Things as they are...

By proxy
and thus removed
In use
or just decay

Severed selves
detached
dissolving

As is
as in
honesty or demise

Where and when
related
realized or relinquished

The truth
or folly's fiction
To deceive is to
despise
to confess
  to realize

Head, Heart, Head...

The street to cross
The ways to look first
Right, Left, & Right (again)
No coin to toss
No spells to curse
No luck to distrust

If you're going to make your own way through
It's going to be all on you
and only one way will likely do

Head, Heart, Head
The way across the dread
To dreams beyond your bed

Think the world on through
till it means something to you
then feel what your heart would do
and plan to make it true

See it through with the light within your mind
Search wisely for what your heart will find
Don't just rush through the darkness blind
and you just might leave the dark behind

Head, Heart, Head
Think twice as hard as you feel
and feel for what is real
Head, Heart, Head
The path of your ordeal
deserted with this ideal

Head, Heart, Head
Beware, but move ahead

Refusing To Regress...

Battles won & battles lost
All the wounds & all the cost
With little left & less to gain
Questions used to just remain
The refusal to regress
as substitute for progress

The smallest victory can cost more than all
The only souls live enough to fall
will be considered standing tall

One bullet in a chamber waiting
with countless threats encroaching near
Surrender too ingratiating
and suicide presents no fear
To regress towards death becomes the pull
that tugs upon the triggered-soul

How do you live when it's to the death
How do you fill your final breath
How do you refuse to just regress
What will is there one might possess
beyond the doubts the dead confess

From the first word spoken
to the last rites read
From the petty token
to the nourishing bread
The life that lives will not be dead
despite the horrors and fearsome dread
but refuses to regress instead

On A Night...

On a night
when everyone you see
looks like someone you know
but you don't know anyone
though they all seem to know
  each other
and maybe even you
but none of them do
and all the sentences
  run on
along with the hours
through the vacancy of time
in the crowded/empty spaces
that fill your thoughts
with their emptiness
as you pour yourself
into each drink
of whatever it is you're having
even if you don't take so much
as a sip of anything more
than the glass half-emptied
that drowns your silenced breath

On a night
when the distance
from you to anything
is farther than the spaces between
and even the distance
from you to your own thoughts
is as infinite as the void
between two opposing dreams
and all that vapid nothing
is tightly closing in
as if the whole world
were one collapsing-lung
afflicted with emphysema
and choking on itself
as it tries not to gasp for air

On a night
when the only word
that you can feel
is the numbness
of alone
but it means something
vastly different than
being on your own
as you're stranded
without your self
and therefore more
than just alone
in the least of all
you've known

On a night
when everything is disparate,
too hopeless to be desperate,
and all-together desolate
there's still the faintest hint
of a promise to be broken
that is the rising dawn
that brings the light
you'll see through
even if it's lost
before you're gone

On a night
when you've lost yourself
and found yourself lost
all in the course of no events
it's hard to find the words
that silence themselves
in contention with laments
and hard to find ascension
till the rising sun repents
and the dark of night relents

Tender Torments Of A Callous Heart...

No artillery pierced the shell
as Cupid's arsenal struck & fell
from a callous heart, forged in hell
that knew such battles all too well

no pains were felt
no signs would show
no markings left
no blood to flow

The saboteurs could never near
the vicinity of a heart so clear,
so calm, so callous, & strangely dear
to all the usual torments here

Even as the earth would shake
the heart held still amidst the quake
of dreams from which it thought to wake
and leave for other hearts to take

Tender torments of a callous heart
kept at bay before they'd start
to cause such callous parts to soften
like rains on some unfinished coffin

Confined to this by its restrictions
Consoled alone by its convictions
Its only hope to be secluded
To not intrude or be intruded

Such torments tendered with so much heart
Such callous torments of tendered heart
Such tender torments of a callous heart

Surrendered To The Losing Side...

Surrendered to the losing side
Captives with no place to hide
Accepting things that won't abide
Depending on what can't provide
A life-long grave to stay inside

Die silently in eternal decency
Accomplice to complacency
Accentuate incompetency
Consecrate the death to see

Composed in decomposing
Assuaged into espousing
Reposed to merely posing

The dead that claim the living
In this life opposing death
The thefts that pass as giving
The cough proposed as breath

Let the damned be lost
and pay at their own cost
Deny their futile demands
Refuse them your right hands
and reclaim the prosperous lands

Zhuangzi Butterflies...

As kings dream of butterflies
and butterflies of kings
while flapping their fingers
or extending their wings
their dreaming lives go on
with all these fading things

The truth and the fiction
are converged in the dream
the heat of the friction
propelling with steam

As fading and waking
can each bring an aching
As time is all-taking
the dream's in its making

The kings spread their wings
and the moth wears its crown
the archangel sings
and heaven comes down

Kings of the air
and wings on a throne
these dreams that they wear
are the truths they'll have known
though it hardly seems fair
when all dreams rest alone