Tale of the Vanishing Artist

His footsteps, once upon a time
Struck soundly on the paved walk
In steady, even beats they rang
Into the crowded streets they sang
A chorus of ambitious thought
They did before, but now do not

His fingers, once upon a time
Performed their craft for crowded rooms
To raise the spirits of the saints
And soothe the souls of those who faint
A glimpse of hope to them impart
They did before, but now do not

His eyes, oh, once upon a time
Were brilliant blue and spoke the truth
Believing in a better plight
Believing they could set things right
Without the fear of falling short
They did before, but now do not

For once upon a time, it seems
He vanished into nouns and verbs
And faded into distant dreams
To still be seen but never heard
His soul translated into rhyme
His heart converted into poem
No more to walk among the world
But now, at last, at rest–at home

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Replacement

My heart
They took my heart
Replaced by parts
Lithium ion
Underneath

I move
But cannot feel
My life–unreal
I am stainless steel
Underneath

My heart
What have they done?
I miss the soft
I miss the teardrops
In my eyes

My heart
They took my heart
And what is this
My cold replacement
Underneath?

Audible Medication

Stat
We need a line
We need a dosage
This is serious

Quick
We’re losing vitals
Make it potent
This is serious

Melodies & harmonies
Rhythm & emotion
Feed it through the cables
Wired to my head

Cadence & cacophonies
Memories & tokens
Keep the beeping stable
Wired to my head

Zero Visibility

The sky cried “mutiny”
The blue jumped ship
Into a sea of white
And now it covers me
Like waves of pale
Awash across the light

The sun is drowning in
A tidal wave
Of color-vacant hues
The waters overhead
Have swallowed up
The last and best of blue

And we are left here
In zero visibility
A quiet rest where
The atmosphere collapsed
I must confess: here
In zero visibility
I’m better dressed for
My disappearing act

Beneath the vapor
In zero visibility
The clouds have anchored
The buildings fade to shapes
I want to stay here
In zero visibility
To hide away here
In blankets of the grey

Something About A Song

In the stillness of a small enclosure
An indulgent marriage of will and surrender
Provoke me to invoke a melody
From unfeeling devices
Spanning the depths of my soul
These merciless strains
All but rip the very sanity from my brain
Frozen here in some fantasy or fear
Or soft, warming loneliness that comforts and burns me as a potent drug in my veins
How can such wave forms transmitted
Across polluted airways and twisted wires
So thoroughly embrace me
As if the world were a myth that exists only beyond this painted plastic frame
But in here there is only me
Me and this…
Entity of sound
This invasive little parasite sucking the life from my heart and flooding my thoughts
And I love it
Something about a song
A language that at times seems too advanced for our primitive race
The blood in my veins
The pulse in my wrist
A melody
A sound
A door out of places with walls too think and air too stale
Something about a song
And I sit here at ground zero
The full impact absorbed in the fibers of my structure
For a few minutes raptured
For a few minutes at one
And then it ends
Life fades slowly back
Reality resumes
I reluctantly revive the engine
Wake up the roar and hum of this foreign land again
Breathe long and release
And drive away

Fashion And Fatalities

You wear your skin convincingly
As if it’s where you want to be
But I can see, oh, I can see
And nothing here is fooling me

You wear your smile so finely peeled
As if it’s how you really feel
But I can see, oh, I can see
And nothing here is fooling me

You wear that dress so confident
As to impress with elegance
But I can see uncertainty
And nothing here is fooling me

You wear your Jewelry like a charm
As if it keeps you safe and warm
But I can see you’re disbelief
And nothing here is fooling me

I don’t intend to condescend
As if I don’t know how you feel
I can see, oh, I can see
Because you look a lot like me

I wear my heart out on my sleeve
As if that’s where it’s meant to be
And we can leave, oh, we can leave
Because none of them are fooling me

Emerging (a restless sleep)

Whispers crawl under my skin
In twisting rivets driven deep
Beneath the softened flesh within
A rasping catch of breath and wind

Voices creep behind my eyes
With words of faded agony
Enshrouded spirits of the night
Entombed in tongue of ardent flight

Echoes dance around my head
With vague and unrequited hums
In quivers faint of lovers dead
They haunt the covers of my bed

Every dawn as I emerge
Reluctantly they break their cry
And silence for a time their urge
To wait for me ’til I return

Oh So Still

The teeth are out tonight
Just be motionless and quiet
The eyes are on the prowl
Making fearful sorts of sounds

But I learned early life is scary
Everything out to get me
Don’t disturb the silence
And stay oh so still

I learned early no one knows me
Everyone is cold and lonely
Don’t disturb the balance
Just stay oh so still

The mob is out tonight
Just be motionless and quiet
With torches held as swords
It’s a vicious little world

I learned early life is scary
There are secrets you should bury
Don’t leave any footprints
And be oh so still

I learned early life is scary
This disguise is necessary
Never let them see you
And be oh so still

But maybe just maybe
If I don’t move a muscle
The eyes will not see me
The teeth will not bite

And maybe just maybe
If nothing can find me
My silence will save me
And I will survive

Speaking To An Empty Room

It’s like a surgical procedure as I separate the sound
From the things I feel inside of me and how it all turned out
As I tear a little piece of me from underneath my skin
It becomes a rough translation of the state that I am in

Unintentionally
I opened my mouth
And the sound that came out was “I miss you”
But there was nothing to say
The room was empty
And it echoed it back to me “I miss you”

What happened
I’m talking to myself again
I must be crazy

It’s not that I
Don’t know how to live
It’s just that lately

Nothing feels
Like reality
It’s all a little strange

I guess that I
Have a lot to live for
But I just need to say

I miss you
Sometimes I just smile pretending you are there
I miss you
Sometimes I just cry for no reason at all
I miss you
I would not trade any moment I have had
I miss you
In the end I know it’s really not so bad

No one knows the way I feel
Except for you and this empty room
No one hears these little words
But it’s the least that I could do

Unintentionally
I opened my mouth
And the sound that came out was “I miss you”
But there was nothing to say
The room was empty
And it echoed it back to me “I miss you”

And I could almost hear your voice…

Tragedy Is In Love With Me

Tragedy is in love with me
And I’m in love with her
Can you see what she’s done to me

Tragedy is my bestest friend
I take her everywhere
We can be what we want to be

Tragedy is in love with me
And she can be so sweet
Everything is a fantasy

Tragedy is my nearest kin
I feel her in my blood
We can be what we want to be

Tragedy is in love with me
She likes to hold my hand
We make up when we disagree

Tragedy is my mirror mask
She always understands
We can be what we want to be

Tragedy is in love with me
She never wants to leave
Every evening she follows me

Tragedy is my better half
She helps my heart believe
We can be what we want to be

Enclosure

Interred in juggernaut walls
Rifted as it were from form well fit
By cause or catastrophe untold
Folded for wilting
Petals lain in tired heaps about this enclosure
Swept up in figure crumpled slumped and sunken in efforts spent
To rend mortar from brick to crack sick structured severance
Laced in loosely laid arguments
Spun for movements yet untaken
In desperation resolve forsaken
Trapped
But not apparent
These exits hid for time when waking reason sheds inhibition
When sense and sensitivity are molded first for what cannot be seen
Which here now resides
Bent in shadow
Drawn for eyes of brighter respect
Whose lenses cleansed again repent the disbelief in trade for what is made
Gentle fingers to trace the contour of this devil’s grave
In truth to discover the clever architect of such cruel monuments
Could not a tyrant be
If indeed as tyrants go a hand external this would mean
Entombed in grave remorse or faded course
For drunken charting in love’s throes
A figure fair and sovereign did fashion such a cavern
If not by reason
Then by lack of will to look beyond a cold unforgiving frame
To name an enemy unseen a thing of dreams or even more a ghost
But ghosts do not here dwell
And ghosts
Though present nonetheless
Do not the dwelling of the living form
Nor lay the bricks
A holding pen
If that is what it is that you are in
May rise but ‘neath the guide of only one
The one in which resides this mortar
This brick
This mob of walls from which is not a certain door
And so laid
Crumpled on the floor
A figure bathed in cascaded darkness all it’s own
To wrap in rags from sorrow sewn
A thing of beauty
A thing of bright elements infused
Of such a race that angels envy for their loves
Disfigured in despair by air oppressed and rent of rest
And yet…
Free
If by choosing she will be
Uncluttered by restraint to paint a stroke of brilliant light
Across a night in need of such
For out the darkness
Blushes paths untaken
Words unspoken
Exits formed of threads being woven by hands which built
Perhaps unknowing
This dim and dreamless dark enclosure
To unravel walls well fabricated
But not from necessity here created
A farce are they
By motion shattered with ease
Poor creature you are not caged
You are not clipped as birds with wings
You are not held within these
As always you are liberated
And have been since when first created
Birthed unclothed and unashamed
Untold untrained and untamed
To build grander things than tombs in which to cower from a world of tombs
A world of rooms
A world of flowers wilted in walls built
By hands not meant for such doom
By eyes fused with colors unreflected without others
Arise to face these juggernaut walls
And find them weak
Made to fall
Spend those finely sculpted hands on other tasks of greater chance and higher call
Lit from a fist thrown firm beneath the tired chest of these apparitions
Move and live and love
And in so doing be the destroyer
Of your saddened heart’s enclosure

Grey

I take comfort under grey skies
In the shadow of the storm
I feel better when the rain cries
And I don’t feel so alone
I would rather see the cloud line
Than to feel the heat of day
I am thankful for the sunshine
But I’d rather have the grey

24,901

Twenty four thousand miles
The circle of this sphere
Surely somewhere there’s a place for me

Twenty four thousand miles
And anywhere but here
I don’t know where I would rather be

But I would like to belong
And I would like to be home

Twenty four thousand miles
Across this speck of dust
Floating in an endless open space

Twenty four thousand miles
The distance between us
I want to set the galaxies ablaze

And I just want to belong
And I just want to be home

I want to tear apart the sky
Rip the colors from the leaves
Burn the atmosphere to static

If we could light it all on fire
Maybe then I could believe
We could rise up from the ashes

I can’t feel anything at all
But I feel nothing very well
Someone wake me when it’s over

I’ll either choose to sleep it off
Or I will blow us all to hell
I guess I’ll go back to the covers

But I just want to belong
And I just want to be home

My Heart Doesn’t Break

My heart doesn’t break
It shatters and splinters
It freezes and cracks
Like the coldest of winters
It melts into liquid
It trickles and runs
It heads for the sea
Where it waits for the sun

My heart doesn’t break
It fills up the oceans
It turns and it changes
Like innate emotions
Till sunlight assaults it
And heats it to vapor
It rains down like words
On the surface of paper

My heart doesn’t break
It shrinks into pen strokes
It morphs into art
Like things that we invoke
It comes out in poems
Or things that I do
I gather the pieces
And send them to you

Tear Myself Apart

Can you hear the threads explode
As I rip a hole through this open wound
I tried to heal but it won’t stay closed
And the stitches snap like a heart attack

When I tear myself apart
To expose my beating heart
For a lost and lonely world
Let the pain become my art
With the blood my ink to write
As I tear myself apart

Every sinew is woven wrong
Let me shred this tissue and break these bones
Call me human but I’m so much more
You can burn my skin but I’m deep within

And I tear myself apart
To expose this broken heart
For a lost and lonely girl
Let the pain become my art
We will paint our love in blood
As we tear ourselves apart

Reach your hand down farther and feel
There is passion burning there still
From this gash carved here in my chest
Till they dress me and lay me to rest

I will tear myself apart
Take the last of my beating heart
It’s a black and broken world
But the pain is my purest art
And I love you whatever the cost
I would tear myself apart

Happy Face

I think I need time or space
Maybe just a bit of both
To bring back a smiling face
Tonight it’s out on loan
Not that I’m all that sad
I think it’s the aftermath
Of crying too hard too much
And they don’t make pills for that

The pillows I sleep with know
Oh when it rains it pours
I turned all my insides out
There’s nothing to say anymore
But I’ll get along just fine
And soon I will find a place
To translate these tears of mine
And put on a happy face

Trouble has come and gone
Maybe it hangs around
I don’t feel like checking tonight
It’s late and I need to lay down
The world is an awkward place
For being a sensitive type
There’s too many ways to fall
And not enough help to rise

But I’ve got a drink beside
The bed stand where I will sleep
The headache will fade by then
Along with the rest of me
I do what I can to believe
The choices we make will count
For something beyond these dreams
It’s all worth the cost for now

It could be worse I suppose
And that’s what I tell myself
We have to keep feeding our hope
We have to keep up our health
When all of these tragic times
Have turned into history
I’ll look back and say it’s alright
It’s still worth it all to me

Giving Blood

Bleed me
Take what you need and
Release me
Make these incisions
So deep we
Feel it inside
when they cut
This is the greatest divide

Bleed me
Drunk from the pain and still
Reeling
I’d give the last drop to
Free you
Please don’t be scared
You can have it all
Promise I will be prepared

Wake up strapped to the table
I will keep pumping as long as I can
You can have all of this life I am able
To give you and then I will give it again

Bleed me
Take my inside out
And see me
I will not hide when
You need me
Here I will stay
Give what it takes
Till they take me away