Looking to you
for support
is like longing for
validation
from
a pterodactyl:

not only would I likely
age and die 
as I waited,

I’d have to forget
you were dead
to seek it
in the first place.

And if it were possible,
if by chance you were
to come back to life,

what are the chances
that I’d survive
coming face to face with you
after the pilgrimage
to your lair? 

Still, I’m saying this
out loud

as a way to pretend
I’m not scanning the skies
even now. 

Once your ears are folded and stitched in
to block the voice of Outside,
you’ll sit back and expect to hear
what you’re really like.
You’ll be disappointed.
Once you realize
how much of what you tell yourself
is a lie, you’ll need to seal your eyes.
Seeing how much of Outside
rejects your Inside, rebukes
your thinking, and negates
your perspective, you’ll want
to be blind.  You’ll want to be deaf
too, but it’ll be too late for that. 

I love dark toast.
If the tips of the texture
of the slice are just singed,
just enough to hint of carbon,
so much the better.

I love a bad note
dropped into an aching run
by a horn player hanging on
to the edge of music
by the love of music. 

I want the crestfallen temporary failure,
the dinged-in-the-attempt, the just-ahead-of-broken.
I want imperfection
that praises perfection while knowing
how boring perfection can be,

that honors the pursuit
without exalting the capture.

Also, I prefer hot
and fleshy curves
over cool, gentle slopes.
Give me real skin that rebukes
all the popular defaults.

I want a little warfare
in my personal peace,
reminding me
of why I value peace
without submitting to its tyranny,

its demand to be all of time
and all of history.  Give me a Bronx cheer
over undeserved praise. Give me
an obituary that tells the tale
of me as constant bastard and frequent fool,

of my fits and starts, my graces and my stumbles
toward extracting moments from undistinguished time.

Give me sun in a pre-tornado sky.
Give me a beach
scoured of its tourists by storm.
I always cheat in favor of the emptied,
the desolate, the contrasting view.  

I yearn to be with those like me
who smell a rose in the compost
even if we won’t be here to cut it;
the ten year old kid with broken sunglasses
singing loudly off key at the local open mic

while his mother shoots phone video
and beams and struts and smiles.  
I love the way I applaud him
as if it was the last time
he’ll ever do this,

and maybe it is. Maybe he’ll go home
and never sing again after seeing that…but I doubt it.

I applaud and seek
any grand charge
toward the rejection of oblivion’s dominion
however it manifests, even when it manifests
as a mistake. God doesn’t make a mistake,

it’s said.  God leaves us to make them
and when we now and then fail to do so,
God reminds us in the next second
that while divinity is not impossible to touch,
it skirts away from us as quickly as it arrives.

I munch on near-burnt toast 
with a possibility howling inside me.
I hear a music I can’t imagine how to play.
I scramble for the ring I can’t quite see.
I call on a God who will pull it away.

There’s that edge, so bright it hurts.
So slick, so smooth, so present, so hard to seize.