A stranger to my style

This morning she gave me a fist
When I asked for a smile.
All day I've been walking with a bruise in my heart.

Poetry doesn't have to be bigger than the thing it contains

I choke within myself, straining to find a voice
that does not want to be heard.
Meaning is a rope tightening around
my neck; a daily strangler.
A little I gasp for breath everyday.
A little I watch myself die everyday.

Whenever I put paper to pen,
Reading my thoughts
Means looking through the paper of my mind
On to the other side
And reading what's written there, backwards.

This page, printed,
Is a blurred, tasteless, memory
of minds full of illegible meaning.

Experimenting with shape

The rectangular mirror
Reveals a form untamed by geometry;
A gurgling shape.

I stare at my eyes.
My eyes draw me
Out as they stare me out
Spilling shapeless over form.

I see my eye.
A single eye with possessions
From both parents,
Deposited in me; temporary safekeepings.

Not my own, my own existence -
Borrowed.

I shift shape between man and woman
Lingering along lines,
Uncertain, certainly not defined.

On silent nights, when sound is a fragile friend
Waiting to exist in its own right,
Is that me, you hear, gurgling into amorphous unity?

'O Clock!

My body goes tick-tock to the 3 A.M. wisdom of night;
A snip-snip sound comes from the sharp scissors of time
as they cut my life into more and more bits of age.

this monotonous life

all night I stared at four
unattractive legs of my three
dimensional chair
to take a break from my
flattened existence within two
dimensional computer screens.

on secret loves

Dearest,

How is it that

simply listening to a voice

belonging to a man you do not know

dance to a tune that he did not create

with you in mind

makes you feel so loved?

this beaming heart

everyday

i want to be fortunate enough

to encounter at least one smile

that i did not cause

so that

everyday

a smile i did not cause

can cause a smile in me.

inside this wormy little head

inside this wormy little head

are seven sparrows twittering out a song

that is your name

backwards and forwards.

forward and backward

your name

is an endless song sung by a host of sparrows

that know not how they got

inside my wormy little head.

your name

is also my love

is also your absence.

inside this wormy little head

curls only your memory.

inside my broken heart is a pocket for you

about honesty:

for convenience's sake, the truth is malleable.

determined to bloom, these buds.