Was that your plan?
To beat me down?
Do I look beaten down?
Let me tell you something
I smile because you matter as much as they mattered
Those heart breakers and slick talkers
I broke and broke and broke
Til I was spinning tooth missing
And I smiled cause you mattered as much as they mattered
Which was my whole heart
And whole hearts get replaced everyday
Mine had to be gotten the easy way
Regrowth
And once you’ve regrown one whole heart
It doesn’t seem impossible to grow another and another and another
So I can break and smile in the same sentence
Facing the same faces which broke and broke and broke me
Cause I awoke to new definitions of each one of you young guns, old mags, hot rods
I awoke and I see you coming

Balance on me your worries
Describe me in all your pain and I will stand
Bearing them

I stride across your face wide and strange
A man’s recollection of another’s world
Trinkets sand and paint
Tools of mischief
We tinkle and itch and splotch
Any other way

To see your face rubber-banded into night terrors
Mashed and missed by horrors bright and alarming
I am asking you to forgive the madness that inhabits me
The strange worm across my vision
Please see me beneath the blinding mask
I did not choose to wear it
I did not choose to see

moon taffy madness
along the sidewalk cracked I crack
a form I once inhabited
Strange and listless
No groceries
No where to be
The long low roar of the moon

The code of this conversation
Has me prickling in my seat
How far will you draw my skin from its bone
To prove there is meat?

Staccatos of talk and video fire
A/C’s forgettable humming
A snap of computer keys surreptitiously
Tapped past ten
The tremor in my jaw like an ever creaking door
I sigh
Biting my tongue
Biding my time

Pine scented car in a forest
Feeling uneasy with his life choices
Waits for the keyholder
To bring him home
Nuzzle after a good guzzle
With the camper in the garage
Unless the boat is back again
In which cause
Here’s really starting to feel uneasy about his life choices

Reaching the coyote-line, I pause
Dangle my feet
And continue my walk
No air pressing up to greet me
Just a comical miracle
An aside to a shocked audience
We all wanted to see you fall

Forward in the future of your lines
Will you speak to me?
In all your hallelujah chorus
In Romeo’s soliloquy spoken for the dozenth time
Have you spoken it once to me?

Memorization murmurs without the muse
Dizzying alphabet into refuse
Pickles the promise of the poet
Yea,
In all my devotion
I speak to you