Cellophane Smile

Twas awareness that slain the beast

How long before we’re all just callouses?

Is that the next evolutionary step?

An exterior shell, impenetrable by the ways of language or violence,

Yeah that could do us all some good

Maybe evolution works as a wheel does

And when you keep turning and turning

Spinning it all the way around

You start over

Burrowing outward and upwards from the ground

That’s what man does, it seems

Extends it’s length from his home, building upwards 

Higher and higher

Further and further away from his homeland 

We should have a symbiotic relationship with each other and our home

But instead we feed and house ourselves like a bacteria, a plague 

Scraping and gnawing at the roots of our existence

And taking home doggy bags of crude oil for later

We pray to the alter of our egos

For they overshadow us

Starting over might do us all some good

A couple thousand years in the ground might give us time

To find what’s really important

If it even exists

That flicker’s not a flame

And that light at the end of the tunnel, that’s a freight train of awareness.

Let these words come to you not as a sense of grief but of enlightenment

I’m writing a letter to your forehead of which I hope to post at dawn

For you seem to not get the overall picture

It’s nice to see you’re fitting in quite nicely with the rest of us

Wandering around, gawking at the next shiny-toy-career or 

A water bed filled with cement

The knees of my jeans are worn and torn from the begging and pleading that

I have done

Not to any god or deity

But to the bastards that we rub shoulders with in our day-to-day

Sometimes it feels like I bought a thousand flags to wave

But I burned them all before their prime

The elephant in the room doesn’t know that it’s about to be shot

The kicker is, the guns not loaded and the elephant is fake

E. coli

I’m like a literary butcher

Gutting my feelings and ideas like slabs of beef 

Then hanging them up on the hooks of the internet for all to see

What if I cut off the wrong piece? 

What if I trim too much, what will they say?

I’ve got an overstock of product with no one to buy so I’ll be having a sale soon

Buy one simile, get one free. Metaphors half off. 

Will this get their attention?

What do I care? The last batch gave them all E. coli.

The Old New World

The boy down the road swallows diamonds

For spare change

While my neighbor takes out a loan to afford some of 

His mothers time

He’s filing for bankruptcy in the spring

I stand wary in the street with bags of old silver dollars in my arms

Grasped tightly like a stillborn child

We’ll be putting our children through college via scholarships from

Remington and Colt manufacturing

He can hit the wick of a lit candle from across the road

They say this is a new world we live in

But we’re only going backwards

This is an old world, an old way

Dragging our fists across the asphalt like our ancestors before us

Moving from one highly populated ghost town to another

Struggle

I watched a hawk battle the winds over the interstate on my drive home

Today

The most beautiful bird I’ve ever seen

The apex predator that it is

Struggling to stay adrift in the air that it resides in

It swooped down elegantly and stared through the windshield 

Into my eyes as if beckoning for help or directly providing guidance

I was caught up in this

Stuck on this image for the entire day

It was then that I realized what it meant to struggle

What it truly meant to live

And that they go hand in hand

On your morning commute, fight it

Kick it’s scrawny ass into submission

Leave nothing but a stain of what it used to be on the carpet of your

Living room floor

And when you’re done, pat yourself on the back

‘Cause it’s only just lunch time