Poetry,

Between Love and Disaster

Soundtrack by Ruston Kelly “Hellfire”.

This is your life, take it or leave it

Thru your tears and laughter

Were’e all just finding our way

Ya never know what ya got

Till you find out what you’re not

And most the time there’s nothing

There’s nothing there at all

Make your choice between love and disaster 

This is your life, to use as you choose

There’s anger and there’s forgiveness 

They’re both out there waiting for you

Grab a hold with both hands

Sometimes ya win sometimes ya lose

It’s no good to go it alone

Inside your soul make a home 

Made of Glass and stone

Make your choice between love and disaster 

This is your dream, to awaken

Watching your life unfold

Some give in, some give up

Trust your heart, trust your gut

Search the edges of your thoughts

What’s illusion, what’s not

Be careful what you’re chasing after

Make your choice between love and disaster 

Reprieves And Lost Causes

Let’s get this straight, people who seek simple answers are stupid. The ones who say, “Just repeat this mantra, just take this pill, go to this church, become a vegan, do yoga, read this book, join this party, attend this meeting, be affiliated, be indoctrinated, surrender yourself to a cult, follow this preacher, prophet, shaman, sacrifice your individualism, follow these steps, support this program and on and on into perpetuation. If anyone offers you simple solutions to the myriad of life challenges, immediately run in the opposite direction. Nobody’s gonna save you———except you!

Get this through your complacent brainwashed mind, “Life ain’t simple and surely not easy”. It’s filled with tough decisions, difficult questions and complex choices. Furthermore, life is unfair. Innocent children unexplainably die while evil murders on death-row live out long heathy lives——it’s infuriating! These dreadful thoughts keep me up at night. What kind of god creates a universe that approves such horror, inequality——such depravity. 

There was a time many years ago when there were only three TV networks to choose from (ABC, NBC and CBS). There were two types of bread, white or wheat. You were either a Chevy person or a Ford person. You were a Beatle fan or a Beach Boy’s fan. You either watch CNN or Fox News. There was a time when we only required one hour of nightly news to cover the local and national fresh batch of calamities. 

Nothing is simple anymore. Is “more” always better? Maybe the Amish have it right with their horse-drawn buggies, silly bonnets and goofy black hats? Maybe enlightenment is more achievable for the Zen Monk living alone in a cave in the Himalayas, no distractions, no facebook, no TikTok, no porn. Is ignorance bliss? Was Socrates right when he said “unexamined life is not worth living”. Are the stupid people happier than the seekers? It’s so much easier to be stupid and happy rather than struggling to find yourself, to be “woke” (whatever that means?) 

Now a days, we want to see, hear and know everything. We watch with glee as our heroes fall from grace. Does the tragedies of others make us feel better about our lackluster lives? Life is no longer lived, it’s processed, deep fried, homogenized, propagandized.  We watch life through a porthole, secretly peering into others Social Network realities. We seek out others in an echo chamber that supports our beliefs. We’re overloaded with conspiracies, truthiness and artificial intelligence (oxymoron). There are now computer apps that can be programed to write college thesis papers, compose music and create original paintings. I don’t know what original means anymore. Is there an algorithm for originality? For beauty? For reality? For Love? 

What’s real, what’s illusion. What’s true and what’s bullshit? It’s all up to you because the future is up for grabs. There’s no longer a truth filter or bullshit detector. We live in a world of contradictions and complications. I don’t know about you, but I’m pissed off. Why you might ask? 

The rich pay no taxes while the rest of us fight over table scraps. Politicians sit on their asses and do nothing while our children are slaughtered in another mass shooting. We have resources to better feed and house the homeless but yet there are more starving people living on the streets than ever before. We have better medications available to save lives but pharmaceutical companies charge more than what the sick can afford. We have science that has revealed the imminent dangers of global warming, yet our governments and industries fail to implement changes that will reduce the greenhouse effect. 

This one life given, should be better lived.

Sometimes it’s a curve ball

A dear John letter

A tire with a slow leak

A misfire

Ruble and ashes

Simplicity lost

Regretful goodbyes

Cold left overs

Prayers and futility

Unexpected farewells

Stained excuses

Potholes and apologies

Pretend love

Leached out success

Players and fakers

Listing ships

Death by loneliness

Silent betrayal

Orphaned dreams

Waiting on nothing

On no one

Self forgiven

Forgotten promises

Stubborn solitude

Watered down desire

Driving alone

Getting nowhere

Squelched confessions

July Snowstorm

Unhappy endings

Reprieves and Lost Causes 

Duct Tape And Hope

Life is fleeting, time can be cruel, money has wings——and in the end what matters most are the seemingly insignificant forgotten moments. It’s the ones who we surround ourselves with that matters, the ones who make us laugh at ourselves and help us to untether from this claustrophobic existence. Those honest ones, who in spite of ourselves cause us to wanna be a better person. But in the end we’re exposed as frauds and not what we had hoped to be.—- Hope is duct tape.

Unrealized dreams, fitful nights, trust betrayed, falling through that trapdoor in a used up life. Illogically, love is something that comes from nothing, like the meandering melancholy melodies of Chet Bakers trumpet on the tune “My Funny Valentine”. 

How can something so simple tie knots in tangled hearts. How many lives are wrapped within one life. Ends become beginnings. Promises and vows are watered down “what use to be’s”. Sadly, there are no second chances, only the impulsive choices we must now learn to live with. 

Loneliness makes its home in the heart of old loves that in time have become contrite.

I Over Think Stuff

I wrote this for a friend of mine who recently celebrated his 40th wedding anniversary.

Forty years is a long time to believe in anything, but if you’re going to believe in anything, it might as well be love. Love, what a strange and unreasonable concept. We promise to love people and things as if they’ll always remain the same. Maybe love has nothing to do with those things. When love grows old and uncomfortably comfortable——- is when it is the most real. After the sex is gone, after the sweet Hallmark Cards have all been sent, signed and delivered with their cursory hearts and X’s and O’s.  After all is said and done, there’s only you and that fool-hearted promise that you’d give your love to someone forever—it’s truly hard to love anything or anyone forever. Commitments and promises belong to fools, dreamers and those who know the gift of a miracle. Love is a miracle. If ya wanna be loved, then ya gotta be lovable—–its the receptacle law of give and take. There are some who never “get it”.

Lately I’ve been having this awful feeling that I’m forgetting something, or missing something. I get this overwhelming feeling of loss. I feel like life is going too fast and I can’t catch up, or worse yet, I’m wasting time going in the wrong direction. So many forks in the road. I’m so damn sentimental, I hate letting go of people and things. The Buddhist believe that all suffering is due to the attachment of people and things—–And then there’s the physicists who say change is the only constant. 

I overthink stuff. 

Things I Had To Find Out

I remember my first apartment. It never felt like home, it was sparse and empty. It smelled of stale cigarets and flat beer. But I needed to go there and find things out for myself. I had to rid myself of parents and daily routines of doing chores——that draining feeling of being someones child, being someones pride and burden. It’s an awful feeling of being young and realizing that you’re going nowhere fast. Failure is a brutal teacher. 

I thought it was going to be a lot different. I dreamt that there’d be girls, all kinds of girls. Girls dancing with me in the dark, spending their nights in my ramshackle pad. I thought there’d be late night parties, beer for breakfast and never having to make my bed or mow my dad’s lawn. But mainly, it ended up being me and a couple of buddies sitting on my broken down couch, smoking pot and drinking the cheapest beer we could find. 

We found out the hard way that the girls wanted boys with fancy cars and college bound incomes. They went for the boys who were going to Cabo for Spring Break and living off the money their parents gave to them freely. 

Me and my buddies spent long nights hanging out in my dimly lit apartment. Our big plans veiled the fear that our dreams were like all those pretty girls, untouchable, just out of reach. And it ached deep down to watch them walk by, hand in hand with their privileged preppies. They left a trail of republican stench in their wake. 

As for us, we were never going to comprises and end up working for “the man”. We were going to travel, see the world, have grand adventures and yes, we’d find carefree girls too. But we found out that everything had a price, everything cost money.  The fast-food jobs sucked, and the jobs working at the Canneries were tedious, heartless and grueling. We were constantly being fired for showing up late, or being hungover and not showing up at all. We were  expendable to “the man”. Our only refuge was the broken down apartment where we could exchange big ideas and plot out our untested futures. 

But, this world is designed to castrate young men and squeeze every last drop of life out of them. They wanted us to be content working at their mindless, meaningless, soul sucking jobs that were designed to make us feel insignificant, replicable. Replaceable like a worn out part or broken piece of machinery. They enjoyed watching us fight each other over the table scraps they tossed us. 

There would be a string of rundown apartments, quicksand jobs and that sound of silent screams of someone under water, someone suffocating. The American Dream was a con, a lost cause, a carrot dangling just out of reach, but close enough to keep us plodding along like dimwitted plow horses. 

So, one day I woke up and I stopped trying to be something or somebody. I stopped, shook my head and walked away from it all, from the city and its constant drone of nothingness. Along with its horde of brainwashed proletariat working stiffs, who’s only purpose was to make the rich richer. They worked at dreadful jobs to pay the mortgage on houses they left empty so that they could go to work and pay their mortgage. They got loans to buy cars that they drove from home to work and from work to home in a vicious circle. It all seemed so senseless to me. There was nothing there for me. I had no use for that world that once left me feeling insignificant. I moved to the mountains and never looked back. I found purpose hiking in the woods and sharing sunsets and sunrises with fellow pariahs.

Like I said “I had to find things out for myself”.

Inventing Colors

Art is everywhere, but most only see it when it’s put in a fancy frame, installed in an art show or defined as such by pretentious critics’. I do love art. I love Bukowski and Kerouac….Their pens like divining rods, separating raw sewage from raw beauty.  Some people breakdown playing the piano into a math problem, into intervals and the frequency of notes on a page, but that’s missing the point of playing the piano. Why paint by numbers when there’s so much more waiting outside the lines. Doodle, scribble, close your eyes and let the music flow through you, out of you, into you——like a new color that’s yet to be discovered. 

The Forgiveness Song

This one’s for all the old couples who stuck it out through the hard times.

I’m tired of you

Being tired of me

I’m tired of me 

Being tired of you

Once again

You forgive me

Once again 

I forgive you (2X)

Your my friend and lover

I’m your lover and friend

We’re still together

Cause we’ve learned how to bend

Wrote you a love song

Wrote me a letter

Some loves fall apart==but

We’re better off together

We can take bike

We can take a bus

Enjoy the ride 

Don’t get in a rush

Come on to bed

Don’t make a fuss

Shut off those lights

I’m gonna make ya blush

I’ve been wrong

A few times right

You’ve been right

A few times wrong

After all our trials

And tribulations 

Our loves like a sweet song

Playing on a country station (2x)

Gave me a kiss, and a hug

Gave ya a hug, and a kiss

Turn tears to laughter

Cause it’s better than being pissed

Doubts and questions

We’ve had a few

But, you still love me

And, I still love you

We can take a Harley

We can take a bus

Enjoy the ride 

Don’t get in a rush

Come on to bed

Don’t make a fuss

Shut off those lights

We’ll polish off the dust

I’m gonna make ya blush