God poem 1020

When I try to remember why I lost my faith in a present God

Maybe remaining in a distant indifferent God by irrelevant to the toil

Outside the ubiquitous suffering of the substantial portion of humanity

In poverty, disease, war, hunger, and depravity

Resting like a beacon to prompt the waterfalls of empathy

To stave our species’ extinction

Where we may in parcels obtain the essence of what I considered God

Within the act of love

In my splint of a microcosm of a life it was the dunking into that which I love by blood

To remind me most of my isolation like a chain to use my compassion against me

As choker and mace

To revolve the cycles of watching my daughter grown in a town of Hades

I may never truly escape until my daughter ascends her adolescence

I am baptized anew each fortnight like a dark unction

Into all of that which I pray to forget

To see my ex-wife’s son run across a soccer field followed by his father

To embrace my daughter in a hug after driving an hour during a Sunday Saints’ game

To be on time for warmups and see the idea of family flattened out my being

Like waterboarding or thumbscrews pressed to never want to be

What I tell myself now I will never want again like a cult memorized mantra

In attempts at alternatives that so far have only ended in death, rejection, and isolation

I walk on into the countless nights of prayer how one can choose for or against a book

A will, a guide, a policy of prompts towards the kindness of human empathy

To make another’s path that tad bit easier, providing that cushion in times of volition’s

Separation from all of that which hurts the soul in honest path

Of what one wants and the other does not in the passing currents of love’s folly

It is in how one does what one chooses, not the choice that tears the fabric of the universe

So in I see not a place for a present God and am happier for it

For in to believe that a God would entertain such pain as in play with a desire of plan

I see only a monster; blessings random 

Love like a Starfish

How I longed to write a love poem

Truths of longing and reciprocating guile

To crack life in the jaw rocketing skyward

To see the heavens in irises gleaming God’s grace

The nude tempest of the verboten lairs nesting in volition

To explore behind the plastic shores of the commercial mire

To dare love true likes vigilantes amongst the comatose bar denizens

Hocking the perfumed allure of the now to wade into the eternal

Marked in a moment to sip upon the chalice of the vulnerable ale

I am here inside you exposed for love be not the happy lush,

But the crackling vagabond opened raw knowing there be no escape

A soul is given shameless in need of the other

For prick does bleed, for gaze does awaken paradise

The humble servitude of knowing a heart into a hand to be crushed

Or cherished like a supernova exploding divine

Exalting love into the interconnection of ages in presence

How close the siren’s song does tear the threads of my aspirations

Flittered like stardust washing away in the crimson tides at her feet

Swaddling for a mermaid’s tail and glittering into nothingness

Pondering reality and fantasy into a baleful farce

How I longed to write a love poem

Escaping the prismatic labyrinths for a time dreaming upon iterations

Of the concrete revolutions to see the same wall in seasonal colors

Reminded of the lessons learned and forgotten

Lamenting the crest of the waves sweetness wafting in my plucked heart strings

A lyre to the opera of being eaten alive finger by finger like a starfish

Praying he does grow back yet again

Thinking of her stomach acids annihilating me in a stew of a man’s attempt

How I longed to write a love poem

Vulnerability in the crux knowing the definition of unrequited love

Is the release to be destroyed present in one and absent in the other   

A Cave’s Reverie

It’s the silence; it’s always been the silence

Lies at least bear the respect of a response

As if the speaker had the respect for an offering

To tide the beast with a scrap of humor

Plato’s stalactites are in the computer screen now

Anchoring in documents casting shadows twisting in the darkness

Writing the potential of dreams bouncing off dreams

Swirling worlds that only exist in cascading assumption

Brewed in the silence of what one hopes founded out of ignorance

Breathing in the darkness of possibility of the horror

A man commits when he closes his eyes and sees the infinite

No walls, no boundaries, just besotted hope slobbering

A Blockbuster movie rental house to find the pictures she spoke

Her behind the counter, me trying to check out without confrontation

Yet I see a turned computer screen of her edited script asking

If all that I wrote was true, if I was so inspired

She stops the line; pulls me behind the counter and starts fellatio

She gets fired; I leave the movies on the counter and fly out that building

Like an angel with giant feathered wings smiling happy

Before the glass shatters

Dreams like visions of a sad mind conjuring God’s hints

Seeing what one wants, praying over cereal bowls

Asking (pleading) for directions, “What do you want me to do now?”

“If it was not that; if not her, if not... Then...”

The shadows bounce off the sphere of rock

Splaying a man through like spears ripping his guts

Until all there is becomes fraying rope fragmenting into flitted shards

Dust to sweep up if anyone gave a shit about the floor

Mirrored in the ceiling with the blood crusted from the leaks

Pouring in the silence slapping itself in echoes

As if when one talks to himself the wood will answer

The horizon will bring the man a moon to shine a mirror in the darkness

Dreaming the words would shift like a snap before the last drop of hope

Evaporates at dawn like a perverse dew of midnight’s dreams

Knowing when one wakes it is all over, back to the bat guano and shitty cell phone reception

Typing at a computer trying to get back to the dream 

Friday Afternoon with Otis

Sitting at work together explaining to my fifty year old female coworker

Why the Blue’s Brothers are a travesty to soul

I explain about twenty-six year old Otis Redding plummeting in a plane

Playing Fa Fa Fa, I can’t turn you lose, Try a Little Tenderness

I feel like my heart is sitting on the desk

Just thumping there like an animated stapler

Sore eyes from going home to eat gumbo at lunch

Crying on the carpet kneeling to hope there is a God

Drying eyes with a black cloth in the mirror

Trying to look presentable and drain the head

Before returning to punching numbers in a computer and dying

Just god damn dying, not because the job’s a grind

But because coming home is the true hell

Trying to fill the silence with writing poems, letters, and stories

To ghost lives and ghost women attempting to shake

Shake in the morning, Early in the evening

Hoping for a head on collusion with the ground

To end it all, just end it all because growing old before your time

Is worse than dying young 

Shot Glass

Sometimes you can put a pillow down

As you know you are about to knock a body to a floor

You can set the room; move the coffee table, or the night stand

Throw the goose feathers in a bag of parts upon the hard wood boards

Watches hit hours, hands strike midnight

Have to have a last call and leave some whiskey in the glass

Pound that column on the bar top for the tender to pitch to the sink

Sometimes a head needs the fresh air of street lights and car engines

That burn in the gut shifted from butterflies to wasps

The look in the other set of eyes did not and you are supposed to explain

Choice of words, how so, to deliver

Sometimes you can put a pillow down

Saves a lot of shattered metal, when the bones break

And a body gets up stunned numb racing out into the street

Gets run straight over like a tabby cat

Bloody in the hood of some other bastard just trying to make it home

Guts like paste drying like a neighborhood blood clot

Telling the officer what happened like point blank

Could have used a pillow mam, just a little cushion

That the drink was not full of nothing

Makes a body give up living, dying a little bit each day

Thought the bottle had hope and it was nowhere, swigs of nowhere

Makes a man feel like the universe is all about filling up a shot glass

For just one sip; that is all a life needs, just one good sip

But women like you are like the reason the shot glass always tips

Always a reason, always a spill wishing for a pillow just once

To keep a few drops, to drink a few drops down and savor

Before the blood comes gushing from a body knocked out by a fender

Looking for his heart wailing at the moon 

Soul poem 83,482

In case it was not obvious

I am a man with a broken soul

Broken hearts are capable of hope

Souls know the backstory

Seen it before, the blueprints in the backrooms

This pattern is immutable like fingerprints in a trial

Even when the body changes the evidence rearranges

To fit the smudge

Prayer, weeping in meditative child’s pose

Hungering to convince one’s self that God exists

For a fraction of time to feel that a home is somewhere in this now here

Wanting to feel the innocence of ignorance like a young soul

Back-burned fields and love’s torment

Sticking fingers in the grinder one at a time

Because the entire hand would shorten the pain

As if to feel alive for a moment did not bend in the spectrum

That the only emotion that still registers is ache

Wanting what gets close and then like magnetism repulses

Bouncing back as the poles start to align in similarity

The paradox of a soul that knows how this story will bleed into the next

Star after star vibrating hoping for the light of God

To show an anomaly comet to surprise like a shining angelic beacon

That this soul had not seen it all

Just because the hope was placed in its bin of known destruction

It was not to be in this iteration as if a platform for the station

Could abide some here for the other to take the ticket and sit along side

The moon came to meet the sun and smiled at his audacity 

To stay close those nights writing tales

The empty, the empty, oh my the empty 

Dried Blood

I saw God behind your eyes

I saw God behind your eyes

And there is no unseeing God

Not even for a recovering atheist

Damn the numb just bleed out over the table

Drain the lot until the last syllable

Dries like crusted blood next to the glass

Pressing send on an email at one a.m.

Another spit short story about mermaids and starfish

Vampires and unicorns, sodomy bears and centaurs

Muses of the moon and the man in the belly of the sun

Burning into the ashen darkness knowing the gravity of alone

An artist has to be alone with the art

Such a god damn lie

Glorification of solitude as superior to loneliness

Loneliness is where all the food is

The raw aching tumult of the maelstrom

Down, down, down

Aware in the wanting vibration of the denied

Once tasted and the never is where all the fuel is

Destroyed here in the oblivion of dusted bone twilights

Marauding insomniac parade mandates to write until the body breaks

Scratched throat, swollen tongue, red eyes to get the stories out

Before the flood of wanting ices up in the fulcrum of anger into the numb

The depressive numb of uncaring not because one wants

But because one has to, just god damn has to

To let the atheism back in like cough syrup heroin

To be mad at God instead of the self being what I have to be

This flawed wretch enveloped inside the forget

Of every taste of love becomes an opera

Only because I felt it so hard into clotted blood

Not because she did, just staring into the pathetic crux

That God has a damn bit to do with any of it