This is my state of missing,
My left right left
Shuffling to a lone beat
Far off in the distance
With tightly bound vacationers
In a cold and windy coastal retreat.
I’m a window shopper
With four empty pockets.
I’m a full stomach
And nowhere I call home.
I don’t want to hold hands with fate anymore,
I don’t want to believe there’s a right way,
Or that I have a significant impact on worth,
On death, or the elusive act thereof.
With whom shall I grow old with,
If I am not planning it out?
With what shall I enjoy, if gamblers
Keep convincing me I’m right.
Share my soul with wounded hearts!
Hardly healthy and needing.
Share my aches amongst the rocks!
Already scalded sourly
For I am no man fit for redemption,
I am no guest at the gates of fate
And I have brought no gifts for my maker.
Our political agendas are nauseating.
They’re stuffed so full of capital letters
That the underlying messages of our society –
Hell, even our cultures,
Are suffocated with exhaust stacks and bottom dollars.
If I could have dreamed up a Heathenistic Hell,
I’d put city roads and destruction for progress
Right at the top of that scorched list.
I’d decree land had suddenly become a commodity
We could sell simply because we had a gun that said we could.
Just like young adults unable to find their righteous paths,
Explicit lyrics contaminating the innocent minds,
My Hell would be a prescribed better way, mothers.
Did you feel my heart as it’s ripped out every single day
When land mines help fight swollen populations,
Planted in a war to help save lives?
War to not war! Fight fire with fire!
And in my Hell, in my political agenda I call my country,
I would give us hope, every.single.day.
We would wake up to the smell of progress
And desire to capture it in any way possible
So that it could be shared with anybody we knew.
We would mutually feel good about the loss of our trees,
Because our heads were buried so deep in our electricity
Where we were collectively dreaming about
Ways to continue our progress.
For my simple pleasure I’d have dandelions everywhere
As symbols of true health and prosperity.
I’d pull up my old lawn chair, warm beer in hand,
And watch as all the sinners pulled out their organic chemicals
To spray the evil yellow root to death.
On the cold days when there were no death machines
I’d read my botanical books and let the rain
Wash tears into my Hell.
For me this is the saddest thought of all,
Because in spite all my attempts to rectify ignorance,
I would be a black seed living in my own true Hell.
I would be a puppet, inspired to raise my voice
And told that I do mean something to this Hell.
There I’d be, red faced eating my poisoned earth,
Handed another blank Party card
And told why I should be excited.
“What happened to us?” we used to say.
Now we just roll our eyes at passing strangers
Doing strange things.
Now we just wave our flag and sip lemonade
While we wait for our favorite 6PM
Radio show to keep at our time.
What happened is we became victims willingly,
We accepted our lonely road
With righteousness.
We held our heads high and believed in a constitution
That was created and sworn upon in vain, in contempt, in disbelief,
Yet all of these cowardly apparitions
And beautiful speakers continued to wow our humble thoughts into thinking
It was all peachy.
It was ordinary.
We fought the ordinary and they learned to tell us it was remarkable.
We fought the remarkable
And they told us it was right.
So we changed channels but drank the same milk –
We never did find that girl,
But we did learn to cool the voice of reason
With fireworks and birthday parties
Because we deserved them.
We were hard workers and deserved our fruits.
We were hard workers and we accepted our lonely road,
But fought it believing what we’d been sold.
Sometimes I gaze into her eyes at night. She whispers words I’ve never heard before,
And we count backwards from our chairs
Until we reach a new paragraph in our romance novels,
And soon it’s time for tea.
Can you climb into my memory,
See the ghosts that I see?
I’ve waited for a sign to be
Alone in simple harmony.
But as my days turn dark inside,
As my simple answers flirt
With necromancy,
I crave compassion, empathy,
And hope all shall carry me.
Window shop my loneliness away,
Dove tails and fresh mocks.
I couldn’t remember your age
In the reflection of my heart.
I’ve lost my mind before we met;
Into which eyes do I resort?
Do I see through or reflect back?
When twilight circles my mind like crows and shadows at the hour of feast
I wish for silence, a thousand feet deep.
A silence so lasting that breath trails off into
A frozen pane of windowless reflections,
And the moon clears it’s sleepy eyes
As it gazes over sharp backs of rocky mountains.
Stars must look different from up there, shining so bright.
I have always imagined they have different colors
As the temperature drops.
But from a thousand feet deep I can find only shadows.
I crawl upon bloody knees and fight for my own feast
Among crows and worms who, at this intimate an angle,
Scream like black night and wrinkled sheets.
I pause for a moment struggling to understand
Black lines that criss-cross my hands.
Black arcs that cap my fingernails, digging deep.
I find twilight again as thought slips from my conscience
And incoherent noise picks up again.
Born with a soldier on my back,
A militarically kind of fight.
I marched for justice.
I marched with a heavy heart.
And you step on your way?
You take leave without wisdom,
And miss all these unspoken thoughts.
And if mother In Control
Makes an exit from a foolish heart,
Leave diamonds on the floor;
Take our mirrors down at night.
Truth is not in an insult!
Let’s be born again,
An ocean in the sky!
And nighttime falls
To machine gun sunrise.
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I screamed from head to feet
With dragging dreams
Slipping down the lonesome path
Of all I’ve ever wanted.
And from here a whisper started,
Like a row of columns
Three hundred feet tall;
Built by the hands of iron giants
Who spoke only in grunts.
My itchy trigger finger
Gargled a strong glass of salt water,
And spit truth onto dry solid ground
That crackled underneath the weight of my
Soft leather soles, wrapping their
Loose ends half way up my calf.
Thankfully I knew how to walk,
I knew that all good things
Come at the end of the row,
So I buttoned up my callused shell
And I rolled on.
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Mistaken identities reel me,
They collapse my reason
And shuffle my logic into
Tiny boxes that are overflowing
And upset and forgotten,
Lisping away in the corner
With curse words and condemnations.
I filter my logic on some days,
Letting it roll over me in a
Slow head nod with raspberry pudding.
But in the end of most of these days,
I’m still left reeled: reeling.
Misunderstood and forgotten,
Turned away at the door,
Catching my breath and lying awake
At midnight, mistaken.