I need to write a letter, in curling cursive blue,
and mail it to me, it doesn't matter what the words say
I just want to see them scrawled on the page, to remind me
I am seventy minus eight, and my symmetry in script
is increasingly askew

I know this
when I press ******* the pen,
when I fold the paper, lick the envelope,
and drop it in the blue metal world where its flat life
commingles with strangers until it comes back to my red and white box,
into my black and white life, where the average of the two is gray,
the growing, groping color of my beard,
and the hair on my heaving chest.

I need not even open it to know I have forgotten
what secrets I writ...the name and address suffice,
showing me not who I be or where I be, but how slanted and sloping
my world has become, no matter how vainly I endeavor to keep things straight,
of late, and more tomorrow, my dysgraphic lines
tell the truer tale, in the simple scribbled letter
I wrote to me

Laughs echo down
the halls around you.
Your are seperated from
the happiness.
You have to remind yourself:
I exist.

Everyone around you
is talking.
You are seperated from
their madness.
You have to remind yourself:
I exist.

Lives seem to move on
around you.
You are seperated from
the adventure.
You have to remind yourself:
I exist.

In night and day:
I exist.
In time and history:
I exist.
I have flesh and a heart:
I exist.

As painful as it is to walk, it's the most beautiful thing.

A million times to say
goodbye in this life,
over and over again.

Empty rooms,
windowless pains
oh, I'm going insane.

I've lost the patience
to believe
when everything
crumbles at my feet.

Even in the night,
there's no end to the fight.

Three years ago,
home wasn't home anymore.
When your front door step isn't the same
or your secret hide outs don't exist furthermore,
it isn't home.

"Home is where the heart is",
my mother once said.
She told me to be happy because we are together as a family.
But what happens when
family isn't family furthermore.

More than three years ago
family wasn't family anymore.
When alcohol,
hospital visits,
poverty,
and pain seeped through the cracks of our roof,
we all broke apart like
shards of a broken glass.

***** lies drip from the walls
on the foundation we call home now.
Anger unleashes through their mouths and hands.
"Forget its" have become a process for breathing.

Three years ago, my lungs filled with holes.
They are rotting with the time and tearing apart by the hands of, not only my demons, but everyone else's.
These demons sense my weakness,
my vulnerability.
So they feed off of my broken eyes and make their way in through the cracks.

Three years ago I lost home.
Family.
And myself.
Where is the heart now, mother?

In The Broken House.

I lost my mother a long time ago.
But you see, she is still breathing.
Still here.
But is she alive?

Bottles of wine stack up,
one by one,
on top of broken promises.

Pills are disappearing
but we all know
where they go.

"You call yourself a poet? A writer?" You said to me,
last night after I told you
how I feel.

So the poems I left for you,
I took away.
The book I've been working on,
I took away.

You said it four times.
The first time, I didn't actually believe you did.
The second time, my eyes ran cold.
The third time, I walked out the door.

The forth time, I realized you weren't
my mother.