I reel with love and disgust at once, wishing for sensitivity or sympathy from practicers of groundlessness – an idea of fun is to run, hide, or laugh, never getting to the heart of the matter.
I’d like to spend time to know and grow in closeness – I am angry when it’s used as time to drown the conscience. Out of warmth, out of loneliness, I approach encroaching on my own integrity.
If you can’t win at cards while playing fair
Try your hand at solitaire!
But even then, you’ll still get stuck –
That’s right – what a bunch of rotten luck.
What cards I’ve dealt are all face down;
What I do I’ve hardly known.
By choice I’ve made the game this way
And it isn’t one smidge more easy to play.
Wandering the streets, I paused to ask a bystander a question. It must have been a stupid one, because I was turned away feeling ridiculed.
I don’t belong here, I realized – I don’t belong here, because it’s a dream.
If I am the dreamer, why am I out of place?
Somehow, the world that I’ve fashioned for myself does not welcome me.
Half the earth at a time forgets the sun doesn’t sleep,
But moon gazers and planet watchers know it hasn’t stopped
Scattering beams in every direction, expelling flares,
Hooks of flame glaring into cold nothingness.
There, there is no night – endless cycle of dark spots – it is all the same, hurtling through space,
Anchor in a whirlpool of stars.
Glancing past Mercury, Venus, it reflects off
blue and green
and smiles.
No body can boast a life like mine.
Over its coldness
A kiss
Aurora borealis
It feels wrong to stay at the lake for five days and not five thousand,
during which the water and the landscape and people it shapes could claim me for their own
and I’d grow used to it all, maybe.
The flitting swallows and wood fire at twilight puzzle me, like an embrace that makes you feel guilty for leaving (or ever coming at all).
I leave while the embers still glow under low, wind-tossed flames that leave the scent of smoke in my hair.
You might cleave your dreams from waking hours
And whims from decisions – but I
Can’t sever a knot with the edge of reason or
Rend the weft of life from the warp of wonder.
And so, my hands are patient and deft –
If I’m given the task of untangling, I’ll take it.
I am beginning to feel the pangs of being
Some painting one is ashamed of
and keeps facing the wall
In a basement storage room,
The stench of mildew intensifying
With every day that I sit here.
Y’know, I don’t mind so much.
After all, it is terribly amusing, I must say
To be meant for display,
Yet to function as an absorber of musty air
And only be viewed
By a visitor or two.
Is this how it was meant to be?
Perhaps, admiration in sunlit rooms
Never even was; maybe this, this darkness,
Is the only beauty to be had
In a world of unbearability.
A son who looks nothing like his father
Gets nothing he ought to.
Coldness is all he knows from his keepers,
Yet he adores them.
Retreat, dream,
Take the wide path, and then the narrow –
Come forth as a spring of words and verse;
Craft from a turbulent past
A still life.
Okay, so, my face is full of little pins and needles
That I stick there when I’m not using them.
They don’t bother me, and I just keep sticking
As I sit, hemming endless lengths of fraying fabric.
Suddenly, there comes a wave, a sudden freezing of my face,
Prickling at a million nerve endings, throbbing with defeat.
Enough, enough! There are far too many, though I never thought I’d see the day;
There are too many, and I clutch at the needles that fill my skin.
I rip them out, wailing piteously, spewing convoluted complaints
Concerning everything, save for what ails me.
I’ve filled myself in the wrong way,
Like a failed crossword puzzle –
Let me start over.
Tell me, why should I care about should?
And why would I care about would?
I honestly don’t, and never did –
Maybe I, perhaps with some prompting,
Have just convinced myself that I do.
Can I retire from language and from sight?
I’d like to just be again.
I am, therefore I art 
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