Haunt

The wind tastes like the moment –

Forget that – the wind leaves the flavor

Of hate and bitterness

On my tongue,

No amount of any drink will wash

It out.

No crescent of hope spilling

Its portents in the sky

Will ever change the rancid taste of forgotten love,

Wet newspaper promises,

Or the vice grip of your hand around a crimson stone

It is not that the word “waste” fails

To describe the pinprick stars of time,

The grains – whatever you please –

But it falls short of being anything

At all.

You vanished

And pop up to haunt my footsteps

Like a banshee in the ghosting mist

You’re screaming

I’m pretending not to hear

What’s new?

But that isn’t really you,

It’s the little memory in the back of my head

Gnawing at the chair leg supports

Like an untrained puppy

But then it’s a bear or worse

And I’m tumbling, drowning

In a fucking kiddy pool

Because I have no light to see,

No arms, no legs, nothing to float with.

I struggle to kick and scissor just not to sink.

All I have are lungs, slowly filling with water

And a crimson rock – diamond hard,

Oh

But you left me one thing.

I’ve got this impossible taste

That the rushing water won’t take with it.

Memories fade, but that taste,

That is something I will

Be hard pressed to forget.

Everything feels the same

The solitude is the wishing well for the over-

stimulated

with a brain slowly folding in on itself

we hope for some

Ebola to end it all -

To be the nothing-mush

that comes out the end of that tunnel

serenity, peaceful forests, with the

sweet tweets of birds hidden

from view

that's a pipe dream

that's the beginning

walk down the tube's length

(this without a light at the

end) and

Woosh - flames

forests gone, stumps, burned

flesh, birds screaming so shrill

you can't shut it out

and you remember it so

vividly

your synapses fused in the

afterimage of a burning

Buddhist monk

the protest -

a futile waste attempting

to make it all mean something

but you're stuck in a tunnel,

waiting for the blaze

and smoke

it's inevitable

it's inevitable

God, this gets old

The solitude is the wishing well for the over-

stimulated

with a brain slowly folding in on itself

we hope for some

Ebola to end it all -

To be the nothing-mush

that comes out the end of that tunnel

serenity, peaceful forests, with the

sweet tweets of birds hidden

from view

that's a pipe dream

that's the beginning

walk down the tube's length

(this without a light at the

end) and

Woosh - flames

forests gone, stumps, burned

flesh, birds screaming so shrill

you can't shut it out

and you remember it so

vividly

your synapses fused in the

afterimage of a burning

Buddhist monk

the protest -

a futile waste attempting

to make it all mean something

but you're stuck in a tunnel,

waiting for the blaze

and smoke

it's inevitable

it's inevitable

Sunscreen, please

Leaves wither under the pounding sun.

Weak as can be, they beg for the flame.

There is not a cave in the

world that would convince them

of this fate. Who wants

to slowly burn?

The Good is

inside,

and the sun is far off, away from here.

How could it know what it feels like to

be a leaf, or an apple,

or even a human being and then

within that how is a sycamore to know a tulip?

The leaves ask to catch flame, and

with silent screams, question

“what have you done

to think that you know me?”

I told you it was over

The runs like blood through veins

So it’s running pretty dry tonight

The bottle’s empty, the page

Is empty

And the heart isn’t beating

Like it should

The drum in the deep

Has ceased to boom

And in the dim-lit room

The brain in the chair is wired

Too tight on the edge of a knife

Just waiting for a chance to stumble

It wastes time struggling

To piece a mirror of broken reflections

Together

The deed is done and the luck has run out

Empty-handed at the close of day

With its dimming of lights

The day is not a happy day

For the man in his chair

Can no longer hear life around him

The room is covered in shards of him

And he’s dry as a husk

In the middle of the Sahara.

Kill me and take away the boredom

The conversation has muddied

with the course of an hour

and in the hour there is nothing

that has really been discovered.

Stuck in the morass of waiting

for that singular time

is as painful as living though

the stagnation and drowning

of all the years, he thinks.

The rumble of words trickles

down her face like a baby

in need of a bib. So musing,

he decides that this

is what it comes to,

birth to death,

a child to a child and sometimes

in the middle you’re a child too.

Some never really grow up,

they just wait a long

sixty, seventy, eighty years

to die as a dribbling child.

Grass is ugly when looking up

Every nail has a home

in flesh or in wood.

They make beds or

they make beds,

and never have they ceased

to serve a dual purpose

in holding together or

the bleeding out.

But I sit in a lawn chair with a beer can

and a Geisha fan,

waiting for the day

when there is some sort

of clarity.

But we’re hazy here on the

mountain,

waiting for a purpose,

jealous of this sharp nail.

It will never fail

to find its home

like the rest of us fail to do.

And one day when

we are forced to stop looking,

it will nail us in for

good.

It will always outlast us

when

the six feet under becomes our

home.

Today is my birthday

I have no hope for a love-filled dream.

When I sleep, I never wake.

When I cry, I drown.

As the world goes dark every day,

the lights never turn back on.

They speak with a stumbling mumble,

without the hope of ever saying

anything at all.

8.54

The cold, white sheets fall lightly

like little kisses on the forehead

in the darkness, then white, then dark

as the lamppost awakens the air.

For a brief instant to dance like a

bride and her dark-clad groom.

"We are alive, falling for a blink,"

she winks

in my direction, with the playful

grin of the best kept secret

holder. The air swirls around.

Hands too cold to know they are

being held, ears too numb to really hear.

And the feet are like weightless

extensions allowing me to hover

across the ground.

"I could never fall if I'm floating,"

I quip with the airy happiness

of a snowflake.

Anxiety

I can't sleep at night

without waking to the pitter-patter

of rain on the inside of my

sternum.

The thumping is more the wish than

the fact itself.

The world is quiet then,

at 3:28,

but it is the loudest crowd in my head,

ten thousand rising screams, tearing

bits in every direction.

It is the boom of thunder shaking my

frame.

The pictures rattle on the walls of a

room,

an earthquake.

The lonely, simple chair trembles in

the center of the gray.

The voices throw the walls about

and crack the plaster

floor to ceiling.

They cry for a change and revolution, but

I'm too scared to move, too weak to

feel,

a void within a void.

And the slow beating of tears on the

roof of a room feel more comforting

than the arms and bodies.

The cries cease

At 3:28 when I wake.

Endless Blue, Thank You

I stumbled in

and she-

she stumbled too

staring through depths of

endless blue.

Her eyes, they wake you

from the nightmare

daze and dream

keeping you focused on what

it means to be.

I am empty handed, lost

and she-

she is too

without the whole you'd expect

from her.

"That's ok, that's ok,"

the words we whisper out

just to count the times

it's happened is to waste

your limited days and

the numbers never matter

against the light blue waves.

And "thank you this means the world"

is never far from the tongue

the hourly bell never noticed, always rung

there are no words we have to say

the poetry speaks like blood.

But she feels some distance away,

the thing we will never take

because it's too precious where it lay.

We must preserve behind glass

that priceless, infinite blue.

No one can touch it,

especially not me.