Posts tagged Spoken word

 My heart is fireworks. Phosphorous and dreams, wrapped up in hopes I promised not to have anymore, coiling fuses wrapped tightly around Your little finger… 

Let us not be matchsticks. I want to go on loving You longer than a fire burns, A fire burns in my rib cage where I had built a mausoleum around my loneliness and You’re sitting there warming Your hands on it  while I stand dumb… trying to figure out where You hid the walls I thrust up from the nightsoil of my reticence to keep You out. 

My stomach is ropes. You’re spooling it out like a kite runner, It drops each time we say goodnight and You’ve given me more than enough to hang myself… Or just get hung up on You. 

I was a bad boy scout. I never earned my knot tying merit badge. But even I can see that every love I’ve ever lied before was a pretty Christmas bow trying to hold the war ship of my expectations to the dock… But Your kisses are a cleat hitch, and I’ll teach ya’ ta’ tie one…

My knees are cornerstones. I am cast on to them. I am building an empire from a thousand years of bleeding Your name into the mortar.  I will set the Keystone with a compass. Every gruesome speck of blood and bone in my body orients on You, when I turn West, my foundations split like the Red Sea and I am…. Inconsolable. This means You are true north. Guide me home.

My head is Paul Revere with a twenty foot megaphone, Even the British knew You were coming, he rode so hard his horse grew an engine, and that engine pumped so hard it suddenly realized it was an engine and it bucked me off in to the still ocean waters of Your embrace. We’re soaked, to the bone, in hugs, in smiles, in holding… I never say goodbye.

My hands… are not cellar doors. If I’m clapping, it is not the winds of change slamming them against the terrified house frame… My hands, are just hands, and they’re saying; “some day the man at the end of my arms is gonna run out of words. But these fingers, soft as sand paper, will always be helping… I just hope You learn another way to love him before his luck gives out.” 

I had a nightmare that our bodies turned up in the river and no number of matchsticks could get us warm again. 
I had a notion that we’d driven the car until the engine knew it was an engine and refused to be a slave anymore. 
Promise me we won’t be like trees; our branches don’t have to end somewhere, bare and stretched, scraped toward a sky that never came down to say “goodmorning.” 
I want to tell you had I laid my good linens on the green grass so your stockings wouldn’t stain, how the rain came in gallons and tore straight through my umbrella like I only ever dreamed of dryness. 
Remember how I told you the sun doesn’t come up? It’s actually the Earth that rises. Look down. If our shadows are long, it must be sunset. 
That means you’re indispensable. 
When I tuck you in to bed tonight, tell me the lie about the love that felt like square knots, and the fear as fragile as late Autumn leaves. 
I once met the bubble boy.  
Promise me a future where even he hears a heartbeat that’s not his own. 

I pulled the hands off my wallclock this morning…

Now it’s a metronome.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Breathe. Smile. Stretch.

I should have been a musician; long neck strung with the sinews of a creature that never wondered about Your motivations.

But I will not go blindly like chattle in to the spinning blades.

Please… don’t be spinning blades.

I like You better as the wind.

Blowing over the Sierras and sweeping the dead leaves from my cold porch;

Like a sapling tree I will bend to You.

But I’m not a contortionist. Please do not treat me like a stretch armstrong doll; if You bend me too far I will break.

I can see that Your blood’s red, and We’ve got feelings,

But they both get spilled too much. (without thinking.)

But I’m thinking; I’ve had too many friends leave this world on purpose to believe that one can’t die from a broken heart. So I keep a canary in my ribcage and it won’t stop screaming.

Ah, This mineshaft is already flooded and I still believe in shovels.

Miles deep, water blowing apart my timbers,

Ah, Ah, I still believe in dayreak.

I wanna see the dawn again, even though I hammered down the sundials…

The sun doesn’t actually come up, didjya know?

It’s actually the Earth that rises.

I am a son, a student, a poet, a lover, a brother, a book reader, a Buddhist, a painter, a dancer, a singer, a camper, a hiker, a diner hopper, an out-all-nighter, a dilettante of language, a foot rubber, a nose-picker and a Banker. In that order. I’ll say it again. Son, student, poet, lover, brother, book reader, Buddhist, painter, dancer, singer, camper, hiker, diner hopper, out all-nighter, dilettante of language, foot rubber, NOSE PICKER, banker. In that order. So if you want to know about my job, do not ask me what I do. What I do and what I do for a living are not the same thing. I stay up all night trying to bend my pen nib back so far I’ll finally get an angle on all the beauty outside my door. I fail to sleep because I’m grasping at a topic sentence like astro glide kite strings. I get my finger so far up my nose it bleeds sometimes. These are the things I do.

I’m saying… we need our selves now more than ever before, do you see it? I’ll take that as a no. Luke says the state needs smashing. Luke says the backs of the working class are breaking. Luke says that timecards are slavery and homelessness bravery and we can build a better tomorrow in the hollows of our resistance, But Luke’s parents didn’t finish high school. And Luke’s first girlfriend had his baby. And Luke just barely finished high school and it’s time to get real. Luke signs on the dotted line. 3 years to life. Luke finishes basic training in Louisiana. It’s the farthest he’s ever been from home until Luke lands in Somewhereistan. Luke sharpies “Resistance is Fertile” on his M16. Luke stomps out resistance with his trigger finger and never has another sleep without a nightmare. Luke is a soldier of necessity. Willing to do whatever is necessary to give his family more opportunity than he had. Luke is still a two foot purple Mohawk. Luke is still four broken ribs from that fight he picked with the white supremacists in the alley behind the Archaic. Luke is still a human being.

Next time someone asks you what you do… Please don’t tell them about your job. Tell them about your hobby. Tell them about your children. Tell them all about how badly you do or do not want children. Tell them about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you. Tell them anything… else. In a true and correct capitalism, everything becomes a commodity. But we are human beings… not human resources. Take the price tag off your backbone. You are not what you do for a living. You are not what you do for a living. You are not what you do for a living.

There was never a day I wanted out. It was always a night. When You’d go and do things like tell Your friends we were married, Tiny, trite, American Dream that You have, You made me hope that I was worth such a thing, The glamour of Your wheedling smile keeping me idle twenty hours more, our frayed hearts glued together at the edges like paper mache eggshells.

And then there was the way You made me dig my smile up, Teeth splitting out my lips, bright as daybreak, like I never forgot how it on the days I was up to my neck with loneliness. I should have told you, when I first said “forever” that I’d given up your God like a heroin habit years before and “recovering” is the only thing I’ll always be.

What I have of You now is a dig site. The bones of us. Naked and gleaming beneath a summer sun, Scattered so badly no archaeologist will ever assemble me without You, We’ll always have a few of our ribs exchanged on the display at the natural history museum and I choke on that when the minutes drag.

I had a heart to heart with “Promise” and I promised I wouldn’t make any more promises, But my momma always said I was a lying bastard and both those things are true, So, You can imagine how much it hurt to make good on that insult when I packed up the things You kept in our apartment after the last time we fucked. Couldn’t make love any more, I forgot it, left it in the hospital with my childhood and my mercy, but I rolled out of there in a wheelchair with a backbone I’d never had before.

Listen, breaking Your heart was always at the bottom of my To-Do list but there’s only so many things I can do to kill the hours in a lifetime and I entombed too many days in the mausoleum of Your expectations. There is a point where breaking things doesn’t quell Your fury anymore. This howling rage has broken my vocal chords. I hate You so much some days that I consider killing myself and addressing the suicide note to You just to guarantee I’d finally have the last word.

The note would read: K.D.H. ! I know Your daddy didn’t raise You to be Judas Iscariot. No one ever called You a liar or a bastard and You were neither of those things, So I couldn’t believe it when You didn’t fight to keep us together. Your promises; “always” and “forever” they, wore away my tarnish and sweetened up my sour to the point that when I finally walked out on You I had to go learn to be a cynic again because I’d let You make me an optimist. You called me sunshine, but You taught me, that’s not how love works, neither lover should ever be a sundial; worthless without the other’s light… I need You to know, in a shallow attempt to repair the bridge I burned between us I did show up to Your church on that last Sunday. You were already blowing the youth leader and I remembered why I let You go.

Goodbye.

We all deserve absolution. But especially the Godless who choose the way of peace and kindness without promise of reward or fear of repercussion. I’m here to tell you; in a world where science tells us what, where, why, how, and to what extent, Love is the last great mystery, the final frontier, the deep and wild wilderness, Worth every moment.

The human back is made for breaking. Bone is entirely too fragile a material from which to craft the spines that hold us mountains up but somehow our fathers never found iron for our creation. Our mothers never learned to temper steel in the forges of our earthen hearts but, Keep cool, glaciers, we range together, we are not forced to do our breaking apart.

The stress fractures of life have been working tirelessly to make puzzle pieces of us all even though we began it stitched together at the end of our fingers like fossils, in the ancient dust. But we are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half so deep as our burdens are heavy and there are shoulders enough for us all to share in our peaks.

Promise me, you’ll never be, too proud to ask for help. Let us not be bowed by anything less than the tectonic plates, it’s true; one cannot carry this world alone.

We’re never alone. We mountains have roots, let’s trace them, we can find excuses to be brothers and sisters and not have to struggle under the yoke of a solitary survival any longer. Bind up the splinters of your brittle back with me; Together we can cast down the walls we have all built around our hearts, They are, full of holes that we don’t notice until it’s dark, and they are blowing us apart!

The enduring power of the human spirit has been straining beneath the continental drift 30 hours a day since the invention of time and we still cannot afford the lease on contentment. But keep cool, glaciers, we range together, we are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half so deep as our burdens are heavy and there are shoulders enough for us all to share in our peaks. Hand in hand, fused back together at the end of our fingers like fossils in the ancient dust, we can forge tomorrows with the bellows of our earthen hearts. The human back is made for breaking, But we are not forced to do our breaking… apart.

If you have ever have ever enjoyed a red wine alone in the dark, this poem is for you. If you dream of a better tomorrow, wish you could forget the past, love the ocean but are terrified of drowning, hate the cold but love snowfall, or wake up some mornings wondering how you’re going to make it through another day, this poem is for you.

If you still laugh at rape jokes- this poem is not for you, that shit aint funny.

But if you have stood on the edge of a mountain summit and wondered why we must continue to live when we could die at any moment, this poem has been waiting for you its whole life.

Take it out and unfold it when you’re feeling down.

This poem will keep you warm, make you coffee, ask you to the junior prom.

be your very best friend. This poem will walk your dogs, read you your favorite book, wash the dishes,

have dinner ready when you get home from work, call in to work and spend the whole day with you because you’re sick and you feel like the door of your world is breaking off at the hinges.

This poem will call in to work and spend the day with you because you smiled at it.

This poem will not disappoint your parents.

This poem will not disappoint you, forget the milk, let you drive drunk, miss important social cues or keep you up all night unless you’re feeling frisky and you want it to.

This poem will not keep your sister up all night ever, lie when you ask it if your butt looks big, forget your birthday, push when you need a pull, pull when you need a push, or think that anything you can buy at a 7-11 is an acceptable anniversary gift.

This poem will be there when your iron will rusts and you need to put your pride away and be carried awhile.

This poem will go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil, keep the hope chest, hold the line, build you up, butter cup, only make promises it can keep, and love you…

Unconditionally.

You’re perfect.

There was never a day I wanted out. It was always a night. When you’d go and do things like tell your friends we were married, Tiny, trite, American Dream that you have, You made me hope that I was worth such a thing, The glamour of your smile keeping me idle twenty hours more, Our frayed hearts glued together at the edges like paper mache eggshells.

And then there was the way you made me dust my smile off, Teeth splitting out my lips, bright as daybreak, like I never forgot it on the days I was up to my neck with loneliness. I should have told you, when I first said “forever” that I’d given up your God like a heroin habit years before and “recovering” is the only thing I’ll always be.

What I have of you now is a dig site. The bones of us. Naked and gleaming beneath a summer sun, Scattered so badly no archaeologist will ever assemble me apart from you, We’ll always have a few of our ribs exchanged on the display at the natural history museum and I choke on that when the minutes drag.

I had a heart to heart with “Promise” and I swore I wouldn’t make any, But my momma always said I was a lying bastard and both those things are true, You can imagine how much it hurt to make good on that insult when I packed up your things after that last time you fucked me. Couldn’t make love any more, I forgot it, left it in the hospital with my childhood and my mercy, but I rolled out in a wheelchair with a backbone I’d never had before.

Listen, breaking your heart was always at the bottom of my To-Do list but there’s only so many things I can do to kill the hours in a lifetime and I entombed too many days in the mausoleum of your expectations. But I need you to know, in a shallow attempt to repair the bridge I burned between us I did show up to your church on that last Sunday. You were already blowing the youth leader and I remembered why I let you go.

There is a point where breaking things doesn’t quell your fury anymore. This howling rage has broken my vocal chords. I hate you so much some days that I consider killing myself and addressing the suicide note to you just to guarantee I’d finally have the last word. That’d show ya.

The note would read: K.D.H. ! I know your daddy didn’t raise you to be Judas Iscariot. No one ever called you a lying bastard and you were neither, So I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t fight to keep us together. The words “always” and “forever” wore away my tarnish and sweetened up my sour, and I still can’t purge you from that dark spot behind my dreams. So now I’m eating razorcake and spitting up the happily never after, You called me sunshine but I was a sundial, worthless without your light. Goodbye.

We all deserve absolution. But especially the Godless who choose the way of peace and kindness without promise of reward or repercussion. I’m here to tell you; in a world where science tells us what, where, why, how, and to what extent, Love is the last great mystery, the final frontier, the deep and wild wilderness, Worth every moment.

The human back is made for breaking. But keep cool, glaciers, bone may be entirely too fragile a material from which to craft the spine that holds us mountains up, but somehow our Fathers never found iron for our creation; they never learned to temper steel in the forges of our hearts, But we are not forced to break apart.

The stress fractures of life have been making puzzle pieces of us all even though we began it fused together at the ends of our fingers like fossils in the ancient dust. Every day we invent a geology with scopes obscured enough to make it okay to look at one another’s eyes again. It’s Everest lonely and Arctic cold, So let’s hug each other in the dark, warm and dirty, made of earth and water, just like me, it doesn’t matter here that we can’t look our shame in the eyes anymore; these lights are out. There was never an Edison in the emotion of our existence.

The human back is made for breaking, but we are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half as deep as our burdens are heavy and there are shoulders enough for all of us in these peaks. Promise you’ll never be too proud to ask for help. Let us not be bowed by anything less than the tectonic plates, keep cool, glaciers, one cannot carry these worlds alone.

But we’re never alone. We mountains have roots; let’s trace them. We can find excuses to be brothers and sisters so we don’t have to suffer under the yoke of a solitary survival any longer, Bind up the splinters of your brittle back with sincere apologies and kind words. Cast down the walls we’ve built around our hearts, they’re full of holes we don’t notice till it’s dark, and they’re blowing us apart.

The enduring power of the human spirit has been straining beneath the continental drift twenty hours a day since the invention of time and we still can’t afford the lease on contentment. Let’s not treat each other like molehills in the hour of our mountain; keep cool, glaciers, we’re only a range together. We are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half as deep as our burdens are heavy and the human back is made for breaking. Hand in hand, fused back together like fossils in the ancient dust, we’ll forge tomorrows in the forges of our earthen hearts; we are not forced to break apart.

The Listener told me we only have what we remember. But I was always the speaker.

The sins of my fathers paid dividends in silver tongues, not ears, I’ve got a shoulder to cry on but it’s cold as a frozen lake, and beneathe that water for walking on, there’s a loss like a river- it keeps flowing. I continue to reach for things that aren’t there, like some prankster placed razorblades around this blind man’s house, I’ve cut each of these fingers to the bone grasping for my memories like they were astro-glide kite strings, Time taught me that letting go means giving up and those things you drop may just never come back to you.

We only have what we remember. But my memory has been slippery as a fish in water, deceptive at best, obvious as the needlestack had no hay, I jumped out the barn loft on to it anyway, but at least it taught me what it meant to bleed for the first time. I’m learning so much for the first time, I can no longer ride a bicycle and I already had smile lines when I learned to walk, but I’d still give my knees to recall what it was like to love someone.

Ive got 13 keys on my keyring. Because every house I’ve lived in becomes a home, and even though fate has changed the locks themselves, These chips of brass remind me there has always been a place to lay my head. If I ever forget that, well, trumpets, too, are made of brass, and I’ll give you all these shadows of homesteads and hope you can craft me a clarion call.

The wizard made the Tinman a heart, can’t I make my stoneheart a brain? I can build it better than before. Construct it from ‘your’ broken guitar strings. Glue it together with ‘your’ tears of grief,Cover it with ‘your’ picked scabs and scar tissue, Paint it with all the blood anyone ever bled on purpose, and when I’ve got all these pieces of everyone hung up in my thrift shop skull their discarded compassion will cover up my sawbones survival scars and I will finally know what a yesterday feels like.