Poem: I Can't Remember and I Can't Forget

Vestigial questions echo in swimming high-school hallways.
Vague in their now periphery-nature,
Haunting in their imperative:
Of life's intent. Of broader hope. Of being right, almost always, and knowing it.
But swimming out and down, now breathless, filled with languid panic--
I can't share the air they need to exist, 'cause I need it just to live.

I stare at myself with red eyeballs. Is fatigue the drug I'm addicted to?
A young man half my age should be here staring back, cocky and cool. Where did he go?
I have those vestigial questions to ask him...

In fragment moments of clarity I almost-proudly remember
I scratched the white-washed concrete constructs of the institution.
I left my fingernails, and fingertips and bits of teeth there,
Though of course I left no mark.
That was not my destiny.
But the bruised and bleeding scars
Have left no mark on me
I've spent the years-intervening,
Healing to the point we're even.

Poem: Thrown-out Unused

our man-made world defines us by our lack,
bruises and abuses us with it,
Works to pump desire in like an anechoic vacuum.

We are abraded by expensive impressions of affluence.
The fear of poverty -- seeing the faces but not the eye of the people in our glossy magazines, their tears, their endless hurt --
by rote we recite what we know of the one-step-away precipice.
(There but by ____ go I)
the fence that became a wall that became a cliff that we climbed up on to see
we got dizzy vertigo
from the chasm
(just one step back)

we wonder at a planet that shudders under the weight of its humanity
we call sin consequence
and try to pass it off as inconsequential
to spin like selfish hurricanes.