Cave

You’ve lost all you have. You’ve lost it.
Frosting over on the fourth of July, God bless independence and integrity.

Break her like a promise because she hasn’t any hope; make sure she’s lost her hope like you’ve lost your mind so that together you can
leave this shit behind.

You know the cues and clicks that will make it stick.
It makes me sick.

Through stained glass windows, it looks like the rainbow brick road.

You won’t be able keep it in forever.

Or keep it all together.

So make it last, fast, because soon tomorrow will be the past.

For Chances

Another shot at spoken word, I guess. 

Bohemia

There is such a thing as feeling too alive. Drowning underneath the cloud cover until the sun was in my throat and my blood was filled with the rain of tomorrow night's storm, I stood with my chest pressed against the milky way and sighed. Could you see that I was fading when you were walking close behind? Everything was melting into nothing when you touched the outside of the inside of the outside of her hand. I would've sang you a rhapsody, set in Bohemia, but it's been done before. Everything I have for you has been done before you one too many times by everyone who has ever laid eyes on your metallic features and their pulsing tastes. Phantom vibrations play with the symphony and I stare at my fingers, hypnotized by the size of my atoms crunching and bouncing against each other inside of my insignificant skin. Bumble bees work together and I can't seem to find my brain inside my head. It's a loss of control that I'm looking for, other than the silence. Peace is overrated when it comes to being lonely. I never realized that everyone is supposed to be a child and I missed it, because life trains don't come back around. I rip tobacco up even smaller and smoke it out of my ticket that would pick me up at  kid and drop me off at you. I was sitting on seats made up of tenderness when you picked her up and spun her around the constellations in a wedding dress; I've always looked better in black anyway. The saints can't help me anymore. We're older than we should be and younger than we wish we were. We'll be alive a little white longer and then we'll be alive forever. Inhabiting the sky, we'll wish we could be rockets again. Guns in my pocket, I'll sleep on Saturn's rings if you don't mind. Close your eyes.

Laughing without Reason

The wind and the rain made love that afternoon with their hands held up tightly and their kisses like sugar plums floating across the emptied mind. The bridges were suspended by the cloudy skies and the sunshine behind them, so hot, so far away, was nowhere close to the instep of their thoughts. With a sigh and a half-fall, they landed swiftly back upon the room of no return. History slapped humanity with the iron knives of mutilation until they remembered their mortality; they've been dying since their birth, they’d been laughing without reason. The spikes fell into their skin with the bone cracking pressure of revenge. Hideous and heartwarming, they wanted nothing more than to forget the rest of the world and become something less wonderful than the books. She was raving about yesterday and ravaging tomorrow, with lighted fantasies and darkened nightmares, there was little left over from the plundering of pirates. Cheers to giving it a whirl in the middle of the eye of the storm. Waiting for rain at the top of the mountain, let the skies caress the back of your neck and give blood to the needy and hearts to the heartless. Its over for the best of them, but for the rest of us, we’re just getting started. 

With breakable silence that hummed incessantly in her brain, she understood that the time was upon her; thoughts like wildfire along the Tanzanian coast, the blood boiling symptoms became obsolete at the expense of her pain. Too little would not hold true when the many moons had set; but as so many stand alone psychics had told her in the back of gypsy caravan-filled daydreams "All that really matters is the now." Crystal balls and crystal meth could show her lots of illusions of the light and maybe, someday, she could count the nightlights easier than her track marks. But until then, she held herself on a Popsicle stick stained with watermelon juice and only made a mess on the inside. She held her head like a hero on the edge of the Olympian mountain and stood like the marbleized erection of a Greek looking glass God, Aphrodite or Persephone, waiting to wallow in the clouds instead of beneath them. She dreamed of the tops of lightning bolts and seeing the sunshine from above. Maybe someone up there knew she was extraordinary. She was drinking the drips of ambrosia that fell with vigor as she herself tried to figure it out.

Blue Lagoons

Blue lagoons are falling from your ivory tower
                     How can I key along the outer wall
of your
                           divinity?
It's hard to see which way miracles
conclude
              but allude
                              to the kingdom come
          and           it           will           be            done



The forecast calls for bloody rain
raining insides outside down upon
           our                                    sinful souls
It's harder to catch sight of the snow
                    when there is nothing to
                        hold it up                to

Young ladies peruse the silvery light
                    and flirt with the air
                          beneath palm fronds
quoting Juliet
                       to
            nobody who cares

It's just another French full moon
another silent night.

Tinker Toys

From the bottom of the toy chest, if you sat quiet enough, you could hear the slight wheezing of your forgotten treasure; once upon a time, they were the world to your tiny fumbling fingertips, sticky from left over lollipops and sneakily stolen chocolate squares. Just for a minute, or an hour, or a day or a week, they were everything you would need for forever. Their shiny plastic shells protected them from the walls and the concrete and the playground and made them invincible to the dangerous terrain of your innermost desires; they were a pirate map to the hidden perfection of fantastic daydreams. You could have held them for the rest of your life and never needed anything else.

Until the next one came along. And then they found the toy chest, right at the top, so their painted on eyes could watch you send all the love that they once owned into the next lucky one, playing until your eyes grew sleepy and your heart grew fatigued and you began to rub your tiny face and fall fast asleep upon the outskirts of your imagination. The lady would pick you up and slide you into your bed, as you slept, grasping tight on to the lucky one. They had all been the lucky one once.

But then the next one came along. And little by little, they would fall down and down into the darkened box, smelling of cobwebs, and memories, and forgotten promises. Once you had whispered your daydreams to them, held them close when you heard the monsters moving underneath, and kissed them with all the joy that your little heart could muster. Now, as you clung tightly to another, they felt the cold hard sides of the box of not-good-enough hitting their heads as you crammed more and more left overs into yesterday.

The tinker toys' lament played only when you had fallen asleep. You never heard, but they always hummed you a melody to lull you into your dreaming slumber. You never heard, but they always whispered goodbye when, backpack donned, new friend in hand, you skirted off to school to expand your thoughts and forget about them just a little more. You never heard, but they cried every time you opened the toy box to drop some other one into the blackness; all they wanted, every single one, even the busted up teddy bear at the bottom and the action figure next to him, even the slinky and the barrel of monkeys sitting on top, every single one was waiting for the day that you would find a toy and truly love it forever. But day in and day out, little by little, the box grew fuller and fuller until the lament was loud enough, for they all sang it to you ever night, that you would wake up and wonder what dull sound had roused you.

You are grown now, with your computer having cleared out the space that once held your Little Tykes play house, and your rock-n-roll music replacing your lullabies. There is a new darkness to your eyes and you've stopped playing with anyone at all. The toys in the box in the corner have grown too old to sing. But, from the bottom of the toy chest, if you sat quiet enough, you could hear the slight wheezing of your forgotten treasure; and maybe, if you opened it once, you would remember.