Just 'Cause

I want to write a movie called Extracurricular Activities,
and a book called Male Teachers Don't Wanna Get Hugs.
I want to write a song called "It's Been a Dog's Age Since I Saw You
(But Since Men Are Dogs, It Feels Like Forever),"
and I want to direct a porno called "service," just 'cause.

I want to sing like the world is tone-deaf,
and dance like the world isn't watching,
and eat like I missed breakfast today,
and drink like I will again tomorrow.
and take a pass at the homecoming queen,
Just 'cause,

But my youth is in its last breaths,
So I want a preview of what's next.

Snowflake

The classroom is a showroom,
Featuring twenty-one new,
High-end model students
With more than a few flashy,
Expensive aftermarket features,
and one crazy guy who writes too much,
and talks too much, and reads too much.
It makes me seem like a snowflake --
White and short-lived and insubstantial,
But don't we hold that in common?

Blessed

I can't count the times that I wished I'd confessed

That my lucky star's brightest, that I know I am blessed,

But I've given up asking the whys and the hows.

I don't want to leave questions for homecoming cows.

I just want to thank you, my field of four-leaf clovers.

A day that's filled with you all is what truly runneth over.

Precipice

I stand on the precipice of a new beginning,
Which is a euphemism for an ending,
and I look back on the freedom
and the diversions and the discourse
and the dining and the drinking and the dancing
and I know my jealous mind will miss them,
But my heart will not admit it, and I will be alright.
The friends though, the friends...
My heart already mourns their absence in foresight.

Grain Train

Rolling through life's night is friendship's grain train,

A mile long, unstopping, unchanging,

In shadow, barely visible to passersby,

Not exciting, but unwavering in form.

Romance is a mere stick laid on the tracks,

Its potential only to derail and be destroyed.

As a writer in a house-world built of paper and ink

On a shaky foundation of my diminishing mental capacity,

I am thankful that friendship has direction.

It is unyielding, solid, uniform, there.

Why I Write, Part x+160: The Triple Standard

I've acknowledged, so let it be known

That I don't judge others' words and work the same way as my own.

In the company of strangers, I'm pleased if they just entertain me,

But my words don't merely represent. I expect them to contain me.

One might expect my friends to fall 'tween stranger than myself,
Based on how close they are to me, but the truth is something else:

That there's another standard yet, pertaining to my friends.

It's not that I go easy to avoid a need to make amends.

I see their prints on what they do, the ridges of their minds.

My friends' work takes a picture of the best folks I can find.

Runner

She's brighter than the sun and yet

She's always out of sight.

She circles my life like the moon.

She'd warm the darkest night.

I don't know who she is when I'm gone,

Or ask this spell I'm under,

But she's all smiles when I'm here.

I love my little runner.

She is the kind of girl

Who leads my heart around in circles,

With long hair and eyes so deep blue

They nearly turn to purple.

I'd do her a rank injustice

To say she's just a stunner.

I love her 'cause God broke the mold

Once he had made my runner.

She's brighter than the sun and yet

She's always out of sight.

She circles my life like the moon.

She'd warm the darkest night.

I don't know who she is when I'm gone,

Or ask this spell I'm under,

But she's all smiles when I'm here.

I love my little runner.

She leads me through the woods

And off the path and over hurdles.

She always wears her faith

Like it's an armor-plated girdle.

I've been chasing her since spring

Was out of earshot from the summer,

And I am breathless with exertion,

But I still love my little runner.

She's brighter than the sun and yet

She's always out of sight.

She circles my life like the moon.

She'd warm the darkest night.

I don't know who she is when I'm gone,

Or ask this spell I'm under,

But she's all smiles when I'm here.

I love my little runner.

I don't know what I did to earn

This endless, weary race.

I don't know how I earned the right

To glimpse her smiling face.

She doesn't want a steady date.

She thinks these games are funner.

I disagree with every word

But I still love my runner.

She's brighter than the sun and yet

She's always out of sight.

She circles my life like the moon.

She'd warm the darkest night.

I don't know who she is when I'm gone,

Or ask this spell I'm under,

But she's all smiles when I'm here.

I love my little runner.

Concerned

Where you are concerned,

I see, and I notice,

But I didn't appreciate,

and I have a certain estimate

Of the volume of your mind,

A pure hypothesis I've left

Most utterly untested.

The fact is that I see you once a week,

and sometimes in the halls

and hardly talk to you at all,

But when you're away

My life plays the scatter-brained

Geographer, all over the map.

I don't know where,

and I don't know why.

I spend weeks finding and returning it.

J. Sebastian Bach

No one points a finger to the calendar or clock

When we speak of names like Beethoven or J. Sebastian Bach.

They painted on the very air. Their music's truly art,

But that isn't the whole picture; other songs can play a part.

So many songs lack greatness, but are arguably good.

They're easily remembered and just as quickly understood,

But the leave the mind, the heart, the ears, awash in vibrant peace.

Everyone I know deserves to wake to songs like these.

Everyone Has

Everyone has a past like everyone has an ass.

Most of them are ugly, and they all stink,

But not really.

There are three kinds of pasts:

The tearful, trying tale of woe,

The excuse for needing an excuse;

The timeless, ever-told song of the whale,

The melancholodic cautionary tale;

and the belly-built beats of the bard

Who laughs because he's had it hard.

My Contagion

You are my contagion.
You are my salvation,
That which many can desire
and none can deserve.

I can't keep living my life on paper.
I can't clear my head of you with vapor.
I want to tell the world about us,
But I don't even want to tell you about me.

Five Minutes

Find destiny five minutes late and see your chances blown,

But leave five minutes early and you never could have known.

I don't think skill and fate alone decide the search for love

When random happenstance helps us deciding who we're thinking of.

When some poor bastard misses out, they say his timing sucks

What others blame on timing, I just put down to luck.

Full Circle

When I was five, my first love was baseball.

When I was ten, I first learned “don't trust people.”

When I was fifteen, I said I'd write five novels.

When I was twenty, I wasn't quite so hopeful.

That's life for you – it always comes full circle.

Introduced

I was out with friends,

(Yeah, it happens.)

and I ran into you.

I didn't know you well enough,

So I introduced myself.

Eventually, I was out

(Yeah, yeah, again)

and I ran into you,

So I introduced you as a friend.

I was out with you,

and we ran into someone I knew.

I introduced her as a friend.

I introduced you, too.

(Your name wasn't new.)

I was out with someone almost new,

and we ran into each other,

Like we always used to do.

(You never know which time will be the last.)

I introduced you as someone from my past.

Too Big

Life stores its beauty behind accidents.

There is nothing in this world I can't comprehend,

But more than a few things too big for intent.

No, life's great insights and mysteries are to be tripped over.

I want to fall headlong into the skies behind my eyelids,

So that I find myself soaked,

So that I find myself cloaked

In knowledge and understanding and wonder.

These are the moments

That both the poets and the scientists live for.

We just put different metaphors to them.

Why I Write, Part x+159: The Stars

The poets have been writing of the stars

Since before there was writing involved.

There's something about the mystery

Of those infinitesimal, cute, twinkly,

Utterly unlivable hellscapes,

That bring light to the darkness,

But disappear in the day,

Hiding unfathomable distances away

That is even more beautiful when solved.

Up a Hill

In this tedious slog up a hill we call “living,”

You stand out in a dark sky, a point of light-giving,

But like meteor showers on gray-clouded nights

You may pass any moment, unseen, from my life.

Why I Write, Part x+158: Telling Stories

I could not write so much poetry

If it weren't so incredibly easy,

As natural as telling stories,

As looking, and narrating what I see,

'Cause the world looks different

Once passed through a self.

Everything becomes metaphor

For everything else,

and I see more, though not clear,

as sight takes many passes.

The world is all mirrors,

and I am colored glasses.

No, Galileo!

I used to think you circled me

In deep orbit.

I used to think there was something

That held you to me.

I was looking too hard for you

To see.

I am no Galileo.

You are the attractive one.

I am the attracted one,

and I should have known.

I am spinning in circles.

My Personal World, Part 15: Fertile Fields

What was once a new song's fields fertile verdure

Now seems as distant – as old – as my ardor.

What was once the edge of uncharted words' wood's now bereft,

Which is to say that I see nothing there left

For me, if not for the one who hears it next.

My Personal World, Part 14: My Watch-Dog

What was once my watch-dog, warding depression,

Now grates on my ears.  The mangy chord-progression,

The rib-visible skeleton of an over-pushed beat

That once kindled my action has been losing its heat,

Shedding eight-notes as it grinds over my dried mind.

A fiery song that burns long is sure hard to find,

and soon, with no watchdog I find myself hurled,

Overthrown down from my personal world.

Under My Fingers

I'm not of a mood or a mindset to linger

On the work or the play I've got under my fingers,

But I've three-fourths of a mind to start dragging the tips

Up over your skin 'til I stop at your lips,

But you seeped through my brain where the outside world cracked it.

My heart only pumps out when I'm feeling distracted.

Digital Age

If desire's the sin, then time wasted's the wage
In this awkwardly in-person digital age.
My mind is old, analog, an unwieldy worry-holder,
and the first time I met you, it felt me get older.
My mind drafted my skull to ward off my heart.
You accepted my friend request.  Guess that's a start.

We Were Once

Though I suffer isolate, and before in stoic silence,
We were once a team.  This was once a shared loss.
Now it is the unity and the sharing that is lost.

I miss the genius, the leader, the one out ahead,
and I miss the substantial beauty, my woman in red,
and I miss the wry wit with the world in his head,

But you, my overlooked, the sweetest, strongest one,
With a soul of gold and a heart of filigreed iron,
Of all who are left, I miss you most of all.

To Deserve This

If I'm awake, I'm late.
My alarm clock broke again.
My legs refuse to bend,
and I missed a call from friends.
There is no time to eat.
The pain shoots through my feet.
I've got someone to meet,
and I can't stand him.
Slow drivers?  I can't pass.
I have an early in class,
I slip, land on my ass.

No one has to ask what I did to deserve this.


So many kids to teach,
So many friends to meet,
So many meals to eat,
A long soak for my feet,
and a classic Christmas tree
Forty-two days early:

No one seems to ask what I did to deserve this.

Human Weakness

I believe in human weakness, not humanpower.
I do not see strangers as candy and flowers,
So imagine my look of shock when I see
A person I almost know bloom right in front of me,
Show a self-professed side I'd not believed was there.

It was damn near enough to almost make me care.

Impermanence

Could I give up impermanence like I didn't give up play?
Once all the normal things in life were prices I would pay
Merely from an eagerness to throw them all away.
I saw so many things differently than I see them today.
Am I just going soft, or hardening in new and different ways?

I will never grow old enough to know...
_______________________________...or perhaps I may.

Ah, Genetics

Ah, Genetics!  They are twice as good as Vegas.
The house only wins half the time,
and their study is science, not economics,
But there is no love lost for genetics in my house.
I got my father's back and ingrown toenail.
I got my mother's knees and mental illness.
Though I hold those four cards and a joker
(I need someone around to laugh the luck of my draw),
The only choice is to see the hand through,
See what a pale half my parents' minds can do.

I refuse to fold this hand.
I can only ante the next one in hell.

The Minefield

Complimenting women is really all about

Removing branches of interpretation that leaf in self doubt

Without the words becoming too many or too much – that is, emphatic –

Which might come off aggressive, or she might take as sarcastic,

So I might want to put it off, but then she might feel she's left hanging,

and I'll have to do it all again, and I've just doubled my planning.

Out of the three Fs – family, friends, and foods – she's 4-F – fun.

I might someday call her 'girlfriend', but I can't now call it “love.”

The movies say “be honest. Just tell her how you feel.”

I do my best to avoid war metaphors, but she's a minefield.

It's Sometimes Better Not to Know

When you're already leaving, or you're just about to go,
When a reversal-revelation might just make my head explode,
I've loved the music, not the lyrics, since I first got radio.
So many times I've found it's sometimes better not to know.

Every Word and Every Deed

Your eyes and their winking were dearest distraction

From the fact that on your end their was no attraction,

Nor what seemed to follow from what followed

Shortly (and I do mean shortly) afterward.

It was in every word and every deed a fake.

You made faithless promises of faith,

Did your best to imitate good taste,

Did your best to imitate a person.

Together, we did our best imitations,

But this hate? This hate is real.

Sharing

I tell my stories so that I can laugh.

I wouldn't mind sharing my laugh,

But I'd prefer nobody share my life.

I wasted almost thirty years

Standing against the wall,

And now, poised to spend the next thirty

Standing against the blackboard,

I wonder if there's something

I should have done in the middle.

Playing the Part

I'm a pleasure-reader playing the part

Of an amateur critic who takes theory to heart.

I find the acting politic.

I find the theory makes me sick.

With those tests (and papers) passed,

I make my way to teaching class,

and play the teacher, though I'm a poet who

Just wants to spend his life in a classroom.

When sports are on,

I play a barbarian.

Sometimes I, sinner, even play a Christian,

Though I'm merely a deist with dearly loved friends.

All day, I play an actor,

But I'm really just a poet who

Wants to find a metaphor

The whole world can relate to.

I Come From

I come from Montana,

and I love Montana.

I come from friends whom I'm unworthy of,

Whom I admire, even love.

I come from two liberal parents,

and every political leaning in existence,

and a grand literary tradition,

Varying states of physical condition,

A rabid consumption of sports media

and television unsummarized on Wikipedia,

But why?

I am going to teach,

and I love to teach.

I am going up the socioeconomic ladder

Among people who pretend that doesn't matter.

I am headed for adulthood delayed

With the sense of humor for adulthood denied.

Perhaps I am going outside.

Though I still exist as a physical obstacle,

I am otherwise fading away,

But why?

Get Around

I just don't get around like I used to.
You don't mind if I expound, do you?
I was never Jim Thorpe and I was never Casanova,
But my career as a physical being's long over.

Besides, modern life's lived in the mind,
Which seemed for some years to have fit me just fine,
But it's not just man's legs that leave limping and lame.
My mind is by bad luck, or maybe time, tamed,

and I'd like it better if you didn't call me "the late,"
But against odds, it looks like I'm spoiled, past date.

Overpaid

I have to say I've overpaid

For us to go our separate ways.

I surely don't mind getting laid,

But if you'd come and I had stayed,

Uncounted memories we'd have made,

But that's just hope – a thing that fades.

I Will Never

I will never have what they have --
The relaxed impulsiveness, the escapades,
The easy smile, the history,
and they will never have what I have,
But if you don't know you're looking for it...

I will never hate being beaten
As much as I hate the mercy rule.

I will never be satisfied with myself,
Just as you will never be satisfied with myself.
You will never be the reason for my improvement,
Just the alarm clock that woke it up.

I will never purposely write of you,
But I always have a pen at hand,
and I do not always have purpose.

I will never be there for you.
It would only make you uncomfortable.

I Remember When

I remember when you knocked that stuff off the ledge.
The whole room looked like I had gone through with a sledge,
and you said "It's okay.  A messy house signifies
A full, truly-lived life," and you were half right.

I remember several days I called and you did not pick up the phone.
Those days were boring at the best; at worst, depressed alone.
You promised "when it's important, I'll always be there."
Should have known.  Deceivers are quickest with weak words like "care."

I remember when I said "that guy wants some ass,"
and you said, "don't worry.  He's just in my class.
We're only friends talking.  We're making some slides."
The next I saw him you two were talking incidentally, asides.

The Trailhead

I've found the trailhead to my life,
My new reason not to be lazy.
I halfway suspect that I'm going to cry
If not laugh as though all the way crazy.

For all the unpadded immediacy in it
My life's unfamiliar with tears,
Just as someone who won't plan the next forty minutes
Is surprised to want forty more years,

But I'm in the foothills.  I'll make the turn.
To not turn back, I'll teach and learn.

Thoughts of the End

When thoughts of the end have obscured the beginning,
When the temptation sauce slides right off of your sinning,
When you only stay 'cause you don't want to go,
When you don't like it much and you just can't say no,
That's when affection is not your affliction,
When infatuation becomes an addiction.

I Love Teaching

Give me two dozen suns and imagine the light
I'll be shining in corners of literate life.
Give me too dozen sponges.  What can I clean?
I'll let them absorb the whole world 'til it gleams.
Give me four dozen arms, and set them to reaching.
We'll hit all of the corners.  That's why I love teaching.