He gazed upon the ugliest
Visage he ever saw
Examined long the grim complexion
Counting each and every flaw
Of imperfection staring back
Confronting him to face his fear
A shattered ego in the mirror
Mind exterior appearance
No epiphany yet clearer
So exemplified his weirdness
Recognizing who he was
Again, yet honored in its presence
Just a beastly man’s identity
For all the world to witness
And resistance to his charm
Was all together a futile trial
Goddesses of loveliness
Would beg to taste his smile
And his mastery of how to be
His he himself alone
And all the muses in their vanity
Henceforth set him in stone

Must have meant
Something then
Same old
How could it end
What makes us
Carry on
Forward from here
For the whole world imploding
Dark nights
To appear
For the fear
Sinking in
I go through it alone
Maybe turn over
Every last
Perfect match stone
Before finding the one
If such notions exist
As an actual form
Or a premature kiss

Choose to hate me because
Choose to love me despite
What I get into thinking
Alone in the night
When by day
Just a regular
Cellular
Leveller
Revel in
Devilishly
Rendering
Relative
All my impersonal
Woebegone
Songs
To the rest of us
Just predisposed
All along
To be wrongfully
Righteously
Sure of our ways
So convinced
Moral rectitude
Isn’t a maze
But a page
In a book
Higher plane
In a prayer
Like a little lamb
Crams
To get in…
Doctrinaire

Fallback in my arms
Baby, you don’t want a war
You don’t want to drink and run
You just want to help the poor
Without becoming one yourself
Inside the portal gilded shore
To take you closer to forever
To a tune of Nevermore

Panicking
Panicking
Vanishing
Sanity
What would I do if she notices
Manic me
Banding together
With dissociation
Untethered
And severed from
All limitation
Though wandering aimlessly
Fathomless depths
Recollecting the cost
Of my countless regrets
In a frenzy
Frenetic
Warp portal
Distortion
Awoken
And dreaming
Without
Disproportion
Beyond
What this vessel
Could ever contain
Unrestrained,
Scatterbrained,
Cogitation
Unchained

Might make
A big move in my life soon
It’s something I’d tell you
If you were still there
At the other end,
Other side
Of this cell box
Sending signals
Replied
In our ongoing talks
Or just text,
Put it best
When it was a contest  
To see who was more loyal
To finding themself
This should spell it out,
I clearly lost
The heartfelt
And only regained it
When it was too late
Now just stalemates result
In this chess game with fate
And sometimes I still think
It was all in my head
That you didn’t exist
I was already dead
Or however explains
What this other autonomy
More or less said
Both to me,
And of me,
From your world to mine
So much more going on
In two lives intertwined

You think you have talent,
Uniqueness,
A gift
An instinctive
Distinct
Perspicacious skill with
What so few have made living
An art form reform
When they couldn’t conform
To the unwritten norm
For you’re born in a system
Demanding you work
But in love with a world
That inspires this quirk
Yet requires you keep it
Concealed and repressed
And you can’t pay for food
By describing depressed
Maybe meet someone special,
Who tries to relate
But however wholeheartedly
Fails to equate
What this practiced,
Precocious,
Essential component
That constitutes genuine you
In the moment
Is saying,
Conveying
With their still delaying
To find the right words
To recite as you’re laying
In rest
For the rest of eternity
Was
Just absurdly,
Assuredly
Lacking because

If there are no answers
And there are no truths
Should we look to the heavens
Or dig up the roots
In our quest to find purpose
And meaning, and peace
Is it simply the moment
We let it all cease
When the thoughts slip away
And time drifts into space
Staring at the abyss
Then we exit this place
For a world where the riddles
Don't need to be solved
From some darker matters
These life forms evolved
And join them you shall
In the stardust again
To guide us all home
As a constellation

It’s days that go by
I’m left wondering why
I thought living without you
I even could try
To pretend I don’t need you
Don’t see you now writing
Your likeness instilled
In my gloomy moonlighting
As some independent
Erstwhile
In-lover
With you it was always
Just being each other
But I was still lonely
Somehow
Didn’t hold you
As long as I could
Should’ve told you the words
Maybe you never would
For at best
It was care for you deeply
I feel
And trust me
I felt it too
Good to be real

Rendered expendable
Merits commendable
Just not the right
Fit for you
At this time
Heard it once before
Now
I can’t leave it behind
Wasn’t good enough
Failed
To meet standards  
Unfair
And availed no comparison
Income upscaled
But I’m making more now
Doing less than I’d hoped
I’m the office space coffin’s
New friendliest ghost

Millenia ago
The gravekeepers and reapers
Played games of shadow
Against peace and its keepers
And darkened the world
From the East to the West
And the eldest considered
Themselves to be best
But the pharaoh kid built himself
Up a sweet deck
Of the finest cards, taking him
Years to collect
And he challenged them all
To a duel to the death

The gangs are the left
I’m the master suspicion
She’s not coming back
Not a star
To be wishin’
Upon
So go fish
For a dish in the kitchen
Soups on
And the homeless
Are worlds away
Hoping
Soon all be revealed
As the kid
Interloping
Some empath,
A scribe,
Messenger
In his stride
Impish his
Disposition
The Pacific
In his glide
And his mind
Is awhirl
Wind divining
Declining
Empire
Design
For the architect’s
Shape-scaping
Wasteland of mine
But the tribe
Is his center
His entryway to
Centuries
Of rich heritage,
Culture,
And food

Thought I was afraid of nothing
And then I met you
Terrified to even feel you
And the things that you do
To my mind, you’re inside
I’m inside of your sky
I’m the wind in the trees
I’m the oceans you cry
And if knowledge is power
I know we all die
And I’d do it a million
And one extra times
To keep teaching you lyrics
Still muse of Apollo
And Daphne’s designs
I see titans and gods
On their knees to my shines
And sometimes I bang history bombs
On the side
‘Cause I see these machines
And I make them my bride
I’m the secret to peace
And in you I confide
In your poet-eyed nether
World LSD swirling  
Forever
My nevermore twirl
Ballerina girl

Vultures and carrion
choirs conspired
I rose from the rubble
Ground zero
Admired
Domestically terrorized
Seven-year mind
In an instantly shattered
My people attacked
As I learned growing up
How much history stacked
On the odds
One by one
Like it’s fun
Reenact
Having seen how they crumbled
So carelessly cracked
By the Fed
We entrust
All our currency
Backed
And I saw it all bolstered
By oil and greed
By the war profiteering
American dream

Can’t leave her side
Always on her
Rely
When without her
You cry
When she’s gone?
Can’t survive
Why belie
You are anything more
Than a child?
So eager to seek out
A care-taking lover
Replacing  
The lost embrace
Arms of the mother

We’re all a little mad in here
Inside the rhyming riddle realm
Where ravens are like writing desks
And jibber jabberwockies dwell
In incoherent babble
Metaphysically poetry
Identities in crisis
Heads will roll
As we let go of me
In search of wonderlands
Preserving childhood naiveté
The most peculiar dreams
Have come to party over tales and tea

We’ve mastered
Being busy
Being everywhere
But here
For in the now
Is seldom ever
Where we wanted to appear
Just something
Somewhere
We all more or less
Agree is good advice
But when we’re planning for the future
Overlook
The paradise
And present danger
Still contains her
Out of mind
And out of sight
So don’t pretend
To be awareness
Sanctimonious at peace
With every moment
In its passing
Without thinking what to eat
It all comes next,
It’s imminence,
It’s take it all away,
Within an instant
And you dread it
And regret it in dismay
When I emerge from the unsettled
Boiling kettle’s
Piercing shriek
I am the gravest warning
Storming
In your current lack of sleep

Spelled it out
All on the line
Crystal clear
I was not quite the same
Person changed
With you here
But who didn’t
Or doesn’t
Or wasn’t
Enough
For the person they loved,
Were unworthy to touch
And behold
And adore
And amuse
And delight
In the simple,
Sincere
Sentimental goodnight
And like each of the hundreds
Before were for her
If she’s even still reading
I cannot be sure

Still mystifies me
Denies peace of mind
In defining transformative moments
Confined
To unfortunate
Course of events
And gradations,
The vagaries
Replaying vague
Illustrations
Hallucinations
Just as faint
Of heart now
Just as broken
As spoken word’s
Surety vow
Maybe once upon times
Almost unrecognizable
Some grand delusion
Of love was advisable
But currently
Only counter-intuits
The passion we had
For its toxic pollutants

Do not bear
Fear
Or weary
My irrelevant existence
My request
You just reflect
My categorical indifference
Just admit it is
The best
Approach
To forming these attachments
Just confess
If we had never met
And memorized these fragments
Formed these habits
Would we have it?  
Or confabulate
A tragic
Would you even need
To know my name
Or tune it out like static?
For what actively
Is listening
But passively
Imprisoning
The confluence of ego
And emotion
In some other
And to oversee
Eventually
Imploding as their lover

Try to keep me from my students
I’ll be back with retribution
Execute
My education
Like an edifice
From ruin
For consumed
In long entombed
Devoid of purpose
I collapse
Without a point
Through which to put it
On this page
Within my grasp
I am aghast,
Must teach the class
That this divides us from the beasts
But has the power
To unite us
As a species that can speak

God is just
Existence
Speaking
Temptress of
Addictions
Tweaking
Tweeting ego
Complex
Seeking
Ever more
The sleepless
Counting sheep into the bleakness
Where it reaps
Its phantom tolls
Like holy ghosts
Rewrite the scrolls
In keeping
With traditions
Old as time
Just follow money trails
And find
Divine is not the maker
But the makings
Of the mind

Guess we weren’t worth saving
Or only that once
The pretense of salvation
Was dust into dust
Just to sire creation
Abandoned to fate
But still willing us freedom
To reincarnate
As you did
The deceiver
The charlatan
Prophet
Instilled with your Word
And imbued with your gifts
But like any man
Bows
Before my
Hieroglyphs

Searching for that spark again
For dark my all too willing friend
Seeps through this pen, as I the light
Become the world
And dawn my dwindling days from night
Resisting purposelessness urges
To expel emotion purges
Verses lacking luster shades, as I the waves
Become the sea
And drift so far away from me

And maybe I’ll see her
Tomorrow
Get higher
Keep hiding
The side of me
Thinks her a liar
Conspires to mire
In cables and wire
Desires to beckon
My seldom replier
And dire my poverty
Trauma resurfaces
Now she’s ignoring me
Pouring my worthlessness
Pertinent somehow
To what she was saying
Just take it away from me
You?

I’m not praying for
Paying for,
Graven decaying for
Graying in waiting
To fade in your nevermore,
Save to beside you
Still ebb with the tide you
And hungry and tired
Still strive to provide you
The vibes
And the rides
All the planets align
As the words that I choose
To define it arise
As a decomposition
Of nature’s demise
And the role that I play in it
Soon to reprise
God be ******
Glass of sand
Turns to weeping wasteland
And abandoned all hope
Check the pulse
As it dies
For its roots in me
Still yield
The apple of eyes

That further from her
Feeling grows everyday
At the edge of the land
Masses sinking away
We would watch the tides rise
And envelop horizons
Advise them to see it
On more psilocybins
Imbibe culture rich
Criticizing its glitch
And combine our diversities
Into this niche
We would thrive for all time
Within withering woe
Oh I guess only me
Wanted that deep to go

To even begin
With the end
Is an errand
In errantly
Erring
To bend
The mind to
The nuncupative
Limits
Unwritten
Are words
Insufficient
Explicitly
Stated
To explicate
Nothing waits
For you to feel
Copacetic,
At peace
With decedent
Fates sealed
What is real
But a 4 letter
Thought
Counter-measure
Distraught
By the
Fraught with pain’s
Ought to be
Pleasure
Sought out
Like unreachable
Pre-destinations
And preached
As unspeakable
As revelations
Of all it comes down to
Comes back to believing
That here in this moment
Eternally fleeting
Confers any meaning
Upon
What is being?

Free screechin’
My speech
From on high
Out of reach
And I keep droppin’ bombs
Like the gods you beseech
To surcease the truth-bleaching
How many we reap
To keep eye-sis on prizes
And dreams ever suite
Like the president’s penthouse
My skyrocket rents out
The tenements
Residents
Turned into terrorists
Level it all
For a nest egg
Resettlement
Watch the rest beg
As I hatch
Propaganda
My liberty spectacle
Extravaganza  
Commanding
Demand
In my talons’
Vice-grip
Watch me crush the life out of
Refuse to submit
And perpetuate conflict
Unscathed and unfettered
Without even ruffling
One single feather

Enraptured
Contraptions
Devices
Newfangled
As circuits and wires
In conflicts entangled
Move closer to further
From peace
Global order
To tech hubs and giants
Securing the border
With job loss creation
Dehumanized
States
And robotic connections
That make better mates
Than reciprocates
Costly emotion
Is worth
An economy
Planned
Obsolescence’s
Earth
In control
Of a streamlined objective
Uploaded
To all the collective mind’s
Function outmoded

How many words does it take
For the writer in search of
A novel to make
Before realizing he or she
Poetry needs
To be freed from the brush
Of the artist therein
And the vision imprisoned
In where to begin?

Not enough I suppose
Of these words would suffice
If they did you would see
My pristine paradise
But instead it seems like
I just write to ignite
An uprising demise
Of your country in spite
Of the plight we in common

Must actively fight

Abandonment issues
Don’t cut it this time
If I lose you
That’s it for me
End of the line
So I want you to stay
Want us both to feel safe
In the longing for always
The other’s embrace
Not just pitched
In an argument
Soon to forget
Soon enough
We’re conflating
It all as a threat
To respect
To the debt
That we owe
To the photos
To memories
Fade to pain
Only
Alone knows

And just when it seems
I’ve all topics
Exhausted
In detail,
At length
Have I talked of them
Lost in
My thoughts
Far more often
Than not
With the shocked
Interlocutor
Therapist blocked
Mentally
From me,
Minding the clock
As it sought
To conceal
What my gravest
Of weaknesses
Makes me reveal
What my deepest of secrets
Can’t keep
With a fealty
To what really feels
Is my truest
Admission
Of not quite contrition
But cuts nonetheless
Like the surgeon’s
Incision
To enter cerebral
Deficiencies
Fixed
By inoperable voices
Of whispered abyss
That a flick
Of the ficklest wrist
Swiftly snips
What I keep to myself
Like lobotomized bliss

Not about
Not seeing color
Azul
But we could
Start with teaching
The difference
In school
Not to make them afraid
But to make them
To think
Love each other
Learning how
We just do what we do
And I write to her too
‘Cause I knew
How she wanted
To truly see through
And this drew me
Ensnared
All my visions
Impaired
And my barren wastelands
Inundated
With scared
She could be
Happily
What I take to the grave
On a faraway day
When the lights
Go away
And for all of oblivion
With me she’d stay

This bastion
Comes crashing
Dystopian
Social experiment
Taxing
So prone
To mob rule
To upheaval
Amassing
But passing that off
For empowered
Is lacking
If all that amounts
To each other
Attacking
And in the ensuing
Hysteric highjacking
Of lives
Livelihoods
And our whereabouts
Tracking
We back oligarchic
Solutions
Divided
Or seek an anarchic
Conclusion
Ignited

False flags,
Fallen idols
Are flatlining vitals
Declines of empires
Who can’t feed their people
Distractions of
Factions of
Separate but equal
And even the pretense
Democracy wanes
Until only
The cash-cropper’s
Judgment remains
As the guild
Fixes prices,
Elections,
Opinions
But can’t repair roads
Lead to Roman dominion

Incorporeal
Spiritual
Entity
A million points of light
Single unit
Of reality
Reduced in half
To ad in-finite
Then I wonder
Who designed it?

Willingly
Wasting it
Your time and mine
The audacity
Making it
Harder to find
Someone real
Wants to feel
Not conceal their intentions
Or rather, unsure of them
Raise apprehensions
Just stay at home,
Be alone,
Drop the phone
For I’m not just some free trial period
Loaning
My heart out to harpies
Who really don’t care
Just aware that I’m their
Favorite game
Truth or dare

Now what
To say
Let it go
Old and gray
Growing cold
Starts to feel
As if slipping away
Is the only way
Forward
Into the grave lowered
And lower
And lower
Seems like
What I told her
A failed attempt
Saving grace
Breaking heart’s
Closure
If this
What awaits
Complete silence
Creates
Just this void
Ever-widening rift
Inundates
My already beleaguered,
Besieged
Peace of mind
Intertwined
With there is no
Forgiveness
This time

And there through the balcony window
Appeared
Such a beast
As the devil himself
Could revere
And it said unto me
A most cryptic refrain
In increasing vexation
I scared it away
But the next
Lonely night
It returned
To its menace
All perched
In the lurch
Echoing
Of my penance
And as I paced
Pensively
Gleaned its
Propensity
To follow me
With its eyes’
Dark immensity
Piercing
Most fiercely
My hollowed out core
Its now resident
Resonant
Cry
Nevermore

The newsreel continues
To capture the screen
And command my attention
But what does it mean?
I could see the same story
Unfolding, retold
By a hundred one pundits
And still never know
The significance, impacts
It has on my life
I just want to be sure
That it's still mine to write
But I guess that is why
I so hawkishly watch
And click into the ticker tape
Media clock
For the first of intriguing
Developments mentioned
Recrudescences in
Border kids in detention
Just an update
On the world I'm a part
Of the broad simulcast
Of its need to restart
Is my only conclusion
When natural disasters
Are just a school shooting
Colluding again
With some populist movement
And some celebrity scandal
Exclusive
But me the eye witness
Can't help but tune in
And remain so fixated
On when will it end

Don’t want to feel alive
So go switch off
Concede the time
Is not of yours
For any taking,
Any making
Of design
Refuse to speak
Don’t deviate
From fate
Is sealed
In shades of bleak
Rejuvenated
From the enervating
Make a living week
If you go seeking
Conversation
You might find
Only deceit
But when you try,
Revitalized
By what you say
Begets replies

I’m Mike
And this is my vanity project
The biggest bad bully
This playground
Conceived
A disquiet
Pariah
Orator
Aggrieved
Making ravens of crows
They’ve examined my brain
And yet still no one knows
Quite this kind of insane
Can’t explain
How the wolf
So avails his ambition
On lions
And tigers
And bears
In submission
How impossible precision
Of my mark
Is but a spark
And when you whisper
Wistfully
I am the echo in the dark
Harken back
To the exact
Unambiguous
Conclusion
And if my heart was still intact
I could depart from its
Illusion

For shadows are most
Inhospitable hosts
When you revel in devils
And settle for ghosts
You will always see evil
Subsuming the good
And consumed in delusion
Forgetting it could
All quite possibly,
Nay
Almost certainly be
All contained in your head
A threadbare
Lunacy

Performance anxiety
In the description
The job entails
Failing
The best self depiction
And multiple takes
Multitudinous breaks
From reality
Raising
The trust-falling stakes
For the part to be played
Can be made from organic
Emotions
Inspired
But sync
In Titanic
Romantic delusions
Dramatic displays
And cliff-hanging conclusions
Assuming the love
On a true story based
What its face value
Close up
Maintains when embraced
In its shadowy,
Naked,
Most vulnerable form
Just the same
As in costumes
And make-up
Adorned

Condensed tufts of vapor
Stuff,
Puffs white as paper
Misshapen gas mass
Passing at
Paces glacial
Through spatial glass vast
Cotton swab
Wads of wonder
Thin wisps of my wistfulness
Blissfully dissipate
To the gray
State of mind
Thunder, I ponder
Beyond, float away
And like sunlight asunder
I struggle to breach them
To reach out
And push them aside
And divine
Shining sanctuaries
Behind gates in the sky
An ethereal fortress
Some call it
The heavens
And fewer will glimpse it
With God’s
Omni-prescience
But all in attendance
From righteous ascendance
Believe it to be
Paradise’s life-sentence
Beginning
And ending
With serenade angels
And demons
Descending

No more the prince
On the hill
Over paradise
Peering out
Peerless
But vision
Was imprecise
Short-sighted somewhat
Naive perhaps even
Believing no influence
Waned in the region
No reason to think
Nor the proof to suspect
Usurpation awaited
And I would be left
But a pauper
A peasant
Cast out
From my castle
My kingdom
Comes under
Some treacherous vassal

Distorted shapes fade,
The faces age,
The pages turn
We make mistakes
Along the way
And from them
Lessons we have learned
More often failures
Than in victories
Still writing
Ancient histories
Concluding
In a moral
Nihilistic
Burning question
In reliving such a process
Is it progress
Or regression?
If for all
Of mortal nature’s
Human races
Have embraced it
In complacency
To sameness
In perpetual stagnation
Or if they, themselves  
Have ever been
Unbidden to its languish
Active agents
In its game
Or merely subjects
To its changes

Missed you a lot
As I drove off the lot
As I rode out of sight
To foreboding distraught  
Travel time is too long
Destination is final
Without you
I’m already
Dead on arrival