Times like this/these

Time pours like hot water

Down a cold tar-shingled roof –

It leaves memories and takes life –

Until it finds a way into your house.

It floods you and slowly rots you,

Never ending its relentless, patient cause until,

Well,

You know.

I sit here caressed in my boredom and soft ideas

Waiting for a lover to hold me or a hard problem,

But nothing comes.

I slap at the ghosts and kick at the demons

But they don’t sleep and I sometimes do –

More often these dogged days –

And now my eyes are wretched and sordid from being alert and helpless.

The cure screams at me

And I laugh in its face like I’m the bully.

All three of us know how this ends,

So it let’s me be arrogant and composed,

As it watches the cracks forming and the sleep come for me.

Time passes to come by and say hello, to torment me, and finally to kill me.

Some kind of truth

My head is too busy hurting to feel my heart,

Emotions are raw and new and final.

The dull day peddles its weak sun as truth,

But the sky remembers the real.

We went from bar for bar,

to bar to bar,

Trying to find spoken and bodily truths

And none were found.

Ghosts of road

No white knight, no Batman –

I run from the real and the actors –

And nobody is coming to save me

I left them all on the road.

I buried them on the road,

running from city to hole and river

and I’m drinking blood to stay young.

Young never felt so old,

I fall apart to ghosts in wind

and the chimes hold everything I am.

Angry skinny

I watch the rage distort your

paper, silky wrappings,

contorting your love into fire flickering

through your skin and eyes and mouth.

The back breaks and

the stomach turns as

the mouths dry up on words, which

could never say a damn thing we need.

62-year sentence

62 years of pain in a sentence,

“but then I’ll be alone,

and see you one weekend a year.”

Or maybe 35 years of pain –

the length of a family,

mostly nuclear and dysfunctional –

all rolled into some words.

A cage in the city,

with frequent visitors, or

a cabin in the cedars,

mostly alone.

Jagged living moments

The jagged start-stop movement of life –

all edges of sandpaper-wrapped boards –

kills me in a thousand and one cuts.

I want to shake, spread and shakes again –

limbs wrapped in saran wrap rules and laws –

I want to scream.

Who was I,

to become this?

Or who was I not,

to fail this hard?

Blue

Blue –

the water-coloured orchids,

the GNC shaker bottle,

your favourite kettle on the stove,

and the Creemore beer can –

is so majestic, yet morose and missing in itself.

 

And so are we.