Dreamless

Troubles rise wakeful,
Chaos dances in the wind;
Hope slumbers dreamless.

The Hole

You know you have a hole to fill;
You carry it around.
So as you see us standing still,
The questions run aground.

Why leave behind a shovel
Just to cover with a tarp?
Because some things are never full,
And shovels can be sharp.

Desert Rivers

I should be drowned in rivers
Streams should flow of tears
But currents barely quiver
And I’ve looked away for years.

My Unlife

How can I complain about an unlife
When I know that it is my life,
And whatever goes unchanging,
It’s my fault that it’s so?

Underneath

Frantically, she tore up the floorboards. “It has to be here!” she half-screeched, as she darted to and fro, searching different places. In the end, she collapsed, crumpling into a heap in the middle of what was left of the floor. Her bleeding fingers pulsed with pain, a reminder, and her glazed eyes wandered to one of the places where she’d torn up the wood. There should have been something underneath of it. A secret passage, a beating heart, a hidden stash with all the answers in it. Dirt, even. She would’ve taken dirt. But instead there was nothing. Just the void, that endless dark. “There should have been SOMETHING,” she whispered, eyes tearing up. “But there wasn’t,” her mind hissed back. Instead of crying, she began to laugh; a mad laugh. The darkness didn’t end at the floorboards.

Intentions (explicit)

I’m not intending to be shallow,
But shallow’s what I am;

Phantom Pain

I wonder if I have a soul —
You tell me that I must;
For who would care to question
If they did not care first?

But the more I try to think of it,
The more it hurts my brain;
For what if all the things I feel
Amount to only phantom pain?

Weak Links

So many broken links
In one long endless chain;
Everybody points, but nobody thinks
That they might share the blame.
They want to dub a “weakest”
So that it will be okay
And the chain at last will be the best
With one link thrown away.
But such chains aren’t made of people,
So easily dismissed:
They’re linked by actions and their ripples;
Made brittle by our emptiness.

Machiavellian

I twist myself in knots:
My rope, these aching thoughts;
The maddening echoes I have wrought
By eclipsing every light around.

I call myself so very clever;
I know that nothing lasts forever,
And so to all trapdoors I pull the lever
And listen for the falling sound.

But there’s no tresspasser standing;
No enemy there is dancing,
And I can spend my life demanding
For the culprit to be found.

Yet still there’s something missing
And though the well is filled with wishing
It’s as well as rod-less fishing
And I fear that I’ll be drowned.

Dead

What became of us I do not know.
Were we buried beneath the dirt, or snow?
Did we drown beneath the waves so low,
We thought there was noplace underneath to go?
Did we walk the walk right off a cliff?
Did we stay still until the ground would shift?
Did we our spirits try to lift,
Only to fall, or remain adrift?
Did we try to fix the dissonance
With a simple shift of countenance,
Believing that a road paved with pretense
Might be the path to happiness?
Did we wave as the real thing passed us by,
Seeing only a stranger in our eye,
But wondering still if we should stop and lie
And talk about the weather with a sigh?
I suppose we just walked on instead,
Admiring roses black instead of red,
Not bothering to note where this road always led.
Perhaps that is why we lie here dead.