the wallflowers

So long ago, I don't remember when
That's when they say I lost my only friend
Well they said she died easy of a broken heart disease
As I listened through the cemetery trees
I seen the sun comin' up at the funeral at dawn
The long broken arm of human law
Now it always seemed such a waste
She always had a pretty face
So I wondered how she hung around this place


Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together We can drive it home
With one headlight


She said it's cold
It feels like Independence Day
And I can't break away from this parade
But there's got to be an opening
Somewhere here in front of me
Through this maze of ugliness and greed
And I seen the sign up ahead
At the county line bridge
Sayin' all there's good and nothingness is dead
We'll run until she's out of breath
She ran until there's nothin' left
She hit the end it's just her window ledge


Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together We can drive it home
With one headlight


Well this place is old
It feels just like a beat up truck
I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn
Well it smells of cheap wine and cigarettes
This place is always such a mess
Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn
I'm so alone, and I feel just like somebody else
Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same
But somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams
I think of death it must be killin' me


Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together We can drive it home
With One Headlight

Baby Girl

Will Hoge-Baby Girl

May the sunlight find your face
Even when the rain does fall
And get back on your feet again
Every time you slip and fall
Keep your heart wide open
And always taking in
And even when it's broken
Be strong enough to fix it up again

Oh little baby girl
Sweet little baby girl
I wish I could hold your hand in this great big world
Oh little baby girl

And I hope your hands are steady
And never need to make a fist
And I hope that when you're ready
You get one never ending kiss
And I hope that deep inside of you
There's a sweet eternal song
And I hope the words are pretty
And that you'll always sing along

And I hope your friends are many
And your laughter's always loud
To help you when you're lonely
And pick you up when you're down
I hope your eyes shine bright love
And learn to see the light
Take the time to listen
Decide yourself what's wrong or right

Oh little baby girl
Sweet little baby girl
Be strong in this great big world
Oh little baby girl

love unreciprocated

The light from the sun filters through the trees, and lands on your face. I smile and brush the hair back from your face. Your eyes smile back and we drift off into a slumber matchless to anything I have ever known. Later on in this most breathtaking day I awake and find you curled up in my arms. I gaze at you sleeping, scanning each feature upon your face. Tracing them with my finger on your skin, and my heart skips a beat.

In my mind I see you, this loving person in a cage, your hands out stretched, reaching for the key to your freedom, which hangs from the branch of a tree just out of reach. You try many times to touch it, to have it and the freedom it stands for, but you give up, and accept your sentence. And only I can see the other key that lies within your reach, the one that hangs on my heart. I try to verbalize, to get you to understand the ease at which your quest for love can be found, but my words resonance in silence. Suddenly I hear you stir and I am drawn away from my visions and back to the most satisfying of times. Shhh, I whisper and softly stroke your face, a small smile comes through, then fades, leaving me feeling something I have never before felt in my life. The sun has almost finished setting into the sea and I realize that I could lay here forever as the warm breeze flows across us and never tire of such bliss. The male crickets begin their calling out to potential mates as I smile, and view your face in the growing moonlight that is now filtering thought the trees.

But soon, you will again kiss me goodbye and return to the life that you long to escape. Or so you have said. I will be here alone again, waiting for your scraps. Angry at my own foolishness for allowing myself to be a man stranded upon this island of love unreciprocated. I know when you leave, you’ll go home where you will be surrounded by riches beyond comprehension, and I understanding they mean more to you than I do. Yet, I seem unable to change it. Blind, and helpless, my own key calls to me, but I refuse to even reach for it.

Now, on the days I see you I soar. On the days I don’t, I pile them behind my heart, where they began smelling of lies, and become unbearable to view. A Dorian Gray portrait of lonely days existing in my heart. The sad days currently out number the happy. And when you do grace me with your presence and presents I feel cheap. But somehow the hopefulness still masks the lie and I smile, falling in love all over again. Finding I am grateful like an alley cat desperate for a bowl of milk, all the while hating myself for what I have become. Wondering how I could let myself fall prey to your touch and attention. Then another day comes when we bask in the sun like lovers with a future and I am buoyant. Still, I let you take my heart and hold it carrot like in front of your own. And like a puppy trying to please his master I shamefully follow you, never fully retaining the knowledge that I am being used. I do know I am a fool, I know you will never leave him but I am locked agonizingly in your hourglass, feeling the sands of your time run through my fingers, and like a man without a country I long for a home.

tears

The ground was beginning to cool as water cascaded down the hills and into the mountain. Storm after storm had hit McKinney’s Creek bringing complete saturation of the summer baked terrain. The water rose up deep inside the cavern, often inches an hour. Coming to life she did what she did every year, just as she had for tens of thousands of years. As if filling with tears inside, the rain rushed to join the water table, bringing the flood. Still, a few diehards held high hopes that somehow, someway she would still welcome them back. But nature won, as she often does, and sadly, the many passages dug out by the loving hands of the masses flooded. Cave City’s South Lead Dig went under on December 27th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

time to love

She opens the door and walks through, in her mind she was thinking about the dry cleaning and whether she would have time to make it to the gym today. It was 5:00 and quitting time simply marked the moment she’d start a new batch of tasks, still, she was out of there.
He was walking down the street, heading towards his sisters house where he was going to watch the kids for her so she could shop No big deal, he loved those two kids almost as if they were his own, only without the sick part where he would have slept with his own sister. . He just had one quick stop.
She reached for the door to Quincy Cleaners just as he was. He smiled at her, and opened the door. She smiled back………
funny how our eyes can take in a version of a vision that no one else sees and how it starts that chemical process that makes our hearts float and our minds race........

Writing

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)

No Failure

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

-James Baldwin-

Gambini's Money

I know I’m not suppose to tell anyone this, and certainly some folk are going to try and convince you that I have a death wish, but really, it’s more a matter of getting it off my chest. Mind if I smoke……….thanks. I used to work for a group of Jersey businessmen who, not only bent the rules, but turned them over there collective knees and spanked them beet red. Oh, I did my part. We all did. Me and Bernie, we were in for the full pound, screw that penny.
It’s said through the eyes and not words that once a member of the Gambini’s you’ll never go back to your own, unless in a fifty five gallon drum or a wooden box. But I beat the odds, I’m here, almost twelve years later and I’m ready to sing sweeter than a canary returning alive from the mines. You got any beer?
Louis Gambini ran his “family” tighter than any one in the past, present and future had, although I may be speculating some on the later. He knew things that even the Man Up Stairs couldn’t know, just take my word that. His empire was worth over 750 million dollars and stashed in so many off shore accounts if they were all on a single island it would sink into the sea. Lucky Lou was indeed blessed, so much so you’d think he’d never miss a lousy 10%, but I’m getting ahead of my self. You got any food?
Anyway, me and Bernie had got a call from Ernie Halverson, he’s Lou’s accountant, and he had been drinking a little. Seems he was getting ready to be taken upstairs and entertained by three of Maggie’s best girls and needed me to take a certain book…what, oh?.. she’s Lou’s social director….yeah, no problem. Any way, this certain book turned out to be some kinda coded combination to Lou’s fortune, and old Ernie let the wrong head chose unwisely for him. Lets just say a copy of this book fell onto a turnip truck and no one was the wiser. This? It’s a Smith and Wesson, 357. Yeah no problem.
So where was I? Yeah yeah yeah… so Bernie had this sister, Becky who turns out was a total computer wiz, but it was her old man, Carl, who had just returned from the service, and get this, he was a code breaker, I swear! Any ways, it takes us what, maybe eighteen minutes and badaboom, we’re all set for life. Not a full one, but one with penthouse views, and maidservants.
They took Carl and Becky down first. Found them in Vegas, and lets just say if they’d smoked, they could have done it from their throats. Bernie made it two years, but they got him in some backwater joint off a Caribbean reef. I’ve never seen a man sink but I heard it he went like a rock. Poor bastard. So, that leaves me, well me and Maggie, I mean you didn’t think I was smart enough to make this haul on my own did ya? She and I, well, we used some of the money on the French Rivera to get a more youthful look through the wonders of plastic surgery. We spent eleven great years together, in the sun, out in the open and fearless. She always made me smile, seemed like when she’d open up the glass doors every morning that the sun stole its light from her eyes. I loved that woman more than life itself, so when she died last week…What?…no, nothing like that, it was cancer, yeah………How much do I have left?…..Ha-ha, wouldn’t like to know…………..

Hearing Harry

Hearing Harry

Although these are my words, I have only collected them along with the feelings and lessons learned over my time here on earth and arranged them into the story below. This IS NOT the story of me. It is rather, a melting of many people, including a friend named Harry. This is their combined cry for help, again NOT MINE even though it is written as if it is. Please accept my apologies in advance should you find yourself buried within the verbiage below.
After five years of not dealing with this subject I know its now time.
Dedicated to Harry
Sometimes, when the loneliness grows like moss on a boulder, and I wander through these empty late night halls I sense a profound, almost eternal incompleteness inside. It’s as if I live, grasping at the edges of passion, seeking truth for more than a fleeting moment, always coming away with only strands of reality in my dirty hands. Longing for something that eludes me, as if attempting to mix water and oil, no one has ever completed me fully in the ways etched upon my heart by the dreams and hopes within. The pain, feeding upon the loneliness turns to despair and together they have calcified the portals to my heart. Sealed tightly against most melting factors, it simply beats, without chance to again feel. The dark nothingness becomes stronger day after day, consuming my ability to cover the raw ending of nerves left exposed by the cruelty that is sometimes called life. And then, it happens. No longer able to pretend that I am in control I stumble on something that masks itself as peace, hiding among the sheep, clothed as comfort it calls to me, and I step towards it. Like the first ray of sun after the storm it is beautiful, but the smell reeks of death, yet it goes undetected inside my nostrils. I reach for it, and find that I have been deceived, that the line I stand across is final and unending, it leads away from life as well as the wonder it had all along. I had been blind to it while in it, now the images of flowers, and summer days build and I know I have made a fatal mistake. I have rushed head on into deaths arms, and I am sorry.
I wish I had known this then, when he did reach out to me. I miss you buddy.

Fondly Fondled

Her hands, although older, were still so very capable of bringing a full smile to my face. Fondling me as I drove her back from the airport, she started by running her finger along the top of my ear, and tucking back my hair. This produced a tingling that rushed to the receptors in my brain, then back out at nano-second speed to my manhood, and heart. My face lit up, feeling her eyes on me, taking me in as if about to test ride a wild stallion. The years had been good to her. She was still an amazing woman, and I tried to recall why we had ever parted in the first place. The day dream fell away as I felt her breath on my ear, causing me to change lanes. She kissed it softly, stroking me again and whispered, you need a haircut. It was sooooo sexy that I almost pulled over and let her ravage me again along the road side. The first time that happened, she took my virginity away, adding another notch to her cowgirl belt. And while I had offered up little if any resistance I still have a scar from it. As we continued down the hiway, Petty, played with the words of love. She had slid over next to me, her mouth moved along my neck as if nibbling a cob of corn, reminding me that I would most likely end up with a few well placed hickeys. Her hand nimbly unbuttoned my shirt, allowing her hand to glide in, and brush against my nipple. Her hand turned, and she pinched me playfully. At the same time her tongue had entered my ear and was gently moving in little circles. I was now guilty of driving while erect.
Her hands soon unbuttoned my old 501’s and freed Willie, breathing new life into him in ways I had forgotten about. Moving up and back down on me she cooed, vibrating her throat making me look at the toll booth man with a crooked smile of apology. I said she was just happy to see me, trying to offer an explanation to the obvious. She giggled as I accelerated away from him and back out onto the road. Later I found a lonely county lane outside the city and pulled over; turning the key I joined her.
She stayed longer than I had thought she would, and that made me happy, I’ll never turn down the opportunity to spend time with her. But when we actually examine our relationship, both of us know we are looking for more than great sex, which sounds like I’ve lost my mind when I reread this, but it’s the only thing we really have in common, and we both want social intercourse as well. And who knows, next time maybe I’ll get to show her the sights.

You and I

Jason Mraz-you and I

Was it you who spoke the words that things would happen but not to me?
Oh things are gonna happen naturally
And taking your advice I'm looking on the bright side
And balancing the whole thing...
But often times those words get tangled up in lines
And the bright lights
turn to night
Until the dawn it brings
A little bird who'll sing about the magic that was
you and me
Cause you and I both loved
What you and I spoke of
What you and I spoke of
Others only dream of
the love that I love
See I'm all about them words
Over numbers
unencumbered
numbered words
Hundreds of pages
pages
pages forwards
More words then I had ever heard and I feel so alive
Now you and I
you and I
Not so little you and I
anymore
And with this silence brings a moral story
more importantly evolving is the glory of a boy
cause you and I both loved
what you and I spoke of
and others just read of
and if you could see now
well I'm already finally out
and it's okay if you have go away
just remember the telephone works both ways
and if I never ever hear it ring
if nothing else I'll think the bells inside
have finally found you someone else and that's okay
cause I'll remember everything you sang
you and I both loved
what you and I spoke of
and others just read of
and if you could see now
well I'm already finally out of words

melting with the better half

(Modern English)---I Melt With You


Moving forward using all my breath
Making love to you was never second best
I saw the world thrashing all around your face
Never really knowing it was always mesh and lace
I'll stop the world and melt with you
You've seen the difference and
It's getting better all the time
There's nothing you and I won't do
I'll stop the world and melt with you
(You should know better)
Dream of better lives the kind which never hate
(You should see why)
Dropped in the state of imaginary grace
(You should know better)
I made a pilgrimage to save this human race
(You should see why)
Never comprehending a race that long gone by
I'll stop the world and melt with you
(I'll stop the world)
I'ave seen some changes and it's getting better all the time
(Let's stop the world)
There's nothing you and I won't do
(Let's stop the world)
I'll stop the world and melt with you
The future's open wide
(Let's stop the world)
I'll stop the world and melt with you
(Let's stop the world)
I've seen some changes but it's getting better all the time
(Let's stop the world)
There's nothing you and I won't do
(Let's stop the world)
I'll stop the world and melt with you
The future's open wide
hmmm hmmm hmmm
hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm
hmmm hmmm hmmm
hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm
I'll stop the world and melt with you
(Let's stop the world)
You've seen the difference and it's getting better all the time
(Let's stop the world)
There's nothing you and I won't do
(Let's stop the world)
I'll stop the world and melt with you
(Let's stop the world)
I'll stop the world and melt with you...

never ending move

I followed the thin gray wires from my house out the back door. They led across the freshly plowed field before disappearing into the barn. Through the barn window, I could see at least two of them. Surely, Jimmy would have sent more than this I thought, but now was not the time to try to psychoanalyze the crazy bastard. I drew my weapon, aimed at the electrical meter on the back of the house and squeezed off three rounds. The first shattered the meter glass and exited out the back. They’d later find it stuck in a tomato juice can in the refrigerator. The second round hit the main feed and everything went black. The third one was simply to put some ground between us. Rolling under the flatbed truck, I waited. When I had walked through my house, I had seen a couple pounds of C-4 waiting to welcome me; to bad for them, their lookout had blinked. Now I was hoping that by cutting off the electricity they would have nothing to set off the charges with. I needed my house for at least another 20 minutes. I heard the barn door creek as the first huge lug of a man came charging towards the house shooting continuous rounds into the old wooden structure. I had already attached the silencer to my weapon and he went down fast and quietly. More shots came from the barn, whizzing past, heading towards some random sudden stop.

The other stayed put. It was now a waiting game, one in which he could be reasonably sure his man had not killed me since no communications came. No, he knew I was still out here, and without the power being on he had the darkness working for him just as much as I did. They’d later find him in the loft, out of bullets and ready to go into their custody. Jail seemed a better then facing me without bullets.

I waited a couple of minutes, and crawled to the end of the truck. Standing up I could see the flicker from a lighter as he headed up into the loft so I made my move. Inside the house, I worked very quickly. I pulled up the loose floorboard in the dining room and lifted two suitcases out. Opening the first one, I pulled out and set up a timer gun which would shoot a round every ten minutes to make sure he did not try to follow me. The second one left with me………

Being a fugitive from both the underworld and now the witness protection program was going to hard, but I was not left many choices. I walked down the street and unlocked a non-descript garage I rented. I got in the old truck and pulled out, heading south, finding myself on the run again.