*Gouge

No matter how hard I try, I can not move fast enough.
I feel as though I'm moving through a viscous substance
and my body is betraying me.

He gains on me, this faceless man.

My heart pounds in my throat, my chest aches for air.
I am unable to scream because I have been silenced by
unimaginable fear.

The knife plunges between my shoulder blades with
searing force.  I feel my life flow down my back in a
warm rush.

I have surrendered to the knowledge that it is over and
now I know what it feels like to be prey in a predators mouth.
Thankfully I fade into a gentle numbness...

I am startled awake, unable to wrap my fourteen year-old mind
around such a dream.

*Disconnected

I enter the cold, abandoned room.  My eyes are quickly drawn to a deep window sill.  There sitting alone, is a telephone.  Perhaps three-quarters of a century old it, has become a forgotten relic of the past....




A sort of melancholy drags through my heart.  I long to pick up the receiver and feel it's weight in my hand, to press the cold hardness against my warm ear, and sense the mouth piece against my lips.
                                                
I would like to talk to a spirit from the past.  What would they tell me, that they were happy here?  That life was too difficult and joy came only in fleeting moments?  I try and imagine the conversations that flowed through this wire.  Maybe a peevish exchange between two disgruntled neighbors, the wonderful news of the birth of a child, the downcast delivery of a death in the family or a covert conversation between a man and his mistress?   

A thousand or more discussions shared through this line, bridging time and space.  Connecting two people with the power of the spoken word.  I find it eerie, in a lovely sort of way that I am completely detached from the present.  I do not want to leave this place for fear that I will be forced to relinquish all that I feel and what emotion that was stirred here will be forgotten - like this old telephone.

Want

A little piece of you carries me through
the lonely places I walk.
You have gone from me now and I
do not know how to make this
craving stop.

Relentless dreams, or so they seem,
fill disconcert into my head.
I surrender to this, your lingering kiss
as you tie me to your bed.

*Fire In My Belly

Mediocrity creeps through my being
and it is an unpleasant feeling at best.
Stagnation has cemented me in this
place of unrealized dreams.

I yearn for a creative explosion, to throw
you to the floor, to strip you naked
emotionally.  To make you feel everything.

I have a desire to expose myself fully so that
you will either love me or hate me.
I will leave no room between for indifference.

I want to render you speechless, yet have
you share everything just by feeding you
my thoughts and visions.

I want to possess and hold you for a moment,
to pull you through an image, to perhaps take
you where it hurts, but don't expect me to heal you.

All this to men and women alike - I want to
make you slip back into the familiar,
yet uncomfortable skin of being human.

*Love, Guns and Other Matters

Memories seek an audience and single me out in a silent
show of my past.  Taste, touch, sound, smell and images
of such fill my head.

I remember the taste of my first passionate kiss, the smell
of my mother's favorite perfume, the sound the front door
of my childhood home made when slamming.

I remember the heaviness of a shotgun and the power it
possessed, the smell of wet horse, my first taste of
Jack Daniels, and the beautiful symphony of a thunder
storm.

I remember the taste of pleasure with a long ago lover,
the smell of hot candle wax and whiskey, the whispered
conversations in the darkness of the morning and the
sheer tediousness of having sex hanging off a tire swing.

I remember touching my two children for the first time,
warm and wet from these childbearing hips.  The loveliness
of their first cry.  The sweetness of breast milk and an intoxicating
smell of baby lotion on soft skin.

Now with the Milky Way above my head, the cold night
chilling my face, I listen to the waves pound the shore and
smell the sea thick in the air.  Chardonnay crosses my lips,
and blankets my mouth with a delightful familiarity. 
I say a quiet, "thank you" to God for a rich life.