Two Brothers

Cain said to Able

I am you; you are me

We are the dual psyche of man

I do what you are unwilling

To survive

You benefit from the lines crossed

In death, you are reborn

From the tantrums of childhood

To knowing God

As cities burn under assassination attempts

Humans despising and prideful over our identities

We have convinced ourselves that we are 

Never asking did the symbols we share

Ever speak

Outside of a dream distorted image

From our evolved reptile breaching consciousness

To salivate for our survival

Thinking we can separate the wars our brothers begin

As our governments vote; our markets bank

Slave camps are stocked counting coffee

Drinking, dancing, daring for exemption

That what we do is not to the self 

Wrung Towel

Keep trying to not think of you

Like a twist of the arm wrung like a towel

Time unfurls pulling a familiar direction

However inaccessible

When the energy to attempt to progress wanes

The image of who I wanted you to be returns to form

Like a ghost of a martyred heroine

Recollected in the vein of King, Jesus, or Gandhi

Or someone you never were

Just a stitched together fabrication of colors

Not your claim, just my thirst for a requited love

Able to provide what you needed

Wondering if that ever would have been

Enough to feel like you understood interdependence 

Like a blood track of roots drinking from an irreplaceable reservoir

Knowing what I was wanting and ready

The twine of ambivalence and fear strangle the images

Of who we were in bed sheets and at breakfast tables

The chocolate and the blueberry

The paste makes me feel like no one if not that time

So damn hungry! 

All you Need

Exhausted from being love poor

The Beatles were right

I have tried to be kind

Generous, honest, and vulnerable to receive and give

The accounts that matter have been barren

I am nearing the end of commerce

Head, numb, and teetering

Stomach cold, devouring itself perversely plump

Blood thinning and passing out to the alcohol

Toasting a yellow moon

Laughing, thinking about

Biting on some more lumber

Let me go, knock the consciousness

Bat that fucking skull!

Ignite the ant hill to the kerosene soak

Legs afire until bankruptcy settles the debt

Burn the pyre of no-talk days

Wrestling for something human

Knowing all I need

Is an evasive mutuality

Like God I am not sure exists

Faith, hope…

Love you’ve been up, struck out swinging

Staring at blank bleachers since the Good Morning

Where to go, damn stick is heavy

Put it down, let the grass takeover

Choke in the weeds like no one was ever here 

Life as a Vent Crab

Sometimes I feel I have spent the preponderance of this life

Being ignored in numb hopes

Attempting correspondence

With that glass half empty / full

Debating the relevance of internal perspective

Feeling like rotten carcass road kill thumped

This dynamic of emotional recollection is a perdition of cognizance

Wishing to not remember the hue of emotion

Music, locations, words are elements all

Into the intransigent anchors of fossil fuels

Seeing extinction rise from the taint

Into lungs incapable of relating on the surface

Because their substance fumes from the deep

Nether caverns of busted pipes and rotten plants

Evans, Jack, Bent Trail, Wilson, Roland, Long Pine into Keith

With Douglas’ Chateau d’if in between 

Where from here with these feckless Easter baskets and saccharin stockings?

Vomit, knowing all the choices that ever mattered were not in my volition

Every one away from me into those silent lakes

Sterile surface reflecting placid waves over the trenches

Down, down to the vent-crabs suckling the methane and geothermal heat

Just say goodbye  

Breaking Down Again

If not her, then who God?

I am doing my best to remain open

To release those who wish not my attention

I called in every direction I could muster

Promise stood tall on the horizon

We have to some degree acquainted in the moonlight

The silence returns like a sting

I am draining

Doubt washes over the levees

Gurgling hope bubbles naught

The heavy ankles swell leaden clods

I cannot be this lap dog in pursuit

Snapped away at the snout

With no effort to assert the other’s vulnerability

The numb ache is at the gates

With a mirror of acne and limbs reaching to the sky

I just want a partner for this life

One person, kind and beautiful to each other

Always been, too much to ask, too hard to find

Boy, go back to the corner.

It’s not that God doesn’t give a fuck

It’s that you were right the first time

God doesn’t exist

You wanted to feel the divine presence

As some kind of ubiquitous component of all

Neither instigating, saving, or condemning

Merely, an aspect of acknowledgment one could choose

Contingent on volition of beings and the science of atoms

So very cold, the surfaces, praying for kindred

If not her, then who God?

About to break down again, hoping for fuel, wondering

How much for a gallon this time?

Stumped

Sometimes the forest is replete with stumps

The scattered old growth left is a farcical costume

A seasonal fire to return the nutrients 

Would have probably been better

Instead the roots link back

The children anchoring the preserve

The ideas of a castaway fatherhood and husband

Wanting to regrow, seeing the chainsaws

Grinding whirl chucking splinters

Like a deranged fairy cloud seizing hope

Like a banished plaything for a boy too short to qualify

As the man, so much anger repressed

Wanting progression from this mouth full of sawdust

Words blunted irrelevant as focus diverts

To redefine family into this transmogrified fleet of branches

Gnarled gray and brittle straining to drink

A broken heart all the more obvious

Contemplating how to ever feel that best friend lover again

Gazing over this bosque with a lackluster grin

Accepting the echo of fallen trunks and the reverberating silence

Booms every reason to believe this pattern will continue

Because the agony is in the seed

The patterned sequence of appearance and nature

Wanting more than anything to be wrong 

Trying not to Want

I want a voice to cheer from my corner

I want legs to walk to the breakfast table with me

I want ears to listen to my writing inside her mind

I want nostrils to inhale the waft of my cooking in appreciation

I want eyes to look at me before turning the lamp before sleep

I want a wife who wishes to be present, choosing

The balance of elusive melody playing like a eulogy

Wondering if I will ever have her ask me to be her version

Of these counterweights

So that when the account of my life is told

There is a reason for those people that say everything has a reason

There is a measure for all those people who see a judicial balance

For me I wish to know what love is

For I do not claim to know

Every instance feels like a mirage of heathens and drunkards

Seeing distorted visions in states of chaos wanting the picture to be

Something other than a blurring apparition

I want a credulity of heart to pair with the bullet holes

I want to believe in better than as possible

I want to hold and link and service a timeless being

I want the unguarded bastion to rook

I want to know my library has been and is being read as it is written

I want to feel her absorb the glow of my smile as she enters the room

I want to provide and feel in every part more than a mortal man

I want to escort the dreams of folding lifetimes into the pages of her wishes

I want to know the echoing corners of her travels to interpret any languages she chooses

I want to be the one

How to; who; when;

I am not certain

Just trying not to want