Deadline Dives

I think I love the night. I think I love the deadline. The feeling of purpose breathing down my tense neck as I rove the haze-lit navy avenues with a glowing cigarette. Maybe this is why I struggle. I'm focused: focused on the momentary bliss of perfection. Nothing is late, and certain things need to be done.

To not do them is hallelujah terrific. Everything you do takes on a flavor so deep you can taste the atmospheric pressures. It's my daredevil cliff-dive, the moment I know I am alive. Small single digits clicking slowly on some red-glaring clock and I am eternal!

And although sometimes at the end of the night I am astonished to find the work done, I'll be the first to confess it's rarely the case. Maybe I'm just addicted to the struggle.

No one has ever told me I couldn't do anything. Never once have I felt unprepared. Is that all this is? This unholy, habitual, parasitic struggle to drink life?

Draft One: Poster Child

And then there were posters on the wall
exhorting twelve dollars prismatically
--but, only with a personal sort of palette.

Like a chin-line or father's nose,
the unfurled rectangled lines
adding up aesthetically, almost,

just almost as if to say
I know, I know you,
it's okay on these walls enclosing:

plywood furniture, a person, and an estate of ideals.
Each one constructed from the pulp
of some mashed up distant forest branching

like a family of guidelines and pretenses
to buy posters for some walls.
Every confining wall, at least,

the walls that'd otherwise be blank
and empty or worse than empty:
the walls with one unchanging color.

Like a leaf that never figured it was autumn,
like a branch that forgot to shed
or a forest unwilling to explode.

And then what? Frozen roots
destined to shrivel without
the persistent sky-born flames;

thick walk-around trunks to climb
collapsing into gray until no one remembered.
Did anyone even know before?

And the room expanded under the weight
of expression and knowledge and colors,
colors a person could inhabit

and grow. Colored in like a coloring book
numbered in by the walls that sprouted posters.
Filled in by twelve dollars at the mall.

Right now I feel like this is my opus. At this moment I am wholly proud. These moments have a way of deserting me though.

Draft One: Penumbral Pretend

Sometimes, when the full moon
is just right I pretend
I am a werewolf who
is waiting for the sun.

Sometimes, when the sun is
just right, I pretend I
am a werewolf who is
waiting for the full moon.

Oooh, if I ever wrote a personal poem this is it.