Good guys do bad things,
or wrong things,
and bad guys,
sometimes,
do good things.
The measure of a man
is not the sum of his actions,
but it’s all we’ve got.
Good guys do bad things,
or wrong things,
and bad guys,
sometimes,
do good things.
The measure of a man
is not the sum of his actions,
but it’s all we’ve got.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes
When the one gets away
She takes your heart,
And you pushed her there.
A feeling slides down
my brain and seeps into my heart,
or maybe it’s a soul,
and floods my senses.
It bleeds from my heart
until I feel it in my fingers and toes
and it moves out through my soft skin.
Maybe I’m not okay.
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 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.
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 –
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.