being

Who cares? I keep asking. But the page doesn't answer. Who will you stimulate? Not me, for one. And not most people. But the few who live off this madness. They're mad! All of them. And they ask me to reproduce it. Why do they live off it? Can't they feel anything simple anymore? Does it all have to be so convoluted, complex, compressed into tiny spaces unseen by mere mortals, but "fun" for those academics so washed with the language of fine matter that nothing gentle interests them anymore? Yes. Because they own me, and they've lost the power to be caressed by mortals. They are the masters of argument, and I can't argue to their liking. The servant who can't prepare the tea just right is unreliable, yet unreleased. He is hired to fail. Oh, I'll get my justice when I'm the master. I'll devour my heirs, their embarrassments will repay me. I'll shoot down all the idiot notions of clowns like me . . . as soon as I'm not a clown. At least, that's the thought I should be having because that's the thought that will drive me to madness--the happy state of masters. But I can't think. I can't understand the words on this page. It does not feel like life to me. It leaves no space for being.

My Last Crush

She makes the sunrise
And I was there to see it.
I held her face in my hands
until it burned my fingertips.

She makes the sunshine
And I was there to see it.
I played during the light hours
and ran to her with every smile.

She makes the sunset
And I was there to see it.
I was the purple hue fading
between her and the growing cold.

She makes the starlight
And I could barely see it.
I held her face in my eyes
until frozen tears shattered it.

She makes the sunrise
And I was not there.
I was making the rain fall
And she was standing in it.

My First Crush

If I could turn you into sunlight's ray,
you'd yet be with me when so far away.
The dew on every flower'd reflect your face,
but alas, without such realness and such grace
as has the moment rare and soft with you.
Me thinks I shall not want for sun, but you.
--May 2003

I wrote this for someone a long time ago. My first crush after the mission. See how simple it was to love back then? How new and harmless? My words are as innocent and free as they are naive. There is something childish about them, so lost in what I'd found, so simple in what I needed. And now when love is the prison I can't seem to escape, I wish for the first crush again, when love was a candy store, and I knew nothing of cavities.

I walk at night on streets lined with my solace.
The homes and trees and street lamps are my friends.
When I've the road alone at midnight
I think the things that make amends.

the difference

You hiked a mountain.
How long can you sit at the top before you stop feeling?
The greatest moment is the first.
You begin descending the moment you arrive.
It is the difference, the sheer difference
between a nearly conquered foe and a conquered one
that makes you feel.
And for one moment, you are alive.

But life is borrowed, then returned.
It isn't yours; it isn't earned.

You seek for pain to feel the difference.
A "high" has no where to go, but down
and a "low," no where but up.
Will you experiment with lows?
...to feel the difference?
or claw the air for matter still to climb?

circles

******built to
***are*******be
We************broken,
**again.******and
****built****broken
********to be

pheonix blood

If only you could see me now,

could see the flashes in my eyes
like slashes deep in purple skies,
the golden streaks, the piercing cries
from cutting blades . . .
the new sunrise

You wouldn't have called me wasted.
You'd have stood up and you'd have faced it,
the storm that then erased it,
the care we started with.

But from your eyes once giddy
came eyes that burned whole cities
to the ground.
My world turned upside down.

Then left you did to find you'd rid
yourself of phoenix blood,
the stuff you left in ashes,
the stuff they call true love.

And now when I am coming out
renewing hope, doubting doubt,
I feel the flashes in my eye,
but this time birth can't make me cry.
I am the apple of my eye,
not you, not her, not girls plus guys.
I've unlearned romance, unlearned why.

If only you could see me now
back when our youth knew how.

For Sara, because she listens

I need to find you again.
You were the sweet bread
I ate before my meal--too early.
And now the plain bread is too plain.
My taste buds know the difference.
They can't be fooled for lesser things than you.

For Jessica, because she's there

Sitting on a lonely chair
atop four floors of memory,
I sit at night among ghosts.
I watch them run from door to door
across the roof-top.
They play the night games I once played for real.
I won't play them again the same--
the people are gone who taught them to me.
And with each leaving, left a ghost to play
unfinished games.
I am the last to leave
and sit alone in the shell of past happiness.
I wish you filled the hollow places,
the emptiness that haunts ghost faces.

setting

Life is full of good-bye's,
each one more potent than the last.
And each compounded to the rest
like new weight on a heavy heart.
Anticipate it, adjust to it if you must.
Brace yourself for the emptiness that weighs.
But don't close too early.
Don't say good-bye before it's time.
Don't lose before it's lost
or surrender what's not yet taken.
For those you lose are also losing you.
They count the seconds left
like sunset seconds of a favored day.
And wish to see the setting till it's done--
the ending brilliance, the parting sun.
It isn't losing when you've won
a past of memories.

Though stars are all that's left of light,
the stars do not appear till night.