Too many drafts

Saved drafts of
Empty pages that
Should have been
Something worth sharing.

Instead they’re only
Ghosts of words of poems
Outlining the existence of

Saved drafts of
Empty pages that
Should have been
Something worth sharing.

Blackness

Long lost like daylight beams,
What has gone are
Diurnal thralls
Going on and on wordlessly
Over the meaning of things
To come and to be.
What’s otherwise the dawn
Just a blackness to me.

Cars.

My car is giving me trouble.
Right now it’s the cooling system.
Before that it was the idler.
Before that, the battery.
Before all that, it was a head gasket, which cost me nearly a grand to have replaced.

I bought a new overflow tank. It has a built-in sensor which may well be our present culprit. The threads on the lid had long been stripped and needed to be replaced anyway. Now I have to drain the entire cooling system to replace it. It’s cold out. I’m a little annoyed.
My car is fifteen years old and she’s getting about that age, that something needs to be replaced on a monthly basis. I’m running out of elbow grease. She had 140,000 miles when I bought her from an old man two years ago, and since then I’ve added another 30,000 miles. I’d say we had a good run, but I can’t keep fixing shit every few weeks, and wondering what might be the next part to go bad or break down. I need something that can get me from A to B, and so far she has, every time, but I’m beginning to wonder how long she’ll remain reliable.

Rick–my roommate–has a 1980 Corvette that he’s been trying to sell for ages. It’s just been sitting on the carport, collecting dust. A pretty sad concept considering how badass that car is. It’s only got 130,000 miles on it. I could easily juice another 30 or 40 thousand miles out of that engine. So I’ve convinced Rick to sell it to me dirt cheap. Only a couple grand when he’s been asking six. Of course, some work still needs to be done to it.
It needs a new carburetor, an alignment, the gages don’t work, the stereo doesn’t work, but everything else is in good order. It’s all pretty straightforward. It’s already black so paint is not an issue.
So I may be purchasing this Corvette over the next few weeks. The best I’m going to do with my budget is something with enough life left in it to hold me over for a few years. Why not make it a Corvette?
I can’t stand not having a car. There are plenty of people who could give me a ride at a moment’s notice, but it’s not the same. The freedom isn’t there. In order to feel free it’s essential that I have a car I can rely on.

I’m doing good otherwise. Spending more and more time with Michelle. I’m in love with her. I only want to tell her a million times, but I’m afraid I’d run her off. If I had the balls to tell her just once, how would she react? What would she say? These questions plague me. Perhaps I should give it a little more time.

–Plagued

Too close

Too close would mean
Saying Where I’ve been
What I’ve done
The things I’ve seen.
If you can’t tell,
I would rather
Lose myself
In your angelic rings.
I’d prefer to
Be lost
In the time we spend.
I know me
And I’d rather
Not return there again.

Bright as an A-Bomb

It was only a feeble attempt
To find correspondence
Between the alacritous heart and
The congelation of earthly things,
And

Only this I know.

She came in white and
Scattered my inquest
Like an A-bomb.

Concerning the day all light failed to illuminate an empty page.

“This pen is wrong
For writing,” she said,
Though
I’d composed delicately
Once before
On the dissolution
Of the sky.

“You have to watch your lines,
And the lighting must
Be right.”

There are only two
Lamps
Made of brass and
Wire,
And now they
Are dissolving
Too.

Ares

Warlords
Drum out a hypnagogic din
Here in my living room.

I try to play along but
All this drumming
On the table is making
My fingers sore.

Ares, Ares, on and on
You beat your battle tune.

Maybe next time I’ll
Hold my rhythm in accordance
with a less vengeful you.

Some kind of communion.

Today despite the cold I suited up so Rudie and I could make a pilgrimage to my favorite ash tree.

Frost

Morning dew clings
To Spring flowers
But not to Winter’s
Icy grass.
Cold makes frost that crackles
Underneath your shivering path.
It’s the lack of warmth that causes
All other things to lack.
Persephone’s gone, but
One day she’ll come back.

Winter storm

Red is
The reticent color
Of the encroaching
Winter storm
And all its frigid hateful
Snowflake scourges
Without warmer things adorned
As they barrel weightless
thru the high slipstream
Their only lonely selves
They mourn
The coldest storm
Of another winter is
Itself already frayed and torn.