Breathlessly I take in a breath
Knowing that it's yours; I
Disperse it through my
Dark hallways. As a bellows
Ignites these broken
Branches, may my soul
Be wrapped in a warm
Ring of green stone, like you,
Subtle in your intricate beauties.

Capacious, yet lacking trust;
Our frenetic hearts combust.
Your eyes were a wellspring in winter
And thus, a mirror angled at the dusk.

And just as easy my soul unmoored;
A boat yawning across a dark lake.
Soon it would be docked in a bed of ice,
But this cursed night is mild, and my wounds
Soak freely in chilled undercurrents.

Time [And How It is to Be Collected]

Grandfather, your voice has become hollow,
A wood-warped frame leaning
In the shadows down the hall.

And what of this ‘way of worn carpet?
Whispering, your slippers make their friction
The comfortable creaking of floorboards, a song
As you make your clockwork journey
From the bathroom to your bed.

Dust is collecting upon your pillowcase
Like a bottoming out hourglass, if only
There were a way to know for sure
When the room should be turned on its end.
The sheets parachute down to the ceiling.
The flip clock, still tumbling an hour too late,
Is hanged by its own cord, swinging
Like a pendulum without an anchor.

Will your meaningless possessions fall
Through a narrow neck
Into a mirror’s reflection
To begin Anew
In a shadowed parody of an Afterlife?

But there is a strength that lies within memories.
The seconds, minutes, hours spent by your side
And likewise a thousand other hands
Have softly brushed by your numbers
Only to come around again, to witness
The air rushing across accumulating candles
On cakes long squared and divided
And dispersed
Amongst the yellowed photographs
Of so many smiling, frosting-flecked faces.

If you could hear them now, their bursts of canned laughter
Would remain fragmentary and maddening
Like the number of spent matches used to light the candles
And the burn marks on a hand accidentally touching flame,
Vision without creation.
Laughter without a joke.

And so, Grandfather, the sun is at your back
Your once erect figure, a pedestal
In the season of youth, how bravely
You laughed at your sweeping shadow, central
To your own kept time.
Look upon it now
Witness your own aging hands, a pair
Of crippled claws desperate in their attempt
To collect the receding ground.

It is a fruitless attempt, for soon it will be dark
And night is the revenant
The clocks cannot occlude.

And as we lose the trail of a thousand stone cogs, winding
And pushing and supporting each other,
The varying sizes, the ringing, flicking tongues
Of silent alarms like the beating
Of our tired fists against our hollow wrung hearts
Remember that the steps we take forward
Are our only fated movements, a procession
Celebrating a wake.

Ten callused relatives drunk on the fear
That we might have buried the past prematurely.

Once I dreamt I held your hand,
Traced the image in the sand,
But a jealous tide, under a stinted moon,
Took the image away too soon.

My sunken footprints form salty pools,
My feet desperate in their ignorance,
To clutch back the grainy past.

Night owl eyes 
Hints of a Chesire smile
Curling like a conquered wave
On the corners of your mouth.
Just the right hint of devil
To temp, as undercurrent,
The frothy white tide.

Waiting [In a Waiting Room]

Hope has been hung on the words of strange men
The cogs of clocked avenues are wound
Twitching tightly in our shadowed hearts
Waiting for the footfalls of gloved shoes
To whisper rehearsed apologies.

Outside the men stamp out cigarettes
Wordless in the sleet-stung lot
Angered by their impotence.

I once traced firefly trajectories
Sitting on the back steps of my youth
Such a pattern less flight, only now
Does it occur to me how
Blind was their path before the light
How must they feel when taking these
Leaps of faith, pushing forward
Without constant validation?

And equally how blind I was
Chasing insects through summer
Wide-eyed and barefoot
Stumbling forward on half estimation
Half blind chance, waiting
With cupped hands for the light
To prove my choice of paths.

It’s true, as adults, as well.
How subliminally we change our steps
Wandering our nightly paths, the happenstance
Occurring as a glimmer flash, a shared smile
A tickle of fingers as they clasp
Quite naturally, hearts beating
Like invisible insect wings
Carrying us off with ease
Into the more secret shades of night.

Such actions transport me, days distant
And a feeling I thought gone forever
The soft summer breeze, a white fog
Hanging like thin sheets drying on the line
A delicate, ghostly glow of skin
Desperate in the fragility of the moment
I find myself chasing you, tracing
Random paths upon you, hands cupped
With trained patience
Hoping to catch your light.

But just as my choices dead end, fireflies
Glowing in my peripheral like headlights
Drifting through this night fog, so drifts
My gaze from your stunning, blue eyes
To the tree line before me, notice
That although the path is dark, sometimes
A light shines, and on some nights
The lights shine together, decorating
The trees like blinking Christmas bulbs.

How transitory our lives,
How strangely timed,
But just as we open our palms, joyous
To catch fleeting beauty, we know
That the beauty must be let free,
To wander blindly out into the world,
It’s glow forever an etched memory.

A Good Night Brewing

Smoke evades
A mirage, you can see it but you can’t feel it,
The cigarette in your hand only fades,
Outside on the porch watching the night masquerade,
Legs kicked up, lounging in the shade of
Night.

Brakes squeal distant,
Waiting for the crash you just listen, but no sound,
Missed the period on that sentence,
But you’re persistent,
Keep your ears to the ground, can’t let it be,
Other voices surround,
People heading in town,
The night is young and so are we,
Inadvertently,
Your brain forgets the crash that will never be,
Or happily lets it go, shuffles the thought to obscurity,
And you’re reminded
That you never wanted the crash in the first place.

Down the street there’s a sign, halogen glow,
A different kind of show
Inside resides the hearts of a few dozen minds,
Dulling their senses,
Putting down their defenses, letting go,
You’re tempted to follow,
To throw caution to wind and you know,
That the pressures that cleave will never relieve
Unless you leave your front door so,
Off
You
Go …

Words I Wish Could Be Unwritten...

The rain from this afternoon was slowly drying. Slowly because it was night now and the cooling exhaust from another spent day was whispering away its body heat. The window was half-open to let in the breeze. He walked quickly about, performing his damn rituals—making sure the shoes were correctly lined under his bed, peeking out with their shoelaces, dusting what he could. Correcting his life. He spread his hand along the comforter, easing out the crinkles, thinking how she was probably just getting out her class and the rain had stopped. This was good timing because she didn’t have an umbrella that he knew of and now she wouldn’t have to wait in the rain. Any moment she’d be calling him and he’d go there to pick her up. Sitting there on the steps of the science building, having a good smoke, she’d spot him and put it out, crushing out the stagnant daydream. Her backpack, stuffed with books, would gain momentum from her hurried jog and slightly affect her ability to jog in the first place.

A smile would filter through the fogged glass.

Forgot to unlock the passenger door! But his body is much faster, running on some sort of better instincts, already straining against the seatbelt to pop the lock. The timing happens to be perfect, for just as his pinched fingers fall back the door is thrown open. And just like that she is here with him, deep in the shadows of this college street, listening to the music on the radio. The car smells damp inside, but it does not make a difference; the ride is short. Nestled in this moving car, they talk in spurts, reflecting the day. It wouldn’t be considered anything special to them, this quiet fragment of their relationship, just something that they did when they were together, at least not on a conscious level, for he definitely felt the accumulation of. . .what? A life? No, even if that were true it would be too much of a cliché for him to ever accept. Maybe it was something in him that fears abandonment, he . . . no, that’s another cliché. He was terribly afraid that she would eventually leave, that somehow it would all come apart.

He loved her.

That said; they parked at the back of his house and made their way up towards his immaculate room, fresh from the air from opened windows.

Rain

The one good thing about rainy nights
Is the raindrops and the windows and the distant street lights
And the way they all play
In bespeckled array
To the lonely young man taking in all the sights

And when the rain picks up it pounds the black street
Forms the puddles as children we tried to cheat
Though we have laughed in the past
Gravity has the last
And huddles together the dark ghosts of our sad defeat

But there are days without water and a dry gutter drain
That air out the damp hollows of our muddled brain
And we're haunted, of course
But there is no remorse
Just a scar and a grin at the receding pain.

More Death...

I should think that when I die
My tired soul would give a sigh
Fight atrophy to squint an eye
A crooked smile, his last goodbye

And I should think that when I’m dead
That there’d be nothing in my head
A hollowed shell; the maggots fed
Not sentiment; the truth instead

And you, yes you, will someday soon
You cannot break what death has hewn
There is no hope; no whispered boon
To save you from its raspy croon

Monkey

A patient god

There are nights that darkness holds closer to his heart

And sitting lonely in your room

Will only prove an easy target.

I have, as I think many have, spent nights alone in my room. Alone in my thoughts. Settling down to have a few drinks and watch something funny. Waiting for my roommates to go to bed so I can wander through my apartment completely in the dark. Not bothering to turn on a light, because sometimes it’s fun to let the darkness creep in a little closer to your skin. Your cell phone light to guide you, you start to notice that everything seems so foreign. Couches you once knew so well are brooding angular shapes in the dark, dogs about the pounce. When you finally make it to the kitchen you almost crack, almost hit that light switch. But it doesn’t happen. You realize that there is a power, a calming veil of soft, crisp light that is produced only by the opening of a fridge in a kitchen vaguely illuminated by the filtered moon beams floating in through the window. Oh the sweet sticky pull, how it exacts such rewards. You bask in the cool air a little; feel your skin tightening, on the verge of goose bumps. And just for a funny thought, think for a moment of how it must look through the lens of god. The view a patient god might have, watching a lonely man pour a drink in the middle of the night. Watch him leave the cool oasis for the balcony. Out there in the cool air and the overlapping branches, their sway a cadence of chaotic beats, luring in the eye.

You strike your match. Cup.

And bring it to your face.

And you forgot the damn thing is still tucked neatly behind your ear. There are really two choices in a situation like that. One is you erase it. You shake the match out and grab your cigarette and start over. I made the other choice. You protect the flame from the wind and bring the cigarette over, its first inhaled breath a bigger victory than usual. And you think. You ponder. This is why I always will smoke cigarettes. My addiction to them does not stem from nicotine, but rather; the whims of my emotions and there is no better time to smoke a cigarette than late at night on a breezy blue-veiled balcony by yourself. You think about how your life is going and then realize that you don’t really care. As long as you can still press finger to keyboard—put pen to paper. Because a writer and loneliness go hand in hand like two young lovers. There is a detachment from society that exists within you. There is a part of you that can take complete isolation better than most. Can forget all about people and become a god—a patient god. And the characters you create actually exist. Some of the best words are written slowly in the creeping minutes after midnight.

Kafka probably had nights like these.

Thinking of him, a begin to write…

Death

If light so fierce, could somehow pierce,
This Apathetic Pall,
A single gleam, this mired dream,
Might not survive withal,

Conversely if such, sunlight be crushed,
As finger pressed to keyhole,
The darkness might do, and again imbue,
The dreams that hope doth stifle,

Be light be dark, produce the spark,
Or pull out the fuse ‘together,
There is no fix, in saving wicks,
For disagreeable weather,

I’ve tried to stave, this shallow grave,
With hope for one more song,
But shoveled dirt, will only skirt,
The casket for so long.

Brief Moments...

The fickle promise of rain in this late-summer heat seemed to laugh at the dying lawns, small and boxed off by stone and brick and step, sweeping down the avenue. The green licks of grass were slowly thinning out into islands amongst the browning, cracked majority. Cars bunched together upon the narrow street took the brunt of the sun, shimmering like dull gems, tangentially refracting small beams of light into the shadowed porches, sighing in the lazy darkness. One such beam caught John across the eyes, causing him to shift of out the way. It brought back memories of dusty classrooms and bored kids angling watches at teacher’s faces.
“I’m horrible in the heat, man. I sweat like a pig.” John’s roommate Philip Quane was leaning against the wooden banister that separated their duplex porches, quickly smoking a cigarette. John thought about bringing up the thought he had about watches, but caught himself, pointing out silently in his head how random a thing it would be to bring up, without context anyway. Instead, he laughed shortly, barely making a sound. “What are you doing tonight?”
“I don’t know. I got nothing planned, really.”
“Maybe catch a movie?”
“What movie?” Both young men paused to think about this, to roll through their mental list of titles. Both young men drew blanks. “Is there anything On Demand, you think?”
“Maybe. It’s fucking summer. This is when movies are supposed to come out, right? Movies worth seeing?” Their cigarettes, smoked nearly down to their filters, were flicked one at a time outward. The crushed, tumbling objects flitted onto the sidewalks. The two roommates went inside.

Gumby reaches his breaking point...

It is a little know fact that Sauron's quest for conquering Middle-Earth started after a string of meaningless relationships...

What An Excellent Day For An Exorcism...

Enflamed Tensions

Zombie Fruit!!!