You are: here.
Unseen narrator: the ravine lies before you
and it is narrow.
Walk through, the path is present.
Do not wander, do not touch.
The walls, they appear as stability,
as opportunity.
They are distractions.
You must discern the difference.
Stay vigilant, focus on the task at hand.
Walk through.

When the walls end,
you will have come to the other side.
To: a valley of efflorescence.
A verdurous mountain rising.
in the vista’s breadth.

He is in the mountain.
You will meet him there.
But the people are in the valley.
Life more abundantly awaits.
Go: there.

my life would read like a red cross
volunteer straight out of a brief
bio in readers digest or a lifetime
original movie. everything played just
right and everyone cared for in
just the right way. but really while
i’m tying the bandages around this guys
leg, or helping this old lady across
the street . . . while i’m scooping
poop out of the clogged septic tanks
or de-toilet-papering a house for a
neighbor, the whole time my head is
in town. at a pub where i plan to go
the moment the sun hides behind the
mountains. a place i know where i can
climb inside a bottle, hole up, and soak
into every pore, the brewed nectar of
the fruit of the earth. enjoying life and
joy in a bottle so many others are there
abusing. just waiting for the day to break
so i can hop back in my thirty-year-old
chevy truck and head back to do
it all again.

He was a Career Man
and a Red Cross Volunteer
and his life read just like
a bottom-shelf dime-store novel
with all the characters stuck
in all their own little worlds
and the two-tracks tying their
countryside together would freeze,
every winter, and split,
right at the seams,
but he drove a giant pickup truck
and didn’t abide by snow-drifts
or stuck tires, and the folks he knew
hardly knew him at all, hiding
behind kitchen cabinets and
dead-locked storm doors. No,
they won’t be joining him.
Not any time this lifetime.
So he drives to town each night
and crawls inside a bottle,
waiting for the dawn to break
it open so he can drive
back home again.

there is a certain amount of death involved when you purchase a heavy duty battery but what you really wanted was an alkaline and you get home and plug the crap into your electronic device and find the power is gone within just a few minutes.

you mourn

through things like overeating or returning to the store to purchase new batteries, but you know that something significant has taken place in your failure to purchase the right thing the first time.

because it’s relegated to the dump

and this saddens you as you are well aware of the environmental damage your two little wimpy batteries will cause to the landscape around the area far from your home but near to that trailer park where you know that guy who you bought a beer for once at that pub downtown

and this has brought you back to beer

which you must admit has made this full circle, even this brief bout with death, something less than as bad as you thought it would be because nothing calms your nerves or settles your stomach like bubbles slowly rising on the inside of a green or clear bottle and the flavor of a slightly too strong

ale.

I have no use for February Snows
or the salt on the half-iced roads,
and there is no great love with me
for plowblades or 2-stage abominations

But when I breathe that iced serenity
and I know that all the bugs are dead
I can let some ghosts be bygone and
prepare to bury all of the rest
under snows so directly-metaphorical
it makes my fingers cold to even
think of them.

in love
imperfections
fade

like a child just learning to walk
i’ve wandered these halls in the dark
stumbling into walls
tripping over myself
and all the others here with me
wandering
believing we all have some idea
of the way out.

like a child just learning to eat
i pick up a piece and try to fit it
perfectly in the mouth hole
but find myself hitting nose
cheeks and occasionally shoving
a cheerio at great velocity into
my open eye.

i see you there offering me help
but

like a child just learning free will
i figure i’ll do it better myself thank you.

And as his
eyeballs
run from his skull
and the thicker parts
are cooked instead
of liquified
and beasts crawl out
from beds and closets
to feast and flay
and lay to waste
him and his and
God Damn it I
wish there was something
that anyone
could do because
God Damn it I
would do it
but there isn’t
and I can’t

tan, beach, pool, sun, sand,
running barefoot beside waves
back to the *fine* grind

forgive me, please
for basking
in the luminescent haze
and shaking hands
with the deciders
of happiness
of pain
for today they smile upon me

forgive me for not stopping

The lights come up and
these transient souls start filing
out every door, the walls
of this dark place veritably
hemorrhaging human life,
pumping it in to icy streets
and flooding our Fair City
with cancer.

Their bloods will be poison
and they will cut it from one-another
and every being will drip into nothing.

But the King of the Mountain
will stand unmoved, watching
and waiting until he is still
the King of the Mountain and
the only one on the Earth

I have spoken with your elders and
the ‘ayes’ clearly have it and
I am not quite qualified
to practice in your hallowed halls
nor play the psalms you hold so dear;
the sounds I am you will not hear.

But I can rest so foully deemed
and easily too, it’s true.
I’ll spend my time making music
and you can do whatever it is you do.

His family, a gang of dishwashers
come to make their fortunes from the harshest
fields of Hungary so many years ago. His kin
kept clean hands and a tight ship and
not so many amenities, save for liquors
to burn out the bits that made one
Socially acceptable on Friday Nights.

He hardly knew a day of rest and slept,
for the most part, atop a stack of rags
collected from his travels through the city.
His teeth were yellow and his hair near black
and the scars across his cheek and arms
made obvious his penchant for knife-fighting.

But he was a Gentle Man overall, with a
quick wit about him and a too-soft smile
that could send a gal to fainting. And though
his hair was only cut so often, he kept
the toes of his boots clean, and the hems
of his cloths were never in much disrepair.

His repute was not so bad and not ill-founded
and not so existant, save for the weekly
game of cards he’d been known to take to
with his brother-in-law. He never won too much,
but he never bet too much either, and so
was not to be scolded when he found his way
to buying another bottle.

When last I saw him he was still a Dishwasher’s
Son, but his head was held high, and though
he never said it, he was proud a man as
any I’d ever knew.

It is a trifling discomfort to know
that somewhere, out there,
in the great wide world,
you are still alive and able,
at will,
to speak.

Would that I could silence you
till thy kingdom come, you’d
be as silent as death, or
the warning letter that fell
from the post box yesterday morning.

Your shoes would be buried
in a square you’d hated
with a shrine for all you stood against
erected atop their grave.

I would dance there, most nights,
and conjure curses against your
Family Name,
with a book of strong words in one hand
and a bottle of strong spirits in the other.

But you walk still,
and breathe and speak
and though it is a discomfort,
’tis a trifle and nothing more.