I’m a monarch with no one to rule. I’m a sick joke on the lips of a fool. And she can’t get enough inside. At least not enough to fill her. She never wanted to be a butterfly. Just a caterpillar. And is their a difference between déjàvu and coincidence?  ¶ 5:42 PM 0 comments

  It all seems so obvious to me. The danger of a second glance. So incriminating. We all have a certain capacity to deceive ourselves and beyond that, it is a choice. Destiny, death, chance, circumstance, the car accident late at night. To some degree it is all a decision. So is the inability to look away. To stare in hopes of catching a small bit of flesh under the red and white sheet. We all have done it. Wondered about the attendance at our funeral. Who will be there? Will they cry? Will they tell the same cliché lies? “He was always happy. The life of the party. Everybody’s best friend.” Even then we chose. Even then. We find ourselves in this sick continual marathon of daily survival. And all the little things so difficult to make work. Am I bad enough? Should I be worse? Are the rumors true? Will I get the girl in the final reel? Is any of this real? Can’t she see through it? Why not? Would it be different if I were different? Of course it would. But blah, blah, blah and hum. Moments before I rage and beat on the window, screaming my throat raw and my hands bleeding until it breaks and leaves me numb. Knowing full well that we need a bigger boat, or a single farewell, or just a bloody chance. And will I finish first or last. And will I forgive myself my past. And will the wind fill my mast. As I come full circle with the keel raking barnacles across the wooden boards of my pride. My pride that I pull down in great gulps like grog. Toasting my benefactor and surrendering my hope to Peter Coffin, the owner and proprietor. But I’ll make an exception and I’ll bang a drum and call for war and reach a verdict without a jury, much less a trial. And I will confess that she is beautiful and vile. And all that I want and more. She’s the vestal virgin that prays like a whore. She’s the hinges on the wooden double door. And what do we mean? When is a goodbye ever good? And when has anything good been free? Maybe it should be costly bye. Or costly sold. Or maybe I’ll just be a stitched up tear on a pair of blue jean pants. Or maybe I’ll be as steadfast as a row of small black ants. Or maybe I’ll add up all my do’s and subtract all my cant’s to find my worth. Or seek rebirth. Or punch you till it hurts. Or maybe I’ll just be, and never really know who I am. And never really give a damn. And fetch the lost experience of my youth, while questioning my truth, but it won’t matter anyway, unless I find that truthful place that scares me to my core. That place I want to leave now. Once and for all with you. Can we? Can we leave here? I’m ready. My ladder is built. Can I go? Please say goodbye to my benefactor. I trust he’ll understand, like it or not. Tell him the snow melts at spring and things will grow again. Just don’t quit. See each snowfall as less than the blizzard and one day I will grow again. Till I drown. Drawn to the ocean to drink the water that tastes like my tears and see the reflection bending my years, and telling the sea shells to listen to the ocean in my ears. And all of this to you. To you who knows my fears. Drink. Drink my reason, drink my guess. Drink my treason. Drink my best. Drink with me till the last call of the beastly night kills our revels and sends us out to streets with fog made up of our collected breath on the wings of the cold, cold sky. And we’ll slay every dragon between here and home, because you’ll do as we do when you find you’re in Rome. Stay awhile. And perhaps even more, because I’m ending this now, how I began it before. Because it all seems so obvious to me. It all seems so obvious to me.  ¶ 4:25 PM 0 comments

  I am words. I am a gift. I am the voice of the artisans of this age. I am slam. I am beat. I am rhyme and meter, sometimes sloppy, sometimes neat. I am in San Diego trying to learn to teach Yoga and struggling to cope with the rage. I am the writing on the wall as well as on the page. I am torn into trying to figure out what to do with what I am learning and what I know. I am an ex-pastor named Joe, who wants to stand up and be seen. Who loves the machine, and the lights, and the stage. But loves the truth more than his own video age. I am an edge-walker. One who sees the buildings as just another wilderness. One who sees the trees as part of a concrete forest. As the cities dumbs down, his awareness is heightening. A modern day primitive, as rare as autumn lightning. Or maybe I’m an English American but mostly Mexican sociologist who is also a Kung-fu master. Like some kind of twisted Shao-lin burrito in a fortune cookie made of plaster, served up in a vegan restaurant smack dab in the middle of the ghetto. With a fortune in the cookie made up of a cynicism sometimes so brilliant, it blows my mind. Or maybe I’m a sniper one who still doesn’t know what he’s trying to find in making that shot.
What did you feel?
The recoil of my rifle.
What did you feel?
The light they were trying to stifle.
What do you feel?
Hope. Love. Peace. Beyond anything you can dream. Picking his shots on the battlefield, only now it’s with his soccer team. Only “dead” he had to learn was the lyrics to the dead head songs he learned on tour. As he finds that it’s up to his head if his heart is pure. Or maybe, maybe I’m fighting the good fight and feeling like I fail most of the time. As I watch the world around me that covers up the crime and I won’t take it. Maybe I’ll carry the child in my womb to the prisons I teach in and write the words on the walls of the tomb they keep free speech in. And I will fight for the strong women who haven’t found their strength yet until they do. Because it is far too long that the world goes barefoot when I can give them shoes. Or maybe I’ll see the day coming when one to many of my friends are dead or in jail and I realize it’s time to say what the hell and cut my losses. Realize that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be all that I could be in the mind numbing prison of the U.S. Army, but maybe I’m a little more blue than I deserve so I find a reason to protect and serve. And maybe I’m a brother, taking one more shot to the chin of that white boy who thinks he can spit, cause his pad and pen and race don’t fit and his words won’t ever amount to shit. What if I’m a poet laureate with just enough slam to make her tough, who fights disease, and family, and ghosts, like she just can’t get enough. And maybe she doesn’t pray to above, but her prayers got answered when she fell in love. And maybe she’s a single letter of the alphabet at the top of a letter that just runs on and on but hey, Mmmm. It sure is good. Or maybe you had to push the pause button on the tape recorder of the music of your life to learn the words to the song of your daughter and wife, learning once and for all that, that is true music. And maybe you’re a bum just looking for a meal. Or maybe you’re a dealer, trying to make that deal. Or maybe you’ll shackle me happily, grinning in your power. But you can’t cage my tongue and you can’t stop the hour. And we all got time. We’ve all been around the block. And maybe we’ll laugh it, or cry it, or bleed it. But get to it. Now. Write your story down. The rest of us need it.
  ¶ 12:53 PM 0 comments

  I want to love in bright and vibrant colors, swept across the sky, with a paintbrush in haphazard strokes of intimacy. Reds and blues and greens, clashing across a skyline that is a testimony to my ability to love completely. I want to love like I’ve never been let down and I have no cause to fear. I want to drink an ocean full of love in as I paddle frantically to stay afloat. Sucking it down in great gulps instead of sipping it, ladle full by ladle full. I want to love so deeply that I have to question my motives and wonder if I’m just kidding myself that anything could be this wonderful, while making me this confused. I want to love to my core, picking apart her silence in a quest for deeper meaning, while I lay awake and watch her and wonder if she’s dreaming. I want to love to a fault that splits me wide open as my hands shake and my heart quakes with a delirium that came from the anticipation of just one kiss. I want to take a shot at piercing her heart and not fear it if I miss. I want goodbyes that are bitter and hellos that begin with a desperate kiss, every time we should meet. I want to love like God. Flawless and Pure. But Only a Goddess is worthy of such love. (Even though I’d give it freely to anyone who chose to receive it if I truly loved like God.) I’d wrap her like a goddess in lengths of sex and clothe her in passion. I’d weave my words together to form a tapestry of metaphor and lay it happily before the door, padding the floor of the palace she has built in my heart and eagerly await the steps. The touch of her feet that would grace them. I’d gather my words of confusion and erase them. I want to fear my actions but not be able to stop them as I fall headlong down the hall. Moving steadily towards the place that keeps the thoughts of her that I won’t share with anyone because they should only ever be mine. And I look for her and wait. Wondering if it was me who took to long or her that is late. The one who wants this too. Sometimes I feel her in a crowd. Sometimes I see her just beyond the blackness of my closed eyes as I try to sleep, fighting the running dialogue in my head that prevents it. Sometimes I hear her, wishing for me. Walking in the rain, like I have done, missing someone we’ve never met. At least not yet. But until then I’ll wait, somewhere beyond myself, and love my words. I’ll perfect my hope of love and cultivate it like a seed until the time comes that I can plant it, and grow it, and water it with raindrops we will feel walking together in the rain. Wistfully recalling and somewhat missing that far away desire to one day love like we do now, but having no desire to surrender what we have found. No. We’d walk together in the rain forever. Even if we drown.  ¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments

  That bent corner below Shakespeare? That's me. And what does Shakespeare really know? I think his most profound and prolific statement was this, "Take it God. For it is none but thine." Do I serve God? When I am naked in the corner, in the dark? With thousands of little fingers pulling me down? When I have no verse to hide behind? When I am a mad scientist mixing dreams with metaphors to make gold? Or do I serve me. With words and actions, relying only on grace?  ¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments

  Experience. Experience, they say, is what you get when you don’t get what you want. They say a lot. And usually, they have no idea what they are talking about. But sometimes, we take a blind shot and hit. And sometimes, we bet once and quit. And sometimes we gamble with the houses money. And sometimes we’ll take the sting, if we get to taste the honey. And give me a home where the cell phones all roam and they sky will stay cloudy for days. It has its advantages. It has its own voice. Sometimes it’s bitter like a cup of old tea and sometimes it’s smooth. Like freshly shaved legs, just south of paradise. But either way, I do love it. Quite the dancer, quite the flirt, quite the pants, and quite the skirt. And quite the comrade and quite the saint, and quite the villain, and quite the pain. I like it poured on ice in rocks glasses and straight up in dirty shot glasses. I like it in movies, and books, and Sunday school classes. (I like it in this new approach of wandering in and out of verse, as I find my infrequency of paper and pen is a blessing as well as a curse.) I like it spicy. I like it bland. I like it salty. I like it plain. But, oh, do I like it more than they. Oh, do I long for its recompense. This fickle love. Experience.  ¶ 1:39 PM 0 comments

  And then I'll have everything I need. And then I'll have the tools to start the deed. And then I'll kiss you, cause I won't be afraid. And then I'll lie in the bed that I just made. Listening to the chaotic rhythms thumping in my brain. And singing loud, and singing hard, while dancing in the rain. And why so far away? Why can't salvation be here? And why should I ever chose to win the lost by fear? And alarm clocks with blood red digits leaving crimson fingerprints on the time that I should be asleep. With their opinions of my performance hidden in the beep, beep, beep.
I lose. I lose sleep. I count my nights in deadlines. I move. I slowly creep, as I muddle through these head-rhymes. If I turn in now, it's six hours till dawn. If I write three more verses, that's sixteen seconds gone. Words like a shotgun spray on a public bathroom stall. Cause I've got no time to think if I want to write it all. Why do I always get there just a single step behind? Why do all my confessions come a single space per line?
Meet me here as I try to conclude. It's not the poem that makes me sick, it's just my attitude. Not that you should understand. Your heaving chest beneath your shirt. Because it's me that's heading into it and him that's getting hurt. And random confessions found easy to write when all is stripped away. It's the idea that maybe I'm a fraud and tomorrow is judgment day.
  ¶ 12:52 PM 0 comments