Autumn

Fall


I am formless, overwhelming
Futility embodied in drifting
On the wings of Zeus' gasp
Into Hades' unforgiving grasp.
I am preconceived as whispers
Father Time footsore with blisters
In every creak and groan and snap
In each dim-lit feinting pass
Overgrown and under-worked
And often seldom tread.
I shift in fluttered dread
As I feel the earth's derision.
I am convenient hope's abscission.
I will pass in ash nigh Advent
In reds and golds and browns,
For three months absorbed into the ground
Yet someday, life will find it's morn.
Among the pruned and plucked and torn
Upon the dark midwinter's pass
I will frost amidst the dying glass,
And on a warm day as the bleak fades
On a Friday, as the black grays
Someday, there among the thorns
Someday, on a Sunday, I will be reborn.

Than What I've Been Handed

The Insurrectionist


Are we really all so justified
In our blindly trusting ties
Bound as victim to the tide
The shore's self-defeating slide
Into erosion, corrosive pride
Where fractured filaments lied
In premasticated fabrications
Spit back out, wide-eyed dilations
Thoughtless forms of meditation
All led us back to here.
Baptized both by fire and fear
Muddling through the very clear
Dimmesdale-packaged preaching
Plastic-wrapped magazines impeaching
Virtue with perjury's beseeching
Mercy for its slandered speech.
Another doubter into the breach
Where discontented masses reach
For connection to themselves.
Self-help books on battered shelves
Epics of men, dwarves and elves
Distract us from believing.
Time capsules are deceiving
As any truth worth perceiving
Is found in clawing up from crashing down
We're all alone in a room of clowns
And we're the closing joke.
As the laughter drowns our final choke
Perspective swirls in vapid smoke,
Burns away all time's reclusions
Fills our lungs with our delusions
Marks our souls with dark contusions
Lost inside our own illusion.

The Blog is Back!

I Am John Wilkes Booth

Someplace.  Spotlights.  Stage lights.

Today is the day I assassinate everything

That I have ever believed in.

Poor caliber selection my only saving grace

With residue on every point of contact

And q-tip flavored second thoughts

In chemical solution

While my hand is quietly turning blue.

Today I am an incorruptible figure

In a stupid hat, constructed mostly of legend

Sewn together with myth

And liberal usage of wishful thinking.

Tomorrow I am Novacaine mixed with vodka

And a single cherry

In a glass of sherry

Downed by whispered fools

And I tie my tongue in knots

To relieve the loosening in my stomach

Yes tomorrow I kill the only face I ever loved

In preparation for facing the mirror.

Today I shot the face of freedom.

jjjjjjjjjjjjj

Tigers & Goats

Oh disenchanted charm

The loveless lovers' undying vows

Until death will do them part.

Bright and luminous darkness

Ere the night time's dawning sky

With still and stilling breeze

Distilling undiluted ale

From the pure corrupted proof

Of vintage-aged modernity.

Oh anachronistic dancers

A three-step waltz in five-by-four

Patterned unique conformity.

Sacred oath of perjury

With crossed-finger hand to God

Standing tall on bended knees.

Oh misbegotten child of promise

Named destitute of fate

A clear, abstract work of art

With a three-part death on wooden stake

Oh the demons here are human

And the bastard child of Father time

Just fingerprints of doubt's divine

Once a pride of manes, a flock of wool

Now jungle cats and mutton

Just blindly looking for a sign.

I Am Death 

The pathway to revealing chaos

Is begun by creating order

As in our world where factions border

Patristic, nationalistic pride

Stars and stripes and stitches in our sides.

We're crafting rules just to break them down

Singing drunken eulogies in round

Ah, but at least there is defiance

Masked puritanical compliance

But really a joker wearing spades.

Here our feeble eyes are crossed and glazed

To convey an infirm appearance.

Bondage of the will makes adherence

A betnoir's glimpse of grinning ghasts

Where Tanaris breaching reach is past

And we're just phantoms wearing halos.

Pink, Orange, Moon and Stars


Still and picturesque, swells and collapse
A backdrop of everlasting fire
Of mantles, veils and cloaks
Pinprick eyes of a thousand gods
Awash in infinite longing
Beg Lady Midnight lift her skirt
And send them all their waking slumber
And send them all their gold-orbed rest
And send them all their unadorned, azure sleep.
Lord Twilight peddles wares tonight
Star-scape pendants emblazoned white
With the traversing, patterned sameness
Of eternal heat.
There with the unenduring sojourners
A stillborn faith flat-lines while yet awake
And miracles birthed of fathomless breath
Streak sonnets 'cross the forever sky,
Giving mortals turn to wish
Entreat, entrap my love with yours
As we wait for Avalon's kiss.

Tendrils of Insanity

Whisked about the frothy madness
Of the addled and Antaean mercury
That siphons the alchemy within;
That which beats within the breasts of beasts
And twice within the chests of men.
Ah, but the fates are loud tonight
Those bringers and revelers of chaos
Intermittently feral the saints march
In concussed, percussion steps
As if on the stroke of witching hour
Your loyalty falls to eldritch ire
To be replaced with the yellow stains
Of temerity, stench of tremulous fear
Oh and how . . . are you looking closely?
With leaps of roiling grace
With gifts of slight of hand
Breached yet unassailable
Nigh but unapproachable
Surreptitiously revealing cards
Iris glazed, with malice hidden in the sleeves
And oh, but what are we, what are we . . .

We walk were angels fear to tread.

Olive Garden Mints

Vintage Fake

Clerical collars for witches
And silver chains for priests
Thumbscrews unleash the sacred wine
Bits of Mass clinging to torture
Bind it up on the tides of time
If it floats, just hollow sleepless fits
So bite your tongue and will it to sink
You were never meant for bliss
Cloaks and silver daggers
Concealed within our lips
Designed to humble kings.
Again the simple way of things
Bleeds the color from our world
With blurry hues of pastel beige
Heaving with surprise and rage
At the rapier betwixt our ribs
Cracking every egg-shelled friend
Just another lie proclaiming peace
Another wrinkle, an older face
Another farce pretending end.

Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers

Asps

In every quarter-hour crisis
The blood infused retch stains carpet

Oh be still my faithless heart

Please be still.
But I will not say peace.
Not to each passing wave of nausea
Each directed search of pain
Each reverberating weakness

Please be still, I ask you
But I issue no commands.

I offer forth no trust
Neither animosity nor kinship
Darken bile-cracked lips
Consider me a moment to be chosen
But neutral on the both sides
Until the future of forestry is revealed
As ink-stained obscenitied hands
With cyanide tears.

Or should I say all trees become paper
Covered in worthless words
And the cries of our venomous fears.

Consider my scars, measure my doubts
Carefully weigh this poverty
Yes, consider me well
Else, consider me poison.

Winding Roads of Cheese

Paul Revere

The intravenous insurrection beckons, gently
Come.
Ethereal injections whimper as you run
Until the howling in your ears become the throbbing hum
That bids you think escaping is an urgency,
Just Come.
Forward on the beat, at the thrash of pounding drum
Come.
The silence echoes swiftly across the darkened numb
Of holes in midnight forearms,
Into the breach - the scum
Into the cracks - the scrum
Into the darkness
Come.
The Paul Revere of madness rides in twilight, gathers some
But answer not his cavalcade of finitude and
Come.
The bells astound the scattering alarum of we numb
Catatonic replicas of violence render dumb
Into the breach and seal the void, insurrection's strum
Come.
And rally toward the weary lines of chaos,
Simply Come.

Come.

Come.

I beseech you, come.

Fear not the tyranny of possible
And Come.

Ultimately life makes fools of us all

Rivers, Rivets and Convergence

We will kneel
With empty hands aloft
As the albatross
Of our grief bears down upon our skulls
And every spoken word
Infringes on the quiet
Each sigh of sweet relief
Rings harsh amid the silence
All well-intentioned
But utterly pointless.
In seamless retractions
Of infinite voids
One whole is the next
The intimate toys with the blasphemed
Creating a kaleidoscope
Of comforting irreverence.
We would speak to vanquish
The still beating hearts
That gather together our tears
In banquets of tourniquet blunder
And the rending leaves every wound fresh,
Even ripe for the plunder of breath
Into staccato, stale breathing.
But speaking is words
An encroachment of order upon
The meandering meadow of chaos
While heartbreak judges itself.
Thus we will stand
With vacant eyes alight
As fragmented hands reunite
With another
Hands raised to banish the oncoming darkness. 

Danish boats float higher above the water

Cottage Cheese

How long can misrepresenting
And various "isms" hold us together
When we are determined to blow?
Yes, the infinite dwelt inside
And corrupted all our movements
With extending bronze fists
In iron-clad contracts.
So greatness entered a life's holy hell
And the fulfillment was too great to bear
Tiny hands drop their egg-shell worlds
To cover the stains on their pants.
Love is paramount
Anything else is tantamount
To swearing allegiance to disaster.
We are jesters in the courts of mobs
The unruly conscience of riot
So full of the ether we explode
And cover the world in our entrails.
We're so full of the righteous we crack
Leaving a track of digested god
The world sits in hand grenades.

And your smile is the reason I am still alive

We The Broken China Dolls


In the whirlwind of unanswered pleas
Spat back like vending machine change
From the genie jar of well-wishes,
         The weary insincere mop crinkled brows
         With wary eyes in haggard countenance
         Weary shine dampened by romance spots on tissue.

Every clarity forsaking me
In news reels of microfilm vision
Swimming against the dowsing rod
That has claimed my lusted, rusted orbs
As it's potentially hapless victim.

(I already walked the aisle
And took my hypocritic oath
With a reveler's hand on my shoulder.)

Everything within climbs over the clamor and out
(Digging trenches of crusted precari)
Retreating from ruddy child with muddy cheeks
         Wanting only water, hugs and candy
         With their human rain-delayed smiles

My twin spirits dilate with greed
I cannot move forward and yet I can't leave.

And I only see a sawdust-stained iris.

They Say Only Fools Rush In

Pharisee

Pyrotechnic hands are raised
As eyes are glazed with blind faith
Offering un-fazed salutes
With (one) finger to the truth
And (two) upright in sacrifice
For each of (three) denials.
(Four) of (five) are tried by trials
Of the vague and "Christian" sense
That may or may not exist.
Thus with words both never meant
And scattered over fourths and fifths
Poor chords sear their souls with glee
Euphoric mid-cacophony
Of post-creativity
Then lost for (six) or (seven) days
To masturbate away the gays
Then wake up at (eight) and rinse . . .
Abandon sin and common sense
For prejudice and pretense
As if we're (nine)-lived creatures.
Backroading faith to glory
To escape the bloody stories
Of the dying and burnt out
Tourniquet tithe a small amount
Now, are we down . . . for . . . the count

(Ten).

Quiero Comida!!!!

Prepositional Incarnations


You can tell me that death is forever
That beauty in strange places
Wearing scarred faces never was.
That the timings of hoping are chance
Matchsticks in desolation are trance
That the void in the star-scape is coming
And the mind of the skeptic is humming
In our ears, and that science defines
These disparate blurring lines
And all else is just blips
Random synaptic firings in a chaotic world
All but begging me to believe
You tell me, you tell me
But that doesn't change what I see.

Only the Lonely

Antipathetic Filler Kills

"Negligence" cry blinded mice
Speaking in the land of lice
Reeking both of unwashed flesh
And branches grafted, limbs spliced
Together into mansions
Built pseudonyms of failure
Hanged man from the monorail
Finds the apathy of God.
Nausea floods the remedy
Hemorrhaging memories
Like aneurystic doctrines
Bail other facts in buckets
Keep floating in the muck yet
Listing toward the monolith
Anti-intellectual
Mostly ineffectual
Thinking God is in the synths
Distortion pre-recorded
Our Theos burnings dormant.

Percent Ampersand Ampersand Snicker Snicker Snicker

Fourths and Fifths


Change is born with each phasing atom
Chance within each split infinity
Empty, hollow rocks hold destiny
Though enmity spans many fathoms
Incompletion scrolls the universe
As oppression fakes each hallowed hold
There exchanging divine sparks for mold
Leavened with the covenanted curse
Brokenness bars possibility
And mars scars with insecurity
Now turning healing into pity
With each irresponsibility
Burning promise into claustrophobes
And our pain attempts one last escape
With velvet sin forming concrete drapes
Where death is cloaked with our human robes
Remember, it's just the beginning.




Earrings, Statues and Snakes


Wandering inside these what ifs . . .
Yes, grace and pain feel much the same
And we wish the gods would tame
Themselves for our amusement.
So go ahead and turn me gray
Baptize me with spit
Tongue bathe me with shit
And wash me clean with irony
In the baptismal font of fire and farce
Forbidden fruits of Spirit sparse
Only eaten by the chosen few
Keeping company with fools
But there's only dark in whiter lies.
Prayer drops warping wooden floors
Tattooed with shrouds and plaster and sores
Waiting for the wild to come claiming
But everything is too tame to save me
Smoke and grinning torture
And god I need a drink.

Somebody told me that Mormons taste like donuts, and I said that's not possible, they don't drink caffeine

Witnessing a Murder


Creating Hell with insistence
Spontaneous riffs on existence
If life is wasted is breathing vain?
With each contraction exhaling shame
Conjunctions spell subtraction slain
A teeming mass of human game
Hunted by the same, divine without fame
Mocking each stitching, seizured side.
A Sisyphus climbing Syzygy's slide
And form without function is pride
Least until Dante finds us a home.
Industry replacing Shalom
Post scripts of violence echo Dear John
Where God signs the greetings of cons.
A poorer place, the world is lost
The sky is calm, the trees are tossed
By endless vengeance and arrogance
If we're going to die, then shall we dance?
Whiskey tango foxtrot, my side's caught
I can't breathe, dimes for nickel thoughts
What if I traded love, created naught?

Do the truffle shuffle?

Canonized With Paint


My eyelids have heartburn I claim
As I rub the reflux from my cheek.
My chin shakes with dry-heaving
Sshh baby, rest, don't try to speak.
Nursemaids with old fairy tales
Hold my writhing sides for countless weeks
And kept the lint from my tongue
Until her vacant skies are numb;
Yet dark with misty disregard
Still somehow greener than my black thumb.
There's life inside this poisoned rum
Leeching thin and taut, food from thought
And ridicule from religion.
Rolling paraphrasing from my skin
More alive than nearly scary
All angles and elbows, arms and shins
With soft misquoted reverence
And an embrace that smells of love.

Like finding a needle in a needlestack

Dingy, Sinking Dinghy

I sat alone in a peopled space
My prayers loosely forming fists
As if unclenched fists exist.
If I bare my throat in kindness
Are my sights above Your highness
Do You see me in this blindness
Are You answering with silence
Each desperate, graduated plea?
You must know I can't submit and see!
Are You drowning me in waves of sand
Or guiding me into wasted lands
Because You love me?

Or because You always find me deaf?

Am I so hidden within the cleft
And shadow of Your passing
That I'll never see where You are
Just lost among the fallen stars
Spinning freely from Your ether?
Another destitute with fever
Hallucinating hands extending
A beggar waking and pretending
That God takes notice of his fears . . .
Are You calming me with violence?
Is there sacred in this silence?
Are You reaching out in shyness
Crying every time it rains
To place the beauty in mundane
In my profane?


___________________________________________________
Spitting in the Wind


If we're going to set the world a-fire
Then we might as well burn it down
Hear the creak of guillotine sounds
Come to take the stress away.
Redemption is the endless tide
Repetition's erase divides
Or eloquently gathers up.
And we are the lens without scope
Still-life when capturing movement
We are the bridge, wood without rope
Finite blurs of self-reprovement
Pajamas soaked through with thunder
Anonymity stoops to wonder
Chaos finds us where substance passed
Camera shudders too slow to capture
All this chasing after rapture
Are we spitting in the wind . . .

Sooooo Tired

Lazy Can O' Corn


It was noon and the moon was rising high
And our horror plots were poorly written
While I rest against the fatal sigh
Shut my eyes, my faults are drawing nigh
Naive lies, no one's this snake-bitten.
Maker calling carvings; deaf, blind and numb
No one believes in patience anymore
The air-conditioned drum and hum
As raucous laughter mocks the dumb
Waiting, just waiting for the death of war -
Can't find the plot-line, fingers turning claws
Innocence sets sail, waving last goodbyes
The world handed me unlucky draws
I find excuses there for all my flaws
It's midnight, and the sun was in my eyes.

"What's the ratio of spiderman to moose muffins?" ~ Mark

Where Angels Cast Shadows


I wake and feel like blood clots in
Tornadoes, blocked and unrelenting
Swirling and churning with blacked-out despair
In a country of lead paint and consenting
Waste.  With garbage-pails of salad days
And quite frankly not repenting
Of our mindless belief in lust
In sweaty palms and dust and touch
And sand beneath and between
Our toothless fantasies, the sheen
And luster replaced by idle hate
While I pine to ponder love.
Love like free-falling screams and shrieks
Of helpless panicked jubilation,
Like thunder in squalls and reckless
Fear suspended in fascination,
Love in train-wrecked sensations
In thoughtless desperations
Until it only hurts to look away,
Love like a gale, that though I stay
Feral gusts carry the day
Steal me away.

Bounce

Deconstruction


Life does not exist in black and white
But in various hues of percolate
Of dark and darker blends, non-absolutes
Misogyny wrapped in coffee
A chocolate date with toffee
I lacked the guts to flip the trigger
I guess it goes to figure
Isotopes and dye
Weak kinetic ties
Allergies and wishful thinking
Stoned and cold and whistful drinking
Eyes are washed with lie, cleaning soap and lye
Careful children cry, but why don't I?
Life exists in capes of black, shades of lack
Window-shopping need
Hiding morbid thoughts with speed
Obese infatuations, obscene insinuations
A mist across creation
Some say the world will end in fire
Some in flood
And some when the gods blink their eyes
But most probably, if I can read the signs
We'll asphyxiate while doing lines
Hallucinating about the times
We held our breath for change.

p-p-p-po-em

Aurora


Formless and void . . . devoid
Nothing's expansive smirks
Expression tilts and spoke
Axis, expanding clerks
In dark cloaks of orbit
Spun of the naked man's
Journey into abstract
With flags to mark the span
And arrogance to spay
Or neuter each perceived
Obsession, whether fact
Or madness' hope conceived.
The licit rotates once
Angles, peaks, curves and rope
Anchor straining shoulders,
Tensed against graying slopes,
Heads rest on familiar
Habits, abbots, rabbits
Pulled from hats in keeping
Gravity at bay.  Mitts
Warmed at the blurring slide
Of great into the small.
Some see a juggler's ball
Some see a place to hide.

I Believe I'd Buy Whatever You Would Sell To Me

Mornings Spent Hacking Up the Phlegm


Sometimes I am weightless
But never in the proper order
Dark with flecks of light
Littering the unspoken eulogies
Of thousands of un-mourned
But well-buried beliefs.
Sometimes I see light in darkness
So secretly afraid
That it's only the patterns
The physics of motion
The induced psychosis of strobe
The effects of shadow
That I love.
And if the light would flood
Break forth and sink the barge
Of stranded deserters
And seek forth in absolutes
I think I would be mostly . . .
Disappointed (not to mention blind),
Become search and self-destruct
Another love in which to hide
Can the soul of daylight find
The luminescent terrors
That only ghost the mind?

Oswalt

Stoned


The going rate for going broke
With wide-eyed stares in curling smoke
And graveyard shifts in drowner's moats
Only keeping in the desperate.
Our feet are bound by twisted sheets
Soaked with artificial heat
Damp with manifested bleats
For death, for dawn, for drifting.
Harnessed in our fabric gallows
Hands sniffing out every shallow
Flicker, jaundiced lungs are sallow
Yet awake, flirting with destiny.
Garden handcuffs, fly-trap stains
Flowers decked with wistful chains
Petals laced with acid rain
Sifting across our compass,
Plucked and sown in sleeting spar
Picked and strewn in melodic bar
A fleeting wish on green-stemmed star
And we watch it float away.

We've Never Done Nothing, How Can We Be Something?

Contrivances


They said she said he said that
We said somebody said something
Passed along in sidelong whispers
Perceptions, rumors . . . flings
Shoulder to shoulder . . . tap, touch, tap
Fibonacci patterns code
Hand to fingers, nose to nose
Exchanged, inhaling gossip.
Chew then swallowing the rap
Drinking the isotope connect
Becoming caricatures
Of ourselves, straw people
In straw houses of sand, assured
Of mutually contrived
Misrepresentation derived
From deaf certainty, demurred
The ambiguous, amorphous sheaf
The collective teeming masses
Breathing sighs of blind relief.

Farsighted

Paper Bags

Hell's high-water mark is nigh upon us
Upon our knees, our bones . . . our souls
There upon the cash-strapped tree
Stripped of whatever dignity
We thought our right to own.
The slow decay of bramble
Into human ash
A world of fire.
Our collective work redundant
Mere mockery of complacency
Incapable of even that, fingers pant
Fulfillment.
And all creation groans in wait
A crown of incapacitation
Upon our feet, where higher wattage bows
To mere conductors, pianos of the mind
Strings and sound and triumph's score
                          Swelling inconsistencies.
The re-warmed brooks no reduction
Forever fleet of heart
And the original scopes the ceiling's fade
                        Arches loft the dead seduction
The quest to deny the wonder.

Tequila

Somewhere There's Rice in Her Hair


At the dark side of noon
Roiling, roiling, toiling
Perfection feels like failure
Faith is just an easy sell
Attraction reeks of hate
Above a cresting dell
Toiling, teething, seething
Cut our gums on milk and wine
To mask the taste of brine
Inane, terrain, indiff'rence.
Vacuums filled with substance
Ignorance feels like need
But fatal marks a diff'rent breed
Sliding, grinding, leeching
Just at honesty's impeaching
Love looks much like absence,
And damning with faint praise,
With browner grass to graze.
Salvation seems surrender's tell
Sometimes grace burns like hell.

Jesus

Jesus.

The word is obscene regardless of context. Those who use it as profanity offend those who use it religiously. Those who use it religiously offend those who it casually. It never ends.

Who is He?

What did He actually come to do?

Ask a self-proclaimed evangelical and you will usually get either a cliche, a slogan, or a long-winded response that ultimately is similar to "cow spit". Jesus did this theological act. He did this soteriological act. He freed us from this particular sin, that particular struggle, etc. He came to establish particular redemption for His glory (by the way, if anyone actually knows what the hell that means in real life, let me know).

Exactly.

Wrong.

You see, the real genius, the true brilliance of Jesus is that He came teaching a new application of old truths. He didn't come establishing new doctrines left and right. He came applying old doctrines to new life, using old doctrines to create new life.

He did not come to introduce a new religion. He didn't come to save us from particular sins, from general ideas or improper doctrines. No.

He came to do what nothing else could do, what no one else could accomplish.

Any religion, properly applied, can free a person from greed. Any religion, properly applied, can free a person from pornography. Disease can render certain sins impossible. Injury can render certain sins impossible. Surgery can render certain sins impossible. Any religion can fix the particulars, can change general ideas. Any religion can establish, enforce and manipulate doctrines.

But only Jesus can save us from ourselves.

Only the love of Jesus is capable of freeing us from fixating on ourselves, from being our every waking thought, our only true worship, our only waking desire. Only Jesus is capable of letting us see life beyond ourselves. Only Jesus is capable of freeing us from the mindset that we are the most important thing.

Only Jesus can save us from our need to save the world.

From our need to always be right, always correct, always certain.

If we are always right, then He is not. If we are all-knowing, then He is not. It is the nature of Truth. Either we can be the truly Great One, or He can - but never both.

Certainty in life is not the perfection of faith - it is the absence of faith.

This is the beauty and brilliance of what Jesus did. He saved us from ourselves by saving us from needing to be the Savior. He saved us from ourselves by freeing us from the burden of having to be absolutely certain, absolutely correct and instead He allows us to trust, to rest, and to believe.

That is the true measure or grace and redemption - they are always bigger than the scope of our imagination. They are bigger than what we can fathom. They are limitless.

And this is what Jesus did that nothing else could do. No matter how far we extend ourselves to assert our dominance, no matter how far we retreat within ourselves to preserve ourselves - He is there. Grace extends beyond the boundaries of our capabilities.

It surrounds us, hems us in from every side, isolates us from ourselves, and removes us from ourselves replacing us with the person we always thought we were and hoped we would be. A person who looks a lot like Jesus.

And that is what no one else could do, no other religion could accomplish - the redemption of the self. The newness of all things.

Jesus came to save us from ourselves, because no other Savior could.

Clock Tower

Clock Tower

We are clockwork
Carefully measured deconstruction
Inextricable
Mostly inconsequential . . . with perks,
But occasionally lights and sound
Combine to Morse the message
Embedded in a subculture
The stoned have yet to drown.
Noise without frame of reference
Beauty lacking footnotes
And depth less its citations
Gold, myrrh and frankincense . . .
Lights, sound and clockwork
And insubstantial meanings
Pain with transitive verbs
The promise lingers, the forgotten lurks
At the periphery of flatlined
When the effervescent clicking stops,
The memory burns both white and red
And only death can read the signs.
Lights and sound and clockwork.
Lights. And sound. And shame.

Moon and Whiskey

Black Hole Supernova

Cracks and fissures form, colliding
From the expanding contraction
In the heating and cooling of a blush.
Someday the somber drains away
To find another's face to flush
In reprimand, remorse, or glee.
Beneath the flash of melancholy
Mischief flutters pretty eyes
Every time you "loved" me . . . lies
Pupils sliding down and left
While my face wore a lover's smile
Not that you would glance to see it,
Chance to meet it on a dare
A chill falters through the air
Daily severing the human . . .
Confronting who we are
But not enough to chafe the mind.
Shackled by grandeur's hubris
While squalor lurks behind the blinds
And after shocks contorting grace
To form tomorrow's about face
A black holed supernova.

We Are the Ocean

We Are the Ocean

We are untamed violence with a poet's soul
Insurmountable potential in a harlot's bed
A seamless garment of fractured wholes
Unassailable in our disbelieving faith
Light and dark are the fire and ice in our veins
Contracting and recycling our breath
Forging and remembering the strains
Of the refining song the Singer sang
To purify our ash out of nothing.
The singer blinks above the deep
And pauses draft across the sky
To part the everlasting sleep
And impossible dreams above the dreamer
Where speaking into abscess brings about the keeping
Of the song of soul and psych
Where we are the ocean
As the Ever-Burning One ignites the night.

Tango

The Dance of Nightmares

Snowfall against a midnight sky
Breathing like teardrops
Swept across the madness of the gods.
Currents of torment, flakes of certainty
Funnel into wind tunnels and swirl
Eddies of prophecy
Three parts confusion, one part hope.
And stone by stone we raised it up
Brick by brick we tore it down
Voices raised in silence, united by the sound
Of whirling wishes, flickers in a stream
Sputters of anointed flame
Against the wings of serendepity
And the stuttering of the gods. . .

Chopsticks are not ideal for pizza

Orbitals, Spheres

I woke while drifting toward a feeling
Startled I continued reeling (in)
A fantasy lest it fade to haze
And count itself among the razed
The grind of years have rendered.
Toil endured made a peasant spender
The moon a change of phase
Human course marks the passing ways
In teardrops on a ceiling
The seasons spiral, ever stealing
Away. Fly and fly away you say
Count me in each yesterday.
There I can only gape and stare
Chance a glance at something fair
There, be swept away from me
By this tonic, static sea
Till my ember sparks the bloodless coal
To sapphire eyes I give my soul.