Hang tough dog fighter,

The woodlands of memory await

Calming to the core I can remember

a place beyond this hate

 

hold strong sailor,

navigate out the sea

the waves might rise to meet us

while in our hearts we’re free.

 

Be still warrior,

The path is not yet clear

Many roads fork and converge

That lead beyond this fear

 

Hold your head up human

The day is not yet done

factions of unknown bravery

have still not been won  

 

calm your thoughts being,

this world is not complete

there is so much left to do

there’s a fate we’ve got to meet

5, 6, 7, 8

 

It looms as a horizon I can never trespass.

A wake with no ship

That ripples between what is and isn’t

Struggling to have agency over something one cannot control

 

It runs like tireless horses

That rear up swiping their hooves

In one sense will trample you senseless

And in another, key to future salvation

 

I have wondered forever it seems

On visions of conquest and empire

And how those curses have befallen

Greater men than myself.

 

to see now the awakening æsthetic

is nothing more than contamination within my landscape

as a cancer within my soul

that causes the wilderness within to spread.   

Dullness

 

To occupy the delusion 

that one is not the main character in their own life

 a desiccating boredom

That dry-rots the whole experience

 

How empty these spaces feel

Begging for fulfillment

As hungry birds gluttonously vying

For another revolting morsel

 

How plain it all tastes

When stripped of color and meaning

As if the tide has been out for so long

one wonders if the ocean is evaporating

 

the ship for larger schemes has set sail

lost beyond the illusion of the horizon

as a memory of otherness that cannot be placed  

words unspoken

Meaningless phrases

Falling in thick drops

Formulaic in composition.

Polished to a place where

All human error has been absolved through work

where each day slips like the footing in a muddy hill

framed in labor but short on accomplishment

There is a stamina

A callous of psyche

So bored from the suffering

That seems so far away, and is still so pressing

In every possible context

Everything inside-out and wrong

Awkwardly impossible to contextualize

And I feel rooting for some other, greater storm

That lies just beyond the horizon

Some greater chaos that feels so distinctly like roulette

Betting on gladiators of genre to raze the other

With gimmicky luchador personas

beyond the spectacle that nobody would take seriously

in other theaters

And there is a persistence, like a faint bell

Like the loss of hearing creeping upon you in a way beyond control

In the way that the scars make the damage real

When all other, fonder, memories have faded into the rose-color tint of nostalgia

As words that sit upon a shelf, easier to speak about

Than to actually read

and it shapes the language in a fuzzy feeling
as if acting out the lines rather than actually feeling them
like a pantomime of shared fear that is commiseratory
to place your audience's mind at ease 
by never bringing up the conversation -

       

the hunger of birds

The words come out all mixed up and flawed

As if I am some shitty songbird 

Singing its song over and over again

Stuck in a place, form-fitted

as a wobbly log of cranberry sauce

flumping out awkwardly onto a plate to go uneaten

we have become pinned-down, entrenched

unable to move forward or retreat

as a stone being dissolved in myriad waves

everything’s fine

the dishes are clean, everyone’s being nice

yet—

within me there is a burning hellscape

 that wants to cleanse in fire

as a scavenger tearing into carrion

streaked in the feted blood of opportunity

it is time to be about it—

and it hangs in my soul like a torn banner

like a power that I cannot escape

that extinguishes if I cannot perfect it

as a dance, practiced across many lifetimes

doled out to yearning mouths

in a house made of whatever you could find. 

as if we are amalgamations

against the grain of time

wrought to immortality, by some greater truth

in a kind of honesty

a primal rawness to the grip of reality

circling overhead, as streaked feathers against the sky

impetuous— 

as awakening the gears of some great machine

becoming—

As we must rise to meet our fate, every. single. day.     

harbinger

On soft wings

Nostalgic, like in old photos

It lives in the spaces where

Your teacher shops for groceries

Like humanity

In the fractures of the concrete

Who are we really,

On soft wings

At sundown 

The condors take to the sky.

Take the sky.

As if it was always yours

Bound to a legacy

In a strength of patience

Awaken to the willingness

And somehow there but, not

Awaiting the future with boredom

As the days come and pass

But time remains eternal

An endlessness of sunrises

Expanding into extinction

What will have mattered, is poetry

In the beauty of ephemera

Where the rain fell And the rivers ran

the soul danced as many and one

as a jungle of something greater

like the whispers that call you home

Nesting

From the vantage point of crampt little spaces

Chittering like starlings in a nest

An old cypress, swaying in the wind like some cheap apartment building

What sounds like a thousand little conversations bubbling up—

Through flimsy walls

From the rooms next door  

A gurgling, squeaky sound to pour upon the interactions of the laundromat

and off down the street

There is a confusion

In the recesses of myself

Hinged on the complexity and the needlessness

Of telepathically empty spaces that do nothing to feed the soul

As the possession of peculiar hunger lives familiar

Like a series of prefabricated homes

where I am expected to “Ooh” and “ahh” Over every piece of minutia

as if it is…

(what?)

an emptiness, that proliferates

made urgent with time.

As if it is buying into a bland story line.

To ease the ache of mediocrity

Unable to shake the grasp of what the world should be

In an upheaval of unanswerable questions

About the nature of what it is to belong.