Pants

Gorgeous green lights hum
melancholy love songs,
flooding the scene
along a champagne glow.
Gruesome gone with a pair of lips,
forgotten as surprise rupture
of my own, tumbling
with the speed of the flakes
resting on my sleeve.

One out of four
have no face.
Hidden underneath
tight-knit woven cotton
exceptionally
clear-headed thinking.

My own two legs
curse me,
leaving,
two arms
dull and worn by
cracked concrete
and black ice.
I'll grow wheels,
find those damn legs
and give them
just what they deserve.

The Philosopher Takes a Drink of Three Dollar Wine and Laughs at Me

A gem
of
borrowed inspiration
from
an overwritten, overquoted
piece of melodrama that
is often overlooked.
I'll remember to use that,
in another poem.

A Soundtrack Not My Own

Dancing with a decade old
bottle of gin
but new to me,
I called for you
but you stared blankly
and the snow fell
and it still is falling.
I wonder if it will be there
whenever I wake up.
Paul says hello.

Just prose

We picked out the bunch that held the most flowers. Standing underneath the hum of three foot long lightbulbs, our sneakers seemed to squeak with the same anticipation normally reserved for first dates.
We were only seventeen, that silly, in-between age that has no monumental achievements associated with it, just sandwiched between sweetness and legality. We decided on two bunches of miniature carnations, only seven bucks, there had to have been more then forty or so stemmed flowers. Our anticipation grew as we veered slowly onto the Stevensen.

That night wasn't the first time we had done something like this. One of our favorite teenage past times in fact. The first time we handed out flowers for the sake of brightening a strangers day was actually during the day. We canvassed the Loop with the buds in our hands, handing away flowers to anyone who would take it. The reactions were just as diverse as the people. The worst being apathy or a passing ridicule but the best were the smiles and laughter of someone experiencing something different within the monotony. That is the essence of our philosophy. We were young but somehow even in our youth we were able to recognize the importance of celebrating normalcy to transcend it to a daily revolution of thought.

It Doesn't Have to be That Way

Imagine all of the things that former lovers would breathe into one another,
when the room was lit from a streetlight outside,
the background music was the stale static of the apartments
surrounding while they lay naked,
making promises
they one day broke.

The thoughts I had about love are the thoughts I have with you

I realized today that I don't even care about the rest,
the immoderate contempts I used to hold so close
the need to guard myself from attack of memories,
both new and old,
is faded and gone.
When the snow fell again this morning,
the second coat somehow looked even better covering up the footprints
from the day before
and the day before that.

The End

She told me that she hated me,
threw my shirt down the stairwell and
screamed, moaned, all the while taking the same short-rapid breaths
for more air, just how she used to in bed when her hair would fall over my eyes.
The phone fell and as I reached her hand - our last kiss was narrated
by a dial tone.

The Flash of a Despondent Domestic

A frozen blossom
fell into my open hand,
it shattered in two.

I picked up a piece,
examining it closely
under a flat, dull sky.

It brought you to mind,
that one day under the train
when we were younger.

You just shook your head
when all I really wanted
was your open hand.

Found Philosophy

How do you respond?
He could remark that his death was a resurrection,
an interesting philosopher that should know how to live.
One terms without asking a human mourning affords posthumous gifts.
The work of thinkers taught me significance in their precondition, the predestination of a voice.
October in enslavement, offered to me freely,
not to be a link but strictly moments.
Moments as demands.
"I am," he says,
because he is,
because it is.
Reputation changed, he admitted his rules were art, signs to no particular intentions.
He missed the response of an apartheid opposition, his terror undermined death.
In another life is a thought, "How do you respond to your life and your name?"
The meaningless task of what a life makes on us with enjoyable beginnings.

A dumb goodbye haiku

There isn't much time
so we will shake our two hands
and be on our way.

A dumb love haiku

The whole universe
holds many, many bodies
but only one single sun.

Invention

Your arm moves across the bench, your fingers slip through my own a tapestry of icy skin, meeting pelagic eyes. Yours, the deep blue of an Atlantic reflect my Mediterranean splash.

A still prayer escapes your lips, head bowed. It flies through the air with precision, my ears receptive to your elder tongue. Minerva, sitting on this shoreline, musical poetry pulsing through thought. I can barely see, lean closer, lost in my thoughts, a moment. So many. My own unknown potential finally found in the high tides of your eyes.

At last, relief.

Watching her walk across the unkempt grass,
her right hand holding the wicker basket,
her left hand clearing the stray hairs from her eyes.
The tall grass attempts to to stick against her glowing skin
but can not get through the soft cotton skirt.
The plants grow wild the further she walks,
swallowing the path,
leaving her memory as her only guide.
Her skirt stained but her feet tracing the imprints left in the dried clay,
those imprints from the day the sky opened up.
Where she
hidden beneath a yellow barn,
her hands clapsed over a mouth,
prayers escaped her gently parted lips winding their way past the gripping fingers.
She watched that day as the ground grew to meet her knees,
her skirt flowing in the current.
Crying out at the falling sky,
that day she forgot more then just the words of a past life.

An illustrated portrait of myself now rests in your hands, something that I'd never even dreamed.
Consideration goes a long way when you are paying through the back door.
Come back, we'll make it all worthwhile and forget the bad while we whisper over the loud voices in the next room. Let our gin soaked throats carry upward and onward as we hail, "We are the real ones. We won your silly little game."
Your hand can trace the outline of a name you once called yourself but here is where there isn't a single identity but multiple people encompassed into one sigh.

Know/Knew

Pepper-grained grass with navy specked skies,
there wasn't a single thing wrong with that day we said
'keep me in the know.'
unsure of spies and crooks with majesticly woven mattresses could we ever be certain that we were not where we once were.
In fact, this was somewhere completely knew.

Finally

I was enjoying the company of the lifeless while killing off a few of my own limited cells when I realized how temporary everything is.
This depression, that feeling of elation, every touch that can only linger for so long until it's gone.
Everything goes away.
All of these boxes now full of dirt and bones were once just like me. Living, loving, lingering until one day it all ended.
Did they want to be remembered like this, by some wretch who just happens to wander past them while smoking a cigarette for the first time in five months?
Doubtful.
My own existence mocked by overturned granite and faded surnames.

A Thought

There were more carcasses then cars on the road and I felt like I could've crept up beside any one of them and been the same.

Here

There are selfish things inside of me when your arms lay on top of me.
I want you for myself, for things to eternally grow and expand.
I want so much of this that my greed overcomes my senses and lets me escape everything else.
That escape is so different and vivid that my breath becomes scarce and my heart ceases it's incessant beating to just a rare thump-thum.

This is the world for me,
with tiled ceilings and overpriced antiques,
this is the world for me.
I can't wait for these metal highways to bring it all together.

The End

With a sense of irony the only thing that can be done is to drown ourselves in poison while still looking forward. We can talk about you because you make it so easy. Ridiculously easy.
The guilt that was there has disappeared, replaced with an undying sarcasm to your mundane existence.
You've been left behind, funny when with the circumstances
but now you're alone and I don't feel bad, not a single bit.
Because you see, you're a mirror. There is nothing changing about you at all except for which direction you're facing and who looks into your eyes, nothing but their own black pupils staring back at them but cheapened, watered down.
You've been outed so let's move on.
Okay? Okay.

Five Acts

There's an open bottle on the counter with his eyes open, startled yet prophetic. Pleasantries accompanied by the daily tirades start us off before we realize how far we've come. Before these moments of sipping hot elixirs on an oddly warm September day, the feeling of mutual hatred that was real, not just the imitation we do to amuse our boredom. He might be the one person who understands how this air is suffocating to breathe in, to live in, to exist in. He knows how much it hurts to rise day in and day out.

I think back to those adolescent nights of discovering short stories by an ancient Russian and I have to pose so many questions to myself but the main one stands, I know the answer.
It's these days. They keep coming even when I refuse. I shake my head, cross my arms and hold my ground. A refusal partially of spite but also of logic, experience and the day to day that I live in.

I am worn through with fibers close to their final grasp at coherence but instead of real help, let's sit in these stolen chairs and discuss our mutual gripes. It will do for now.

I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all
these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come
in handy.

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

Unpropitious

He was inside me

without even knowing where he was.

What a funny feeling.

A Story & a Voice

Let me tell you a story, it's not mine to tell but hopefully they won't mind. One day, they were walking along, gray concrete and gray skies with nothing to separate the two. His hand was warm and hers was too, but covered by fingers not their own with tight grasps on opposite wrists. She whispered secrets through the sewer grates while he watched the gray turn to white then back again. She was lost in tunnels while he couldn't even see what his downfall would be before they both tripped head over heels.

Maybe I need to start documenting through images again because these thoughts are all incomplete and unfinished. I need something concrete, gray skies can only hold my gaze for so long. Let me show you the delicate patterns of the world that make living so difficult.

The origin of beautiful prose can't just appear, it has to exist. It has to be found and cultivated, through patience and hard work. It's ignorant of the writer to sit and wait for life to come to them, living it themselves is the only way to truly do more then just existing in the world.

One humble creator sits in a former pool, drinking in historical thoughts and transcribing everything down to individual pages. These words become concrete, ideas forever printed in ink. This ink sometimes will sit and wait, days, weeks, months, even years before it sees the light of an observant eye but once it does it lifts off of it's fibrous home and weaves itself with past memories and thoughts, materializing deep in the subconscious.

Can you see emotion, the connections that run as deep as the tributaries leading to and from your life source. A finger can rest over a word, studying patiently for it only to stay on the page. Everything is transferable in this world with a little work, bond with it not against it.

Abstract Expressionism : The Formative Years

Sussurations keep still, filtered light shining on water.

A blue grown up without control,

A fit of fidgets, coughs and things that don't keep still, stay well.

Rules can't be broken unless they're lyrically done.

Thirty one blue lights, two broken bulbs;

Incomplete thoughts lay tangent against the ganglion, waitingfornothing.

Gosh, what bullshit.