Never got a Manual (or Perceiving is Detrimental)

Wants me broken; Wants me burned.

Washes my mouth out

With the script of right words.

 

Yet...

I am a wild thing;

A cataclysmic song.

Break apart in earthquakes

When the perceptions are too strong to belong.

I'd be a super-hero.

You'd want me on your side,

If what I felt wasn't measured out

In so many wrongs and not enough rights.

 

Gather together

All ye manual laborers!

Ye students of the calm!

I never got the notice;

I missed the trumpet call.

When you feel too much is precisely when

You're to show nothing at all.

Be broken.

Be burned.

Memorize the script.

Memorize the words.

Two Birds

Made two people with two people. Out of youth, one; out of love, two.

("The clouds look like mountains or castles or both and I just want to be with you.")

Carried them both in the same little room; a space in my body

Universe filled with atoms collecting, it all coalescing

Into bodies brand new.

 

Thirty-six moments (A.K.A. thirty-six years)

Out of time, three; out of sight, four.

(Caught up to the age of the death of a girl who was so old to the people she'd made.)

And what about them?

How would they know that she was just one flake

In a whole lot of snow?

Where we are all falling

We are all falling

Yes, we are all falling

So where do you want to go?

 

Birds, if you need a people, a person to blame

Hold out your wings and I'll give you my name

Out of words, five; out of excuses, six.

Can't make amends for all that was battered and bruised yet

I shall always carry you

'Cause we are all falling

We are all falling

Yes, we are all falling

But what do you have to lose?

July Twelfth Two-Thousand and Three

I find that I fade out of moments and struggle with words I fear are wrong.

Caught up in upheaval,longing for the ability to keep my eye on the ball.

My dreams disturb me, the players never right, all the wrong characters coming and going, kissing my mouth and I blush, turn around, and close my eyes.

Where is the even-tread?

We stare into mirrors lovely, tired, worn, and console ourselves with pots of colours, with notions, with idealism run rampant born from a magazine.

I see a girl. Reciting words to her mother, "This means family, this means love."

She calls her mother a bitch, stares hard to hurt, her mother withdrawing in pain.

I watch that embrace.

I hate that girl, these girls, those girls with their mothers.

They do not know how good they have it.

We have the smoking gun.

We have so much to lose.

We have run hard to ignore.

We have our projections to share.

My revenue is dropping.

My profit is waning.

My status is under review.

My outlook is revised.

Here is a sprinkling of words that mean nothing to you.

I toe the line, I dive right in but without the optimism he tends to pretend.

You light my fervor

You stop my waning woebegone Sundays on fire.

You tickle my fancy maybe

you speed up my heart, a low-battery jump start and a Pop Pop Pop of my love is jumping out at me.

I would write you a song we all could sing and hope you'd remember me but I don't have it in words, just love.

Canyon Cake Maker

I was walking the edge of the canyon line-- Slipped and fell into that great divide--

All that caught me was memory and time;

A ledge on the outer edge of my mind.

I had been making cakes for everyone,

Watching them eat and leaving me crumbs;

A drill sergeant for an army of sons--

A mask so heavy it made me go numb.

 

I have dollars and plastic,

My head has a roof,

My body a bed and my body no bruise,

Fingers are warm; my belly is fed

But that means nothing when you’re fucked in the head.

Dare I long for more when at least I have bread?

When that far away child is quite close to death?

But who’s to say they wouldn’t want the same,

If they stood where I stood and had my same name?

 

Needed to find a place to belong--

Wanted to right the wrongs with a song--

The words they tumbled out of my hands,

And the melody left me for another man.

So just let me lay here for a long while--

Ledges are better than falling for miles--

My mind is slipping, my heart so tired

From everything of me that has been required.