Invisible

He sits on the street corner,
howling sentences broken and

divested from meaning, hurtling

angry invectives at each person

passing unhearing and unseeing.

His voice cracks with forsaken fury,

the faces reflect the unfeeling edifices

rising and towering and surrounding,

an unending procession of cold exteriors

and hard fronts, lips locked doors set in

inexpressive glass and steel and concrete

bouncing, hollowing, blending and distorting

his wail with the roar of trucks and sea

of horns; the screaming screech of metal

and shower of electric sparks from the ‘L’

above echoing and overtaking in the din

of chaos his blindly grasping rage

searching the deaf and mute masses

for evidence of his own existence.

But here, the louder you cry, the more

you disappear, just another silent scream

swallowed by the city.

Happy Hour

Blue summer marble cat's eyed night blasted and emotionally broke from too many trips to the tried and true you-call-it well of emotion that my heart serves strong and mixed-shaken-stirred over ice with a twist of hope, desire, and fear.

She Said...

She said

     You seem lonely

and with those three little words

in a bar where smoke hung in the air like a lazy cat

batting at the muted din of drunken too loud laughing

smiles and cheap beer that infused everything like a

faded stain that had long ago effaced the ancient old

worn wood;

where the past and memories and lives and an

endless procession of nights reaching backward

through time had spilled and ingrained themselves

into the very pulp and marrow till all that existed

were ghosts taking up the familiar patterns that

those well-worn floors laid out like dance steps

to a forgotten song forever followed into eternity;

my reflection in those cigarette stung eyes red with pity

caused the gallowed floor at the bottom of my stomach to

drop open and instead of the quick snapping sound of my

heart’s neck breaking the slipshod noose tightened in a

suffocatingly slow squeeze causing my chest to constrict

and ribs to groan and strain under the heavy suspended

weight kicking then penduluming inside them until

eventually all was still;

only the jukebox was new,

and even it played the same old songs.

Two Months of Random Writing...

Nothing worse than the itching urge to write so bad that it is not an interest
but a piercing flaming jagged rusty raw razor-edged desire,
an unyielding compulsion whose violation risks your very sanity;
no longer a want but a physical necessity;
when it is a wild animal, visceral and savage, all sharp fangs and claws,
teeth and tendons and straining sinew slashing and gnashing and smashing
against the prison bars of your rib cage...

and you have writers block;
my pen and keypad emitting nothing but a
weak limp drizzle of wasted words and uninspired ideas
hobbling across the page held up by cheap cliche crutches.

When the entire time all I can imagine
is sinking a fountain pen into my outstretched and tied off arm
and depressing the plunger to fill my veins with the ink and words that beat
and beat and beat in my heart till
I’m completely infused-

then I would lift up on that pens pump
and fill its empty chamber like a loaded gun
with the infiltrated red ink of my blood
and use it to write words like ego piercing bullets
to fire into minds and penetrate thoughts leaving
inspired exit wounds of wonder…

I want to craft and create pages on whom hang
the memory of time and the secrets of life,
filled with the magical moments of mundane beauty
that weld together each days passing,
those unmarked meters that tick between seconds
as unaware we wander through life
from home to work, to bed and back, waiting and
waiting for what we don’t know but
something anything to remind us that there is more…

letters like neighbors talking on patios
over fences on sunny summer Sundays, 
words laid out together building strong
sentences like we used to build communities, communities
connecting into paragraphs of disseminated hope and prosperity
that make up the page turning foundations of our storied cities,
and pages of cities, made of paragraphs,
made of sentences and words and letters all together
in an expansive book of our best selves
that would be called The Great American novel.

But we all face writers block,
locked away from each other and the punctuating
connections that make our lives make full-stop sense
so we run on in circles of masturbatory
misappropriations confusing dollars with worth
selling our souls for cents running always ever faster
just to stay in the same income brackets
too distracted to notice that who we once knew as neighbors
we now just keep up with as the Joneses.

But if we could rediscover how our livelihoods
are as dependent on each other as clauses, then maybe
we could begin to craft the right words required
by putting our interests and investments back into our neighborhoods
so empathy and understanding would replace envy and self-interest
and together we could make the greatest book ever written.

The only destiny that is inevitable is the one we don’t want.
The only future that’s certain is joining together or falling apart.
We must recognize that we are the authors of our fate
and what is needed will remain unwritten
if don’t put action behind intention
and put our pens to the page.

These two sides of our nature are like continental plates
colliding they slide then stick as the pressure and power

of unimaginable masses meeting and moving us
towards the building finality of their fusion finally forcing
a ripping bending breaking eruption and explosion
of decisions that threaten to  mend
or shatter the fabric of society itself.

...there are no fault lines here.
The faults lie within us all.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fingers like loose lips spilling hidden half-truths,
this is not me; this poem is a lie.
Oz the embodied mediocre writer and poet is
not the same as the man behind the microphone curtain.

This is a deception, like any performance;
practiced pauses and punctuating “perchances”
imitated inflection and intonations filled with
implications of imbued importance,
this is not my voice.

If the man who sat in that seat said and spoke
in such a manner, he would have no friends.
This poem is a lie.

My speaking in not filled with fancy or forced metaphors.
I do not frequently use the same excessive amount
of multisyllabic words whose meaning was only made manifest to me
with a rhyming guide, thesaurus, and a dictionary.

This moment may be the longest I’ve gone all week
meaning less than five measly minutes, without saying
like or um. And I didn’t even make it the full five minutes.
This poem is a lie.

The false confident front that you are facing
is a forced fiction formed to fake feelings
to fight the intimidating inner anxiety that has been
instigating slathers of sweat and the sensation of a
sick and sour stomach.

Alliterative prose arranged in neat rows
nestled nuggets of nice sounding nouns and
verbs all vying and vexed in this vacuum of time
for your attention are the antithesis of how
I actually write.
This poem is a lie.

I am not the calm clean cut compassionate caring
creature you see standing before you,
I am not the nice guy or nerdy neighbor I seem
I am not the sober smiling person speaking
into the microphone.

I am a bastard. A drunk jerk off jack off, a
jaded jester out of jokes. A wanton waste,
a womanizing weasel, a whimpering wise ass
all worked up and whacking of to his own washed out
washed up wasted life of words.

This poem is a lie.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Slip-shod and slack jawed words tip toe and trip
     tying themselves up trying to traipse across a tipsy page



------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am a fucked up person,
faded, faithless and fickle,
frozen hearted bleeding icicle tears
of whiskey and women and wonder;
wandering a world
that feels like a wonderful
emotional wasteland.

With cigarette dangling dead dreams and
ash wishes for what, for a love I don’t dare?
For a future or fate that has ass fucked me
with my own goddamned goals?

What promised prison is this passionless life
of painful pursuits and hedonistic pleasures?
Why do I betray those who depend most upon
this damaged individual? What damned demons and
destructive ends do I dare desire I can escape with
my escapades of enlightened unenlightenment?

I dread dreaming because hope is hell, hollow,
half-hearted, and hungry to swallow the desires
and drives that drag me down into defilement.

What damns me is myself, my inescapable image,
my face’s freckles and teeth flashing back in a
sadistic sarcastic smile telling taunting tall tales
that I can or could ever be liked, love,

or be loved.

I am a bastard. I am a bat-shit buffoon blundering
my way from saloon to saloon, slutting
through beds and bordellos and bodices and belladonnas
with all the nimbleness of a nightcap of nightshade.

I lick my emotional wounds with shots of foreboding,
drown depression in depressants and dealers;
the broken breaking man who thinks any problem he
cannot drink or fuck or dodge or drug his way out of
is not his problem at all.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Heartbroken with desire for a dream

She, my real or imagined perfect counterpart.
And because of her perfect imperfection,

We can never be.

I cannot pull her down from the stars
cannot pin her to cardboard or press her between pages

Preservation is death. We cannot be anything more

than a shared distant dream.  Anything else
would be sacrificing everything it is

that makes her,

Her.

I’ve heard that love isn’t holding on,

Love is letting go. Like a bird, love may return,

But it will never stay. Love is wild, like her,

The world too big and begging her to be explored,
even the largest of hearts cannot hope to contain

Such a beautiful beast.

Love is loss, life is suffering;
The moment may be fleeting,
but at least it’s memory is something

I can hope to hold onto forever.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wound up old wounds weeping

Heavy is head the wears the heart as its crown

Dreams dashed and drowned by their own deep desires

A life filled with paradox and impossible

Inescapable contradictions;
we always kill the things we love.

My banality hides a broken-

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Love is a toxic emotion

it eats, an acid stripping the bonds
of independence, dissolving identity

We are unable to reconcile

Our hearts with ourselves

Our conflicted and confused ideas and egos
emotions which strangle the unbound

Beauty we see

you cannot frame a mountain range,

Nor lock tiger in a zoo’s cage

Without something priceless being lost

Wolves become dogs,

Domesticated dependable
dependent. Shadows of their
wild former selves.

One can be admired outside, one possessed in the house,
but each is incapable of surviving,

of being, as they are

Were they to trade places with the other.

--------------------------------------
Emotional thoughts pushing feelings
like explosive pistons, overwhelming
impulses racing in response, overreacting
to minor incidences.

All taken away with a lubricating puff
that stops the friction and the slows down
and puts distance between you and the issues
allowing thoughts to emerge;

Rationality preserved
_______________________________________

Shifting seasons as snow melt and cold
spring suns give way to warmth.
Tulips taking over evergreens as lush
life buds forth from once bare branches.
The thermometer’s mercury hands reach out
grabbing desperate grasping gasping
souls and spirits who, rising,
revel in each measured degree
of its slow ascension to summer.

___________________________________________________

“Shit son,” said Joseph, whose
next unpacked phrase suggested,
now’days, all our words heard
can’t hardly help cut through the
contemporary grammar of our increasingly
digital disconnection from meaningful discourse;
all said with a single, resounding, sighed syllable,
“F’ck.”

Seeking sandy shores shaded with the
shadows of palm fronds and freckled with
shells whose sounds echo the sea, siren’s
songs searching for a return, calling-
longing, for the cradle of their creation.
_____________________________________________________

Coconut dreams and tropical drinks;
delirium drifting across continents
chasing eternal summer suns-

Equatorial rains and warm waters
clear blue colored waves washing
against reefs and rocks with
fish and crabs like rainbow spots-

geckos grasping at ceilings
seeking sustenance watching over
sleeping shapes whose unseeing
eyes bask in the twilight of paradise.
_______________________________________________

Rising sun at dawn set against the clear sky
of the horizon like a blazing blue eye
opening up to all the promise and
possibility of a new day.

Heavy sighs of hope

and worry and wonder
and worry and excitement
and worry
and worry,

Joy and jangled
jumpy nerves fraught
and full with feeling
wounded and weary and
hurt and hopeful and healing,
heaving my stuck self forward
struck and stuttering and straining
sorrow and joy fighting for
freedom revealing my
hidden heart reveling
in tomorrow trapped
in today until
tomorrow or
the next day,
or…

---------------------------------

she arrives, that sprite
and I’m feeling
I’m falling
I’m giddy as anticipations
fingers tap on my nerves
and tug at my insides

I’m scared and excited
braced for hope or hurt,

Searching for my faltering
false confidence that evaporates
before my imagination of her
leaving my vulnerability
bare and exposed
---------------------------------

Life: A sick hilarious sad spectacular unending all-too-brief depressing fucked-up fabulous random fated heartbreaking heavenly tumultuous tragic magical mundane experience we live love and somehow still take for granted each and every day.

---------------------------------

Beaten and broken by our best intentions,
Choked by our choices, defeated by our dreams;

We walk into our traps, fall upon our own
swords and spears, pierced by the very tips we shaped
and shaved and sharpened.
------------------------------------------------

I am the unpublished author of unread un-
written words whose only lifeline is hope;
drowning in a sea of decisions that  
rope we desperately cast and clasp
guiding us through time and tragedy;
knotted grabbing and grasping  
as all around we are buffered and
blindsided by the fraught and fickle
winds of faithless fate.
Who we coil and cling to climbing
and clawing hand-over-hand hoisting
ourselves from darkness and despair.

It leads me onwards upwards forwards towards some
seemingly inevitable improved unknown ending…

…where I am finally found fallen
off the tapering tip of my own bare broken
breaking branch on this blooming tree of life,
strange fruit slowly swaying hanging hung
by the noose I never knew I was making.