The dug deep hole is dark.
Black, eating candles with
wisps of cool air coming from
not-God knows where,
every match is cooled
before its flame illuminates
this lived-in cave.


*****

I'm hating.
Waking.
Knowing that I'm chaining
myself to a train that isn't moving.
It just sits rusting on an overpass.
Oh decay.
How. Long. Can. I. Stay. This. Way?

Sun in the Mirror

I can see the reflection of the sun through the door in the South wall of our room that you left open when you went to work.  The mirror in the hallway captures its ambition and shrinks it to the 36 inch by 24 inch cherry-stained frame.  In the translation, all warmth is lost, along with green leaves, chirping birds and dark sunglasses.  All that remains is a yellow ball.  I hold my hand up with pallid tattooed fingers to hide the glare, and even the yellow ambition darkens except where it explodes red out from between my closed fingers, and I hope for dreams.  I know it is a futile dream because around the corner of that Southern door, the day waits also for me.  It sits silently anticipating my ambition will clatter against the cherry-stained frame of my own self-perception reflection: that I am incapable and undeserving of happiness.  So, like the sun in the mirror, I only, but just sort of, exist.

Tendrils
is the kind of word to use
when describing the arms that engulf
me and you:
snaking underneath arms
and over backs
and down sides
and across necks.

Hate-Ku

I'm made of murder,
black greasy evil sleaze,
but found salvation.

You end your sentences with commas,

You end your sentences with commas,
thoughts hanging fruit unpicked - waiting.
Whisper, or mumble, I can't hear,
head inclined, sweat-soaked hands
clinched fists against my hips.
What is this?
Do you require a response?
Some decision to pick your
low-hanging thoughts?
You gaze past faces and walls
to somewhere far, far beyond,
and I wonder what potential future you see.
And does it include an actual me?
Or just a decal you keep around
at least until you tear the living room wall down.

forgiver

i see everything,
looks lingering on hips,
soft seperation of sticky coffee lips,
i see the extra beat per minute
i see the worn molars.

and in a look, a thought, a whisper
you're hung; taught rope brought out
but i can forgive you
if you want me to

i see everything,
green looks on jewelery
planted seeds of disease sprouting
i see the poison ivy vines.
i see the bitten nails.

and in a look, a thought, a whisper
you're hung; taught rope brought out
but i can fortive you
if you want me to

do you?

My Faces.

My Faces.

All I remember is the flash
like a camera that stole my smile away,
that and the rest of my face,
the last thing I saw or will see.

They fixed all the holes,
plugged them up with scars, now
I'm told I'm a skull wearing skin,
and when I'm taken in public
my family tells me I'm a terror;
some nightmare who's roaming the streets.
My daughter can't comprehend
why my lips have no replacement
or why my eye sockets show skin
stretched like canvas to prevent germs getting in.

My heart beats, but shamefully,
and aches with the pain I've caused
those so close to me.

Now they say they'll transplant
my face for another, says the doctor
averting his eyes, so I'm told,
From some stranger whose passing away.
Tomorrow if I wake up, will my face be a neighbor's?
Will my family see through my facade?
Will this smile be wry?
Will these lips finally find the expectant lips of my wife
or will this stranger mask turn her away?