*

You left me for the Ozarks
Left me to my own heart

So this is how it's going to feel
When you're really gone...

It's safe to take your picture out now
& I wonder
If there is an unwritten maximum
Of how much wine
Candles pen and papers
A man is allowed
Before something breaks

time wasted working
up to masterpieces
that topple into
anti-climaxes
falling under the excess waking up with half-poems
illegible
and roam into overcast mornings
away from annoyed
deactivated energies

I stand in the strewn mess
of incapability
It's safe to take your picture out now
And
As if mentally ill
Against a voice that assures me
"She never comes
Never has
And never will"
I tell myself
"There is time
to prepare for her presence"
-To the photograph, focused;

"There is time"

Unspecified Pronouns

i think you are cruel
deep inside your deepest words
and if you don't know it
you are a fool

even now
both in our separate worlds
mostly the same
you and i live
but toward each other
differently
than we once did

cluelessly
you came after me in tears
problems with pronouns
defined your whole year
and all of our exchanges
were rendered ridiculous

your cuteness in the end
could not win my mind
turning away from you
I had something so simple
written clearly in my face
a dead give-away
you didn't find
(but still replaced)

i saw your act span across the years
but to tell you what I think now
is too hard for your ears

i chose to step away
from what was unclear

& after all, still, dumbly
you wonder why
the sudden closure

did you even try?

i saw a real you
trapped inside a game
i wonder if you still play
and you never got
that i wanted to get us
beyond where we had gotten
ourselves

i found strings attached to your wisdom
that when i pulled
drew up
a deception 
and I was crushed;
wondering
how long have you known?
how long these strings?

but stopping your dance
you look at my
devastated face
and ask

"What's wrong Mathew? What's wrong?"

As Long as I Look at Thee

To stop is to finick
Her lips hush the infinite
Inspiring what could not exist
Till this minute
Finicking with paper
Gaping at this neighbor
Writing poems
For a limited scope
Of time's labor
Working to sway her...

Unbroken honesty's promising
Why I felt warm by your hues
Accomplishing the true
Organic romantic processing
Of what comes thru
Your eyes,
Everything, energy-
Unconditional love's easy
When unknown
To you
To your angelic prophesy
That tells me
Endlessly
Something lovely
To be
As long as I look at thee.

Dinner Fued

The quiet scraping
Of utencils on plates
When dinner's bombarded
By negative fate
Everyone's face
Drawn down to the chore
Chewing thru bits
With thoughts at their core

(She yearns to undo
The destruction of what
She made with such care)

But the food grows cold
So far from finished
And what started as a debate
Is now love, diminished.

Apologetic Confessions

You're the driving force
For this poetry
So now you know
It's out
I'm guilty
Monuments and ruins
of my heart's busy city
Laid bare
As you dig
With every soft stare
& the ways they speak thru thin air
Put in me the softest care
With what I draw down
For you to alight upon
This confession
Of which you have been unaware...

Yellow Roses

For you it's yellow roses
My affinity poses
Afraid it would ruin us
To give you red
So I lock the love
Inside my head
Giving you what you can use
Instead

Yellow roses!
& it's modest of me
For a girl that turns hearts
Into red rose monopolies
Though since I'm certain
Not to be the one
I forfeit the market
To one who's rose means
A face in her locket

I'm one of the rest
Of these fools, you know
But smarter to guide
My love by a rule:
Be at peace with your love of him
And pray
He treats you like a jewel!

Keeping the Secret

You shouldn't have cried on my shoulder
It's only made me bolder
In approaching you my love;
My love's withholder!

I tried giving this
Up for dead
But knowing you
Means images
Are locked inside my head

This compulsion is
Instinct
Internally led;
Without thinking of you
My heart's underfed,
My steps lose their tread!

I turn to tell you
But look at the stars
Keeping the secret instead

Cognition

Sometimes Stillness forgets
Inside I'm always thrilled
And peers thru narrow slits
And thinks I'm unfulfilled

Everything we've ever had... we have!
Unless there is something we've killed
Even then
Resurrect what you will

Sometimes sitting
I become unsettled
Grabbing some
Complex slab of theory
The kind that makes
People weary

Still in love
With a tendril
A tender
Flower perched
On atoms numbering
A billion-fold
Floating above
The gravity's hold

We could all blow
Like pedals
To soft dust
And disappear

Or we could all
Take this moment
Right now
and right here
To know you, Crystal clear.

secret admiration

Your name has been
On my heart
And when I see your face
I fall apart

Put me back together
Enough
To meet
Your eyes
With my eyes!

Who am I
That leaves messages in disguise?

*

Under the illusion
You are following confusion
Why is there no other gate
For you to walk thru
To realize good fate?
The intrusion
is Hate

The pace of words
Calculates your mind
Initiates a climb
Of thought

When you begin to seek
You are instantly sought
Muted by amazement-
Caught!

Thus I Quit My Life Today (an old man talks to his youth)

It's a long way down into this river,
But who is he to have the last feat?
I'm an old man now
Craving one last passionate heartbeat!

Too often I wonder how
He was so brilliant
With all of those things
He could do
But they say that was me
As they point at me saying,
"Good friend, that was YOU!"

Yet I believe they are wrong
Certain his mistakes
Were bigger ones
Than I could make
But what's more, the dance
Of his existential song
I only wish I could imitate!

No, time divides us infinitely
So I' m barely myself it seems,
He lived so much he's lucky not to have died
And for me? My life's a dream!;
Where birds must keep their appetite
As bread crumbs are my memories
As life is sitting on a bench
And feeding them, -my ecstasy!

No, the day has come where
Too long I have wondered
If there is any meaning left
For me in the summer
Flowers bloom, the world and the
sky are blue
And all of life is doing things
I once used to do

Flashback after flashback
Has sent me reeling,
This is my woe
I'm too weary for appealing.

I want to trade in these
Final dragging days
For a few quick moments
More worthy of my praise
To have made it this far is enough,
I'm amazed!

now somewhere in me
Against me he plays
His beautiful song
His meditation is a deep well of assurance
Reaching into itself for me
Beneath me in glimmering currents

So finally I must end this delay
And like a child to the one's ahead; "make way!"
-Thus I quit my life today.

*

Of late
Moonlight spills
To tell you've escaped
Standing next to
My projected fate

Here is the imprint
A ghost that remains
Till the sun that filled
Your face
With the first calm of life so loved.

*

I tried to find your substance
In the company of friends
It fell far short
And to much shorter ends
A mouthful of liquor
It occurred to me then;
I will die if I don't soon get near you again!

The moon's almost blue
But it wastes and decays
If it's witnessed like this
Far apart from your gaze
The expanse that surrounds it
Chokes and strangles it away!

Everything in me; all feelings collide
Confide in two words; fuck it!
Let poetry die!
Fuck poetry and all the lies that it hides!
There's no substance in waiting
In paling from this plight
In love? With a ghost!
No woman in sight
Nor tears drench the page
Nor words left to write.

Energy

I'm never cheating
Only ingesting
The sweet conflation
Of your words and mine
This pilgrim with conflagrant heart
Continually wraps
Your name around time

Your radiant beams reach deep;
Blaze thru smothering heaps
That bury sight;
Locate bottom where this
Introvert hides;
Paint Byzantine capitals
By mosaic at night

When in self-suffocation
You are grasping my clothes
To inhale in love
What I've left behind
Know that somewhere out there
I am lifting you up
(you are lifting me up with your mind)

Immortality

I dance to forget mortality
Sooner than it brings your life
It wrings it tight

Who will sing for me
When I am dead?
Who will close my eyes
And kiss my forehead?
So turn me to dust, promise me this!
I won't have my body
Stuck back in time
With maggots to kiss
Hissing with slime

Unhand me death, I'm living!
I'm tired of your doom that looms
Over all that I'm giving
And all that I do
You find me unfitting
What's fitting for you!?

Unhand me life I'm dying!
You tease me with flowers
And taunt me with flying
With passion and power
With women and crying
See! I can even love pain
& I'd suffer much more
Just to see you again

In my arms I kiss you, trembling
In the wait to be consumed
Embracing face to face
Hiding from departure and ruin

But wait-
A flash
In your eyes,
-Sudden grace;
The a vision of a place
Gravity can't trace;

Without a mind to cut us in sections
Without any work to resume
Revolving forever in pluperfection
Heart around Heaven like a moon.

*

Even when I want to fall over on myself
You hold me up
Not literally, to be my crutch
But in my heart
To help as much
And more
Or just
As when our skin
Once really touched

Even beat
At the end of each day
My heart stays strong to repeat
Your name with every
Drop of life it greets

Upon waking the only
Requirement I find
Is to remember I've known you
And the day falls into line
The calendar shines, sweet life!
Though all of night was
Nostalgia for your eyes
When you looked at me long
And I realized; "Love"
But you moved on as
Life for you is young
And for me?
I'll still grow
Still be free
As when from heaven above
A baby slips into the world
And exclaims with a cry;
"Beautiful life!... but why?"

*

Sweet litter of cells
To regenerate themselves
Flake death away
And skin to hell
Each cell kind
Growing weaker
Each time
Wrapped around bones
That become the punch-line

*

Leaving for a fraction
Love blinks its cautious eye
Its prey had run away
Then back with some unfitting difference
Subtracting a piece of her perfection
Tracing steps
That I myself would not take
Bruised deeper by denial of that other world
Which is empty of her wants
His shape is not hers
His mind I do not fight
I sin as I dream of a diminishing link
Between them.

*

…enamor of her is what it is
But your hands are on foreign controls
She may pull away when you blink
Or kiss you when you’re down

*

Where do you live?
Of what do you think?
When my eyes stumble upon your smile
It makes me wonder who you really are
Does the rain collect on your windowsill
While your sweet pale hands reach out to it?
So many stories I imagine about you
And… do you dream?
Or at that… do angels dream!?
Where lies your pillow?
Someday I’d like to stay there!
But no-
For when I’d make and leave that stay-
I might not dream another day.

Tommy

I found her at a different age
Our youth upon a different page
The separated numbers rage
When face to face upon the stage
To reality; my eyes dead shut!
Her smiles pierce the open cut
She doesn’t know the pain she brings
I’ve drowned alone in better things!
And now I hate to know a line
That love as bait so much defines
The pain; I cannot back away
The lure of another lifetime  

The Instructor

The rain is dried
The tears are cried
And nothing’s left to say
Save broken lines of indecision
Unanswered from yesterday
I’m looking down at meaningless metal
Forward the trees point skyward
And tell me the answers all fall from above
But silence is all that I’ve heard

What a calming quiet it is though
Its depths are as deep as the moon’s glow

Until a voice
Cuts thru the air like a hawk

*

A shanty in Valdez
I carry in my head
With the deepest bay
For a boat to tread
Listening to the ocean
Pounding
Darkness pervading
Desolate reaches
Endlessly
We could make it
To where the lights slip out of view.

*

At sunrise
In front of my house
A white cat went
(like a dog after its tail)
In circles

-the cars bypassed

I crossed the lawn
Into the street
Stepping in a pool of blood
Where she fell over,
Face like a murder

Sighing with grief
As she struggled to breath
I kneeled
To touch the soft
White remains
Of her mangled body

Till the sun sank and she was gone

*

Misfit alphabet from hell
Who turned these into words from goblins?
Took my flowers by smoke?
Some
Misfit empire of smiles remote
Dodged
Breeds words by kisses blew
Blue
Remote
Others ambulance
Of Telepathic antigens rush up
And
Oh sirens we sign the cross
Passing you turn death
Into single demonstrations
What is this capacity overbearing
Lounge philosophy?
What is this nothing of letters with which
We counter death
Calling karma down to deal what is ours?
Or leaping from these finite forms
We love that go under
And cause despair
To something most incredible,
Buttons of faith-
The poems we ingest.

*

I do not make a cringing scene
For an invisible audience
Where I cling to your being
With pictures or words
With which I could have dreamed
But I do remember you
In sorrow about your absence
Deserving pardon
One letter after another
That find you.
Is it my fault
That flowers bring your face
Every place they bloom or die?
For I do not decide the muse
A poet never does
And now you have become my art
Seemingly just because.

Cafe Caffeine

10:00 Rainy morning
Poetic lust
Coffee shop comfort
Picture window people
Running to their urban lodges
Only when this
Setting lifts will
A brand new hangover reply
The dawn is gone
And day has spawned
The next monopoly

Alison

We made it so far
In a big highschool world

And learned so much
By it
But now I'm 

Haunted by emotion

Colorado must be some place
(Milwaukee does change)
Your missing fall
Sweat jackets & dreaming
By the lake
You’re missing storm clouds
On cornfields 

To techno driving aimlessly

Those mountains are nothing
Compared to what this was 

*

Dictionary, my
#1 companion
Completes me
Has everything I need
Ex-er-cise, qui-et-ness
Lots of var-i-ous items and…
Supererogation?
What words!
Simple ones also
Sim-ple, re-lax
And
Oh, love-
Love. N. affection; strong liking; goodwill; devoted attachment to one of the opposite sex.
Oh.
Re-lapse.

Love in School Time

Between ever punctual bells
Rooms are chambers
Hallways echo loose voices
Like closing cell doors in prisons
I’m reclined against a yellow wall
That someday won’t exist
So many glorious buildings
For whatever cause will topple
And that is far greater than this
Certain windows linger
Injured by angry fists
That responded in a moment
Making cookie cut breaks
We try to save time that will soon
Be expired

I managed to find love amid

These confining walls
Which is lost now
As I feed my diary
Scribbled in place of homework

Someday I'll read it back
And question youth and

Wasted days at school
When memories were infused by that girl
Till hours vaguely calculated
Got passed pondering the future

And a love that disappears into it.

Elizabeth

Her aquatic eyes sank
Like stones in my mind
A metronome entrancing
Tick by tick
Our hands met
Like a prayer
Her face chasing through dreams
Fading when day broke.
I knew her not for but a day

Destiny slipped Elizabeth,
I know we could have loved.

HIgh School

Marked with the slow death of personality
Who runs the razor thru the wrist?
Who pushes the man from the cliff?
Despair!
Failure to conform correctly
Boredom with constrictive society.
To explore, this is a need!
To have a good love, this is a need!
We wake against will
Sitting in an assembly line
Awaiting the next injection
Of imposed knowledge
From those who came before
Who see us rise while really we fall
Deeper inside
Struggling to meet someone else’s needs.

*

I want to jet plane
To your sleepy cove
Of thinking
The primitive anti-pleasure
Of hangovers
Reaps every thought of you
To cure itself
Every cell in my body
Holds a dream of your skin
And I miss you all over
Again and again

*

Calling the eternal tide
Rise my love
Powered under a moon
Sinking into the sand
Sinking into me
Reach into it
Underneath the heavy warmth
Of your whispering words
Winds from the depths inside you
Create waves
Drifting from this shore
To find the source
Be calm
I saw beauty looking up through you
Be calm
Eyes and the sea
But do not recede.

A Winter Dance

Quiet November
In streets in the morning
Where the air’s ever punctual
In delivering the cold
Someone's always waiting
Perpetually ready
For the first snowflake
From nothing
To unfold
Up in the foreground
Of a neo-gothic tower
Falls lightly a feather from somewhere unknown
Inspired by this I quietly sing
Spinning thru memory, a mind overgrown

I study the meaning, taking the signs

Carry a burden that cannot be said

Fires are burning seeds we've sewn

The moon is the trees' lullaby, living dead

People are crowded in buses and hallways
Shuffling to a bell's ring the classes proceed

All that is held in the walls and the structures

Is far from the truth that a season can free

A feather still falls but surely all things
Are accompanied by more than just instants of show

So as I am witness still too many others

Track a million navigating imitations of snow
As points they are dancing, connecting the lines

An abstract creation 

For winter to raise
Quiet November
Speak your joy;

Anything that dances in the winter should be praised! 

*

So let the liquor unearth
On a bruised plane I speak easy
Of all the things
Of how we chase
From eroding place
To eroding place
Fighting what takes over the Holy Earth
Conforming unorganically in an unholy bind
Dimensional words driven to extinction
Silenced by the robots of time
Take technology out of poetry
Take machinery out of words
But too late
Your eyes are day leaving
In your eyes a sad red setting
Like a sunset we recall
Like the last real thing,
Our largest pain to face
(Our largest face to paint)

*

And I departed from him
Pretending not to know I would return
And that he would still be there
Having gone nowhere since the real me began
Though I had gone off
Sluggishly into my ignorance
My actions falling flat on their face.

Nicky

Only to distant dreamlands
Do I write without intentions
And here lies no obligations, as I write of you
The fantasy… It cheats our promise of space
In not leaving all of you behind,
But what matters fairy tales to promises?
I had a falling out with poetry
Which you have bridged among other things
And now aggression is freed in your name-
The unfreedom of being with you
Has its freedom too!
I look thru you for fantastic visions
Yet somehow you are also a mirror?
Destiny is now two-faced and
A two sided dream wakes me to say “impossible”
Now the voice in my head speaks boldly of metaphors
Has foreign reason and slippery hands
I want to grip and choke this demon in the light
But then the eyes seduce me
And the forrest rushes over us. So I tell lies
With words that are backwards
And the scene of you and I seems backwards too.
In this nothing in neutralized
Our hands are overlapped and match accordingly
But how to understand
Confusion seeming far too true.
And who are you?