Prelude to The Fall

(Paris in response to The Judgement, his choice in Aphrodite, Hera, or Athena)

I have no time for troubles
tales told as such
Love has its own sinews
poisen sickness lust
time, distance
can we master these?
life degrades
this place is falling faster
memories receed
what does this mean to me?

The Beauty Curse

The Beauty Curse


It hovers there
grasped by our senses shallow
and swallowed deep percieved
with dangers lurking sweet serene
beyond all we know we can hold
Vortex Spinning Gravity
no safe harbor home
havens all seem to slip in time
to own is to lie
no permanence to hold
no endeavor so foolish
so bold
a path towards fulfilled Desire
Imperial Fantasy
Eternally Fated Misery

No One Else But You

No One Else But You

I will wait for you
The words you said
As I sailed away
Gone that day
into the Sargasso Sea
I will wait for no one else but you
as days pass
you’ll forget this time
And all we had
when the end of the day was long
I’ll still wait for no one else but you
The waves will grow large
And the depths will be deep
I will remember our last embrace
As I fall into icy water sleep
In night
For years to be
Dreams may come
And I will be there with you again
Perhaps you will keep me close
To your heart as you are to mine
If I could return, you know I would
If I could bring you to me, through
Time and Space
To a place that never ends
I would give it all again



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Hickory on Donahue

Hickory on Donahue

Hickory on Donahue, Editors Choice Award, International Library of Poetry, 2007.

How many times I must have passed
below your outstretched arms and leaves
in life and dreams
hickory tree reaching over this sea
fifty years or more of history
and thousands of versions each of me
as we travel to downtown and the lights
or in return to our beds and high on revelry
leprous stringy bark, coarse to the touch
grown bonzai shaped to avoid
our relentless restless human progress
another half century we shall remain
as ghosts or memories.


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Wu-Tang Forever

Wu-Tang Forever


Last night I stayed up late
going through old music
and I remembered how I
had forgotten the crisp casio
keyboard logic of Wu-Tang
Clan, NYC rolling bass
and Worldview
I stayed up an extra hour
collecting every song and
instrumental I could find

Two of Me

Two of Me

There of are two of me
I am quick to say
Twenty times a day when confronted with
this duality that presents itself as me
In my heart I know I am a winner
yet often art is the representation of the despair
of someone who has not won all the games
I have been 32-5
I have been the lead off batter on a team that barely lost
I have been the leading gross salesman
and still been dragged down by this thing, my heart
I have lost the ones I wanted on the battlefield
I have sacrificed The One(s) for that intanglible
Victory at any cost, give it all for The World
Twenty-Four hours in a day, how many to win?
I win, that is my job, that is what I do
Now, twelve or more hours a day
lonely am I in whatever hours I spend away
from the battlefield, confronted with the emptiness
of a home abandoned, a life forgotten
an eternal love foresaken for earthly, fleeting pleasures
How much more could I have won?
Had I forestalled Love for Victory at every turn?
but as a human I have made the choice a dozen times
to follow my heart and lose the battles in heat
Now I Am Clear
I see, there is only one player in this game, It Is Me
and the Team I believe in, and who appears to reciprocate
I give myself, prostrate myself, in hopes of recognition
In hopes of being noticed in my unyielding flight
I will win for you, sacrifice for you, I will destroy
Whatever life might be outside this little world
This little battle we fight every day to survive
I will be who you need me to be
because I know there have always been Two of Me
and my losing tendencies have come
when I could not decide which one I wanted
in control.

They Say The End

They Say The End

They Say The End, Immortal Verses (anthology), 2007, The Sound of Poetry (anthology), 2007, Editor’s Published Poet Ribbon Award, Intenational Library of Poetry, 2007. Editors Choice Award, International Library of Poetry, 2007.

They Say The End of Days are Near
every twenty years
another war starts, the market crumbles
someone important dies or is born
another prominent figure goes environmentalist
new catastrophes, new enemies
it will never be the same again
the dreams we held dear are so far away
visions of apocalyptic nightmares
They Say The End of Days are Near
because what we once thought sure
has again become suspect
crime goes up, the glaciers receed
inflation goes up, freedom is repealed
pollution piles up, species disappeared
They Say the End of Days are Here
dictators and presidents and lobbyists
pundits and local politicians
judges and advocates
law enforcement and Multinationals
citizens and criminals
men of God and the children of the damned
They Say the End of Days are Here
we listen, we hear
we have heard this all before
and we console ourselves with doubt
and hope maybe not this year


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High Contrast--Literature of the Digital Evolution, December 14, 2006 (Jon Sanders, Richard Grayson, POETiC)

High Contrast--Literature of the Digital Evolution
December 14, 2006



Between Love and Hate
by Jon Sanders


On this thin line, on this thin line of mine
I'm on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

The angel wore her white-
a blouse on which she bled-
as unrequited feelings paved the road we tread
I walked upon a line
as angelically I'm led
Only part of me's alive
while most of me is dead
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

She showed me many things
though both of us were blind
You've gotta stop looking
if you wanna see sometimes
While all amidst the rain, the sun's still in the sky
with blackened clouds beside all the shades of blue
And all amidst the pain, there's still a feeling deep inside
All that shines in me are all the shades of you
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

I asked her why she bled
for nothing had she said
I waited longer but she spoke the same
She showed me- as she led-
the dawn at dusk in red
I didn't know whether it was the morning dew
or if it were the evening rain
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

And I'm often thoughted well,
but I can never tell
if it has or if it hasn't been this way forever
And I can't even tell if it's heaven or it's hell
as I see seraphs and junkies shooting up together
But I guess they'll do anything to leave reality
especially if this is the reality they see
And here you need drugs more than ever
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

At times we'd walk, at times we'd fall
but she held me through it all
Except the times we held the line
just to stay alive
Risen slow, the fall we'd know
would be more than just a dive
But for all we know, letting go
would help us stay alive
It's hard to live and hard to love
It's hard to just survive
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine
I saw it her- the one I loved,
the one hated so
Through all that I'd forgotten,
love's blinded eyes I'd know
I guess I just stopped looking
somewhere down the road
I was never afraid to die
I was just afraid to live alone
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

The angel wore a broken wing-
laughing as she cried
It's funny how you live for love
to only let it die
We saw the sunrise setting
in the corner of the sky
A clouded storm approaching
with the sun in both our eyes
on this thin line, on this thin line of mine

She mouthed her last "I love you"
and refused to catch my hand
If it were sixteen years ago,
I'd somewhat understand
But I just thought of freedom
and the shackled pain it brings
I'm imprisoned either way
but freedom's everythingon this thin line, on this thin line of mine


SIXTEEN ATTEMPTS TO JUSTIFY MY EXISTENCE
by Richard Grayson

1
When I was in high school, I was unhappy. I had gym first period, at seven in the morning, and I used to hide Pepto-Bismol tablets inside my white athletic socks. I tried not to do too much in gym. Usually I pretended to be waiting for the weights. My gym teacher yelled at me. Behind his back, I kept sneaking Pepto-Bismol tablets from my socks. The gym teacher called me Mister America. He had discovered my secret identity. Seven years later, I ran across my gym teacher in a funeral parlor. My father had died, as had his half brother. The funerals were in different rooms. I went up to him and said, "Hi, it's Mister America," but he just turned away and pretended he didn't hear what I said.

2
I almost had a baby brother, but the doctors couldn't find one in the bed. My mother and father were sitting downstairs all during the delivery, and they were getting nervous because it was taking so long. The gym teacher's half brother came down the steps and started the rumor that we had twins, but we knew right away it was a lie. My mother thought she should go upstairs because it was supposed to be her baby, after all, but my father said he needed my mother there to keep him calm. I offered my father a Pepto-Bismol tablet but he didn't want it. I got tired of waiting so I went outside and pretended I was riding a motorcycle in my secret identity. When I came back, all the doctors had left. My mother sat me down and told me they couldn't find a baby in the bed. She said maybe we could have one next year.

3
I wrote the class notes for my Alumni Association Bulletin and always made up things about myself and my friends. I usually made everyone sound more important than they were in real life. My friend Stephen runs the newsstand at the Abbey-Victoria Hotel, but I put down in the class notes that he directed two plays that had limited runs in Off Broadway theatres. My friend Wendy is a secretary for the Girl Scouts of America, but I made her the chairman of the board of a vitamin manufacturing company. My friend Scott, the hair stylist's assistant, I turned into a radio talk show host on the Gulf Coast. In every issue of the Alumni Association bulletin, I said something different about myself. I was a professor of linguistics and a state senator and an official of the Arab-American Anti-Defamation League and the owner of a pet shop. In next month's class notes, I'm going to be deceased.

4
Sometimes, usually around the middle of February, I can smell death. At these times, I am sure I am going to have another breakdown. I get afraid to leave my room, but then again, I am afraid to stay in my room because it is too bright. I ask everyone if they have painted my room while I was sleeping and everyone says no. So I cry myself to sleep, and eight hours later I wake up and decide that there are worse fates than being Mister America in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

5
I tell myself that my life has been better than those of ninety-seven percent of the human race throughout history. I have family, I have friends, I have Pepto-Bismol tablets in my socks. I have good health and a roof over my head and protection from the cold and the ability to go to funerals. Sometimes I even have Carole, when she lets me have her. She gets so hoarse but she won't see a doctor, ever. "They're for the birds," Carole says. I tell Carole that she should be grateful that she lives in a time of doctors, but she just looks at me differently whenever I say that.

6
Once I had to introduce a man who was so famous that everyone except me knew who he was. I was too embarrassed to tell the members of the Alumni Association that I had never heard of him. So I began by saying, "And now a man who needs no introduction…" but I forgot his name, too. People started whispering and that's when I looked down and saw that my fly is open, and everyone was staring at all the pink triangular Pepto-Bismol tablets I had hidden in my underwear. My face turned red, and I felt like I did back in high school until Carole, in her hoarse voice, reminded me that I was a high school graduate, a member of the Alumni Association. Then I regained my composure.

7
I wear contact lenses. My eye doctor is a very rich man because so many people like myself wear contact lenses. He tells children that reading is good for the, especially reading small print. Everyone thinks that my eye doctor and his wife are only in it for the money, but there is no other eye doctor to go to, so they keep going back to him. That is why my eye doctor and his wife are so rich that they can afford three houses in three different states. When my eye doctor went to stay at his house in Florida, there was a plane crash over the Everglades. The newspaper printed the names of my eye doctor and his wife as those killed in the crash. I called my eye doctor up and heard his voice on the answering machine saying he'd be back in two weeks. This made everyone sad. But then it turned out that the newspaper had made a mistake, and my eye doctor and his wife were all right. When they came back from Florida, everyone was so glad to see them alive that they stopped complaining about all the money he charged. Of course, this lasted only two weeks. Then people went back to complaining again.

8
Question: Did I always hate my mother?
Answer: No, I didn't hate her until my sixteenth birthday when she slept with me. Satisfied?

9
I need to be sane, calm, floating through the day with a smile. When I don't smile, people say, "Oh, you look so sad" and "Need a vacation?" and "What's the matter?" and (jokingly) "Are you getting your period?" When people say these things, I feel like biting their heads off. I read about the men in carnivals who bite chickens' heads off, but I am not interested in animals. I had a cat when I was little. The cat was called Eisenhower because he didn't do anything. He was run over by a hearse. My father couldn't stop laughing, and I felt like biting his head off then. Later, of course, I really fixed him. But by then he was an old man and it was too late.

10
In high school I wrote short stories but never finished any of them. I wrote them only in my head in gym class while pretending to be waiting for the other guys to get through with the weights. The stories all began the same way: "He was always writing stories about getting lost, literally and metaphorically. The first story he wrote was about the grey time on the highway intersection near Miami, walking towards nothing except what seemed like lights. Or he wrote about a boy set apart, in another dimension from the other people I the story." I don't like that type of writing anymore. It reminds me too much of high school.

11
I used to steal things from my friends' parents' houses. Small things, mostly: kitchen knives, ballpoint pens, lemons, prescriptions for hypertension medicine. Once I stole an electric vibrator and in my secret identity as Mister America, I did very strange things with it and a cored apple. Very soon afterwards, I grew ashamed of what I had done, and then later it got to be funny and I started amusing people at parties with the story. Then, after a few years of that, I got ashamed again. Carole says that she used to masturbate with her electric toothbrush. She thinks that shocks me but it doesn't.

12
While waiting for the elevator, I was told that these were the best years of my life. I didn't believe it then. I don't believe it now. Something was wrong with that statement. I've tried to figure out what, but I can't come up with anything. It makes no difference anyway. I don't need Pepto-Bismol tablets anymore.

13
After my father died, my mother still talked to him. Whenever I did something that she considered outrageous, like asking Carole to go to the show with me, my mother would say in a very reasonable tone, "Your son is acting nutsy again." My father had died of a stroke three years before, but she was talking to my father and no one else. When my mother said these things, I would fly in to a rage and throw the furniture around. When good things came my way, as they eventually do to everybody, my mother took credit for them and spoke to my dead father, saying, "Look what we've accomplished with our son." The last time she said it was the night I spent walking the rainy streets, looking for someone who would kill me. After that, my mother stopped taking credit for my life. All the publicity had something to do with it.

14
Isn't this all bullshit? What do I want, anyway? You see, I'm not even old and I'm a garrulous old bore already. I was so much better-liked when I was unhappy and Mister America. Then nobody respected me but they liked me. Of course, it's all a matter of opportunities.

15
When the psychiatrist showed me the photograph and asked me what it looked like, I told her that it looked like a photograph from a thematic apperception test. She frowned. Then I said it looked like my gym teacher having sex with my mother. The psychiatrist smiled. Then she showed me the inkblot of my gym teacher's half brother lying in his coffin with Carole crying over it and asked me what the inkblot looked like. I lied and said it looked like a Christmas tree. Then she frowned and pointed to the man's penis and asked me what that looked like. "A Christmas present," I said. Later I found that this psychiatrist had been married four times. Someone said it on the Johnny Carson show.

16
From the class notes of the Alumni Association Bulletin: "Mister America, '91, died of what passed for a cerebral hemorrhage but was actually an overdose of despair, July 5, 2006. He is survived by Carole, who is always hoarse and who was his friend, and his gym teacher from high school. In lieu of flowers, please send ironic donations to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." When I read this, I cried. I can't remember the last time I cried.
(Originally from the Collection Highly Irregular Stories)


FINDING MY WAY
by POETiC

Hiding issues
In loving
Pictures that
Fire arrows
Aimed at
Open Minds
To give
My support
In words
Alive in
Actions that
Speak loudly
From within
My soul

Lonely feelings
That multiply
Indirections that
Never mislead
Reflections of
Youthful wisdom
Through mirrored
Glass Deflecting
Wishful secrets
Whispered quietly
To be
Released in
My words'
Calm Speech

Locating channels
To carry
My messengers
To reach
Set destinations
Patiently absent
From thoughts
Mentally alert
In selfish
Destinies soon
Erased and
Forever Forgotten
In my
Renewed vows

Parallel paths
To travel
Without baggage
Hiding in
Heartfelt corners
As unsolved
Cases wait
To be
Filed away
Like discarded
Ideas outmoded
And transformed
Finally I
Am complete

AIDS

AIDS

The Earth has AIDS
Autoimmune Diffecinecy Syndrome
mankind is a cancer, a virus
overpopulation pollution consumption destruction
five hundred years ago man couldn't destroy the Earth
and now it dies around us faster than we can grasp
out mother planet has AIDS
in this night, while we slumber, she might die or tomorrow
trembly shaking fingers always on the button
a nation lives and breathes by its ideas
and all of ours are empty and stale
we are caught up
in murder, in consumerism
products and money are the highest ideal
I'd sell you out if it would buy me a condo
in the Bahamas or whatever paradise inside my mind
if I was God I would send down a flood or plauge
destroy it all and begin again
our ideas are all a century old, obsolete
and prices we pay for ignorance a century builds
my life is a poem in constant construction
do you see at all or do you look the other way
choose to be blind
over the sight and guilt of what you have helped create
our culture is sick, twisted, empty, lost
we entertain for the lowest common denominator
suppress the angry frightened screams of all that see
brainwash the kids, desensitized, addicted to T.V.
video games and half are on drugs
the president is urging us all to war
he believes if we pick a fight with unseen enemies
he can distract us from this wasted mess, our lives
facism of the heart, of the mind, of our nations soul
we all have to be patriots, no questions asked
in the land of the prison and home of the slave
maybe if we turn what's left of Iraq into rubble
we can bring back three thousand dead
we need to send the rest of Iraq to follow
the 1,500,000 of their women, childred and men dead
of starvation and curable disease since the Gulf War 1992
after Iraq, where do our bombers fly next?
the world anticipates, waits, sits on the edge of their seats
yes, capitolism, democracy, god
I used to believe in you, I used to believe in me
but now the world is infested with the demon virus greed
God, please, send us a sign
help us save ourselves from ourselves
this is hell and we are all trapped
our country is on the fast track to totalitarianism
our foreign policy bitter revenge
we rule the world with the threat of death
our dollar bills keep them all in line
we have seen the sickness, and the sickness is us
a damn thing to reverse, it's already too late
I want to tear away the illusion, to burn the veil of Maya
to show all the innocents the true face of fate, our destiney
but what would that accomplish
in a half hour it's more commercials and nightly news
nothing that matters lasts very long, utopia is nowhere
all that is left is our mind to collect
impressions and beleifs
and in our mind we are all alone
we can escape into our dreams
because in our dreams we are free
I pray, I wait, I taste
when will this old world and life fade away?
yes, our mother Earth is dying
I feel every cell beginning their decay
and see that I am the only one who cares to percieve
I feel this all inside, don't you?
WHO? WHERE? does anyone fight the fight I fight?
to save all the starving and blind
every letter I write is a pair of eyes unlocked
and a mind set free
don't you see, I see nothing
there will be no sign given
in my darkest hours I almost don't care anymore
I'm going to die one day, as will you
why not tomorrow, or the day after?
as long as we all go together
into our own nuclear heaven


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Nuclear Heaven

Nuclear Heaven

Nuclear Heaven, The International Who's Who in Poetry (anthology), 2007. Purr, 1999. The Daily Sentinel, 1997.

There was a land we could never touch
Somewhere far too deep
Somewhere you were scared to go
And somewhere that I couldn't lead
Why we never left, I'll never know
Time was fast, and so were we
We never could stop to take a look
and sometimes it was too dark to see
I though maybe you could never feel
Because of him I'd never be
In his light I was Shadow
and the dream being the pure light finality
The cloud grew up to be a flower
Because in the end
We'll always have
Our own Nuclear Heaven


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