Las Vegas

Though Sky’s gone black,

Sea’s alight,

With a thousand burning brigs,

From a thousand bitter battles,

Fought here.

Alone.

I glide along,

With mindful mastery,

My keel gently kissing,

Debri and destruction,

Grave markers from those,

Who captained less carefully.

From the smoke,

And through the glow,

Another ship,

Torn sails,

Flailing in hot wind,

Without point or effort,

Bearing down upon me.

Pull the sails,

Throw hard the rudder,

My broadside to the danger,

Hoping through haze,

My humble Caravel,

Appears a Man o’ war.

Drawing near,

I see my fear,

Reflected cross the faces,

The weary hang,

Of sailors’ frames,

Adrift upon the water.

As I pull aside,

And watch them by,

No cries for help,

No offers lent,

Their ship sits low,

Their cargo heavy,

And I’ve my own to carry.

Skyline

An exhale,

Smoke rides wind,

To where I can’t follow,

Disappear.

I knew it all,

Or thought,

Yet now so small,

Hope fighting fear,

Together we fall,

To where you can’t follow.

Shimmering skies

Replaced by silhouettes,

Terrifying monuments

To meaninglessness.

Amidst it all you cheer,

Man succeeds,

Man conquers,

Man dominant above all.

Yet in this din and dim,

I’ve died,

By devious deceptions,

And deeds dealt down,

Not by a Father on high,

But thy brother,

Elevated by absurdity

And a number.

All created

I undo,

Slumbering away

In my tower.

Do the hundred souls

Beside me here

See my dreams

In theirs.

Or are those visions

Manufactured

Like the shrines

We can’t be without.

If I find a grave,

Hide away,

A lifetime,

Or longer,

Waken when

Stars shine,

Man surrenders,

And gods don’t ask for money.

Love

Were I to say it once,

I'd mean it forever.

Yet by forever I mean not only,

For only does not make special.

Were you now to split this heart,

In two,

In four,

In more,

You'd find not oozing tar,

Spread cross these strings,

From pain, sorrow, and loss.

Instead, clear as crystal springs

True love we find

Not in bond or lust,

Not in touched and seen,

But in the soul of one who stood,

Though fallen,

Bleeding,

And through lies,

Death and defeat,

Still standing,

Throwing it back

And asking again.

A piercing note of hope

Amidst angry cries

As it begs "Once more"

Of the patient skies.

And with the quiet answer

Seas of anger settle

To what was,

Before details.

My love.

Not a person,

Not a one,

Just this.

Neither taken,

Nor given,

It was ever mine.

In the light,

Waters flowed,

So it grew,

Tall and bold.

And in darkness,

Trying to cut back,

This briar within,

Thorns shredding,

Still it grew.

Living not in muscle,

In blood or brain,

But transcending matter,

Exceeding thought,

Imagination,

Making me believe in

Believing in something.

While anger quiets in death,

This laughs and cries

And continues,

Undiminished,

In full spectrum and splendor.

This is mine.

And this in me,

This marvel,

A miracle,

This lives in all,

More varied and complex

Than could ever be contained

By a book,

Or a helix,

Or a god.

For how can this be,

This purity,

Buried in each of us,

Who are but flesh,

Fragile and foolish.

We pull it out

Hold it up

And waste it away

As God

Or biology

Or nothing.

Perhaps the fall

Was looking out to see in.

But this is mine,

Blinding sunlight,

And I know I can’t explain.

A Lesson

Time goes by and I learn what I wish I knew

Lessons that could have changed choices

Paths that should have been avoided

Hearts I’d have left unbroken

Yet tempered and cooled by time I am

Every pain a step on those shining stairs

A hope that with every drop of blood

I inch from darkness to light

Indeed I’ve come to see these heavy hearts

In myself, those I hide amongst, strangers

More precious than gold or gems

All I’d hope to die for

Sometimes

    Sometimes I’m lost and don’t know who I am.  Sometimes I’m overwhelmed and just want to flee.  Sometimes I don’t know if there is a point at all, sometimes I don’t even hope.

    Sometimes I make mistakes.  Sometimes they hurt others, sometimes they hurt me.  Sometimes they hurt everyone.

    Sometimes I am forgiven.  Sometimes I’m not.  Sometimes it takes a moment to reconcile.  Sometimes it takes years.  Sometimes we fade away.

    Sometimes after all the deeds are done and the words lost to the wind you don’t so much remember the what, just the who.  Sometimes you can never properly explain what happened because that relationship itself defies definition.  

    Sometimes you don’t have to live close.  Sometimes you don’t have to talk everyday.  Sometimes you know that when you see that person, all the rest of life stops so you can live.  Sometimes your night could not be better than something normally regrettable.  Sometimes we cry.  Sometimes from dander.  Sometimes we laugh and talk until time is an irrelevant concept we don’t need to conform to.

    Sometimes things make sense.  Sometimes, things just come together.  Sometimes someone is their drink.  Sometimes they are the spicy, salty, unignorable champion of getting up and on that is a bloody mary.  Sometimes they wrote the book.

    Sometimes when everything else is about to crush me, I just have to shout out a good thing.  

Stuck In Me

    We are soldiers on a barren battlefield, fighting our war each day and night against an enemy we can neither see nor touch, but we know is there.  Be it doubt, sloth, fear, or anything else, we all have demons that we must choose to wrestle or run from.

    Your war is unique, often played out in battles that are just yours.  It is so easy to feel alone.  To believe yourself the only warrior, standing alone between life and the void, your philosophical struggles somehow sparing the oblivious masses.  Yet such thought only serve to embitter the mind and soul, to separate us.  Yet we were never meant to fight alone.

    I look out on the swarming hive that is our city, and I see everyone caught up.  In food, in money and work, in lust for power or flesh, in so many ways tainting and wasting until any idea of there being a purpose is absurd.  Yet we all do.  I do.

    To think you are above it is the true absurdity.  No matter how high you climb, how hard you fight, how many demons you slay, you are human.  You are.  It is our prison, our gift, our true challenge.

    Across time and our globe we have tried to define and redefine what we are, what we can be, what we should be.  Yet even in the struggle to understand, we lose focus, and find ourselves alone again.  Those guys believe weird things, their values are all messed up, they are petty and foolish, they are unenlightened and simple, they hate me and I must defend myself, they blew up my tower, they bombed my town.  We are lost in our own hate, in our own history, in our own solitude.  We haven’t the courage to lay down arms and understand the pain of these “enemies.”

    We are all the same.  Pale, light, male, female, short, tall, rich, poor, policeman, banker, president, vagrant, sex offender, terrorist, suicide.  We are all to be loved.  

    We need to stop fighting alone.

A Dress, A Choice

I often think of that dress I bought you.  Our lives were tearing apart, and I was so sure you were going to leave, and you did, but I loved to see you happy.  I always did.  And as you tried on this dress, I saw joy in your eyes, so I seized it.  Or tried.

It was expensive, I know, and I never saw you wear it outside the store.  Sometimes I wonder when you did, who you went home with, what happened to this dress.  But that is unimportant.  What mattered was what this dress meant to me.  What it symbolized for me.  A selfless gift in the face of hopelessness.  An acknowledgement that I had no power or control, but in this void I would choose love and happiness over anger.  Even if it would not choose me.

It’s funny, or maybe sad, that I don’t even remember what the dress looks like.  I remember the moment, and the emotion, over the details.  The dress I do remember, a plain purple one you’d worn so many times before.  I remember watching you walk away down an alley, in a moment that felt so heavy.

Somewhere in my mind these dresses have defined the end of an era.  One waves goodbye and the other a final gesture of love before we were over.

But nothing is ever over.  I carry in me more complex emotion than anyone seems to believe.  I can be torn with laughter and tears, smiles and rage, all in a moment.  Every moment.  I just choose to pull out what I do, but it is all always there.  Bubbling beneath the surface.

             I don’t want pity, I despise it.  When other people talk about my life and tear up it makes me angry.  I don’t want people to feel bad for me.  I don’t want to be pitied.  I’m not the one who quit, I didn’t run away and hide.  I faced my doom head on, and I did it with a gift dress in hand and love in my heart.  That is who I chose to be.