The world’s going to hell.
I say, “Let it. At least until morning.”
With you, resting beside me, I think to myself:
“Finally, I’ve found love.”
So let’s stick together,
and treat each other well
until it feels like that’s all we’ve ever known.
Together we can forget cruelty,
like algebra, as kids, when the summer came.
After all,
you’ve gotta forget something.
Autumn has claws.
It’s not winter on her wind,
no, no,
she’s a knickerbocker,
cutting where you begged,
with heartache for all.
Wrap the sweater, why don’t you?
Tight under your chin,
for the world is your bed, tuck yourself in.
Close your eyes and dream of Virgil, as a romantic,
post-perdition
exclaiming, “If over the gates of Hell it says
‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’
then over the gates of love
it must surely say
to abandon all reason.”
For this is the season,
and Autumn has claws,
winter’s to spring
and summer’s to fall.
So?
Fall.
We are
the Tower of Babel,
God,
how confused He was by us
created in His image
a patchwork of faults
and imperfections
stitched together not by skin and bones
but by each other.
“My thread
is your thread.”
We seemed to say
as we reached for the sky,
not for God,
but for what was Next.
For even as we looked up
we looked to each other,
the commonalities between us
not the noises we made
but the blood
between our hearts and veins
this meat between us, our language,
the only thing that God couldn’t feel,
maybe through his son, by proxy, maybe.
And it’s insecurity, isn’t it?
The thing that makes what’s powerful
take from what’s not?
All these noises between us
barely the spray
on the tide of how I know you
with still waters running deep
beyond what I can see,
beyond what I can comprehend.
It’s depth-like-height
this tower between you and me,
built so high
that even God can see,
and like Babel before it
it’s scary,
the reality,
that if we need each other so much
what need is left for He?
And I look to you,
from a world away,
yet here
as we search each other
gazing
in nervous moments
from iris’ to candles, dancing,
glancing off our conversations
because we don’t speak with our words
do we?
It’s not our vowels and fricatives
that
God confused
but our hearts,
this blood and meat,
this connection,
the only thing we have
that could make
us
more
than He,
but confusion He did bring,
and I just can’t stop
hurting you,
you,
hurting me.
So here we are, in the shadow of God,
unable to find each other,
unable to see,
searching,
for something beyond Him,
something between You and Me.
“Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.”
Buddy Wakefield wrote that,
wrote it and said it
over and over
a once in a generation sentence
skipping on top of the collective consciousness
touching down
in the break we all take when everything makes sense
and skipping away
when we’re swallowed up again by madness.
And it’s not just that he said it
it’s that he meant it
for in all of us there burns
an insanity
the true core of creativity
and where I wear mine like an over coat
he wears his like tears on his eyelashes
catching light
causing spectrums to take flight
in a ROYGBIV
of expressiveness
daring everybody who sees him
to stare into his madness and forgive
not just him
but themselves,
forgiveness like shotgun shells
buck-shooting blindly hitting everyone
who’s ever hurt you
past, present and maybe
until all that there may be
is beauty, blind
like justice after cross examination
and weighed by a Jury of Your Peers
who are actually your peers,
because there are real hurts
and they will betray you
tipping the scales
until even Justice
has to open her eyes
to keep from falling.
Because Justice may be blind
but I’m not
and I have been torn apart by this bitterness
but forgiveness is
the release of all hope for a better past
and I loved my past
with my heart and soul
and what broke the mold
of every bit of me
wasn’t what happened
but what I lost
and so I mounted a cross
and slowly
as I died
killed by Greater Forces
I held on to the portion
of the pain at my wrists
where the nails went in
and I forgot one thing:
it wasn’t you, you see
that made me climb up there in the first place.
It was me.
So I’m choosing
to take off my insanity
like an over coat
internalizing instead
all of this dread
until my tears flow like Buddy’s
out of my eyes and onto my lashes
for the whole world to see
and in the ROYGBIV of my crazy
I will create a spectrum of expression
like buck shot
each shell
full of forgiveness
until I’ve hit everyone and everything who’s ever wronged me
filling them with light
so I can finally be free
of all this darkness
I’ve been carrying inside of me.
Because it’s not worth it,
is it?
This distance between you and me?
A friend of mine remarked
that I haven’t written any poetry
in a while.
“It’s because I’m happy.”
I replied.
Like God snapped a finger
and suddenly I was no longer broken.
How beautiful, the balm of time.
How terrible, that the trenches of depression
and creativity so often begin and end with each other.
Her nose is upturned,
which I like if I’m honest.
She talks with her hands,
ten digits
exploding to life
like an idea past a murder of crows.
She looks at him
so vulnerably,
her sterling blues
too focused on the back of his mind
(the dark parts)
where desire and romance meet.
The intensity of her laughter
pulls the pane of glass
we all keep
between what we receive
and what we’re willing to give
so what he sees of her is her, unfiltered.
She plays absently with the bun
she’s tied in her hair,
checking it,
nervous, in love.
That I could see through his eyes,
even for a moment.