June 7th, 2010
Dream Again
His eyes refuse to close. Somehow the lids
have become a drive in movie screen
playing silent horror movies endlessly.
One does not always need sleep to have
nightmares that wake them from rest.
He prays for sleep like a child trying to race
his way out of the maze of bad dreams.
Wide eyed all night and no longer a child
he can only wish he had dreams, even
bad ones.
If only the nightmare would end and
he could dream again.
June 6th, 2010
The Aftershock
“This is just the aftershock,” I tell her
as she trembles with eyes half here,
half in that night with visions as clear
as day of that face no amount of
therapy with ever erase.
I tell her today’s date.
I tell her what time it is, where we are,
who I am, that I love her.
I tell her that she’s safe now.
Yet she trembles still with every
cell in her body remembering
every painful permanent detail.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” I tell her, knowing
full well every comforting word I say is a lie,
knowing these memories will continue
attacking her for the rest of her life.
I tell her it gets better with time,
it gets easier, knowing it never will,
knowing she does not need the truth now.
She needs the lies to help her back here,
help her back home from one more of the
hundreds of flashbacks she’ll have her whole life.
I tell her kind lies until I can see her eyes are here,
until she has returned to this curse she’s left to live now,
until she looks at me with half a smile, believing
all of my lies.
May 31st, 2010
Untitled
Your heart was not edged in gold
for love is no coin or currency.
And all the riches of the world
cannot buy your lonely heart
out of its painful poverty.
May 22 2010
Memory of Destiny
We find just enough light to cast a shadow
while we look for the brightness that seemed
to shine somewhere in a half faded memory
that after all the years feels more like a dream
we invented in a desperate attempt to hope
that we could make something good come true
that we could find more light than just enough
to cast a shadow on all the broken places
we walked naked and trembling through while
searching for that brilliant light that we call
a memory, but it is no remembrance
of our history. It is the memory of where we
are heading, the memory of our destiny.
Enough of Arguing
I am tired of words and even this music is getting old.
There is more than what our lips say. Sit with me.
Quietly. These words have become too good at arguing.
Say nothing tonight. Let me listen to your breath.
Give this angry language a rest. Let me hear
your heart beating beneath your breast. Words
cannot compensate for what our voices have done.
The syllables of I’m sorry mean nothing. Read
the apology in my eyes, in these eyes that loved
you in the instant of a glance, loved you before
lips moved, before names were spoken, before
promises, before arguments. Hear what my heart
is saying without word, without sentence or sound.
Hear how much I love you.
Know how wrong my angry words were.
May 1st, 2010
A Father’s Final Hours
You owe me nothing for this
for sitting here, hours upon hours, while
the minutes slowly creep towards eternity’s door.
No, there is nothing you need give to me
for these fingers kept clasped in yours and
the frequent caresses across your paling skin.
I ask for nothing in return for staying beside you
while you now can no longer fight, no longer hit, or
yell or terrorize. You owe me no apologies now.
You couldn’t give them anyway, not with so many
tubes and wires trying to keep you tied to the earth.
You have no obligations or debts left due to me.
But if, in a few moments,
when you face the God that gave me to you,
you want to do something for me,
you may tell God that I forgive him
for letting you do what you did to me.
December 30 2009
Too many doors are closed.
Too many keys are missing.
If only I could unlock you.
If only I could unlock me.
There are too too many
doors closed, and more
doors closing every day.
And never enough keys.
If only I could learn to be
a key maker, oh, the doors
I would open. So, so many
doors that must be opened.
So many many locked doors
and millions locked alone
behind them. If only
I could make keys.
**********************
The sound of cars racing towards promotions
is not loud enough.
The rumbling of the trains carrying the weary
home is not loud enough.
The caravan of school busses bringing children
home is not loud enough.
The cable news turned up and arguing about
arguing is not loud enough.
The airplanes, the fire engines, the alarms,
the thunder are not loud enough.
Nothing is loud enough to cover your silence
to cover your absence
to cover that you are no longer with us.
*********************
There is courage in words.
Look at the language your father
was too afraid to speak, language
of love, language of comfort.
See the vocabulary trapped
behind your mother’s lips,
lips that were told they had no words
worth saying. See the stories
she’s still too frightened to tell.
Look at the strangers as their
eyes look away from injustice
afraid that if they see they may
accidentally speak, might without
intention speak up for the hurt,
the wronged and the battered.
See how frightened they are of
what words could get them
tangled into. Yes, there is
courage in words. Words
are actions that carry sounds
that can save, can love, can
free, can reconcile, can cure.
To speak, to truly say, to
let the truth slip past
the lips is a bravery
few have in this silent
speechless world.
Be courageous and let
your lips release your
words, let your lips
change this world.
******************
Nothing curves like your sorrow
at night in this bed.
I reach my arms out around
try to make you a bridge
so you can cross across your sorrow.
All night, my arms like suspension wires
hoping you will reach the other side by tomorrow.
*******************
When the words are so many
you can no longer understand any of them,
when the meaning has escaped leaving
strange and scary static in your mind,
when the definitions of love and life
and hope and friendship and faith
have all deserted the dictionary of your heart,
when there is no conversation, so sentence
left that could ease you or cure this,
when you reach the dark abyss of wordlessness
remember the African drum, the whistle of
wind, remember the pulsing pounding
blood banging in your heart. Remember
the rhythm, the music, the beat, remember
the coyote calls without words,
the songbird sings without vocabulary.
When all the words are gone, remember
we are musical beings who built drums
long before we wrote dictionaries, beings
that sang perfectly comprehensible songs
long before we invented language. Remember
that when all the words have failed you
the music still remains.
December 29 2009
There is no prison bar
so strong as what you
father taught you,
told you, ingrained
in your mind. There is no
fortress less escapable
than what you mother
mislead you to believe
and beat into your heart.
The land is an evil barren
prison you can only work
work and work in for nothing.
There is no crime punished
with such suffering as this.
But somewhere, hidden in
the deepest untouchable
safe hold of the soul
there is a key that unlocks
this latitude of lies and
lets you escape to the
wide open wondrous
world outside. And that
world is waiting for your
arrival with open arms,
arms wider than your
wildest imagination
all waiting to embrace you
once you make your escape.
Go and find your key.
The world is waiting for you.
***************************
I know you are no acrobat,
no great performer, actor,
imposter of someone they
said you should be. I know.
If you were any of those
things, I would not be lying
here beside you in this bed.
I would not be lying beside
something beautiful and
true. I know you cannot
force your body to bend
to the God of money, I
know, you cannot disguise
your scars or your heart.
And I know everyday
you look at me feeling
you have falling short,
failed to be all you
should be for me.
If only, I could make
you know the only
way you could ever
let me down is if you
were to be anything
other than who you
truly are.
********************
If we start this
this arguing, this need,
this greed. If we begin
trying to take, sealing
what we want. If we
become a grabbing
for just want we each
want for ourselves.
If we stop being an
exchange of gifts
between two souls
that have not always
enough for themselves
but always enough
to give the other.
If we stop giving
this love, this courage,
this structural support
of shoulders and arms.
If we just start taking
there will not be enough
to satisfy one or the other and we
will fall from each other.
But together in this sharing
in this exchange together
we will always have
enough for three. If we
continue feeding
each other’s hearts
there will forever
be plenty for you
and me
an us.
December 27 2009
February Freeze
I know even your ghosts are cold tonight,
with the winter chill whirling and
the masses of legs and coats passing
too busy to fill your cup or offer something
warm as a smile, a kind glace, or heaven
forbid a soothing conversation. There were
cold, cold nights in the war you fought in.
But never, not on the farthest, snowiest
battlefield that broke you was it ever
as cold as it is on this city street tonight.
***********
I am not asking
for you to love every
sharp edge of my shattered soul,
not asking for complete devotion
to my sudden sorrows and
frequent pushing away.
I would never expect you
to accept every strange belief
the wolves that raised me taught me.
Not even wanting you to approve
of my delusional but well ingrained
insanely untrue views of certain
aspects of human nature and
the workings of the world.
I am only asking you to love
the collective of all of me,
to appreciate my kindness
though I was never taught it,
for your heart to fill my heart
that still loves though it has
been beaten and shattered
in countless cruel ways.
I am only asking for you
to take all of me as someone
greater and more beautiful
than any individual piece of me
regardless of which parts
are good or bad.
And in return,
I will love the whole of you,
laugh with the joyful pieces of you,
cradle the crying bumps and bruises of you,
be patient with the frustrated and angry bits,
adore the courage that has raised you
above your raising,
Am an only asking
that we love one another with the knowing,
that we are like mathematics where
the whole is always greater
than the sum of its individual parts.
******************
Solitude is too shallow
of a word to describe
the depths of his empty ocean.
How a man reaches this
uncharted barren underworld
is far from any imagining
but somehow still
he has arrived
at the deepest
canyon below
the coldest sea.
No family. No mother.
No father. Orphaned
from the world itself.
No friend remaining.
And even the memory
of love long gone.
He is not even a fish
in this wilderness
of dark water.
Something primordial
something pre-evolution.
Something that has painfully
yet miraculously reach
that point of such nothingness
that only creation remains.
It is a slow and lonely process
he struggles with, first growing
fins, then gills, then swimming
again. Finding his way up the
water towards a level where
a little light seeps in. He grows
eyes, his own eyes, untainted
by society. He is slowly
evolving into his own being.
See, it is only when all others
are gone, that one can find
one’s own self, can become
exactly as one was created
and not what one was made.
Floating closer to the surface he
creates his own lips and an
un-jaded fresh heart. He sprouts
arms that only want to hold, legs
that let him return to the surface
of a world he left long ago.
And with his new eyes, with his new
heart, it is a new world he finds.
It is a world he will define
with his own mind
this time.
November 8 2009
Cross the Emptiness
At the edge of the great canyon,
the emptiness inside your ribs is clearest.
Air is all that you have left as you look at your
trembling hands wondering if they are too
weak to try now at this far too late time
to build, to hammer, to make it possible
to deliver you to the other side of life,
to the living, to where alive
is a heartbeat rhythm that fills
your flesh. Build bridges you tell
yourself, build wings, build anything,
just get to the other side.