i let it rain on niko bellic for ten minutes
i felt like Vonnegut
watching him stand in one spot
shaking off the rain

You are as a fish
stuck in the same little bowl
and though it is
a nice bowl,
rife
with all the trinkets
that a fish could ever need,
it is just a bowl
and there is such trouble
leaping out.

Instead, there are lungs
to be had, and claws
to be grown from fins,
for to climb atop a small stone castle
and leap so very gracefully
from the bowl-rim to counter-top to
kitchen sink, which is
not much better,
but
at least you can
flush on down to stream that way.

i wrote a poem filled with crap
and put it by your door.
i lit it on fire and rang your bell.

because if you can’t enjoy it’s verse
you can at least enjoy its smell, as it
sticks to your shoe this week at work
and nearly burns down your house.

There is a New World Order
but it deals directly with french fries
at fast food chains and I
think I’ll have a large if you can manage.

The Gods are being dug back up
and in equal parts tacked on sandwich boards
and being hung out to dry, for to prove
the points meandering that nobody
knows anything and everything
is ending, and soon anyway.

but that’s okay, ‘cuz
even if the seas rise up to swallow us,
or the winds blow everything down to Texas
(What could be a worse Armageddon, after all, than to wake up in your own
home but down in Texas?)
, with all these things I’ve done and seen
I’ve had a pretty good run, it seems,
and even the very End Times can’t
take that away from me.

One was asked permission to breathe,
the other granted,
and soon they were huffing and puffing along
as if they knew what to do
with these intricately overcomplicated bodies
of theirs.

One felt is if they were falling,
the other as if they were
The Walking Dead, and together they
made a pair of fools with
too-high a limit on their credit cards
to be healthy.

Then they got to jostling and one,
he bumps in to the wall, and the other,
she falls over, and it’s all
his fault but she’s the one that
takes the fall and now everyone is screaming
and now everyone is slamming doors and
now everyone is leaving
and now everyone is gone except for me,
With only enough nails to board up
half the broken windows.

viscosity

sometimes
you find yourself
washed up on a foreign shore
and you must get to know
the indigenous people
the language
and look around
and blink
as if you’d woken up from
a dream
as if you’d been here
all along

It’s been 36 hours
and with all
the smoke
and haze I
can still
smell you
on my fingers
but you’d
think it’d have
rubbed off
on the car
door handle
by now,
or the
cold side of
my pillow or
the shirt
I wore that
day.

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.