Everyone is everything
huddled together
to fight the cold of the universe,
of its infinite black,
from seeping in,
its dark blue fingers
creeping into our warmth
and blocking out the light
of a million suns
dead and dying.

everyone is everything
and no-one is everyone.

Breathin' smokestack lightning
in the howlin' wind.
This is what it sounds like
when a man refuses to die.
A tempest raging
breaking down your walls
and tearing open your eyes.
His song almost sings itself
echoing through the hallways and corridors
and out the back door.
Wolves bark and wail
as driving wind and rain
batter the world blue
with scorpion stings
and mean left hooks.

The sky is falling
in millions of pieces
I have to put it back together.

A driving pounding obsession
Fix everything,
make it clear and neat and good.

Frantic, frenetic, failed.
try again.
Maybe I'll get it next time.

The music reaches a fever pitch
as I try to break the tide
of jagged pieces raining down.

Nothing fits,
too small, too big, too many angles
I never get what I need.

I'm looking for the perfect fit
it's been so long
I don't think that any one fits with me

Playing catch up
Like the Red Queen
Running so fast to stay where I am.

Maybe the next one
will fill the void
and put everything back to where it began.




This poem was about Tetris.

My sword is a symphony.
It sings as it slices through the still air surrounding me.

My enemy is emptiness.
He is fear
he is pain
he is hunger
and he is doubt.
Most of all, he is a suffocating silence,
heavy and dry.
He smells like regret
and he makes skin crawl
He moves, left to right, black ichor body shifting,
slithering like sand in an hourglass,
flowing like venom in a vein.

His words crawl
out of the dark cavern of his mouth,
off of the black tongue that slithers from side to side
whispering
whispering
whispering
always whispering.

Darts and arrows,
imperceptibly quiet,
volleys that fall on my armor.
The words creep across like thin fingers
searching, desperate, for any crack in my plating
so that they might find purchase
and tear into me
one ghostly, haunting syllable at a time.

Only the songs and colors stave him off.
We circle, like wolves desperate and emaciated
from a long, fading winter,
until one of us makes a move
and the other parries back
like clockwork.

It's a game.

The thing has no sex
but I know it is a he.
He moves with the subtle brutality
of a solider too long at war,
a hovering, unwavering hurricane.
His attacks become a routine,
a way of measuring days, minutes, seconds.

Then, a change.

He lunges and twists,
moving quickly, like a stormcloud.
My foe falters
and for one fleeting moment,
he affords me a glimpse
of his cracked and scarred visage.
My sword plunges deep into his form,
a lightning bolt through a rotten tree.

His boredom turns to fury.

He bellows, a terrible yell
that makes the ground wish it could crack
and swallow the sound forever.
His hot dry breath hits every part of me at once
again and again.
There are no more whispers.

His words now cut and burrow and slash
blind and furious,
searching, burning, needing
needing to be heard
needing to fill my ears and my mind
with doubt and sorrow and loss
but I never hear a sound.

I feel his words, feel his desperate need to hurt,
the primal need for agony and despair,
but my blade's blinding rhapsody,
its lyrical swiftness,
keeps him at bay.
Keeps him scrambling in the dark, unfulfilled
terrified and furious,
unable to shake the ground under my feet.
Unable.

For now.

It's all just a bunch of lines.

Lines and colors, directing the eye in circles,

lines that never go anywhere,

unless steered by a veteran captain.

it's like a poem that doesn't get bogged down in syllables,

where subtle flicks of a pen can say more than any of your sonnets.

line width drawing the eye upwards,

only to have spiraling shades and hue tear it all down again.

Metaphors become slow and awkward,

while strokes dance around them, mercurial,

spelling out their messages at the speed of watercolor.

Gentle french curves draw the attention in, and reject it in the same luxurious movement,

cold and inviting all at once.

Dusty tomes capture words,

while pictures float on dragon wings.



This is an accidental poem.

Your chemical touch tastes like revolution
and the wailing spectral moon sings songs of the end times.
It is in this dark refrain
that the Fisher King, wandering lonely,
muttering fractured rhymes and humming bastard tunes,
like a knight with no queen or banner,
finds salvation and fall to his knees, weeping like a child.

He grasps the earth as if drowning in its emptiness
and coughs out a final, soul stiffening prayer
before plunging headfirst
in to the dark mire that seeps through the cracks in mens' words
and, sinking fast, he calls out for the love he never knew, but once held
like a god holds his world, steam drifting through clasped fingers,
winding and weaving like the chains on Jacob Marley's heart.

Hollow words ring in a void that they struggle to fill
building intricate webs that say nothing, contribute nothing
only take space from those who need it
and bask in imagined meaning.

Day breaks, dropped from the hands of a child,
and grey dawn slithers in
through panes of glass and curtains of lead.
As cold skies stretch across the dull roar of metropolis,
steel snakes scrape over the feet of the ones at the platform
waiting for the deluge that never comes.

Gravelly voices whisper sweet nothings
through bent back pipes covered in yesterday's future,
telling us what we can have
if we only shut our eyes and stay our tongues.

Poets sing songs about poets
from streetcorner pulpits
while shuffling people grumble their own dead songs,
ignoring the blindly hopeful.
Jazz musicians whistle in alleyways,
hoping noone will hear.

Day breaks, your mind aches, the ground quakes,
as our subterranean dragons lift drooping eyelids
if only to signal their disapproval.
Dark tears, cried for nothing, fill the streets and rush into stormdrains,
where the only ones to catch them don't need the pity
and hurry off for some unspoken vice.

The dreamer, the unwoken fool,
on his gilded throne in Eldorado,
is the only one who lives the life promised
by painted billboards and government tongues.
He gives nothing back and takes nothing in return,
and for this agregious slight,
he lies in his slumber, blissfully unaware
of the cold black shackles
affixed at his wrists.

Heavy gray clouds, bloated with rain,
sit above the spires, thundering an empty promise
like the steel horses nailed to the streets.
They all do the same thing, dropping enough rain to drown out the green
and leave the avenues a uniform hue.

Shifting eyes and loosely moving tongues
meet the club and the mace, as policemen in high topped boots
keep the peace in places where it never existed.
The only truths here are put up against the wall
and forced to read the dusty lies inscribed there.

The words of the rebels,
silhouetted on subway walls and crooked backs,
shout their meanings in dead languages,
their cryptic tongue saving them from the whitewash.
Unintelligible messages are still messages.

While the tired crowds stand, shielded
by nothing but their own doubt and self-loathing,
A man in a hat shouts hollow prophecy
from a stage secure with a barrier
of sharp broken dreams and thorny barbed words.

The loudspeaker's trumpeted questions are answered
in faded blue monotone,
the truths muffled between sheets of old velvet.
"How would you rate your willingness to stare into the unblinking eye of infinity?"
"Somewhere between amicable and obsessive."

Blood-red crowns, sprayed below rebel graffiti,
answer questions that nobody asks,
while sermons in bent brown churches,
ask what no one can answer.
Here, my closed eyes see more than your blue ones ever will.

The cold grey wind comes blowin' in,
howl'ing hollow threats
He turns inside and Pilate lights
His day's last cigarette.

He stands wishing in the fountains,
Sacrificing change
As drunken lonely sailors wail
Down crooked cobbled lanes

A lilting, lyrical woman
flicks her Arab eyes
across poor Pilate's stony mask
and tears down his disguise.

Ships with tattooed sails rebel
against his singing twin
But as she goes he knows she throws
white rhymes not meant for him.

Pontius sits with furrowed brow,
his head bent low with guilt.
He clutches with a serpent's grip
his dagger's cool black hilt.

A spectre of his former self,
Pontius pulls dimly on the chains
Whose rusting groans ring in concert with
The creaking wind's refrain.

He sees the end, in shining black
but for it he must wait
chained to the sorrows of the ones
whose salvation he must await.

As his cigarette's last dull glow
slips off into the dark
Pontius Pilate looks, gaze transfixed
on oblivion's steady arc.

As he beholds his mournful fate
He phases like the moon.
Always going, never there,
humming his somber tune.

The war came silently
on a thief's feet in the night
as wars seldom do.

It crept over the black roofs of the town
sealing out the moonlight
and before dawn, it crept away,
to its dark, wet grendelcave,
hiding from the sun
behind rotting shutters on yellowed plaster,
under gutters in dim alleyways,
and between the cracks in mens' hearts.

Even so, its effects were... brobdingnagian.

Slate gray clouds thundered quietly through the air
like a downbound train consumed by fever
while jazz musicians waited in bread lines
shuffling their feet against the cold,
instruments like albatrosses hanging heavily from their necks
while the poets became backwards-talking prophets,
preaching nonsense from streetlamp pulpits,
frothing madly at anyone foolish enough to listen.


Moths in their wool coats tumbled
through the dark corridors and crooked streets
the fog thick with pale blue melancholy,
almost tangible in the wet air.

A thin breeze snaked over tin roofs and around dripping corners
playing an elegy of emptiness,
a lonely dirge echoing over
every broken sidewalk and dusty window.

The clockwork king at the center of town chimed on the hour
his hollow, false sound rolling over the city
like a shroud on a dead man's face,
providing a steady, sorrowful harmony
with the wind's stark chorus.

The faces of the town were painted,
painted in quiet, agonized desperation,
their masks trying to conceal frantic eyes,
madly searching for deliverance
from the cold sorrow that stung their cheeks.

Color drained from the world,
the sky lost its hue,
paintings lost their vibrant timbre
poems' meanings became lost in swirling tidepools
and imagination walked on creaking crutches,
begging in the dead-ended alleys.

The war was won,
started and finished before anyone was aware,
and without a single shot fired.

The casualties were innumerable.

The rain in the lane made skating there a pain.