The one I started (and never finished) for Jenn after Kelley passed. Suppose I should try and decipher my handwriting at some point (since she liked the other one I did for her).

I mean … I suppose I should try writing poetry on Adderall as well at some point, seeing as all this crap I am d$cking with is twenty years old and pre-diagnosis.

I've got to get to Arizona
And see the desert smile
But I mustn't leave these church bells
To the boys in the corral

Half-way now to Arizona,
I can feel his muscles rise.
With his goosebump riddled hair
And a peanut shell for Parthenon,
A blanket sky with stars for dawn,
But I just can't leave the look
I saw in Izabella's eyes

Her eyes control the vacancy
Behind my wounded sight
But Arizona calls
To mend my frailty.
For inspiration and desperation
Alone control our plight
And I'm half a mile from Arizona…

More blather.

Keep your eyes on the road, not the wheel
You must know where you’re going to know how you feel.

I mean … f$&k if I know.

Mark well the stain of the wind as the whales take flight
A blight on the natural, a bite from the phallic falsehood

Towards the end (and probably months away from finally being diagnosed with Dysthymia and ADHD) I was basically down to one-liners.

The bleached night collecting light

More drunken drivel.

A closed mind will weave the twine for a noose to constrict your soul.

Going out on limb and guessing this was around the time I began going to The Globe to write.

I write better when I am sober but I drink better when I am writing.

Cover page for my collected poems when I was in high school.

Pretty confident every poetry writing high school kid coming up in Georgia has written at least one poem on a Waffle House napkin.

If I could see through my walls of lazy faith
I would agree that my thoughts are days away
I lay here flushed in this field of daisied clay
Waiting for my love to light the way
And pushing with my pen, I contemplate my sin
And aggravate my mind to be a saint and invite it in
For through the water I wade
Until the scene has decayed
I have not been cleansed
But lick my rust and peel away

A traveler weary from mileage
Borne by raw, aching feet
By blistered heals and battered toes
Fearing ravaged feet will weight no longer hold

A traveler moving slowly
Each step cries out defeat
First one step, then another
Two weepy steps behind
Too many left

A traveler fearing herself unable
To keep on trekking
Feet shedding bloody tears
And skin
When at last she stops
Will boots hold naught but pulp and bone?

A traveler unaware must then be told
Of all that escapes her vision
And shapes her soul

The strength to carry on resides not within her feet
Her heart propels her forward
Feeds her body's motion
Layers of skin incur resurrection
Strengthened by all they have endured

At journey's end, feet unsheathed
Have been heart-tempered
Able to bear even greater weight
Yet, free to choose a friendlier path
To a happier place, with a lighter load

I wonder what it will be like for things to get better after being arguably as bad as they have ever been.

I wonder how all those falsehoods will play after things start to get better.

I wonder how many full fledged COVID deniers will finally encounter this deadly pandemic.

I wonder if red states will continue to suffer needlessly under Trumpian COVID policies.

I wonder how those red state constituents will feel when their jobs come back.

When they aren’t so frightened.

When their families feel safe.

When they feel that their families are safe.

I wonder who the ratings leader is among cable news networks.

Wait … who used to be the leader?

Okay … but for how long? Really?

I wonder what changed.

I wonder how many more previously registered Republicans will re-register with reality.

I wonder what it will feel like in 2022 … after two years of feeling better.

I wonder how difficult it would be to reject reality for 6 straight years with nothing but the whole sale loss of jobs and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American citizens to show for it.

I wonder how much quicker the historical record becomes cemented when that record has been broadcast to the globe via the digitization of every inch of our lives.

I wonder who will write that history, and how the reality rejectionists will come off in retrospect.

I wonder how embracing white supremacy and white grievance as a party platform will age as the demography tips (like flipped GA tips).

I wonder how many more people will come to believe in a shadowy high power cabal drinking up babies in the pursuit of immortality.

I wonder if it will be enough to win elections.

Where meaning goes to die
Where smiles lie
Where mild manners pander to appease
An obfuscated aura
Hides well malignancy
A spirit merely spoken of
Fills not with love
But with hot air and emptiness
A vagabond of vacancy
A spirit lived distends
To hold the breadth of life
In this place it is all talk
Walk and talk
Walk and talk
The efficacy with which
Emptiness fills space astounds
Pestilence personified
A hallowed face and hollow heart
Think not that perceptive clarity
Belies similitude
If ever I had meaning
It has died
Could I purse my lips to smile
It would lie
My spirit quivers
With complacency
But, are not my manners mild?

An empty pocket sailor
Drifting along the currents of cohabitation
Tattered sails hang hidden
To all save crying eyes
Alone from earth to sky
An inverted intentation
Wearing a strapless soul and
Paper boots with starving roots
Howling silence at the satellite city
Lupine speech with a laudable lisp
Transient taste
And aches to be kissed
Crumbling mortar means weakening walls
Within his house of cards
The Jack of Clubs can’t hold long
Without the Queen of Hearts
Solitary confinement
Rooted by stars with iron bars
The fear of growing barren
Has him sticking love in jars

A sorted affair, like the little girl's hair
A libation on information
When you can trust nothing you'll believe anything
Conscious or conscientious? Which? Either?
Break like summer sun through cloudy sky
Or milky puss through broken sty

Wary should we be
That our eyes don't paint the leaves
Here there be monsters
The likes of which I've never seen
Shimmy up and down the stalk
So I may tell you what you've seen

We breathe, we breed, we need to explain
Awake we frighten fosterlings
Adjudicate accessibility
Drown out objectivity
Bleating axioms angrily
To taint with torpid movement the last of man's humanity
The earthworm eats the shit we leave and
Gives it back for us to seed
Who ingests our karmic waste
The kids may play like a snow day
Constructing existential effigies
But, the fires won't go out and now
It's getting difficult to breathe

Let us embark upon a midnight dream
Of post-war metaphysical strength
A gap in the trodden mind
That bequeaths relief from time
A witness to the quickness with which
 Father trunk can shake his leaves
With cankered flesh and molten minds
A barren branch of rotted pine
Like a faulty-bearing prisoner
we die

Imprisoned by our own existence
And liberated only by our dreams
A pigeon on the tightrope
Trying to fly with ingrown wings
Surpassing but a baby's whim
A meager keg of cream
Nothing is scared from within our loans
Nothing sacred in our voice
Dream your dreams
And dream of dreaming dreams

Infallible peasants, armed and obese
Neither a factor for growing the seed
Trite and trivial, stringing their toes
Relics for abstinence, fools in the flow
Eden or Amityville, time tells all truth
Prior to fortification they prosed
Inside through blood streams, vitamins screamed
David, the layman, led marches, formed teams
During the squabbles the rejects ran dry
Reaching for speech to follow and chide
Eminent soldiers showed little breath
Aging anxiety creates fear of death
Merely a tool to tame the faint hearted
So are the religions these old laymen started

Sleep, she lies in fairy tales for me
Creates gaps in Stalin's misty dream
Of barring leaves from trees
To court the gaps in veins
That leave a sullen pilot light,
A spark like twilight,
To shine for me

The lines are wired
The breeze is felt like velvet eruptions
Finally, a break in the patterns of light
And a ghost in the reflection
You find out that your death and your face have connections
The lines in your face seem to glow from the misological soap
As the summer comes
And the weeds and the grass elope

Something ties this face together
Olive oil turns leaves to feathers
Christ runs worldly crime and hate
Inside this field with iron gates
Even after teething abates and
Tithing prostrates a rise in weight
Your false words have fallen short and late