THE GREY (PERSPECTIVE, ACCEPTANCE LOOP)

I told my brother I hate it here.
It’s unrelenting, the grey.
He told me he doesn’t see it.
Through his shaky, pinhole vision
still. 
He sees more. Chooses to.

And I took comfort in that.

All this time I was luxuriating in the grey.
Bathing myself in absent sunlight.
Letting it sink me down, 
lower.
But the numbness never led me anywhere.
Unknowingly, I let it flatten me out.

Slowly, I start to pick up on the range,
tune in.
Most days now I see more.
The frost bites back, but so do I.

Today, with a laugh, he told me he sees the grey.
That we all do.

And I take comfort in that, too.



WINDOW OBSERVER

I’m glad you live across from the highway
Mom says over her shoulder.

It’ll remind you, even when you’re lonely
That there’s still life happening out there.

I wonder if the faceless people flashing by look in at me
And think the same thing.

I leave my blinds open.
To see and be seen.

But only through the window.

hungry

 
people ask
how you

find something
to do with
your life.
something to
burn for.
my response
is always:
do what
you skip
meals for.
what
makes you
hungry.

 

poems

 
people
move thru
the afternoon
in different ways.
naps, sex,
books, work,
exercise.
i glide
thru
in poems.
each one
moves me
closer
to dusk
and when
that falls
i know
i’ve
made it.

 

rampant

 
everyone’s
a comedian,
writer,
or artist
these days.
content runs
more rampant
than fentanyl.
it feels like
a bubble
might burst.
indie presses
swallow up
my books
and spit them
out
on amazon
with millions
of other books.
excess content
isn’t good
for
the culture.
but when
did we
prioritize
culture
over profit?

Paternal


Your father
Cocks his
Rifle, stifles

Pearled autumn
Murmurs with

Splintered hands
Wrapped around

The trigger.
Crowing out 

False morning,
Cracking dawn

Like his
Brother’s teeth

Once gnashed
Soil, sinking

As birds
Do into

Sunrise. Have
You caught
The bullet?

a 1,000 roads


I don’t know any roads like the back of my hand
but I’ve cut my palms crawling down a few,

crawling hands and feet to you,
being grateful I’ve got any blood left to bleed,

crawling through the mud
just to be able to rest on a riverbank 

for a night and avoid the flood,
crawling towards next pay day

with half a diet
and all the meters running low,

crawling through the working day
towards the weekend, the home time bell.

I have crawled for so long
I forgot how to stand up straight,

becoming natural to be down
in the dirt with the spurs kicking me.

How I longed to get back up on the saddle
and ride that horse on out of this town,

but it was my own spurs
pinning me down.

Paycheck.

My musical instruments
Blue topping ice creams
Matured conventional prologue
I see it barely now
How the postmen waited for the dove
How my natural insinuations
Folded before your zeal
X marked before and after
Afternoons planked a gaze
It's own milieu
Epiphanies phoned me
My hibiscus desk full of
Streamed lies
Lord's own megaphone
Metaphors everywhere
I swam under it
My musical instruments
I see it barely now
Lord's own paycheck.

Pops                                    


Making lots of trouble,
because I can’t be in control…
but I am.
Just like Pops.

I want to be how he was.

Pops brought me toys
when he’d be out working awhile.
Flashlights, pencils, and the like-
all with corporate branding.

Big surprises from Pops, always thinking of me.

He made his ballcap look so slick that
I wanted to hit dogs with him,
call my Mom a whore,
and hang out in bars with miners.

When Pops got mad, he’d use the most
colorful words-
an artist.
That’s who my Pops was.

I’d like to be like him.

Heck, I’ve already seen how it’s done.
Pops sure did like to throw me around,
and I’ll do the same with my boy.
Gotta show a young man
who’s the real man of the house.
Wear ballcaps,
hit cats with shovels,
slam whiskey at Noon,
grab children by the neck and squeeze.

A sensitive man…I want to be a sensitive man…like Pops.

Behind all the ballcap charisma,
he wept at World War documentaries.

It’s a brave man I wanna be.
A courageous man…like Pops.

Unholy Land 

Whether it is life itself that is garbled
or just the news that is, hell is settling in,

a dry white place where there is no need
to take sides, you can be on all sides at once,

now that the God of Gods, aloof, impassive,
acknowledges neither the cold nor dark,

neither ancient grudges nor new outrages,
but sits stone-faced on his tall throne

amid dead bodies and bombed-out buildings
and the continuous roar of unheard prayers.

"Giving Up?"

She begged me
not to go
off to war...

So I stayed
and with a kiss
we died,

listening
to the whistling
of an incoming bomb,

not knowing she was pregnant. 



"The Smile"

She waved
goodbye 
naked.

“The Neurotic Perfectionism of Artificial Scarcity”

The literary game is like being a virgin,
It’s the catch-22 that without first getting laid
No one will sleep with you.
And you constantly obsess over trivialities like the way you dress.
You think you just can’t do it properly,
That everyone else has some secret
Which they are constantly making money from
Putting out ordered lists.
As an emotion in pixels,
Squares of morale like little trigrams,
Cry like the Delta blues,
Bits of carrying on piecing my lonely journey together.
I can see the meticulous beauty of chicken scratch Chinese,
Like wispy forms in the blocks of graph paper
Her exercise books laid out,
On the floor with a mattress for a bed.
Penned in her own red
That she was lacking,
In what comes to the native
Speaker the most natural thing in the world.


“When Acclaim Outweighs the Vital”

Too much around that some to like,
When did pretension become a high art
The poor pen may ask
As much as the street person is often a master of glibness,
I have seen the grandiosity of language that runs as deep
As civilization itself, with its contrived futility
Like arguing with a judge who holds power over one’s sentencing!
How silly your excellence is on precarious chairs
Who privilege justification for greedy excesses that never trickle down
But in the form of meritocracies of debt and addiction.
A tedious ruling that makes of a sane objector some contentious rebel;
A loner of those who graffiti over patronizing voices of ads
Explaining how to live from a mansion of incontrovertible bullshit.
If we could eat as a result of your precious pronouncements;
If they could build a consciousness of all human beings as worthy of a place to live for the future to live in,
Perhaps I wouldn’t be so struck by the anodyne boredom of a culture that tells us it’s the best.
Maybe we might go outside into a world we contributed to make
Hearing the echoes of our prefigured yawps down the canyons of human possibility,
And walk off the standard of the bourgeois clock premised on no digit which grants the masses their liberty.
Those figures, whose canned applause
Triggers our consent for their impoverished masterpieces,
I tell you fame is really only an ersatz
Cosmic belonging. For what an otherwise unknown person would give
Simply for a friend. Simply a lover is better than
All of the loving fame after one is dead.
A simple natural scene is better than
All the best paintings about it. 

Your Favorite Songs

You told me your favorite songs.
Even made me a playlist.
Took a minute to get acquainted with them, 
Songs that went from strangers, to friends, to family.
Songs that became a part of me.
Through my veins when they played,
Those songs got me through.
Music that made me think of you.
Listening, as if an arm reached deep in my chest
Pulled a handful of emotions,
And held them up in front of me to face them.
I wont delete the songs, but I always skip them.
Far down my list now as time has passed,
My bluetooth wont connect, radio it is today.
There it is again, one of the songs.
No skipping what was made to play now.
Suddenly, it comes rushing back.
I sit and wonder about the songs.
Do they make you think of me too?
The songs that got me through. 
The songs that make me think of you.