Tangled Up

You walk into the shower and close the door
Letting out all the man that you've become
And I lay in my bed listening unlike before
to the water splashing to come.
Your body seems much firmer now,
your lips so soft and inviting
The calls and proposals I once left ignored
are beginning to get life exciting
And why so suddenly does it all seem so?
Is it the fire ignited in you to reinvent your passions?
Or maybe I simply do not know...
can only guess the persistent, loving gaze has toppled my wallish fashions
Unwavering
has gently urged me to listen with different ears and look with open eyes
these days
I see the man that's always been inside
And I take back everything I've ever said
and how I tied rocks to your name
for it was a little girl who would not forget a little boy in her head
and lost a love in vain
Now, I listen to the water and you
not so far away
inspiring dangerous tossing of cautions to the wind
imagining the delicious depths of where you can play
all the while questioning the friends
that I hope we stay.

The Funeral

Once there was a little girl who was not afraid of death. Then she went to a funeral.
She had been to funerals before. Even stared down into the closed eyes of those shells left behind with an almost morbid yet numb disconnect. She watched the mourners and only cried a tear or two empathizing with the pain of those who hurt because they lost another.
But then came this funeral. The funeral of a woman who once held her hand when she was only a little girl. She sat in the back row as countless others who had also been touched by this woman stood and told stories of the life lived before the crowd. The girl, now much older then when the woman had first held her hand, could not stop thinking. First were the memories they had shared, memories she was too cowardly to confess in front of all the watery eyes. The girl remembered how the woman would teach her to make paper-bag puppets and hand her Hansen's Mandarin sodas on hot, sunny days. She remembered that she once was a little girl, a time that now seemed so far away.

Then a speaker addressed the crowd and said this:
"What we say, what we do, and who we are will affect people in ways we will never know, like our shadow that stretches past ourselves and goes places we may actually never go."

The girl couldn't stop thinking about her own shadow, where it was stretching and if it was even there at all. The girl wondered if her friends would sing at her funeral...if she would be so fondly remembered. The girl did not go to the opened casket to see the empty shell and instead chose to remember the woman good and standing tall, laughing in unison with her child-self as they both made paper-bag puppets. The girl couldn't stop crying, even after she returned home, wondering about her own life and what she would leave behind. And for the first time, the girl truly understood the value a death gives to life.

New York

More than just buildings

...so many faces

Eyes meet on concrete
rushing to places

I asked a man at the bus stop,
whether he waits for love or the 14D
Headed uptown
he left without me
I exit the wrong stop,
and walk right on to my destiny.

Boom Man

There he was. Where did he come from? How did he know we needed him? I needed him. What a mundane and dull gray that was my welcome, every day, every night, the first thing I see, saw before Boom Man was there, was plain concrete wall.
He came and posted up on the wall, the wall that divided my senses from the 405. And if it isn't bad enough to live directly across the street from the 405, with the noise, noxious particulate matter dusting our lawn and lungs, and incessant vibrations, I have to look at an ugly, concrete wall holding the over-pruned freeway ivy from falling down.
And then there was Boom Man, waiting outside my door one morning.
"Yes! Wheeeew!" I shouted to him as I stood on the porch realizing the view had changed. Beautiful. Exciting!
"What does he mean?" I thought about it all day. Boom. Are we destined? In this concrete jungle only? Are we bound to skinny pants and exploding mentals from stress? Or is he just a cocky punk, stating how bomb he is, hiding behind the claim? He holds his can, representing his trade, making me ask questions. More questions than walls. He gave the wall a purpose, made me fantasize about his father...
He inspired me you know. I made my first stencils. I took down the cans. Somehow talked my friend into helping me add onto the newly realized canvas. We hit up around him. I lengthened his fuse halfway down the block, swirling under along the freeway. I figured Boom Man would be pleased he had been given a little more time.
Three days later it was all gone. Boom Man, my Boom Man...art, color, youth, change, a piece of creativity and slap in the face to the standardization of surroundings, of us, was gone. The city came and painted him away, buried him under their favorite color, gray. And I will miss him so, and try to remind myself he's still there, looking at me from underneath.

Not Ruled By a Planet

My nose doesn’t like you as much as my brain

My eyes are not as tickled as my ears

and it wasn’t until I held your knives that it was clear

your witty words and all too well practiced moves

that seemed laced in truth, took me to bed

Our sweat concocted pungent odors, sent by Venus to ward us off

…Still, the echoes of sweeter notes draw my curiosity

Against chemicals warning

Like that bad batch in the unmarked container

You just couldn’t believe was true.

Forty Hours a Week

How did the day get stolen from underneath my feet?

Friends become strangers cause’ there’s no time to meet

Signing in and out of punch clocks and initialing sheets

Trading the sunlight and hours for dollars seems cheap



But I can’t blame it on the man or systematic rat race

As each day I consciously rush to keep with their pace

And each night I return worn and exhausted from haste

Thanking God in the dark shine’s the moon’s patient face