Is there a sort of death in stillness?
In silence? In turning in on yourself
so much so that you are translucent. Poor
translucent stagnation; this thing that won't allow us to step forward,
we can't always be circling the same decisions.
There are no answers lying in the shadows of circumferences.
What we need is what we dream
desires
those things we have forbidden ourselves from...
National Poetry Month - Day 30
National Poetry Month - Day 29
Another late one...this is almost over, but until the end of today...I'mma keep on truckin...
I could be the Mad Max of the mornings
unconciously pressing the petal
I jerk forward, feel myself streaking
the pre-dawn feels collapsible around me
I know it's not, that there are things that might be sturdier than myself;
I haven't met them yet, still aware they might exist.
National Poetry Month - Day 28
I can't imagine if your words held any beauty
because your mouth perfected a sneer
a scar across your face. I'd already lived this present
past tense on what I knew you were saying
though you'd somehow gone mute
or I went deaf, suddenly. We'd stopped speaking
the same riddles months ago. Tongue-twisting a lie to fit the scene of the crime.
I would ask for mercy if it were yours to grant.
You play executioner in bedsheets
a cop to my increasingly convincing robber. I think the bad guy wins
today. I think I stole your heart and got away...
National Poetry Month - Day 27
I'll leave the baggage you tried to make me shoulder on your front porch
between the potted begonia and the dying fern
I hope you recognize them;
if you don't they will surely recognize you
and your handwriting scribbled on the tags
and the scent of you or moreso a scene like dying.
National Poetry Month - Day 26
I have been under the weather since yesterday....here's yesterday's poem:
Exhaustion
means I'm pass the point of caring
about the complexity of the webs we weave
or wove in the past with a passion
National Poetry Month - Day 25
Designing my own desires
I give firm voice to exactly what I want. Not questioning,
no wish or hope. These are the things I cannot give up
a dream from which I can't re-awaken.
National Poetry Month - Day 24
The sun is disappearing behind these white plastic blinds
I barely notice the stress my eyes are under
reading by twilight. I strain to maintain this connection
to something else; words bigger than myself. I can't help it:
I built dreams on a story...
National Poetry Month - Day 23
Preface: Today was a really sexually-charged writing day; who knows why...but I was writing and grinning like a fool.
I can hold my hand right here
just here, just so
silently, unless smirks speak
then I'm yelling "victory..."
My other fingers are lost somewhere
wall hair hip, hip hair,
wall breast. They are so inconsistent
unlike the others steady in their determination. I can hold you up
my hand
right here, just here, just so
holding you cupped to catch you should you fall
National Poetry Month - Day 22
Dear You,
awkwardly standing across the room
your heart is a sabbatical shadow blooming
outwards like a mid-spring cherry blossom. I
am a refugee shipwrecked in your peripheral
a wounded satellite barely keeping orbit. I build beds
waiting for the day you might eclipse me
an outer ring of light, a radiance outpouring
in waves; to drown me. 
photo copyright NASA
National Poetry Month - Day 21
Sin never sleeps, so they call me an insomniac
my eyeballs are allergic to the lids, blinking
leaves me tearing; like I believe in emotions.
With anger I'm most intimate, one night stand
where the day never comes.
National Poetry Month - Day 20
Transparency, a ghost of something past
I keep moving too quickly; my present
becomes a future, perhaps not mine: a clicking slideshow.
Slow-motion,
dancing to silent music
this song always plays here
It's our swan song
beautiful in it's one lingering note
we've been stretching it out by half beats
Pausing, until that plucked string finally breaks
National Poetry Month - Day 19
She wants to remind me of some good day
some yesteryear, repeats a mantra of nostalgia.
"We use to think we could be..."
anything
or anyone. We're too old for fables.
Even our dreams don't end in "Happily Ever Afters..."
They've grown up. Laid down plastic swords for real knives
or fists; your bed owns a gun now, your nightmares ride bullets.
National Poetry Month - Day 17
I enter the house of Saturn
running again from the return of the sun
I test her structures, sturdy yet unstable-
this is not a home for permanence
it is a home made of sticks, or straw; waiting
watching big bad wolves huffing and puffing at my heels
you've never been able to blow me away
Saturn writes love letters on wolves' breath
she wants to change my existence,
earthquake the value I've placed on this life
the motivation I've placed on my feet
she thrives on upheaval and her house is already a half-mess
I can't stay here forever...
I'm barely making it through today
limped my way through yesterday
running from the sun who's always three steps ahead of me
into the waiting arms of Saturn, who returned too, a lover...
photo courtesy of NASA
Happy Birthday to Me!
National Poetry Month - Day 17
I enter the house of Saturn
running again from the return of the sun
I test her structures, sturdy yet unstable-
this is not a home for permanence
it is a home made of sticks, or straw; waiting
watching big bad wolves huffing and puffing at my heels
you've never been able to blow me away
Saturn writes love letters on wolves' breath
National Poetry Month - Day 16
"Gotta shine my rusty halo..." -The Script "Rusty Halo"
I wear my halo as a belt buckle
thumb it loosely as I shoulder the wall
watch the people as they part around me
I make choices to not migrate with them
to stick out as something separate from them.
I wear my horns underneath my dreads
tuck them behind my ears
know the evil that I could get into
I make choices that lead me not
unto the path of temptation, the path most traveled.
National Poetry Month - Day 15
I cannot accept this distance
the space that has grown above our knotted selves
National Poetry Month - Day 14
Dear Atlanta,
you are my in-between love
or the love that happened without looking for love
(in all the wrong places)
or a really strong like. You are that kinda-friend
open door and free couch; letting me rest here
without a calendar, without motivation
without pushing me to stay-
or go. And I could love you for that,
but you would be well aware when I kiss you my heart wasn't really in it...
my heart is miles ahead of me.
I can't smile at you with my eyes, and I can't lie:
you've given me more pain than pleasure, left more scars
than your worth; that's why you're an in-between place
and I'm in-between staying and leaving you.
ugh..I hate that ending....jeez...
National Poetry Month - Day 13
I stitched my heart up my sleeve
buttoned the wrists close so it wouldn't slide out on accident.
Thread can break sometimes
unraveling slowly til it pops, I don't know how to reinforce this.
National Poetry Month - Day 12
I wrote this yesterday but didn't get a chance to post it...hoppped up on benadryl...
"In reality there are no black outlines..." -Some art teacher somewhere
We are all shade and shine
a blended grayscale
softly, we yield to the existence of each other
malleable, light bends and breaks around us
or if we prove fragile enough, bends to break us.
National Poetry Month - Day 11
The last time I said "I love you..." I didn't mean it,
there was a pause that stretched across the galaxy
I saw Jupiter in your eyes
cloudy and searching out something more in me
some sign of intelligent life
a heartbeat, a pulse...
the words escaped me in a rush of breath
a hiccup or burp
a complete accident, that I couldn't excuse myself enough for
couldn't take back; because you held it close
something fragile you knew you would lose.
National Poetry Month - Day 10
It's nothing personal,
there's an envy that comes with death
for the living. This is just about survival;
base instincts and simple appetites.
If it wasn't your brain, it'd be someone else;
wrong place
wrong time
wrong side of the apocalypse...
One second to look away
or look off slightly to the left imagining life before
that your neighbor's skin isn't peeling from the bone
that there isn't dried blood smeared across an ex-lover's lips
that your mother's eyes haven't gone blank, flat and lifeless.
When they pull you back
with a strength they never possessed in life
how hard will you struggle? How much will you want to survive?
Question as their mouths descend on your struggling:
Is it better to run forever alone
or dying and walk in hunger together?
National Poetry Month - Day 9
You are: me
driving towards the westward dipping sun,
squinting eyes and burnt retinas; the focus is askew.
I blink back shine-
the punishment for being heliocentric,
following stars; galactic paparazzo.
Blame gravity:
tidal pools and kissing shorelines.
Blame orbits:
invisible lifelines weaving through the constellations.
Circumstantial, evidence isn't science
conjectures are hypotheses without experimentation. Truth is tangible
a theorem tried and tested.
Paradigm Shift: You are blindness...
National Poetry Month - Day 8
Stitching the veins of one hand to the other
I am all tied up, too tangled to tap out-
cat's cradles and stretched rubber bands
I wrote prayers in needlepoint
looping letters to God.
I haven't waited long enough at one address
to receive an answer
past stamped postmarks and pre-paid envelopes
God pays it forward...
Leaving my answers leaning on others' doorframes
perched inside their mailboxes, a bill inked: past due.
National Poetry Month - Day 7
Every brick has a history;
a century of ghosts live inside each column
I have marked the growth of my footprints next to the floor lines
the deep scratches of years before I arrived here. Months before I leave
or stay; growing use to my fingers trailing across these brick walls,
the creak of these floorboards beneath my hesitant footsteps.
I keep moving because moving has kept me alive.
National Poetry Month - Day 6
You are frozen as this photograph of you
an imagination
bend yourself to fit my memory;
your memory is quite different, because you see reality in hindsight:
20/20
a dream that changes each time
what could have been, but actually never was. Unfreeze!
Everyone shuffles, makes poses to exemplify their lives
the pretend-believe of it all.
This is who you thought you were three years ago...
Who you are now fails all expectations. Breaks
all rules.
You always did...you never really could help it.
National Poetry Month - Day 4
And I hope your heart is insured
or stocked up on bandages, because I aim to break it;
hold it while it hopes for me
and I give you less.
Today this isn't working out. I kept thinking about the first line. I'd actually been thinking about it for a week now but couldn't figure how to work with it. I think this is my worse effort thus far, but who knows later it may work into something successful, just not today...
National Poetry Month - Day 3
Walking the valley of metallic trees
iron trunks and copper-coated branches;
the air heavy with electrons, bouncing
the frenzied whirl of loose atoms.
They are quiet in their excursion picking
their way through the thickest part this night
both shoulder backpacks and weeks of burdens
heading without direction towards: escape.
Weaving moonlight in their footsteps,there are no maps in their strides
only purpose and a plan directed towards daybreak.
National Poetry Month - Day 2
Shadows sleep awkwardly across his face
timid of daylight or another day breaking
silently; he shelters himself in polos and chucks
uses his backpack as a shield.
His peers are dragons
and he is no St. George; not fireproof or tested.
His skin is paper and they watch him crumbling
fraying at the edges, transparent in the center.
So I can say that I wrote this because all the headlines right now about bullying...
National Poetry Month - Day 1
papier-mache lion you roar in crumbling notes
un-fearsome
unfathomably you matchstick the roads you've already traveled,
trailblazing. You comet flame
burning an ideal long past it's lifetime. You burn at half-light
I burn on a daily basis, end to end
a furnace brimming with ashes.
