Outside looking in 

Bodies

Bodies thrown together in a mountain of sheets. The door swells with humidity and the sweat is lost in the cracks. The odor hangs in the air like a thick fog early in the morning and everything is still, as in mourning. A child runs down the street next to his bike while a woman sits in the window drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. Her cigarette traces a ladder to the sky. The dusk of the morning has everything bathed in blue light, acknowledging the loss that comes with the dawn, and the world meditates on itself and heals with the sun only to have the scar torn open again with the yellowness of the crime lights whose reflection is disturbed when a boot splashes through a puddle gathered in the street. Everything is violated in the artificial. where body parts are easily swapped out at your neighborhood 7-eleven, as simple as an oil change and twice as convenient... cosmetic surgeons are obsolete now, its as easy as getting a Slurpee and a quick pick. The lines run deep, like canyons around the eyes, twice a year they flood, on the anniversary of his death and then on the anniversary of her birth. He escaped her aging and now the only companion is the all too truthful mirror, each year is another line and another tear. Canyons become the ocean floor as we drown in our own self.

Fiery

I seem to only get you in passing. My heart hangs heavy on a low bow bent by its weight. At any moment it could erupt unleashing all that it has sought to keep inside, sheltered from the world for so many years. The valves are closed holding the fire that pumps against them like a piston made of iron. At any moment a trail of fiery exhaust will part in the path behind me as I walk over cobbled streets, through back alleys, catching glimpses of blue light from TV’s flickering beyond the window, behind the drawn shades. Everyone has a secret they hide behind their eyelid, trying to stifle with each blink. The innocence of children peering through wooden shutters, just an eye and a nose and an expression of hope and escape. I can feel the contour of each stone under my boot, no part of the world is lost to me... I see through your eyes, I peer through your dreams, and I live in your head. My shadow is everyman, but my heart is mine, heavy with the weight of the world.