when people don’t get your joke

unable to find the folds of your smile,
the punchline slowly backed
away from the thin straight line
of your neutral lips-disheartened,
it sullenly retreated, shivering from
its failure of becoming born
retreating into a shell of awkward silence
sucking its thumb as it sulked

words are feeble

words are feeble
they stumble and collapse
there seems no end to this
litany, no end to these
ink-stained tears that
eat into flesh
hollow out bones

and words are feeble
to contain hearts
rupturing with a thunderous
crack, each pulse a bolt
of lightning, splitting
the sky into two

and words
are feeble
to stop the bleeding eyes
everywhere, everywhere
there are bleeding eyes
failed by these feeble words
these words that are feeble

toothache

the bitter words I harbored
were burdens I consciously bore
and though it hurt
to speak
I spoke at will
baring my teeth
like a beast
so you would know
the pain
I felt

I left my demons by the fire

it diminished gently

overlapping skies, ripples of
light shifting into rainfall
the impenetrable gray

I ripped pages out of my heart
burned philosophy by the book
stories that made my spirit lame

watching,
those diabolical words break,
breaking
whispers turning into ash

turning

I left my demons by the fire
for the rain
and its cascade

Little Mouse

I have already learned
the acrobatic excellence
of your sarcasm; just take
a good look at my squirming
heart: a pathetic little
mouse, clutching its tail,
crying, squirming, and trying
so desperately to hold on
and not lose itself to each
trembling heartbeat

 

army of ghosts

boy-photography-sad-Favim.com-178038

what is this inscrutable urge
to achieve immortality?
it’s not about perfection,
but how would I know?

So I hide, behind the
inadequacy of language and
let it occupy me, occupy me
like an army
an army of ghosts

Dear Miss Grammar

Words. Mispilled.

Modifiers dangling at the

wrong places, having stared too long

into your turquoise eyes

The sparkles in them fall

into my run-on sentences of deliberation

like punctuations; little commas

with an attitude that divides my manhood

and stubborn periods

that keep everything

I say and do  in line.

.

You don’t need to control my words

You’re on my mind, in my heart,

down to the bottom of my soul,

across from my sight like a phantom,

all about me and all the way through me

.

This is what you do best

These subtle distortions

of a man’s prepositions

.

This is what you do best

The forceful reduction

Of  a man’s expression

to mere adjectives for your existence

.

And you, being always plural,

will never agree to be the subject of my romance

for I, being perpetually single due to my

pathetic inability to talk to beautiful girls,

I am the lame verb in the wrong tense

with taped retro glasses and jeans that are

so last-century-ago, without the sizzle

.

That is why in English,

a sentence’s subject is never changed

for the sake of the verb

for it is definite, written in stone,

while the verb, so meagre and hopelessly in love

suspends his life with the decisions you make.