Yesterday

The years soak like rain
  through the clothes
            chilling the skin
    torturing the bones.

In the now,
                    all the days before-
            the days to come;
are a murky stew of moments
                  that obscure the current one.

I scream my first lungfull
          and take my last,
                  prepare for another.

       The stew stirs,
                cools
                    congeals;
            fresh off the stove,
                      and half finished.

                                     I don’t know…

                                     I don’t know…

               I know only,

Today is tomorrow’s yesterday.

To My Younger Self:

Enjoy the silences;
the waiting,
slow words.

Not having anything to do;
the leashed phone,
the unknown.

Bruises, cuts and wounds;
the bitter cold,
the searching soul.

The night without street lights;
uncivilized sights,
sunlit rooms.

Enjoy the world
as it was meant to be;
sober, subtle and unexplored,
because in the end
it will turn on you;
bind you in rope,
flood your eyes, your ears,
and leave you with no place
                        to call home.

Grow Gray With Me

The fog that hides the day as night retires,
shades of sunlight grasping for purchase
struggling in undulating swirls,
hoping to find in ambiguity, some purpose.

The rising darkness from the depths of fire
billowing into the night to throttle the stars,
like open mouths cradling soundless screams
or the profound words of a dead man’s memoirs.

The way a tree feels when bound to expire,
stripped of all its lush extravagance
the machinations of a world that brought it life,
now turned to break it beneath those same elements.

The slow pyrotechnics of stagnant air’s attire
sustained in sanguine starlight while time drifts away,
held like the pot won in a game of marbles,
careful hands celebrating their display.

The decisions we unearth in quagmire
seeking more an end than a right or wrong,
transfixed by distant familiarity
the difference lost in the chorus of the song.

The way our histories resurface as satire
courage marred by fear, the bold now timid and pale
those truths that hide in the present revealed
once pitted against the rest and placed on a scale.

The thoughts that in twilight give cause to perspire
when the permanence of absence is paramount,
trickling through the cracks in our confidence
though it is only ourselves we need to surmount.

Neutron Life

I would go outside today
               if it meant I could play with my friends
if I could do more than wave at them
               watch them drift off from my doorstep
getting further and further away
               we’d choose whose yard would host the game
and recite the rules of play
               then make up altogether new ones
and that would become our whole day.
               But now, all of us stay inside
forgetting the rules, forgoing new ones
               adopting only those from where we reside
an intensely smaller world
               the density of a dead star preventing any escape.

From the window I can see where I want to be
               I wave, hoping it will turn to wave back at me.