Dream place

May 21, 2016

I drink wine when I can find the time,

But stirs up my sleep with dreams,

That are not quite out of the past,

I always drift back to that cold water flat

I settled into when I turned 24,

A hide out with almost no heat

Where water even froze on top of the stove

And the stand up stall in which I showered

Was all I had to keep me warm,

I go back there in my dreams like a thief,

Scared the landlord my catch me

And demand rent for all those years

Since I last lived their for real,

Yet as afraid as I am in those dreams,

I feel as safe as a hermit crab in a stolen shell,

Like no other place I have lived past or present,

My Alamo with pealing paint

From which I might resist the over complexities

That life has become when I am fully awake,

Even now with my eyes wide open

I ache for that place, and the simple life

I lived there, and slap my pockets

Each time I think of it

Wondering where I put the key.

Even in the mirror

Sunday, May 22, 2016

I fold it under

Where I can’t see it

Even in a mirror,

That other self

I sometimes feel ashamed about

The obnoxious character I abhor

When I bother to think of him at all.

We live our lives with both good and bad
then pretend one of them does not exist,

The bad side up gives the perception of strength,

The good always seemingly the weakest,

Until we look too closely, and reverse it

So we do not have to see the bad at all,

Not even in the mirror.

We dress it us it phony clothes, cross-dressing it,

As if a character in some play that isn’t quite real,

Knowing the whole time just how real it really is,

And how impossible it is for us to keep it hid,

How it always takes us over, flipping good to bad,

At a time in our lives when bad looks particularly unattractive,

And how it refuses to keep hid, but always shows

From beneath the thin veneer of good we totally believe

Ourselves to be,

Even in the mirror.