Poem – But You Say

You’ve got that perfect mask,

Of pity and concern,

Layered over apathy,

Oh all the wicked things you’ve learned,

Poem – Alright

I’m insecure and too sincere

All pretty eyes and scarce overcome fears

Prettier words you’ve never heard

Tall dark and handsome

Begging to be held for ransom

Bidding starts at the price of one heart

Oh yes Oh yes Oh yes

Poem – Gratification

In that instant

When you tell me you don’t love me like I love you

When you tell me maybe we need time really apart

When you are breathing and it doesn’t hurt like breathing hurts me

In that instant

I just want to turn the world to ashes and dust.

Spoken Word -This $h17 Hurts

My mind is a memory, that bitch is so reflective,

Life walks in and perpetrates some perspective.

Like you thought times was hard before?

Wait till you lose it all, wasn’t so hard anymore,

Short Story – Catching Dreams

Downloadable PDF

I was high as hell that night, six shots and three vicodin into the latest breakdown. I staggered out the backdoor of Lisa’s house, my shirt unbuttoned, the bourbon in one hand while the other flailed to maintain balance. The humid night’s air was like being smothered with a wet towel, and the starless sky loomed heavy with the promise of rain. I didn’t care.

Flash Fiction – The Race

The tree outside my apartment is dying. It’s not like the other trees, that are blushing crimson and gold as they strip off their summer leaves to meet the winter naked and unadorned. No, the tree outside my apartment is actually dying. The leaves aren’t turning colors, they are an ugly brown, covered in little growths. Maybe it has cancer, I don’t know, do trees even get cancer?

The groundskeeper keeps bitching, because he’s going to have to cut it down. Has to make sure when it comes down that it doesn’t hit an apartment, or smash someone’s tea-cup poodle (there are two different people in this place that have them, tells you about my neighbors). He’s got to rent a chainsaw because the apartment complex doesn’t keep one on the grounds. Every day he must spend a good hour scowling up at that big, ugly, dying tree. Well not every day.

On Tuesdays he has chemo, poisoning his body and hoping the growth on his prostate gives out before the rest of him does. He wears a big Bears hat to cover up the lack of hair, and his rugged face dares you to ask what happened to his beard. He should be home, he should be in a hospital. But he’s been the groundskeeper here for over thirty years (I asked the front desk, he wouldn’t talk to me, I’m a liberal hipster to him). He’s dying, he’ll tell you, without even pausing afterwards to watch your response. Most dying people, they wait to see how you handle that information, see whether you show pity, discomfort, or incredulousness. The groundskeeper doesn’t, he just throws it out to the few people who bother to ask between passes on his riding mower.

Every day that old man gets thinner, more gnarled. Arthritis is taking his joints, his hands are warped and twisted with it. His eyes are blue like the sky though, and they aren’t filtered through eyelashes. It’s startling to look at eyes without that familiar ring. So he stands there, every day (except Tuesday), a skeletal man, his hair falling out and his body gnarled. He stands there and he scowls at that tree, bare and wilting; wishing, hoping, that it dies before he does.

Flash Fiction -Waiting

She rides him hard. It’s not making love, it’s not even sex, it’s fucking and they both know it. No soft kisses, no gentle “I love you”s just the rhythmic sound of flesh angrily hitting flesh. And when they are done, they roll to their separate sides of the bed.

He pulls out a cigarette, the golden flicker of the lighter casting deep shadows that pool around his eyes. Then the lighter snaps shut and the crimson tip of the cigarette is the only light in the room. The similarity between the way he sucks on the filter and the way an old man sucks on his oxygen tube isn’t lost on him. But he can’t care anymore.

She immediately gets up and heads to the shower, eager to wash the night off her skin. She prays as she goes, that he’ll be gone when she comes out. She turns the water too hot, but it feels good. She doesn’t wash her skin, or her hair, she doesn’t even reach for the soap. She just stands, watching the scorching water run down in little waterfalls off her finger tips.

He is there when she comes back, the amber tip of the cigarette barely an inch from his lips. She’d think he was asleep, but the light from the hall falls on his eyes, and she can watch his pupils follow her to the bed side. As she sits down on the edge of the bed, he snuffs the cigarette on the ash tray by the bed.

He sits up beside her. They don’t move to comfort each other. He is supposed to leave at midnight. That’s when they agreed he’d go. Before or after would start a fight. So they both sit on the edge of the bed, separated by an endless twelve inch rift, watching the hands of a broken clock. Waiting.

Short Story – Tree House

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Sheila Robinson was seven when her dad decided to build her a tree house. It was a week before her eighth birthday, in that sweaty time where spring’s gentle warmth bleeds into summer’s blazing heat. Their backyard was larger than most in the neighborhood, stretching back to a small piece of the shore. That hundred foot section of shoreline had doubled the price Mr. Robinson had to pay for the place, but he considered it well worth it. He and Mrs. Robinson would watch Sheila float around in the water, pretending to fly, while they sat on the pier holding hands and sneaking kisses when they thought Sheila wasn’t looking. She saw it, but it didn’t bother her. Far as she could tell, hers were the only parents that still kissed anyway. And people only kissed in movies when they were happy, so Mom and Dad must be happy. The logic of seven year olds is penetrating.

Flash Fiction – Flight at 0.08

For a split second it was like flying. His arms were slightly raised, his hair was blown back, and he was weightless. His eyes narrowed with the flashbulbs popping in his mind, each millisecond captured in exquisite detail. Time became something he had heard of but never seen; he existed in every moment of his short life at once.

His hand stung with the recoil from catching a baseball tossed by his dad. It was a sunny day in mid-summer, and they were playing catch in the yard. Dad’s hairline crept slowly back over his head, but the smell of fresh cut green grass made him seem young again.

His nose was filled with the smell of his mother’s fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. The warm, moist dough filled with delicious little chips of pure chocolate. Mom always spent the extra money for name brand chocolate, only the best for her son.

His tongue sizzles with the taste of Rachel’s kiss. They are kissing for the first of a decade’s worth of times. The taste of her chapstick mixes with the salt from her dancing floor sweat, and the unique taste of another human being’s lips.

His ears echo with the sound of her sobbing as she tells him to leave. He can hear the gentle splash of each tear as it falls on the floor of the house. He can hear the sound of his eighth beer being poured into the mug at the bar.

His eyes are filled with the tree trunk that has gone from two hundred feet to a mere three feet in two seconds. The glass spiderwebs and shatters as his head goes through. The hood of the car is dented and bent, the tree crumpling the flimsy plastic.

Time starts again with a sharp, final crack.

Short Story – White Out

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I didn’t know how I fell in love with Angie. It’s not one of those things that I’m in the habit of keeping track of. Hell, I didn’t even know when I fell in love with her. Skydivers aren’t really in the habit of checking their watches half way down. But I fell in love with her. Her hair, her skin, her jokes, her habit of breaking into song and dance like our life in a second story apartment is a Broadway musical and the whole world is her chorus line. I fell in love with her, all of her. Even the parts I hated. I loved her, and she loved me, but there was the first person plural pronoun in there that we couldn’t deal with. We. Us. Ourselves.