Beware the bitter idiot--
That fellow with the sour
    Mind,
Cankered by disillusion,
And feelings of
Left behind.

So life may not be everything
As planned--
It does, after all, arrive in
Installments called the day.
One of these is enough to try
    To understand,
One enough for this thin
Vessel of stardust clay.

His voice is but a drone,
Nothing but rancor and filth
    Ride upon his tongue.
Complaint the engine of his
    Tone,
The wormwood ballad of
Pitiful woe he sings and has
    Ever sung.

He will not be mistaken,
For the street tough is at his
    Very core.
He will not allow to awaken
The malleable man of his
    Youth and yore.

And so this fellow who has
Shut his soul off,
Stands in front of his mirror and cries.
He's too proud to unhand the
Lance of the scoff--
Boldness is his favorite lie.

for Jeannie Kristufek Hawrysz who once quoted me Shakespeare -
"Of all the words in the universe, when stated thrice, only one royal above all gleams best, an uncoded mathematical tripartite repetitive stating:
love love love this."
----------------------------

third attempt and just not happening
then recall a Ben Folds hand-me-down
heard on Tuesday, passed onto me by Sara B.
about writer’s block

“Kick the editor out of the room”

the best don’t even flow,
they fall out of ya, rough and tumbling,
screaming did ya get that,
are ya keeping up,
you can be the self-editing-I need-perfection roadblock
or the delivery guy, the one with the towel and the scissors, who brings ya a clean new baby, and/or a veggie pizza,
which ya gonna pick?

another nougat nugget:
when you’re stuck, write about the block,
what’s sticking you; one would have thought
some one thousand five hundred poems later,
this one would have been midwifed a long, long time ago,  
but at 4:32am, it’s all I got

rather than throw false news confetti on myself
from the rafters that don’t exist in a citified apartment,
I’ll reward myself with some
rock n’ pop,
a revisitation to the scene of the crime, and listen quiet like and maybe leak back to prone sleep,
in hopes that the rest of the gang,
hoping the words to a  poem-in-transit,
“confetti is just tomorrow’s garbage”
gets off at my dreamy new subway stop


should the wordy birdies shotgun come sneaking in
thru the correct ear
i.e. not the sunken pillow one,
so I have half a fat chance of
recalling its dimensions in an hour, 
when I wake up-officially,


fat chance

later, like 4:56am

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2471979/confetti-is-just-tomorrows-garbage/

He is here.
Be careful of him.
He whispers in my ear.
Now he is in front of me.
He places his hands on my shoulder.
He ask what my brother said.
What did he tell you to do?
To ignore me?
To despise me?
Turn around.
Face me.
I am you.
Are you scared that the devil has the same face as you?
I was never here to begin with.
I always wore the face of you.
Are you afraid?
Do you shake?
That you are capable of disaster?
That you are an evil if you let it happen?
Blaming me for all your problems?
How dare you?
Blame non-existence for your apparent actions.
Love me.
Kiss me.
Hug me.
You’ll never find happiness unless you join me like your good apparatus.
We're one.

We're almost touching.
we were walking side by side,
you're talking about cabs in your hometown.
I can feel the gravity of your hand, calling my fingers
whispering "it's alright."

We're touching but not quite.
you held my shoulder to protect me from the passing cars.
and for the first time in a long while, I felt so fragile.
In this world where I find it hard even to breathe,
you believed me.

I almost said it.
All I need is one ounce of strength to tell you every single thing that I have ever felt about you.

I want to find home in your collarbones.
Would you be kind enough to let a stranger in?
I want to seep in your being because I'm cold.
The world is harsh and my cracks are aching.

Almost.

We have not fallen
in love with the second
coming of November,
but she is here
nonetheless.

How sad it is
that she is so
drunk on her sister
April’s wine
that all she can
do is weep her
frozen tears,

wail her chilled
misery,
ruining this year’s
garden already.

I would like to
be warmer,
no doubt,
but

this return will
be short lived.

So, while November
is here again,
I’ll pour her another
glass of her sister’s
best vintage,
join her on the porch
and offer her one
of my
cigarettes.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2018

that moment
when the worry
begins to seep into
my veins

that moment
when the pain
begins to play
tricks within
my brain

i feel my collarbones
and know i'll be

o k a y

read a thousand love stories,
pause, rest awhile,
read ten thousand more,
and then deny equality.

If you ask for no more than you can give,
you ask for not enough

love is imbalance not an equation,
with a single solution

love has both constants and variable factors

so you write of tribulations and tributes
so you write of lamentations and liftings

you think you are on the same page
perhaps
but do we not all read at different paces?

one of you is solid, one is dotted and dashed
one of you is straight, one is bent, forever curving

when you think you are
in balance
in the same place
in syncopation

perhaps you are for a moment
a calculus of one point on a trajectory

and you say I can only ask for what I give
and am given
and no more,
you have miscalculated

this flux
flummoxed
when the old terrain is flayed flat
but thru the windshield you see the
plateau ends, the geography unknown,

when you see unknown
when you seek the unknown
when you give from places you did not know
you had to give from
when you kiss a hand
for  twenty minutes more than than the one minute you intended
when you give more than is asked
when you ask for more than you can you think you can give
the imbalance is the only concert
the imbalance is the the only constant

how do I know this?
what are my credentials?
you are not a teenage girl,
what matters of what you know of these matters?

I am who I am
a diversity of man and manner
I am past prime and in decline
but this I know
for having failed ten thousand poem times
you must ask for more than one can give

but that's not fair!

silly one, still wretched confused,
even after one hundred
thousand poem times

you must ask of
yourself
more than you can give
and ask no less
demand no less

a body in emotion is not a body in rest
when the imbalance is too great or insufficient
then you write a poem
look in the mirror that cannot lie
and move
on
or
move
off

and begin to ask
yourself
to whom may I give myself
more than is asked
then you have finally asked
the correct solution to the
unsolvable equation