Friend

 Hey look at that
There's blood on the floor. 
Be careful now, I don't want you to slip
I don't want you to get hurt. 
Sure is a lot of blood on the floor. 
What a terrible mess. 
It sure is cold in here.
Did you want to tell me something friend? 
I've been sitting here all along.
I've been sharing my bread with you. 
I've been reading the manual, but my eyes are blurry. 
Friend, I've been listening, but you have got to watch your step. 
I don't want to see you fall, but you have to watch your step. 
Did you cut yourself? 
Is this your blood? 
I'm feeling a little light headed friend but I'm here for you. 
I've been here for you this entire time. 
Whats the knife for friend?
Its covered with bloody handprints and caked in malice. 
Are you in danger friend? 
Its good to see you smiling friend but what's so funny?
Thats a lot of blood....friend... 
That blood is mine friend... 
What happened here friend... 

...why
...why did you kill me... 



I was your friend

Clay and Candlelight

 I walk the streets looking up at the tall buildings and down at men of earthenware souls. Men of clay morals and chipped characters, broken down statures lining the roads traveled by. A shirtless man drinks poisoned water from a decorative fountain spilling chemicals down his leathery shirtless skin. The rubber band in his beard quivers slightly at the notion that there is some foreign agent to the water that is not quite well. I move to speak truth to him but he pays me no mind and is on his way again.  I’ve staggered these same streets laughing at nothing as a madman not fully lost. Like a wolf left to the wild, perhaps wherever I am is where I am to be. No, I don’t believe that. Where I am is somewhere dangerous I suspect.  As I traverse the byways of clay men cracked and fired by the temperaments of expectation and stigmas I look at my own broken hands. The shards of myself calling out to me for adhesion.  I laugh like a man that lights a candle at noon day, and is scolded for the wasteful light. The sun may be bright enough, yes, but the matches were for warmth.  When I look at myself more over I see less Jesus and more Diogenes. I’ve shrank more from arguing ethics in the pattern of Cicero and have reduced to rolling barrels in the siege. The cynic is winning out. I have concerns for the growing deafness of my spirit. We cant laugh at ourselves as a people it seems.  I’ve misplaced my zealotry as of late. I do not war and crusade for God and cause as I did in my youth. I now stand in a room with God in a starring contest.  I’ve walked these streets looking for a holy man. I need a righteous man to keep me company as I seem to not be able to put myself in the roll. The righteous though, they’ll cause your flesh to remind you of what a sinner you are by the innate nature of reflection, but what's the alternative? Those who embrace the sins are fawning and falling over themselves to eat each other. A great loss of focus and acceptance, unified by the one over arching desire to consume.  I don’t consider myself a righteous man, but I can say for certain that I hate sin in its confusion and mastery. I laugh at the ugliness and the impropriety as a man that should by all means have a drinking problem. My contempt glows with a dim lights brightening cast, and my doubts hobble me. My God as I call Him, is good for however long He claims me.  He is good, should the day come when He doesn’t. I wade through doubts not of his truth, but my place within it as  I watch the devil dance in the shadows of flickering light. I am a man of an earthenware soul, chipped and marred in the sun. 

Through the Sickness

 I open my mouth and vomit all the pain sickening my heart.
and it spills across your feet in bile of bitterness and chunks of despair.
I try to make out your face amidst the salt water welling up in my eyes.
Searching out the features that make you, you.
It isn't the modern, non-corporate hippy hair,
and it's not the rugged lumberjack beard.

No, it is the creases of worry in your forehead.
A single drop springs forth from my eyes and runs.
It runs from my eyes the same way I have run from yours.
Darting downward, leaving traces of itself as it blends with the flesh near the bottom.

My throat burns with the scent of the reflection of my heart.
Hands tremble and the end of my fragile arms as I flail weakly before you.
Again I spew out a recollection of once held highly views, testifying of my poisoned state.
My chin quivers and my body shakes, as what I had partaken of is rejected from my body.

The temple pounds as I try and recall where things went wrong.
I look up from the floor and your stained garb, knowing that I have clothed you in filth.
You didn't deserve this.I was the one to was given something other than real bread.
I'm the one that didn't have enough sense to spit it out.
I am the one foolish enough to get sick.

My skin burns like a fever with a memory to match,
and the cool of your hand is more than I could ask.
The fathomability of your persistence and concern for me is beyond my limits.
My stomach turns again thinking of the place I am.
I blink away the tears to see a look of compassion accentuated by the deep laugh lines of your eyes
Your smile, bent in a way that that speaks to me.
Over my groans and pains I think I heard you
I swear I heard you.

This too will pass.

As my cheek presses flat against the tile floor
you offer a reassuring hand on my shoulder,
And I am grateful for a friend.

Tell the Truth

 Tell the truth and they’ll treat you like a prophet. They’ll gather together, assembling with their finest stones for the throwing. Speak it anyway.  The truth, it’ll cost you money sometimes. It’ll take some friend like the undertow and wash them out into the abyss. Speak it any way. In a time of itching ears and diuretic doctrines, keep your hands and feet free of that shit. Tell the truth, even if it costs you the wrong church.  Tell the truth when you see the man throw a rock and hide his hand, even when it hits your enemy. Right is right even when it’s unfashionable.  Tell the truth, even when they try to destroy you, even if you are standing alone because its one thing they can’t bleed out of you.  Speak up, tell the truth, because you can’t fix the broken things by pretending they’re not there or imagining that the world is perfect.  Tell the truth to the young girls that are dabbling with the powers of attraction that they know nothing of. Tell the truth to the young boys about what being a real man entails. Tell the truth to those who want to scapegoat an entire people as the source of all that is wrong and flawed, after all even some Nazi’s tried to stop Hitler and died for the right cause. Speak the truth to the politicians who get surrounded by sycophants.   The truth will cut you, and cost you, and strengthen you. Hold to it even when you stand alone, because like a fire it burns away the dross and eventually others will find you. Others will back you against the lies. It may be one solitary friend, it may be some married couple 1865 miles away, but they’ll find you. When the world loses its collective minds trying to keep up with the sliding morals, fashionable outrage, or the impossible standards masquerading as acceptance... you can sleep at night.

Many things Make a Man

 A man can get lost in introspection and solitude... and He'll speak of himself in mystery. He'll speak out loud with 5 dollar words and sentence fragments each syllable creating a spark of surprise at their utterance.   He'll think of himself a scientist some moments, observing social formulas and patterns. He'll pick up pieces that he thinks are normal and compare them with traits he thinks he holds, giving great wonder at each shape and picture. He's pause and wonder if they're even from the same set. A man like that will strive to understand himself, so he could be understood, so he could relate, and be relatable. Sharing pieces of his findings with the world with the same confusion of a child who found a syringe in the playground sand. What a strange thing to find, in a place where harmony should dwell. 

A an could get lost indeed in the corners of his own recessive thoughts. Not just in the ways days played out in choices and emotions cultivating vacant stares and quiet words.  With a sense of terminal curiosity he'll question how people can be so assured in trivialities and so adamantly flawed in absolutes. He'll try and sound smart, but also not pretentious. He'll see himself as not particularly anything, and also most assuredly not nothing. His mind will  pontificate philosophy and history, revolutionaries and explorers. He'll ruminate on essences of nobility, chivalry, idealism and valor, but then He knows that He also holds repugnance, contempt, ignorance and bias.  

He'd wander, lost as he is in his thoughts. He'd drift from home to home, state to state. He'd look at the dusty people in their anger, and he'd look at the tree people in their cold.He'd measure their values and their strengths, all the while pulling out pieces of his heart to see if he was one of them. People would tell him to fight a war, and he'd ask why. People would tell him to develop credit and he'd ask why. He'd look at each of them as picture frames and he's a stained glass window in making. They each hold a portrait of a dream, and he'd see himself as an assortment of shattered glass. He's a hundred thousand grains of sand  exposed to the flames of time. 

Maybe He'd call himself a time traveler from the moment he was born, falling backwards through space until a grave breaks his fall. The past is the future, some would say. Look forward to tomorrow while letting go of yesterday, and those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.