We the People

We the people of the United States

In order to form a more perfect union

We have fought and we will keep fighting.

We have marched and we will keep marching.

We the people are angry.

Do you hear us, you untouchable gods?

As our lightning flashes

As our voices thunder in the streets

As the cries of the outraged beat upon skyscrapers

As the feat of the living pound the pavement of the dead

Hands up

Don't shoot

I can't breathe

I can't breathe

I can't breathe

Hands up

Don't shoot

I can't breathe.

Why gods, do you not weep

As those you protect are weeping?

Vengeance is power.

A blinding rod of control

Can you not see, even through our eyes

What you now have wrought?

Hands up 

Don't shoot

I can't breathe

I can't breathe

I can't breathe.

--12.4.14

Ember and Shadow

Phoenix trapped in werewolf's cave

Thinks its fire will make it brave

Works so hard his soul to save

But for blood does the werewolf crave.

Werewolf calm by glowing day

A kindly man, not much to say

If only such a soul could stay

As the sunlight sinks away.

Werewolf struggles against attack

One foul night shall send him back

Strength of will he seems to lack

Once sane mind going black.

Phoenix weeps with healing tears

Fights all day to mend his fears

But as the looming moonlight nears

A lonely howl is all he hears.

Werewolf claws at Phoenix heart

Moonlit terror tears them apart

Though an end this is only the start

Impending silence his cruelest art

Deepest night

Darkest fright

Loss of might

No will to fight

Of the werewolf only shadow remains

Phoenix left with bloody teary stains 

Free she soars across the plains

But still is haunted by werewolf's pains

Shadow passes over the sky

Follows the phoenix wherever she doth fly

Always lingers, standing by

Reminding her darkness is nigh.

Phoenix learns to live with dark

Sleeps between the passing sparks

At times the daylight is too stark

Til she finds the werewolf's shadowy arc.

Time goes by, the shadow shrinks

Phoenix doesn't notice, until she blinks

Then into the past her heart sinks

And she herself teeters on the brink.

Phoenix watches the shadow fade

Wonders if her debt's been paid

Or if bare her soul's been laid

Or if in the cave she should have stayed.

Shadow nudges at her mind

The truths ever harder to find

Til tighter inside the demons wind

When Phoenix seeks answers, shadow declines.

Dark and silent in Phoenix thought

After so many shadows and demons fought

Werewolf with him new ones brought

And in the cave she still feels caught

Werewolf shadow in a star

In the sea, not so far

Beyond the veil, across the bar

Waiting where the memories are.

Shadow barely visible now

Phoenix sees it, wonders how

Beyond what reason should allow

And yet no fever upon her fiery brow.

Tiny shadow waves hello

Cocks its head, nodding slow

Fades away to lonely echo

Tiny shadow, where did you go?

--10.30.14

Untold Story

A melody-in-progress song:

We said our goodbyes

On the first of July

And that was the last

Of you.

Now September is setting

And I'm still not forgetting

The memories I have

Of you.

As I walk through the darkness, I feel so alone

With just the ghost of your hand in mine

And I know you can't be here but I wish you'd just write

Just please tell me you're doing fine.

Though it's fall I still wonder

What would this summer

Have been like if I was

With you.

And could you now be stronger

If you'd let me stay longer

If I'd helped you out

With you.

As I walk through the darkness, I feel so alone

With just the ghost of your lips on mine

And I know you can't be here but I wish you'd just write

Just please tell me you're doing fine.

How long can I suffer the silence?

How long can these thoughts carry on?

How long can I let my heart love you?

How long can I pretend you're not gone?

As I walk through the darkness, I feel so alone

With just the ghost of your arms 'round mine

And I know you can't be here but I wish you'd just write

Just please tell me you're doing fine.

Just please tell me you're doing fine.

--9.28.14

Absence

Sometimes, I don't miss you,

I miss you missing me.

Remember, you in love,

You are lucky to be missed

For some of us are not.

--7.22.14

Storms and Monsters

It is always the nights

When I cannot sleep

That are fraught

With spontaneous storms

Of heartbreak

When lightning strikes

A new ravine in my heart

And roaring thunder 

Wakes the slumbering monster

Of fury and love

Winds of frustration

Whip through my veins

And lion claws rip 

Eagle beak tears 

And I must try to heal again

As my shredded heart

Falls to pieces

In the rain 

--7.21.14

Archer

Archer with your bow

Strong, you pull the heartstring

Draw the trust 

Aim at your target

Every arrow, a lie

Dead center in my soul.

Archer with your bow

Loosed at a distance

Weapon of stealth

Or cowardice.

Archer with your bow

The bullseye is full

Nothing but holes

Where you struck true

Archer with your bow

And arrows

And empty, I quiver.

--6.29.14

Fairy Tale

There once lived 

A crusader among men

No prince, but a warrior

Battling demons

In a great raging sea.

There lived too

A phoenix

A near-immortal healer

Protecting those it loved

With tears of great power.

One fateful day they met

The warrior and the phoenix

And as he fought

She wept for him

Healing his deepest wounds.

Theirs was a partnership

Spanning continents

And lifetimes

A story spread through creation

As a tale of love and bravery.

--6.19.14

Lost

I am left

With only your shadows

And your shadows

Are not you

They are

Cold I

Cannot hold them

As I hold you

Hot against my skin

Heart pounding towards mine.

My hands are empty

They cannot grasp

Your loneliness

They are empty

Touching only your absence.

Just when I thought

I'd found you.

My love sits

Sweltering in my heart

Trapped

Yearning to be free

To run to you.

Where are you

Do you remember me?

There is still magic

Trying to escape

My fingertips

And touch you

Keep you safe.

Somehow my heart keeps beating.

My hands claw at my chest.

So lost am I without you

I want only to retreat within.

--6.3.14

Wash Away

Crown of my heart

You make the world more radiant

My veins pulse with euphoria.

Jewels in my soul

You shine

And I hope

To reflect your brilliance

And strike your heart

Like lightning.

Awaken your soul

To the beauty I see.

I will carry your rain

Drop by drop in my eyes.

Free you

From the storm.

--6.2.14

Fitting

Wake up, I miss you

What dreams lie in your head

So far from me

You are a waking dream

Of honesty and adventure

Softness in a hard world

Wake up, I miss you

Sleep has taken you so swiftly

I imagine you at peace

And wish to kiss

The breath upon your lips

Wake up, I miss you

Though I be right by your side

And your eyelashes flutter

And a smile creeps upon your face

And you fit so perfectly in my arms

That I must sleep too

And dream

--5.24.14

Children of the Moon

Were we but pieces of the same whole

That parted in the fall to earth,

Are we but shattered beings

Who put our pieces back together

Not quite right, some missing?

Did I lose you in Eternity?

Have I known you before,

For your hand is my hand

And there is something in your smile

That feels familiar on my lips.

Are you the tingling in my fingertips

The reminder of something absent

Have you finally come home

And are we safe, we weary travelers?

Through time and space and misfits

Picking up our broken pieces

Sightless ancient beings

Raging in our chests

Calling out to each other

Across centuries.

And now I find you, so simply

There can be no question

I can love you as if you were me

As we weld together our empty spaces

Put the pieces back where they belong

My heart in you, your heart in me

And we beat in harmony.

--5.24.14

Wreck(less)

Could I kiss your scars away

I wouldn't.

To love your past

As I love your present.

You are not a painting

To brush over mistakes.

You are cast in bronze

To glisten in the sun

But also to be dented

Scratched and scorched.

You are armor.

Grown hot in the blazing days of battle

Burn my skin

I remember you.

You have a history

One of strength

That I would not wipe away.

Why be perfect

When you can be real.

Why be new

When you can be ancient.

Pieces of stardust in your eyes

Wisdom and clarity

In the great expanse

Of the story written on your skin.

--5.22.14

Recoil

You put a bullet in my heart

Before I ever knew

Your finger

Was on

The trigger.

--4.10.14

Weakness

I could fall in love

With the tears in your eyes

A capacity for pain

That might rival mine

I can see the fear in your heart

And that my bravery scares you most 

I could tell you anything

You might think is a lie

Because you don't recognize the truth

That you could be strong

That love is never wrong

That you could be capable of anything

You are not just a dream

I am not just a heart

But the pain of things lost

That pulls us together

Is what tears you apart.

--5.3.14

Bad Habit

I was but one
In your pack of cigarettes
Picked me out of the box
Lit me up
And I burned
Became ash
As you needed me
Sweet relief
So completely
So briefly 
Specks lost in the wind
But now I lie
Barely smoldering
On city concrete
Tread upon
By a passing shoe
None the wiser
To my moment 
On your lips
—4.10.14

Inked

I love you like


Ink loves paper


Written forever on the pages


Of my little leather-bound soul

I love you


My well-read paperback,


Know all the words


But keep finding more in your story

Ink soaks in


Takes hold of fibers


Makes a blank page


Another world

Ink stains fingers


As they brush across the page


Marks left behind


In destruction of the void

Ink loves paper


Doesn’t wash away, just bleeds


Words lose their meaning


Become black clouds of memory

Ink writes new stories


Dips in the well


Flies across new pages


Sets a world on fire

I love you like


Ink loves paper


Written forever on the pages


Of my little leather-bound soul

--3.26.14

Burned

Loving you is like

Trying to catch smoke in my hands.

Hot and elusive 

No matter how hard I try

To hold you

To keep you from hurting others

You escape.

I cannot tame you.

Embers become ash.

Swirling mist goes to ground.

Loving you is like

Holding fire

Never safe for too long.

Lighting things I've never seen

But burning some along the way.

I cannot keep you forever.

The light goes out.

But loving you is like

An eternal spark

Flying through my heart

In quick bursts of feeling

That never truly die.

And a spark can become an

Ember, and an ember a

Flame, and a flame becomes

Smoke that I keep chasing

In a dance that never ends

All from one little spark.

--12.24.13

Little Lost Boy

Perhaps you never grew up

Because you gave your shadow away.

Little lost boy

Hiding in neverland

Angry, afraid, and abandoned

While your shadow dances

On the shoulders of others.

Poor little lost boy

I'll happily return your shadow.

I don't want it.

Style yourself captain,

Your own villain.

But who will come to your rescue?

My kite has sailed.

No one clapped.

The light has gone out.

Little lost boy,

It's all in your imagination.

Take your shadow back and live.

--3.8.14

Oblivion

Your shadow follows me

Will not let me go

Has become mine

In an anti-gravity whiskey prison

Floating or drowning

Turning out the lights

To make the shadow disappear

But all that's left

Is darkness

And oblivion.

--3.8.14

Bleed

How long would you have let me bleed

Before you

Cauterized the wound

I set fire to myself?

I tried to bleed to death for you

But my body just wouldn't let me

Perhaps because

You were already

Dying yourself

And there was nothing more I could do

To save you.

--3.8.14

Attack

You were shooting blanks

While I was shooting film

Trying to understand

Your murderous ways

Who is the hunter

And who is the hunted

Who finds the monster

Under the empty bed?

--3.4.14

Long Gone

And yet I write you elegies

Long after I am gone

So lost are you

As words flow

Unbidden

Filling in

Around a story already written

As though

Adding belated subtext

Could somehow

Rescue the past.

--3.4.14

Anartchy

I can't stop filling in the empty spaces

Left behind by you

On every inch of

Blank muscle

The beating canvas in my heart.

As the slash of paint

The violent brush

Tries so very valiantly

To drown out the

Raucous

Silence.

--3.4.14

Resistance

You are so easy

Too easy

To demonize

And yet

So hard

Too hard

To love

And yet 

Somehow

Though I try

To do neither

I do both.

--3.4.14

Armor

Here's the thing.

Love is never wrong.

It is never wrong

To love someone.

But what you cannot

Cannot

Under any circumstances

Do

Is let your love

Break you.

Love

With all your heart

Whoever it is

And yourself.

And you will fall

Into despair

That ink and paper

Can never do justice.

But you will also rise

Beyond any and all danger

To points higher and further

Than space or time can know.

Your love is strong.

And you are as strong as your love.

Love is pain

But love is not death.

Pain is not death.

You are alive

And you are love.

--2.28.14

Wound

Does my heart still beat?

I don't know if you can feel it.

Touch your hands to the wound

Deep purple at the edges.

This is bleeding that won't stop.

I ran upon your sword so long ago

Let my insides fall apart.

And you trickle out

Ever slowly

From the chronic sore

Hole in the middle of my soul.

Black and blue

From a fight I stopped fighting 

Before you ever realized

There was a weapon in your hand.

--2.27.14

Eternal Gravity

Sky on fire at the edge of the world

Flames up in reverse

As I stand looking out at

Where the stars should be.

Meteor to the heart.

Shooting star through the chest.

I break apart into pieces,

Blood in my veins shattered glass.

A cosmic dagger I constantly await -

News that you are gone.

Imperfect, red dwarf, I glow,

And I cannot like you.

But my celestial soul

Can only love you, knife in hand.

Yours or mine, I cannot say.

Only the spheres and the spiders know.

The man who fell to earth.

--2.26.14

A Haiku About Sleep

I'm going to bed

Without being deeply sad

It's so hard alone

--2.25.14

Persevere/Preserve

Could not predict

Intuitive, but not psychic

As I feel myself fall away

The clarity of a common sadness

That I wish you would just let go

As I forced myself to do.

You are drowning in an ocean

Of my rain

As I swim away

Yet I keep looking back

Can't quite leave you behind

If you might reach out a hand

Could I be your salvation?

--2.21.14

A Quote about Love

We are not meant to be alone, that is why we love. Love does not quench thirst or feed us or shelter us in the literal sense, but no one can tell me they have not been nourished or sustained or protected by love.

Stardust

There are moments when

I can feel you thinking of me

With a familiar flutter in my chest

In the secret cave that the Girl with All the Answers

Tried to hide away.

I reign in the sunlight

In the dusky late afternoon

Like when we first met

In the closest moment

Before you began to flee.

And sometimes the night falls apart so swiftly

At the thought of you

So far from here

That I feel the tingle in my fingers

Trying to catch something

They never quite held in the first place.

--2.20.14

E(u)legy for a Lost Friend

The moments where it mattered
Where it mattered that you didn't love me
Have faded away
Lost to the ancient halls of memory
Where you no longer tread.

We shared together the moment
"Don't let me abandon you."
How did you disappear?

But what matters now
What matters is that I loved you
More deeply and truly
Than ever I have loved anyone.

And what matters is
What matters is that still I love you
Even as the thought of you
Makes me want to rip my veins from my arms
Fling your heart in a grave
And leave you there to rot.

I would have loved you
To the ends of the world
Through times we could never live to see.

For all that wretchedness
You killed my friend
And exactly as I feared
It was indifference, not hate
My love could rescue you, or me.

I can never quite let you go.
I don't want to go.
But I did.
--2.19.14

Desert

I held in my hands

All the love from my heart

Let it sift slowly through my fingers

Like water

Raining down upon you

Until my hands were empty

Until my skin was dry

I could see drops caught in your eyelashes

Taste them on your lips

And still you told me

You were living in a drought.

No one could save you.

--2.18.14

The Truths He'll Never Hear

I understand you, perhaps better than you will ever know. You, who proclaim yourself to be brave and proud, who values honesty and loyalty, and what you think of as justice. You are the victim of your fear, and in your fear you are neither brave, nor honest, nor loyal nor just. You are nothing worth being proud of. But you are not nothing.

Think of what a miracle it is to love, when so many things happen to take away our trust and our faith. It is easy to fall victim to the faults of others and blame our own upon them. Yet blaming others does yourself no favors, and only harms those closest to you, the few and loyal that you slash at with your righteous sword.

You are angry because you are afraid of hurting. You are arrogant because you are afraid of being wrong. You are mean because you are afraid of being attached. You are alone because you are afraid of trusting, and being abandoned. You are afraid of trusting, afraid of admitting you cannot and do not want to go through life alone, afraid of letting yourself feel loss rather than power. But your independence and your power and your control are products of fear, and they will keep away all that you truly want from life.

I understand you. I have felt these things myself. I know what it feels like to be afraid to trust, to discover feelings and be terrified that they are beyond your control. What we must learn is only through true bravery, pushing past fear to love and trust others, will we be happy.

I pity you, alone and afraid to let yourself hurt, instead wrapped in self-righteous anger, the anger that will continue the destructive cycle you have found yourself in for so long. I know how hard it is to be vulnerable, to admit you need help. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is admit we are scared.

I love you, with all of my heart, for it is souls like yours that need the most love, since they refuse so much of it. I pray for you regularly, in hopes that one day you will let go of your anger so that it can let go of you. Letting go of your anger will hurt. In its place will be the pain you won't let yourself feel, and that is a scary thing to face. But when you decide to be brave, you will be free.

Some will say you do not deserve my prayers. Some will say that you deserve whatever you get, and I deserve so much better. But I believe everyone deserves love, and, as much as it is possible, freedom from fear. I tried to give you both. I took them from you for myself, and wish to give them to you in return, but freedom and love are gifts you have to be willing to accept.

You cannot accept freedom and love until you strip away your armor of steel anger and cast off your iron cage of fear. I have reached through the bars, but you have not given me your hand. I have had to move on, for your cage is not mine to inhabit, your armor not mine to remove. All I can do now is let the strongest heart continue to beat inside me, braver than ever, and with all the ferocity I posess will you to seek for yourself that which I know can be yours.

Put down your sword, my love. Stop fighting and be free.

--11.3.13

Story Over

I write the words over I write the words over I write the story over Do I rewrite the story?

I learn the lesson over I learn the lesson over I write the story over Do I learn the lesson?

The words are new The words are the same I write the story over Do I rewrite the story?

I live the story over I live the life over I write the words over Do I live a new life?

I love the life over I love the story over I write the story over Do I rewrite the love?

Do I rewrite the love? Do I requite the love? Do I require the love? I write the story over.

--12.18.14

No Good

So hard
Not to speak the truth
Words I'm not allowed to say
But no one else would understand
What this "I love you" means
And so I hold it
Tight and close
As I long to hold you
Alone, tender
A whisper
As thoughts of you blare on.
It's no good
We're no good
We're no good
What to do
Without you
I don't know.
--1.3.14

Young American

Guitar heart strings

Arteries of steel.

I'll love you like thunder

The storm you're afraid to feel.

I've got a lightning bolt heartbeat

In my rock n roll soul.

Brave and honest to a fault

Though virtue takes its toll.

Stubborn and hot tempered

Like a heavy metal riff,

But with a bluesy bass line

A love that's never swift.

I'm a sword-slinging rebel,

Defender of belief

Protector of fragile hearts

Vanquisher of love's thief.

With magic in my spirit

And a warrior in these eyes

Follow the sound of my music

Your adventure this way lies.

--12.19.13

All Too Well

Hallowed ground

A smile hides in the familiar corners

Of your frowning mouth.

Sad-eyed sacred

Your muddled view

Speak quick think slow

Live fast love long.

Fingers creep across the empty space

So heavy with everything unsaid.

You've run out of wonderland

Left the ground behind.

Free fall tumble up or down

Just behind your ribcage

Beating out a storm.

Earthquakes in your coffee cup

Betraying the holy tectonic shift.

--2.4.14

Cloud Cover

Sickness of a man on the edge of a precipice

Hunting owl circles low

Could I love you a little longer

Bottom looms closer

While farther away

Precipice of a man on the edge of a sickness

Hunting owl glares, wise to tricks

Could I lift you a little longer

Strength begins to falter

You're so far away

Edge of a man on the precipice of sickness

Hunting owl calls out in the dark

Could I kill you a little longer

Truth seeps in

Daggers fall away

Sick man on a precipice

Hunting owl in a tree 

I on the bridge

What falls below

Who goes away

--2.4.14