1.
Jagged all around
I pick myself up in pieces
I find as they wound me.
Kitten claws of fear
And doubt
Move me to inaction.
There is no rest
For the wicked, wise, or best
That is just a myth.
2.
Laser-quested flamboyance
Suddenly brings back
Nought but the springtime dew
3.
Compatibility... is that far off
Dreamingly impossible?
Irastionaliedded I've got of
Enoughs and (you?)
4.
When the Daughters of Selective Realism choose to recognize their absence in the Congress of Judicious Reality, then and only then will we begin to settle an issue and reach a relative peace.
Dripping with laughter
And sarcasm too
I hold you aloft
For all to view.
They cheered and ranted
Til finally I said
That you'd have not a word,
That your gauges were red.
As it turns out
(Now that we're grown)
It took sixteen year
To properly own
That which consumes you
That constantly masses
Behind your brown eyes
And beyond reason's grasp.
And today I beheld
What was plainly to see
The mess of a thing
That binds you and me.
It isn't improving
The doctors agree
So it's best that we kill it
Just bury at sea.
Because one more day
Of this constance and pride
Will sure drive me mad
I confess--I can't hide.
So if'n you love me
Please step up and take
One of these blue pills
Then never I'll wake.
5.
Demons spiral
Like a carnival ride
Holding onto my thoughts
And spinning me mad
And madder
When I dream
There are fields of green
And purple and orange
And not a woman in sight
I am alone.
Driven by fear
Into a pit, from which
I cannot see the exit
Once I am finally inside
Trapped with this coward.
Even though I know
The worse judge of my sins
Cowers beside me, within me,
I dare not uncover these truths
These terrible truths.
Ode to Inner Child
Walking within
You guide me to innocence
I hold our hand in the darkness
And protect you from the
Angry people
The drunks and
The codependents
The authority figures
Nosy teacher and concerned counselors
All ask
"What to do?" and
"What to do?"
But they cannot help.
Walk within me
And I am your armor
And side by side we will find
Peace, play, innocence, and wonder
Like never before
Like nothing ever before.
6.
Some kinds of elation
Cannot be misstated
And gone over from slation
To wander the stars
My kind of nonsense
Rules all of your sense
Pushes it out of
[unfinished]
7.
Skittering pages are not enough
To defeat a lingering betrayal.
Such are betrayals; pesky things
Overwhelm the deepest of events and emotions
Comparatively, all are just little puffs of smoke.
Even raw smoke gets beat by
Jealously, rage, suspicion,
The heart is a warrior that follows
The orders of its commander
--Kill, Hate, Destroy, (now Love)
Love is, after all, a kind of warfare.
Skittering across pages
My words elude me
And I am left with a page
Full of confusion--
Pregnant with potential
Yet eventually failing utterly to deliver.
8.
Clearheaded-ness is over-rated
Leastways for an artist
"Write every day" says Ray
But I don't think it's helping
No one seems interested in these worthless leaves except me.
But who else are they for? Nobody.
Wrapping my head around unknown ideas to feel their shape. Sometimes squeezing them reveals hidden pockets of contour, other times things sharp and painful. I am a blind man feeling around a room, a new room each day it seems. I can hear the telephone ringing but I cannot find it. There must have been a door there in the wall when I came in.
One of these days I'll find the light switch, or better yet, bring my own.
9.
So much
Drops away when transferred from there to here
It's a palpable weight I serve myself.
I only hope the rest of the flora are just as sweet and friendly home [unfinished]
10.
Floating ashes contaminate the trees
Luke
Sisko
In too many planes--too many of lifetimes at once.
Piloting perfect is a burden
Scarcely known
And [unifinished]
11.
Sure is since an leud (?)
To be so damned annoying
One wishes once understood a lot
Of things Should (moves?) been if
Year ago, you'd simply done at I (dounced at?)
Ring
And Olympic green
12.
The light was unforgiving, and printed out every flaw in a plan he'd just as soon have keep [sic] private. But she forced his hand by surprising him with public accusation.
* * * * *
The first time
It hurts, so you say
"Never again"
And other such nonsense.
But every time after
It still hurts, but you want
Everyone to think you're strong
And that you can adapt
So you say
"No big deal"
And chip away
At yourself a little more
Every single time.
Because it
always hurts.
* * * * *
There was no other way, the doctor said, that head just had to come off. After looking at the evidence, I couldn't disagree. My behaviour has [sic] become erratic, it was true, and some of my actions were simply inexcusable. When pressed, I admitted that yes, I'd been at my shenanigans longer than had been made public, and also that I'd promised to change before, but failed to make such changes permanently.
She shook her head as she repeated the diagnostics, and we both became sad, but I couldn't disagree with her. This really did seem the only cure for my condition. Slowly, I stepped upon the platform and kneeled [sic] into the apparatus, my neck feeling oddly comfortable in the tight slot. I heard the doctor's command through the black hood, and as the blade fell, I felt the sensation that could only be the sweet redemption every one had been talking about. The release was marvelous, and my last action was to smile in relief.
I can only hope my face still bore that smile when my wife was given my head in the ceremonial basket later that day. Maybe, just maybe, she'd forgive me now, for I'd taken the only steps that would absolutely, without any doubt, guarantee I'd never be able to hurt her again.
Finally, she could be happy.
13.
Thoughts rattle off each side of my head and encounter nothing in between, like an atom smasher they gain velocity until finally POW they collide and component pieces of individual thoughts trace rays and spirals across a page, teaching me the origin of my universe with paths etched permanently and crudely in such a way as to discover their true composition.
It is in this way the 3:15 Experiment contributes to Humankind's greater understanding of itself, and becomes invaluable.
* * *
I learned yesterday night to push myself past a normal stopping point. The first shit to come out is fodder, which clears the muzzle for the good stuff. I spend a lot of time NOT clearing the muzzle, using first, unformed thoughts in place of those that are really being prepared to perform the task on which they slowly stew in my subconscious. I crowd my heart with so much, trying to cram every bit of hope and dream and hopelessness into it that I can, that it's no wonder thoughts fragment and split and malform in there. My brain becomes so preoccupied with the mundane, it can't effectively produce those thoughts which would create real quality thinking.
What I need here is a distillery. Or some mental Hoppe's No. 9. Either, I think would do the trick just right. Good night.
14.
There is almost no difference
Between the person
Who look at this
Rediculous verse
And sees not only something desperate--
an enormous attempt
to become greater,
to be truly meaningful
to someone
But someone willing
To sweat every line
On the off chance that This word or that word
Is *just* the right one to convey
serenity
solitude
suffering
sadness
sacrifice
I know it's hard to believe
That someone just like you and me
May read this and see ART
But trust me, it's true
Let's give that person
Whomever s/he may be
The benefit of the doubt
Shall we?
* * *
There is no greater joy or confusion than that which I will experience in only a handful of hours--whether I get an A or not, I will have finished the courses--I will have climbed that mountain I'd build the last 20+ years out of doubt and self-pity and denial. Climbed or torn down, I can now almost see beyond it, and can plan steps into that realm of achievement which was so mysteriously elusive, so just out of reach, 15 months ago.
To think, overcoming 15 years of self defeat in 15 months--if only I could condense such time-reversing self-healing for all my areas of self-defeat! That would be a miracle. (Right? Better get started, hadn't I?)
16.
Cinematographer's party
There were cakes big and little
And embryonic, too
So fine that I was made up
Tantalizing systems do
The airflow from this corner
Doesn't seem that bad
But getting up to write the end
Could change the outcome, lad
There exists a tedium
Beneath which fun is found
And only because
Of my test for the strange
Have you and I been bound
"You won't even know me from Adam,"
I heard him say over the din
Then he pulled out some bar trick
I'd not seen since grade six
And both he and my partner--air thin!
19.
Training with the best
As they calendar-float away
On Heaven's seed
Rocks of Age whisper gently like snow
Falling in trees like a dozen day-long larks
Who've lost their voices
Michigan hurts when made of sunshine
Little ones sacrificed to keep the Machine at bay
Always marching, always finding
Out, but never telling
That's a kind of betrayal
I cannot fathom.
That one poor lark would
Out another before he could find his wings
And then to float aimlessly down the Huron
For no other purpose than to listen
The water glide along the hull
Or witness blushing birdsong in a candid moment
And feel the cool summer morning blowing across sunburnt shoulders
Because I was too proud for a little SPF
The sound of kitten pawns awakens the deepest sleepers
Despite their fluffy texture, and purring throats are not as gentle as they may seem.
Faces rubbed against you mid-slumber make for crazy whisker-lined dreams.
Oh, to sail the azure sea on wings of solid love, spread gleefully and miles from tip to feathered tip! Would they flap or just extend gracefully from lightly jointed shoulders? Moving slowly up and down like a flame, at the whim of God's whisper?
20.
"Fuck the fuel," she said, and turned into a 3.5 G loop that should have made her lose her lunch. It was just as well--without the external tank she'd be forced to land either at an abandoned strip in the DMZ or behind enemy lines.
Lined up for another run, she brought the plane level and set the bead on the enemy Howitzer net that had just killed her wing man. A sound to her left like bamboo sticks banging together distracted her--anti-aircraft fire from the village. "Those fuckers," she thought, after we liberated them a month ago. She was unaware the rebels had executed every man, woman, and child in the village to repopulated it just in time for "liberation."
Inspired by a new sense of rage, and now a leaking left tank and coolant line, she brought her altitude even lower as she neared the Howitzers. That's when she spotted the dark horizontal lines on the distance that looked too regularly spaced and square-cornered to anything but evidence of a bunker. It soon wouldn't matter if she was right or wrong--she intended to riddle every living thing in range with half-inch diameter holes. The thought of the entire area doused in J1 fuel from her ruptured tank was a comforting one, even if it did also mean the addition of her body trapped on a burning fuselage for a centerpiece to the destruction.
Finally in range, she squeezed the trigger and unleashed the quad cannons into the Howitzer nest just as they began to turn. Her decreased altitude had bought her a frosting layer of surprise to spread upon this attack. Ground radar hadn't seen her coming--it had taken a radio call from the village to alert the gun crews.
Ammunition poured forth and spilled heavily into the bodies of the men running to man their positions around the targeting stations. Unlike with a typical strafing run, this pilot had no need to preserve ammo, and held the trigger gently while weaving slightly from left to right to spread the firing pattern copiously; and scanning the compound for any kind of evidence that a bunker-like structure existed beneath the guns.
Then she caught sight of it--a stream of people began exiting a doorway just south of the last gun--an entrance. Lights went on inside and for a brief second she could see silhouettes inside through the narrow horizontal windows, shapes she'd never have been able to see if she were at proper altitude, but shapes she would have been able to recognize in her sleep--weapons.
She adjusted her course just south as a final decision settled itself in her head. It was the easiest, most serious decision she'd ever made in her short 32 years. In just over seventeen or so seconds, her plane, 8500 lbs of metal and fury, would enter that cache through flaws in the bunker wall and destroy it for good.
Her ammo nearly spent, she concentrated fire on a space between two of those tell-tale windows. Twelve seconds left. She thought of the people back at base who were probably just now finding the maps and drawing that led her to this place. Seven seconds. She thought of the family she was leaving behind. Her resolve nearly broke until her cannons suddenly went silent. Four seconds. She watched light emerge through a tattered hole in the bunker wall, and remembered the last words she'd heard from another human being, words spoken to her over the radio by her wingman just after his plane was torn in half by Howitzer fire.
"I'm not afraid any more."
The explosion could be heard for miles.
21.
Song lyrics blend with the carnal tones of a pleasant little dream
At 3:15 in my house
"And the truth may carry us" over to my chair, where
"A little bleary, worse for wear and tear" I sit and scratch out stories or misguided 'poetry'
And my own 'far away eyes' are turned inward
The cat pads around the house while, confused (but accepting), the most loyal animals in the world sleep locked up,
Miles down some road, beauty lurks draped in darkness and waits to steal me away. She is guarded by a stone gargoyle that smiles brightly as you approach, but waits until your back is turned before burning you with its evil eyes.
Persephone, my sometimes muse, will soon return to her underworld lover, and Pluto will still stand calmly at my side as I peer through his keyhole, too afraid to accept his gift.
Rooks tumble and thunder rolls over me like tidal waves, pulled by moon-bright stallions intent on driving me into the ground.
Meanwhile, a second hand bangs in time to crickets and toads and leftover cicadas, sometimes sounding like a 55-gallon drum being hit by an errant pitch. I sit and scratch with my pen, fairly amazed at what has begun to appear. Goodnight, sweet muse. Goodnight.
22.
Gazing into a nightmare, with fifty souls and [however many were stuck for so long on h...
24.
Like the end of all things
The end of my world will involve plenty of peach pits and yellow rice and orange blossom.
The space between what it takes to know these simple battlings and seven-zero pockets
I cannot tell, but someone sure likes to protect his privacy.
And finally the background of a common misperception, has given u-vielsell a bolowed and .
Darkness was lklme thoegut.
So now, on the showest of tunes,
I cross the liken [sic] so easily with these.
27.
Each of the different tesserae have a minimum guaranteed flux variance of +/-0.5, ensuring the user's entrance into and stable maintenance of each personal anomaly. Or your money back!
When I was older, I was much more serious. Indeed, it was a strict fault lone among many that I took everything way too seriously. I never smiled or laughed, not the way I do now, and truth be told, I still have a long way to go. One thing that came easily with such inflexibility and impossibly high expectations, though, was self-discipline. Growing into a larger self awareness a younger person, has brought with it the character flaw of indifference, and sometimes that in itself causes problems. Ah, sweet youth.
Time, alas
Will surely pass us by
Ensuring of poor successes are all we'll ever enjoy
It's a mean fate that allows such necessary and brutal failures
Her cruel ministrations gnawing at otherwise sensible sensibilities
Flaws, you see
Are the things we never die
Without having eliminated within our meager beings
But then what would life be like if spent floating lazily down some shallow blue river, without the occasionally swift current to keep us on our toes?
Boring, that's what.
What's more, what would be we like without the layers of conflict that flavour our personalities, taint of existence with impurities, and rendering our otherwise smooth transition from one situation to the next a mere fantasy?
Wonderful, I tell you. Simply wonderful.
My layer are too many already
I have no mere need of conflict or impurities, thank you very much
Yet here is more, on this path
STEP
And here is more, as an alternative
STEP
All along my passway lay trouble like so many puddles to wet my shoes and stain my clothes
So that, by journey's end, I will most assuredly be filthied by the many encounters
Will there be a hard enough rain that can pelt me clean? And if so, can I stand the pain of it? I think I will never know.
28.
There was no telling its origin. What started as a simple blood donation turned into a full-blown CDC event. Even I would eventually wish they'd just left it alone, quietly overtaking my bloodstream, while most of the world stayed ignorant of the awful things that had been witnessed the last 72 hours.
29. Some things *are* worth waiting for.
Shake-get something
A coat of arms accidentally but beautifully drawn with a stroke of a pen
A phrase perfectly beheld
The perfect word(s) for saving everything that hangs in the balance--
Everything.
And just how much is everything?
Everything means every day I go to work until I'm 70--every bit of expertise, mentoring, and growing--
Not to mention the salaries--
Everything means every day and night spent with the kids--
Ours and the ones we share.
Laughing over cheezy jokes and fishing on too hot days and arguments that end in tears for which I will have to but know it's the right thing to do--apologize.
And times as yet unforseen
Wedding days and long nights in hospitals and your own car keys and first lovers
And night spent in my own father's chair realizing you're no longer a child.
But what's more--
Everything means evenings writing beautiful songs only we'll ever hear
And footfalls among the trees barely notices as we hold each other's lives in our own warm hand
And drunken discoveries and accidental bliss found in ways no book has ever explored
And pain--Everything means some of that too
For you, and me, and certainly them, at least a little
No one gets out of Everything unscathed or unscarred.
All this and more--THAT'S "Everything"
And for you all, I endure the loss of some of it and gain the rest, and which is which can change day to day or hour to hour
Or in the hot flash of one incendiary word, the version I think I'm fighting for can suddenly be swapped, as if by some serpentine salesman
This I do not control.
This I must discover--go deep in the hold and rout out the rigging that links the wheel to the rudder and maybe, for once, make a connection between action and reaction, between cause and consequence
--for I am living too much in reaction and consequence, and some things--
Some things are worth waiting for.
Like my Everything.
30.
Little cat is
always messing
with noisy inarticulate things
Perhaps she and
I could arrange
something really noisy
Then we'll both get our tongues tied!
31. (fin)
The mind is a vessell
and I just have to play mine
to keep the right shit from
falling out
Its contents put on display at times
Yet others, hidden before their very faces
Nobody every got rich by self closer of the Bruce.
When asked, she said I'd whispered,
"Love you, baby," and then there was a kiss
She responded in kind and then was settled.
All this overly quiet drama to close such a noisy conversation
Sweet endings will come and sometimes they will go,
And we need to be aware of their movement through our lives
And the ways in which we touch the people around us
So that more endings can be pleasant, and beginnings
A cap, a gown, a feathered boa
Cannot take the form of a weathered Noah
Enough to fool me into bringing him my pair of asses
Indeed, they're all I've got that draws attention of those not blessed with glasses.
In the dill dim of early morn, so sits a lonely writer, gently tapping out ridiculous prose-verse into the Comp Book with his pen, trying desperately not to wake his trusting family, and wanting only the petal-thin reassurance that one day he may be read and loved after 3:15 AM.
