i know you're not stupid.

right now that's just about all i know.

would you judge a bucket of vomit?  and, even if you did, what insight or understanding would that provide?  it's a bucket of vomit.  all the rest is in YOUR head.

it's that place where all that your body knows to do is curl in on itself.  you twist and shrivel like cellophane in a fire until you are a fraction of your size, head buried in your arms.  you cradle yourself because there is nothing and no one to do it for you.

you rock slowly.  it is not hard to detach and see it as it is, babe without a mother.  that open-mouthed cry that is silent because the breadth and depth of the noise exceeds that of its only available exit.  that primal loneliness, so expansive and so heavy and so old that it feels like a story from a dusty tome on the shelf rather than the thing that has suddenly flowed in where your blood used to be.

she came home
two hours after she said
the butterflies in me
turned to fire, instead.

please don't tell me what went wrong, my love.
do you remember how it was when we first met?

kiss my lips before
they go away.
let me kiss your lips
while they're still mine.

please don't tell me what went wrong, my love.
do you remember how it was when we first met?

your friends are worse liars
than you
and there's no flowers bright enough
to change my mind.

i awoke alone
and filled with pain.
she's left a letter
that i won't read.

i won't think of what went wrong, my love
i'll only think of how it was when we first met.

it would be so much easier if i knew i could walk the halls of my life without memory taped like a kick-me sign to my consciousness.  it would be so much easier to say goodbye were it not for the memory of hello.

i want to be able to live as though i never loved you at all.  and i don't think i can.

grey

the sky is grey
the sand is grey
and the ocean is grey

and i feel right at home
in this stunning monochrome
alone in my way

i smoke and i drink
and every time i blink
i have a tiny dream

but as bad as i am
i'm proud of the fact
that i'm worse than i seem

what kind of paradise am i looking for?
i've got everything i want and still i want more
maybe some tiny shiny key
will wash up on the shore

you walk through my walls
like a ghost on tv
you penetrate me

and my little pink heart
is on its little brown raft
floating out to sea

and what can i say
but i'm wired this way
and you're wired to me

and what can i do
but wallow in you
unintentionally
what kind of paradise am i looking for?
i've got everything i want and still i want more
maybe some tiny shiny key
will wash up on the shore

regretfully
i guess i've only got three
simple things to say:
why me?
why this now?
why this way?
with overtones ringing
and undertows pulling away
under a sky that is grey
on sand that is grey
by an ocean that's grey

what kind of paradise am i looking for?
i've got everything i want
and still i want more
maybe some tiny shiny key
will wash up on the shore

i could not explain to you how i am
listening to a song that isn't
being played, really.  i am
listening to the Incidental ---
a sudden museum of noise.  the shadow
cast inside the footprint of a song
that passed by not long ago...

a song remembering itself
as a song

minus time signature and genre. 
minus language and meaning. 
minus everything but the sound itself. 

and i am
liking it more than i likely would like
the song you are listening to

the same song,
but not. 

Time has always seemed to me like a writer tormented at the hands of his own trillions of transient ideas for the stories we'll all tell one another over cocktails or gravestones.

Time gives up halfway on some tales, sweeping them in effortless, echo-less motions from the table to the floor, already forgotten.
_________________________

you promised me bluebells
and jazz
but there was never time, was there, Love.

there was never Time
for us.

i am rifling through
alien drawers, pulling up
strange objects from history
with a squelch like something heavy
sucked up
from the wet silt of time, baffled
at their existence as "mine".

there is the easy love of
sixteen
pink chalk hearts on
the sidewalk, lazy
like the spring afternoon
they were drawn

and then

there is this love;
uneasy, unwieldy--
heavy like grocery bags
stuffed with necessities
that smears

the easy love of sixteen
pink chalk hearts underfoot,
too busy to care anymore.

are you living

your life like
i am living mine, moving
slowly like blood from a pinprick
squeezed

in sick delight,

plodding revolutions
along the periphery of everything
you ever believed
about How Things Really Are.

never daring the radius inward
to touch any of it.