Odysseus - or - Villanelle Unbroken

Hold on for one day more.
The waves are wrought with chance
that I may touch the shore
and scatter kisses,
Sore across your patient glance.
Hold on for one day more.
I steer this plank-wood floor within the night.
A dance that I may touch the shore you guarded.
Once before,
sharp masts shot cannon lance.
Hold on for one day more this love of loss.
This lore,
which suffocates romance.
That I may touch the shore and learn of decades,
four gone, wasted in a trance.
Hold on for
one day more
that I may touch the shore.

argh ar! ehr! Stupid playwrite muddafukkas!
why can't I screeeeeeee
am.
Why?
Blastid bullshit blarney pre-cognitive
selfish.
We are all far too selfish.
If I weren't me,
I would pity me.
I would pity everything I'd ever thought I might be.
[pity pity pity pity]
Sounds like I might be
If only I were
does everything think I'm
crazy?
no, they love me. They all love me.
I'm so glad I've met the persona of
my drudging. she's sweet,
and cute.
I pretend sometimes we might belong to classifications other than
alive.
But we don't.
We don't belong.

Selfish,
blubbering idiots.
And the like.
Presence becomes
to us
post-occupation. What
was I left with? Value
the brutal honesty stuffed in to
compliments and kindness and
pasted-around passed-up.
Quit making up meaning.
Start prescriptions with,
"All we've ever become is a
transition between birth
and true wisdom"
But truly believe.

I owed you one.

If i was beautiful,
like cherries and their blossoms, would
it matter? Not much belongs
inside these arms. Not much.
But yet, can't we stop reaching for something
other than our occupation?
So fulfilling in vivid essence.
There is a plant in her living room
that once wilted,
but grew upwards again.
She had given up on the sun.
Became a believer.
What could be the word for trying so
hard you would
forgive your mistakes?
Monopathic?
Telesition?
Renaissance belongs
in books and lectures.
New starts belong
in fairy tales and pop culture.
Not me.
Not here.
Not without blood,
spilled across
an imagination so ignorant
it couldn't understand
lessons learned.
But what is it? A poem?
pardon me for the attempt.

Act 1

That night when I drove home,
it was foggy, and I was stoned.
So, at a pace of one-stop-light an hour.
I put in Notorius BIG and started writing
a movie about you.
It started with a close-up of your ears.
Zooming out to show they were small, like your nose.
Then,
it transitions to a scene where I
watched you scratch your neck for 23 seconds.
The whole plot line centered around the fact
that I don't know how to talk to you.
At least about this.
And is this why art really exists?
Too many people scared to speak
about what they think.
Well then don't think.
Feel.
I'm writing this to tell you I do.
I feel.
Like the cracks in your smile.
I'm writing you this to tell you I have patience
like starlight.
I'd wait a million years
just to catch your eye one night.
Keep looking.
The thought of love must be enough
to keep trying.
Why am I still writing?
I don't know who this poem is about, anymore.
Was Michaelangelo's next big accomplishment
to chisel nesting crescents into the moon?
Was the chapel not enough of an "I Love You"?
Edward Leedskalnin was just five feet tall.
After his fiance left, he spent the rest of his life
moving 56 tons of coral in the dead of night
to build a castle that would
be fit for his queen.
She never came back.
Why am I still writing?
Is it to find you?
Are these jumbled lines
and mashed confessions my attempt
at navigation?
I don't know who this poem is about, anymore.
Maybe you became a better lover
and I became a better liar
so let's fuck each other
one last time.

I've been tossing a lot,
in my sleep.
This morning, I awoke with
the blankets wrapped
around my neck, tied
as a noose.
I wonder how dark
my nightmares really are.
While I slept?
I didn't know sadness
could permeate dreams.
But I didn't know many things
until I had learned the difference
of cried and wept.

When your toys
were strewn across the carpet,
I would have thought to myself - Three years
from now, I will not miss you
as much as
I thought I would. But more than
everyone else did -
And then, I'll think
of all the stars that have
burned up. All the bottles
of wine I've drank. All
the nightmares I wrote like
love.
And I'll fail at writing a poem about you.

A Closed Letter

To happiness,
or whom it may concern.
I don't think I'd recognize you
at first.
Sparkling, transfixed
inside me.
I'd wonder how you
didn't clutch guilt like a
sparrow in the spring.
Would you be like they say,
the ones with smiles?
Could you be so easy to kiss?
To lick like a paintbrush?
Sometimes, I think, I regret
the break up. As though I'm sorry for broken
wills and iron bloodlust.
But more often, I
imagine how you feel in my clothes.
So when did our ambition grow eyes?
The way you used to remind me that
breath and believe both started with
letting go.

highku

she gave me a choice
her or alcoholism
I chose being drunk

Un Tren! Un Tren!

I gave up experimenting with
train sets when
the breaker wouldn't stay flipped.
It's hard to move on track
when electricity doesn't exist.
You aren't
impossible,
but loving you is.
I let the Pacific Ocean run
up the rocks to
slap me a life-awakening.
And when my glasses got
wet, I saw water
prism bricks stack
up and mortar
themselves with salty breath.
I don't have patience like this.
Come down from blimp-clouds.
Trickle through bed rock and
basalt. Clean
the crops.
Promise me a rainy season
so I stop these ankle-
extensions dancing.
So I quit praying at 60 mph.
I wonder if oil would make
you thicker, like
feathers,
or slick.
And the smells of rewound tapes
leak out of our arguments.
Next time, you have the fight
and I'll read
the transcript. That way I
won't set fire to your
repeated mistakes. I'll just
love the way
your cross-examination makes me
feel guilty for moving my tongue.
How many stenographers did you hire
before you found a deaf one?

Train tracks rust in
the cuffs of my jeans.
This great escape led me to
a spine stronger than mine.
I performed the transplant, and walked
back into you upright.
Rearranged your veins until your
heart could finally beat again.
A shakey-handed surgeon with
ball point scalpels and morphine
in my touch but it wasn't enough.

Your Colosseum held peanut cans
filled with springy snakes.
A defense mechanism for those
easily afraid of a lie.
Thank your god I was born with blind faith.
Thank mine I was born with round legs.
Lay railroad ties and I will
dream up steel
pace to keep moving through
these dried-up jerk towns.
There is coal burning in the
back of my perseverance.
I study medical dictionaries
in the headlights. But
she's running me down and I
haven't found
the chapter on terminally empty.
I'm out of time
and I'm sorry.

Blue

There are runs in our stockings.
We shouldn't wear such things in the snow.
It makes us slow to apologize
for mistakes we purposefully
make. And quick
to make love
by smacking our glass against
each other.
I could have loved you,
if you hadn't reminded me of myself
so much.
We shattered,
but before that we had cracked.
Hairlines and fractures in the
concrete wishing wells
we call eyes.
I exchanged life savings
into pennies.
Muttered a prayer in Hebrew.
Translated it into promises.
I promise to never be good
enough for you.
I promise to pretend
I had Eloise in my sights
and an eye to shoot straighter
this time.
Grant me a seventeenth chance
so I can fail to make it up
to you.
Blue is not pretty
like eyes welling up with wishes.
It's lying about sleeping
when I lay next to you.
Blue,
like the bay I threw dollar bills
into. Signed
with your middle name
and the love I fell
into. It was wet.
Warm like a bathtub with
the arms of an ocean.
These are things I am not.
I am not disgusted with myself.
I am not holding grudges against
my mistakes.
I am not looking for problems
or sabotaging us.
I am not afraid of being a father
like mine.
I am not lying!
I am not blue-eyed.
I am not blue.
I don't regret every goodbye
that I painted on my voice.
I didn't want to stay.
I didn't want to wrap myself
in your sheets and forgive
everything. I can't come clean.
I'm stained with spilt faith
but I've never lost God.
I tucked her deep, next
to my self esteem.
Locked them up and
threw away the key.
I don't miss me.
I'm not lying.
I'm not blue
I don't miss you.
I can't tell the truth.

But I've stopped sleeping,
hoping I can be happy in
something other than my dreams.
I'm not ready.
I can't burn the list of
sins I drag from my wrists.
Or the failures
bent like staples holding my smile down;
it'll never be big again.
So let me be the body you
left behind.
And perhaps I
can forgive the
weight of my skin
and find you.
Intertwined in the padlock.
When the key clicks,
the world will have to
forgive me.
I will be useless,
except for loving you.

Bleach

When you pulled your skin back,
did you find what you were running from?
Was it shaped
like slow, open arms, lit
with magnesium? And
do you need me to undress you now?
Because I remember turning myself
inside-out
for your enjoyment and
losing my good coat in the process.
How we float,
dunking our heads to test our breath.
Slowly,
we are drinking this river to get closer to each other.
Catapults line our thirsty throats
and we cannot scream.
We cannot present our anthems of
frustrated worth. Tie
collapsing fortitude to my limbs.
I will not quarter.
My shoulders are cementing,
stagnant clay pits.
I've dyed my earlobes red from
all the shrugging. But when I sing,
the clay goes slowly soft.
And after 6 months of staining like children,
for my birthday
you gave me more bleach.
I scrubbed until I was clean.
Last night,
I watched a middle-aged man lose
two weeks of self help tapes in
a coffee shop.
He had been turned down
by a twenty-something who
didn't trust innocence.
So is this my sentence for giving up on love?
My dreams and nightmares are distorting.
Horses are running wild through cemeteries
and in the background you
are laughing.
I need an exorcist, most nights.
But I settle for a finger-painting,
or more bleach.
Which leads me to ask;
Did you understand I wasn't a jeweler?
Just a stranger who knew
rubies were found in the hearts of the missing.

If I had touched you
as hard as I wanted to,
my lips would still be imprinted onto your fist.
After all,
this explosion began
with the kiss
we missed.
But that's not to say I couldn't bleed still.
I digress.
If it wasn't for the scratches of the win,
I wouldn't remember the good parts.
Like the night we waltzed
between the knees of the butterflies
and you laughed,
and said it tickled.
Or those December windows
we steamed without breathing.
I've gathered these memories into
the type of neighborhood where
porch swings don't budge.
I watch the porcelain grey in the bathtubs.
I watch the wallpaper creep from the molding.
This is where I learned
to lie,
and to shiver.
I always imagined I would marry the girl
who left: the painter blind, the
poet speechless.
But she would want to see the neighbors,
and I can't go back there.
So instead, I will marry
a girl with eyes like walls.
A girl who fancies herself.
A girl who can't see the backgrounds in portraits.
And when she sleeps, I'll
sneak out into the night, alone, and
ask how we could forget that
flowers are still flowers in the rain.

I still water the plum tree you planted.
And sometimes, when the wind blows.
The branches scratch up against
the inside of my ribs.
And it tickles me to tears.

Reding is phun

If you look at Glenn Beck's library
record, you won't see...much.
Kanye West has admitted to
never reading books,
although he wrote one.
1 in 15 Americans
can't make sense of a newspaper.
Every first world country
teaches at least two
languages to children starting from birth.
And we don't know our own.
Where did we go wrong?
Did television announce itself
as a deity?
Did our busy hands move too fast
for our eyes to see?
Did we trade poetry
for portability?
Or was it when we knew?
When we knew we were smart enough.
When we knew the coldest wars were over.
When we knew how to advertise.
Maybe.
But maybe,
the end of culture should be blamed on us,
the weak.
The death of our language happened
when we were far too bold to listen
and far too scared to speak.

4 minutes, or damn near.

In the passenger seat of a
Chevrolet Cavalier, one of the
greatest gifts I've ever met
confesses they call her bipolar.
I tell her I am, too.
They just haven't caught me yet.
If they set a trap made of
6-pack rings and suicide attempts
I'd be fucked.
But they won't.
Instead, people become uncomfortable
when I tell them I was a canceled abortion.
Do you get it yet?
I'm not supposed to be here.
I drank a bottle of nail-polish when I was two.
Gave my mother a week before I tipped
the aspirin pill case back.
Stomach pumps are longer than you'd think.
But perhaps you can tell me what
it's like to have a purpose-filled life.
I party with the best of 'em.
Which means I drink alone.
If you ask, I'll tell you it gets
rid of the headaches in my chest.
Some days I feel like a latex balloon
no one has the breath to fill back up.

So where's the ambulance?
Where are the white apes in white jackets?
I respect this world enough
to leave it
with one less dreamer.
One less chance.
And you can doubt my wings. I wouldn't expect
the lot of you to
see anything you couldn't proclaim a war against.
For calling yourselves believers and faith healers
you sure are blind to a love
built on empathy.
Pull the bit from your mouth
before you speak to me.
If you're right, I'll hang myself from your reins.
I've wanted nothing more
than to watch you watch me
suffocate in a hope chest.
Tucked underneath forgotten birthday cards
and a first marriage wedding dress.
The only thing worth hearing about me
will be my eulogy. It will read
like a grocery list for insomnia.
They'll decorate my coffin with
Parisian cafe charm because
I was an artist,
and artists adore elitist culture.
But if I have my way.
they'll march my body to a landfill
so I won't ever decompose.
And there I will lay, staring at all the stars
I threw away.
The sun will rise
to broken promises dancing on my grave.
And I won't blame them for holding a grudge.

I want out of a world where
your sins outlast you
and riches are held in currency.
Give me a world
where Raskalnikov weeps
and New York can finally sleep.
I want truth stitched into me
like a Star of David in the ghetto.
The Gestapo better bring their rifles.
I have no intention of going quietly
into the night.
I encased my heart in iron bars
that rusted when I cried
I pried them apart.
So don't call me a tin man
I have miles of love inside.
I'll rip open your permanent
record and stamp
"Too Gorgeous To Die".'
Just like the sky,
your eyes hold the stars in line.
Don't shut them, yet.
Sacrifice complacency for
acceleration.
Put your lead foot on the
burn pedal until
we all catch fire.
Mimic the sun.
Chase down the dreams you had before
they told you it couldn't be done.
They are trying to cut off our fingers
so lets all give them one.
Lick the teeth of your heroes
and call it a kiss.
Spit on the wrists of
anyone who tells you fairy tales don't exist.
Because we shouldn't be here.
We dreamers.
We rogues of a new dawn.
We love-song singers
and tear-hiders.
We were always told
to fall in line
so we leaped out,
foreheads glistening in sweat spelling out
"we aren't beaten yet".
And I'll keep
playing psalms on the harmonica.
And you'll keep painting smiles
on nativity sets.
And before this shit gets
us in the end,
we will weep passion
until those empty veins
run red again.

My grandfather was 85
when his wife left this world
and him.
He told me it wasn't enough, anymore.
He had stopped moving inside.
And I said "Grandpa, I don't blame you.
True hope in this world doesn't
come often. But I know,
for all the things that
want to kill us in this world,
when we love,
we find the only
thing worth dying for.

Welcome Back

Pour it out.
Vomit into my hands, and
I will hold you and
what you've needed to throw away.
Give thanks for the propellers
in your arms, call them veins
and love and goosebumps.
Whisper through trees too quiet
like you were the patience of starlight.
She spent 30 years getting here.
She traveled through an asteroid belt.
Stars don't get stains or
covered in satin or given
sainthood. What is it like to be
a needle in a black haystack?
I would ask her, but I'm frightened
of what her eyes would tell me
before her mouth could open,
swallowing me like a child's forehead
into wonderment.

Dedicated to the last 3 weeks of my job.

She only thinks
out loud, finding
a million ways to say
a million nothings.
Reaching deep for compliments
about her highlights
and slimming skirt.
I look at my chopsticks
and ask how hard I
would have to throw my face
to penetrate my brain.
It's been twenty five
minutes now and I'm
crawling with nausea. How can she
be so full of herself?
Then she asks how my day
has been, and
I realize
I haven't been
paying any attention to her
at all.
Sometimes, I'm too proud
to apologize.

To be shipwrecked

The head-rush is not
as instant as one
would think.
There is a settling
of iron in your
circulation, first.
Sweat retreats back
through your pores.
Then her empty
eyes ring like crystal
under a wet thumb.
And you pray to be deaf,
or blind.
Sirens perch on
her eyelashes,
inviting you into a paradise
filled with shattered hulls
and stories you don't get the endings of.
.....
possible nicknames continued
.....
Double-stitch,
sweet pea. Don't ever
let me rip you open.

Woof in Sheeeps Clothing

The want to know what I've been writing,
so I tell them.
.....
There were more blackouts
this week than normal.
And tonight,
when I laid in the grass,
I felt my hand touch a withered
dandelion stalk and mistook it
for someone next to me.
I suppose a more proper title would
be "What I am not writing."
Because in all honesty, the poems
exist in what I
leave out.

Possible Nicknames For You

Horse -
For carrying your long
face so proudly.
Jellyfish -
For transparency only
a mother
could love.
Still-Life -
see: your lips.
Dandelion -
For more than just the obvious
reasons. But I do know I never want
to see the color yellow, again.
Will continue list later.

This Weekend

Felt like a crash course in appreciating silence. And just when I thought it would be too much, I realized I had begun to enjoy not speaking. I've had my wings spread for the past two days and I am exhausted. It was a mission trip. And I come home, and feel as though I accomplished nothing.

This is going to be a tough-sleep night.

But in other news,
I've finished reading High Fidelity and have a Top Five list to celebrate.

Top Five Songs for Being in a Dodge Neon:

1. Punk Rock - Mogwai
2. Roxanne - The Police
3. Mosquito Repellent - The Mountain Goats
4. Wildflowers - Ghostface Killa
5. All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix