the bright darkness
of the urban night
hides most of the universe
but shows me
a safe path home:
no adding to crime statisics tonight
and no glimpse
of the ten thousand stars
available to view
in places darker & wilder,
less civilized & less lost.

i wrap my arms around you, tightly.
there is so much i hope for: too much.
this is so unfair to me
to depend on you for so many things
i refuse to see
let alone believe in.
holding you, breathing
your warm, sad scent,
i crush my eyes closed
against every disppointment i can imagine,
and cannot see if you,
caring or otherwise,
look into the same sad overwhelming
or peek over my shoulder
for a convenient route of escape.

march 18, 2008

i want a do-over.
now that i understand
all i did wrong,
a want a chance
to do it all right:
not be a geek;
make the right friends;
go to the better college;
love the girl who got away;
avoid the stupidest
of my lifetime's worth
of stupid mistakes.
i want the chance
to live the life
i know i should have lived
and not the one
i stumbled into.
i want to live
a better life, a happier life,
the life i used to dream of,
before i have
too many regrets.

march 17, 2008

i did the math
and learned a very important
fact about myself:
i am 1,000 times less important
than Alex Rodriquez.
if you translated out net human value,
as measured in current dollars,
he would be over one mile tall
to my mere 5-foot-11-and-three-quarter
inches.
no wonder he cannot hit
in October
while i have no problem
doing my 1,000-times-less-meaningful job
well.

so, yesterday, i went to buy
a monitor for my computer.
(did i need a monitor for my computer?
do i need a computer?
jeez, what century are you from?)
i had the directions
from Google maps,
only in this case, Google maps
could not have been more wrong
had they sent me on a freighter to Taipei.
but after an hour of driving
down every possible road
that could not lead to Fry's,
i asked the woman at the gas station
and 10 minutes later —
2 miles north of where Google maps
said to go —
i was there.

i really hate it
(to paraphrase Annie)
when life becomes such an obvious moral lesson.

bleak comparisons
of my life
to the
hard dark ugly
nasty brutish cruel
vicious sad terrifying
realities of the world
endured (or not) by those
who actually do suffer
(Biafra Lebanon Guatemala)
(rape schizophrenia cancer)
are too pathetic
for the waste of pen & paper,
however poetic i render them.
once in my life — once! —
have i been so stricken.
once.
my life is rough at times,
and this tooth hurts like a mother
and three times my heart has been
honestly broken and
my mother's death was
phone-call sudden,
but compared to the lives
of millions in the truly
dark places of this sad world,
i am on vacation
staying in the luxury suite.
or, to quote Zevon:
poor, poor pitiful me.
poor, poor pitiful me.