Dark Poetry Prose Poetry June 20, 2003 Dark Poetic Prose

6-20-03 friday 8:08pm brick NJ

light up the night with cigarettes and dreams you still pretend. follow the sun as it sinks behind the horizon. time shrinks as years widen.

cafe heart sits quietly sipping the minutes under an umbrella of solitude. watching the world move.

phonograph life crackles with the static from years of dirt that cannot be removed. phonograph lives are analog like, so that you can still hear the faint vibrations even when there is no amplification.

call me do. or call me don't. call me someone who writes more than they live. someone who gives more than they have. someone who listens even when no one's talking. call me then. or call me when. call me someone who you'll remember long after life has forgotten.

i cradle the sunset in my arms. like a babe crying hard. try to rock her to sleep. try to sway her toward something quieter when she can't remember how to sleep. i talk to the voices, though they don't talk to me. sudden whispers in memory of places and people who used to pretend to know me. touches in places. touches in ways that never again will be.

idle days turn to idle nights. progression folds into depression like smooth orgami lines. yesterday is nowhere i can find. and tomorrow only borrowed pages that absorb all i write. today never suspected that i would ask her to prove her presence. today never collected enough yesterdays to know who she is. and now it's gotten so that all the answers we'd defined are useless. all the songs that i'd listen forgetful as the sunset that i witness. cold and far as the horizon that swallows this day. tired as the tide endlessly courting the waves.

6-20-03 friday 9:55pm brick NJ

if you die in the arms of your lvoer, do you die happy? if you suffocate because that perfect kiss stole your last breath. are you more alive or less?

if pauses were movement. and memory live again. would you die just because you'd lived so much. would you die peaceful or in a flurry of sadness?

touch yourself or let others do it. how do you calculate it when there's nothing left to feel? how do you tabulate the moments that your life has neglected? are they places you can come back to when or are they the juxatpositions of your reasoning that you'd rather forget?

smoke your lungs. drown your brain in oceans of. cancer and cravings teach better than any method of loving.

if i've said it before. if i've said it too much. apologies still seem unneccassry given the situation. maybe i was more wrong than i've ever been. maybe i was more right than these lives could stand. whatever happened is now reduced to drippings in the pan. we might make a gravy with them, but the meat is gone. they might make a nice topping, but the meal's already been had.

my cold metaphors. my dark ponderings leave little place for subtlies. and even less room for loving me. so you didn't. so what. no one ever has. so you opted for something less than this. something still greater than. so what. it was never going to happen.

if that last night lives as if it had no end. if that last kiss still can be taste on your lips. it doesn't mean anything except that the bridge you tried to cross is broken. that you'll have to walk all the way around. it'll take so mcuh longer, but the destination is still there to be found. it isn't a different place you want to go,. just a new way to get there. it isn't who you've lost that matters so much as who you still know.