A poem entitled The Prelude Years

The Prelude Years

When you share another person’s childhood

And tumultuous teenage years

You see something rare and beautiful

That will never be seen again

Because there is a purity to those years

That will never recur

Before life has gotten to you

Before children and spouses

And other larger pursuits

Encompass your world

There is just you

And maybe a sibling or friend

To share nights

Of drinking too much coffee with

And only after eleven lattes

And a game of ball

Do you realize how unfortunate four a.m. is

I know four a.m. intimately

As I jealously realize you are asleep

Again

I hate you in that moment until

I take to your bookshelf and read

The tales you read yourself as a child

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

My old familiar friend

And so apropos for these strange times

When my nightmare is home

So I sleep on your floor

And the objects in my pocket

Take up room on your nightstand

I wonder as to what your nightmares are?

Are they made up of the way

That people look

When they underestimate you?

No, this is reality often enough

Why should is take up space in your sleep?

Or do your nightmares fade?

In comparison with your dreams

That you dream

With the imagination of a child

I cannot even begin to suspect

What that means for you

Not in a world

Where for my every nonsense

You have logic

And for my every dramatic tear

You have an answer

I see how we have grown up

And say things like

“Who would have thought?”

When the truth is

Me

I would have

It is no surprise to me or those who knew us

That you grew up to have children

And I remain the eternal child

A poem entitled Tick Tick Tick

Tick Tick Tick

We speak of time

In prose, conversation, and rhyme

Yet we so often forget it is a valuable commodity

The clock ticks

Marking each moment until eternity

Some cruel cosmic joke that is linear

Leading itself into the realm of finite

Time, so benign

Until you find that it can bite

It keeps its secrets and keeps them well

And laughs at the plans that lead us to hell

Time is a construct we created ourselves

And now we are slaves to its power

As we count every minute and monitor every hour

It has become nothing more than a fact of life

We are rats in a maze searching for the prize

But in the end that prize is our demise

Time is a killer

Through eons, and seconds, it sets the snare

And we can’t resist

Willing we enter

Because it is there

It is unstoppable

It is inevitable

And our only defense

Is grace

To face the clock

Accept the ticking

And know that age

Is nothing more that the unwilling gift of time

Wisdom and grace

You can call it pointless

Our inevitable death

You can rebel against the heart that beats within time

But it will do you no good

Until you can face the hands of the clock and bend them to your will

Till you silence the ticking and feel the still

That comes to you when you have time to kill

And linear is nothing but a simple line, drawn in pencil

A creation that is an erasable line

.

A poem entitled the Writers Conundrum

The Writer’s Conundrum

I remember when I was only a child

And I was amazed that a simple stroke of my pen could make words

Beautiful words

Even when they were not profound of brilliant

They were beautiful

But there is a rabbit hole that comes with writing

A spiral of self-loathing

That comes from the words that get stuck in your throat

Until you choke on them

You fight and you struggle

Until you find the right word

Then comes the doubt

The voice that chastises that you could have done better

One of the most painful things for me is to walk away from a completed piece

As it is not completed it is merely abandoned

But like an addict

I keep writing

For no other reason than it is who I am

In a way every piece of writing is a failure

Because your weird little hearts thinks that it could be better

So you choke on these words

And you choke because in the end it is worth it

And even if it is not worth it

You can’t stop yourself

The words call to you

You have no choice to answer them

A poem entitled A Silent Thing

 

A Silent Thing

I am in mourning

But not like a widow standing before a shiny new stone

I am weeping, but not because of my own sadness

I am lamenting for you

Once you had my loyalty

My love and my esteem and my honesty

And now you have a void

Filled with false, almost nonexistent fealty

I would speak to you of all of this

If I thought for a moment you would listen

But really that would be a selfish plea for change

And for those of us who know Ending

We know that when something is truly over

It is a silent thing

I thought that if this ever came to its expiration

Dramatic, deadly harbingers of doom would be seen

I thought it would be an apocalypse

With burning comets falling from the sky

But the end does not come in fire and ice

As so often has been implied

It comes with something that should inspire far more fear

The end comes in cold degrees of apathy

And it is already here

Damaged Inc.

Damaged Inc.

The cards we were dealt in life were all jokers

But they had sharp teeth

And became the shades that haunted our sleep

And left us starving with only emptiness to eat

So we swallowed it whole

And rarely let it show when it made us weak

They gave us gifts

Secrets to keep

And it was too late before we knew

Emotion nearly lead me to death

Anger almost destroyed you

Add to that the glory of genetics

We were suffering

We were sick

Then self-loathing prances in

Lying through the teeth of a sadistic grin

It laughed as we struggled with every test

Schadenfreude at its best

It constantly whispered “worthless”

Sometimes we were foolish enough to believe

Sometimes we were wise enough to continue to dream

But the thing that really kept us alive

Was the mind and the heart of a child of five

We never grew up

We always believed

For us nothing was fantasy

In the dark

Shadow puppets were made

And whimsy was always willing to play

So you took the poison

Both intangible and real

Somehow you managed to heal

I accepted my emotion

For what it was

I used that power

Now look what it does

What is our power was once our curse

Who is laughing now?

You self-loathing clowns

They say the best revenge is success

And we are superheroes both paper and flesh