Why breathe when you know you will die,
When you're drowning, why do you attempt to breathe?
The water ,icy and cold like a spike to the chest,
As the water slowly fills your lungs ,burning .suffocating.
When you are bleeding out why do you put pressure on the wound,
Why do you push as you watch the crimson slip through the cracks of your palm?
The blood spilling out. Bleeding. Dying
So next time you ask me why i love when i cant be loved,
Ask yourself why are you breathing when you know you will die?

for reasons unknown to me,
the urgent need to commence
this one with the words:

Oh man,

this is, this be, challenging,
but these words were found on the drying rack in my
abattoir, my nickname for my unending Draft Day
filings

and kept poking despite another overnight splash,
the product pool is full of creativity's synaptic junctions,
a wild night of up~writing, from god knows when,
and here it is 7:18, there are obligations, needs that
a demand a face to face meeting, tho the troops are
in their boarded beds, gently snoring…

                      so quick, to the sizable task at hand

the search is perpetual, not eternal,
for no one comes forward, willing
to admit, they have been around
since King David's time, practicing
this verbal chicanery game of using
words to guide the perplexed, unless,
of course, unless someone you might
know might be a big fat fibber

right about now, you're exasperatingly seething,
"where the heck is a poem gonna show its face?"

     well, and now,
     some struggle mightily, to ascertain
     who and what is their uniqueness,
     oft turned and twisted, caught between
          competing entities, asking quests that
           take lifetimes to resolute, and when
           you look at the typewriter roll silently
           choking the white cloud surrounding it,
          you, you want to cry/pray out aloud, who, who

shall I be, to make a completion between
the person inside of me. the person I think
                   I want to be, dream of be-coming,

and yes it is too, eternal, for as long as humans
can think dream, create and anticipate, we all
will nonetheless perpetually search for the other
someone, sometwo
in us…

Between drags of my cigarette,
I lie back on the concrete
and stare into the night sky.

The stars are beautiful tonight, aren’t they?

Not because the air is clear,
or that the heavens are unusually bright
but because tonight I see their depth,
their quiet elegance,
the way they gather into a canvas
stitched across light-years.

The way they align feels like perfection
a harmony born of distance,
comfort found
in the vastness of the abyss.

I trace the Big Dipper,
Orion too.
Not for anyone else,
but for the stone that cradles my skull,
for the roots beneath the soil,
for the spiders weaving
in the leaves at my side.

I’m almost finished with the cigarette now.
But some part of me wants to stay out here,
just me and the stars
serendipity
in their quiet, endless beauty.

We all gather here
Young old fat thin wealthy poor
Voluble or quiet
Shy or maybe bold
Even princess but no prince
No matter

We all write silent songs

Some saunter in
Bulging pockets stuffed with
Words
They pull out at random
Glue to the old chalk board in
Confusing stinking chaos
Then they name it poetry
They insist you must read

Perhaps they serve a garden salad
Leafy words already in decay
Which they sniff like aged cheese
And pair with white wine

Others fold origami poems
Engineered with wings
Toss them at you
Boeing planes of paper
That always bank awry
Crash into other words
Made mountains made seas

A few possess talent
Make memories into magic
Slip sly notes from desk
To desk
Where sly mouths silent
Smile back their pleasure
In the read

Here are writers who can write

All that kicking in the third
Trimester, about which
Mother proudly whined
Was nothing more than writer’s block
Ill temper in the little one
Writing and writing
Writing in the womb

Here are masters of the craft
Carpenters of line of rhyme
Plumb-bobbed poems
Straight and true

Like hypnotists on stage
Journeymen and women poets
May put you in a trance
While they sit at a distance
Safe before a desk
Not even wearing pants

They can make you laugh
At nothing
Make you weep with
Made up sorrow
Ask you count your chickens
Today and tomorrow
Make notes in the ledger
Only you can see to borrow

Yet

It ain’t no game
They can write serious
For serious people
They write of life’s big moments
Pick and choose the details
To whittle on
Bring emotions down to size

Sick with love afraid you’ll lose
That woman of mercury moods
Instead you marry algebra
An equation of partnership
New stresses multiply her storms
New threats to leave
Forever - forever free of
Love’s demands

Screams from the birthing bed
There’s the
head of a daughter
You hold her with new love
So strange, unknown, skinning knife sharp
This love……
You hasten to a toilet
To retch

A circle formed of childhood friends
Circled round a bottle Boys
Of aged Kentucky bourbon
For me it holds grave gravity
Drink a dram down my friends
Then another then another
Let us toast my dear dead Mother

A new job, new staff, new friends
Your marriage took a sideways slide
A big down and almost out
Employee Becky
Hands you her business card
Hand written- If you need anything-
Anything at all - call on me
Danger there……
And who doesn’t enjoy a little
Danger?

Do we write our own eulogies?
**** straight we do
Who better, huh?

So go fling some ash
Search my will for cash
Long ago
Such lies I wrote
Such praise I heaped upon
Myself
You may well wonder
Did they burn the wrong body?

curse the summer breeze,
despise the winter's harsh laugh,
this insanity is in every season,
the more I write, this invasive ****,
like the strongest tallest bamboo sticking,
drafts me again and again into the army
of just one more, and for every one I release,
a dozen more inventions, incensed interventions,
come asking, pleading, needy whining, but
for themselves only, not for me,
provide,
do not deny
them their own
new perspective,
an original fabulation,
and I remind them
of Balanchine's wit,
"there are only new combinations,"

and my mental thresher~combine,
explodes that numbered field,
of semi~scripted, planted
yet to be finished,
it only grows larger,
but not higher,
perhaps, sadly thinking,
but not better,

while my sighs of tired only grows louder…as my-race against  time, only shorter, the rat on the spinning wheel....
                                                       ­                                                    nml

when you trim your ***** and your mustache with the same pair of scissors
when you hand over your entire paycheck to the bartender of doom and glee
when you write a bounced check at the grocery store
when you sleep with a girl who isn’t clean
when you’re young, lost, broken and poor
when your childhood runs hard and your luck runs out
when your best friend is dead and your other friend is ******* your girl
when your dog sleeps in the afternoon and dreams of the neighborhood *****
when your nutrients gets replaced with Xanax bars over the one who just left
when your tired eyes meet the brick & mortar of strenuous labor
when the smile is so fake that it appears genuine
when you go all in on someone you weren’t 100% sure of
when you wait on bleeding knees for the unreliable god
when you bet on the boxer that crashed to the canvas
when the interest is high and the banks are closed and the creditors don’t care about grace periods
when you understand very little and you expel a whole lot
when the cord of anxiety strangles your very essence
when you turn out to be just as everyone expected

don’t worry

it’ll all turn around

and find you again

someway

somehow.

except,
when the old eyes tear, with the greatest of ease,

hitched a planetary ride round the sun, more times
to know that the square root of the human is not
his exterior, which without fail, grows and erodes
on a timed schedule not of his own choosing...

but the mystery that never ages, the arousal of
his base metals, when the women looks upon him
with a intriguing askance, tasking a masking of an
invitational challenge, a whimsy expression of hither

confusion is the reigning ruler, mining for her actual
intentions, the push~pull of her contradictions and
her puzzling diction, impossible to interpret until I
admit, jingle jangle woman, I'll come following you

this is a familiar newness, a fresh candle lit for burning,
and every time is the first time, so there you have it,
I'm no ******, but born renewed, when the heated heart
quavers, with the anticipation of the known unknowns

and the old tears free falling, she finds its puzzling,
even troubling, till she grasps my smiling countenace,
and my head, two~handed embraced as she studies my line~age,
my map of wrinkled experiences that whisper yes, I understand

and she kisses my forehead, acknowledging acceptance that our
paths have never until now crossed, what a delightful surprise
will be the reading of a unexplored map of our conjoined palms,
the greatest wonder be that surprise has not died, and I

with one hand waving free, welcome it all, and she grins at my
exuberant silliness, and that we choose to be with each other, on
a treasure hunt for a poem as of yet unwritten, but so so wonderfull
comforting that its mere outline and its composition~completionition

familiarity speaks of the good things that experience has brought
and now, again, will yet bend time to our wills and what fun that
will be, defying odds, reliving new moments unique, hot created,
and this adventure reinstills the awe of wonder at familiar unknowns

*that early morn smell of
buttered brioche  bread,  
fresh, virginal,
like the  sweat
we have shed
and laughs we,
just baked this
day

Smiling in my silent screaming pain,
It's like pushing the wall of hope in vain,
Then my heart aches to the bone,
Freezing me in the room to be alone.