Twenty Years

Portland poem.

Weird sadness, I’m on the cusp of crying

Sheer madness, in the dusk I’m dying

I sigh and drink the old corked wine of dusty cellars

I try to rework my mind’s path with fortune tellers.

And I walk myself down these filthy grit streets

Too broke to sigh and lay me down in pristine sheets.

I keep running from voices spitting rounds inside my head

Til I find churning despair, credit cards, and rotten dread.

I saw a homeless man at the back of a cafe line

In a woman’s hat shouting human extinction’s soon,

The police showed up and they slapped him with a fine

He laughed and told them “ignorance is our cocoon.”

He is more myself than I.

Where will I be in twenty years, an alleyway or grave?

How long can I deny I am my mind’s forgotten slave?

Found Poem 2

One Million Negative

Another Poem based on bad Yelp reviews of a hotel, this time based in NYC

I am people watching.

Do you know me?

I am broken facets,

dust, and garbage,

A soul with questionable stains.

A dirty, vacant heart

And a gaze that explains:

"Don't come here if you have high expectations."

I am people watching

Through a maze of subway lines,
Like millipedes on steroids.

Where city traffic drawls in cockroach crawls,

And workers are thieves 

And a bunch of lying cheats.

There is no ceiling.

They have no feeling

And the homeless, who live on filthy sheets

Don't know how to complain.

Life doesn't follow order

For the disgruntled, 

impenetrable, and miserable

Who shake like a whore house

with paper-thin love making walls.

Nor for the weird-psycho-God-knows-what-people,

or the questionable alley vendors selling junk

or the old pervert reeking 

of dilapidated hotel funk.

Living the dream.

So little for all this mess:

A prison cell with no room to move.

It's the size of a grave: fitting.

Living the nightmare.

To survive, non-existent, and enslaved.

Quietly whimpering,

As I try to fall asleep:

Do you know me?