Every drive home from
a day spent without the
sweet caress of my love
is so cruel and terrible
and I often wonder how
I can bear to stand it,
save for looking ahead
to another day with her.
But even then, my
fingers are sore from
the cut of another woman,
and she can feel, and
she can tell, but I know
she’ll never leave me.
Still, that short drive
is made long, and the
silence, oh so cruel
and terrible.

I wish that I could be there
to taste the juices leaking
from your eye sockets
And hold your skin-and-bone
hands as they tremble,
just to feel them tremble,
just beneath the necktie
that I’m sure you wore.
Though you probably felt
you may as well have been naked.
I probably feel the same.
After all,
It only seems fair to me.

All things culminate
All things are culminations
of other things
which are culminations
et cetera
but where is the bare-bones?
The stuff that makes the stuff
that makes the stuff that makes
et cetera
?
Is there time to worry
about such trivialities?
Are these trivialities
so trivial after all?

Hardly canI fathom these things
though, by definition,
these things are simple.
Give me something
complicated to think on.

Everything is going so slow
like the traffic on a Chinese highway
and there’s just enough time
to really think everything over.
But with all these cars just crawling
it’s a shame to think
we may be headed
in the wrong direction.

And even with these teeth
sharpened and serrated
pressed against bruised
and battered flesh,
I must smile.

it’s the teeth that make
the love run all along,
Just like blood
from a freshly bit wound.

Two little fans working double-time
trying with all their heart and soul to cool
this god damn hot-box.
Tirelessly,
Thanklessly,
They blow and blow and push
against the air and smoke and anguish
fighting all of the particulate dismay
out one of the wide-open windows,
but to no avail.
Less than distress,
more than discomfort,
something sets in and settles,
and the fans can do no good against it.
Too heavy, yet just fine enough
to powder every little crevice
and coat so thoroughly.

Then the coughing starts,
first in moderation,
then on in to bouts,
and finally a full on fit of it.
Red eyes and runny noses
with phlegm and snot and bile
spraying splashing compounding
until the walls of this hot-box
are damp from all of the excrement.
Between the hot and the sick
there starts the shivering until
one by one by one the bodies fall
down to the floor only to be left unattended
until the last man drops,
and no one is around to turn off those poor fans.

I never would have thought this
from your younger days, but
despite all of the yelling, my
mother is still a saint, and while
I can’t speak foryours, I know
you could have borrowed mine
if you wanted. Instead, short
sight has turned you a failure.
At least your shourt sight
hasn’t failed us all.

and it feels
like ice down the neck of your
shirt dropped in by a good friend
on a hot summer’s day

There is a pretty girl
in the other room

Off and on she looks at me
through the doorway,
and she smiles sometimes,
and some times she
doesn’t really smile so much.

There are lights and televisons
that flicker on and off again.
I see them flashing all about her
just beyond that doorway,
but I can’t see the lightswitch
and I’ve yet to really decipher
what I hear on that T.V.
(though sometimes she tells me)

Every few days we speak
about the banalities of life
or the things that are not
quite so unimportant.
Every few days we simply
do not speak at all.

I do not comprehend these,
the transactions that occur within
the confines of our little doorway,
Despite all the time spent speaking
waving shouting into the other room.
Though that never was the point.

But I keep looking through the doorway,
hopeful there will be a pretty girl to grin at.

I have not seen her so much these days,
despite the door being open,
if she has not closed the door,
She has certainly moved to a window.

It was a flashback.
Too much noise,
not enough VOLUME
but everything was turned up
all-the-way-and
there you were just
slamming
but it was a flashback
and I don’t know where
the time went. and I’m
not sure if I’m wrong
when I hate it, or
if that’s just the way
flashbacks
are supposed to work.

Let me state obvious things.
I will speak your mind as the words
form in your cranium,
for I can read them from the gestures
that your hands make
towards your feet
all the way down there on the pavement.

I will work out a points system.
I will score when you have had your story
laid out before you before you can
utter a word. I will reign champion.
You will lose.
My points system, though,
is slanted.

there is no almost perfect
perfect is an all-or-nothing sort of thing
so when I say you’re almost perfect,
with your hair and eyes and tone
of voice and
everything you think to tell me that you think of,
know that I’m almost lying.
I won’t care if you understand.

How to count your moments of weakness
with only 60 seconds on a clock-face?

One could posit ‘carefully’
I would rebuff ‘with all the care in the world’

He drank down their smooth yet firey
misnomers and falsehoods until he was
the drunkest man in the world.

He is devoid of logic and reason.
He would make it to the top one day,
hell or high water all that could stop him,
spurred ever onward by new casks
off the foul stuff bottled by the fellows
down the way.

But once or twice he sobers up
and starts in to thinking, as he once did.

I met him on such an occasion.
There he was, confused and befuddled,
just beyond an open door.
I went to him. He said he had troubles.

I said that life was hard.
Tell me about it, he replied.
But it’ll get better some day, he said.
I won’t be around to see it.

He left then, to drink more of their foul draft,
so I told him to take care.
He said you got to.
So I do.

Someone’s mist just
stumbled through the doorway.
No footprints, no strange
melodies echoed on frozen stairs.
Just an impression
left indelible, yet invisible.
These are not wise thoughts
to think of you. These are
Dangers, completely self-imposed.

We do not talk of tigers
in the cornfields down the road.
The tiger, you see, stays native
to it’s home in Wildest Africa,
and Furthest India, and certainly
not in the cornfields down the road.
Yet I speak of you,
and your mist ever stumbling,
and I know you to be here,
indelible, yet invisible.

Like a tiger in a cornfield.

and when we kick it,
as they say on the other side of town,
all the folks will stop and stare
cuz there we’ll be, just kickin’ it,
admittedly,
on the wrong side of town

thick warm air
forced down throats by
heaving lungs
barely breathable
make it work, make it work,
cough and wretch and
gasp it down again
and every
little palpitation
of the heart
the mind
the spirit
will be painted in someone’s studio
immortalized wholly
for ever and ever

Even as long as the Earth has been alive
and the stars its seen explode
and the billions of species it has
deemed unfit to remain,
I wonder if ever
in its long, lauded life,
thought it would one day measure,
absolutely,
its sorrow by the gallon.

I do not walk in to your house
with my head held high
and my sword-tip swinging low
for to cut up all the carpeting,
my boots making a mess of things
and all the while a smile across my face

I do not walk in to your house
a pistol in my hand
and a dagger in my fist
with a gun-belt and a bandolier,
and a swagger oh-so-cavalier,
my pomp and pride permeating the place

Outside, though,
I’ll kill you.

Cold sorts of fingers are
the worst sort gripping
’round the parts one tries
to breath through

and sometimes
(right now)
it’s getting hard to breathe
‘cuz there’s this pressure,
just below the
cheek-bones. Tightening up.

but I still breathe.
Now, only to peel
the frozen fingers
from my wind-pipe.