30

We are your sons
We are your fathers
We are your half-smiles and frail limbs 
We are your motel vacancies in blood long shed.

Shadows cast in the dim light of societal separation
A winding ward’s floor, once bleached like bone
Is now a cockroach’s pitched and pitted playground
Men still endure here against all indignity.

A screaming curse against once firm truths
Be they sacred stone or a brother’s bond
Shaking hatred shatters even Christmas photographs
It hurts, it hurts, my god, it just hurts.

In even this
We still have an embrace to give
Our illness is not yet death
And we are alive.

Babel

There is as much romance in man’s madness,
As there is aesthetics in the rotten yellow of his sunken grave.
An epicurean delight,
Still soils the sheet.
Art is not more than the sweat on a carpenter’s brow...
I am no poet and I will never write again.

Elitism

Deliverance before dessert,
An IPA before introspection,
Hipster small talk on trimmed tablecloth.
Hands too soft to claim a blue collar,
But a brain too simple to tremble at a spinning sphere with zero significance,
They don’t belong anywhere except in the ground.
Have your cake and eat it too…
Then get the fuck out of here, this ain't no open mic night.