

Piping in secret and one day four knives lie in silence expecting

Sliced swine are held and taken half in her hands

One for left, one for right centimeters from his throat

Like a blanket of blades to secure her position

And yet he had no intention of moving

Time ticks and he sits four legs of a chair with no tilt

And a microphone with his child and his wallet held to his Adam’s apple

Patient as staring a lioness down with out sound hoping a sniper exists

Out in the grasslands popping up like a magistrate meerkat

With a judicial decree of desist

Autumn comes, his legs slumping, but steady.  The blade of his daughter

Rattles to the ground as she hugs his pant leg in tears

In a minute measure of release he pauses to spasm the ease of breathing normally

His neck tinges crimson as the other rapier sets just as steady in her left

Reminded of the distance to freedom as his bank account remains bifurcated

His house from hardy plank into concrete as the prison door clangs

The oven timer is beeping incessantly, the meat dried into leather

He waits for her to lower her guard so he can pop up and turn the tables

Of fear into angered revenge carried out in this unspoken clutter

By marching out in an in-prompt-to escape for clean utensils

Pondering the needs for either a taxidermist or a real estate agent.

Yet he stands measuring his breaths

Common Place

Afraid of staring in a mirror of make up and remixed faces

Smeared over this place mat of a countertop

Cluttering by the minute with shoe boxes filling up in the closet

With more sleeping over and spilling into the undercurrents

Of what gets stored without sheathing or room for breathing

Sheets washed or feeling that need to clean

Before as if company is a connotation for her arrival depleting

All of this becoming more normal, common place

Sliced onto the tongue into a less provincial taste

Smoothing like cotton over satin, bronze over platinum

Beautiful but star light fading for a hue of malaise craving

Twenty second showings and knowing over-coats

Arms in like anesthetized footsteps around conversations

Stacked in the corner of the known erasing what could have been instead

Like concrete over fairy dust constructing where I am

Instead of where I could be, drifting, drifting away from

A past and into and into and in between of a here and now

Knowing this is not the every thing of where I want to hit a finish line

Waiting for the scandal of holding my hands out to pull down the handle

On the airplane door mid flight, pick up the parachute strap it on and

Plummet right where ever the wings are gliding

A thousand stories high and there I make indiscriminate decisions

Where I am no longer the one absorbing victim, but dispensing the serve

Like a catapult turning its trajectory on his own troops

Boulders come bowling plopped out and rolling

Clump, clump, dump frump heads smashed and a belated check

Of days of getting bullet holes in faded clothes

Turnaround on someone new retribution that had nothing to do

With her, but feels like a misdirection revenge and

I wouldn’t be able to help but cringe at actions folding out

Like origami of a Sumatran tsunami thunder under-quake

And drama in me like my hand in a wave brushing over

The shore lines of her dreams like a comb to claw it all

Back into the sea of what will not be

I don’t want to be the monster like the giant rock lobster

Clawing up and sparing no survivors gone off for nothing

On the bottom of this ocean just waiting for my own wooden purgatory

First Impression

First Impression

Calculating out an exit entry point like a mathematic of

Ticking towards presenting the statue of a man

He dreams to be for her as if fractures in this stone could heal

Like biology unleashed in metamorphic metamorphosis

Flesh from granite and warming known under

Hands moving from sculpted pose

This moss grown on collected and fired off with drugs internal

Hair follicles molded from rust with limbs with empty palms gone

Plain and steady concrete feet watered down and ready

In the presentation to frame that first impression

Like a portal opened and no return to the wonderland of the unknown

Naked with wardrobe chosen and a night of mention

In the history of notes of anecdotes fumbling out

Like marbles in a mouth

Rolling out onto the gallows floor between her and he

A tablecloth and all the thoughts

Of nuance and paramour intertwined are on the line

To burn up like wax stacked in the middle

Of a circle in a pillar of flickering tongues

Tattling a script of what is to come

Ants Marching

Ants Marching

Pretending I do not expect to sustain this loneliness

Like a fractured ankle to my pace and stride bending and grinding bone on bone

Realizing the alternative will end up in the stare down

With retribution like loaded ammunition fired off in household maintenance

Must do’s and rationalizations stored under stair board compartments

Pressed down and glued with instructions

Mapped out on pressed down no popcorn ceilings

Perfectly molded tinted and primed the colors clearly in line

Red next to white not overlapped predictable metrics

Stacks of cook books and measures, recipes written

Cat food set out cans waiting to be dispensed

Every morning in a murmured routine of all the flavors that will ever be

Coagulated tuna and salmon on tin, preserved tastes

Buried within the incorrect answer given and accepted without question

Or worry that all of this was granted in too big a hurry to

Follow up queries lingering on door steps knocking and abandoned

No more listening for the salesmen trying to remind us

About true love and fantasies about unicorns and legends of champions

Of fantastic times and gilded lives, played out and prancing

With questions we should have been answering

Compacted into perfect conclusions despite these blinded illusions

Ants marching right into the grease fire, burning alive with the smell in the feelers

Tapping the Earth for a different path, the tread heating up six legs and two lives

With one heart and tender lies

Fourteen

Fourteen stands like an obelisk, mounted and towering

An inverted pyramid of burgeoning days of intersected angled lines

Expanding in opposing directions sixty degrees

In equitable divergence of new found land days

Wetting beaches as novel for numb pilgrim legs

Glances and looks, lottery tickets cashed across classrooms

Chalk boards and non-parental chauffeurs motoring about

With hymns of rebellion, sex, and recompense

In wait for pubescent mistakes lingering in the background

Of uncensored sounds making their rounds

Into afterthoughts magnetized and remembered in years lost

Antiheroic and puissant, potent and crucial that

Every sight, smell, sign from there to here

Stacks up in that inverted pyramid magnified like an exponent of then

Where every new sense no matter the year will filter through that angle

First, remembered always, the fog of the middle, but the beginning is so clear

Of all the love, the purpose of life flicked the flint in those days and nights

Sparks of start, the flames of heart set afire into pyres of years

Of all our loves and greatest fears exemplified smoldering down to die

Like pole vaulting up a ladder of Fahrenheit the flame will never

Streak as high on those Technicolor lives

Fourteen years and the colors change, spring has come and

Pheromones rage, car crashes looming and reading the next page

Of story books parents avert the eyes and now children can look

Without being explained why just diving in with barracuda swims

Floundering limbs flailing in choppy waters

Grabbing breaths in the undulating quarters of time where peace

Escapes into your soul in parceled flotation devices of control

Tossed out like Mardi Gras cups to the beautiful, the athletic and gregarious

The parade, the crowd thirsts to share in praying for fresh water

And not the salt spit out and thrust into the cult of vagabonds

And castrated masses sitting out staring at the prized ponies prancing

Inside the fences drinking from the well and the sun’s smell of

Peaches and cream skin and the secrets blooming in

The eyes of colts bucking and setting the trends and living in

Fourteen and on the scene to Sixteen, Twenty one and the fun is shattered in the ladder

Getting there and the patter of hallways has dissipated from an ocean into a trickle

And where have the vagabonds walked beyond the cripples

Seen the scars of every living fish, the hook marks and busted lips

All the same, with all the scales scrapped and raped as childhood abates