Looking at a blank page

Seeking the rage that forms the art and

Finding only peace

Looking deeper searching the poison rivers

that once were lakes that once were

Oceans that once spanned space but now

Trickle along almost dehydrated from this complacency

I find myself in

Ennui creeping from the goodness I have found

To steal my passion and carry it far away from my minds eye

“Stop!” I cry and seek the blistering hole that has tortured me

Since childhood

Immerse

myself in its fetid depths and taste the rancor settled there the

Abuses and shamefulness and misery and failure

I wallow like a dog in filth

Catching bits and pieces of hell on my shifting skin

Memories painful slaps to bring me ‘round to my angst

FATHER do you sleep well in thoughtlessness your little mensch all grown up and bearing your cross whittled down to a splinter small enough to fit in a vest pocket

I did not wither in your footsteps following you to endless liquor sunsets and seeking the dead ghosts of the past with passion better given to the living

I did not learn from you the lessons I carry now that time of fatherly teaching passing you by like the thick blood pumping past your heartlessness

I love you still just for making me but nothing more and remorse a faint nag that surfaces when I dream of being a professional football player or a rock star which is less than seldom now

I used to cry listening to Sting singing

Of taking his father away with him to strange lands and just being

But crying doesn’t bring you here

MOTHER I see you lonely and feel my heart crack and sputter at all this time you sacrifice for others pretending your not but I know

I feel

I taste your sadness it spills from you in Angel tears that rip the world and stain the sky

You would never say it

But you do you just don’t know it so you hide in others needs and magnify your self with pity sometimes at your being overworked but mostly overlooked and alone

Grandpa needs you now so your loneliness gets pushed to second place again

I forgave you long ago for standing fast with bad men I understand you had nowhere to go but home and so you eventually did and I’m still a good man regardless because I’ve always felt

Your love

The words bleeding from me now matching the tears that spill from my eyes as I wonder back

Back

Back

Regret is an easy rock to grasp to your belly

Letting it pull you down into the abyss

Feeling the sea walls rise above you as you

Cry and drown

But here is where I need to be

Tasting shit at the bottom my

Present world a paradise and free

Where I laugh with impunity and eat life like rare steak and dance

My wife and children my anchors to joy

I must visit the hell

Inside

The vault of bad things and bad ideas and just bad

And bask there for a time before I return to now the time I revel in

Thus creating the balance I need to create and

So the blank page fills with rage

And pain

and maybe hope

And I can go on again

Giving the inside out to the outside in and

Freeing those sins that

Are my buoyancy now

Catapulting me past those failures I articulated

and letting me taste a future of

Blossoming

A time of regrowth

And a harvest of change