And yet in that dynamic, there can be so much pain and violence.

Strange how the passion between man and woman

Can straddle the line between love and hate.

Sometimes, I haven’t an answer for the words that pass my lips,

And I can’t explain the words I hurl into the open air

The air that swirls helplessly around you.

Sometimes the things I do and say, I wish only for a rewind button,

To press aggressively and hold down until it is all undone.

But there is no going backwards,

There is only going on.

And the damage done, one can only try to make amends,

The best way he can, so that the ties remain unbroken,

And she will still want to look at you,

The way she first did, when you finally won her heart,

And the way she did, when she first told you,

“I love you too.”

A sneaky interloper I never saw coming.

Stealing the lights that have illuminated my world,

Replacing them with ever-burgeoning voids

That seem to suck more out of my world

With each passing day.

The dark threatens to consume more and more light,

And the uninvited take a little more from my cupboards,

The impending emptiness

Is all for which I can prepare.

Nowhere was it ever said,

“You will be glad I happened by.”

And at no time will I ever say,

“Hope to see you again soon.”

Of ubiquitously abridged

The amalgamted circular motions

Our minds make in the midst of random chaos.

I know I have been away,

And that I let the light burn out.

Staring at the ships dashed upon the rocks,

I am damned to dwell in a nebulous failure.

Unflinching,

Unfettered,

And neverending

In the murky tidepools of Time.

Those splintered frays between the strings

That resound within the confines of our lives.

Words fail in description,

Only eyes can truly behold.

And within the nebulae that engulfs us,

Of which we are oblivious,

The fluidity of the soul

Finds its freedom amidst the unknown

And the unknowning.

Tearing holes in the stage,

Screaming like a banshee

While a sonic wall collided with drunken doldrums.

Eyes and ears transfixed

At the shadowy figure, clutching his bottle,

An elixir sweet and mysterious

Filling my mind with a slight wicked notion,

To let my soul run naked amidst the crowd.

The song rang out its last note,

And the crowd soon disappears

Like vapors hovering in the night sky.

Left alone as the high sinks low.

The ride to the hotel,

And the drunken conversations a blur –

The one solace is in a bottle of wine.

My nectar, my saving grace.

The inebriant plying me to a more peaceful sleep,

A more vanquished dream,

And a prolonged morning with eyes closed,

And soul caged in,

Awaiting its next release,

On stage, afire, high on wine

Vulnerable beneath the lights

And before the eyes of another drunken crowd.

Stops at the very thought of it,

That salvation of syncope, that spiral downward

Into a place I hoped never to go again.

Unfurling right before my very eyes,

The wings of that predatory creature,

That flying darkness, that hurled insult

That floats like iron in the sky -

It’s all high velocity nothingness,

A trick of the tail.

Not sure where I will end up

As the compass shows us off course.

Mind comes unglued, arms flailing madly

Against the waves of indifference.

In the face of uncertainty, I surrender, wearily

As the day descends darkly into night.

All I could see was the black.

For so long, drifting amidst an onyx sea

While the sunlight was filtered from my mind.

Strange that salvation lie inside a capsule,

The medicine like salve for the soul.

Quieting the unrelenting torrent of my thoughts.

And easing me slowly back beneath the sun.

The doors of opportunity close.

Ice weighs heavy on the glass ceiling,

And the ground splits open,

Revealing a warmer, darker place below.

I manuever through this world

As an obstacle course,

Landmines strewn across razor wire and broken shards -

It feels like I am inside a homemade pipe bomb,

Just seconds before the boom.

I never wanted it to be this way

And I am most certain no one ever does.

Yet this is the way the world is,

Within the whimpers and the bangs,

A crash test dummy, a whipping boy,

And a battering ram.

Minute and undetectable, yet glaring now

As I walk along its towering presence.

White stucco walls with slight stains of unknown origin,

An otherwise nondescript edifice

Erected to keep the world apart

And keep its inhabitants controlled, afraid, and frail.

The constructors of this wall labored in darkness

For centuries, making sure we were distracted with our own needs,

Our own wants, and our own desires – working feverishly

To mollify our fragile worlds from ourselves,

All while designing a partition to contain our spirits.

Yet now, as they devour each other with their largesse,

The people have seize the opportunity

To tear at the fissures, plying apart the now-porous rock

That has seemed to divide us all for a lifetime.

The wars and the deceptions have become punchlines

To jokes revealed too early, and all the bright and shiny things

Have lost all of their allure in the presence of truth.

The question no longer is if it will come down;

The question now becomes when,

And as the factions gather their strength and their resolve,

All will be revealed in the end,

And all will finally be set free.

“Getting older is getting old.”

Though ironically, my hair has grown out,

And is almost as long as it was when I was 25,

My belly is bigger,

My disposition is more jaded,

And my blood pressure is up in the ionosphere.

The days are becoming a blur,

And I’ve become a lot more forgetful –

Though I can’t blame it on the drugs anymore.

One drink gets me drunk

When in my youth,

It took almost the entire bottle.

I could go all night long in my twenties,

Yet my forties brought with it

An early bed time.

I could choke down a handful of wasabi,

When all it gets me now is irritable bowels.

It’s no wonder there is such a love for nostalgia –

We would all love to stay young and full of life.

But the road in-between is long and turbulent,

Filled with disappointment, tragedy and pain.

It’s a rough ride that we all have to live through,

And the light on the other side

Is just the deliverance to an older, well-worn you.

Staring at it half-empty, nostalgia is a feckless beast,

Gnawing at our insecurities, playing up all that regret.

Yet staring at it half-full, nostalgia has no power,

And the road that lead us here

Served to make us who we are now.

So aside from the scars I display to the world these days,

I am a better man than I was two decades ago.

Stronger at heart, stronger in mind, and stronger of spirit.

I could never make that claim when I was young.