Dear Troubadour

My brain is not here

Dumbstruck bankrupt of want

The malaise of Monday morn stretches from the previous week torn

As if septets of rotations truncate emotional stagnation

Into the breach once more dear troubadour

I say not love; this is not love

The elixir has been spat upon the garments

The reach of forgiveness has conceded to acceptance

These travelers conjoined for an intermediate expanse

The impetus of each divergent so will be the future

No walls needed to see the impasse

The blockade harbors colonies crafting separate constitutions

The pain ousts the pleasure of January weddings

The irises sit on the table requited with the stagnant silence

The blanket is barren of vibration

The videos rotate the tide un-viewed 

Why Side Arise

You have saved me

In a human faith

I believe in you

More than any force in the universe

If there may be a greater flowing through you

So be it; you have taught me to believe

That happiness is possible

Like a countermeasure to atomic mathematics

Inertia without mass impervious to time

Dancing to bend light in reduction of explanations

To the nucleus of what love is

That I am incapable of not wanting what is best for you

Even in the absence of myself prepared for extradition

Back to the writing desk and lone wolf howls

I am exculpated in your refusal to put us into a bastion

Of what must be remembered sparingly

For to recall daily what cannot be witnessed

Would be a tortuous strife of longing

You have challenged me to be a better man

To love myself enough to be happy

To see not cancer, but muscle

I feel oxygen is your skin

Reminding me what human is

The paradoxes of atheism and Christianity dancing

Ten thousand thoughts at once

Straight forward and through the road

We each had the chance to become hardened stone   

I have seen the minute before dawn

Grasping your hand to say the word family without flinch

To do more than accept a blade in the gullet

To provide a home, meals, stability, and honest joy

To have the honor of being by your side

For my empathy with you is unbound

To know the frankness, the starkness of life’s planks

Water’s clarity of that, which we all come,

But react in varied course

I in motion inside, you out

I calm the out, you the in

Balance like positioning lips

You are my person

I choose you

As family, as always, as love 

Organic Accounts

An economy is a living organism

The stagnant waters are breeding algae, not lethargic, but desperate

For the oxygen has been strained into a cult of consolidation

Where the nearest star is ever more eclipsed by the height

Of the mounds of wealth sleeping in banks rising like eponymous elephant hills

Bearing lessons for the reluctant orators shuffling subsidized soybean and corn

At drive-through counter conversations via hands-free head-sets

For hygienically paper-wrapped plastic straws stuffed into golden-arch bags

A man owns a hotel

Breaks a bit above-even on-paper

Revenue ten million, expenses nine point ninety-nine million

What has he accomplished?

A gumbo pot starts with the roux

Fire, flour, oil, time

Thickening into the trinity of onions, bell pepper, and celery

Mixed with stock to drench either chicken-Andouille or shrimp-crab-oyster

Okra, cayenne, bay leaves, soaked with the bones and shells

The herbs to the tongue to make a winter’s grip slip into empathetic steam

Rising from bowl into the mouths of a family around a table

Spoons, bellies, and bath before bedtime for school in the morn

Mother to change the sheets of city visitors on convention

Father to drive a taxi

Children bundled up and hoping the fights in the yard don’t get too close

Just want to have a little time for recess before attending to the common core

A man does not build a hotel

Funds on sequester

An investment account for market return percentages

I think I will keep the difference

Open the shores of Mexico and Brazil to the mountains of China and Tennessee

There goes the average labor rate spread across the lowest common denominator

Rice and beans, farms and concrete, Woody Guthrie’s singing about heavy loads

In the dust rolling in stomach’s and okra brought on African produce ships

Productive value paid an official taxable wage to smile at freedom

Fountain pens and hand guns, marijuana and cotton

Foxconn and Fox news; Roger Ailes and hammering nails

Organic vegetables and a world pond

Syphoning off into a bathtub drain at the spa

Permission to be Happy

You would not let me go

You fought for us and with that the ice shattered

This permission I have been pursuing inside my volition

To love you

Fissured into a sightline in a current of your demand

That I was not negligible to your happiness

I was able to visualize the permanence you see in me

Stubborn to my skeleton

I asked for stillness

You gave me stability of comfort

Tell me you want me and you said

You wish to spend your forever by my side

The winter in my heart has thawed and I am ecstatic

Tempered in my robust enthusiasm, but pouring like a war of water

I could never combat the river’s solidity

I have waited for my spring for five years

I am flowing and I see your beautiful face as harbor

Praying in glances of common bond 

To see the seed of life come full circle

In the darkest before the dawn

I crumbled into an elixir of fear apt to sip the draught of death

Your faith in life’s bloom has let the glass slip from my cancerous fingers

The deadness is wandering to evaporation for other clouds,

But this morn I am smelling ambrosia in your embrace

This balance that I am not replaceable

Nor numbered in a fraction of forgetfulness

Has shook me to the crucible of my humanity

The chemistry of humble love registering has ensnared me in your meekness

I am breaking into sonic reverberation as the universe tolls

Let us be a family

You and me; balancing the alone inside the love

That I can be the full encompassing self I have always

And that is the man you love

I have never gone a day when I did not root for us behind my spider webs

I am drawn to you

You, me, daylight, midnight, roads, let’s roll!

For so long I saw peril in happiness; the risk of the stinger in looks

And in you I have given myself permission to be happy

Drinks on the Porch

Unquenchable sadness

Tastes like anger

When you ask God for a drink

The ripples on the surface fade

Into the stillness of November

Approaching another round

So that the evergreen sheds numb

As trees are dragged to the curb

Like closets rattling cedar hangers hollow

Questions stacked like coffee cakes

Stale and cockroach eggs for sugar sprinkles

Teaspoons scoop the cardiovascular nugget

Into summer rebounding like a concussion

From the player’s skull against the field

Sleeping is vertigo and all the skirts sway like death

Halo’s in the bar lights of iPhone illuminated cheeks

Kid in a doll house; adults in the theater

Treasure was a jester scepter, nothing to be but eyeballs

Glancing out at apparitions for the substitutions

Of wanting not and feeding nil for the inertia to hope

For legs that move beyond the blown off

Napalm and eggnog, lace cookies for the eunuch playoffs  

Glad to be ousted seeing the man hang her ornaments

The boy in his arms that has her eyes

The girl that lives across the hall from the boy that has mine

Jumbled jungle and the farm got too close, back mouse to the city 

Before the cheese jams his throat

Learning to sip and talk to a new bartender

Paid for beyond the tithe

Afraid of abandoning the silence, but it might be time

Getting into the Cab

It is you and me together.

Family

If you let go I will die.

If you understand we will dance

If not let me starve here fending bone for blood

I can partition no marrow

There is a living body or a corpse

And your body will end me to either horizon

Horizontal or vertical

The babies need a father and I intend to be the man,

Neither of us can waver as the shaft may bend

The wheat remains rooted

The weeds we will stamp

Fuck them.  I pick you.   Let’s go!

I am not able to endure another loss

So I will play as if termination is not an option

I know I will perish on the spot

If I am ever privy to the end,

I will drink, inject, vomit, sleep, crash!

The ugliness will have no mirror

Only ashen cremated laughter

So parry the blow, jungle love to shake the coconuts

Pebbles for the banker and wood to warm the chimney

If we could leave Jesus at the cab stand and just see God

I would be in heaven instead of cock blocked.

Most marriages have men before the man

Women before the woman

Ghosts in the machine campaigning for fear over love 

Let’s not pay attention and see if we can get these skeletons upstairs

Write where I want to Be 2014

You make me write where I want to be

As if the notion to pray was still in me

To see the passage of god like fingertips

Dabbling through the nuance of coincidence

For the gamblers who empower purpose past the blades of volition

Slashing from veteran tongues and novice breaths

Daring for a chocolate cone on Venice Beach as the horizon

Slurps the impossible orange cattle cade egg drop soup

Into oblivion’s haughty gurgle

You make me aspire that chocolate was palatable

To make life sweetly nuzzle past a prayer-view porch

Climb Abram’s bridge and read in the undulation

I kiss you and see this life un-dragged, questions muddled

Into the eyes of children knowing a mother loving a father

Requited into a man on a hill proud and tethered to love

From a junkyard crowned with a nation of pauper’s decadence

Singing to sleep, “It’s all right.  It’s all right.  Baby It’s all right.”