Shipped

Dear alarms and gun-rememberers
Calvin's fountain at the center of town
Messages from the scouts of Black and Red
A toy message

Plastic believers
How you stood, packed at the show
Will you show patience or bare your teeth
Sentenced to the Outside

Headphone drugs all about the living room floor
all over
My great, great uncle was a war hero
and his strong soul drifted off
like smoke

Steal Zero

On lists we reside
Quiet and burning men watch us
The two of us, one-hundred of us. All of us.

"We know where you work and what you had for supper. We know when your wife drops the kids off for school and what drugs she uses."

Keepers of logic and latitude - our forefathers and our heroes
Our saviors and the carousel
Protect us through prayer and predict our mood swings

"We have determined that the waxing and waning of the moon has a subtle effect on many of our citizens. For a select few, it has a great and far more visible physical and psychological effect."

Trespassers and neighbors
You are warned
you are lost
you are us
you are gone

In the Beginning/The End

You are my church
I, the beast in the tall grass - watching, lost, searching
Perhaps I am a hunter-cat, or a hound
Perhaps your stars light up and shine like Heaven's offices

Night breaks, it explodes and crumples into something you can throw away
For all of the dark pasts and unkind words/deeds
We are here
I want to look into your eyes, deep and of destiny
I want to whisper "Finally", with no words

Down the road, I traveled
My feet, bare and worn to agony kept moving
Was it will or want, I cannot say
My mind, feral
My tongue hanging from my mouth
A song of exhaustion sung from deep in my empty belly

How, then, it pleased me to find familiar streets and nooks
They were hazy, but my mind and heart knew them
"I haven't been here in forever, or ever" I convinced myself
and it was true
My DNA dreamed of it, before eyes formed or hair grew
My heart longed for it, before fingers or claws or fangs came to be

I end where I am meant to
A stream of code that begins with the beginning
is corrupted and askew throughout the labor lines and intimate functions
but, as it was meant to be, ended in your arms and under your canopy of hair

Much as a child weeps for its lost pet
Perhaps a hound, or a cat
It finds its way back to them
The magnetics in its head scanning the starscape; Heaven's offices
It walks down unknown/known ways, looks up to the light's ceiling, heavy with air
It calls out a gutteral sound
and doors, hearts, eyes all open
It is called-to and comes
It smiles through hurt that is no longer hurt
looks to its Master and sings to her
"I am Your beast"