Jason and Jenni split up.
I knew about her
what/who she was doing.
There aren't enough miles to silence the rumour mill.
My old way was tempted to move on it.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm not the same person that I left behind.
Being new is difficult.
I just want to get destroyed at Havanas.
It just seems so sad now.
I can never go back. I got out. To go back would be to attempt to reclaim a time that passed me by.
I feel like my friends are just beyond a transparent brick wall,
I can see them but I can't get through. I don't fit.
Its like listening to Bright Eyes or Sublime or 90s alternative.
They were moments and those moments are gone.

We as humans are in constant metamorphosis and rebirth. We are constantly reevaluating ourselves and seeking to more fully understand our intentions and ascertain our correct trajectory. Meanwhile, the trajectory is the story and we're missing it. I am missing it. The one piece of the puzzle that I feel entirely definitive in is the fact that we are meant to ease one another's suffering. As I try to move beyond this I can feel the frustrating limitations of my humanity close in and I am left as dumb and simple as before. Trying to shed old skin is spiritually painful. Denying my base nature in order to strive toward a perceived "greater good" is a constant struggle. This is one of the main differences between my current and former life. I have an awareness of a larger picture beyond my immediate mood, mindstate, or desire. I have to wonder if this will lead to an overall strengthening of my character and utility or if it will merely serve to be a small sober stopover in an otherwise wasted existence. Everything is so well mixed with fear that I can almost fail to separate the two. How foolish that we should be sprung from the unknown and yet find it so sinister. How can we be made of the infinite possibility and yet strive every moment to control every second. Fear, in my opinion is the greatest enemy of man's ability to overcome and live the subconscious ideal that he has for himself.

I am too comfortable, this comfort needs to desist or else I will be trading one prison for another.

It is silent now.

Finally,

all
is
silent.

These words are mine alone.

A dialogue for myself and my creator
now only poignant discourse
or didactic discussion,
this is an end to the celebration of
mayhem.

It is time,
not to forget the past,
but to heal from it.
Let this be a salve for the burning,
a stitch for the wound.

Be honest.

No more superfluous speech and sentence structure
only raw reality.

There is no audience.

God guide my hand.

Plumbing the depths,
ploughing the fields,
riding the wave and
burning
the midnight
oil.

There's a simple joy in
kicking off your socks
after a long day,
in coming back home
after losing your way and
following feet first with
feet
up.

To laugh over hot tea.

I've closed the cover on bedlam
and met simplicity at
the
door.

And there is a lot more art in this
than every glass that I pressed
to my lips let
the record
reflect that I miss them but
I'll probably never be back there
again.

I don't know if I'll ever
see another yellowed day-after,
lying about and
tracing every scar.
Each bruise reading like an epic
and
every freckle, a
fable.

We are all simply energies,
dust in differing excitation,
being given moments in
exchange
for a higher
call.

So as dutiful conduits
we take up the plough
and revel in each pinprick
between the beginning and
now.

Light for my fingertips,
outside the night,
a bright white glow
and a
blue white hue.

How have you been?

Why can't you make it work?
Your body stayed so nice and
your eyes still
so green.

Yet nada is nigh.

How strange it would feel to count the rings
around your spine after all these revolutions round
the
sun.

You're still so much surface,
you never plumbed the depths like
I hoped you would.
You're a bramble
pricked onto
pantleg -
still in the mix
still around.

Come for the ride,
stay for the potential.

Tonight I challenged myself to say something uplifting.

How'd I do?

It's been a long time since I've seen someone beautiful.
Day to day, the typically deranged,
march past in their incessant sameness
each indistinguishable from the last.
The first sets the bar low for the next,
leaving me beige,
sparks of ecru
on a sandpaper sea.
It's been awhile since I've been totaled.
Since I've been spat upon and tossed out with the filth,
pitiful and propped up
by the rotting wood of the wounded.
Since I've heard the mournful symphony of bottle and can,
the sting of citrus on a glass split hand,
my red throat raw
with tobacco's pitch black
burn.
But I've seen the leaves turn over
in anticipation of rain
as the thunderheads rolled in along the touchlines,
the emphatic wind shaking hands with the blades of the pitch.
I've seen the flight of hawks as they scan the fields for prey.
I've tasted my own sweat on my own tongue
as my troubled past falls slowly
from my battered and beleaguered
frame.
I sleep the sleep of the dead and the free
dreaming of bawd and brawl
in sacred rest denied the wicked:
the rest of the redeemed.

Still,
it's been so very long
since I've seen
someone
beautiful.

After all these years, what strikes me most about life, when examining the array of its most defining features, is its inescapable bittersweet impermanence. No earthly creation, natural, or chemical bond, though having the appearance of being held dear or inexhaustibly strong, is built to withstand the cruel test of separation and time. Eventually, even the purest of gentle intention is given flight and released to the fickle wind of fortune, its journey now set skyward to find an individual path through the cold cosmos of fate. As these newfound wanderers set forth on this imperative exploration, they take with them a name, a face, a smell, a memory, once so undeniably alive but now irretrievably absent from the mind of the one they forsook for freedom. As time, in its typical and careless fashion, moves forward with unbridled alacrity and brings circumstances beyond control, the who of the world might be frequently lost, but, in this unavoidable act of losing, allows room for the soul's unique why to appear.

I do believe that I am seeing this larger picture, the why it all has happened since the start,
and what I am viewing
tends not to disappoint
at
all.

There were often mornings like this
outside my open window at 604
Washington.

A grey rain damp
black coat day,
served with side of yellow cab ride:
downtown Raleigh
late 2014.

Mud colored sidewalks,
the stench of modernity,
dragging feet and baggage
toward mostly habit supporting
servitude.

Fences and gutters
streetsigns and alleyways,
my flickering cigarette,
ashes in the wind.

Arrive alive. Finally, Kyla.

You tough as nails conundrum.

My love for you so thinly veiled,
so soft against your harsh demeanor.
A satin skin forced to thicken
when your husband's bones
were blown apart
over a foreign and unforgiving desert.

I loved you and your grief.
I love you still.

Words never did you justice
so I'll leave it all at this:

Congratulations darling.

Buckman over breakfast was always my favorite.

The Germans would have to wait
as bacon stormed our eggs of Normandy.

Buckman over breakfast.

Freshman frittata,
Buckman biscuits,
the world outside in a rush hour fit while
our hangovers drowned in tea with sugar.

Picture this:
A pitcher that
we drained but good with purpose.

Buckman butter,
Buckman jam,
Buckman: the morning's hash browned special.

Being anywhere with her was easy.

But Buckman over breakfast was always my favorite.

I wonder if one day
someone will read between my lines
and see themselves a bit in it and
find a place to
belong.

I'd like it if one day
someone would think that I'm all magic
and we talk till dawn -
neither of us feeling like we said too much.

Maybe one day
we'll call it even.
Not a me over you
or you more than I,
just even.
Even on the bed,
legs crossed,
knee to knee,
unraveling our minds and
tangled pant legs.

Just something calm like thunder over the plains
lightning in the distance
rains on the horizon
People and shelter in ample supply.

Wisecrack prophets on the lamp-lit corner
comfortable in skin and evasive youth
cars flying by faster than our vaporous cares.

One day,
yesterday will have been worth it
and tomorrow not so far away.

I see now that every home,
full of all or some we love,
is the closest to home
we'll ever be.

By my breath
through my teeth
against your ear,
licking and lapping,
raising your hair
against your better judgment.

I'm a bad idea
you're a traffic fatality
a tragedy for the papers
pictures of roadkill
at 4 am.

What's there to shout anymore,
all that rage against nothing
the fitful madness of fleeting youth
oxytocin is a liar
and time is a vandal.

We'll bury our forebears,
we'll bury our progeny,
we'll bury ourselves.

If we were to choose,
independent of reptilian tendency,
would we choose this?
Here until not
alive until dead -
tongues teeth and eyes
our fingers probing each other's orifices
trying to plug the
leak.

Building skyward while
wasting toward nothing
trying to stave off disappointment
one bed frame at
a
time.

Little bluebird
gentle jay,
slight of feather
most brittle bones.

Morning raven,
feathered black,
cut to rails
claw scrape on glass.

Rest near each wing to wing.

Two companions
hearts so dear,
strong
but giving way to
winter.

Jaybird fly to
the woodcock's side
find shelter
from its
shiver.

Grow old, content,
till dust again
mother moon gives way to
light.

Live your days
my gentle jay
and let the raven return
to
night.

I should be sleeping.

One of my greatest enemies is creeping dissatisfaction.
Another is self obsession.
Life happens outside the sphere of my own feelings
I just somehow forget it.

Just a few in seven billion are even aware that I exist.

I don't think I have treated many of them with as much dignity as maybe
they deserved.

That is, beyond the usual take off yours and take off mine.

I've always wondered about the true intentions of the people around me
ever since I threw nightly molly parties and
everyone rolled and rolled.
Eventually I had no real idea if they would have come back so often
if not for
the drugs.

One night Brutus took a picture of me in silhouette on top of a train.
I loved that night.
We would get high and walk the tracks to the concrete plant
sitting on top of the cars and just breathing in our carefree abandon
never minding the night ending soon
soon to be strung out at dawn
waiting for someone to make the move to leave.

I'm depressed,
stupidly nostalgic for something empty,
wishing I could reclaim something that ended long ago.

I should be sleeping.

Instead I'm marinating in a dust pile of feelings
wondering when I will stop being so dramatic
but secretly hoping
that I never
will.