Poems

Annual reexamination ’18

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I’ve been reexamining things. What I want and what I want to do. And my thinking is this, maybe I won’t be a commercial success. Hell, how many poets are commercial successes? And that’s what I am. A poet. Sure, I write short stories and erotica but that’s not what I come back to. It’s poetry. It’s always poetry.

So what do I want?
I want two primary things for my life. I want to be with someone who falls as deeply in love with me as I fall for them. And I want to be with them. I’m pretty good at finding the former, it’s the ‘be with them part’ that gives me trouble.

And my complicated love life notwithstanding, I want to write. I want to write poetry that has people saying, “yeah, me too.” That causes goosebumps when you hear me speak it. I want a poem I write to be some piece that lives with someone. That is what I want. Money and fame are not worth what we ascribe. I want to be impactful to the lives of the people who read my work. Maybe not all, probably even not most, but to the few that read and this poem is what they needed. This resonates.

I suppose I want to create beauty. And connect with people who connect to my work.

Close enough to be far away

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This is the poem I wrote while completely in despair before I passed out from emotional pain that feels like a heart attack, but just a little one. A poem that I couldn’t go to sleep without writing even though I was exhausted, having had four hours of sleep each night for four nights.

Sitting in this storm full of razor blades
Cut to pieces in the eye
Saw you through the wind
Thought take a chance
Else you die

Never make it past the barriers
Just this blood
This pain
These tears

Waiting for the long road
To end

And these are the thoughts after I wake, having gotten four hours of sleep and not being able to get back to sleep, because my heart hurts like a constant low level heart attack and I widen my eyes and hold my breath to keep writing and my vision blurs from unshed tears. And I blink but things just get more blurry. And I have to take a breath. And it feels like everything stops.

But
It doesn’t.
And I think
“It’s halfway through the week, can I make it through another one?”
It’s been two weeks and I’m still not sleeping and tears are so close to the surface and I feel so lost and lonely. And I want all the things we might be or have been but I miss my friend too. And life is just stupid and hard.

Lost in my life

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I miss you in the long empty place
Between one breath and the next
Between one heartbeat
And the long hopeless till the next
When I wake
And your words are silent
When I sleep
Alone in my empty bed
Driving down freeways wondering if your up
If you’d like to say high
But can’t
My limbs ache for want of holding you
My words drip from blurry eyes
Out into the spaces between
Hoping they reach you
Hoping they bring you back
Heart beats waiting

The sun struts and dances

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Heat lights the silence
Soft clouds drift in too blue sky
Rush of bodies bellow
Push
Melting into skin
Sun beats down
Carving sound

In this pocket
Just the silence
Deep within
The tears
Cries of need

Looking towards the east
Looking towards a future
One yet unrealized
One which may never be

Silence
Heat
And the soft thump
Of a heart no where close
To giving up

But still
Salt
Tears
And pain wracked sobs

The pain a deep abiding presence
Alleviated only in the brief
Too brief
Moments
Of you

Echoed heartbeat becomes distant

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Feel like skin and bones
Slowly ablating away
Disintegrating
Losing coherence
Once solid
Burned ash
Disappearing slowly
In the desert wind

Alone

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We are lights burning out into the brightness
The dark isn’t as scary
Cause I see the other lights
And I know that we’re shining out
Yearning for that brilliant nova connection
Two stars rotating in orbit until
Too close they burst
New light
Burning
Together

Love fool

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We say that love lasts forever
But that’s not true
It lasts as long as we feed it
As long as the environment we grow it in can sustain it
At best that’s forever, until it breaks our hearts when they die
At worst its when it shatters and we need to run to cover to avoid being caught in the shrapnel

But most it dies slowly, in between. Lack of feeding.
Until all we are left is the hollow echo of the edifice
Filled with fuckups and missed chances
Filled with the haunting laughter and the heart ripping memories of promises made

Love breaks us all
But like fools
The best kind of hopeful beautiful fools
We keep trying
Hoping
Breaking

Other plans

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I’m not looking for a different life
I’m looking for a life with you
I’m not running away
I’m running to

Yet here I am
this face
That slight smile
hiding the grimace
That rictis of pain
lurking just beneath the surface

Two interlaced
Pulled apart so slowly
Not a sound is made

Just a long drawn out scream slowed down
Sounds like wind
Howl of agony
Broken and warbling

Bled by hours
Glass falling from a high shelf
Seconds before impact
Just the panic
Before the pieces fly apart

Words left unsaid – a translated song

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I fell in love in summer
You fell out of love in fall
By winter we were over

And I lost it all

Love forgives my trespass
But not our pain filled words
Our harshest insults
We reserved

This fallen lifetime
Our fallen hurts

We were happy once?
I can’t remember
Just this painful passage
Just this time gone by

Life was for the living
Now its passed me by

Slipping

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Alone
depressed and tired
and going to sleep
No words expressed into the silence

Drowning in shallow water
After swimming free
In the depths

Fading light