Tom

Tom took the mic and asked for attention, and when he got it, made note of the irony.

This was his final goodbye, he’d packed his clothes and locked his home,
organized some lines into a suicide poem.

In meter and step, through stanzas spit in 5-3, he’d confess a profound phenomenon indeed.

You see, he wanted himself to end.

He watched the faces flirt with concern and wondered why, the critic’s nerve burns when something real is on the line.

Now, Tom was too fat, and Tom was too ugly, skinny as hell and resented for his good looks.

Tom was a druggy, a jock, a heathen, a fuck’n goth,
a nigger, a faggot, and whatever else somebody can be when you’re not.

Tom didn’t chastise or ask for apologies, he just rolled up his sleeve and said “here, this is my anthology”.

He broke a crooked smile and traced his veins with a finger,
and whispered something about the shapes you can make if you just let the blade linger,

Tom chose to recite his wounded life to cliques of men and women congregating under track lights,
bearing cappuccino mustaches and psychosomatic addictions to trendy words spit to elicit some friction.

He said, “these are the paths a person will walk, step by step their feet will tread,
into silent corners where life doesn’t talk, you just whisper to yourself and retreat into your head,

His soliloquy continued, half conscious of his audience,
interpreting his arm’s hieroglyphics audibly.

“It ought to be,” he told us, “that a man can escape the wrath,
of lips that like to remember how you fucked up in the past.”

“But here that dream cannot be realized,
so I thought, maybe through death, I can steal mine.”

Yet the death Tom talked about wasn’t drugs or knives or guns,
no, his expiration was the act of becoming undone.

Tom raised a second arm and exposed the crowd to a map,
of cities and countries and sunsets and oceans,
of danger and risk, the kinds of trips you take that don’t have a way back.

From wrist to elbow he’d scribbled descriptions of the places he was going to conquer,
to find those things of simple bliss, for a moment be a witness, till his chest drew breath no longer.

And when Tom choked up, and found the crowd and smiled,
and promised, “for every insult you conjure, I add a hundred miles.”

I didn’t know what to do. My chair felt old, my words had staled.
My insights were empty.

This man, beaten and rejected, will experience the world in order to forget me.

Lover, Don't Go

You gave me a book.
Its back was broken, the leather was torn.
I took it and shook,
My body rebelling, I couldn't take anymore.

The plane was my captor,
the kidnap of the willing, you forfeited me with a kiss,
it would bring me soon there after,
over oceans like the boatmen, tending the River Styx.

Why did we choose this,
to leave each other now, and let our bodies writhe,
to award ourselves the misery,
of measuring the love we've built and how fast its going to die.

You left me an inscription,
a wordless phrase upon imagined paper,
a declaration that this princess would wait,
if ever this knight found it in him to save her.

At once you both crushed me and made me immortal,
you offered me hope, yet left it contorted.

"Come back to me," you pled, as if there were a chance,
as if these things were possible for the unheroic love of men.

I climbed on the plane, a time for wings to steal me away,

and within my book there waited for me,
the poison of goodbye, the voice of desperation, a soul on its knees.

Three words bled to me from a wound I couldn't close,
a book of three words, a book, in three words, three words, "Lover, don't go."

A Californian Vote

In a world swollen with issues to take up and make one’s own, I wonder and wait, as many writers do, to see which injustices, which insults upon humanity will scale the walls of deafening popular media and make themselves known. November 4th offered gads of reasons for press, many being hopeful while at least a few, it turns out, startlingly backwards. Barack Obama’s move into President-Elect reflected a promise, for many millions around the world, that the rebirth of equality and the pursuit of discrimination’s extinction had once again come to the forefront of American intention – a beautiful promise indeed. But for couples in one of Barack’s most supportive states, anticipating the legal and familial expression of their love through marriage, November 4th was a giant backwards bound toward emphatic primitivity. Gay couples across the United States watched as “Proposition 8” – California’s constitutional amendment which declares the State definition of marriage as between one man and one woman – passed with a 52% majority and removed one of few legislative allies the gay and lesbian communities own in the United States. In early October, the then Vice Presidential hopefuls took a St. Louis stage and elucidated for the rest of us every imperfection of one another. In a rare moment of relative peace, they agreed on Darfur – thank god. They also agreed that marriage cannot happen between a man and another man, nor a woman and another woman – also thanks to god. But in their temporary camaraderie, they did manage to say that this civil union thing, this separate but still equal institution, sure is swell. Almost one month later, three days before these candidates would be awarded their future place in American politics, resident theists of San Diego and southern California flocked to Qualcomm stadium. Tossing themselves on the astroturf, they beseeched their god, an avid sports fan, that the institution of marriage be kept from the hands of unenlightened lovers. With the clarity of time’s forgiveness, and the genius of empathy in retrospect, one era’s target of hate and slanderous exclusion accepts the Presidency of the most powerful nation on earth. And on the opposite coast, the decidedly inferior of the 21st century begin to understand that they have yet to mature to the honor of marriage. Any thinker, regardless of creed or lack thereof, should look at such a morally dichotomous nation with some scathing incredulity. The freedom of religion authored in our constitution was as much a demand for the freedom to religion, as it was a promise for freedom from religion. In a sad manipulation of a holy book written to liberate and radically inspire, Christianity’s sacred scripture has become the wand of damnation for those homosexuals still caught in the grips of the Great Deceiver, and a baton which conducts the masses. An empty bubble filled by hundreds of thousands of hands in Californian polling booths has spoken the will of a nation, and perpetuated a dark history it so laboriously clings to.