Unexpected downtime, I thought that we might play

Instead you pace and want to flee

Why can you not just stay?

I thought this was a good place to be…

Nowhere to go on this rainy day

Here with me

Yet I can feel your love decay

And sense your longing to be free

Why can you not just stay?

But other places you long to see

And your nerves, they seem to fray

Here with me

“Out there” seems to always outweigh

Time only spent with me

Why can you not just stay?

I wonder how long you’ve felt this way

A rainy day-- the truth exposed, I only have this plea:

Why can you not just stay

Here with me?

I am the child

who sits alone

on rooftops

feet dangling

to watch

the city

burn to ash

I am a heavy

hearted widow

awestruck and

bewildered by

New York City

boulevards

I am this

ancient world

crumbling at

the heels of

technology

my heartbeat

the echo

of a small dying

hummingbird

I am a cloudburst

in the distance

waiting silently

for rain

and you are

the drop

MIND: Don’t do it.

ME: But he asked me about my writing which is essentially asking about ME, so…

MIND: He, just like your reader, does NOT need to know every single thing about you. You have this bad habit-- you tend to divulge way too much too soon. Retaining some mystery is a good thing, trust me.

ME: I’m an open book.

MIND: And not a very good one, honestly. Mediocre at best. Entirely, way too much, over-the-top hyperbole. Sloppy form. Typoes. Enough tired cliché to choke a horse. Anyone with literary chops that reads you winces. You try too hard.

ME: It's called being earnest.

MIND: This is you: ‘please clap’.

ME: Stop.

MIND: You stop.

ME: “I love to write about feelings. I mean, I really FEEL feelings deeply, so I write about them. Mostly deep things about deep feelings… Sometimes feelings just well up within me and I have to let them out in a poem. Ohh, and I love to write about nature, too. Nature is so beautiful and makes me feel free so yeah, I write about that also.”

MIND: Holy shit. You really are a real boner killer.

DATE: *fidgets intensely with phone*

MIND: Evasive maneuvers deployed *face palm*

DATE: “Shit. I’m so sorry, I gotta take this call…” *promptly slides out of booth*

MIND: Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a runner!

ME: Wait—no. You’re wrong, Mind.

MIND: You do realize there was no phone call, right?

Many minutes pass…

ME: He’s not coming back, is he?

MIND: Nope.

ME: I’m going to remain alone for the rest of my days, aren’t I?

MIND: Now dear, don’t you worry. There’s sure to be other guys out there who like girls that write plodding, banal rubbish about their feelings.

Also, on a completely unrelated note: let’s swing by the shelter to check out those cats for adoption.

Lift this. Please. Take away from me this weight heaped upon my chest and let the freedom of a harmless man displace this burdened air. What am I... to them? I am the sacrifice... the tortured soul that breathes despair by their fabricated democratic prosecution and their fraudulent decree--guilt by association, indeed. My pain will not break their windows as they slumber this night. No suffering will rap with bloodied, swollen knuckles at their doors. Yet they are incapable of comprehending the distance to which my screams will travel to meet their sanctimonious hearts. Lift this horrid constraint, for their sake, and I will squash my hatred here and now lest the spectre leave my weakened body, condensed and filled with wicked ways, and snatch up all their children as they skip away and tumble and play and frolic in their fields-- careless, intrepid, foolish. Lift this--I beg of you. Death does not pine for me, nor travel swiftly as heroes predict-- it scoffs at my anguish though I call for it by name. Do you hear me, Icy One?! I am yours! Wield your sharp and rigid shears to sever the sacred Thread of Days, and charge the buzzards once again to task. Enlist their beaks and appetites, engage their terrible practice upon my limp and lifeless flesh! Employ the worms to do their work! Devour every fiber, every cell down to the last. Erase every tiny gene-- the very architects of my construction-- to feed their young what putrid morsels they should find to line these starved and foul, repugnant bowels! Do your eyes deceive you, Death? Do your ears find my words pat and insincere? Do you suspect they want for candor? That tomfoolery you hear? Can I not provoke you, Spirit?! I spit at you! Do you see now, friend? What alternative conclusion can be drawn from this equation but that I simply cannot qualify for death's merciful release? Will he ban me from Hell and Heaven, both, simply to prolong my suffering? Lift this. Free from your sight this pathetic form, this shorn and flightless bird, this hollowed shell, this living hell... let the pulleys turn and the cable flex its twine. Let not this chapter end with routed, dismal, sullen truths--this long, tormented paragraph... loathsome rotten prose.

Stab me with a fountain pen and I will bleed ink.

My black embryonic fluid will splatter into letters, words, and sentences on sheets of creamy, white paper and pool at my feet when I fall asleep, head on the desk, clutching the pen in my stiff hand.

My insides will splash and stain the nearby walls with confused ramblings and carefully edited thoughts that have been bouncing off the walls in my brain for as long as I’ve been able to think.

Can anyone remember the first thought they ever had? The first tear they ever shed? Their first nightmare?

I can.

The crazed mist of memories is all here, tucked neatly into the never sleeping beehive under my skull. How can humans not go crazy? So many thoughts fighting for a place in our heads. Every day more thoughts crowd into that finite space.

Stick a pen in my vein and let the thoughts drip out onto the pages before I lose what little sanity I have left. Any pain in there? Bleed it out onto the screen before me, so I can understand it. Regrets? Many. They live rent-free in my head until I pour my inky blood out onto hungry pages, looking for redemption. Dreams? They are gone. Taken by my past.

Writing is a sick business, done in the dark by sick people.

I lost control. And that's all she wrote. But then, no joke, I saw poetry in motion. Reality rhyming while I'm mindful of minding business big or small. I came to crawl out of my ego-crib, proceed to promptly sit up straight, witness to reality demonstrate its way with the Way. Okay? And here's what the jam-band would say. It's all atoms dancing, electrons prancing, gluons laughing - but then keep diving, your scuba gear binding, you will get to finding, that there's no separation, just pure space-ness, and upon the amazement and elation that mind-brush will be painting, you will feel the utter and absolute opposite of anxious.