The Walk with Subtitles

It’s a winter come early,
On my way home, well house,
Light poles, tinkling like bells,
Boots stomping and hands clapping.

All animals mechanical, on the screen,
Change the channel before I close my eyes.
At the dinner table, or at the locksmith,
We all try to get inside, we’re locked out.

I am the one who is always plugged in.
Singing songs without sound,
Moving my lips without words,
I walk along acorn walkways.

Like a chicken with a rhythm,
I move my head back and forth,
The sound grabs me, and shakes me.
The lights drip and run, like my nose.

Kleptomaniac for ideas only,
At night where all the windows look in,
And I am walking alone, a stranger.
Unwelcomed is an understatement.

Dead bodies frozen in a puddle,
I feel his eyes and smile, that cold,
As I feel my face falling off,
I realize how much I miss a dear friend.

Everything I Have Come To Know, but Accept As Temporary

Life,
Here now, we are, we can, and we will,
Breathe, and create for we are the creators.
We are the forever young, for our souls,
Are detached from our bodies, they do not age.

We can absorb the knowledge deep within the shelves,
If we wish to learn, and we can experience all,
Hidden in caverns and train stations, we can,
Be a part of everything, we are alive.

Live like you are aware of life, and know the gift,
You have been given, so much it’s incredible.
Never assume anything, except that tomorrow,
Will never be like today, have hope, or fear.

Change,
I throw glitter that doesn’t sustain,
The illusion I try to create,
Although, I understand I need no illusion.
I can be without being made of glossy glass.

Here now, and changed a day from now.
Metamorphosis on the run, a chameleon,
Who does not repeat his mistakes.
Learn and relearn what colors work.

Learning most of my lessons face down.
Then having the strength to stand back up,
Wipe the tears away, they are temporary,
Stress relievers and nothing more.

Death,
The man on the bench disappears,
Who notices? A life gone,
I notice, and that void cannot be filled,
He was never anything, but everything at once.

Facing candles we let loose our grief.
Running your hand down that dark wood,
And begging to see that face again,
Filled with life and able to exist once more.

We all have each other and the world too,
Nothing is eternal but eternity, and,
That we shall not encounter here, only elsewhere.
Little one, no more tears, we are a blink of an eye.

Legacy,
When we are but uncomfortable shadows,
Cast upon the walls at night, where we were,
But now are not, sleeping in another world,
No longer able to spread ourselves among the living.

What have we been? In this world we feel less,
Than what we realize we are, we really are,
Stones that, cast upon the pond shake the surface,
And create ripples from our point of exit, they spread.

Nobody is weightless in the end, and we pull,
Upon the fabric of the world around us,
Bringing down heads in all directions,
Whether or not we were gods among men in life.

The World

Mother is being pulled by the hair,
When we breach her cells, we throw our hands up,
We surrender her unto the dead among us.
We do not fight because we are numb.

When will he arrive from the mountains?
A homemade Jesus, covered in dirt,
Walking slowly, giving us a chance,
Before he arrives, to give us the truth.

How much more blood will surge?
A waterfall to fill a pool of hatred,
We feed the beast, it hungers for more,
Oh Jesus, speed, we are in need of wisdom.

A human dies and we ferociously lament,
A species goes extinct, and we shrug.
We melt the world, our ground is shrinking,
We cannot stop for fear of being thrown off.

Surely she will take back her domain,
As I listen to the knife sing, I hear her,
A static hiding behind every cohesive sound,
Begging me to stop and listen, beneath the leaves.

We blind her with smoke, suffocate her.
We scrape the minerals from her bones,
We suck the oil from her veins,
We burn her hair to plant our own seeds.

I can hear her scream, through the static,
A woman passes my window, wearing heels,
They click to the beat of Mother’s rapid breaths,
This woman is unaware and continues on.

Deep within the silent scream I find myself,
Another one of her children, made from flesh.
We live only because we were chosen; we hold life.
Yet we murder our mother, we are condemned.

As I run against a million faces and words,
I cry out, but nobody hears me,
The sound of coins falling catches all ears,
They swarm towards it, I run away.

Other children fight for her, ignoring the mechanisms,
Of the machine that reaches higher and higher,
The machine calls my clock everyday to drag me,
From my bed, I allow these things, I feel helpless.

“Take it All” Said the Capitalist, the Poet, and the Believer

I have become diseased.
A build up of abuse,
Has taken my body and mind,
So far away I fear they’re lost.

All I have left are coals,
They heat this shell at night,
They keep me writing, breathing,
They burn hotter and brighter, rarely.

All of my passion travels the skies.
I can only touch pieces of it,
When it flows past me in rivulets.
I wish I could hold it, all at once.

Did you think I was new to this game?
I am no amateur, I am years ahead.
Childish creatures, fly away,
I will devastate you, surprise surprise.

Be like the night and crumble,
Crumble, with my smile, sunrise.
I hate people, I am misanthrope.
Equality is a fainting prostitute.

A gray shadow wanders,
Down the streets at night,
To rest upon a tree, to ponder,
Why are his eyes black holes?

I allow these pains into my life.
I am the gate, the one, the door.
Let yourself inside, find out who I am.
Just don’t expect to feel the same.

Thief, rogue, destitute, die.
I am hate, hate you so much.
Take my hard earned work, cherish it.
You could never have touched my accomplishments.

Put me on a stand,
I am your whipping post.
I want it that way, my choice.
Mock me like the birds in the trees.

Silence is my wall, my language.
When I feel this coldness, loveless.
Letters can do the talking, communicate,
My feelings, words are pitiful ghosts.

Have what you want, I have my God.
Take what you want, I have my God.
Say what you want, I have my God.
Hate what you want, I have my God.

You only have my paycheck.

Ink Stains

All bad news is sponged up so easily.
Like black ink traversing white fabric.
In frustration; I smudge it across a yellowed wall,
Where pictures of us in innocence have hung for so long.

As I finished making a mess of things, I heard,
We are always going to know the bad.
But, why not also know the good?
Why can’t our world be like it was when we were little?

Even you are still a child; your eyes betray you,
Every night together we still learn something new,
Your face sparkles and shines like aluminum foil,
Like the kind that wrap my lunch in elementary school.

Once, under the boughs of an old oak tree,
I carved our names inside a heart.
Until the bark comes back again,
That tree will spread the cheerful news.

Good news is the best news, let’s listen.
People constantly look for the darkness,
Why can’t they touch it without absorbing it?
I just want to see smiles, and feel nostalgia.

Well, I feel that old kind of feeling when you smile.
A feeling that takes me home, Shenandoah.
Wide opened fields like golden seas,
Blue Mountains like giants on the horizon.

You laugh like my mother, chimes on the wind.
Her laugh could realign my world, and heal me.
No ink stains can blacken my clouds anymore.
All the painful truths I’ve learned disappear to the back burner.

When I wake up on the floor of your bedroom,
I feel like a kid again, you constantly remind me,
The world is still full of wonder, and newness.
Everything seems fresh, and anything seems possible.

We are all children, beneath the same sky,
We are all lost, still learning how to fly.
We all say things that make our loved ones cry.
And once we’ve got it figured out, we die.

Even when I’m nothing more than bones,
I can still look back and my throat will clench.
Throughout all the visits to the hospital,
Throughout all the turned backs, and bad news.

I’ll know I was always alive, free,
And the world was a wondrous place that we could see together.
We don’t have to stop looking,
We’ll never find all the goodness, it’s limitless.

So, with pots on our heads,
Blankets on our shoulders,
And sticks in our hands
We will explore every inch of our backyard and beyond.

Remnants of a Past

How long have I been sleeping?
I awoke to find myself surrounded.
Everywhere I turned stood familiar ruins,
White columns and walls lie crumbled, nostalgia.

In an instant was overwhelmed with hope.
These were institutions I had invented,
Collapsed by their own faulty design.
I was a blank slate, a new world.

I was free, to start over, to sow new fields,
I decided to walk amongst my past.
The poor quality of thought was evident.
My ignorance had built me a muddied city.

I could now see why I had been wrong.
I built with intentions of elitism, greatness.
I did not realize that by default we are all great.
The butterflies descended; flowers on the breeze.

They perched among every stone remnant,
Of my broken past ideals and desires.
When I saw them I felt God smiling.
His love washed over me, and I was silent.

I breathed in deeply, and released with a smile.
A great wind disembarked from my lungs.
All clues of my blindness were swept away, disintegration.
All that remained were the butterflies and me.

Jail cells, perfect statues, and rivers of tears that eked,
All were dust in the wind, all were no longer me.
I was a child in an attic who found an old truth.
After building blocks of mud, I found marble.

From this place of utopia I will rebuild.
Hope has me by the hand, she will guide me.
Into a brighter tomorrow I float away.
Only until I awake again, remnants of myself.

Stakes, Ropes, Nails, and How You Use Them

Birds flee from me, exodus from a bush,
Colored red, with autumn’s hand,
I draw closer to you, you mimic me.
My heart begins to tear at its bars.

I know the reality, yet I return.
You smile at me, I am yours,
A marionette despairingly dangling,
From cruel fingers white as hospitals.

I hear your laugh in my dreams.
I am a prisoner, you are the warden.
My feelings are your toys, like a child,
You throw me upon the carpet.

You make me remember my worth,
I choke upon dirt, I swallow rocks.
You hold me down, I cannot move.
Claustrophobia wreaks havoc upon me.

You are a massacre to my emotions.
You speak sweet air, but lies,
Set off alarms in my mind,
I disregard dangers, they wilt and peel.

I cannot be my own, so waste me,
Dispense me, I am your object.
I am mud; I am nobody, place me in flames.
Yet, there is always hope.

What?

Pig the Nihilist

Pig would travel to the hilltops,
Oh, and he would sit looking down,
He pondered the boundaries of life, sky.
He wanted to know why he couldn’t fly.

Of course, the answer came to him.
Like some dead goddess the world answered.
She told him that he was vain.
The pig had spent too much time on hilltops.

Looking down, he always was looking down.
He had thought himself smarter, he had changed.
Nihilism had become his mistress,
Absurdist pig, how could you do that?

Narcissism was his speech,
He had been on hilltops far too long.
Solitude had made him a lunatic,
For lunatics come in ones.

Poor pig, why did you have to think?
If only you had stayed level with your kind.
Now you are a monster, a rooted statue.
You can never be moved, by anything.

Your nose smells clouds.
Your hooves stand upon,
The bodies of your kind.
Your mind is not of this world.

Simple pig, floating in a universe,
All your own, ideas and illusions,
You said you could fly,
Now you are, only lunatics dare fly.

Come back down, come back,
The end is not everywhere,
Stop chasing ghosts, taste life,
It is before you pig, take it, truth exists.

Poor pig traveled to hilltops,
He would sit and ponder this world of lies,
Ponder his death, all ends, fire.
Now he has been stolen from us.

Pig is a nihilist. The end end end end end end end end end end end end.

Mood Swing Swing

I tried to close the dark timber door,
The hinges were doused in slime, swing swing,
A thousand fears pushed against the other side.
I was a child in the ocean, a wave on the horizon.

No matter how hard you push,
The water slides between your fingers,
Outstretched your hands are useless.
Things you wish out come through, swing swing.

Sadness crashes upon my soul.
I succumb to the wailing, I weep, swing swing.
How else does one empty themselves?
Else the ocean drowns you, lose the ocean.

I am a withered leaf, life unspoken.
White mass upon the floorboards, swing swing.
Slowly I melt into my abyss, lose myself.
I hang there lifeless, as if from a noose.

I am so noisy, like a flock of parrots.
Screaming, mood swings attack, swing swing.
They steal my smiles away, I am all that’s left.
Alone, heavy, clenched, and sickly.

Swing, swing, the hinges of my sanity,
Back and forth without a decision.
Where am I, and what do I want?
These choices I fear to make.

Pale flesh outstretched in an empty house, swing swing.
Splayed on a sundial, telling the time, I am lit.
Burning inside, a bird has flown away.
I watch shudders of shadows from the wings.

Haunted by past mistakes, today’s mistakes,
Every mistake lined up like trees, swing swing.
Their roots run deep within my heart,
I try to burn them, but they are made of steel.

I feel so small, then happy.
Light switch, on off, off on.
Flip like a gymnast, fall like a kamikaze.
These are my trials, swing swing.

I open my eyes, I see the sky.
I wallow, for I am not one of the stars.
Pity for me, swing swing, swing swing.
Stop the pendulum on the right side, forever.

I nail the golden disk to the wall.
The angle is that of a rising wing.
It will always be ready to come down,
To lift me higher, swing swing.

Like a seagull flapping down to go up.
I die, I am born, I wish for more.
I want to escape the chains of emotion,
I am stuck in my childhood, swing swing.

My window is a memory, reality.
I can see the cars pass by, lives unfolding.
I stay in my room; I bar the door from the water.
Still flooding, I am drowned daily, swing swing.

Justify my hatred, condone my sadness.
Make me one of you, one of me.
Frost upon the eyelids, frozen shut, swing swing.
No more water may pass this icy wall.

I am alteration, hear me swing swing, swing swing, swing swing, swing swing.