I’m awake again now
And I have to get out of bed
Maybe its 2 maybe its 3 am
But just the same
I step out
Walk around
This apartment with the fevered steps of a mad man
In these moments, oh I know you Ophelia.
The walls of solace, silent, and stagnant
Around our troubled heads
Our love is indeed as brief
As we have been told
By men who madness seems to not touch
Because their desires have the longevity of steel
And you and I, Ophelia are made of clay
The water, I understand how it felt to you now
Inviting and cold
Able to sooth our aching feet
From the constant pacing
How nice it must have been to dissolve into its currents
To rid yourself of the heavy footsteps
Stooping on your heart the friction
Must have made your smooth skin melt
And oh, Ophelia I understand
How enticing that cold water must have been.

I loved her body
And I used it up
The parts I liked
I drank up with a fever
Of thirst
That left her
Dry and frail
And I would have felt bad
If I wasn’t so
Dry and frail
When I met her
And now I suppose she’ll
Go
And find someone else
Whose parts she likes
And after that we’ll both be hydrated enough
To look at the parts we aren’t so fond of.

Can I be cavalier with a heart
That doesn’t belong to me
Can I afford the same careless
Actions to be inflicted onto someone else
As I have inflected them onto my own heart
Will I not feel knots in my stomach
And pains in my chest if I allow
The dread in my heart
To stain another’s who
I promised to keep untainted
Promised to hold with gentle hands
And look at with kind eyes
To blow off the dust that settles
On it after too much time
Without enough use
I said I would love your heart for
As long as mine would pump
But is that promise broken
If the beating slows so severely
It severs the sound of the second hand
Tick of a tenuous time keeper
My heart as always been my keeper
And it’s working at a slower rate
Than is needed for oxygen
To run through my veins
And into to my muscles
Making my mouth lethargic
And unable to not be cavalier
With the words I love you
And to shy away from someone else’s heart
I promised to love till mine stopped beating.

The ordinary man
Is always, in part, the villain.
The supporting role for the hero’s story-
They are never adorned with
Fangs or ominous and dark eyes
Their evil is much more insidious
Subtle but complex
Within a man that could easily
Pass for the hero himself
If his bad days did not over shadow the good
If he did not so strongly hold steady
His own beliefs
So that he felt bound to bind them to others
We are all part hero and villain
What casts us in our role as one or the other
Is if we act on the small part of us
That fights to the death for our beliefs
In the face of the popular opposition.

I wonder if my mother ever struggled
With whether to give me roots or wings-
If she looked at me as a seed or as an egg-
I wonder if as a child she thought of
Planting me in the earth, letting me grow strong
In one spot she see could always see
And I could always call my home
I wonder if when I was born
She stretched out my arms
Noted their strength and deemed them fit to fly
From one corner of this world to the other-
To her, was I an impending tree or bird
I wondered if she wondered
As she pushed me out of her arms
But then I knew she always knew I could fly.

One’s own personal philosophy cannot be
Accurately expressed in words
Nor can it very well be spoken out loud
The only blueprint offered to guide
One through the psyche of their own mind
Are the choices they make.
It is in their choices do their stances stand firm
And their beliefs made to be believed in
I do not think
I will not accept
And I cannot support
The idea that choices are only two
They are many and they are often
And they change and they are tried by life
They are what shapes one’s philosophy
Because they are the things that
Torture out the truth.

There is no passion to be found
In small things
Thoughts, people, places
That cannot hold a word so big
A notion of human emotion
That can barely contain itself
It is not one for small things
Where the strongest of emotions
Are tethered by reins
To chariots hell bent on driving to reason
Passion is a horse that will never trot straight
Will never drink the water
Because it will never arrive to a lake
Passion drives itself- its master is itself and
Uses humans as little more
Than vessels to serve its own means
And I shout, “God, let them!”
Let passion use our bodies and our minds
Let this force stronger than us guide us
To places bigger than our small minds
Will ever take us to
Let us fall into the wild and live off
What passion has been thriving on for years
Trust an emotion that lives longer
Than we ever could and let it teach us something
About making a small life big.