Silent Devotion

Silent Devotion

the way her hands fit

along the seams of my heart,

like a tailored glove, suits me

fine. the way our mouths

light up at night, glancing back

at the metal moon thinking,

"how did I deserve this?"

never really expressing how

I must've been born lucky

or fulfilled my karmic duty

in a past life, silent devotion

stripping me of my actual love,

leaving behind a bitter shell,

one that doesn't speak when

everything is on the line, watching

her lose interest, saying only,

"talk to me, what's wrong?" 

the hardest thing I do

is not answer.

and the fights will happen,

little things that could've been

avoided, if only I hadn't taken

my vow of silent sabotage

at birth, realizing that it's the only

thing keeping me together anymore

 -- devotion to my own fucking idiocy.

vast and expansive, a Rubicon

of emptiness that I cannot cross

without her love.

as she turns to leave, I

break my vow of silence.

finally saying, "if you decide

to go -- I won't stop you."

Epistle to Your Former Self

but when the party was over and the others had gone to bed, the man was still awake, lying on his back looking up at the stars. pairing off like Noah's Ark, his friends were happy and he was happy for them so they all were happy. but he wanted to be happier and he wanted to not be a liar and he wanted all these pretty things in life that turned into pretty little disappointments -- rubies that turn to dust in your hand. the stars were starting and flickering and fading and the man was tired of the stars being so far away from him. cold distant light, an anglerfish at the bottom of his heart, tempting him with light and food and water, all of it good for him but none of it real. stars like teeth on a saw, cutting into him every time he looked up. so he decided he would never look up again, he would forget about her, whoever she was, and he would stare down into the earth, that cold, lonely last stop, never really stopping to look where he was going, but always escaping from the starsaws.

and it's easy when you're down. it's harder to stand up, to not crack, to shout fuck you every time someone who said they'd be there isn't. but it's just not possible anymore. you lost that golden glow, the blonde haired girls of your past, you've lost yourself in someone else -- someone who isn't charming or brave or confident or clever. and you get tired of writing these rants that have no end, always thrown off by the pacing of the whole ordeal, always looking for a way out of these worthless words and trying to find a way to become more actual -- more entelechinetic. which is not to say that I'm real anymore, but the process of becoming real would be nice; a wraith in the willows.

Junk-Garbage Writing

alone again -- desperate diner living,
eating cold coffee with bitter regrets,
I'll bet that he's over and I'm over it,
those razors in your eyes, hands
clasping cold kindness, bringing back
what you took away from me before
there was nothing left.

Poem for Alisha on Her Birthday

Of Love First-Hand

there will always be love
the way that there will always
be flowers -- gold blooms on
black days, boys with hard hands
to soften your heart.

there will always be love
from your friends, the people
who bring you sunlight, who
bring you back from nighttime
dreams of the past.

there is always love
from the cats, meowing
softly as you pet them,
not sure who is being put at ease,
but thankful nonetheless.

and I know his love for you
transcends what I have known
of love first-hand. he will always
be your shade during summer;
the tree where you carve your initials.

Alisha -- no matter what happens,
there will always be love
between the stars, smiling
while you read this, thinking how
lucky we are to have you in our lives.

Achilles Didn't Wear Armor

sometimes when the conveyor jams
(often)
I try looking for Jesus' face in
the broken wood pallets
the gears or
the settling clouds of dirt
I make when I rip and tear
apart those boards. and when things
are real bad
(more often than the conveyor
jams), my skin hardens and
bronzes over my
soft pale flesh and I'm
tougher than fuck like
Achilles, yeah like the colossus of
the factory. so when they raise me
up to crucify me from those
forklift beams, those iron
spikes of redemption, for production's
sake, I will not bleed for
them -- no, my armor is
tougher than fuck like
galzanized hearts & pipe bomb dreams.
weld me to your cause and
I will carry everything tonight on
my spikes of pain and lost time -- and
when my olive shell starts to
b r eak I'll remember that
Achilles didn't wear armor and I will
spill my blood like a
tapped well like a
draining sky like a
dead brother like a
granite slab. and if I ever
find that face in the dirt or
wherever it is that face has been
lost -- I will keep raising myself up&
uptofindmyplace.

voices

I remember it snowed heavy
that year.

he said he didn't want to talk
about it.

the ham was cold when I walked down
the stairs to eat.

she talked about their first christmas
together.

they had both just gotten out of
bad relationships.

she cried as she was telling me.
that was years ago.

maybe that's what they're talking about
starting over.

there's a star on top of the tree
we lost the angel.

when Ben was home we all decorated
he left us.

the christmas lights are
finally blown.

maybe that's what they're talking about.
christmas lights.

I walk back up towards
my bed.

and try to count the number
of prayers

I lied during. there were
over 138.

maybe that's what they're talking about.
lost faith.

my father throws a bottle
and leaves.

fragments resonating past his tires
peeling out.

he didn't drink until I
was born.

maybe that's what they're talking about
being alive.

my mother starts to clean
up again.

I wonder if god hears her crying
every night.

tomorrow is christmas and he'll
be gone

again -- downstairs the voices
die out.

they are still buried in
my dreams.

those voices of a dead child-
hood winter.

All the times I tried to run, I never made it past the pond. God knows how much I hated my house, especially in the winter when the darkness moved swiftly over the snow banks, leaving me a prisoner in my room. Boxes neatly stacked in one corner next to my twin sized bed left little space for me to maneuver around in and the small window above my bed let in a few rays from time to time, but it was never enough to make it feel like home. It was essentially just a place to sleep; no posters of my favorite band on the wall, no TV and video game setup that I could pass the time with, just a clean empty space and bare blue walls. Something about that pond though always held me close – ageless and deep, the last hope for salvation buried in its mirrored darkness.

There’s this one time in particular I’m thinking of. It was just about mid-January and I was in my bed, reading a book I had been working on for my English class, trying to get a little bit ahead like usual. Mom wasn’t home from work yet, and Stacy was making dinner for us that night. Nothing too complex, since she had only recently begun to make meals on her own; I’m pretty sure it was tacos that night. Regardless, the food was almost ready when my Dad stumbled in, throwing open the simple cherry red door at the bottom of the stairs with a theatrical flair. He was obviously drunk, aside from the fact that he leaves work at three and could’ve been home by three thirty if there had been traffic and it was now seven, his glazed eyes, unkempt hair and smoky demeanor said it best. Hearing his brutal ascent upward towards the kitchen, I ducked out of my room down the long hallway to try and fend off some of the flak Stacy would undoubtedly receive for not having dinner on the table.

I didn’t get there quick enough and I heard the screams from both sides, flatly resonating through dead air. When I got to the kitchen, she was on the floor, curled and crying on the dirty white tile with him standing over her, several chairs scattered and overturned in his wake. As he started to pull her up by the hair, I ran in swinging knowing that I didn’t have a chance. I thought about her. I thought about steel beams, ancient granite, thought about having hammers for fists, and most importantly, I didn’t think about anything. I just acted. My punch hit him in the jaw, flesh cracking against hard bone, and sent him back into the sink. That was all the time I could give her and she knew enough to run. I cocked back for another salvo, hands sweating and thought about why I didn’t grab a ceramic plate off of the table, still neatly set with a snowflake tablecloth and silverware.

My nose was broken and a stream of dark red sprayed across the stovetop as I went down. I was screaming; flailing around on the tile like a fish on land, legs kicking chairs, shins, oven doors – anything so long as I could stay conscious. There was a parting shot to my ribs I couldn’t see coming through closed and blackened eyes, and I heard my father panting loudly, the air above me thick with whiskey and hate. It was several minutes before I tried to get up, and I assumed that he had retreated down the hallway to pass out. Crawling by memory, I found my downcast coat near the porch door and gathered myself on a kitchen countertop. Opening the door, I scrambled out into the deep, wonderfully brisk air and felt the snow pushing itself against my wounded face like a protective mother.

The hundred yard trek normally wasn’t too tough to make, but considering the weather, my blood encrusted face and my freshly swollen eyes, it was almost five minutes before I reached the clearing. Clean, unspoiled snow covered everything dead and gone, branches on the outskirt heavy with winter and I thought that this would make a great postcard; a boy standing alone in a snowy clearing, the inky mirrored water next to him, an enraptured scream escaping his lips, wanting nothing more than for the icy embrace of winter to take him and pull him close. Stacy probably would’ve ran to the neighbor’s house about 200 yards in the opposite direction, and Mom wouldn’t be home for at least three more hours. I’m not religious by any means, but I never imagined Hell as a burning inferno of darkness and demons. Hell to me was always a lonely desert of ice, where you could walk forever in any direction and you’d always be bitterly frozen to the core. But you would never freeze to death out there, and you could never lie down to rest; you just kept moving nowhere. The weird thing is, Heaven was the same thing; you were free from everything, the air was so cold it would freeze cleanly in your lungs, and there was no one that would spoil the spotless landscape, not even you, because the snow would be sinking quietly like a graveyard. I thought about all those things and smiled to myself, congealed blood cracking sweetly on my lips as the empty echoes of silence rang out across the still January water.