Underrated

The pen touches paper:
A flash of a smile before the doors close together
The captured shine of a yellow sunrise
I saw a cat stretch and yawn
A penny on the sidewalk left for me to find
Scratched memoirs.

The pen expresses anything:
Spread the doom
Inflame the ignorant masses
Doodles helped me survive classrooms
Here's my phone number
Her BP is 80 over 120
Driving While Intoxicated, Failure To Have A Clue
I do hereby agree to dissolve this marriage

The pen paints inky curves:
Highlights errors
Makes cartoons with mustaches
Graffitti-hate-vandalize-deface
Captures ideas, breaks barriers
Leaks and ruins and stains
Runs dry, archive
Indelible epitaph left to impress

Today, 6/27/06

In the office:

You said, "How's the truck coming?" and I didn't even know you remembered that I had bought one. Heck, I don't even know your last name, but you remembered. You asked, you wanted to know about me on this horrible, sinking Tuesday. Thank you.

At the bar:

You said, "I want to know how to write better, because it is so easy for you." I said, no sweat, I'd help. We drank another and walked to the Marta stop and the line divided us with two electric rails, going in both directions at once like a never-ending journey of arrival and departure.

On the train:

I said that the art was fantastic and he said "thanks..." and I talked about it all the way to my station. He asked me if I drew and I said I wrote and he said, "oh, graffiti tags" and I said "yeah, and prose" and he looked confused. I shook his hand and left the train.

On the bus:

The noise from the back grew in volume as the driver passed the bus stop. "That's my stop! Are you drunk?" screamed the annoyed rider. He got off about 40 feet past his stop and mumbled curses. The driver slammed the accelerator pedal down and we lurched forward and I grinned because I knew we'd get home quick today.

In my room:

Don't give up hope, don't curl like a bug and die on your back. Don't dismiss life or breathe slowly enough to pass on to dispersal. I will move forward, I said, as I checked the sites for mistakes and didn't call or answer the phone.

Outside while smoking:

I grabbed the leftover oversized sidewalk chalk from when the kids were a part of my life, left on my porch to remind me of them every day or night, and I dropped to the pavement. I just tagged the word "grow" and colored it. I highlighted it. I sweated and swatted. I got my hands dirty. I smiled. I smiled. I smiled all to myself.

Ghost Vision

Everywhere I look, everything I see is white. If it isn't white, I see the absence of white and only register where white belongs. It is a color, a glow, a radiance, a blinding flash like seeing stars when you clock your noggin. It is not a racial color, nor is it dismissive of the various other colors of the spectrum. It is white, and that is the meaning of it. It is large white clouds or sickly white skin; it is microspecks of white on the carpet or pinpoints of white light emanating from distant and past stars. It is the wash of the bloated dead, the circular coldness of the commode, the blank stretches of uncaring snow, and the color surround of your eyes. It is Marta buses and panties peeking over the tops of pants and gnashing teeth and balms for burns and captioned letters across tvs in a bar where waitresses place white napkins down and snorted up fat, chalky white lines of withdrawn hurt in locked bathrooms. White is the light that projects my dreams against the backs of my eyelids; white is the last thing that will register when I expire; white is the burn and the embrace and the dissolving of a solid into a gas and into a general glow against the face of God above. White is innocence, white is fear, white is purity, and white is the emptiness that contains all things.

Mirror, Mirror

The dashboard screams alarming colors of warning, fearful hues that project danger but have no ability to extend aid, correct, or reconstruct the damage of which it alarms or alerts. The gears grind onward in circular patterns and add friction to inertia in a physics prediction of machine life, slice it in half with neglect. The walk seems so much longer and arduous with these ill-fitting shoes; blisters form and shine like hidden supernovas on trodden feet that only point blankly across non-directional milestones of away, gone, i-hate-your-face, and never-ever-more. Misguidance bleeds and rubs raw and causes much confusion in a heavy blanket of blindness of the steps plodded, the words absorbed with bruises, the brushes of reality that make one sigh heavily in thankfulness, or cringe in shameful recollection. My skin is fresh, easily burned, and wounds are still there even if the scabs and band-aids and gauze have been bravely discarded. I tread lightly amidst the throngs of pointless parameters and aiding abetters; where am I going, face of reflection and future?

Unforgettable

Brief Haiku

They ask of me things-
I release structured
Inner demons too.

Catch and release us;
The voice moves time through hurt,
Like silvery fish.

Listen, aches, wording-
I'm naked on a bed;
Where are you tonight?

Reality Slaps Hard

It doesn't hurt but rather it only annoys me
The junk and trash and smack and slander you sling
While your pride burns into your grasp on reality
That you've been bested, you've been burned,
Your image in the mirror is distorting, a carnival reflection
And the walls you clammer and stab to find stability
Turn out to be vaporous and phantasmagorical
And fake...
Which riles your blood and paints your cheek red with shame
And coats you in foolishness in the black hours
Of self-reflection when you should be sleeping

Because you rise in the morning mean as an alley-cat,
And with blood-thirst, and sadistic tendencies,
And retribution coating your gnashing teeth
That can only be brushed away and dismissed
When I'm gone, dead, disappeared, perhaps dismembered...
But are you going to kill the world? Will you delete the
slip ups, the ooops, the disassociation, the removed attention,
the less-than-perfect-you that you blame me for causing,
From their minds, or my dead dreams or memories,
Or transcendental penitence?
Forgive yourself, Grow, or Understand you weren't
The distortion your ego whispered you were in your colluding vanity.
You are better, you are more: Find who you are
And leave who I am to me.

2 GBU Shoes=True

A clatter,
Amidst chit-chatter;
You can tell by my face that it matters.

Onward, shived-blood drops;
Leaving is harder than previously thought.

"Yes, I would rather..."

Boot-delivered shatter
Gone, so gone.

Died tonight for relief.

Pain transforms into ache.

Goodbye inward waste.

Future rides a drifty leaf.

Attraction

It is not a name or face or tactile sensation, rather it is breathless, open ambiguity. The slick-wet tongue twists sounds across intonations and lingering eyes lock deep into private feelings of warmth, and desire, and shame, and reckless abandonment. These accidental touches electrify that scare of crossing imagination into reality, leaving each with separate unfulfilled aches, reasons, and reactions. This dream of you, fogging my waking thoughts, crosses over into an unexpected morning elevator ride and those edges of our nervous smiles are reflections of hurt-riddled loneliness and unfulfillment which simply cannot choke off climbing vines of hope. A name feels good to express across my lips as if it were a kiss carried on the projected light of my inner burning for the one that is forbidden by inexpression, situational disruption, or society's bitter scrutiny. Dreams, locked so deeply inside, seep out on channels of kindness, compassion, care within renegade, intuitive impulse. Without ever saying it aloud, we have carved soft recesses of retreat into one another's embrace, curled whirlwind connections into cat's cradle puzzles of our lives' histories, and crossed into places which are inaccessible to share with mechanics of the brain. No picture, no position, no "move", no experience: just hot-sexy, unspoken tenderness willing for embrace.

Connections

One minute of connected thoughts based off the word Karate. Kind of like 7 Degrees of Separation, but more like one minute of connection due to boredom.

Karate
Bloody Nose
Beepers
Heart Monitors
Airports are like Hospitals
Sunsets
Prayer
Amelia
Painting my apartment
Curtis
Bicycle Chain
The Smiths
Zits
Scrambled Eggs

Reflection Portrait

Take your life as a collage and capture it, mixing the feelings and experiences and disruptions into something presentable to outsiders of your life. Blend the borders to mend the breaks and divides, the pits and failed perceptions, the unfulfilled dreams. Smooth the edges of excellence--which already cause you to smile inside in your recollections--and make them light up your entire effort. Take the blackened crust of ruination and smear it, lighten it, add brightness to it, and tell the tale for some other so that you don't have to harbor that caustic burn like shame, and so that some unnamed behind you in life's line can learn...like the colors of poisonous snakes or tick bites or hot stoves when you are a child.
Make the collage extraordinary, break molds and tempt fate. Lean on instinct and feel when to let your mind go and your fingers deliver. Take all that shit that is within you and splatter it for all to see in ways their eyes have never viewed things before now. Keep those colorful expansions of your spirit in bright accents to contrast the hurt, lifting the hearts and making the thoughtful breathe in with refreshment. Show your wonderful, gifted life for all it is and for all it is worth. Display that it can be more than the languid feelings hinder...be the most illuminated of the ever-expansive night sky, for you already are...

Cloudy

He became a cloud as easily as he had become anything else in his life. The cloud was expansive, fitting all forms and spreading or contracting upon suggestion. He arrived in the cloud inside of the lull of day, when time moved so slowly that his body dissipated into something other than human-formed atoms. His soul shifted into something more transcendent, evolving, unconfined and abstract, and the moment his napping eyes snapped open he no longer had eyes. He had long stretches of mist and vapor and curls of air transfixed between two different physical forms. His eyes were tactile feelings and his emotions pulled or stretched his form embodiment on relaxation or tension.

At first he simply floated on top of the wind current, trepidation causing him to cling the breathy ends of himself into a tighter unit for fear of dispersion of who he used to be. But after a couple of miles of floating, his breath shaped him into undefined representations of how he wished he could present his inside feelings as a human, as a normal person although he was now cloudlike and removed from those ideals. The paranoia of losing himself into the winds was unfounded; he stretched far to the horizon in a thin, wispy layer and retained his permanence. He concentrated himself into an impressive rain cloud and noticed the darkening of his coloring as his intensity and focus intermixed. He made his intentions into very random forms and reliefs and accents, often comedic or representational, above or around the terrain he crossed.

His speed of travel was rated by the current, by the activity of motion of his surrounding forces. He could only constrict into an impossibly gray, menacing enormity to lag his clip. Or to gain distance he would spread out in a line or thinly extend across all directions and cover incredible distances in his redundant circular flow. Not once did he ever think to seep into thick fog, or to hover over, oh say a swamp or cemetery or valley; he moved, he glided, he exhaled expansion and inhaled molecular concentrated activity. He did not remember beyond himself and he had no perceived goal or destination. Wondering if he was alone, he leaked rain quietly over a familiar neighborhood and place and time, mourning his ever-fading passage.