Back behind the machine, I worked into the poem. It had been awhile for me. The poem was a good animal. Faulkner had said that novelists were failed short story writers, and all short story writers were failed poets. Which was utter nonsense. Poets were filled with less longevity in form, and they concentrated more color into smaller spaces, and aside from a handful of them that moved me, I thought that most poets were terrible at it. I’d started out writing poems as a younger man, a child of that handful of poets, and Faulkner wasn’t one of them. As I became older and moved into more experience, the pages grew into stories, and they grew into novels. Now it was a trip back and forth between the two, but the poem was still important to me, it was the blood that ran beneath the veins of everything that I did behind the machine. The years of poems had built my base, and whatever grew from that toward the sky was only as strong as the feelings the poems gave me. I had hundreds of pages of poems on file, and maybe one day I would submit them, but maybe I wouldn’t. And there I thought about aphorisms, axioms, the priceless words of the greats , which always made me laugh a bit, because when a man does nothing but plays with words for a lifetime, he’s bound to come up with a few stones from the mud. Not to say that the words of great writers hadn’t put the world where it was, because they had. But the way people hung on the ideals of others just because they were reading them in print, it halted independent thought and went beyond reference, which is all information really is. For every wise sentence another person gave you, it was there as a stem for your own enhancement, or intelligent debate, not something to be lived by. All of this triggered a memory of a moment, in a bar in Portland, and I wrote it, about back in my early thirties, after I had quit smoking cigarettes –one, because I thought that it was a disgusting habit−and two, because I didn’t want to keep feeling like crap−and three, because I thought that it lacked grace. And it wasn’t hard to quit, they just tell you it is. But after I’d cut them out, I sat in a bar with a buddy of mine, who lit up and shook his head at me, and relied on a paraphrased dictum from Abraham Lincoln. He shot the smoke from his nostrils and looked at me arrogantly: “Every good man has a vice.” “No, every good man had a vice.” I sat there remembering, and let the words pour down the page in broadside, free from structure, and the old rush came back. The opaque blood that might have started to filter into the bloodstream was colored over again, just for good measure. But I wrote about the bar, my friend, who actually had a rare condition of being born without enamel on his teeth, and the gears engaged until the oil cycled through. I wrote a grip more, some about present day, some about Los Angeles. It was good to check in and feed the flames.

beneath this barricade of broken bones

behind this shroud of scarred skin

stuffed inside organs

spilling out of arteries

there is a garden of wildflowers

watered by the tears I didn't cry

growing from the depths

of my undiscovered soul

housed by the greenhouse

of my abandoned lungs

there are vines overtaking my spine

I feel the itch of soil behind my eyes

and I know no one will see

the beauty within this skeleton

i.

my eyes are red.

hers are blue.

she holds me and

reminds me that

we both see things

from different

perspectives.

ii.

she says there are galaxies

growing between my

shoulders and stomach.

that beneath

my saltwater skin

there are stars

sprouting out of

my spine.

iii.

i have ripped open

my flesh and

unzipped my throat,

and i still have not found

the milky way.

my eyes are black holes.

hers are blue skies.

she tells me i can't

see my own beauty,

like the wonders of the

world inside my lungs,

or the universe blooming

underneath my ribcage.

she says you are

what you love,

but i do not

love myself.

Underneath our flesh and bone, I believe, is our “story,” kinda like a tree when you count the rings in its trunk. You can tell when they grew the most and when, in a way they died a little. I believe scars, and memories are not only on the skin and in our minds, but they are also inside our bodies buried deep within. Making us who we are. Now the question is...what’s your story

Beneath flesh and bones, under everything that we show, is what we try to hide. There lies our secrets and iniquities. It is there that we're afraid to explore, so we hide everything deeper and deeper, hoping no one has enough courage and strength to look that far in us. We try to forget what lies beneath our flesh and bones, although it's not successful. No matter how hard we try, the pain and brokenness still remains. All we can do is try to learn to live with it, even if it is killing us from the inside out.

"Beauty is only skin deep":

So what lies beneath

the lie?

Under the layers upon layers of

makeup that covers the

dark circles and evens out the

complexion to make it

acceptable lies even more

lies that I could never bear to

write for

fear that they'd tattoo themselves to

everything I've ever known.

What lies beneath

the flesh and bones

should never surface.

It must stay

out of sight

but always right

in my head, right

above my eyes

where I can

hide it from the

outside.

We are composite anagrams of organic structure arranged in such a way that permits life to exist deep within our complete assembly.

Try saying that after two bottles of Shiraz!

Of course I ramble, but I would put it only slightly more elegantly, we exist on a molecular level.

But we are so much more that such a simplification, but, speaking only for myself I would have to say that beneath the flesh and creaking bones I am a sac of disappointments, needs and hopes saturated in a an emotional pus that seeps at every opportunity.

That said, I present an agreeable form and if my surroundings are basic then I need little else to exist in perfect harmony with my gadget, and my Prose App, and the occasional cup of sustenance.

These are happy days are they not?

The Seasons are advancing toward Spring and Summer and my muse is glowing like a radiant thing that glows within me. All is well.