The New World...

In sunshine
I squint and seek shadows

In darkness
I wish for illumination

When I write
I write like an asshole

Ummm...that's it.

To My Own Private China...

I dig all day and get very tired.

I know that I can work harder but I'm lazy, wistfully nostalgic and have a hard time focusing. When I finally put myself to sleep for a bit and wake up the next morning, the first thing that I do is go into the backyard to see how much progress I made the day before.

The hole is always filled back up AND has mounds of dirt on top. Who keeps on doing this? It happens everyday. I don't know whom or what does it but it's frustrating. Give me a hole. Just one day - all I want is a tiny ditch, a grave, a concave mark of progress. Maybe I need to be patient, maybe I need to take my vitamins with regularity, maybe I need a partner or to hire some cheap labor, maybe I need a better shovel, maybe I can transform myself into a Constructicon?

One day though, I'll walk into the backyard and a perfect grave will await me...and suddenly my eyes will flutter, my Coke can will drop on the grass, my legs will give, the world will fade to black and then......

Cocoon...

I can't recall the last time that I got out of this sprawling, ghost-infested, sad, sad little place.

Time to go.

Try Harder...

MINE...

(used with no permission)

ELVIRA
No--I’ll grant you, that’s foul: well played lad. But, no, this rank bouquet is far more pungent. Smells like sweat, tears, blood and longing, accented by strangled desperation and stunted ambition laced with a sticky film of broken, useless dreams.

SGANARELLE
Oh, that! That’s poetry!

POET MODERATOR
Ok, Roger, thank’s for kicking off our monthly drunken poet symposium with that wonderfully concise, reading. I want to welcome everyone tonight to our monthly poetry clambake where we all have the opportunity to share, through words, the joy and tribulations of what, our dear late founder Kevynn Malone, once described as our lifelong relationship...with alcohol. Though friends hurt you, lovers betray you, leaders lie to you and your pets die, there’s always one relationship we can count on in this world.

Snapping of fingers.

The Don Juan Project

The People On The Bus part one...

Me.

I was eighteen. That was a long time ago, I think. Maybe not that long. 365 days pass and then we allocate another point to the internal and external atrophy system. I was on a bus. The rest of my high school class that I recently graduated with was slinging down tequila shots in Mexican resorts while I was trying to not take poops on The Greyhound. My graduation present was getting kicked out of my house. My father and I had actually been getting along pretty well for the last couple of weeks. For us, at least. I was eating leftover chicken when he came out of his dark bedroom and into the dark living room and then walked into the dark kitchen that I was eating at. He plopped down an envelope with my name on it. Inside was a card with his signature scrawled on it, along with a check for three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars? Wow! He didn't get me anything for graduation, not that I expected anything, and for birthdays, I might get twenty-five or fifty bucks if I was lucky. I expressed my gratitude, thinking that maybe this was a combo-graduation-birthday-present-thingy. He told me that it was for moving expenses. I asked him when was I moving? I had twenty-four hours to leave, he said. Oh. He walked back into his dark room, and I sat in the dark kitchen, not really feeling particularly hungry anymore. I threw the rest of my food away and went into my dark room. Looking over a lifetime's-worth of accumulative teenage crap. Where the hell was I supposed to go? What the hell was I going to do? Did I really have to leave?

I did. By noon the next day, I'd thrown away mountains of stuff that really didn't seem as important to me as they did the day before when I had a place to keep it, and the rest that I deemed essential enough to keep got stored in a friend's parent's attic. I floated around the next couple of weeks at a couple of buddy's houses. Tried to stay out of everybody's hair. I didn't try to figure out what to do, because I had absolutely nothing to do. Where the hell would I go? I'd always told my father that I was going to get the hell out as soon as I possibly could but never really thought about what that meant. It meant money. A place to stay. A steady income. I ended up homeless and would sleep in parks or stay up at the only twenty-four hour donut shop in town. I'd smoke, write, and wait until dawn. Wander around maybe, until a buddy got home.

After a couple months of this crap, I finally decided to get the hell out of Dodge. I was losing sanity points. I bought a round trip ticket that was good for one year from Montclair, California to New York City. This was great because this meant that even though I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I could stay in one place for a short time if it suited me, go back to a bus station and get a new series of tickets printed out, and everything would be cool. My father, of all people, dropped me off. He was really the only one who could take me. He seemed sad, and this perplexed me. If he was so sad, why didn't he just let me stay for a few months, stop being the ass that he was, I would stop being the ass that I was - and then I'd get out as soon as I could when I was better prepared. I waved to him as the bus pulled away. He had his hands in his pocket and looked very old. I didn't know what feeling old was yet. I just felt scared. Confused. Unreal. Like a character in a movie or some cardboard cutout in a poorly written story. We were heading to Arizona, it would take all night, so I tried to make myself comfortable and quiet all of the hard voices in my soft head. I turned to my left and smiled timidly at the man next to me. We eventually introduced ourselves…

Oh, Kundun...

One cent for every hour of my working minimum wage is yours.

god(s)bewithye

I am messy
Disorganized
Moody
Distracted easily
A five year old
An idiot savant
Nerdy
Remorseful
Hopeful
Hopeless
And remorseless
Stuck
And marching forward
I am
Spirited
And vicious
Everything
And nothing
When
My heart
Keeps pumping
Maybe this tells me something
Or maybe
Nothing at all

Enders Game...

I had a joke about low gravity, dropping things on your foot and The International Space Station - but I lost it. I think it was lame anyway.