we are the people

store-front churches, pawn shops, bars, the police, and the homeless sleeping on the streets. The artists who know everything but nobody cares. Concrete jungle smells like shit, piss behind buildings and garbage bins. record stores where assholes buy records with an iphone in their back-pocket. the lost, the found, the hip, and the just. we are the people. and we are everywhere like some god-damned disease.

strange caller

I've never had a lot of readers,
but I do remember when someone read
one of my poems and called the police department
for being too obscene.

I received a phone call from a police officer
who was following an investigation
on some of my poems.

he left me a voice mail and told me to call him back,
but when I did he never responded and
I never heard from him again.

to this day I haven't heard from him.

in plumes of fire they went

It's a pale blue earth

as we suck on

the thickness

of the white air,

our lungs heaving in despair.

woman fall in and out of love

as men

burn down houses

with their children inside.

it's true,

I read it in a newspaper today,

it happened in washington.

we are often ignored

until it's too late.