Poem for Rachel

Love is a word,

And only a word

A stand-in for an idea

A reference to a feeling.

It could not possibly be

Adequate for us, for you...

A word could not hold

The energy to race my heart.

It couldn’t express the fracture

I feel when we’re apart.

It is a pale shadow,

And a distant echo,

Of the thousands of touches,

Kisses and stolen glances...

Or the hard-learned lessons

Of being one soul.

Yet the word “love”

Is the best that we have

While our two hearts

Author something better.

In Search of Laundry Room on Record Store Day

We searched in vain
For the prize of the day
But around every bend
Was another dead end

We tried different places
Asked many vacant faces
But each glimmer of hope
Was a mirage where we'd go

And at the end of failed plans
We finally washed our hands
And bitterly realized
There would be no prize.

Not today.

Subservient

Subservient to you
To all your vacant notions
Underneath your shoe
Without any commotion

And I'm feeling tread upon
My head is hot with fever
When I lift high my thoughts
Your gravity holds me here

Subservient to you
And your dangerous notions
The many and the few
That serve with sad devotion

That I feel so put upon
Put upon like clothes
My head here, my heart gone
Left a sense of bitter loathing

Subservient... subservient
With time enough to fall apart

Deep Down, You're Not Fooling Anyone

Misshapen angels
Wings without flight
Relieved by disbelief
Of this desperate insight.

And all the while laughing
For after all, why not?
These misshapen angels
Know they're all we've got.

Fall back on superstition
Anything will do
Like bedtime fairy tales
Or mathematical proofs.

We all need to believe
We all need an excuse
So we can hide our scars
Like misshapen angels do.

Ordinary Relativity

Moving frame of reference
With no view of space or time
Lost my way in the confusion
Unraveled as I unwind

Knowledge with respect
To all that we can see
Trying hard to be
Both man and machine

Watching light bend
And dilation of time
Everything is relative
The law is the crime

Planet Nothing Special
Species ill-conceived
Gravity never needed
For you to believe

Untitled Experimental

we stood and faced a mighty insurrection
as cracks formed all around the galaxy
my armor of broken glasses and wool shirt
held strong against the university's attack
we shall forever remain uneducated
we shall forever maintain filtered ideology
we shall torture our math into limericks
our words live without grammatical consent

The Art of Disbelief

What's my place?
To agree or disagree?
To interrogate myself,
In the art of disbelief?

So many faces gone...
Like pictures on a wall...
While life passed my eyes--
Like Super 8 filmed-loss.

The unreported petty theft
Of my childhood dreams
Another hard lesson
In the art of disbelief.