Thank You Note

You--I want you to know that I truly appreciate the dinner, this kindly proffered food for me...for I surely would not have eaten this night if it was not for your generosity. I would have languished in some corner, with a growling stomach, and I would not have seen nourishment. That food! Oh, the taste of it still lingers in my mouth. I never knew that simple food could be so delicious, so wonderous! I thank you, I know you won't ever read my appreciation. I grubbed on true dinner this evening; I didn't tear my body's fortitude down for needed energy from the cells that form my constitution, to survive; Why? Because you fed me, you provided for me, you cared about me in my tarnished state, my lost plight.

Thank you again. I will pull these covers over my head and try to rest for tomorrow will roll over all too soon and I'll be in search again.

Sincerely,
Your bum son

Unearthing Hurt

For Ian

The lights dimmed, the surrounding noise followed suit, leasing shadows time among elbows, glass reflections, and haze smoke circulating.
"I'll tell you, I'll say it all...doesn't mean a damn really. Here, toast me to it--the story."
Mugs clinked, fluid sloshed, the bartender without a bra settled against the bar pretending to stare at a speck on the wall.
"It went down like this: two stupid people lost sight of the end of a tunnel."
There was a long pause which called for some serious endurance, and I sipped my beer a couple of times.
"And?"
"That's it Mate. That is the story in the concentrated form."
I watched the bartender walk away, noticeably let-down and bored from the summation of the story, and when she was out of earshot I whispered to my companion the horrible, the almost evil truth.
"LIfe was inverted for me, for our situation, and someone would die, no doubt, soon, if a drastic change didn't happen."
I let that sit inside of background noise, swallows, taps of a cigarette on the ashtray.
Finally, he straightened up and asked, or noted, "So...you are saying that by leaving her and the kids...just up and abandoning them...you saved a life, or their lives?"
My cigarette smoke swirled slowly around my hand, shifting away as I reached for the mug, and then dispersed as I snubbed the butt out. I drank the remaining contents of the mug.
I turned to my companion, locking on his eyes.
"Yes. Someone would have died if I didn't split the scene. It was truly a matter of life and death."
I threw down some bills and we left the bar with the heaviness of my past expressed out loud hovering between us.

Pad Days 2

This town seemed to ghost away before his eyes, daily fading into swirling dust and wind-blown curtains from open, empty windows of houses that once held vibrant life...families, laughter, connection.

The railroad spur discounted this community, sought a hard, bent-steel rail right into perceived ripened valleys of opportunity.

Mailboxes sat empty on hand-fashioned posts that lean from uncare, disuse.

The swirl of the wind whips when the life of a town is exhumed to past status.

He tilted his grimy hat brim, looking longing down streets that echoed calls of neighbors, youth, turmoil, care...he stood rigid against time with squinted eyes and a locked jaw. A fool on an empty Main Street of forgotten, moved-on-to-newer dreams; planted in his stance, he would continue this little town in words, in fistfuls of scourned, mouthed sounds, in gritty determination--disappearing words marking the dusk like Indian symbols, for those members that no longer gather.

He...cared about the Pad--people, purpose, potential. He felt it needed permanence and he obeyed--alone--because he found himself reaching out into empty night sky.

The wind quickend, the dust circled, he lowered his head and scratched positivity into the shifting dirt underfoot, trying to define time against an unyielding grind of motion.

This one stood against change for realizations...in solitude.

Turntablism

For Jubei

Echo...reverbing note bends in the foreshadowing of your eardrum, mind's eye, fingertip.
Manipulate from the tingle inside of your bio-timing,
Bleeding feelings into streamlined emotions
Poured outside to gathered, mingling receptors.

Sweat means you're human,
Ice settles in the cup,
Reaching for the follow up,
Control? No, only flow.

Watching distant aloof
You provide for my slice of life
For those to enjoy, decide, overload;
You leave alone knowing your tones
Echo...inside of us.

Flame

Sleep-Spoken Prayers

Don't die on me tonight in the hush of coated slumber, inert and unguarded in your form's rest, for this rocky road still extends onward.

I can fold like the flower I am amid the forces hurling against me...oh so easily I can snap...threatening to uproot my feeble roots, just like you.

Smoke, silence, solitude, scared.

We are lost, my brother and I, lost like my father in his purgatory wanderings...only we have not yet given over in the face of doom.

Our lips move in our restless nights of widescreen dreams that pain us sure as reality, maybe more so for our lack of defenses in our fetal-shaped slumber disattachment.

Don't ask explanations of us; others can't know inside workings and few can help us, nor can the rare ones that stretch out for us understand our vaporous hugs.

We are brothers locked in pain.

We are hurt, and sliding, and clinging tight to the lonely coldness inside...a void which presents the uncertainty of every upcoming day,

awakening our new fresh mistakes,

amid our hapless progression through empty waste.

This is the only way we know to proceed, the only direction we follow, on a path beyond you, or us, or this, or done or that which is undone; we pray for one another silently.

Daily Routine Interrupted

Lush, liquid laughter
Absolute
Tender
On a day of complete surprise
New paths
Dreamy, dare?
A necessary connection.