Thoughts on Time

The past cannot be repeated, except of course in the present.

The future is the only thing up for grabs...but it's always out of reach.

The Bad Children: Serrated Edges Left Behind

What becomes of the children; serrated edges left behind from a knife withdrawn then wiped clean. Our past and present their future. How soon we forget when we have something to regret. Somebody please fix my child say the parents who have tried everything. The authorities comply, gladly hiding your mistakes in mountains of paperwork concealed behind cold steel bars. Here the pariah swallows his first force fed meal of consequence and fully digests its nutritional value while his parents are wrapped in a cozy blanket, comforted by the masses for their loss, and remain free to roam the world.

Fairytales and Nightmares

Rock a by baby, I’ll lull you to sleep.
Close your eyes and don’t make a peep.

Morning will come, but you’ll never see.
The hand that rocks controls your destiny.

Hush little baby, as such you will stay.
It is my voice which commands whether you’ll grow or decay.

Sure you can leave. I’ve no problem with that.
I’ll give you some crumbs to find your way back.

But don’t try to run, there’s nowhere to hide.
Wherever you roam, I’m right by your side.


If you let the bough break, the cradle will fall
And the wolves will consume your heart, soul, and all.

In Exile

I lie awake feeling weak. I followed your path expecting to find myself on it. I made my dreams small and searched for ways to be worthy. I disappeared to give you more room for yourself thinking you would find me there eventually. Your contradictions kept me focused and I learned to hear only the best parts of you and make them into the best parts of me. I chided myself for wrong parts of me and could not see anything wrong with you. You were the ideal I was striving to be more like.

You expected perfection from me so as not to draw attention to your own misgivings. When I needed you most, you picked away at parts of me like a crow feeding on pieces of rotting flesh. You fed on me until your belly was full and kept coming back for more when your hunger ravaged you again.

While lying on the hot desert sand in exile I watched you in your castle from a distance dreaming of the day I could come inside. When you shaded me with a small tree with no leaves I was so grateful for the generosity and compassion you showed me. Kept alive by this small tree and the drive to please you when you needed me, I grew bigger, though the pieces torn from me remained open wounds that impaired my growth and ability to move.

I clung to the shade from the small dead tree during the heat and exhaustion in this desert and reached out for it to keep me safe when the storms blew though, but to no avail. I was always left damaged. Unprepared to protect myself. Too weak to move.

Violence Begets Violence: When Do We Become Accountable?

When will we as individuals take accountability for the violence we create at home and around the world?

It is bad enough that as adults diplomacy, decency, and a basic sense of humanity evades many of us while we single-mindedly pursue our goals or silently consent to destruction at the hands of another, but now it seems increasingly common to read daily about children committing heinous crimes; murdering each other, their parents, or other members of the community; raping, robbing, the list goes on. It seems like we are producing a generation of criminals and what’s more, wondering where these children came from.

Filled with unanswered questions and anger we bury our crying eyes in a box of tissues while shaking our fists towards the sky and asking “Why, God, why?” We lift our heads so quickly towards the sky in search of a scapegoat that we miss the fact that the answer is, in great part, earthbound. Last I checked children are socially conditioned through two basic sources; family interactions and society. I seem to remember a biblical passage that goes something like this “violence begets violence.” So, why ask God again for the answers He’s already given us? Growing up, my mom used to say “God helps those who help themselves.” Seems to me that we could give God a breather while we take a moment to retrace our footsteps to find out where we lost our sense of humanity. From that place which exists in all of us we can walk down a different path together. Maybe then we will discover the potential to evolve as a human race.

Though raised Catholic and educated in Catholic grade and high school, I’ve not turned out to be a particularly religious person. Perhaps it is for my disagreeable perception that it offers inherent inequality. For me it probably started with an unsatisfactorily answered question posed to a priest in high school.



“If you say that we are all made in God’s image and likeness then why can’t women be priests and homosexuals be seen as equal by the church?”

My Catholic faith went quickly downhill from there and having found more often than not their pontification over specific issues and groups disheartening over the years, I decided that for me there must be a better way to treat people with respect and dignity if only to start with and spread the basic assumption that we are all different, but equal regardless of our gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or other affiliation. I think that without truly believing in and holding on to that as a foundation for the construction of a civil society, no legislation will ever be created and no war will ever protect us from the impending social suicide.

That said, I am not suggesting that religion has no inherent value. On the contrary, I think that religion can act as one source with the potential to suggest etiquette for a civilized social construct; but when it or any other source takes the next step and sets one race, one gender, one sexual orientation, one religion, or any singular civil liberty above all, it is doomed to tear down the very construct it purports will bind us together. Anyway, it doesn’t appear that the religious affiliation of someone excludes them from criminal or violent behavior. In fact, in many cases currently and historically, that very affiliation is said to be at the core of the fight.

Similarly our government offers us no reprieve. It seems now that we are ruled arbitrarily by a government that doesn’t see a need to produce justifications for its actions, or decides it is better to abolish a system of checks and balances through an act of Congress as a matter of convenience to start a war and detain people. I can’t help but ask our leaders my burning question. How is it that we expect to emerge as leaders in the establishment of a global democratic system when we fail to maintain one in our own country? I’m not really sure anymore that the nay-sayers in this country and in many others are dissenting against democracy so much as hypocrisy.

Faced with such contradiction whereby arbitrary rules are sanctioned and exercised by a group, but condemned for individuals amidst increasing unjustifiable violence, what makes it so inconceivable that we are producing violent children that mimic the examples adults have set forth as guidance for them? The children haven’t stopped listening. We’ve stopped realizing the message we’re sending. They in fact are abiding by the moral code society offers them. It is only afterwards they’re shocked to find out that “in their case it’s punishable.” Is there anything civil or democratic about a society where the law only pertains to some but not to others?

Whether our beliefs are religiously or secularly rooted doesn’t seem to really matter if the overall result pits one human life against another. In the moments that we embrace our differences as justifications for a superiority complex, we fight against ourselves and every life is affected, every liberty reconsidered, and the pursuit of happiness which we’ve been striving towards grinds to a screeching halt while we pick up the pieces in the aftermath. Can’t we do better than this?

Armies of Death

Heralds of the night, the shadows rise up first from the underground having had the breath of hell blown into them. Sweeping over the earth like a swarm of locusts, they ravage life with hellfire. Absorbing death’s energy, they frantically copulate creating new life to replace the old. Obedient, expendable, and plentiful in number, these are the death soldiers of the army of hell.

Weary angles swoop down from the sky once again trying to resist the regime change, but they’ve been slaughtered time and again from the constant battles over the years and without the support of the masses, they’ve decreased in numbers and have grown tired and weak. Their cries have been forcibly diminished by the armies of death in their relentless effort to create a new world order of hollow-souls marching like drones to their death.

The soldiers of death have been cursed to exist on the cusp of life and death. Their faces are drawn and expressionless, while their eyes appear to stare out to a world of memories. Motivated by an insatiable hunger for life, they must kill and channel the energy of the living at their moment of demise to feel life pulsing through them. While for a moment they are revitalized by the life, what follows is the empathetic phase – they are forced to recount their victim’s entire life and feel the pain of their death. They are defined by these two phases of revitalization and empathy and compelled to repeat the cycle endlessly.

There are those who try to hide from him feeling it is their last strategy to avoid capture. The General has come for me. He reaches out his long arm, but keeps his distance. With eyes that pull you in like a vacuum, he fixes his stare on me like looking down the barrel of a shotgun. His long boney fingers are five sharp blades pointing at my chest. Staring intently at me, he makes a claw and thrusts it into my chest. I gasp and my eyes widen as he rotates his talons and sinks in deeper. Pulling back, he holds my heart in his hand. It still beats. Blood drips from my chest and down the length of his arm. My eyes roll back into my head to retreat.

I Want to Be Free

Hey diddle-diddle
caught up in the middle,
the baby found a fiddle,
which she played for me.

She twiddled it a little
until she found riddle,
stuck up in the middle,
she’d repeat to me –

I want to be free. I want to be free.

I stepped back
like a heart attack.
Flat on my back
What’d she say to me?

I want to be free. I want to be free.

Her voice was getting louder.
Started sounding prouder.
Rising from the earth
she surrounded me.

I want to be free. I want to be free.

The earth began to quake.
I began to shake.
Something started to break
inside of me.

A Smoking Gun

A cigarette burns in one hand. Smoke slowly rises. He gestures angrily with the other. A careful balancing act. The ash grows and I watch attentively to see when it will fall. He won’t put it out. A good distraction for me. A timer.

I can smell his breath. I can feel him spitting on my face when he speaks. I watch tonight’s pick-me-up fall to the floor in little scattered droplets. Blinking nervously, I cautiously roll my head downward. They seem to land indiscriminately, but could make a circle if I connect the dots in my mind. I wonder if his strong words could actually ignite a ring fire around me, protecting me from contact.

The ash grows longer now and I know that I have only a few seconds before time runs out and the bomb detonates. It always does. Time seems to slow down, my eyes widen and I watch the ash bow and then break off from the stem. My eyes follow its path as it descends gracefully like an old branch at the end of its life returning to the place from which it took its first breath. It is my last sight of freedom in this moment. A split second after it smashes against the cold hard bedroom floor, now only a fraction of what it once was, I look up and see the rage filling his eyes.

In one fluid motion I watch him swinging one arm high into the air and swiftly plunging it downward towards me. I am cut down like a tree limb that succumbs to the mighty ax. All my breath leaves my chest. I spin like a raging tornado until I lose my footing and the side of my face cracks against the floor. The impact blows the ashes away reducing them into ever smaller pieces of themselves. I blink. My eyelids get heavy. Motionless on the ground, I hear warped voices. They fade into the distance and it darkens. Just before the darkness constricts me with its tight embrace I take a moment to laugh at myself for thinking that I’d be so lucky to be surrounded by a protective ring of fire. With a smile on my face, my eyes snap shut and there is peace.

Lost in a Dance

I am lost in a dance that I’ve been forced to learn
Spinning uncontrollably, I expect to fall

Incessant music fills my brain. Distracts me
Wisps of clouds, unwelcome, settle in

I know that I am alive because I feel you,
Each day I am a heavier burden to bear

It is clear now that I will forget more than I’ll ever know

Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the dark I close my eyes and see clearly into my world. Spinning and twirling I feel the agony and ecstasy of a pure release of my own essence. Not denying myself, I follow the whispers in my heart to carry me along. I am the breeze of a spring day fighting with a raging thunderstorm. Bolts of lightening seek to destroy the fertility of my being like heat seeking missiles searching for a target. Wrestling with the reality of my existence, I let the fire and ice wage a war while I wait passively for the outcome.

Entering each new day I am thrusted onto the front lines of a battle. Looking upon the face of another dragon that must be slayed by me for me to allow the healing of the previous night to begin. Confronting many dragons, I am battle-worn and weakened. The celebration of conquest is short lived, as I never truly win.