He spent the evening
talking with a poor Australian accent
to impress a strange girl
who couldn't decide
whether or not
she had a boyfriend
and on our way home
he told me about how
he liked to walk closer to the curb
in case he had to
valiantly
shove someone
out of the way
of a car
that had careened out of control
and hopped the curb
and he would martyr himself
to save those around him
if only because it would
save him from his
greatest fear
of dying and not
being known.

I thought about you
again today as I drove
past that one street sign
that says
"Victoria Road"
and I've always wanted to
steal
that for you
and I don't know why
and today I nearly did
but that's probably because I had
a little too much of this nice Merlot
(with lots of oak notes, or so the label tells me)
while celebrating a grandparent's 80th birthday
and I just thought I'd let you know you crossed
my mind today
before I go try and sleep off the wine buzz
before work this evening

I am aware
that I sometimes
write rambling
senseless
words with strange
spacing and indentation
and it's overall not very
good poetry
but it's a really
good way of cataloging
the thoughts that flutter in for a
moment or two like:

Whatever happened to
Emilio Estevez?

I could Google it, but I'm happier with
the mystery.

Is it really
any wonder that
our ancestors
looked at the
celestial sphere
they saw the seemingly
random array of stars
and instead of feeling
meaningless created
a narrative of
constellations
flinging
Orion
Taurus
and Ursa
at the temple walls
that make up our
night sky,
ever moving but
staying the same

A friend of mine
told me they don't
like to write poetry
because it's too dark
and people tend to
panic when they read it.
When they send poetry
to their friends,
the responses are usually
"are you okay?
let's hang out
I miss you"
As though to make up
for lost time and apply
social interaction to
staunch the bleeding
that has formed such
turbulent verses.

But perhaps if those things
were said more regularly
without provocation,
their poetry wouldn't be so dark.

The man
on the tv
grew a mustache
and I
wonder whose
permission he had
to get to
be allowed
to do so
as long as it doesn't
clash
against the throbbing
backdrop of green and blue
while neon gods
play America's game
and Christmas is in between
trying to sell me Bud Light

Write your poetry
like accusations for
crimes never committed
against the love you hold
dearly in your heart
better than anyone has ever held
you in loving arms
and write your poetry
like bottled messages
floating adrift in the endless sea
we call loneliness
and hope that you may bump into
someone out there
even if it breaks the glass and you both
sink
you won't be alone
and write your poetry
like some vigilante cowboy
from days past
and treat each letter
each word
each line
like a bullet that will
always meet its mark
and save the day
so that we can all ride into the sunset
happy and free

at least
until someone changes the channel

I've walked by that
park
once in the last
four years
baseball speckled
and bloodied concrete
visible only to those
who lived it
and I can't help but
think of how the world
is awash in great strokes
from the mental paintbrushes
we all wield
in trying to make sense of
our own existences
and I won't ever see
the glory in what you see
but I won't ever try to peel
away those layers of paint either
as we need the artistry of
our nostalgia to cover all the
chips and scuffs that appear
when you're not looking

Monday again
and the wheel
is flinging mud
and my sister is
frantic because
my brother might
be joining the
Church of
Satan
which isn't much
of a
threat
in and of itself
and I need to go
grocery shopping
but instead
I'm trying to put
my stress
into verse
as a means of
emptying
the overflowing cup
that holds all of these
thorny blessings

My words feel
bloated again
and Regina Spektor
is on the TV singing
about love and heartbreak
better than I ever could
and I have no piano
accompaniment
to make this hurt
seem somehow romantic
and somehow beautiful
instead of the
ugly rasping
that has rubbed my
thoughts raw
with memories
of lost times
and fantasies
of reconnecting
and it hurts
extra to realize
that of all these
people
these best friends
and loved ones
lost to time and circumstance
I realize that
there's not
a **** thing
that I want to talk
to them about
and if we're being honest
here
because poets are always
honest
I miss the idea
of these people
but not the people
themselves.

A lot of poetry
comes to me while I'm
driving
because theres
an awful lot to take in
on the road.
Like the woman in the
minivan who came tearing up
out of the ether like Death himself
only to cut me off
and I couldn't even be mad
about it because
She had a life sized rabbit
stuffed animal collection
on her dash board
and before I could even guess
where she got them,
there's a guy leaning out of his
truck flipping off another person who
is texting while driving
and I think back to what a pastor
told me:
"If you want to see an example
of original sin, just go drive on the freeway"
But to me,
freeway driving
is just high speed poetry
waiting to happen.

We continue to act as though
we humans were the first to
discover the beauty
of nature
and that the birds
haven't been singing
about it since the
first little Finch
chirped and created
music as we know it

it is easy to hoard
scars and hope
that the collection
would deter others
from wanting to provide
new ones
but eventually all that
scar tissue
binds up and
you stop being able
to move

Some things in my life
will never be transferred
to poetry
because they were
only pain
and nothing more.

Which box do I check
when born an anomaly
a paradox
to a white supremacist
father
and a Mexican
mother
and not looking
much the part for either
half
since I don't speak Spanish
and don't like Nascar
I reside in a gray
area
like the empty space
between the boxes for
white
and
Hispanic
and I feel like an
outsider to both cultures.

It's not that
I have troubles
with people
it's more that
I spend far too
much time
putting words
to made-up
fantastic landscapes
and scenarios
because I find
people so much
more interesting
when they're hiding
in the rain

The problem with
living
in a sort of
fantasy world
where people
live like
fireworks
all passion
and fury
burning eternally
after the story
ends is
just that

the story ends

and you're left sitting
on the couch you
bought on a five dollar
budget
with no adventure
lurking over
the horizon
other than the
commute to work
the next day
in hopes that
something
amazing
will happen

I sometimes catch
my eyes and mind
latching onto the
Autumn leaves
all bathed in the
inherent frailty of
change between
life and death
and I remember how
beautifully you crumbled
like a forgotten statue
of a forgotten temple
with only rubble
and dead leaves
crunching underfoot
as reminders of what was.

The stories you tell
and the stories
you live
remain endlessly
untitled
in their retellings
only to be quantified
and labeled by those
who can only read them
but never experience
how they truly went

"I've got a good one
working
my dear,"
I said a bit louder
than a whisper,
"I can feel it rolling around
in there."
"A poem?" She asked
and it was beautiful
and it was perfect
and then the poem was
gone.
and I couldn't find the words
so I looked around the library
to see what words would
spark
and the sign on the copier
bellowed
NO PENNIES!!!!!
which is fun for a title
and a sign on the wall
wanted to introduce me
to Muslims on the 26th
but at the end of it all
I was surrounded by endless words
while at a loss
for my own.

I can't stop thinking
about a stranger
from my graduating class
who killed himself a while back
and how he was a quiet type
and had a cloud of hateful rumors floating
around him at all times and
a few years back he took a shotgun
and you know the rest
and all I can think about is how
there are a thousand people
on his memorial page on Facebook
all reminiscing about their time
with the boy they ignored
but all really cared about
deep down
and it makes me afraid of death
because I don't want to be remembered
on some page that gets filed away
with all the other pages and groups
and noise
about buy/sell/trade
and swap meets
and the latest crazy wrap thing.

I remember this
time I was walking
down a hallway during
my schooldays
and fumbling with
what was currency
among students
--chewing gum
and I had paid
a dollar fifty
for this pack of cinnamon
gum
so when a person
with whom I’d spoken
twice
came up to me and said
“yo, zach, gimme some
of that gum”
I said
“Hell no.”
and he asked why.
“Because I don’t like you!”
and the collective shouts
of ooh’s and ****’s
made me feel as though
I had done something
both great and bad
and the reality was I didn’t mind
the guy at all I just didn’t want
to continue having the discussion
but I wondered if I hurt his feelings
and if the cinnamon gum was worth
the endless re-tellings of me being rude
to a perfect stranger
and a little part of my
soul crumbled that day
all cinnamon and fresh

The blood in my veins
is as frozen as the
sap in the trees and I can't
come up with a better
analogy because my
head hurts from it
being so **** cold out
and I get depressed
when I see pictures of
lush
green
landscapes and
I dream about the warmth
of the sun
because there's nothing
green around here
other than the green
I spend trying to keep
myself from dying of frostbite

and yet

there's always a guy
walking around in shorts
and a tank top

Some fool once
suggested
that I start to
carry around a
little notebook
to write my poetry
in whenever
inspiration strikes.

I'd rather not live like
a
caricature
all scribbling melodrama
in the corner of darkened
bars and seemingly
unable to work out the mystery
of women
and exuding an infinite
aura of depth
to draw
the eyes of strangers on
a passenger train
as I ride from mystery
to mystery

the fact of the matter is that
there are
no ******* trains
in this town and
there are no picturesque
vistas with which to fall in
love
but rather an endless
array of fast-food
joints
and thinly disguised
bigotry
and the neon red, white and blue
gets nauseating after a while

truth be told
I had a notebook
once
and a stranger came up
to me and asked me what
I was writing
and I said "poetry"
and he laughed
and sneered
and said
"oh, SOMEBODY is getting cultured!"
and I learned at that point
that more often than not
"nothing" is a good answer
for strangers and that
my poetry is better kept
in my head until it is time
to type it all out
because writing poetry is not
a spectator sport for me

my poetry is a *****
little secret between
myself
and the few who care and
my thoughts are not a persona
I am not a performer for strangers
in an endless act of
"more cultured than thou"
I write for me
and
notebook or no

I am a god ****** poet.

This summer vacation
I chose to write poetry
and someone told me
that I'm not the worst
at it because I am a human
and not a Vogon
and I spent my time standing
on a digital street corner
shouting my threnodies
into the digital white sky
to join the cacophony of
suffering
and healing
and dwelling
and moving on
and of love and hate
and how
the thought of you keeps us up so
god ****** late
that we forgot to set an alarm
and were late to work for the second
time in four years
but in the darkness we
are huddled
bleeding binary
into words of hope.
Rise, rise
and shine
better than the sun ever could.

I appreciate the
fact that
I'm able to stand on
the corner here
and *****
and *****
and moan
and complain
and it's being
accepted as
poetry

I have a tremendously
cinematic memory
all sepia-toned
and the good moments
are surrounded
in perfect lighting
and orchestral swells
and the bad moments
are filled with endless
drum beats
and I imagine one of my
mothers as Judy Garland
and my father as Ernest Hemingway
and it makes it just
a little bit easier
to understand how
they were so consumed
by their ambitions and
their self-destructive
tendencies

One hundred poems
one hundred fractured thoughts
spawned by less than one hundred heartbreaks
but I suppose a city hit by a magnitude 8
earthquake
is worse off than one hit by one hundred
at the level of magnitude 2.

One hundred poems
one hundred running narratives
all telling a story that's some truth
some lie
and a whole lot of pain.

One hundred poems
and someday I'll be one hundred years old
and tell a story to a stranger on a park
bench in which I describe how writing
can help the soul mend itself.

She had eyes
like the Devil's Accountant
always making sure
we were up to some good
and I never thought she'd
find me
while I did some sleeping
in the grass
of an empty lot
in the old neighborhood
and of course the
divine punishment was rich
with irony
and pure and good
as is the case when one
inflicts the best
sort of pain

the kind of pain that
teaches a lesson

I seem to have
lost
form and structure
and spark
and fire
and the words
won't come when
I call

Is this what it's
like to be alone?
To be without?

Where are the words
when I need them most?

There's too much
noise sometimes
and all I can think
about is my friends
rambling in corners
scrawling Confucius
across Facebook walls
trying only to be heard
and taken seriously
through the wisdom
of people long dead
in lieu of facing the
instant rejection of
developing a unique
personality in a sea
of cynical personas
where it's better to
have never loved
than to admit that
you are human.

I.

It had taken something
like fourteen hours
for the devil
to make a cake for her
perfect daughter
all custard-filled
and chocolate
and I threw it down the stairs.

Not that I was trying
to do so.

II.

It's just that
I slipped
on a rogue sock that
had made its home
on the sixth step down
and when I lost balance
I instinctively extended
my legs and
l a u n c h e d
myself into the musty
cosmos of the basement

And for a brief moment,
I was Superman

III.

"Great, it's in the
******* carpeting"
was all she had to say
as I lay gasping on
the concrete floor of the
basement,
pain blooming in
my side
and for a moment
I thought that maybe I deserved
to the pain because
I broke the cake.

Either way,
I hid the pain in my side
for weeks
and haven't
eaten chocolate cake since.

IV.

My side doesn't hurt much
anymore.
And my soul burns a whole lot less.

They say you
can't
truly know somebody
until you
see them
hurt
so I write
these words
and peddle emotional
****
for the lonely ones I'll
never meet
in an effort to
better get to
know myself

Human beings
being human
always looking
with despair at
the sheen
from which they
stumbled
always swearing to be better
than the previous people
as a means of rebellion
against existence itself

Perhaps we
could take
a lesson
from the
surgeon
whose knife
excises
any and all
inconveniences
from her life
standing knee deep
in fictional blood
spilled over
fictional drama
where
"just being honest"
is a license
to maim
and otherwise
eradicate
any answers
other than
"yes ma'am"
because like
a malignant tumor,
dissent messes
with the
clockwork equilibrium
of the idyllic
life in
chronic
glittering
suburbia

When you told me about
how you had hit a low
and a Gorillaz song
led to you taking the
blade
to your skin
I remember hitting you
because I felt betrayed that
you were self destructing
faster than I was
and I didn't want to be left
alone
burning out in the sky,
a novel constellation
for people who always had it better
to look upon
and cheer

Death my darling
I keep writing you
because I'm finding it
harder
and harder
to talk
to people
and not feel
empty

"Kiss me, Judas,
for I do not wish
to be alone"

the Dramamine
won't stop the vertigo
when one is floating
to this heaven
where someone must've
left the thermostat up
because it's a touch
warmer than usual
around these parts

They told me
to think more
positive thoughts
so I described the
movement from
a perfectly good day
to a severe depressive
low was as exhilarating
as being on an
out of control tire swing
attached to a tree that
was half dead
and they told me I needed
to take it more seriously
or leave.

I don't even own
a wall clock
yet I keep hearing a persistent
tick-tock tick-tock tonight.
Maybe it's because it's one thirty
in the morning and I should be asleep
but instead I'm writing poetry
to relax and take my mind off of things
with the added benefit of validation from strangers
who think that my words are pleasant to read
even though my poetry feels like a big run-on sentence
to me and all of these poems are a part
of a larger, more coherent
narrative but all I can do
is amputate and crop
here and there
and break the hands off of the wall
clock that I don't own
in the hopes that for
an unmeasured moment,
my mind will be clear from all
the white noise
that tick tick ticks
away,
hurtling at
one second per second
into infinity.

Music pulsing in my ears
and even though it's a sixteen minute
song,
I feel like my time is running
out as I plod along
the near empty historic downtown
on a sunday evening
and I'm feeling antsy
and on edge
for some unknown reason.
I round the corner while
my eyes are distracted by
endless daydreams of heroism
and death
and I run into a bush
and in my panic I flail at the non-burning bush
to scare away any gods that are going
to tell me that I need to tell people
how to live their lives
but I had McDonald's for dinner,
so I really can't be trusted
with that sort of thing anyway.
All I'm left with is a scratched up hand
and a blank sky with the stars as
endless eyes
staring blankly at my hysteria.

He's making
a list
he's checking
it twice
he's here to tell you
that Bud Light tastes
best when served over
ice

Merry Christmas®

santa has been
hired by the NSA
and [insert threat here]
is on the naughty list
this year so
you'd better keep your
nose to the Good Book
or else santas elves
are going to have to
enforce martial law
on you and your little
protesting buddies
for resisting the
american dream

all
Coca-Cola Red
Lily-White
and
Bud Light Blue

"she looks like she's got her life together"

"I think he wants to fail me"

"I haven't studied for a test since middle school"

"I don't love him like that but he's nice to keep around"

"Well she got what she deserved"

and so on
and so on
and so on
ad nauseam

It's a marvel
how often we'll
choose to share a
drink with
the devil himself
in lieu
of drinking
alone

There's more
static in the air than
usual
and the faintest
signal is trying to
get through
to our novelty Garfield radio
but I'm not sure you want
to hear it
or if we're just gonna
watch TV instead

I read somewhere once
that sailors on the open sea
would often see mermaids
in the water
and I find it so
delightfully human that they tried
to find wonder and amazement
out where no human life can thrive
and perhaps the mermaids were an
anxiety
or a reflection of the lack of humanity
in the open sea
like how we reflect ourselves off of smoke
and mirrors through hallowed halls
of social media and shares and tweets and likes
to give the impression of humanity
where
there is none
to be
found

Why is it that
we romanticize
self-destruction
and buy so heavily
into the archetype
of
tortured artist
tortured soul
and since when did suffering
start to be used
as validation
and survival
and resilience
ignored
as we try to
collect and count
our scars,
only trading them
when something is
to be gained

one of the greatest
mysteries of my
life
revolves around
a dozen roses
and a card that read:

"for crying out loud..."

She liked to
decorate with
makeshift gravestones
and shrines
for those around her
who had died
but still walked
the earth
unaware

I used to live
(and I can say that now)
in a town that I hated
where the police were
perpetually parked in church
parking lots
ready to mete out divine Justice
to those who drive a little too quickly
and the people smoking outside the bars
go silent and glare as you walk by
giving the impression that
you were the topic of conversation
and even though you know it's not the case
you still watch your back
lest you be dragged through
the mud of the community Facebook pages
because this is God's country
and you can be exorcised
for cheap