A Chord

She doesn’t strike a chord
She just presses keys down gently
And lets her music
Linger through the night.
I let it play, I let it play
I let it hold me till the day.

Where's The Thief For Me

It’s a long walk back to bed tonight,
A long walk passing strangers, dodging drunks
And pressing the full weight of my evening
Against the silence of the sidewalk.
All night I spent a thief,
Stealing glances here and there,
Taking what I could from the people all around me,
Hoping that some criminal mastermind
Would find a way into me,
Into the places I try so hard to hide
And make off with something precious.
I’d let them have it, I tell you, I wouldn’t put up a fight
I’d let them steal whatever they like.

We All Fit

You wouldn’t remember all the nights
I spent writing you into existence,
Dreaming each and every feature
To catch me by surprise
When you crossed my path by accident
And made me realize
I wasn’t a fool to believe
That good things can happen
To silly optimists who spend
What little time they have
Making up stories and dreaming,
But if you did you may recall the moment
I held in my bed
When I came to appreciate
That though we weren’t made for each other
We all fit just the same.

Mental Health Week

It’s mental health week
And I’m unhealthy
Because I’m drunk and poor
And feeling wealthy,
And all my conclusions
Are if, ands or buts
But who gives a shit
Cuz I’m feeling nuts
But when the night’s over
And it’s just me
And I look in the mirror
And I’m all I can see
I think to myself
There’s no mystery
Why all these people
Are convinced they’re crazy.

Three Of Us

In an empty house
We three wanderers
Sat ragged by a fire
All high and full of stories,
Unable to hide from tomorrow
But not afraid to try.
That night she let the light of the flames
Dance across each of her twenty two years
As she lay lengthwise
And alerted the two others in the room
And the great silence of the cosmos
That she was alive and beautiful.

God Knows, I Don't

God knows what time it is
And God knows what’s going through
All these pretty girls heads
And God might know everything
But he sure ain’t sharing it with me
Because I’m swimming in a club,
I’m jumping with everyone else
I’m laughing and screaming and shouting
And trying to find God
In all the least likely places.
It’s divine squalor and flashing lights
And I’m loving every minute of it
As we let the pounding beat
Pound our hearts to mincemeat.

Words Are Meant For Daytime

I hate myself, she said
As we lay there in bed,
A bottle of wine gone straight to her head.
So I turned around
And I uttered a sound,
But it didn’t reach her, it just fell to the ground
And sprouted a question, or rather a weed,
Do I shut up, or do I proceed?
Do tell her the things that she wants to hear?
Do press my lips up close to her ear
And whisper sweet nothings that she won’t believe,
She won’t believe because she doesn’t want to believe,
She just wants to see me try and retrieve
The one good thing that we felt
From all the feelings we were dealt.
But that’s gone now and in its place
I see her face,
I see this body that she hates
Balanced before me on a scale of weights.
I see her breasts, her ears, her skin,
I see those goose bumps prickle up again,
I see her cheeks, her neck, her hair,
I see the eyes into which I stare
And I’ve so many words
But none are right
So I’ll leave them with the silence
And drift deep into the night.

Stranger

I want to climb out of my bed,
Walk out of my room
Out of my apartment, onto the street
To grab a taxi to take me to the airport
To get on a plane that’s flying at top speed
To a country full of strangers
Where I’ll get out on the tarmac
Walk through the airport, take a bus
Run through the streets
Up strange stairs, through a strange door
Into a strangers apartment,
A strangers room, a strangers bed
And find myself a stranger.

Winter Malaise

The cold air slows the hours, cools my blood
Then brings all to a stop
Just long enough for me to recognize
I’m caught in a winter malaise.
The world blurs but not the droplets on the window,
My eyes follow them, perfectly in focus and falling.
I sit on the bed in my room
As grey light touches the rooftops
And water darkens the streets
And people with umbrellas scuttle about
Waiting for the day to end.

City Full

My room's a mess
of dirty clothes, scraps of paper
and all the pieces of my life
I don't know what to do with
but the night is full
and the bars are full
and I've had a bellyful
of sitting in this room
so I grab my coat and my shoes
and hit the town
with everything I've got,
that's all the hope in the world
in a city full of chances.

I Guess It's Okay

I guess I’ll keep spending these
Next few years (and few they are)
With not-quite-yet-adults
Who play games with each other
And drink themselves silly
And seem to know everything
But nothing about how beautiful they are.
I guess I can do that.
I guess it’s okay that
Everybody’s laughing
Laughing, laughing, laughing
But not amused
Just somewhat abused
Feeling big about little lives
Where everyone survives
By making up their memories.
I had a memory once.
I guess I’ll make due
With this new definition
This new sense of mission
With late night thoughts
Of oversexed hype, you know the type
Where me or rather little-boy-still
Who has nothing but eons of time to kill
Builds a lover from the immediate surroundings
Borrows a name (gee, I’m good at this game)
And constructs a path to happiness,
Whatever that is.

Lichen

She’s in no rush.
She knows the cracks in my armor
Better than I do
And with great patience
She’ll creep as slow as lichen,
Finding ways into me,
Until before I know it
My castle walls are covered,
Green and lush,
Overpowered by the force in nature
That causes things to grow

The Pin

Pull the pin
from between my lips
and together
we'll explode.

Night Blooming Jasmine

Alone in bed
Or half the way to Babylon?
Tonight it’s hard to tell.
My chest rises and falls,
My body whole, all tendon, meat and bone,
You could know this,
You could know it all
And you wouldn’t know a thing.
For even if you were intimate
With the animal my blood feeds
You can’t see behind these eyelids
So how could you possibly know
That somewhere in this constellation
I call myself
A sore opens like jasmine in the night
And unbeknownst to anyone,
Least of all to me,
Gives birth to these, my secret images,
And gets a rise out of places
Most of you will never see.

Shadow Of Cranes

Bellevue has a square heart
Fed not by a tangled mass
But by the blinking of traffic lights.
I have driven arterial roadways
In search of the blemish, the scar,
The backdoor, the alley
But all I’ve found are sidewalks,
Empty sidewalks who watch
With the eyes of a newborn
As the traffic slowly passes.
Bellevue is Adonis without a head
A marble heap of flesh and bone
Finely wrought, a model specimen,
It’s genitals removed by those who think
They know better.
In pancake corrals
I’ve sat and pondered the soul,
I’ve sat and wondered
If there wasn’t a mother somewhere
In this city, her breasts full,
All womb and all pudenda,
Getting ready to give birth
To something animate and frail
In the shadow of the cranes.

Adventures

Ryan’s at the frat,
Paul’s not picking up
And I’m beneath the stars
Wasting time on dreams again
When every adventure in the world
Is no further than a heartbeat.

Desire

Like the venom that gathers
At the end of a serpents fang
I hang over her, poised to fall.
Ladies, know this,
In the moment of Satan's exultation over Eve
Part of me was born,
When his wingbeat caused her heart to flutter.

Closer

A great loneliness
Travels thousands of miles
Over the land and the sea
To press its pale lips to me
But like all things it passes.
In its place I see your face,
I see you fill this empty space
And I wrap my arms about your waist
So I may feel closer.

I'm An Octagon

Perturbed, I’m an octagon
Who can’t seem to fit
With the lovely people around me
But can I be blamed?
It’s tough to be just one
Of six billion different puzzle pieces
To six billion different puzzles
Perhaps not meant to fit together
Only meant to want to

Seattleite

She’s a Seattleite, an artistic disaster
And always on my mind or only in my mind
As I can’t seem to find her
Which is a shame when I have so many pretty words,
Such lovely phraseology and the space to fill
Endless, endless nights
With silly, adolescent verses
Dedicated to no one, read by no one, appreciated by no one
No one but me and the ghost of my imagination
And who is she tonight?
She’s a Seattleite, an artistic disaster
And always on my mind.

Strange Dreams In Milan

I’m having strange dreams in Milan
Of a girl I haven’t seen in weeks
And already I feel guilty
Already I feel I maybe where it’s at
But that’s not where I need to be….
Her arms, my friends, her arms.

From Beneath The Waves

She’s a 1980’s slit-wrist romantic with a capital R
And I’m dumbstruck, watching as she applies her make up
To Echo & The Bunnymen.
She’s twenty years too late but can’t wait
So she turns back the years with nothing more than a few wishes
And a whole lot of eyeliner.
It’s all make believe but it probably was back then
So why not make it up again?
After all, what are we if not dreamers?
Two mad, grandiose schemers
With nothing better to do on a Friday night
Than pretend we’re smack in the middle
Of our very own apocalypse!

Useless In The Dark

Thoughts of summer crowd a night
Filled already to the brim
With things I’ll say tomorrow
When I must work ever so hard, a craftsman,
To fashion my terrible thoughts,
My selfishness, my cruel, cruel desires,
Into words so lovely that even she,
With her most delicate of dispositions,
Will not be ground to dust
By the weight of imperfection.

In Bed

It’s only when her eyes are closed
And the night has found its way
Through the cracks of our defenses
That my mind feels safe to wander.
Mindful of her slumber
My double-exposed ghost sneaks carefully
Through the window and out into the wilderness
Of a young man’s imagination.
Could she possibly be aware, I wonder,
Of the universe behind my eyelids?
Does she know how many times
I’ve lived and loved and died
In the space of a single yawn?
Perhaps she too is a million miles away
Partaking in her own adventures
With a man who each night looks
Less and less like me.
In the morning we’ll make love
Without even saying a word,
Using silence without much success
To breath life into our dreams.

She Flips My Switch

In the 21st Century we don’t make love by candlelight
We hook up beneath a light bulb.
They keep telling me we’re in the age of electricity
But can I help it if I suffer from an energy crisis?
I imagine her staring pensively into a screen
Waiting for Casanova to fill her inbox,
Instead I think I’ll drop by with a simple request:
Flip my switch, turn me off, lets do this unplugged and in the dark.
I want a connection that isn’t measured by speed
But rather by how slow we wish the minutes would pass
When we’re together and seeking to appreciate
The beauty of flesh and blood.

You Silly, Silly Boy

Being in love with love
I swoop down from above
And reconfigure the face of reality
With the strength of my imagination.
If you only knew the truth
You’d know how absurd I really am,
A self-proclaimed wunderkind
With a heart full of lovely delusions
That will never survive the intrusions
Of the plain and devilish ordinary.
I guess it will only be after I’ve struck the wall
And my head is surrounded with exploding stars
And a little cartoon rocket making its miniature orbit
That someone will reach out their hand and say
Peter, you silly, silly boy, you silly, silly boy
You’ll never be satisfied, not even when in paradise.

Space Cadet

You’re looking at a space cadet
Who’s ready and he’s set
But without a place to go
And no one he can show
If the dreams he dreams
Will hold at the seams
Or if they like his heart
Will just fall apart
And find themselves finished
Before they could start.

Love Fiend (or She Really Gets My Dopamine Flowing)

These days they say that love is a narcotic,
Something to do with dopamine or some other such nonsense.
I’m not so sure, I’ve looked into the eyes of the permanent fixtures
Who line the walls of Dublin’s pharmacopeias
And I don’t think it’s love that I’ve been seeing.
But if our feelings do come down to cocktails
I don’t much mind, I know my poison
I’m a Singapore Sling, or even a Cosmopolitan.
Imagine that scientist looking at the world
Rational, cold, alone, seeing all us junkies
In a mad dash for a fix to help us through the night.
Anyone could tell we’re hooked and hooked bad
Chasing the fantastic and falling over one another,
Smothering and smothered we haven’t got a clue
Just an idea of what it’s like to feel needed
And intimate knowledge of what it is to need someone
Every hour of every day we find ourselves alive.

Because You're You

I feel like writing a love poem
Because you’re you
And everything you do
Makes me feel so happy.
I’m sorry, no sophisticated words
Just sugar, spice and colorful birds
Come to mind
And I find I’ve trouble thinking straight
And I can’t wait to find myself in your arms again.

Night Strikes Time

In the hour night strikes time dead
The past rests gently before my eyes
And all there is to do is to wait for light
To resuscitate the moment.
I share this lonely space with all my loves of yesterday.
I am dumb but full of things to say
But it doesn’t matter, they won’t listen anyway.
They’re done with me now; they’ve nothing left to do
But make love to my imagination
And even that’s just fucking.

It’s no more fun when no one wants to be here.
Two lie in a corner, naked and quickly fading,
Once sirens of perversion now little else than tired,
Their breasts sagging, their hair falling out…
I pay them no mind.

Some specters blur together, humping in obscurity.
How many nights old I wonder? When did they lose their faces?
Their mouths open and close like suffocating fish
As I sweep them beneath my carpet.
Their only defiance is the refusal to be forgotten.

Some midnight lovers still strive to remain ethereal,
Playing coy with dreams, wrapping my thoughts around the secrets
They never let me feel.
Flickering in and out of existence between each heavy breath
They taunt me with lost chances.

One hides with my alternative reality in the Hotel du Seze.
The rain falls gently inside my mind but we don’t notice,
We’re too busy finding happiness, endlessly making love
Within the dampness of the universe.
She laughs and sighs and writes my poems for me.

Lastly come the exiles, my colder, outer cosmos.
She makes up the rules of my border towns, sends me packing
With hungry eyes searching for a future.
Her mind is upside down and intent on turning mine.
I will not let her.

Waiting for the sun we sit and stare at one another.
The table is empty, the wood begins to rot.
They’re dying and we’re all the better for it.
When morning comes and runs through me like the stream of forgetfulness
I’ll stretch my arms out and embrace the coming day.
With new light comes the gift of possibility,
Of new lovers and friends and a thousand dispositions
To weigh against my own.
Still, my attic remains locked and full of dusty memories
With nothing left to wait for but a silent, ignominious end.

Guide

Guide my hand
To any place you like
And I’ll promise to be gentle
I’ll promise to take great care
With the part of you you’ve given
And if you feel my explorations
Fill your heart with shivers
I’ll hear it in your breath.

Kissing

Everyone in the world is kissing but me
Or at least everyone I see
And it’s getting me so down and lonely
I might just float off the sidewalk
And into the depths of space
Leaving Saturday night far behind
But my feet have sprouted roots
That hold me firmly to the ground
On a street that’s full of lovers
Flaunting their loveliness and spreading their wings
While I run wild with the wolves
All snarls and teeth and hunger.

Irish Blossom

I spend these nights climbing stems
In the hopes of finding an Irish blossom
Who will open to my touch.
When I reach her
I will use my fingers
To petal by petal uncover
The places she’s chosen to hide
And offer myself fully
For her to do with in the dim light
All the things she’s dreamed of.

Dialogue

Stumbling from the pub
My tongue becomes forked
And tickles her ear
As she breathes in air
Thickened by my whispers.
My better half sits on the corner,
Head in hands, no longer surprised
By the evenings indiscretions.
In the morning
As he checks the thermometer
And looks down at me, a nervous wreck,
He’ll speak so very softly,
I’ve looked into our heart, he’ll say,
I’ve studied the desires
That turn our blood to battery acid,
Our veins into wires
And now I know we need someone
For more than just a night
Someone like us who loves the dark
But also loves the light.

Sweetheart

She’s the crazy delight
Who makes my night
When she looks at me so real
And when it feels right
I’ll turn out the light
And tell her how I feel.
Sweetheart, I’ll say
In a sincere way,
You’re brighter than the stars
And if you love me too
As I hope you do
This evening could be ours.

Another Night

Another night,
Another night walking in shadows
Skipping over cracks,
Thinking about you…
You,
If only I knew you,
If only I could make a perfect mistake,
Wander into the wrong pub, get off at the wrong stop
Linger a minute longer, a minute less
If only through my blundering I could blunder into you.
Sure, two wrongs don’t make a right
And I’ve been wrong night after night
But maybe tomorrow I’ll do something right
Maybe tomorrow when I turn out the light
It won’t just be another night, but my first night with you.

Every Day, Mysterious

Every day I brush shoulders with another universe
A potential wife, a new best friend,
Someone who’d make my life miserable.
I scan the faces on the bus
Without a clue as to what it is I’m looking for
But regardless I always find it,
I’m just not sure what it is
Or what I am to do with all these feelings
With the loneliness that travels through my blood
To every part of my body
Or the joy that comes from seeing a girl
I’ve never met in my life
And know I’ll never speak to.
Every day I wake up the same way I fall asleep
In a swoon, intoxicated, in love,
I can’t help it, I’ve fallen in love with the universe
And all I’d like as I drift amongst creation
Is someone to hold on to, someone not afraid of the mysterious.